The Lost Master - The Collected Works

by Stanley G. Weinbaum

"And that suits me! I wouldn't even take the job if things were a little different, and—" I broke off suddenly, frozen "Say," I said weakly, "did you know they'd revoked my license?"

  "You don't say," said Henshaw. "And after all the trouble I had talking Interplanetary into permission to take you on, too." Then he grinned. "Here," he said, tossing me an envelope. "See how long it'll take you to lose this one."

  But the very sight of the familiar blue paper was enough to make me forget a lot of things—Kratska, Claire Avery, even hunger.

  The take-off was worse than I had expected. I had sense enough to wear my pilot's goggles to the field, but of course I was recognized as soon as I joined the group at the rocket. They'd given us the Minos, an old ship, but she looked as if she'd handle well.

  The newsmen must have had orders to ignore me, but I could hear plenty of comments from the crowd. And to finish things up, there was Claire Avery, a lot prettier than she looked on the television screens, but with the same unmistakable cobalt-blue eyes, and hair closer to the actual shade of metallic gold than any I'd ever seen. The "Golden Flash," the newsmen called her. Blah!

  She accepted her introduction to me with the coolest possible nod, as if to say to the scanners and cameras that it wasn't her choice she was teamed with yellow Jack Sands. But for that matter, Coretti's black Latin eyes were not especially cordial either, nor were Gogrol's broad features. I'd met Gogrol somewhere before, but couldn't place him at the moment.

  Well, at last the speeches were over, and the photographers and broadcast men let the Golden Flash stop posing, and she and I got into the control cabin for the take-off. I still wore my goggles, and huddled down low besides, because there were a dozen telescopic cameras and scanners recording us from the field's edge. Claire Avery simply ate it up, though, smiling and waving before she cut in the underblast. But finally we were rising over the flame.

  She was worse than I'd dreamed. The Minos was a sweetly balanced ship, but she rolled it like a baby's cradle. She had the radio on the field broadcast, and I could hear the description of the take-off: "—heavily laden. There—she rolls again. But she's making altitude. The blast has stopped splashing now, and is coming down in a beautiful fan of fire. A difficult take-off, even for the Golden Flash." A difficult take-off! Bunk!

  I was watching the red bubble in the level, but I stole a glance to Claire Avery's face, and it wasn't so cool and stand-offish now. And just then the bubble in the level bobbed way over, and I heard the girl at my side give a frightened little gasp. This wasn't cradle rocking any more—we were in a real roll!

  I slapped her hands hard and grabbed the U-bar. I cut the underjets completely off, letting the ship fall free, then shot the full blast through the right laterals. It was damn close, I'm ready to swear, but we leveled, and I snapped on the under-blast before we lost a hundred feet of altitude. And there was that inane radio still talking: "They're over! No—they've leveled again, but what a roll! She's a real pilot, this Golden Flash—"

  I looked at her; she was pale and shaken, but her eyes were angry. "Golden Flash, eh?" I jeered. "The gold must refer to your money, but what's the flash? It can't have much to do with your ability as a pilot." But at that time I had no idea how pitifully little she really knew about rocketry.

  She flared. "Anyway," she hissed, her lips actually quivering with rage, "the gold doesn't refer to color, Mr. Malaria Sands!" She knew that would hurt; the "Malaria" was some bright columnist's idea of a pun on my name. You see, malaria's popularly called Yellow Jack. "Besides," she went on defiantly, "I could have pulled out of that roll myself, and you know it."

  "Sure," I said, with the meanest possible sarcasm. We had considerable upward velocity now, and plenty of altitude, both of which tend toward safety because they give one more time to pull out of a roll. "You can take over again now. The hard part's over."

  She gave me a look from those electric blue eyes, and I began to realize just what sort of trip I was in for. Coretti and Gogrol had indicated their unfriendliness plainly enough, and heaven knows I couldn't mistake the hatred in Claire Avery's eyes, so that left just Captain Henshaw. But the captain of the ship dare not show favoritism; so all in all I saw myself doomed to a lonely trip.

  Lonely isn't the word for it. Henshaw was decent enough, but since Claire Avery had started with a long shift and so had the captain, they were having their free spells and meals on the same schedule, along with Gogrol, and that left me with Coretti. He was pretty cool, and I had pride enough left not to make any unwanted advances.

  Gogrol was worse; I saw him seldom enough, but he never addressed a word to me except on routine. Yet there was something familiar about him— As for Claire Avery, I simply wasn't in her scheme of things at all; she even relieved me in silence.

  Offhand, I'd have said it was the wildest sort of stupidity to send a girl with four men on a trip like this. Well, I had to hand it to Claire Avery; in that way she was a splendid rocketrix. She took the inconveniences of space routine without a murmur, and she was so companionable—that is, with the others—that it was like having a young and unusually entertaining man aboard.

  And, after all, Gogrol was twice her age and Henshaw almost three times; Coretti was younger, but I was the only one who was really of her generation. But as I say, she hated me; Coretti seemed to stand best with her.

  So the weary weeks of the journey dragged along. The Sun shrunk up to a disk only a fifth the diameter of the terrestrial Sun, but Jupiter grew to an enormous moon-like orb with its bands and spots gloriously tinted. It was an exquisite sight, and sometimes, since eight hours' sleep is more than I can use, I used to slip into the control room while Claire Avery was on duty, just to watch the giant planet and its moons. The girl and I never said a word to each other.

  We weren't to stop at Io, but were landing directly on Europa, our destination, the third moon outward from the vast molten globe of Jupiter. In some ways Europa is the queerest little sphere in the Solar System, and for many years it was believed to be quite uninhabitable. It is, too, as far as seventy per cent of its surface goes, but the remaining area is a wild and weird region.

  This is the mountainous hollow in the face toward Jupiter, for Europa, like the Moon, keeps one face always toward its primary. Here in this vast depression, all of the tiny world's scanty atmosphere is collected, gathered like little lakes and puddles into the valleys between mountain ranges that often pierce through the low-lying air into the emptiness of space.

  Often enough a single valley forms a microcosm sundered by nothingness from the rest of the planet, generating its own little rainstorms under pygmy cloud banks, inhabited by its indigenous life, untouched by, and unaware of, all else.

  In the ephemeris, Europa is dismissed prosaically with a string of figures: diameter, 2099 M.—period, 3 days, 13 hours, 14 seconds—distance from primary, 425,160 M. For an astronomical ephemeris isn't concerned with the thin film of life that occasionally blurs a planet's surface; it has nothing to say of the slow libration of Europa that sends intermittent tides of air washing against the mountain slopes under the tidal drag of Jupiter, nor of the waves that sometimes spill air from valley to valley, and sometimes spill alien life as well.

  Least of all is the ephemeris concerned with the queer forms that crawl now and then right up out of the air pools, to lie on the vacuum-bathed peaks exactly as strange fishes flopped their way out of the Earthly seas to bask on the sands at the close of the Devonian age.

  Of the five of us, I was the only one who had ever visited Europa—or so I thought at the time. Indeed, there were few men in the world who had actually set foot on the inhospitable little planet; Gunderson and his men were dead, save me and perhaps Kratska, and we had been the first organized expedition.

  Only a few stray adventurers from Io had preceded us. So it was to me that Captain Henshaw directed his orders when he said, "Take us as close as possible to Gunderson's landing."

  It began to be evident that we'd make grou
nd toward the end of Claire's long shift, so I crawled out of the coffinlike niche I called my cabin an hour early, and went up to the control room to guide her down. We were seventy or eighty miles up, but there were no clouds or air distortion here, and the valleys crisscrossed under us like a relief map.

  It was infernally hard to pick Gunderson's valley; the burned spot from the blast was long since grown over, and I had only memory to rely on, for, of course, all charts were lost with the Hera. But I knew the general region, and it really made less difference than it might have, for practically all the valleys in that vicinity were connected by passes; one could walk between them in breathable air.

  After a while I picked one of a series of narrow parallel valleys, one with what I knew was a salt pool in the center—though most of them had that; they'd be desert without it—and pointed it out to Claire. "That one," I said, adding maliciously, "and I'd better warn you that it's narrow and deep—a ticklish landing place."

  She flashed me an unfriendly glance from sapphire eyes, but said nothing. But a voice behind me sounded unexpectedly: "To the left! The one to the left. It—it looks easier."

  Gogrol! I was startled for a moment, then turned coldly on him. "Keep out of the control room during landings," I snapped.

  He glared, muttered something, and retired. But he left me a trifle worried; not that his valley to the left was any easier to land in—that was pure bunk—but it looked a little familiar! Actually, I wasn't sure but that Gogrol had pointed out Gunderson's valley.

  But I stuck to my first guess. The irritation I felt I took out on Claire. "Take it slow!" I said gruffly. "This isn't a landing field. Nobody's put up leveling poles in these valleys. You're going to have to land completely blind from about four hundred feet, because the blast begins to splash sooner in this thin air. You go down by level and guess, and Heaven help us if you roll her! There's no room for rolling between those cliffs."

  She bit her lip nervously. The Minos was already rolling under the girl's inexpert hand, though that wasn't dangerous while we still had ten or twelve miles of altitude. But the ground was coming up steadily.

  I was in a cruel mood. I watched the strain grow in her lovely features, and if I felt any pity, I lost it when I thought of the way she had treated me. So I taunted her.

  "This shouldn't be a hard landing for the Golden Flash. Or maybe you'd rather be landing at full speed, so you could fall into a braking ellipse—only that wouldn't work here, because the air doesn't stick up high enough to act as a brake."

  And a few minutes later, when her lips were quivering with tension, I said, "It takes more than publicity and gambler's luck to make a pilot, doesn't it?"

  She broke. She screamed suddenly, "Oh, take it! Take it, then!" and slammed the U-bar into my hands. Then she huddled back in her corner sobbing, with her golden hair streaming over her face.

  I took over; I had no choice. I pulled the Minos out of the roll Claire's gesture had put her in, and then started teetering down on the underjets. It was pitifully easy because of Europa's low gravitation and the resulting low falling acceleration; it gave the pilot so much time to compensate for side sway.

  I began to realize how miserably little the Golden Flash really knew about rocketry, and, despite myself, I felt a surge of pity for her. But why pity her? Everyone knew that Claire Avery was simply a wealthy, thrill-intoxicated daredevil, with more than her share of money, of beauty, of adulation. The despised Jack Sands pitying her? That's a laugh!

  The underblast hit and splashed, turning the brown-clad valley into black ashes and flame. I inched down very slowly now, for there was nothing to see below save the fiery sheet of the blast, and I watched the bubble on the level as if my life depended on it—which it did.

  I knew the splash began at about four hundred feet in this density of air, but from then on it was guesswork, and a question of settling down so slowly that when we hit we wouldn't damage the underjets. And if I do say it, we grounded so gently that I don't think Claire Avery knew it until I cut off the blast.

  She rubbed the tears away with her sleeve and glared blue-eyed defiance at me, but before she could speak, Henshaw opened the door. "Nice landing, Miss Avery," he said.

  "Wasn't it?" I echoed, with a grin at the girl.

  She stood up. She was trembling and I think that under Earthly gravitation she would have fallen back into the pilot's seat, for I saw her knees shaking below her trim, black shorts.

  "I didn't land us," she said grimly. "Mr. Sands put us to ground."

  Somehow my pity got the best of me then. "Sure," I said. "It's into my shift. Look." It was; the chronometer showed three minutes in. "Miss Avery had all the hard part—"

  But she was gone. And try as I would, I could not bring myself to see her as the hard, brilliant thrill-seeker which the papers and broadcasts portrayed her. Instead, she left me with a strange and by no means logical impression of—wistfulness.

  Life on Europa began uneventfully. Little by little we reduced the atmospheric pressure in the Minos to conform to that outside. First Coretti and then Claire Avery had a spell of altitude sickness, but by the end of twenty hours we were all acclimated enough to be comfortable outside.

  Henshaw and I were first to venture into the open. I scanned the valley carefully for familiar landmarks, but it was hard to be sure; all these canyonlike ditches were much alike. I know that a copse of song-bushes had grown high on the cliff when the Hera had landed, but our blast had splashed higher, and if the bushes had been there, they were only a patch of ashes now.

  At the far end of the valley there should have been a cleft in the hills, a pass leading to the right into the next valley. That wasn't there; all I could distinguish was a narrow ravine cutting the hills to the left.

  "I'm afraid I've missed Gunderson's valley," I told Henshaw. "I think it's the next one to our left; it's connected to this one by a pass, if I'm right, and this is one I came in several times to hunt." It recurred to me suddenly that Gogrol had said the left one.

  "You say there's a pass?" mused Henshaw. "Then we'll stay here rather than chance another take-off and another landing. We can work in Gunderson's valley through the pass. You're sure it's low enough so we won't have to use oxygen helmets?"

  "If it's the right pass, I am. But work at what in Gunderson's valley? I thought this was an exploring expedition."

  Henshaw gave me a queer, sharp look, and turned away. Right then I saw Gogrol standing in the port of the Minos, and I didn't know whether Henshaw's reticence was due to his presence or mine. I moved a step to follow him, but at that moment the outer door of the air lock opened and Claire Avery came out.

  It was the first time I had seen her in a fair light since the take-off at Young's Field, and I had rather forgotten the loveliness of her coloring. Of course, her skin had paled from the weeks in semidarkness, but her cadmium-yellow hair and sapphire-blue eyes were really startling, especially when she moved into the sun shadow of the cliff and stood bathed only in the golden Jupiter light.

  Like Henshaw and myself, she had slipped on the all-enveloping ski suit one wore on chilly little Europa. The small world received only a fourth as much heat as steamy Io, and would not have been habitable at all, except for the fact that it kept its face always toward its primary, and therefore received heat intermittently from the Sun, but eternally from Jupiter.

  The girl cast an eager look over the valley; I knew this was her first experience on an uninhabited world, and there is always a sense of strangeness and the fascination of the unknown in one's first step on an alien planet.

  She looked at Henshaw, who was methodically examining the scorched soil on which the Minos rested, and then her glance crossed mine. There was an electric moment of tension, but then the anger in her blue eyes—if it had been anger —died away, and she strode deliberately to my side.

  She faced me squarely. "Jack Sands," she said with an undertone of defiance, "I owe you an apology. Don't think I'm apologizing for my op
inion of you, but only for the way I've been acting toward you. In a small company like this there isn't room for enmity, and as far as I'm concerned, your past is yours from now on. What's more, I want to thank you for helping me during the take-off, and"—her defiance was cracking a bit—"d-during the—the landing."

  I stared at her. That apology must have cost her an effort, for the Golden Flash was a proud young lady, and I saw her wink back her tears. I choked back the vicious reply I had been about to make, and said only, "O.K.You keep your opinion of me to yourself and I'll do the same with my opinion of you."

  She flushed, then smiled. "I guess I'm a rotten pilot," she admitted ruefully. "I hate take-offs and landings. To tell the truth, I'm simply scared of the Minos. Up to the time we left Young's Field, I'd never handled anything larger than my little racing rocket, the Golden Flash."

  I gasped. That wouldn't have been credible if I hadn't seen with my own eyes how utterly unpracticed she was. "But why?" I asked in perplexity. "If you hate piloting so, why do it? Just for publicity? With your money you don't have to, you know."

  "Oh, my money!" she echoed irritably. She stared away over the narrow valley, and started suddenly. "Look!" she cried. "There's something moving on the peaks like a big ball. And way up where there's no air at all!"

  I glanced over. "It's just a bladder bird," I said indifferently. I'd seen plenty of them; they were the commonest mobile form of life on Europa. But of course Claire hadn't, and she was eagerly curious.

  I explained. I threw stones into a tinkling grove of song-bushes until I flushed up another, and it went gliding over our heads with its membrane stretched taut.

  I told her that the three-foot creature that had sailed like a flying squirrel was the same sort as the giant ball she had glimpsed among the airless peaks, only the one on the peaks had inflated its bladder. The creatures were able to cross from valley to valley by carrying their air with them in their big, balloonlike bladders. And, of course, bladder birds weren't really birds at all; they didn't fly, but glided like the lemurs and flying squirrels of Earth, and naturally, couldn't even do that when they were up on the airless heights.