First Lensman

by Edward E Smith

  “Check. That the notorious Murgatroyd, instead of being just another pirate chief, is really working for Spaceways and belongs to the Towne-Morgan-Isaacson gang. But dad—what an idea! Can things be that rotten, really?”

  “They may be worse than that. Now the next thing. Who, in your opinion, is the real boss?”

  “Well, it certainly is not Herkimer Herkimer Third.” Jill ticked him off on a pink forefinger. She had been asked for an opinion; she set out to give it without apology or hesitation. “He could—just about—direct the affairs of a hot-dog stand. Nor is it Clander. He isn’t even a little fish; he’s scarcely a minnow. Equally certainly it is neither the Venerian nor the Martian. They may run planetary affairs, but nothing bigger. I haven’t met Murgatroyd, of course, but I have had several evaluations, and he does not rate up with Towne. And Big Jim—and this surprised me as much as it will you—is almost certainly not the prime mover.” She looked at him questioningly.

  “That would have surprised me tremendously yesterday; but after today—I’ll tell you about that presently—it doesn’t.”

  “I’m glad of that. I expected an argument, and I have been inclined to question the validity of my own results, since they do not agree with common knowledge—or, rather, what is supposed to be knowledge. That leaves Isaacson and Senator Morgan.” Jill frowned in perplexity; seemed, for the first time, unsure. “Isaacson is of course a big man. Able. Well-informed. Extremely capable. A top-notch executive. Not only is, would have to be, to run Spaceways. On the other hand, I have always thought that Morgan was nothing but a windbag…” Jill stopped talking; left the thought hanging in air.

  “So did I—until today,” Samms agreed grimly. “I thought that he was simply an unusually corrupt, greedy, rabble-rousing politician. Our estimates of him may have to be changed very radically.”

  Samms’ mind raced. From two entirely different angles of approach, Jill and he had arrived at the same conclusion. But, if Morgan were really the Big Shot, would he have deigned to interview personally such small fry as Olmstead? Or was Olmstead’s job of more importance than he, Samms, had supposed?

  “I’ve got a dozen more things to check with you,” he went on, almost without a pause, “but since this leadership matter is the only one in which my experience would affect your judgment, I had better tell you about what happened today…”

  * * * * *

  Tuesday came, and hour fourteen hundred; and Samms strode into an office. There was a big, clean desk; a wiry, intense, gray-haired man.

  “Captain Willoughby?”

  “Yes.”

  “George Olmstead reporting.”

  “Fourth Officer.” The captain punched a button; the heavy, sound-proof door closed itself and locked.

  “Fourth Officer? New rank, eh, What does the ticket cover?”

  “New, and special. Here’s the articles; read it and sign it.” He did not add “or else”, it was not necessary. It was clearly evident that Captain Willoughby, never garrulous, intended to be particularly reticent with his new subordinate.

  Samms read. “…Fourth Officer…shall…no duties or responsibilities in the operation or maintenance of said space-ship…cargo…” Then came a clause which fairly leaped from the paper and smote his eyes: “when in command of a detail outside the hull of said space-ship he shall enforce, by the infliction of death or such other penalty as he deems fit…”

  The Lensman was rocked to the heels, but did not show it. Instead, he took the captain’s pen—his own, as far as Willoughby was concerned, could have been filled with vanishing ink—and wrote George Olmstead’s name in George Olmstead’s bold, flowing script.

  Willoughby then took him aboard the good ship Virgin Queen and led him to his cabin.

  “Here you are, Mr. Olmstead. Beyond getting acquainted with the supercargo and the rest of your men, you will have no duties for a few days. You have full run of the ship, with one exception. Stay out of the control room until I call you. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir.” Willoughby turned away and Samms, after tossing his space-bag into the rack, took inventory.

  The room was of course very small; but, considering the importance of mass, it was almost extravagantly supplied. There were shelves, or rather, tight racks, of books; there were sun-lamps and card-shelves and exercisers and games; there was a receiver capable of bringing in programs from almost anywhere in space. The room had only one lack; it did not have an ultra-wave visiplate. Nor was this lack surprising. “They” would scarcely let George Olmstead know where “they” were taking him.

  Samms was surprised, however, when he met the men who were to be directly under his command; for instead of one, or at most two, they numbered exactly forty. And they were all, he thought at first glance, the dregs and sweepings of the lowest dives in space. Before long, however, he learned that they were not all space-rats and denizens of Skid Rows. Six of them—the strongest physically and the hardest mentally of the lot—were fugitives from lethal chambers; murderers and worse. He looked at the biggest, toughest one of the six—a rock-drill-eyed, red-haired giant—and asked;

  “What did they tell you, Tworn, that your job was going to be?”

  “They didn’t say. Just that it was dangerous, but if I done exactly what my boss would tell me to do, and nothing else, I might not even get hurt. An’ I was due to take the deep breath the next week, see? That’s just how it was, boss.”

  “I see,” and one by one Virgil Samms, master psychologist, studied and analyzed his motley crew until he was called into the control room.

  The navigating tank was covered; no charts were to be seen. The one “live” visiplate showed a planet and a fiercely blue-white sun.

  “My orders are to tell you, at this point, all I know about what you’ve got to do and about that planet down there. Trenco, they call it.” To Virgil Samms, the first adherent of Civilization ever to hear it, that name meant nothing whatever. “You are to take about five of your men, go down there, and gather all the green leaves you can. Not green in color; sort of purplish. What they call broadleaf is the best; leaves about two feet long and a foot wide. But don’t be too choosy. If there isn’t any broadleaf handy, grab anything you can get hold of.”

  “What is the opposition?” Samms asked, quietly. “And what have they got that makes them so tough?”

  “Nothing. No inhabitants, even Just the planet itself. Next to Arisia, it’s the God damndest planet in space. I’ve never been any closer to it than this, and I never will, so I don’t know anything about it except what I hear; but there’s something about it that kills men or drives them crazy. We spend seven or eight boats every trip, and thirty-five or forty men, and the biggest load that anybody ever took away from here was just under two hundred pounds of leaf. A good many times we don’t get any.”

  “They go crazy, eh?” In spite of his control, Samms paled. But it couldn’t be like Arisia. “What are the symptoms? What do they say?”

  “Various. Main thing seems to be that they lose their sight. Don’t go blind, exactly, but can’t see where anything is; or, if they do see it, it isn’t there. And it rains over forty feet deep every night, and yet it all dries up by morning. The worst electrical storms in the universe, and wind-velocities—I can show you charts on that—of over eight hundred miles an hour.”

  “Whew! How about time? With your permission, I would like to do some surveying before I try to land.”

  “A smart idea. A couple of the other boys had the same, but it didn’t help—they didn’t come back. I’ll give you two Tellurian days—no, three—before I give you up and start sending out the other boats. Pick out your five men and see what you can do.”

  As the boat dropped away, Willoughby’s voice came briskly from a speaker. “I know that you five men have got ideas. Forget ’em. Fourth Officer Olmstead has the authority and the orders to put a half-ounce slug through the guts of any or all of you that don’t jump, and jump fast, to do what he tells you. And if tha
t boat makes any funny moves I blast it out of the ether. Good harvesting!”

  For forty-eight Tellurian hours, taking time out only to sleep, Samms scanned and surveyed the planet Trenco; and the more he studied it, the more outrageously abnormal it became.

  Trenco was, and is, a peculiar planet indeed. Its atmosphere is not air as we know air; its hydrosphere does not resemble water. Half of that atmosphere and most of that hydrosphere are one chemical, a substance of very low heat of vaporization and having a boiling point of about seventy five degrees Fahrenheit. Trenco’s days are intensely hot; its nights are bitterly cold.

  At night, therefore, it rains; and by comparison a Tellurian downpour of one inch per hour is scarcely a drizzle. Upon Trenco is really rains—forty seven feet and five inches of precipitation, every night of every Trenconian year. And this tremendous condensation of course causes wind. Willoughby’s graphs were accurate. Except at Trenco’s very poles there is not a spot in which or a time at which an Earthly gale would not constitute a dead calm; and along the equator, at every sunrise and every sunset, the wind blows from the day side into the night side at a velocity which no Tellurian hurricane or cyclone, however violent, has even distantly approached.

  Also, therefore, there is lightning. Not in the mild and occasional flashes which we of gentle Terra know, but in a continuous, blinding glare which outshines a normal sun; in battering, shattering, multi-billion-volt discharges which not only make darkness unknown there, but also distort beyond recognition and beyond function the warp and the woof of space itself. Sight is almost completely useless in that fantastically altered medium. So is the ultra-beam.

  Landing on the daylight side, except possibly at exact noon, would be impossible because of the wind, nor could the ship stay landed for more than a couple of minutes. Landing on the night side would be practically as bad, because of the terrific charge the boat would pick up—unless the boat carried something that could be rebuilt into a leaker. Did it? It did.

  Time after time, from pole to pole and from midnight around the clock, Samms stabbed Visibeam and spy-ray down toward Trenco’s falsely-visible surface, with consistently and meaninglessly impossible results. The planet tipped, lurched, spun, and danced. It broke up into chunks, each of which began insanely to follow mathematically impossible paths.

  Finally, in desperation, he rammed a beam down and held it down. Again he saw the planet break up before his eyes, but this time he held on. He knew that he was well out of the stratosphere, a good two hundred miles up. Nevertheless, he saw a tremendous mass of jagged rock falling straight down, with terrific velocity, upon his tiny lifeboat!

  Unfortunately the crew, to whom he had not been paying overmuch attention of late, saw it, too; and one of them, with a bestial yell, leaped toward Samms and the controls. Samms, reaching for pistol and blackjack, whirled around just in time to see the big red-head lay the would-be attacker out cold with a vicious hand’s-edge chop at the base of the skull.

  “Thanks, Tworn. Why?”

  “Because I want to get out of this alive, and he’d’ve had us all in hell in fifteen minutes. You know a hell of a lot more than we do, so I’m playin’ it your way. See?”

  “I see. Can you use a sap?”

  “An artist,” the big man admitted, modestly. “Just tell me how long you want a guy to be out and I won’t miss it a minute, either way. But you’d better blow that crumb’s brains out, right now. He ain’t no damn good.”

  “Not until after I see whether he can work or not. You’re a Procian, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah. Midlands—North Central.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing much, at first. Just killed a guy that needed killing; but the goddam louse had a lot of money, so they give me twenty five years. I didn’t like it very well, and acted rough, so they give me solitary—boot, bandage, and so on. So I tried a break—killed six or eight, maybe a dozen, guards—but didn’t quite make it. So they slated me for the big whiff. That’s all, boss.”

  “I’m promoting you, now, to squad leader. Here’s the sap.” He handed Tworn his blackjack. “Watch ’em—I’ll be too busy to. This landing is going to be tough.”

  “Gotcha, boss.” Tworn was calibrating his weapon by slugging himself experimentally on the leg. “Go ahead. As far as these crumbs are concerned, you’ve got this air-tank all to yourself.”

  Samms had finally decided what he was going to do. He located the terminator on the morning side, poised his little ship somewhat nearer to dawn than to midnight, and “cut the rope”. He took one quick reading on the sun, cut off his plates, and let her drop, watching only his pressure gages and gyros.

  One hundred millimeters of mercury. Three hundred. Five hundred. He slowed her down. He was going to hit a thin liquid, but if he hit it too hard he would smash the boat, and he had no idea what the atmospheric pressure at Trenco’s surface would be. Six hundred. Even this late at night, it might be greater than Earth’s…and it might be a lot less. Seven hundred.

  Slower and slower he crept downward, his tension mounting infinitely faster than did the needle of the gage. This was an instrument landing with a vengeance! Eight hundred. How was the crew taking it? How many of them had Tworn had to disable? He glanced quickly around. None! Now that they could not see the hallucinatory images upon the plates, they were not suffering at all—he himself was the only one aboard who was feeling the strain!

  Nine hundred…nine hundred forty. The boat “hit the drink” with a crashing, splashing impact. Its pace was slow enough, however, and the liquid was deep enough, so that no damage was done. Samms applied a little driving power and swung his craft’s sharp nose into the line toward the sun. The little ship plowed slowly forward, as nearly just awash as Samms could keep her; grounded as gently as a river steamboat upon a mud-flat. The starkly incredible downpour slackened; the Lensman knew that the second critical moment was at hand.

  “Strap down, men, until we see what this wind is going to do to us.”

  The atmosphere, moving at a velocity well above that of sound, was in effect not a gas, but a solid. Even a space-boat’s hard skin of alloy plate, with all its bracing, could not take what was coming next. Inert, she would be split open, smashed, flattened out, and twisted into pretzels. Samms’ finger stabbed down; the Berg went into action; the lifeboat went free just as that raging blast of quasi-solid vapor wrenched her into the air.

  The second descent was much faster and much easier than the first. Nor, this time, did Samms remain surfaced or drive toward shore. Knowing now that this ocean was not deep enough to harm his vessel, he let her sink to the bottom. More, he turned her on her side and drove her at a flat angle into the bottom; so deep that the rim of her starboard lock was flush with the ocean’s floor. Again they waited; and this time the wind did not blow the lifeboat away.

  Upon purely theoretical grounds Samms had reasoned that the weird distortion of vision must be a function of distance, and his observations so far had been in accord with that hypothesis. Now, slowly and cautiously, he sent out a visibeam. Ten feet…twenty…forty…all clear. At fifty the seeing was definitely bad; at sixty it became impossible. He shortened back to forty and began to study the vegetation, growing with such fantastic speed that the leaves, pressed flat to the ground by the gale and anchored there by heavy rootlets, were already inches long. There was also what seemed to be animal life, of sorts, but Samms was not, at the moment, interested in Trenconian zoology.

  “Are them the plants we’re going to get, boss?” Tworn asked, staring into the plate over Samms’ shoulder. “Shall we go out now an’ start pickin’ ’em?”

  “Not yet. Even if we could open the port the blast would wreck us. Also, it would shear your head off, flush with the coaming, as fast as you stuck it out. This wind should ease off after while; we’ll go out a little before noon. In the meantime we’ll get ready. Have the boys break out a couple of spare Number Twelve struts, some clamps and chain, four snatch blocks, a
nd a hundred feet of heavy space-line…

  “Good,” he went on, when the order had been obeyed. “Rig the line from the winch through snatch blocks here, and here, and here, so I can haul you back against the wind. While you are doing that I’ll rig a remote control on the winch.”

  Shortly before Trenco’s fierce, blue-white sun reached meridian, the six men donned space-suits and Samms cautiously opened the air-lock ports. They worked. The wind was now scarcely more than an Earthly hurricane; the wildly whipping broadleaf plants, struggling upward, were almost half-way to the vertical. The leaves were apparently almost fully grown.

  Four men clamped their suits to the line. The line was paid out. Each man selected two leaves; the largest, fattest, purplest ones he could reach. Samms hauled them back and received the loot; Tworn stowed the leaves away. Again—again—again.

  With noon there came a few minutes of “calm”. A strong man could stand against the now highly variable wind; could move around without being blown beyond the horizon; and during those few minutes all six men gathered leaves. That time, however, was very short. The wind steadied into the reverse direction with ever-increasing fury; winch and space-line again came into play. And in a scant half hour, when the line began to hum an almost musical note under its load, Samms decided to call it quits.

  “That’ll be all for today, boys,” he announced. “About twice more and this line will part. You’ve done too good a job to lose you. Secure ship.”

  “Shall I blow the air, sir?” Tworn asked.

  “I don’t think so.” Samms thought for a moment. “No. I’m afraid to take the chance. This stuff; whatever it is, is probably as poisonous as cyanide. We’ll keep our suits on and exhaust into space.”

  Time passed. “Night” came; the rain and the flood. The bottom softened. Samms blasted the lifeboat out of the mud and away from the planet. He opened the bleeder valves, then both airlock ports; the contaminated air was replaced by the ultra-hard vacuum of the interplanetary void. He signaled the Virgin Queen; the lifeboat was taken aboard.