Avon Science Fiction Reader 2

by Unknown Author

  JO-AD DUG his heels into his hump-backed steed’s ribs and grunted.

  “The moon used to be up there,” he said morosely, pointing skyward.

  “What did it look like?”

  He stared at the heavens and, for an instant, his dull eyes glittered.

  “Mo-Ad, there was nothing to compare with it in the sky for sheer beauty. A giant globe of the most delicate yellow with black markings over the surface that took on the semblance of a face. It was utilized mainly for romance. Lovers wooed each other in its glow, in cities and countries alike …”

  Mo-Ad rested himself in his saddle.

  “What were cities and countries?” he asked.

  Jo-Ad sighed.

  “The cities were great beehives of industry—that was something that meant producing articles in quantities,” he added hastily as he saw the instant question form upon his son’s lips, “wherein they worked and played, lived and died, loved and begat their children. Beehives of industry, where they made by the millions, in almost less time than it takes to tell, the instruments we produce today by hand. Giant social centers where everyone was happy, where everyone was warm and safe. Countries— well, they were sections of land each inhabited by different races of people. Races, my son, were sections of humanity. Some were different from others. Some had black skin, some yellow, some pale like ours. Some had long noses, some short. A lot of them were tall and a lot were runty. They were not like us.” He raised his head and, shading his eyes, peered ahead.

  “We are approaching the Cliff. You must know of that as well. And when you see it you will understand why our skins are pale and why the skins of the People of the Top are black… .”

  Mo-Ad broke in, eager to show his father a glimmer of the analytical intelligence that alone of the People of the Bottom was Jo-Ad’s.

  “But father, you said that no one could ever reach the country of the. People of the Top. The Cliff is too high. How then do you know that their skins are black?”

  Jo-Ad pulled his burnoose closer about him to protect his thin skin front the evening chill.

  “Their bodies have been found—torn and mangled at the bottom. Some careless individuals fell the awful height of the Cliff. According to the ancient reckoning, it is a hundred and fifty miles high. Their skins were as black as coal. You see, Mo-Ad, when the Top grew over the Bottom, the atmosphere poured down on us, leaving a thin layer on the Top and burdening our Bottom with billions upon billions of tons of air. That is why we are pale skinned. The sun must penetrate additional hundreds of miles of atmosphere. The Top people compensated for the loss of air by developing larger lung-capacities.”

  “And how do you know all these things?” asked Mo-Ad with the skepticism of the very young.

  His father looked at him long.

  “I have read the Books,” he said in an awful voice. “And I know why the Top grew upon the Bottom and why we are pale-skinned and where the Moon went and why we have no industry or cities or countries. And many things more which you shall know.”

  Mo-Ad jogged along in silence for awhile. The undulating desert flowed by. Far ahead loomed the Cliff.

  “I have heard it said,” he breathed softly at length, “that once this land was buried beneath a bottomless ocean.”

  “You heard aright.” Jo-Ad sat up very straight and gazed sadly about the empty wilderness lit by the rays of the setting sun. “The ocean grew when the Top grew and pressed down what it grew over and the Bottom was flooded. The cities were drowned and almost all of the people. The machines rusted and fell apart and their secrets were lost. Presently, the People of the Top, who had all these things, bored through their planet and began draining away the ocean that buried the Bottom. It flowed into the empty chasms under the Top. In a little while it was all gone. The remnants of the people from whom we are descended came down from the mountains to the dry lands and grew and multiplied—but slowly. In the course of time some water returned—and thus our people lived.” He paused and looked at the looming Cliff with hatred. “But enough . , , we are approaching the Cliff.”

  High soared the cliff, one hundred and fifty miles into the dense air. From where their camels coursed, up and down and over the sand-hills, they could see its curving bulk stretching away to the uttermost limits of the horizon. An insurmountable barrier, it reared its grim, absolutely sheer wall to invisible heights. The top was lost in shifting clouds that poured over the barrier and floated down to condense in watery vapor which buried half its height in impenetrable mists.

  “It goes around the world,” gasped Jo-Ad, as he was jogged roughly by his camel, “and no one can climb it. It is too high. It is too smooth.”

  “But the flying birds. Could they not have scaled the Cliff?” asked Mo-Ad naively.

  “I have told you, my son, that all “those secrets were lost when the Bottom was drowned.”

  Mo-Ad stopped his camel and slid to the ground. He set his feet firmly in the sandy soil. He looked inquiringly at his father who also dismounted and stood, lost in thought, one hand on the tether of his mount, the other cupping a weary chin.

  “Father, where is the Moon?”

  Jo-Ad lilted his head and pointed.

  “Beyond the Top. During the course of ages, the uneven pull of the Top slowed the satellite in its orbit to a point where it hung stationary in the sky above the Top.” Fie bent down and with the end of his camel-whip drew a diagram in the sand. What looked like two badly fitted halves fitted to each other, one greatly overlapping the other. A smaller full sphere hung beyond the wider half.

  “This is what the three planets look like now, Mo-Ad,” he said.

  Mo-Ad gazed earnestly at the diagram, eager to please his father who had done what no other parent of his race would—imparted precious knowledge to his son.

  “And what is the name of the Top, father?”

  “Mars, my son.”

  Professor Charters Randolph was no snob. He did his plowing himself. The little college town was too poor to support him adequately and pay for the wild experiments his faculty colleagues frowned on. Fie cracked a whip in the air above the heads of his two blowsy horses and felt the plow-belt about his waist pulled forward sharply.

  Fits action was automatic, because he really wasn’t thinking of the plowing at all. The long furrows lengthened out behind him in mathematically straight lines, and occasionally he absently cracked his whip and was pulled forward when he got around to noticing that the plow had stopped. Randolph jerked his head up and mopped it with a violently red handkerchief. Fie looked around with a startled gaze and realized that he and his horses had reached the end of the field. Wearily he started to turn them around. half-heartedly, he hitched up the belt encircling his waist, then, suddenly let it drop, stepped up to the horses, disconnected their reins and with a slap on the rump sent them ambling toward the barn. Fie took himself painfully toward the distant cottage settling like a grey brick on the brown hill-side.

  His wife Martha greeted him in the front yard which crouched close to the country road. She waved a hand at him and wiped the sweat off her own brow with the other. Hard toil had changed Martha Randolph from the city stenographer who had fallen in love with the Professor into a tall, hard woman of the soil who broke her back during the day with farm chores and spent the evenings reading Shakespeare and holding fuming test tubes tor her husband.

  “Martha, I’m sick of it,” he said with a droop in the corners of his mouth. Pie passed her and went on up to the porch where he doused his sweating head in a pail of cold water and dipped a panful of it into his mouth. ,

  She came up behind him and, laying her cheek against his shoulder, hugged him fiercely.

  “Go on in the house and lay down,” she suggested.

  He turned to her and stood arms akimbo.

  “No, I’m going into the lab. When’s supper? Is Charley coming over?’

  She bent over the pail of fresh water and took a long drink before replying. When she straightene
d, she flashed her white teeth in the light of the sun.

  “Charley’ll be over after supper. We’re having steak. Want any beer? I can drive into town.”

  “Never mind, darling,” he replied, “steak’s enough. Thanks.”

  He turned abruptly and walked around the house to a small shed with a heavy door which he unlocked with a big old-fashioned key. The interior was dark. He carefully lit a kerosene lamp and sent some of the gloom skittering.

  Well, he thought, I’m in my castle now. The farm and the back-breaking labor lay far behind. This was his citadel—his citadel of science, as he called it, a safe haven against a disintegrating world. He pulled up a chair, sat down and looked around, gloating.

  The interior of the shack was rough pine, unpainted, but clean. Lined with shelves, it measured about fifteen by twenty feet and was connected with the rest of the house with a very small door at one end. The shelves were piled high with colored bottles of chemicals and under them, at intervals along the walls, big machines were set on concrete slabs sunk into the earth. Big metal working machinery, bought and paid for with sweat and blood and tears; machinery begrudged Randolph by a jealous world that took far more than it gave. He shrugged his shoulders in the half darkness and smiled a crooked smile. He’d given it more than it could have given him. Invention after invention to brighten the world and clean up the dirty corners. It had all been stolen, by crooked business men and greedy schools. The Professor was a singular man in his conduct toward the world. He was invariably honest and direct. So his brain work was stolen and he starved more often than he ate.

  Between the machines, which were fed by heavy power cables leading out to the field where power lines leaned crazily in all directions on their way up the mountain to the town, were piles of metal slabs, wires, tools, insulation and more chemicals in cans. Where the shadows lay, thrown by the feeble light of the kerosene lamp, they loomed dirty and like a shambles. He didn’t care. The roughness of the assemblage of machinery pleased hint. It owed nothing to the outside world. But it was his baby.

  He sat in the darkness for a while and then Martha called him in to. supper. They ate slowly and meditatively and looked at each other with deep love in their eyes, and sopped huge chunks of bread into the gravy and ate them. As they were having coffee, the unlocked front door opened and Charley Small came in. .

  “Evenin’ folks,” he said slowly and took off his cap and sat down.

  He was a big, lumbering farmer, who had a brain with a razor’s edge and nobody but the Professor to give it something to cut into. He worked during the day at an iceplant in the town and spent as many of his evenings as he could sitting with Randolph in his shack helping him fashion strange machines. He had a queer love for the shiny contraptions turned out by his friend. Somehow, they signified the outside world to him with all its splendor and glory. He was a poet, but only the Professor and his wife knew it.

  Martha smiled up at him and pushed a chair against the supper table.

  “Have some coffee,” she said.

  Charley sat down and took a newspaper out of the back pocket of his work overalls and handed it without a word to the Professor. Randolph picked it up, glanced briefly at the headline and threw it into a corner where reposed stacks of old papers. They often came in handy for kindling fires in the big brick stove. .

  “What’s new?” asked Randolph as Martha got up and reached for the big coffee pot.

  Small scratched his thick-thatched head and grunted.

  “Nothin’ much, Randolph.”

  “Get that tobacco?”

  The big man hitched his pants and brought out a huge package of cut plug. Randolph reached for it.

  “Thanks; don’t know what I’d have done without it.”

  He pushed back his plate and leaned aside while Martha stood over them pouring coffee. When she’d finished, she walked over to a shabby studio couch, reclined on it and snapped on a small radio. Presently the strains of a symphony filled the confines of the small house.

  They finished their coffee in silence.

  “Say, Doc,” began Small after a few minutes, “I got a question.” From a vest pocket underneath the overalls he produced two small mirrors, of the variety sold on notion counters in five-and-dime stores, and held them up to the dim light.

  “What are those?” asked Randolph, interested. He filled his pipe and puffed, looking at the two baubles suspended in the air before his eyes.

  “Just an idea I got today. I was sittin’ in Sloan’s lunch. Sloan has two mirrors on opposite walls and I was sittin’ between ’em. I got a look at myself down both mirrors—and there I was about a million times on both tides …”

  The Professor chuckled.

  “Rather startling when you See it for the first time.”

  The big man scratched his head again.

  “Yeah. Sorta curious. There I was curving away on both sides. Say, why don’t those images line up?”

  Randolph chuckled again.

  “They can’t. No two mirrors can he brought exactly into line with each other. In the first place, no two planes are ever exactly parallel and that’s what you’d need to start off with. Even the slightest unbalance is enough to start the images curving away. And they always do.”

  The two small mirrors still hovered in the air.

  “Yeah, but suppose you could get two of them things in exact line with each other. What would happen?”

  Randolph looked at him queerly and thought to himself for a minute. Well, what would happen? It had never happened before, so he supposed some result was bound to occur. For some reason, an irrelevant picture of an explosion filled his mind, then faded. It had been a random thought, nothing more. He balanced his pipe in his hands.

  “I don’t know just what would happen. It’s a phenomenon that has never been observed.” Fie reached over and plucked the two mirrors from the big man’s calloused hands.

  “Yes,” he mused, “I wonder what would happen …”

  “For instance,” interrupted Small, “if you could do it and I got between ’em, what would happen to the reflection? Would it stay there after 1 got out of the way?”

  Randolph looked at the mirrors and held them up.

  “No, I don’t think it would. The reflection is light and light has mass. Astro-physicists have proven that light loses velocity every time it is reflected. Somewhere the reflection would stop and become mass. Natural law governs that.”

  “Well,” persisted Small, “what would happen to It after it turned solid? Could you put your hand on it?”

  The Professor looked up with a jerk. He turned wide open eyes On Small.

  “I—I suppose you could. Every time the light was re-reflected from mirror to mirror it would lose some of its velocity and get nearer the solid state.”

  The other drank his coffee and lit a pipe himself.

  “Suppose,” he continued along his line of reasoning, “suppose you got a bit of sunlight in between ’em. What would you have after it stopped?” Randolph sat up and stared.

  “My god!” he ejaculated. “And they say that yokels can’t think! Charley, you’ve got an idea there. But—it’s impossible! Nobody could ever get two mirrors in exact alignment. If they did …, but damn it, nobody can.” Small stared moodily into the gloom.

  “Well,” he said, licking his lips. “It was a good idea.”

  They played cards for awhile and then went into the laboratory where the two of them worked over some machines shaping odd lengths of metal and wood. Finally Small went home.

  In bed that night, the big man’s idea haunted Randolph’s dreams. He awoke at last from a deep sleep, sweating. He’d been dreaming about mirrors. He’d been caught between two of them iii exact alignment and hurled, spinning, into infinity.

  God!” he ejaculated and ran his fingers through his hair.

  His wife stirred and woke up.

  “What’s the matter, dear?” she asked, shifting around to face him.

&nbs
p; He was still running his fingers through his hair.

  Martha,” he said after a time, “It’s coming again. An idea. Do you think we can go on short rations for awhile?”

  She smiled sleepily and kissed him, used to his sudden notions.

  “Of course, darling. I didn’t marry a plow horse. I married a mart , Be one. Is it more machines, this time?”

  He nodded. “Yes,” he said hoarsely.

  She kissed him again.

  He went down to his shack many evenings now and worked among the spinning machines powered by the little dynamo that hummed endlessly away, driven by the underground river his science had found. Charley Small helped him shape the box he built and the queer mirrors he carefully polished and ground, and stood over him with infinite patience holding the necessary tools like a nurse at an operating table. Gradually the machine he was building took shape.

  Martha came down one evening from the upstairs bedroom whence she had retired after supper for a wink of sleep. It was a dark, warm night and both men were working in their pants and undershirts. Their bare feet made pattering noises on the pine floor as they moved and the room was lit up by the weird glow of a small metal-cutting torch wielded by her husband.

  As she entered the room, the Professor swung back the visor which protected his eyes from the flame and stood up painfully. Fie arched his back. She came over and rubbed it for awhile. Charley looked on, one hand on the controls of the torch, the other tamping the ashes in his pipe. His huge eyes glittered with the light of discovery.

  “Anywhere near finished?” she asked.

  Randolph wiped his hands with some cotton waste and lit his pipe.

  “We’ve got something, and I don’t know what we’ve got. Remember that centrifuge I built for the Polyclinic that made a dozen separate motions simultaneously? Well, this is a hundred times more complicated.”