Snakehips came slithering up, still holding Basso. “Basso help!” he cried in triumph. “Watch!”
He charged fearlessly through the thick of the flying mass, and for the first time Clark saw the idea, wondered why it had escaped him before. The singing flowers possessed lethal properties, a natural protection of nature against the frightful blue termite scourge. As an Earthly plant absorbs carbon dioxide and chemically alters it to its own uses, so the more intelligent plants of Titan utilized similar methods, but for protection—simply another facet of nature’s endless adaptability.
Basso drew in a tremendous draft of the heavy atmosphere that set his vocal cord stem and face bulging—then he suddenly exhaled an evil-smelling vapor, the oxygen converted into a different molecular construction and highly poisonous. It was so strong it made both Clark and Snakehips stagger dizzily. But the scheme was successful. The biters fell quickly away from that mephitic area.
Again and again Basso inhaled and exhaled, and little by little the bitten, aching party staggered into the forest’s depths. Here the attack fell away; the air was heavy with the stench of fetid vapors from the countless hundreds of singing flowers, all of them emulating Basso’s methods.
They sank down breathlessly on the curious, spongy amalgam that was the ground. The vapors were less mephitic—their heads began to clear. Clark studied the innumerable blood spots on his bare skin.
“Poisonous?” the girl questioned, surveying her own bites.
He shook his head. “Fortunately, no. The termites overcome their prey by biting it in pieces; it’s their only method. No venom. They scarcely need it,” he added bitterly.
“Nice place to come to!” growled Henshaw argumentatively. “I’ve seen zinrota on Ganymede and johercs on Jupiter, but this lot’s got ’em beat.” He braced his nerves with a further draft of sephma juice, then peered hazily round the clearing. Finally he looked at the sinking sun. “Say, whadda we do when it gets dark?”
“It’s never dark,” Clark answered him. “One moon or the other is always over the horizon, so is some part of Saturn. We’ll have light enough—and I think you’d better lay off that juice!” he went on seriously. “You’re getting tight!”
“S’ what? At leasht I’m happy,” Henshaw grunted, and took another drink. Then he put the cork back in the bottle and closed one eye speculatively. He looked up again as Snakehips began to reveal signs of uneasiness.
He flexed his absurd body into all manner of positions in an effort to convey his alarm.
“What is it?” Clark asked sharply. He knew the Titanian’s quick, natural ability to detect the unusual on his own planet.
“Ground-shift,” he said awkwardly, stumbling over the unaccustomed words. “Ground-shift—”
“Ye’re not foolin’ me,” Henshaw said complacently, half asleep. “It’s another of—hup!—your funny names!”
Clark shook his head worriedly. He began to speak, then paused as Basso, standing in his pot near by, suddenly raised his beautiful petalled face and began to sing:
“Sailor beware, sailor take care—danger is near so beware, beware— Many brave hearts are asleep in the deep—”
Clark looked round him quickly, the girl with him. Basso wasn’t singing that famous song for the sake of it; something had inspired it. Danger, obviously. Where? Clark looked at the other singing blossoms on every side. Their petalled faces were dosing up in readiness for something unpleasant. Basso did likewise when he’d rumbled a final. “Be—ware!”
Snakehips pranced frantically up and down. “Ground-shift!” he nearly screamed—then at a sudden quaking along the very floor of the jungle it dawned on Clark what was implied, Ground-shift! Earthquake! They were common on this insubstantial little moon with its plasmic upper crust and almost eternally shifting and changing under-stratum.
He was on his feet in an instant, briefly explained. The girl clutched his arm in dumb terror as a low rumbling growled under their feet and the huge blossoms of the singing plants began to quiver perceptibly.
“‘What is this—?” Henshaw demanded in irritation, getting to his feet—but his sentence was cut short as the ground suddenly pitched mightily and hurled him, sephma bottle and all, nearly twenty yards away in the weak gravity.
Clark clutched the girl and reeled helplessly away with her. They narrowly missed a falling section of singing plants, and got shakily to their feet in the midst of dense undergrowth.
Again and again the ground heaved. It was impossible to keep upright. In normal times the gravity was tricky enough; in a quake one was utterly at its mercy. Helplessly, clutching each other frantically, they spun round and round, came up hard against a natural tree and then whirled on again, caught now in the grip of a surging, super-heated wind.
“What about father?” the girl cried huskily, bracing herself for a moment. She raised her voice and screamed: “Father!”
There was no response from the lashing, collapsing vegetation. A row of singing plants went down with a twang like badly played harps. Of Henshaw, Basso, or Snakehips there was no sign.
Clark began to speak to the distressed girl, but he was interrupted by yet another convulsion. The ground rippled again. Slipping and sliding, they escaped the very edges of a suddenly parting, newborn fifty-foot chasm. There, ground and air heaved and twisted in a million insane furies. Half jumping, half falling, Clark and the girl blundered into the crumbling jungle’s remoter depths—
Then suddenly—so suddenly it was almost a shock—everything was still. Broken branches creaked. The wind ceased, the concussions stopped. Half uprooted plants drooped sadly, others toppled over with dull tinkling sounds as their roots snapped—
Nan sobbed unashamedly. “Oh, Clark, do you think that father was—?” She couldn’t finish. She buried her head on his chest.
Megaphoning his palms, he yelled at the top of his voice. As before, there was no answer—but his eyes saw something over the more distant, remaining trees that he kept to himself. A flock of blue biters were buzzing in a solid cloud over a solitary spot.
The flowers there had died in the quake—and the termites had nothing to oppose them. If Henshaw had survived the quake—which seemed unlikely from his silence—the blue biters would get him anyhow. Nor was it possible to get across that fifty-foot chasm in time to save him.
Clark successfully concealed a shudder as he turned to the girl, raised her tear-stained face. “We’ve got to face it, Nan,” he said gently. “Come on—chin up!”
Her lips quivered in a futile effort to smile. In silence she walked along beside him. Fifteen minutes later they left the remains of Whispering Forest and came out onto the Saturn-lit plain leading to the coldly white, perfectly even mountain range so fantastically named the Piano Keys.
Clark came to a halt and silently studied the stars, checking his direction for due north. As he had expected, the path lay through the Cleft of the Scissors—but when he came to look for it in the varied lights it wasn’t there.
He stared intently, sudden fear at his heart. If the forked cleft was blocked, it meant climbing the Piano Keys, and that wasn’t possible without equipment. Else circumnavigating Titan itself, which was as difficult.
Laying a hand on the girl’s arm he said worriedly, “You’re quite sure you brought your ship down beyond the Range?”
She nodded miserably. “Of course. We came through the Cleft—”
“That’s just the trouble; I believe the quake’s blocked it up. Come on.”
The distance to the Piano Keys was probably five miles; the varied lights and changing shadows precluded any sureness, Clark judged that they reached the base of the lofty, upflung heights an hour later. Stopping, he looked round him in utter amazement.
The whole topography had changed. The Cleft of the Scissors had gone, yes, but in its stead was a gulf going down to an unknown depth, its floor lost in abysmal dark. To get through the range meant descending into that abyss and then traversing its floor.
Clark looked at the girl quickly. She was dry-eyed now; something of the sadness had gone from her face with the need to face this new problem.
“Down there?” she questioned, and he nodded gravely.
“Only way, I’m afraid. I’ll go first. Watch your step. With a depth like this, despite the slight gravity, you could easily break your neck. Here goes!”
He eased himself cautiously over the edge to the first ledge and assisted the girl down. The entire great escarpment was fortunately on a slight incline; otherwise descending it would have been an impossibility. Even as it was, every move called for infinite caution. For one thing, the innumerable rocks that formed the ledges were by no means stable; for another, the constantly conflicting light rendered judgment deceptive.
Two hundred feet down the descent, the slanting light of the moons and Saturn ceased. The two were obliged to stumble downward through a cold gloom, so cold it was biting in intensity through their thin, torn clothes, Clearly, the wind was blowing from some internal point of the satellite’s cold interior—a contradiction only made possible by external warmth and internal cold.
After an apparent age of struggling, the girl suddenly stopped and pointed below.
“Look. Clark! What’s that?”
He looked in puzzlement at a long line gleaming and sparkling faintly in the brilliance of the overhead stars. It almost resembled ice-facets, yet he knew that couldn’t be. The air, though cold, was not down to freezing point. Besides, there was no water worth mentioning at this depth. What there was lay on the surface.
“No idea,” he confessed at last, and resumed the descent.
It took them another slipping, fumbling thirty minutes to reach the chasm bottom. In silence they stood looking up at the lofty wall beside them, its upper half painted by the Saturnshine, then they moved to that long line of brightness.
The moment they reached it, Clark only glanced at it, then let out a yell that echoed and re-echoed between the towering walls.
“It’s vilictus! A whole vein of it!”
“And?” Nan asked, unimpressed.
“And it’s worth three thousand dollars a gram!” he said in rapture. “Oh, boy, think of it! Untold wealth! Just what I need to put me right when I get back to Earth. It took every penny I had to hire that spaceship of mine—I knew this darned stuff was northward somewhere, but I could never find it. Obviously below surface, and the quake revealed it.”
He tugged out the ray gun from his pocket and fired. Great chunks of the brittle, diamond-like substance sailed through the air. The noise of the explosion boomed and rumbled to the heights above.
Clark began to jam his pockets with the stuff. The girl did likewise, filling the provision packs as well. By the time they had finished, they couldn’t possibly estimate the worth of what they had, and by interplanetary law it was all theirs, though the vein itself would belong to America, since that was Clark’s birthplace.
They went on again at length along the ever-rising chasm floor, stopping only once to rest and eat. Then forward once more until at length they reached the level plain beyond the Piano Keys. Not very far away stood the deserted space machine.
“We made it,” Clark said very quietly,
Nan agreed in a low voice; he knew what she was thinking— Then he looked up sharply as a fairly large pebble dropped from the heights and struck him a glancing blow on the shoulder. In the slight gravitation it was trivial, but—
“Great heavens, look!” he shouted desperately, pointing upward.
The girl only glanced, but immediately she screamed. An avalanche was beginning! Part of those lofty mountain heights, evidently shifted by the recent quake, was breaking free. Stones, boulders, and dust were falling with apparent slowness—but by the time they reached the ground they would be traveling at dangerous velocity.
“Back! Back down the chasm!” Clark yelled. He clutched the girl’s arm as he spoke and they hurled themselves at top speed down the incline up which they’d come.
Even as they ran, the first stones thudded and hammered around them. One hit the girl on the back and sent her sprawling on her face, but she was up again almost instantly, running as never before, until at last sheer lack of breath brought her to a gasping halt. Panting, Clark stopped beside her.
They looked back just in time to see numberless tons of white, powdered rock come crashing down at the far end of the incline, rocking the very floor with the concussion, spreading a vast choking haze of dust that set them coughing furiously. Then with the minutes, the disturbance began to settle.
“Gosh, that was close!” Clark breathed, his face tense and dusty in the reflected starshine. “Good job it didn’t block the chasm opening. Only fallen to one side of it.”
“Think the ship will be all right?” the girl questioned anxiously.
“No reason why not. It was a good distance from the line of fall.”
They turned to return up the slope, then they paused in complete bewilderment. Clearly to their ears came singing—clear cut and profoundly deep, echoing against the walls!
“—and all day long the precious draft I’m drinking—drinking—drinking—”
“Basso!” Nan gulped in amazed relief. Then she frowned. “But how did he get this far? He can’t walk—”
“Unless Snakehips—” Clark began, but he paused as an undeniable human voice, congested with liquor and much fainter, tried to take up the same refrain and failed miserably.
“It’s father!” the girl screamed hysterically. “It’s father! He’s alive!” She shouted hoarsely, “Father, is that you?”
A reply floated out of the darknesses of the chasm, far down the long incline.
“Course itsh me, girlie. An’ why shouldn’t it be, I’d like to know? Aw, c’m on now, letsh have it again—I’m drinking, drinking, drink—” He finished in a throaty gurgle.
“What in Heaven—?” Nan started in bewilderment, then at that moment a figure came reeling into view, a figure in soiled white, hat on the back of his head, shiny face faintly visible. In one hand he clutched the now empty bottle of sephma juice, and in the other the pot containing the deeply singing Basso. Something else merged up like green grease paint. It was the faithful Snakehips.
Snakehips came forward eagerly. “Heard shot. Came,” he said briefly from his great height.
Clark frowned. “Shot? Oh, you mean the ray gun when I cut off those vilictus chunks? It guided you here?”
Snakehips nodded. Nan went over to her father and shook him violently. “Father, listen to me! Are you hurt?”
“Snot a bit,” he confided in a whisper, and she jerked her face away at the garlicky reek. “Never felt better—hup!—in my life!” He waved an arm to prove it and nearly overbalanced. Clark caught him tightly.
“Listen, Mr. Henshaw; how’d you escape the blue biters?”
Henshaw chuckled thickly. “I fooled ’em! Easy! They bit me an’—an’ left me alone—” His eye closed significantly.
“Left you alone!” Clark cried. “That’s impossible!”
“Oh, so you call me a liar, huh? Wanna fight—”
“Forget it,” Clark said briefly, and signaled to the girl. Between them they marched the arguing Henshaw up the incline, still clutching pot and bottle tenaciously. Once they circled the remains of the avalanche, they stopped again.
“Come to think of it,” the girl said, “we’d have missed father if this avalanche hadn’t turned us back. And then we mightn’t have known but for the range of Basso’s voice— Why Clark, whatever’s the matter?”
He was grinning amusedly. “Just been thinking about your dad’s escape from the biters. Sure they’d leave him alone! He’s drunk so much sephma juice his blood stream is charged with alcohol. Alcohol is utter poison to them, even in the minutest quantity. Like—like bathing insect bites with beer back on Earth,” he finished reflectively. “Gosh, it was lucky he got drunk. It saved his life.”
“And Snakehips led him?” the girl sa
id eagerly.
“Snakehips did,” the Titanian acknowledged. “Man here was asleep when—when you called. I carry him down chasm in jungle. Not deep, but wide. Carried him most times down wall here—” Snakehips’ huge eyes saddened momentarily. “Miss you,” he said simply, then suddenly turned and went off into the gloom of the lower incline, heading back undoubtedly for his own distant people.
“Well, swat we waiting for?” Henshaw asked disagreeably. “I wanna sleep—”
He slept all right—slept until the ship had pulled well clear of Titan and was on the earthward run. But he spent the greater part of the journey trying to pitch his voice as phenomenally low as Basso.
DOMAIN OF ZERO
BY THORNTON AYRE
From Planet Stories, Fall 1940
“Domain of Zero” was a direct sequel to “Whispering Satellite”, and was submitted to Astounding. However, it was rejected by Campbell, who had made a sudden decision not to feature any further Weinbaum-inspired stories. The ms. was returned to his agent. Meanwhile, in the UK a number of possible UK markets began to emerge, and here Fearn represented himself. To this end he retyped fresh copies of some his recently rejected American stories to have on hand for possible UK sales.
John Carnell was soliciting stories for a new English SF magazine to be called New Worlds. At the beginning of 1940, Fearn submitted and placed with Carnell at least five stories, “Domain of Zero,” “Memory Unlimited,” “Knowledge Without Learning,” “Lunar Concession,” and “Solar Assignment.” Had New Worlds been established at that time, Fearn (who was then the only full-time SF writer in Britain) would undoubtedly have become its leading contributor under his own name and various aliases.
In its early planning stages, New Worlds was ‘big news’ for American sf fans, and news of the sale of three of these stories was printed in the leading U.S. fan newspaper, Fantasy News, edited by James W. Taurasi. The March 24, 1940 issue announced:
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