PROMINENT FAN HEADS ENGLAND’S NEW
PRO SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE!
A new professional science fiction magazine will hit the stands soon in England. It will take its name from the now defunct but very well-known British SF fan mag. New Worlds. Stories already accepted for publication are John Russell Fearn’s “Memory Unlimited”, and Thornton Ayre’s “Domain of Zero” and “Lunar Concession.” Fantasy News is not at liberty to reveal the name of the prominent English fan who will edit the mag and is withholding this information until actual publication by special request of the fan in question. Suffice it to say that he is probably England’s outstanding fan and author of many fan articles in American fan magazines. Full details will be published soon in Fantasy News.
Disappointingly, the next announcement concerning New Worlds in the April 24, 1940 issue dashed everyone’s hopes:
PLANS COLLAPSE
FOR BRITISH
NEW WORLDS
According to advice received by telegram and letter from our England informants, Ted Carnell’s proposed science-fiction magazine New Worlds has collapsed. According to a news report printed in John Bull for March 16, 1940, the man behind World Says, Ltd., publishers of the magazine, has been exposed as a swindler.
It transpired that Alfred Greig, the London-based Canadian publisher, was a conman. He specialized in tricking would-be editors and writers to invest money in his planned magazines. John Carnell had invested £50 (about ten weeks’ salary in 1940 terms) on the promise of a salaried editorial position with the company.
Greig’s racket was revealed in an investigative article in the leading British weekly magazine John Bull, headed HE IS GRAND—BUT SHADY! John Carnell was shocked to read the article, just over a week before he was supposed to take up his editorial position. As he later told me:
“By then I was too late. The company had closed down. Mr. Greig had folded his prospectus along with his tent and departed for his native Canada and the pieces of the proposed magazine were filed away in my desk to await another day. I was richer by a vast amount of experience and poorer by £50 (most of which had been borrowed) but…the experience and the expense were worthwhile.”
Meanwhile in America Fearn’s agent Julius Schwartz still held separate copies of the mss. Fearn had sent to Carnell. Two of them were eventually placed with the emergence of new magazines: “Domain of Zero” appeared in the Fall 1940 issue of Planet Stories, whilst “Lunar Concession” copped the cover for the September 1941 Science Fiction. More about “Lunar Concession” can be found in my companion collection Valley of Pretenders, in which this story has been included.
Like its predecessor, “Domain of Zero” was heavily indebted to Weinbaum, specifically in regard to the alien life forms on Callisto. The ‘balloon bird’ in the story are clearly based on Weibnaum’s ‘Bladder Birds’ in “Redemption Cairn”, and the malevolent germ-creatures have resonance with the ‘Slinkers’ in “The Mad Moon”, whilst ‘Zero’, the icy salient, has even clearer resonance with Weinbaum’s vegetable intelligences in “The Lotus Eaters”. Notwithstanding, Fearn rehashed these elements in an amusing and entertaining fashion, and “Domain of Zero”, which Planet termed a “swift-paced short story” was popular with the magazine’s readers. It paved the way for Fearn to sell new Ayre stories to the same magazine
DOMAIN OF ZERO
Spacemen gave tiny, far-flung Callisto a wide berth. For it was the domain of the shrunken, ice-skinned brain who called himself “Zero”
I.
Clark Mitchell stirred uneasily in his bunk. His space-trained mind and body could detect a change in the direction of the private space flyer; there was a distinct leftward pull, the drag of an unaccountable gravity field.
Sitting up abruptly, he switched on the safety light. Reaching across, he shook the white shoulder of the girl fast asleep in the neighboring bunk. She uncoiled drowsily amid the sheets, blinked at him from her dark eyes.
“Wassamarra?” she slurred, yawning.
“That’s what I’m wondering,” he said anxiously. “Plenty’s the matter by the feel of things.”
He threw on a dressing gown, stumbled over to the port window, and shook the tousled hair from his eyes. In an instant all sleep was dashed from his mind.
“Suffering cats!” he yelped. “We’re headed toward Callisto! What in the name of—?” He twirled round swiftly, jerked a thumb to his wife as she stretched languidly.
“Come on, Nan, you’d better come with me. You’ve more influence over your old man than I have. He must have gotten tight again, or something. This is what comes of leaving a souse at the controls!”
Clark stalked savagely from the bed-cabin and into the adjoining control room. In the doorway he stopped, staring blankly. Jathan Henshaw, millionaire magnite manufacturer, father of Nan, was slumped in the control chair, half asleep, his protruding midriff rising and falling steadily, double chin on his chest. On the bench close beside him a half-emptied bottle of teticol stimulant stood in significant isolation.
Clark’s jaw set. Muttering under his breath he leaned over the sleeping man and slammed the controls into position. It was useless now to try and drag away from Callisto; the vessel was too close. Only thing was to land there and then make a fresh start. Another hour would finish it.
“Why, father!” Nan cried, coming in, silk gown molding her shapely young form. “What’s the matter?” She shook him gently with a slender hand.
“Canned—naturally!” Clark said impatiently, and the girl glanced at him indignantly.
“Oh, Clark, how can you say that! You know he has to take this stimulant to keep his heart in order. Otherwise—”
“Bunk!” Clark snorted. “I don’t forget the way he filled up with alcohol when we were on Titan. You remember, when he tried to match his voice up with those bass singing flowers? Boy, was he plastered!” he whistled reminiscently.
“Who’s plastered?” demanded Henshaw suddenly, jerking up and flattening hair he didn’t possess. “Whatja mean, Clark? Or is it a fight you want?” he finished, bunching flabby fists.
Clark turned deliberately. “That’s a sure sign you’ve been tippling; you’d never want to fight otherwise.” He drew a deep breath, then asked sharply, “How’d the ship come to get off the course for Saturn? We were heading back to Titan to make a study of Piano Key Range, and now this has to happen. What did you do?”
“You’ve got me there,” Henshaw muttered. He closed one eye and meditated; then he said, “I guess it must have been Jupiter’s gravity field that did it. It sort of swung the ship round and—hup! Pardon me—I found Callisto coming toward me. Then—then I do believe I fainted,” he finished with dignity, licking his lips,
Clark sniffed. “Fainted! O.K., I get it. You mean you got so tight you didn’t know what you were doing, forgot to put the robot controls in action, and then passed out. Well, we’ll be delayed in getting to Titan, that’s all. Darned good job I woke up or we might have crashed into Callisto.…” He frowned through the main window. “Pity it has to be Callisto,” he murmured. “I don’t know as much about it as I’d like. The other trading moons are all right, but Callisto’s a bit of an outpost well over a million miles from Jupiter. Frozen world, by night anyhow. Least albedo of all the moons.”
Henshaw got unsteadily to his feet. “S-sorry, Clark,” he apologized, laying a hand on his shoulder. “I guess I do sort of mix things up, don’t I? But I never”—he strangled an incipient belch—“never did know how to control one of these things.” He looked across at the stimulant, picked it up reverently. “My heart,” he explained anxiously. “I—I think I’ll just lie down.”
Clark nodded bitterly and said nothing, watched Henshaw unsteadily depart. Then he turned as the girl took his arm. Her face was serious in its soft mantle of dark hair.
“Honest, Clark, I don’t think he meant any harm,” she said anxiously. “He’s—he’s weak, you know.”
Clark grinned slowly. “Weak! Wea
k enough to build up a fortune from magnite explosive. And that heart business is a lot of applesauce, too.… Still, I guess you wouldn’t be anything of a daughter if you didn’t back him up,” he sighed. “After all, but for his generosity a year ago I would never have been rescued from Titan, or found those vilictus deposits that provided the fortune to make this trip possible.”
Pausing, he glanced through the window again.
“You’d better get dressed, Nan, then you can take the controls while I scramble into some duds. We’ll land in about an hour.”
“Right!” She moved lithely to the inter-door, paused. “Shall I wake dad?”
“No need. We’ll only stop long enough to level out, then we’ll push away against the gravity field and head for Titan. We can’t straighten out from this position. Too much momentum.…”
The passing of the hour brought the 3200-mile globe of Callisto to a point where it filled all heaven—a curious outpost of a world, a million miles further out from frozen Jupiter than the other satellites of Io, Europa, and Ganymede. Possessing the lowest albedo of all, a density that bespoke the possible presence of hydrogen, and maybe oxygen in scarcer quantities, the moon was rarely visited save in an emergency. Nobody knew much about it: those who did pronounced it pretty much like Earth’s Arctic Circle, save that the Arctic Circle is warm and cozy by comparison.
“I don’t like this a bit,” Clark muttered, staring fixedly ahead. “We’re moving toward the dark side of the moon as misfortune has it. Makes it difficult to see; the other moons and Jupiter don’t give such a vast amount of light at this distance.”
Nan strained her neck over his shoulder. “Looks like mountains to me,” she commented. Then suddenly, “But I thought Callisto revolved in relation to the Sun? What do you mean by dark side?”
“Sorry—I meant night side. Callisto does revolve in the solar sense, of course—about once a fortnight. Always turns the same face to Jove, though.”
Clark took hold of the controls firmly and watched earnestly as the vessel began to drop, shooting downward toward a dark mass of mountain range and valley. Ridges of bluish-white rose up at frightening speed. The light of Jove and the moons vanished as the ship hurtled under the overhanging shadow of the vast range. “Look out!” Nan yelled suddenly, pointing. “Look! That cliff—!”
Clark saw it a second later—a titanic wall, a diagonal extension of the mountain range spread straight across the flier’s path, towering to an incredible height. Savagely he blasted the rocket tubes, ripped the vessel round in a circle, dipped—helplessly plunged and tore through a huge mass of apparent powdered ice and snow.
In seconds it was all over. The ship came to rest at a weird angle, surrounded by piled bluish-whitnesses that had crept half way up the observation windows. Through what clear space there was, was a vision of that enormous cliff—a long icy slope—and far overhead, the ebony, star-strewn sky. Down here, Jupiter and the moons were completely hidden.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Nan murmured, straightening up, “but I think we’ve arrived.”
“But only for a moment,” Clark answered. “This is where we leave. The gravity pull will be squared against us now. The under-jets will see to the rest.”
Confidently he released the blast switches, then instantly sprang them back into non-contact as a vicious aura of flame zipped around the ship from end to end. White sheets of fire stabbed savagely outside the windows, momentarily illuminating the drear, wild landscape.
“What in—?” Clark stopped in bewilderment, staring at the girl. “Say, I nearly incinerated the ship!” He swung round and depressed the switch on the external registers. “What sort of an atmosphere have we got in this dump, anyway?”
He stared with the girl at the registers. “Hydrogen—and another gas that looks like argon,” he said, wincing. “Ouch! Then— Let me think. Hydrogen freezes at -264° C, and it would float to upper levels like this. Oxygen, if any, would drop below, freezing at -212° C. This stuff outside must be it.…”
He snapped the lever on the sampler and it released a portion of the exterior substance down a chute into a vacuum trap. The two stared through the thick glass partition.
“Frozen oxygen crystals right enough,” Nan murmured, gazing at the bluish shining powder. “That makes the external temperature somewhere around -200° C. Nitrogen, if any, must also be frozen; it seizes up around the same degree as oxygen, but it’s pretty heavy. Probably at lower levels than this. Can’t be much of it around or it would have doused that fire you nearly started.… Argon wouldn’t do much,” she went on, musing. “It’s unsociable stuff—if argon it really is. Looks to me like some other unknown element. Assuming it is argon, it doesn’t like mingling with other gases.…
“Let’s see now. Frozen oxygen, hydrogen gas, traces of water vapor in the oxygen and also in the blast tubes due to condensation in change from blast-heating in space to sudden cold here.… Gosh! This is no spot to try out a flame, Clark. And it isn’t a place for a deckchair, either.…”
Clark sat down and rubbed his tousled black head.
“Right enough.… But how the devil do we get out of here, anyway? The jets are the only way.”
The girl shrugged. “I have the idea that we’re just going to park around until the dawn comes, then this stuff may congeal into normal, though thin, atmosphere. If there’s any nitrogen around and it mingles up, we’ll be all right. If not—”
She broke off suddenly. The ship had noticeably jerked a little, slid a slight distance. The curious squeegeeing noise of grinding crystals echoed ominously through the walls.
“Hell, we’re slipping!” Clark gasped hoarsely, leaping up. “Moving down the slope— Look down there!” he finished with a yell, pointing through the window.
Nan caught her breath. She could see now in the starshine that the ship was perilously poised on a long, sloping shelf of frozen oxygen, extending downward for perhaps a mile and a half. After that there was a sheer drop into— They knew not what. Probably a chasm.
Clark swung around. “Come on, we’ve got to get out! Get the space suits. Wake up dad—”
“No need to wake me,” growled Henshaw, coming in. “Where the heck are we? I thought you were a good pilot, Clark— Whew, have I got a hangover?” he finished, shutting his eyes tight.
Holding his forehead he lurched toward the window, and his very action set the ship sliding again. Frantically Clark pulled him back.
“Look here, Clark, what is this—?”
“It’s the balance,” Clark panted. “When we move we set the thing sliding. Your weight, dad, is—”
“And what’s the matter with my weight?” Henshaw demanded fiercely. “Two hundred and forty pounds of muscle—that’s me! Strong as a horse, except for my heart, of course. Now, ever since I was a boy—”
“Cut the history, father, and get into this,” interrupted Nan practically, hurrying forward with an outsize spacesuit. “We’ve got to get out of this ship—at least until dawn comes.”
Grumbling, Henshaw stepped into the suit, lurched and heaved wildly as Nan fastened it up. He was still protesting as the helmet clamped over his bald head.
“What about a drink first?” he yelled, but instead of a drink he found three ray guns thrust in his arms by Clark.
“Hang onto these, dad,” he ordered quickly. “But don’t use ’em until we come to some nitrogen or something, otherwise we’ll go up like magnite powder. And put these rubbers over your boots. The slightest friction sparks may have disastrous results.… Nan and I will bring along the food and stuff.”
Henshaw grunted and struggled into the massive goloshes, then he stood waiting as Clark and the girl scrambled into their own suits. Finally, equipment strapped on their backs, Clark led the way with gingery steps to the airlock and began to unscrew it. He snapped a length of cord to his belt, linked it to the girl and her father, then stepped outside.
The ship slithered a little. The girl came out, ankle deep in t
he blue crystals. Henshaw was at no pains to be careful. Being naturally big and still slightly intoxicated he visibly staggered, reeled clumsily through the opening outside.… That did it!
The rocking action started the sliding ship into a real slither. With a sudden grinding of crystals it commenced moving off down the slope with its port lights brightly gleaming.
“To one side!” Clark screamed—noiselessly, for the helmet transmitters were not linked up. Frantically he dragged the girl and Henshaw aside, just in time to avoid the bulging center of the vessel as it slipped invincibly past them.
Dazed, wide-eyed, they watched it travel up the end of the slope and there, visibly half over the edge of the chasm, it came to a standstill, supported by the congealed oxygen it had plowed before it.
Clark got up and flicked on his communicator. “Gosh, that’s done it!” came his voice. “Even if we wanted, we wouldn’t dare get inside it. It’d be over like a shot.”
“And when the dawn comes the thaw will drop it down instead,” Nan muttered hopelessly. “Suppose we go down and see how far it will have to drop? Come on, dad.…”
“Damned silly business altogether,” Henshaw grumbled, getting up and stumbling after the two down the slope. “What with a third normal gravity, these ice crystals or whatever they are, and my heart—I’d give my fortune for a drink.”
“You’ve got water tablets in your helmet trap,” Clark grunted, “Why not use ’em?”
“Water!” Henshaw echoed in horror; then he unaccountably said no more. A sudden thought seemed to have struck him. He released his helmet switch and allowed a tabloid to automatically drop into his mouth.
“G-great stuff!” he mumbled, staggering along like a baby elephant. “Solidified teticol tablets! I remember now—I put them in my helmet in place of the water tablets; and there’s a spare tin of them on my belt here. Easy enough, since my suit’s the biggest, neither of you would get it by mistake. Dammit, no man can live on water!”
World Without Chance Page 7
