Finally he straightened up.
“Darned if you’re not right!” he exclaimed in amazement. “Sorry, Joyce. It’s a queer sort of planet, though—doesn’t budge an eighth of an inch on the scale lines. There ought to be some kind of apparent motion—”
He broke off as he realized with some indignation that his wife was not listening. She had gone over to the untidy desk in the corner and was figuring laboriously.
“It’s—er—roughly one thousand five hundred million miles distant,” she proclaimed, waving her paper triumphantly. “Take us about two hours and a half to get there.”
“Yeah—to find an atmosphere that even a Venusian squid fish wouldn’t live in, I’ll bet,” he growled back. “For that matter, we don’t even know if it has an atmosphere. Those line formations may be surface markings and not clouds at all.”
“I don’t care what they are, we’re going to look,” she returned flatly. “It’s a mystery world and that adds spice to the whole thing. Think of it! A planet that doesn’t revolve, that hasn’t even the slight apparent libration of Venus or Mercury. Nor is it because tidal drag has brought it to the end of its turning days because it has those clouds. Besides that, it has a young and vigorous Sun.”
Lakington nodded slowly, and stroked his chin. “Guess you’re right,” he admitted. “It is a bit odd at that. Okay, we’ll head that way.”
He turned actively to the control board and changed the vessel’s aimless hurtling into a direct course for the unknown world. Then he settled down to wait.
Outside, as the ship tore onward through the growing minutes, blazed the incomprehensible sentinels of the galaxy. Stars and Suns, perhaps even worlds beyond visibility, planetoids, cosmic dust—the whole vast agglomeration of infinity drawn on a scale calculated to stagger the mind.
Archer Lakington and his young wife gave less attention to spatial wonders now. Their attention was devoted to an analysis of the unknown world as it grew visibly in size in the instruments. Both of them felt their bewilderment deepen as the passing time revealed no change in its appearance.
It had not revolved in the slightest since the first observation, nor was it pursuing any orbit round its Sun—a typical G-type of dwarf star, from which it was distant approximately 100,000,000 miles. It seemed to be just one world alone, devoid even of neighboring planets.
“It’s like trying to make equations without any knowledge of figures,” Lakington growled, after making futile efforts to arrive at mathematical postulations. “Only thing to do is to wait until we get there.”
“Such genius!” Joyce murmured. She had forsaken the instruments and was lounging on the wall bed. “I could have told you that an hour ago, only I like to watch you work for a change.”
She locked her hands behind her yellow head and smiled. Finally she laughed aloud.
“Ha-ha,” Lakington mimicked sourly. “What’s so funny, Mrs. Lakington?”
“That planet!” she drawled. “Just suppose it’s a spatial mirage? We’ve encountered them before, remember. It may be a phantom reassembly of light waves that departed into Einstein’s unbounded space millions of ages ago. Our instrument may merely have intersected the convergence of the light images.”
“In that case it wouldn’t be a world with clouds,” he returned with a little asperity. “It would be a mere hulk, the reflection of a dead world that cracked up—according to Eddington’s figures—nearly six thousand six hundred million years ago. And anyhow such a supposition isn’t so funny.”
“But it would be if you returned to Earth and handed old President Bentley a bunch of nothing to colonize! I can just picture his face.”
“Never mind his face. It gives me a pain anyway. Quit lounging about and check up our distance. How much further have we to go?”
She slid dutifully from the bed and checked up.
“Be there in about another sixty-four minutes. Then you can stick a flag right in the middle of emptiness.”
“Seriously, Joyce, you don’t think we are chasing a myth, do you?” he asked anxiously, and she shrugged.
“How should I know? I’ve done plenty of speculating, though, and I can’t see what else that planet can be. Every planet must conform to certain known laws, and this one doesn’t obey one of them! I don’t have to tell you that mighty queer things can happen in space. Not only can we have mirages by light wave quirks, but we can also have delusions by reason of unknown thought waves affecting our brains from sources unknown.”
“Granting the presence of brains,” he murmured acidly. “Truth is you want an excuse to run away. Just plain scared now we’re getting near.”
“Scared!” she flared. “Why, you—” Then she stopped and relaxed as he suddenly reached over and his arms went about her tightly.
“Like all women in space your brain is about as empty,” he murmured, kissing her. “Still, I guess I can stand you at that.… Now stop making love to me, will you? Don’t you know there’s work to do?”
He released her slender body and turned back to the control board, fingering the switches purposefully. From that moment onward both he and his wife became mechanized units in a plan of action, all irrelevancies thrust aside in the management of the ship as it came at last within measurable distance of the strange planet.
It hung directly ahead now. Level cloud belts gathered round it, bathed in the sulphur-yellow light of the Sun.
Lakington studied it for a moment through the window, then gave full power to the softly humming engines that had been guiding the course. Immediately the rocket tubes flared violently and began to slow the vessel down in tremendous jolts and thrusts, bringing the two passengers into direct acquaintance with the sickening laws of inertia.
“That’s no myth!” Lakington muttered, his gray eyes fixed on the queer world. “It’s as solid as this ship. Give your left forward tube a bit more power, Joyce.… That’s it!”
CHAPTER II
Trees Turn to Ash
Rocket discharges spurting powerfully, the ship curved round in a gigantic arc and went sweeping downward to the vast gray concavity directly below. Down and down, slackening and dragging with the flying seconds, clean into the midst of the clouds.
The instant that happened, Archer Lakington’s expression changed from satisfaction to alarm. Usually he relied upon atmosphere to help cushion the ship’s fall, but this time he met no resistance whatever! The air was as resistless as the void itself.
Swearing fervently, he gave the forward rocket tubes the limit. The ship flattened out under terrific strain, just in time to skim the needle summits of a high mountain range.
“Gosh!” Joyce whispered, drawing a long breath and dabbing at her damp brow. “What are you trying to do? Endanger my life?”
“Why not?” he asked, and grinned at her maliciously. Then he studied his meters and gauges.
“Something screwy around here.… Well, what do you know about that?” he finished blankly, staring through the window as the ship finally burst free of the clouds and began to drop gently to the landscape below.
Joyce gazed with him, a vaguely bewildered expression on her cameolike features. She, too, could detect something peculiarly different about this world—a curiously immovable appearance as though it were a still life photograph given the advantage of a third dimension.
“No wind—no movement—no anything,” she almost whispered, as the vessel came gently to rest on a long undulating plain of substance resembling earthly moss. “Just one big immovable landscape.”
Lakington rose from his control chair and stood with lips compressed, looking over her shoulder. His gray eyes took in the moss plain and, bordering it, an immense and motionless jungle that somehow reminded him of Earth’s Carboniferous age. Beyond the jungle reared the tremendous mountain chain with which he had nearly collided.
In the opposite direction the moss plain extended to horizon limit—vast and empty. Overhead were the unmoving clouds, as frozen into inactivity as though th
ey were indeed part of a photograph.
“Are we wrong or is the landscape?” Joyce finally questioned, turning. “Did you ever see a planet so nicely ready for somebody to walk into?” She finished dubiously: “Or out of?”
Lakington looked at his external registers and gave a low whistle of amazement.
“Is everything screwy around here?” he asked helplessly. “Temperature, air pressure, humidity—all of them register zero! That just can’t be! The clouds alone prove water vapor and atmosphere. The moss proves life. What sort of a planet is this?”
Struck with a sudden thought, Joyce reached out her hand and broke the current for the floor gravitating plates. The fact that she had done so was hardly noticeable.
“There you are!” she exclaimed. “The gravitation is okay, anyhow—about the same as Earth’s. In fact the entire planet isn’t altogether unlike Earth at that.… We’re going outside!”
She gave her ultimatum with decision, and headed for the closet where the spacesuits were kept.
Handing one to her puzzled husband, she began to scramble into her own, and screwed her helmet in place. Automatically the air cylinder on her back began to function. Then she disappeared into the storeroom and returned with a space-proof haversack of tabloid food and drink slung over her shoulder.
“Ready?” Her voice came clearly through the helmet phones.
Lakington nodded, fingering his atomic energy gun. Turning to the airlock, he twisted the massive screws and swung the immensely thick cover inward.
“Looks all right,” was his comment, as he contemplated the landscape through his face glass.
“Appearances may be deceptive,” Joyce reminded him. “Even though things look all set for a garden party, we’re safer inside spacesuits to begin with. Let’s get going.”
She set the example by stepping onto the moss-like ground with her thick boots. Almost immediately she stopped and stood looking down in bewilderment at the ashen gray prints she left behind. It was as though she had walked in powdered snow.
“Looks as though the moss is crystallized or something,” she said in a tone of wonder. “Any suggestions, mastermind?”
“None yet,” her husband replied, straightening up from studying the phenomenon. “We’ll keep on going for a bit. Incidentally, if I’m not too curious, where are we heading?”
“The jungle, of course.” She waved a bloated arm toward it. “Unless you prefer to hitchhike across the moss plain instead. It’s up to you.”
He ignored her sarcasm and plodded along in silence beside her, trying to form some sane line of reasoning in his mind. Beyond all doubt this world was literally standing still. It had no axial revolution and no orbital revolution nor, according to the instruments, had it any air pressure. That point, at least, was visibly disproved by the banked clouds; either the instruments were cockeyed or else—
He shook his head inside his helmet in exasperated perplexity, and followed Joyce as she gained the first outpost of the jungle.
After proceeding for a few yards within it, she suddenly stopped and looked closely at one specimen of the towering trees around them. Jerking an instrument like a voltmeter from her belt, she started to jab the needle-pointed end into the trunk. To her consternation, the entire tree collapsed in a cloud of fine ash and smothered her completely.
She emerged from the midst of the setting fog to find her husband doubled up in suppressed mirth.
“Great!” he gasped. “Absolutely great, Joyce! Do it again. I didn’t get a good look the first time.”
“Never mind the cracks,” she returned sourly. “Suppose you bring your supercharged brain to bear on the problem of why an entire tree should collapse like that? I was going to test its temperature. I only just touched it, and—”
“I know,” he said, becoming serious again, “but even if you could have taken its temperature, you’d have found your instrument as haywire as those in the ship. Nothing here registers one way or the other. Seems to be in a state of flat in-between.”
His head bent back inside the glass helmet as his eyes looked up the length of the neighboring trees with their lacy but oddly stiff-looking foliage. Broad spatulate leaves graced all the branches, but they were totally without motion. That in itself was almost unbelievable, for there must certainly be air to produce clouds, and even the stillest air has some slight vibration. Everything seemed to be one vast contradiction.
The undergrowth was the same when he came to look at it, except where he and Joyce had trodden. There he found a zigzag path of ash gray where roots and twisted creepers had fallen to infinitesimal pieces as though they had been saturated in liquid air and then dropped.
“Crystallization?” he asked, in a harassed voice. “No, that couldn’t happen. Frost? Hardly, with sunshine behind those clouds I’m damned if I know! Push on a bit further, Joyce.”
They resumed their steady progress, pushing their way through growing density that snapped into inconceivably fine powder at their clumsy approach. At least there was no necessity for them to blaze a trail. It stretched in a line of crumbled ruin to their rear.
“Do you think it possible that elements here might have evolved in a totally different fashion to anything we understand?” Joyce asked presently, thinking hard. “Isn’t it possible that if they pursued an evolutionary line—”
“No evolutionary line can explain a planet that doesn’t revolve and has motionless clouds,” Lakington returned irritably. “If only we could find some sign of people, or—”
“Oh, Arch! Look!” Joyce stopped so suddenly that he bumped into her.
Instantly he followed the line of her pointing glove and stared in amazement at a veritable monstrosity. In an uncritical mood he might have called the thing a toad, magnified about fifty times. It was squatting in gigantic immobility in the very midst of a heap of brittle grass, a thing of stone gray with its wide saucer eyes staring unseeingly.
“Life!” Lakington breathed, his eyes gleaming. “Pretty tough-looking sort of brute, but life just the same.”
“Life, my eye!” Joyce said acidly. “The thing’s as crystallized as the rest of the stuff. Look!”
She reached forth her hand and touched it. Instantly it was gray dust.
“You yellow-headed dimwit!” Lakington yelped exasperatedly. “I was going to take that back to the ship as a specimen. How do you expect us to start an analysis if you break everything up around here?”
“Hasn’t it occurred to you that you couldn’t carry a thing like that for two miles?” she challenged hotly. “Even a touch finished it. Besides, I’ve better things to do than watch you do an egg and spoon race back to the ship.”
She swung round and stalked off indignantly. With a grin, Archer Lakington followed her. For a long time they twined in and out of the peculiar loveliness, all the time with fast deepening bewilderment. The span of an hour brought them to a clearer space, leading upward to a small hill where the jungle entirely disappeared.
“Keep going,” Lakington counseled, answering his wife’s inquiring look. “If there’s nothing there, we’ll turn back.”
He began to follow her, then gave a grunt of irritation as he stumbled over a piece of rising ground. The slip dislodged his atomic gun from his hand. Mechanically he stooped to pick it up, but long before the action was complete the gun flew back into his open hand with perfect precision! Mechanically his fingers closed over it.
“What the—?” he began dazedly. Then he swung round and charged after the girl before their interconnecting helmet phone wires were snapped by distance.
“Hey, Joyce! Joyce! Wait a minute? Look here!”
CHAPTER III
Random Element
Lakington flung down the gun as he ran. It hit the ground in a puff of ash and rebounded back in a line, dead centered on his palm.
“Now what?” she asked tartly, halting. “Nothing better to do than play ball?”
“This is my gun!” he shouted, drawing level with her s
o she could see it. “If I throw it down it rebounds to the point of origin with exactly the same speed as the throw. The ground isn’t resilient, either. Anything but.”
“But—but that’s impossible!” she protested.
“I know that, but it happens all the same. What does it imply? Quick! Help me think.”
Joyce did think—and quickly. “It proves that the gun retains both the energy and organization of energy of the original fall,” she swiftly decided. “Normally the kinetic energy of the gun should have been converted into heat-energy. Its molecules would move downward with equal and parallel velocities until it struck the ground, when they would be completely disorganized.”
“And they weren’t!” he cried excitedly. “They weren’t! There was no disorganization. Somehow the gun must have got hold of an extraneous energy which lifted it back to the same place—”
“Or else there was actually perfect organization all the time!” Joyce put in quickly. She fell to thinking again, then laid her gloved hand on his arm. “Listen, Arch, it looks as though we’ve blundered into a whole lot of mystery. Suppose by some incredible freak this planet has achieved a perfect organization? It would mean no progress or retrogression, because Time would be a zero quantity where organization is at a complete equilibrium. The possible shuffling of molecules and atoms is at maximum efficiency. There is no random element!”
“No random element,” he repeated slowly. “That means that nothing can ever happen. But why? How the Sam Hill did the planet get that way anyhow? What about gravitation?”
“Gravitation is something we don’t know much about—nor does anybody else either,” she reminded him. “It might be a warp or a force, all depending on the way one views it. It’s quite possible that it would be a thing apart from organized equilibrium.”
“And the sunlight behind those clouds? That involves the action of light waves?”
World Without Chance Page 15
