World Without Chance

by John Russell Fearn

  In all directions the gigantic buildings were crumbling and collapsing in clouds of ashen gray, like objects flawlessly patterned in dust suddenly blown by a mighty wind. Overhead the clouds were no longer motionless, but writhing and boiling as strange hurricane drafts tore through them and gave glimpses of the blazing Sun beyond.

  “Arch, what—what’s happened?” Joyce faltered nervously, and that second all her self-sufficiency collapsed. She was a pale, frightened girl clinging to the rubbered arm of her equally perplexed husband.

  “It looks like an earthquake, but it isn’t,” he answered her grimly. “It’s something we can’t understand—that damned random element old Ixal was talking about. What fools we were not to turn back when we had our theory all doped out, instead of coming on here! It’s our own intrusion that’s caused it. Our breaking through the forest, our footsteps on the ground—everything. We started a process that leads right to extinction.” He grasped her arm tightly.

  “We’ve got to step on it, Joyce if we’re to reach the ship. Come on!”

  They went down the steps three at a time, steps that crumbled and rotted away into impalpable powder as they trod them. The buildings around them slewed and shifted crazily, fell into absurd and unbelievable nothing as their long inert state was shattered utterly by the return of the law of chance.

  The farther the two went, panting hard for breath in the restricted area of their space suits, the more they realized the desperate struggle ahead of them. Even as they ran they dropped knee deep in ground that was no longer ground but a whirling, spreading enigma of emptiness fast losing all relation to material law.

  Solidity and organization had gone forever. The crazy, timeless world was catching up on itself with ever-increasing speed as the random element became eternally faster by very reason of the growing variety of atomic shufflings.

  Beyond the end of the road they slid to a baffled, horrified halt. The little hill they had come down was no longer there! It had collapsed to form what was now a crumbling, level plain in the midst of which there frothed and boiled and flew the dusty phantasmal creations that had formerly been trees and undergrowth.

  “The ship!” Joyce panted hysterically, “Arch, the ship! We can’t possibly reach it. It’s several miles away. What in Heaven’s name are we going to do?”

  “How should I know?” He looked around helplessly, then staggered forward as the ground underneath him suddenly began to collapse. Instantly his young wife grabbed him and drew him back, stumbled forward again with him.

  “Have to keep going,” he gasped. “Either we’ll give in or else the planet will! We’ve got to take the chance!”

  Arms locked round one another, they blundered onward, buffeted now by an insensate hurricane that suddenly sprang from nowhere as the molecules of the atmosphere underwent mad and inexplicable transformations, flew into new paths. Cyclone, rain, raging tumult battered and hammered them with overwhelming force, forced them to stagger blindly forward, hardly able to see through the drenching cataracts streaming down their glass helmets.

  “A—a swell planet this would be to colonize!” Lakington choked, floundering waist-deep in the midst of rolling water and mud. “Hell! It’s worse than a Venusian backdraft!”

  “Unless I miss my guess we check out here,” Joyce whimpered weakly. “We can’t make the ship, Arch, and you know it!”

  She swooshed from the midst of the water and halted momentarily on the crumbling ground, bracing herself against the raging wind. When Lakington looked at her, her face was hardly visible through the dirt and ashy substance plastered to the glass of her helmet.

  “What do you—?” she began, then ended with a wild, desperate cry as the trembling ground under her feet parted abruptly into a yawning, gaping abyss.

  She did not stand a chance. One minute she was swaying and trying to speak; the next, she vanished utterly in the boiling smother of the chasm. With the sudden tug on the helmet communication cord Archer Lakington found himself slammed forcibly down on the chasm edge. The cord parted with a snap and left him staring in dumb, blank misery at copper wire swaying wildly in the half-light.

  “Joyce!” he screamed frantically, and his voice dinned inside his helmet. “Joyce! Oh, my God!”

  Sweat poured down his face in the agony of those seconds. He lay staring down into the frightful gulf, at the tottering walls of it beyond. Everything was swinging and twisting insanely. Joyce had gone! That was the only thought in his tortured brain—his wife was gone beyond recall!

  “Joyce!” he choked, trying to form some kind of rescue plan in his stunned mind.

  Then even as he lay there the ground, under his sprawling form, ceased to be and he was pitched helplessly forward into the depths. For breathless seconds he fell with sickening speed, heart and brain struggling madly to cope with the frightful drop. Then to his surprise his speed began to slacken. The misty vaporings that had been remote chasm sides receded and puffed into nothing.

  The wet and dirt on his face shield cleared somewhat, the former turning into visible frost and then vanishing entirely as water vapor expired. He was dimly aware that he was slowly revolving, blinded by the light of a mighty Sun below him.

  Shielding his tortured eyes as best he could he stared in bewilderment at his surroundings. He was in space! Slowly drifting toward the immensely powerful gravitational field of that blazing star. All traces of the strange, timeless world had disappeared. Nothing was left but the void and stars.

  The thought of Joyce stabbed back into his aching mind. He tried to twist around but only succeeded in drifting crazily and without direction. But in the action he did glimpse the bloated figure of his young wife drifting in the emptiness, and further beyond her the space machine itself gleaming brightly in the sunshine.

  The sudden desperation of the predicament forced itself upon him. Joyce, separated from him by a good mile of void, was not making the slightest movement. For all he knew to the contrary she might be dead. The ship was easily three miles away, moving with swifter speed toward the Sun’s gravitational field by reason of its greater mass.

  Lakington did not need to realize that there is no foothold in space. His helpless efforts to reach Joyce only sent him turning in circles and parabolas, left him staring through half-closed eyes at the writhing prominences curling from the insufferable globe below.

  Desperate with anxiety, he clutched himself tightly in readiness to try again. Then he paused in the action as his gloved hand smote upon the hard outline of his atomic gun in its belt holster. For a moment he fingered it, a thought turning over in his mind. Then he snatched it out and leveled it at his feet, taking care that the beam did not actually strike him.

  Savagely he pressed the release button and, as he had wildly hoped, the stunt worked. The terrific backward recoil hurled him with the exact equivalent of energy in the opposite direction, straight toward his wife. Again he pressed—and again. He cannoned into her softly floating form and flung an arm around her belted waist.

  Fear began to grip him again at the smallness of the leaps under the added mass of her body, yet he dared not release her and work alone as yet, because of the fast-increasing power of the Sun. He had three miles to cover and twelve more charges left in the gun.

  Setting his teeth, he fired again and again, correcting his course each time. The eleventh charge found him within two hundred feet of the vessel drifting toward the Sun. There was nothing for it but to finish solo. Instantly he cast Joyce adrift and fired for the last time, catapulted forward just far enough to grip the edges of the manhole opening.

  Within moments he was inside the vessel and had leaped to the control board, set the rockets blazing fiercely in a pull against the Sun.

  The rest was easy. In a few minutes he had dragged Joyce inside and closed the airlock, switched on the gravitators, and got the air plant to work.…

  “I thought I’d managed to get rid of my yellow-headed distraction for good,” he told her briefly, wh
en they were seated together an hour later, eating a much-needed meal. “Evidently the fall into the chasm did you no more harm than it did me. Pretty obvious that that world just cracked up into nothing and reverted to where it should have been ages ago. You and I and the space ship were the only solid things left.”

  “I’ll never get over being childish enough to faint,” Joyce mourned in self-condemnation. “Must have been the shock. That atomic gun idea was pretty smart, though.”

  “Thanks!” He leaned over and kissed her, then went on eating. When he looked up again it was to find her staring out over the eternal void.

  “Where next?” she asked, catching his glance.

  He shrugged unconcernedly.

  “No idea. There must be something somewhere worth colonizing. Guess we’ll keep on cruising until we find it.”

  She did not answer, but instead began to laugh, finally ended up with a delighted scream of merriment.

  “Why the hysteria?” he questioned gruffly.

  “Just think!” she cried breathlessly. “I was right in what I said. You could go right back to President Bentley and hand him a ball of nothing! That’s all that world turned out to be!”

  “As empty as your yellow head,” he agreed calmly. “Maybe next time we’ll find one just as dense as—”

  He broke off with a widening grin, then ducked as Joyce whisked a cushion from the wall bed and hurled it at him with deadly accuracy.

  CHAMELEON PLANET

  BY POLTON CROSS

  From Astonishing Stories, February 1940

  Whilst the editor of Thrilling Wonder Stories, Mort Weisinger, remained receptive to Weinbaum imitations, he was finding himself bombarded with this type of story as a result of Campbell’s decision not to run them. Weisinger rejected “Chameleon Planet”, although it was a sequel to the previous story he had accepted, this time on the grounds that they were overstocked with this type of story. Several authors, particularly Henry Kuttner, Arthur K. Barnes, and Eando Binder, had been selling them Weinbaum-style stories, and they were not to publish “World Without Chance” until February 1939.

  Because the characters were also due to appear in the first story in a rival magazine, Fearn’s agent did not deem it expedient to offer “Chameleon Planet” elsewhere until Frederik Pohl launched his two new magazines, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories. The astute Julius Schwartz remembered Pohl’s letter that had appeared in the June 1939 Thrilling Wonder Stories praising the original story.

  Schwartz had guessed correctly that Pohl would be receptive to running this sequel to the story he had liked so much. It was sold to him in early December 1939, and quickly assigned for the cover and lead spot in the first issue of Astonishing Stories (February 1940). Oddly, Pohl changed the heroine’s name from Joyce to Elsie! For this reprinting, with the stories appearing consecutively, I have restored it to Joyce.

  Artist Jack Binder painted a splendid illustrative cover, and also executed two fine interior illustrations. “Chameleon Planet” was an excellent story, fully as good as the first one. The story’s novel theme of ‘telescoped accelerated evolution’ (which had been beaten into print by ‘ideas man’ Edmond Hamilton in his 1938 story The Ephemerae”) was quite influential in science fiction—amongst the authors reprising Fearn’s ideas would be no less than Ray Bradbury (in “The Creatures That Time Forgot”, appearing in Planet Stories for Fall 1946). Much less notably, I myself incorporated the story into my continuation of Fearn’s Golden Amazon series in Chameleon Planet (2005). Whilst Fearn’s rationale for the telescoped evolution remained fairly mysterious in his original story, it was strongly hinted at: “A mad, silly little world obviously under the pull of gigantic gravitational fields—perhaps dead stars lurking unseen in the vast void.” To me, this suggested that the planet might be very well orbiting a black hole, and modern science postulates that all kinds of odd time distortions might occur in the vicinity of a black hole. So I rewrote the story accordingly. In this collection, however, the story is reprinted exactly as Fearn wrote it in 1937, when, of course, the existence of black holes was unknown. In passing, however, I would remark that Fearn would later write a story that actually did postulate the possibility of black holes, and even named them as such! This was in “Space Trap” as by Polton Cross, in the Summer 1945 Thrilling Wonder Stories. I suspect that this was the very earliest usage of the phrase ‘black hole’—at least in science fiction. Unfortunately, whilst the idea itself was inspired, “Space Trap” was one of Fearn’s worst-ever stories, being tailored to the juvenile slam-bang action formula then being briefly favoured by the magazine. As such it will likely never be reprinted! Meantime, we can at least enjoy this earlier, much better story, and whilst you read it, you might care to think of a black hole as a rationale for the events in the story—as I did!

  Following the story’s publication in 1940, William F. Temple commented on the story to Fearn thusly:

  “‘Chameleon. Planet’ is the goods. Another of your original notions like ‘The Man Who Stopped the Dust,’ and not a borrow from a film. I know it isn’t too hard to scratch up original ideas now and again, but you never seem at a loss for one. Do you keep a notebook and jot them down as they cross your mind? I gather that you derived the idea from studying the progress of the foetus in the womb. Now what were you up to, to be so interested in that? Natural curiosity?

  “Two things are a bit hard to swallow in the yarn: you say this planet is about the size of the Earth, and working from the 2-hour day, it revolves on its axis six times as fast. Surely the visitors wouldn’t be able to walk naturally, as they did, against that terrific centrifugal force? Or did it possess a more powerful gravitation to counter balance that effect? I guess you’ll say it did! Again, if evolution was proceeding in the caveman’s mind at millions of years per minute, Arch and his wife’s movements would be so slow in comparison that the caveman wouldn’t be able to detect them. And certainly he wouldn’t be able to speak slowly enough to converse with them. His very slowest speech would be somewhere up in the supersonics. But, there, I know what you think about these technical quibbles. The story’s the thing, and I derived pleasure from it, so what?”

  To which Fearn cheerfully replied: “Yes, I guess I made mistakes in ‘Chameleon Planet’—but I wrote it long ago, so please forgive. The process of birth was from Forneir D’Arbes Man the Animal (Blackpool Public Library). Wise guy, huh?”

  CHAMELEON PLANET

  Life was speeded up on Chameleon Planet—where an ape could become a Superman between meals!

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Flying World

  Spaceship 17 of the American Interplanetary Corporation moved at the cruising velocity of 90,000 miles a second through the barren endlessness of the eastern limb of the Milky Way Galaxy, pursuing its journey in search of new worlds to be colonized or claimed in the name of the Corporation.

  In. the vessel’s compact control room, ace colonizer Archer Lakington stood moodily gazing out into the void, gray eyes mirroring the abstract nature of his thoughts. His broad but hunched shoulders gave the clue to his boredom. Speeding through infinity without a trace of excitement or interest was anathema to his adventurous soul. This had been going on now for eight weeks.…

  At length he turned aside and surveyed his instruments. The long-range detector needle was rigidly fixed on zero. The moment any possible world came within range, even though invisible to the eye, an alarm would ring by the actuation of a highly sensitive photo-electric cell. The detector, responding, would immediately fix the position of the disturbance.

  “The more I see of space the more I think I’m a mug to be cruising around in it,” he growled at last, hands in the pockets of his leather cardigan. “I’m getting a sort of yen to be back amongst the smells of New York, seeing familiar faces, telling tales of conquest over a glass of viska water.”

  “While you’re seeing familiar faces, don’t forget President Bentley’s,” a dry feminine voice reminded him.
>
  He twisted round and surveyed the bush of yellow hair just visible over the top of the wall couch. Joyce, his wife—his sole partner in this endless journeying—was pursuing her usual occupation when things got monotonous; simply lying down with her hands locked behind her head. She turned a pair of level cool blue eyes toward him as she felt the strength of his gaze.

  “You don’t have to remind me about Bentley,” he said gruffly. “If he wasn’t President of the Corporation, I’d head back right now for New York!”

  “You mean you’re scared?”

  “Scared nothing!” he snapped. “I mean I’m—”

  He broke off and twirled round with delighted eyes as the detector alarm abruptly clanged into noisy action. In an instant he was squatting before the instruments, keenly studying their reactions. He scarcely noticed that, true to duty, the girl was crouched beside him, her slender fingers twirling the calibrated knobs and controls.

  Without a word to each other they began to check and calculate carefully. The lenses of the detector came into use and visually picked up the cause of the distant alarm. When they had both gazed long and earnestly, they looked blankly at each other.

  “Gosh!” Joyce exclaimed, startled. “That’s the fastest planet I ever saw! Did you see it, Arch? Flying round its sun like a bullet?”

  He puzzled silently for a moment, then stooped down and again sighted the strange distant world in the powerful sights. Clear and distinct it was, a planet perhaps only slightly smaller than Earth, but behaving as no self-respecting planet should. Alone in its glory, apparently sheathed in ice, it was pursuing a highly eccentric orbit round its quite normal dwarf type sun.

  Starting from a close perihelion point, it went sweeping out in a wild curve, zigzagged sharply at one place on its route with a force that looked strong enough to tear it clean out of its path—then it pulled back again and went sailing at terrific speed to remote aphelion almost beyond visual range. A mad, silly little world obviously under the pull of gigantic gravitational fields—perhaps dead stars lurking unseen in the vast void. And as it went its surface coloring changed weirdly.