“Some world!” Arch commented, as he straightened up. “We ought to be near it in about two hours if we step on it. Not that it will be much good though. The darn thing’s frozen solid—”
“If you were more of a scientist and less of a fathead we might do some useful work,” Joyce remarked tartly, herself now peering through the lenses. “That world is only ice-sheathed at aphelion limit but becomes all green and gold at perihelion,” she went on. “Sort—sort of chameleon planet,” she finished hazily, looking up.
“Spectrum warp, probably in the lenses,” said Arch wisely; but she gave an unwomanly snort.
“Spectrum warp my eye! Don’t try and avoid the issue! That’s a planet that may have something worthwhile on it, even if it does hold the cosmic speed record. You wanted relief from monotony—and you’ve got it! Grab yourself a control panel and restore my faith in husbands.”
Arch gave a mock salute and squatted down. Giving the power to the silent rocket tubes, he increased the smoothly perpetual cruising speed of the vessel to the maximum 160,000 miles a second, sent it plunging like a silver bullet through the cosmos while the girl, rigid over the instruments, rapped out instructions in her terse, half cynical voice.
True to calculation, the vessel came within close range of the flying world 120 minutes later, keeping pace with it in its hurtling journey.
Puzzled, the two looked down on its surface and watched the strange spreads of color that suffused it at varied points of its orbit. The nearer it came to the sun the grayer it became, seemed to actually cover itself with clouds—then it moved on again at top speed, merging from gray to green, to blue, fading down into red, then white, and resolving at aphelion into primary black only barely distinguishable against the utter platinum-dust dark of space.
“Chameleon planet is right!” Arch breathed, fascinated. “I still don’t see though how we can colonize it. It’s just a haywire rocket.”
“Never mind talking about fireworks—descend and have a look at it!” the girl counselled. “It may have valuable ores or some kind of salvage worth collecting. Wait until it gets nearest the sun and then drop down. At the rate it’s going that will be at any moment.…” Her eyes followed it speculatively as it raced away into space.
Arch bent more closely over his controls, easing the vessel sideways from the planet’s gravitational pull. With tensed muscles he waited. His gaze, along with the girl’s, followed every movement of that hurtling globe as it suddenly began its return trip.
He gripped the major control switches tightly and began to jockey the vessel round, twisting it in a great arc and then flattening out as the racehorse planet tore past.
His judgment was superb—the machine leveled out at 1,000 feet above the gray turbulent surface. Working dexterously he drove the nose downwards, plunged into the midst of the gray, and found to his satisfaction that it was cloud, cushioning atmosphere that broke the terrific down rush of the ship and eased her gently to a surface that was spongy and steaming with amazing warmth.
The vessel dropped softly at last in the center of a small clearing, surrounded by immense trees. They rose on every hand in fantastic array, their lower boles as smooth as billiard balls and bluish gray in color. Beyond this shiny, bald space they sprouted into circular tiers of similar hue, oddly like hundreds of umbrellas piled on top of each other.
Even as the startled two looked at them through the window, they visibly grew and added fresh veined vegetational domes to their height, quivered in the mystic ecstasy of some inner life. Nor were they isolated in their queerness.… In the midst of the lushy soil, vines of vivid green twirled their roots and tendrils in and out of stolid-looking, bellying bushes like gargantuan mushrooms. Everywhere, in every direction, was a swelling, tangling wilderness of stubbed, crazy shapes—here bulging, there elongating, like the irrelevant, frightening illusions of a nightmare.
“Life—gone mad!” murmured Arch soberly, then he turned away and glanced at the external meters. He felt vaguely satisfied at finding an atmosphere compatible with Earth’s, a gravity almost identical, but a temperature and humidity equalling that of the Carboniferous Age.
“Breathable, but as hot as hell,” Joyce said expressively, gazing over his shoulder. “We could go outside without helmets. The sun’s clouded, so I guess pith hats will do.”
Arch glanced again at the fantastical, swaying life.
“It’s a risk,” he said dubiously. “I don’t mean the air—the form of life.”
“What do explorers usually do? Get cold feet?” Joyce demanded. “If you won’t go, I will. That’s flat!”
Arch caught the challenge in her bright blue eyes. He nodded a trifle reluctantly. “O.K., we’ll chance it, if only to grab a few specimens. We’ll take full precautions, though. Fit up our packs with complete spacesuits as well as provisions. Use the space-bags; they’ll stand any conditions. I’ll look after the portable tent and flame guns.”
“Check!” she nodded eagerly, and went blithely singing into the adjoining storage closet.
CHAPTER TWO
Dinosaurs and Umbrella Trees
Five minutes later, surrounded by surging waves of sickly greenhouse warmth, they were standing together just outside the ship, the airlock securely fastened behind them. Their backs were loaded with full packs, Arch bearing the larger accoutrement in the form of a strong but collapsible vulsanite metal tent.
In silent dubiousness they looked around them on the umbrella trees and tangled shooting life that sprouted with insane fervor on every hand. Despite the heavy, drifting clouds they could feel the intense heat of the sun beating down through the protection of their pith helmets, its ultraviolet radiations tingling the skin of their bare arms. They began to perspire freely.
“Well, bright eyes, what’s your suggestion?” Arch asked querulously. “Looks to me as if wandering in this tangle will make us perform a complete vanishing trick.”
“We’re explorers, not magicians,” the girl answered briefly. “Obviously, the planet’s no good for colonization, but we can at least grab a few of these plants for specimens. Let’s go!”
She stepped forward boldly, flame pistol firmly gripped in her hand.
Arch looked after her slim figure for a moment, then with a resigned shrug prepared to follow her. Mentally he decided that the whole excursion was only fit for lunatics.… He moved, like the girl, with studied care, glancing around and below him at the twisting vines and sprouting shave-grass. Here and there in the patches of damp loam there frothed areas infested with minute, scuttling life, and, for every step he took, he had to dodge aside to avoid a wickedly spired, carmine-hued stem as it rose like a livid bayonet from alluvial soil.
So intent was he in guarding himself, indeed—in surveying the ground, he momentarily forgot the girl, until a sudden wild shout from ahead caused him to look up with a start.
Horrified and amazed, he came to an abrupt halt. Joyce was rising upwards into the air in front of the nearest umbrella tree, the carmine stem of a bayonet-bamboo thrust through the tough leather belt about her waist! Struggling wildly, she reared up to a height of thirty feet, striving frantically to free herself and calling in hysterical fright.
The ludicrous figure she cut set Arch laughing for a moment—then with a single slash from his flame gun he cut the plant in two and broke the girl’s fall as she came toppling down breathlessly into his arms.
“We’ve no time to play at acrobats,” he reproved her drily, as she straightened her rumpled clothing. “You ought to know better, Mrs. Lakington.”
“Could I help it if the thing grew while I was studying an umbrella tree?” she demanded wrathfully. “This place is so darned swift you need a time machine to keep up with it! I’m going back to the ship before worse things happen!”
She broke off as she half turned. Dismay settled on her pretty face at the sight of spreading, spiraling masses of incredible growth. In the few brief minutes occupied in her bayonet-stem adventure, the cl
earing had changed utterly.
Wild, rampant growth had sprouted up soundlessly on all sides, had already hidden the ship from view. Colors, weird and flamboyant, provided a crisscrossing maze of bewildering interlacings. Umbrella trees, bayonet-bamboos, bile-green vines, swelling objects like puffballs—they were all there, creaking in the hot, heavy air with the very speed of their growth, providing a blur of vivid colors that was eye-aching.
Arch did not need to be told that the ship was fast being smothered. The girl’s sudden startled silence was sufficient. For a moment he was nonplussed, then gripping her by the arm he plunged forward towards the tangled mass with flame gun spouting in a vicious arc, but even before he had the chance of seeing what happened, an intense, saturating darkness flooded down.
“Now what?” he yelped, in exasperated alarm. “Have I darn well gone blind or—”
“No, Arch; it’s night!” The girl’s voice quavered a trifle as her hand gripped his arm. “At the terrific speed this planet rotates and moves the day’s already exhausted! We’ll have to try— Ouch!”
She broke off and staggered in the darkness as a vicious unseen thorn stabbed the bare flesh of her arm. Arch drew her more tightly to him and switched on his belt torch. The clear beam revealed the solid, impregnable mass on every side.
Bewildered, they stumbled round, all sense of direction confused. Razor-edged masses were springing up now, mercilessly sharp, leaving slashes on their tough leather gum boots.… Gripping each other they moved onwards, literally forced to do so to escape the mad life twirling insanely around them.
Twice they blundered into an umbrella tree, reeling aside only just in time to escape the sudden sharp closing of its upper folds. It seemed to be more a mystic reflex action than actual carnivorous strain.
At last the girl halted as they came into a slightly quieter region.
“Look here, Arch, what are we going to do?” she panted. “In case you don’t know it, we’re completely lost!”
He stared at her torch-illumined face. “I’m open to suggestions. We can’t find the ship again in this stuff, that’s a certainty. We have provisions to last a month, and in that time—”
“A month!” she echoed, moving quickly as she felt an avid vine shooting over her feet.
“How do you figure we’re going to survive a month in this hole? We’ll be stabbed or strangled long before that!”
“Wonder what causes it? The growth speed, I mean.” Arch’s voice came musingly, out of the dark. “Incredibly fast plant mutations must have some cause behind them. Maybe something to do with the planet’s orbital speed. Even time seems different here. From space this world looked to be revolving like a humming top, yet now we’re on it, night and day seem to arrive normally—”
He stopped short as at that identical moment the stifling, terrible dark suddenly vanished and gave place to daylight again. The glare of the cloud-shielded sun flooded down on the wild growth, which, in the case of the umbrella trees at least, had already achieved cloud-scraping proportions.
“Normal, huh?” the girl questioned laconically, but she was obviously relieved.
“Well, if not normal, it at least resembles day and night,” Arch amended. “I expected something so swift that we’d encounter a sort of winking effect.”
Joyce said nothing to that; her eyes were traveling anxiously round the confusion. The thought of the vanished spaceship, the absolute craziness of everything, was obsessing her mind.
“Only thing to do is to keep on going,” Arch decided at length. “Maybe we’ll find a place to pitch camp and lay further plans.”
“I wish I shared your optimism,” the girl sighed enviously, then easing the burden of her pack she prepared to follow him.…
Forced to keep moving by reason of circumstances, the two blasted their way with flame guns through the crazy rampancy ahead of them. Confused, bewildered, they found themselves constantly confronted with things defying understanding.
One particularly vicious type of plant, which they nicknamed the ‘bellow bulb’, caused them a good deal of trouble. Lying in the soupy soil like a bladder, it released a powerful lethal gas when trodden on. More than once they found themselves tottering away from these things on the verge of unconsciousness.
But at last they became thankfully aware of the fact that the insane growth of the jungle was ceasing. The vast agglomeration of trees and plants seemed to have reached maximum size: there was no longer danger from slicing barbs, blades, and thorns.… Once they realized a passive state had been achieved, they sank down gratefully on one of the ground-level vines and took their first nourishment.
“Wish I could figure it out!” Arch muttered worriedly, twirling a tabloid round his tongue.
“Looks to me as though this is a sort of swamp age,” the girl muttered, thinking. “The plants have stopped growing: by all normal laws they ought to start collapsing to form future coal— Oh, but what am I saying!” she exclaimed hopelessly.
“It isn’t possible for that to happen. That’s the work of ages.”
“On a normal world it is—but here we have a world opposed to normal,” Arch pointed out. “Since orbital speed is so swift, it is possible that evolution might be the same way. Remember that the space plants scattered in the crater floors of the moon pass through their whole existence in the span of a lunar month; On earth a similar occurrence would demand ages. On this chameleon-like planet anything might happen.…”
“Might!” the girl echoed. “It does!”
Arch fell silent, vaguely perplexed, then he aroused himself to speak again.
“Guess we might as well pitch camp here for the time being,” he said briefly.
“We need rest before we think out the return trip—granting there’ll ever be any! Give me a hand.”
The girl came willingly to his assistance as he slid the portable shelter from his back. In the space of a few minutes the ultra-modern contrivance with its hinges, brackets, and angles was snapped into position, its slotted little beds sliding into fixtures as the four walls were clamped.
Grateful for the protection from the fierce ultra violet radiations of the clouded sun, the two scrambled inside and pulled off their provision packs; then for a while they sat together on the edge of the beds, gazing through the open doorway…until Arch stiffened abruptly as his keen gray eyes detected a slight movement in the nearby undergrowth. Instantly his hand went to the flame pistol in his belt.
“What—what is it?” breathed Joyce in amazement, gazing with him as there emerged into view a remarkable object like a monstrous earwig, two bone encrusted eyes watching from the midst of a rattish face.
“Outsize insect,” Arch said quickly. “Harmless, I guess.”
He lowered his gun and waited tensely, in increasing amazement, as between shave-grass and creeping-plants huge salamanders pulled themselves into sight, their queer, three-eyed, crescent-shaped skulls giving the effect of Satanic grimace. Scorpions came next, armed with viciously poisoned needles that quivered like daggers on protruding whip-like tails. Insects began to flit about—titanophasmes, as big as eagles. Above the tops of the lower lying liana dragonflies with yard-wide wings streaked swiftly.… Nor was that all. There were immense grasshoppers, millipedes as big as pumpkins, nauseous spiders dangling on ropy threads.… A hideous and incredible vision.
The two sat for perhaps fifteen minutes anxiously studying the creatures, when light fell again with its former startling suddenness. Day had lasted exactly two hours!
Arch gently closed the door and switched on his torch.
Joyce’s face was strained—her efforts to conceal fear were pretty futile.
“Two hours day; two hours night,” she said nervously. “This place is crazy, Arch! And those horrible things outside! You’re not suggesting we stop here with them around, are you?”
“What do you propose?” he asked quietly. “We daren’t go outside—we’d be worse off than ever. No; the only thing to do is to stick
it and hope for the best, hard though it is.”
The girl shuddered a little. “Guess you’re right, but it’s not going to be easy.”
She relapsed into silence. After a time Arch opened the door again and risked using his flashlight to see exactly what vas transpiring outside. To the utter surprise of both of them the jungle was collapsing! The entire mad growth was breaking up into dried sticks and dust.…
And the insects! They scuttled round in the confusion, yet not for a moment did they look the same. By lightning changes they increased in size, lost their insectile appearance, and became sheathed in scaly armor. The stupendous dragonfly creatures whizzing overhead grew larger with the moments, also achieved a protective covering that pointed beyond doubt to a reptilian strain.
Until finally, by the time daylight arrived once more, a new metamorphosis was complete. The two gazed out n awe on a scene magically different—evolution had slid by in a brief two-hour light! Another jungle was rising, but of a more delicate, refined nature, from the ruins of the old. Ferns of considerable size had sprouted in the clearing—behind them in fast-growing banks were gently waving masses bearing strong resemblance to earthly cycads and conifers.
But nowhere was there a flower: only the fantastically colored vegetation held back from crazy growth by some new mutational law in the planet’s inexplicable chemistry.
“If we set back for the spaceship now we might find it,” Joyce remarked anxiously. “The going would be simpler, anyhow.”
“So far as the jungle is concerned, yes,” Arch agreed; “but there are other perils. Look over there!”
He nodded his head to the opposite side of the clearing and the girl recoiled a little as she beheld a vast head of gray, the face imbecilic in expression, waving up and down on the end of a long neck. Flexible, rubbery lips writhed in avid satisfaction as the extraordinary beast lazily ate the soft, fast-growing leaves of the smaller trees. Once, as the wind parted the vegetation for a moment, there was a vision of vast body and tail.
World Without Chance Page 18
