John Russell Fearn Omnibus

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by John Russell Fearn


  With a care seeming incongruous for their heavy, metallic bodies the robots lifted the limp figure of an Earth man from the floor, laid him gently on a bunk near the control board. He was good looking after a fashion—still young, strong jawed, but with the fading light of approaching death in his eyes.

  He talked thickly, listlessly, between long pauses of hard breathing. The robots’ implanted recording mechanisms registered everything he said.

  “I—I guess I didn’t quite make it. This—this is the first space machine ever made…I made it, but forty million miles was too much for the first hop… I—I got into difficulties. Rockets wouldn’t work….” He stopped for a long time, looked at the unhuman faces around him.

  “I—I’m Gerald Sanders, the first Earth man to get here—maybe the last. I’m the only one who knows the fuel formula for these—these rockets. Hope nobody finds it again. Hellish business, space travel! Gets your mind and body…crushes it. If—if,” he went on, with sudden frantic desperation, “you’ve got any method here that’s—that’s akin to radio, wireless to my wife on Earth and tell her I got here. Her—her name’s Louise Sanders, of San Francisco. She—she couldn’t come, thank God. There’s a baby…”

  He gasped over the completion of his sentence, winced, then with a long, quivering sigh relaxed motionless. The robots stood in silence for a time, then very reverently picked up the dead body between them, bore it outside into the moaning wind.

  With steady, unvarying strides they progressed away towards the north of the red planet… Onwards, hour after hour.

  I – On Earth, 22 Years Later

  Old Jonathan Dare sighed with heavy regret as he shuffled into the large rear room of the shack, bearing a laden tray in his gnarled hands. He picked his way amongst snaky wires, storage batteries, small turbo-generators driven by a mountain stream, together with fantastically patterned radio antennae and reception aerials.

  He sighed even more heavily as he caught the accustomed sight of a black head bent rigidly over a complicated radio reception apparatus—a young figure in flannel shirt and slacks, slender hands hovering over the carefully graded controls.

  Jonathan rubbed the back of his untidy gray head, muttered something about lunacy, then planked the tray down on the bench.

  “Here y’are, Mister Eric—your supper.”

  The figure turned from the apparatus. Eric Sanders got up slowly, stroking a chin that was as square and purposeful as his dead father’s had been. There was a half abstracted, half puzzled look in his gray eyes as he picked up the coffee percolator and began to pour out its contents.

  Jonathan’s rheumy eyes surveyed the wilderness of apparatus. “No luck, Mister Eric?” he ventured.

  “Nope—nothing!” Eric sighed despondently; then he brightened a little. “Just the same, Jonathan, I still insist that I’ll do it one day. Twenty-two years ago my dad went to Mars. He landed there, but was never heard of again. Never returned.”

  The old man shrugged. He knew that: he’d been Gerald Sanders’ servant. Therefore he made the same observation he always made.

  “Y’ can’t be too sure o’ that, Mister Eric. Maybe he didn’t land. Maybe a thousand things happened to him out there in space.”

  “No, Jonathan; he landed all right.” Eric Sanders was quite sure of that. Coffee cup in hand he roamed to the window of the shack and stared from this lonely point of the Wahsatch Range of the Rockies down onto the arid, moonlit basin of Great Salt Lake.

  “Yes, he landed,” he repeated softly, half turning. “The new reflector at Mount Wilson followed his ship. Besides, his special short wave radio messages revealed that he’d gotten to within a million miles of Mars. After that, he couldn’t help but fall on the planet. The gravitational field alone would see to that.”

  “But twenty years!” Jonathan protested, stirring his coffee musingly. “Ever since you took me on here five years ago after your mother’s death—Heaven rest her—you’ve been playing around with these new-fangled radio gadgets, adding this and taking away that, sitting up at nights—What d’you hope to get out of it?”

  “A communication from Mars. Some day.”

  “But suppose your father’s dead? He might be, even if he did reach Mars.”

  Eric smiled a little, sat down thoughtfully. “Probably he is dead, but that wouldn’t stop the Martians from discovering the short wave radio aboard his ship. I hardly think his machine could be so completely smashed up as to destroy every darned thing within it. Mars’ pull is far less than Earth’s, you know. And, if his radio could communicate to Earth when only a million miles from Mars, it could obviously do so from Mars itself.”

  “Might not,” Jonathan said vaguely. “Atmosphere might stop it.”

  “Only the ionized upper layers and there aren’t any on Mars. The planet’s almost airless. Besides, those waves penetrated our ionized layer, so nothing could stop them penetrating Mars’. See?”

  “Ay, I see that—but you can take it from me, Mister Eric that since them Martians haven’t done anything for twenty years they’re not going to. You’re just wasting your time. Perhaps there aren’t any people on Mars anyway. What then?”

  “Oh, but there is intelligent life,” Eric protested quickly. “Every year there are evidences of changes on the disk and in the canali, distinctly visible through the new Mount Wilson telescope. There is intelligent life, all right—Yes, Jonathan, I’m sure that one day I’ll get what I’m after. Each receiver I build has some new improvement for the reception of ultra-short waves such as dad used. Unfortunately I haven’t inherited his genius—or his formulae for short wave efficiency and space travel, so I just have to keep on picking my way. Mars is in my blood, Jonathan. It means something to me. I’d give anything to be able to go there.”

  “Ay; I know that.” The old servant’s tired eyes watched Eric as he got up and paced slowly round the instrument littered room.

  “That new tube I’ve incorporated, for instance,” he went on. “It passes electrons with more ease and latitude than any known tube in the world today. It amplifies even the faintest signal. With ten of those tubes in cascade and linked to the receiver it provides the groundwork of an interplanetary radio receiver.”

  “And you get?” Jonathan grunted.

  “Nothing—yet,” Eric growled. “Not even ordinary police or experimental broadcasts. My stuff’s too sensitive to incorporate them. I get static by the ton, cracklings that are probably accounted for by the Earth’s magnetic poles… But Mars still doesn’t bite.”

  He turned disgustedly away to the window and stared out again. Absently his eyes settled on two spots of light perhaps half a mile distant down the pass on which the lonely shack stood. He watched them with interest, began to frown as they went out and in again as something passed in front of them.

  “I’d say it was a car,” Jonathan murmured, gazing over Eric’s shoulder. “Looks like headlights to me.”

  “But who on earth—?” Eric began in bewilderment.

  “I dunno, Mister Eric, ’less it’s somebody trying to get through to Denver. It is a short cut if you’ve nerve enough —and gas enough—to try it.”

  Eric wasted no further time talking. Slipping on his hat and coat he went out into the sharp night cold, picked his way along the broad mountain pass, aided by familiarity and moonlight. Half a mile brought him to a stranded, luxuriant La Salle convertible. The slim figure of half a girl was visible, peering at the car’s insides.

  “Anything I can do?” Eric inquired, as he came up.

  The girl emerged at that and gazed at him in complete astonishment in the glare of headlamps. He looked back with interest, judged that save for a smudge of oil her oval shaped face was decidedly pretty. Her figure seemed remarkably slight, elfin-like.

  “Where—where on earth did you come from?” she demanded. “It isn’t that—that I’m not glad, of course, but —I thought I was alone here.”

  “Did you want to be?” Eric asked politely.


  “Good heavens, no! I was never so thankful to see anybody in my life… I was heading for ’Frisco…” She broke off and laughed ruefully. “Guess I was a fool to take this way along the pass, only a friend of mine said it was O.K.”

  “It is,” Erie murmured, “if you’re familiar with it.” He stared at the car. “What seems to be the trouble?”

  The girl shrugged helplessly. “That’s just it; I don’t know.”

  Without speaking Eric tested the plugs, ignition and carburettor. Then, smiling a little, he glanced at the illumined dashboard.

  “It’s a good idea to watch your fuel gauge,” he remarked dryly. “You’re out of gas.”

  “Gas!” The girl started in dismay. “Oh, Lord, I never thought of that! Where can I get some?” she asked quickly.

  “Nowhere tonight, I’m afraid.” Eric looked at her keenly. “Where are you from, anyway?”

  “Two miles out of Denver. Anything wrong with it?”

  “Oh, no, but it seems kind of odd—a lone girl like you making a solo of a good five hundred miles to ’Frisco.”

  “There’s a reason,” she murmured demurely. “And, incidentally, it isn’t usual to find anybody living up in this neck of the woods. If I seem queer, you’re queerer!” She brought out a compact and rubbed her smudged face industriously.

  “I’m a radio experimenter,” Eric explained. “What I was going to say was, that in the morning I can fix you up. My servant’s going into ’Frisco on business and can run you there in my own car. There’ll be just enough room for it to get round this car of yours. You can call at the nearest garage and tell them to fill your car up and run it home for you.”

  “Umm…You’ve no spare can of gas?”

  “Sorry, no. You’re welcome to my shack for the night. It’ll be O.K. Old Jonathan will be the guardian angel. How about it?”

  The girl’s face brightened. “Thanks a lot, Mr.—You have a name, I suppose? Or do experimenters just have numbers?”

  Eric laughed, took her arm as they returned up the pass.

  “If I did have a number, zero would about suit it.”

  “Zero isn’t a number, it’s a negation… And I still haven’t your name?”

  “Eric Sanders.”

  “Mine’s Sonia Benson. No ties, no parents, and if my friends are to be believed, no sense either… Say, do you happen to be any relation to the Gerald Sanders who had a shot at Mars some twenty years ago?”

  Eric glanced at her sharply. “Why? How do you know what happened twenty years ago? You don’t look a day over twenty-three or so now.”

  “I could have had parents who told me, couldn’t I?” she demanded.

  “I guess so… I’m Gerald Sanders’ son. Does it mean anything?”

  “Well, no—but it’s interesting… Ah, so this is where you experiment?”

  II – A Message from the Void

  Sonia looked about her with obvious interest as they passed through the shack’s open doorway into the network of instruments and contrivances. Eric closed the door, stood silently watching the girl as she gazed round.

  As she pulled off her hat she released a mass of curls the color of new copper. They framed her quick, youthful face and sharply enhanced the pink and white of her skin, the deep unfathomable violet of her eyes. At least, Eric judged that they were violet; they had an odd knack of changing color as she slowly turned. She was definitely beautiful, but in a manner rather different from the usual.

  “You must do an awful lot of clever things in here,” she said at last, and her dainty mouth smiled to reveal flawless teeth.

  “Take a seat,” Eric invited, and hastily dusted one of the rather ancient chairs. “Sorry things are so upset around here. Maybe you’d better come into the drawing room—”

  “Oh, no—no,” she laughed, settling down. “This is fine…” She looked up questioningly as Jonathan came shuffling in from the kitchen regions. He regarded her with a silence that was almost one of awe until finally Eric spoke.

  “Heat up some more coffee, Jonathan—and rustle up some grub from somewhere. Miss Benson must be pretty hungry…This is my man, Jonathan, by the way.”

  She smiled at the old man prettily and he nodded awkwardly, went out with the percolator clutched in his hand. Then the girl threw off her heavy coat, revealed the flawless curves of her slight, lissom body.

  Eric drew up a chair before her and proffered his cigarette case with a hand that shook oddly. To his surprise the copper curls shook emphatically. “Thanks all the same, no.”

  “No? I should have thought you were—well, modern in every way,” he remarked. Then he frowned a little. “Say, you’re not a television actress, are you?”

  She laughed musically. “Good heavens, no! I’m just a wandering girl, with more money than sense. Why?”

  “Oh, nothing, ’cept that with your looks and—er—figure you’d knock any television producer’s ears off.”

  “Never mind television; what about your experiments?” she asked softly, and her eyes changed from inky black to sapphire blue as she leaned forward eagerly.

  “Oh, forget them! I can afford to take a bit of time off to entertain a visitor. And such a—”

  “But I’m interested!” she broke in quickly. “Anything scientific does something to me. That’s why I asked about your name. I think your father was the most wonderful pioneer in history. He dared the void,” she whispered. “The void!”

  “And somewhere on Mars,” Eric murmured, carried away for the moment, “is somebody, I feel convinced, who will one day communicate with me by radio.”

  She looked at him strangely. “So that’s what you’re doing up here like a hermit?”

  “Sure.” Eric waved proudly to his apparatus, got to his feet and moved to his receiver. He felt doubly proud when the girl got up and stood by his side, profoundly interested in all the things he detailed. Without a hint of boredom she listened, her beautiful face alive and intelligent. Even when Jonathan came shuffling in with the coffee and sandwiches she hardly seemed interested in the subject of supper.

  “It’s simply marvelous!” she declared at last, fingering the receiver with white hands. “To think that this apparatus could receive messages from a world forty million miles away…”

  “But it doesn’t!” Eric complained bitterly, handing her a cup of coffee from the tray Jonathan was holding. “Just listen for yourself what happens…” He closed the many switches that controlled the apparatus and they sat listening to the crackling, whining hum from the loudspeaker.

  “And that racket is Polar static, I suppose?” Sonia asked presently, daintily munching a sandwich.

  Eric looked surprised. “Why, yes. Say, for a girl who says she’s no sense you’re going places.”

  “No sense in ordinary things, perhaps, but those interested in science rarely have. Since static is the free movement of electrons and protons, one of the direct results of ionization—and since the greatest display of that is at the magnetic poles, that’s the natural answer, isn’t it?”

  “I guess so.” Eric drank his coffee and they sat looking at each other over the cup edges, her profound eyes looking directly into his. Jonathan stood silently waiting.

  “Why not try a different wavelength?” the girl asked at last, surveying the graded dials. “Obviously there is nothing in that particular section.”

  “Can if you like, but it won’t be any good. I’ve done it thousands of times before. What would you suggest? Higher or lower?”

  “Oh, I dunno… Try lower.”

  Eric reached out and played with the directional finder, moving the pointer along its graded dial towards the shortest possible radio waves. Then suddenly he stopped, froze in mid action, dropped his coffee cup with a crash, as there came in the speaker an incredibly faint murmuring, almost like the cadences of a rising wind.

  “Listen!” he whispered hoarsely. “Listen to that! A voice!”

  “Probably an experimenter from somewhere,” Soni
a said, putting her cup down.

  Eric studied the dials quickly. “Can’t be that. No experimenter could possibly tune to this short wave—or even if by some fluke he did manage it he’d have to be quite near to this shack. I know that isn’t so because there’s nothing within two hundred miles of this place. I made sure of it because of possible interference.” He slammed his chair round and began to fiddle desperately with gadget after gadget, and the more he fiddled the more the murmuring changed from inaudibility to definite meaning, slowly began to take on the shape of words.

  The girl stiffened and leaned forward with red lips parted. Jonathan advanced and stood with his gray head cocked on one side.

  “…calling to Earth. Mars calling Earth. Calling to third planet from sun. Fourth planet calling third… Mars calling Earth…”

  “It’s English!” Eric yelled, jerking round an amazed face. “Oh, gosh, if only I had a transmitter powerful enough to answer I could perhaps—

  “Listen!” the girl interrupted him, her hand raised—and the faint, whispered communication resumed.

  “Calling to man or woman named Sanders, child of Gerald Sanders of San Francisco, Earth… This message will be repeated without ceasing until my telepathic apparatus reveals that the mind of the child of Gerald Sanders—if there be such a child—is trained directly on Mars. Then I shall know that my message has been received and will communicate in full…. Calling to Earth—”

  The message went on again through the same wording, uttered in a voice that was not unpleasing, but so quiet, so suggestive of vast distances, it had almost an eerie quality in the lonely mountain shack,

  “I made it!” Eric kept whispering, again and again. “I’ve tried all these years, and now—They must have learned the English language from father’s books and radio-phonograph records, and things. Mars inhabited!” he shouted, leaping up. “Infinitely intelligent people with telepathic apparatus! They’ll know when I’m thinking about them! All right!” he yelled, staring at the apparatus in front of him. “I’m concentrating! Do you get it? This is Eric Sanders—!”

 

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