I hope you will agree that they still have the power to astonish and entertain!
Chapter I
The pale Martian sun was at its zenith in the cloudless blue of the sky as the young man and woman dived into the water of Reservoir 7. This was the day that they had been waiting for, when both of them were free of work for a few hours—the young man from the scientific laboratories and the girl from the Bureau of Statistics. One glorious day in every twenty, and it always took too long to arrive.
Reservoir 7 was a private spot, almost a trysting place, and certainly the two young people were breaking the law in coming here. But then, on a world where water was jealously hoarded, where oceans had long since evaporated, there had to be some way for them to practice for the Aquatic Sports without recourse to the crowded swimming baths in the main Capital.
Reservoir 7, a gigantic sheet of water forming a junction between Canals 10 and 12, which were fed from the Polar Caps and so—with the rest of the canal network—irrigated most of Mars’ rainless surface, was the ideal spot.
Swiftly, laughing as the girl set the pace through the green depths, Rad Vaza struck out with massive arms, the weak sunshine catching the wet sheen on his ochre-coloured skin. He noticed as he swam that something was strangely different. The water seemed more buoyant, as though it were pressing him upwards, and—unusual thing—it splashed with a curiously turgid quality…
The girl ahead was moving with all the speed of youth, her skin a shade lighter in hue, her soft flesh rippling as muscles rolled beneath it. She too was noticing the curious quality of the water. It was quite an effort to force herself down in a dive, but because she was playfully determined to avoid Rad’s overtaking clutch, she attempted it. It felt as though she were driving her head into solid ground!
She just bobbed up again as Rad dived too. He came to the surface gasping for breath and spitting water.
“What took you so long?” the girl threw at him, and began to cleave the water towards the sandy embankment.
“The water. It seems treacly somehow. And from the feel of my throat I think I swallowed half the Reservoir!”
The girl laughed, reached the embankment before him and then threw herself down in the warm red sand. With a quick movement she tugged off the transparent helmet she had been wearing and released a mop of thick green hair … Then she lay back with hands behind her head and gazed up into the wan sky.
She was a lissom, tawny-skinned goddess, this girl of Mars—yet by the standard of Earth she was peculiar. To Rad Vaza’s eyes, however, as he came out of the water to join her, she left nothing to be desired. An Earthman would have said that her massive chest and shoulders made her ungainly; that her very long though shapely legs—giving her seven feet of height when she was standing—were perfectly preposterous. But by comparison with many Martian women Invia Drak was by no means outsize.
Or perhaps her face with its rather flat features and strong teeth would have seemed repulsive. Perhaps too the heavy-lidded eyes with their scarlet irises and densely black pupils might have appeared startling—but not to Rad Vaza.
He stood looking down at her in her clinging costume as he reached her side. Her eyes moved from the sky to his eight feet of height, past his great drum of a chest and egregious shoulders to the strength of his young face. Green haired, as she was, but with it closely cropped, he had similar blunt features—yet there was intelligence in them. Plainly, here was a young Martian with genius and strength—and, womanlike, Invia Drak was quite aware of it.
“Well?” she asked presently. “How much longer are you going to stand there spitting and spluttering? It isn’t very complimentary to me, you know!”
Rad coughed deeply and made a wry face. “Sorry, Invia. It’s the first time I ever swallowed so much of the canal water—and I hope it’s the last! It’s bitter; unpleasantly so. And that’s odd,” he reflected, frowning. “It comes over scientifically purified sandbeds all the way from the Pole Caps—and did you notice how it seemed to impede our swimming this time? I wonder if—”
“Oh, you and your science!” the girl’s soft voice chided him. “Come and sit down beside me like a respectable husband-to-be.”
Then Invia gave a whoop of alarm as Rad suddenly dived upon her. For a moment or two, breathless with laughter, they threshed about in the sand. Then they came to rest in each others’ arms. Gradually, as Rad studied her, Invia’s eyes became thoughtful. She turned her head slowly to survey the endless ochre desert yawning to north, south, east, and west, a desert split by the ribbon-straight lines of Canals 10 and 12. Then she looked at the distant city near the southern horizon—and finally she looked at the sky.
“Anything wrong?” Rad enquired, as she relaxed.
“Not exactly wrong, only sometimes I do get the queerest feeling of depression when I realise that we’re living on a fast dying world. It’s hard to be young and find age all around you.”
Rad was silent, his powerful face reflecting grim thoughts. That the stamp of death was on his beloved planet was more than obvious.
“The other day I was looking through the history audioscope,” the girl resumed, and gave a sigh. “Oh, how fascinating it was Rad! Our world must have been very beautiful once when it had fields and oceans, trees and grass, when there were even clouds in the sky. And rain! Think of it, Rad, we once had rain! The audioscope showed it all. People running from water in the skies. And yet look at it now.” Her eyes searched the empty dove-grey heaven. “The clouds and the birds all gone. Everything now is so desolate, so still. You and I have never seen clouds, nor rain, nor birds. They are just images, photographed for us to look at.”
“Just memories,” Rad agreed, and gave himself a little shake. “But there’s no use in our making ourselves miserable over it dearest. Nature is merciless. We live on a small planet from which the atmosphere is gradually escaping due to the slight gravity … After all, we’ll live out our lives in comfort, Invia. Our world isn’t dying that fast. We have the canals irrigating great continents, like Bray-Faldon and Aquapolis.”
“But the desert is winning,” the girl said soberly. “You know it is.”
Rad looked morosely over the expanse and stifled another cough from the reservoir water he had swallowed.
“Well, what can we do about it?” he asked finally. “The engineers have done all they can. When the desert wins and the atmosphere becomes too attenuated to support life, that is the end … An end too far away to worry us.”
The girl was silent for a long time; then, “If we have children—as we shall—they in turn will also have children. They have no heritage, Rad. Nothing is being done to stave off the inevitable death of our planet.”
“I don’t quite agree there,” Rad objected. “Space flights have been made to discover the planets which might be suitable for our migration—but none of them will do. They are either too dense in atmosphere or too heavy in gravitation—”
“Very well then, the answer to that is that we must transfer our entire civilisation underground—not at once but by degrees, so that our children’s children can survive the death of the surface when it comes.”
Rad shook his head doubtfully, looking about him.
“I agree with you, dearest, but you’ll never get the city fathers to do likewise, not in any city on the planet. The death of our world is regarded as inevitable so nobody does anything about it. We have all the amenities of science around us and so the future somehow doesn’t seem to matter.”
Invia suddenly scrambled impatiently to her feet.
“If that statement isn’t the complacency born of achievement I don’t know what is! Posterity has no future, Rad! Don’t you realise it?”
He stood up beside her, drew her head down gently onto his shoulder and stroked her soft hair.
“Yes, dearest, of course I realise it—but the future is so far away. Why do you worry so?”
“Because I’m a woman!” she retorted, pulling herself from him. “Why should I
bring children into a doomed world, children who will beget more children into an increasingly hopeless future? Why should I, just because elderly scientists have given us every modern necessity and yet have refused to look further than the present? The trouble with them is they have forgotten what it’s like to be young and full of vitality and hope!”
Rad looked his distress. “Invia, it’s no use pitching into me because the world is coming to an end in a few more generations—”
“But it is of use! You must save it, for posterity.”
“I must?” Rad stared blankly.
“Of course! You are one of the youngest and cleverest scientists. You have many inventions to your credit already. You must think out ways and means for providing future generations with confidence, and then prove to the savants that you are right.”
Rad laughed emptily. “Good heavens, Invia, what a thing to ask! They wouldn’t even listen to me!”
“You must make them!”
“But why all this sudden concern for—”
The girl brushed Rad’s words aside. “I can’t explain it, not in so many words. It’s just as though I have had a sudden revelation. I have only just realised where complacency and lack of scientific enterprise are leading us on this dying world. Somebody has got to stop the drift, and that somebody must be you.”
Rad looked at her in wonder, like many a man before him when faced with a woman’s unpredictable convictions.
“Rad…dearest.” She rested a gentle hand on his arm and looked up into his face. “Either you make the future safe or we will have no union, no children, no anything. If that sounds a harsh decision on my part it is only because I have such faith in you that I know you will devise ways and means.”
****
When he returned to his home in the calm of the Martian evening after taking his leave of Invia, Rad Vaza thought a good deal about what she had said, and he knew too that she had too purposeful a character to be influenced into changing her mind.
He did not find it so easy to concentrate, however. For some reason he was still coughing spasmodically from his adventures in Reservoir 7. And coughing hurt him—not because he was a weakling but because medical science had eliminated such ailments from his race and therefore it was to him a new malady which racked the delicate lining of his immense lungs. And that bitter taste in his mouth! Rather like dilute vinegar had he but been acquainted with it.
At length he got up irritably from an abstracted survey of the city outside, with busy little Phobos, the nearer moon, streaking across the darkling sky. Everything else had gone from his mind now except the worry of his cough. He had got to stop it somehow, and to do that meant tracing the cause—which also meant an analysis of the water of Reservoir 7.
In a few minutes he was out in the street making his way towards the huge scientific laboratories where by day he was employed as an analyst. Nobody on the night staff paid much attention to him as he went to his own department, took a portable testing equipment from the bench, and then left the building once more.
It was around midnight when he reached the placid Reservoir 7, the water reflecting the stars. Carefully he drew off a sample and placed it in the analysing chamber of the instrument he had brought with him. After a minute or two the apparatus ceased clicking and Rad looked at the luminous figure indicators.
At first he could hardly credit the readings, and looked again. According to them there was something wrong with the hydrogen analysis—something much wrong indeed that he couldn’t hope to sort the problem out without complete laboratory research. He drew off a further sample of water and packed up the equipment—then as he turned to go a figure merged out of the shadows.
“Invia!” Rad moved quickly towards her. “Invia, what in the world are you doing here?”
“Looking around. When I got home I found myself wondering: just why did we float in the Reservoir this afternoon? It never happened before. So not feeling particularly tired, I thought I’d come and take a look. Apparently you had the same idea.”
“Not quite the same. I came to find out the reason for my cough. All I have found out is that there is something wrong with the hydrogen content of the water. I’m going right back now to the lab to make an analysis.”
“Can I come with you?”
“It’s against the rules, but maybe we could risk it just this once.”
In half an hour they were within the long, quiet annex to which Rad—in the daytime—had special access. That he was taking a risk in having Invia with him he knew full well, but the chance of discovery at this hour of night was highly unlikely.
In silence Invia watched the spectroscopic analysis, in which there glimmered a new dark line.
“What is that?” she asked, puzzled. “A new element?”
“No, not a new element,” Rad answered, gazing at the spectrum fixedly. “It’s still hydrogen, but in a heavier form than usual.”
He turned aside to other instruments and inspected their findings.
“Density ten per cent higher than ordinary water,” he said at length. “It freezes at three oh eight instead of zero, and boils at one hundred and one oh four instead of a hundred.”
“Most unusual water,” Invia commented, reflecting.
“Not unusual water, dearest, but heavy water!” Rad spoke deliberately. “We manufacture it in the laboratories for scientific purposes but this the first time I have ever heard of it in the natural state. It explains why we could not swim properly in the Reservoir. In heavy water you can float if you wish to.”
“But how in the world did the Reservoir get into such a state?” the girl asked in amazement.
“I begin to think that the effect is not limited to that particular Reservoir, Invia. In fact it is most probable that every canal and reservoir on the planet is in the same state. Heavy water, according to our laboratory tests, produces a great metabolic increase in both plant an organic life. It extends the period of life to a considerable degree.”
“Plant life?” Invia repeated, thinking; then suddenly she gripped Rad arm. “Rad, I’ve just remembered something! At the Statistical Bureau we have reports that all crops and staple foods—irrigated by the canal of course—are well ahead of season. Could it be caused by this heavy water?”
“No doubt of it,” Rad answered immediately. “But our scientists are so busy enjoying the fruits of past accomplishments that they are not even aware of what has happened. The canals need no attention, anyway; they’re too perfect a job of engineering.”
“None of which explains what turned normal water into heavy water!”
“The sun must have done it,” Rad said, after thinking for a while. “Yes, the sun—and given us another sign of the approaching death of our world. The thinning atmosphere must have attenuated far enough in these past few months to permit of strong radiations getting through. They have electrolyzed every scrap of exposed water on the planet! Day after day the sun pours down from a cloudless sky. This has broken down the water’s oxygen and hydrogen and left an isotope with more electrons than normal water … Heavy water.”
“Then—then it won’t ever improve?”
“No, Invia. It’s a mutational change, which will become progressively more obvious. Staple foods, of course, although they have thrived on heavy water, will not contain enough of it to affect anybody. In fact, I am the only person who has taken heavy water in the pure state—in the Reservoir this afternoon.”
Invia’s expression changed slightly. “Does that mean that you are poisoned?”
“No—anything but that.” Rad gave a slow smile. “What I have probably done is increase my life span and given myself a bitter taste in the mouth. Nothing more, barring the cough which now seems to have disappeared.”
“Rad, tell me something…” Invia’s eyes were fixed upon him intently. “If heavy water can produce longevity why haven’t our scientists manufactured it for everybody’s use?”
“Because of the expense. And anyway, what
use is longevity on a dying world?”
The girl still studied Rad, as if she were trying to fathom his expression. There was something hidden there, some secret behind the burning light in his eyes.
“You’d better be going,” he told her finally. “If anybody were to discover you here it might mean plenty of trouble for both of us.”
She nodded slowly as he began to impel her with gentle firmness towards the door. Then she turned and asked a question.
“Rad, you’re going to report this to the savants, I suppose?”
“If the opportunity arises,” he assented; then as Invia still hesitated, “I suppose you are still adamant about not marrying me unless I can urge our scientists to save our world?”
“Yes, Rad, I am. I think it is the only way to make you enforce your ability.”
He kissed her and then smiled down into her earnest face.
“All right, dearest, so be it. I’ll see you at the same place, same time, tomorrow night—or rather tonight since it’s long past midnight.”
Invia nodded and went off down the corridor in swift silence. Rad returned slowly into the laboratory and spent several minutes in thought, looking at his computations on the heavy water; then coming to a decision he went over to the big filing cabinets wherein were kept the records of laboratory researches. After some searching he took down the metal-foil dossier dealing with heavy water and carried it to the bench. Pulling up a stool he settled to a profound study.
An hour later, hands over both his ears, he was still studying—but a grim look had come to his face. He closed the dossier at last and clenched his fist upon it.
“Rapid metabolism—the heavy hydrogen atom reacting more slowly to the chemical changes of a living body … That means, if consumed in carefully measured doses, that eternity is possible! What could I not do to save the planet if I alone possessed eternal life?”
Rad took a deep breath, awed by the possibilities. It would mean taking a risk. Constant consumption of heavy instead of normal water might produce effects unforeseen in the dossier’s findings. On the other hand Invia had told him to try and save his planet before she would consider union—
John Russell Fearn Omnibus Page 44
