Chapter IV
After an interval the vibrations began to subside. Rad, wincing from bruises, got slowly to his feet and moved to the switchboard to regain control over the vessel, but the view through the window held him spellbound instead. In any case the spaceship was no longer in need of control; it was hurtling away into the deeps, diagonally from the planet towards which it had been moving. And there lay the amazing thing. Rad could hardly credit it, and neither could Invia as she came to his side.
For the planet which had been dead in front of them was no more! It had exploded into tens of thousands of fragments which were swirling in the mysterious current of space, all drifting gradually towards each other, drawn by the inevitable laws of attraction. Where there had been a complete planet, there was now only a titanic field of asteroids, lying between the first of the four giant outer planets and the fourth small inner world.
“We—we blew it up!” Rad said at length, bewildered. “As for the ships they’ve utterly vanished. Been blown to bits as well, I suppose.”
“But our guns just couldn’t have done it, Rad! They’re not that terrific.”
“Maybe not, but the fact remains a whole planet has become a maze of asteroids and—wait!” There was a sudden gleam in Rad’s eyes. Then he snapped his fingers. “I have it! My readings of that planet showed its atmosphere was composed entirely of oxygen and hydrogen, two hydrogen to one of oxygen as far as bulk was concerned. That, with trace of water vapour, such as was also there, is a chemically volatile combination. Let a naked flame near it and—Woof! That’s what must have happened. The flame of the forward gun I fired must have reached the outmost edge of the planet’s atmospheric envelope and there was instant combustion!”
“Yes,” Invia whispered, awed. “Yes, that must be it. It would also account for my gun utterly destroying a whole spaceship at one blow. The ship must have been full of oxy-hydrogen gas in order that those within could breathe comfortably. When my gun flame bit into it the whole lot went up instantly.”
“That’s it…” Rad’s face was serious. “Apparently we blew up an entire civilisation. That would account for the absence of flame from the spaceship exhausts,” he continued, thinking. “Evidently the race had evolved a means of getting power, light, and so forth without using flame. They knew how dangerous we would be with our jets on this machine and so came to stop us at all costs.”
Invia looked back at the vast field of asteroids and then gave a sigh.
“You know something, Rad? When the people of the other planets start to evolve into intelligence they’re certainly going to wonder how that band of asteroids comes to be there when there ought to be a planet!”
Rad nodded slowly; then by degrees he shook off the awe which seemed to be enveloping him.
“We’d better have a look at the big outer worlds, and that small one on the outermost rim, and see if they hold anything worthwhile for us.”
With that he turned to the switchboard, got the machine under control again, and then replotted the course. An hour later the vessel was headed towards the planets beyond the asteroids and once again there settled the inevitable spell of monotony.
The greatest planet of all was reached a week later, by normal time, but if anything it was an even less favourable prospect than the third world had been. By and large it was still in the molten state, boiling turgidly under a twilight sky, its plasmic landscape hidden under drenching clouds of steam and smoke. A hell world if ever there was one.
Rad wasted no time in getting away again, but in this effort he was fighting the planet’s colossal gravity and more than once he was seized with the fear that the spaceship might not be able to pull free. It took two hours, running the plant at maximum pressure, to tear out of the planet’s grip, and it was this experience that left Rad sobered as, through the outlook window, he contemplated the remaining outer worlds.
“Perhaps,” he said slowly, “we’re only wasting our time. There is no need to suppose whether the remaining worlds will be like this one, being of similar size. It would perhaps be better to return home and explore the possibilities of our own world for underground existence.”
“I don’t agree,” Invia responded, after some thought. “We have got this far, and if we return home and leave the rest of these worlds un-investigated, I at least shall wonder always if we didn’t make a mistake. We’ve got this far – let’s finish it.”
Rad shrugged. “All right. Can’t make much difference, I suppose.”
So the journeying was continued, but all it did was satisfy them that they had made it. For on every world they drew a complete blank. Every one was too molten for consideration, except the smallest and furthest world of all, and here there was no atmosphere. Only barren rock and the temperature of interstellar space.
“Which brings us to the end of the road,” Rad said, as the ship lay on a rocky plain and he gazed through the window out towards the Great Galaxy. “There might of course be worlds up there, other systems, other suns, but at the rate we move it would take endless lifetimes to cover the distance.”
“If we are eternal does that really matter?”
“Probably not, but it amounts to running away, doesn’t it? We might find sanctuary, yes, but what about the rest of our race? They are not eternal and certainly could not survive until our return with whatever information we might obtain … No, Invia, we’d better return home and work out the final details of a master-plan for survival beneath surface of our own planet. Then we’ll place it before the savants—or at any rate I will—and see what they have to say. The least they can do is thank us for the efforts we’ve made to try and save the race.”
Invia looked out towards the Galaxy, her eyes wistful; then a change of expression came over her face and she nodded.
“Yes, Rad, I think you’re right … It isn’t what we ourselves want, but what is necessary to the race as a whole.”
****
Once they had returned home, Rad and Invia spent their time exclusively in working out how to domicile the race underground. They visited every part of the planet, made every possible scientific and geologic test, drew the plans for underground habitations, indeed did everything they could possibly do, until Rad at least felt he had all he needed to place the matter before the city fathers. On these grounds he made a request for an audience, and because of his eminence as a scientist it was granted, the same facility being eventually extended to Invia. A day was appointed and finally arrived.
The assembled scientists in the city’s great consulting room glanced at each other in polite wonderment as Rad and Invia were shown in, both of them tall and commanding, their great heads the outward sign of surpassing intelligence. Of the two, Rad looked the more impressive. About the woman there hovered an indefinable air of tragedy, as though she had nothing worthwhile to live for.
“Gentlemen,” Rad said, “I do not need to tell you that our people have no future and that our world is rapidly dying. I have dwelt on that fact at considerable length in the various scientific journals.”
There was a general nodding of heads.
“I have a master plan,” Rad continued. “My wife and I have spent nearly three years working it out, but before bringing it to completion we tested the possibility of our migration to other worlds, both in this system and in the fourth dimension, and met with failure at every point. Therefore our only hope is to vanish underground. Our master plan provides for a vast underworld refuge and the utilization of the metallic ores which, below surface, have survived the tide of ferrous oxide creeping across our planet. It explains in detail how atomic force can be harnessed for excavators; how shafts and cupolas can be designed to withstand tremendous stresses. It provides for synthesis, artificial cold light, special fertilizers for seeds and crops. It envisages our vast civilization as it can live for a thousand years…”
Rad opened the case he had brought with him and laid a sheaf of metal foils on the long table in the room centre; then at leng
th with Invia he retreated to a distance to await opinions.
Nearly an hour passed whilst the scientists studied the diagrams; then at length the leading savant looked up.
“Rad Vaza, whence came this great intelligence which enabled you to devise a scheme so flawless as this?”
“Does it signify?” Rad asked, after a pause.
“It may,” the old scientist responded. “Certainly I require an answer before I give a decision.”
Rad hesitated; then he realised he had no alternative but to speak the truth.
“The genius of my wife and myself is the outcome of heavy water…” Then as the scientists listened impassively he told the whole story. At end of it there was a dead silence.
Invia held Rad’s arm tightly as the leading scientist took up the foils and then threw them into the atomising chamber in the wall. In a puff of disintegrative fire, they vanished!
Stupefied, Rad stared for a moment; then he strode forward angrily to the long council table.
“You destroy the work of years like that!” he yelled in fury.
The savant’s eyes looked back at him calmly.
“Yes, Rad Vaza—because they defy tradition. You had no right to make a heavy water experiment on yourself or your wife without first consulting us! No scientific experiments are permitted without our sanction.”
“Such confounded conservatism—”
“It is the law, Rad Vaza!” The savant slapped his hand palm down the table. “Great though your plan is, we cannot use it because you conceived it through the illegal use of heavy water. Rad Vaza,” the savant asked quietly, “do you realize what you have done?”
“Yes. My wife and I have gained immortality and can save the race.”
The old scientist smiled. In the deep-set eyes was infinite wisdom which youth is too intolerant to observe.
“My boy, you have killed the race!” the savant said slowly. “That is why your plan would never have worked. Killed it! You don’t believe it now, I know—but you will. Why do you think we refrained from continuing heavy water experiments? Because, unlike you, we realised with our greater wisdom just what could happen. Nature, remember, always finds a balance. Yes, you have doomed the race, but since that is inevitable anyway perhaps it may prove the better course.”
Rad stood gazing incredulously, Invia close beside him.
“Go,” the savant ordered, “and think over what I have told you.”
Rad and Invia obeyed the behest without question, and they had arrived home again before Rad made any comment. Then after having stood gazing through the window for a while he turned suddenly on the girl.
“Do you realize that we have been insulted?” he snapped. “After all we have done, and struggled for, that is what we get!”
Invia sighed. “I think it really depends in what light you look at it. For my own part, I think the savants have too much knowledge to waste time consulting either of us.”
“What do you mean by that? That you’re on their side?”
Invia rested a gentle hand on Rad’s arm and looked into his angry eyes.
“Dearest, the savant would never have given us that warning without good reason. What did he mean? It sounded so awful about us having doomed the race. Just like my own words, too, about immortality having a price—”
“Such sudden infernal nonsense!” Rad pulled himself free of the girl’s grasp impatience. “Jealousy, Invia! Nothing else but jealousy! The masterminds are annoyed because I’ve taught them their business—and I intend to carry the plan through! Understand?”
“How? They destroyed everything we worked out, and they still rule the planet.”
“Yes…” Rad turned away moodily. “At the moment they do, anyhow. In another year it will be different. As my intelligence grows I will devise apparatus to make them obey me. Thought amplification, maybe. I hadn’t wanted to become a dictator but they’ve forced me into it. I was a fool not to copy those plans. I was so confident they would accept them…”
He took hold of Invia’s shoulders possessively. “You’ll help me? After all, you were the one who got the idea of saving the race.”
“The eternal selfishness of the male,” Invia smiled. “Yes, I’ll help, even though I shall never forget what the savant said.”
Thereafter, driven chiefly by fury at the reaction of the scientists to his ideas, Rad plunged into new schemes—ideas grandiose in the extreme and aimed at subduing those who did not believe. Day by day, and often through the night, he worked with devouring energy in his laboratory with Invia loyal, but often silent, by his side.
In the back of Rad’s mind as the months flew by, there was a gnawing worry. He knew that, scientifically, he could not go on at his present pace. The effect of hard concentration consumed bodily energy at a tremendous rate, far more rapidly indeed than food and injections could replace it. Yet since his body was invulnerable, Nature could not take her normal course and precipitate a mental and physical breakdown. He wondered vaguely what the alternative would prove to be, and for some reason he kept thinking of the prehistoric protoplasm of his planet which had often maintained their energy by devouring one of their own appendages.
Gradually consuming hunger began to obsess him, yet no matter how much he ate, gnawing emptiness was in his body and mind. Tentatively, he told Invia of his reactions.
“Don’t you feel that way?” he asked finally.
“Not yet, Rad. For one thing I shall always be two weeks behind you, and for another I haven’t had so much concentration to go through as you.”
“Food, stimulants, sleep … all useless to a body like mine!” Rad pushed a hand through his hair and looked at the diagrams on the drawing bench. “And yet I cannot die! I’ve got to do something to replace the energy, Invia! I’ve got to!”
He swung round on her gently, his eyes fixed on hers. For a moment she gazed back at him—then her eyelids drooped and she collapsed heavily on the floor. Normally, Rad would have rushed to her aid, but this time a greater emotion held him motionless. At the very instant she had fallen he had become aware of a boundless tide of energy coursing through him.
He felt satisfied—nay, satiated—as into his mind there poured a host of new ideas and conceptions, some of them so essentially feminine that a vague horror seized him as he caught at the hem of the truth—
Then he acted. He picked the girl up gently and carried her to the long divan beside the wall. Her pulses and respiration had ceased. She had literally dropped dead—and for some reason, Rad did not feel at all grief-stricken. He felt that her youthful vigour and intelligence lived on, mysteriously added to his own.
As he stood looking at her he felt insistent science nudging at him. He had got to find out what had occurred and analyse it to the last detail. But this would take time. City law demanded that he notify the authorities of the girl’s death. This he did, and at her cremation he saw the sombre eyes of the head savant watching him. About the strong mouth there hovered the echo of a smile.
Gradually, as he analysed the mystery, Rad arrived at the truth—and found it nearly impossible to believe.
“Life energy!” he breathed, staring at his notes. “So it does exist, even as some of our scientists have always believed. Now I understand! Nature’s revenge! Since I am unable to die and my energy must be replaced, I absorb it piecemeal from the nearest living being to me. And the intelligence, too! I am now Invia as well as myself. I have become a—a biological magnet. Why not? The stronger always absorbs the power of the weaker. Because Invia was two weeks behind me in development I was strong enough to overwhelm her resistance. And now…”
He gave himself a little shake, beat his great head with his fist. Dimly he began to see how awful was the path he would have to tread, how deadly correct the savant’s prediction had been.
Plans for the future. Diagrams to make his fellowmen listen to him—they did not count anymore. His only consciousness was that he could not die, that his power of adaptability wa
s so great that he could devise no way of committing suicide; that his intellect was immense and yet useless as long as his body insisted on being cared for.
Once the truth was clear to him he gave up laying plans and instead went on long walks, trying to escape from himself, trying not to use the huge intelligence he now possessed. Until, as the months crept by, that terrible emptiness began to pervade him again. He knew he was once more face to face with Nature, and mightily though he strove to win by avoiding contact with anybody. Nature triumphed just the same…
He hardly remembered going into the city one evening. He only realised what had happened when three highly scientific male minds were added to his own and three limp bodies lay at his feet under the glow of a street lamp.
Chapter V
As the full comprehension of his brutal act dawned upon him Rad turned and fled, but not to his home. That would make him accessible to the law which would undoubtedly track him down for this triple murder. He could not be killed by normal methods, of course, but there were other means. He might perhaps be suffocated, since no living creature can survive in its own waste. And the thought of such a death was not by any means to his fancy.
To his surprise, however, no hunt was made for him. It began to look as though he were not even suspect. What he did not know was the savant’s had forbidden any action against him. No matter what he did he was not to be molested or called to account. Exactly why, only the savants knew.
Finally Rad returned to his home, his first fears changing into a sense of contempt for the limited knowledge of his fellow beings. Quadrupled in intelligence as he now was, he no longer tried to suppress his mental ambitions but instead gave them full play—and astounded himself by what he discovered.
Without effort he was capable of solving the most complicated problems of science, and with the realization of this fact, he no longer found any interest in devising ways and means for saving his race. There were far vaster things worthy of his attention. The Cosmos teemed with mysteries demanding solution—way out in the First Galaxy, for instance.
John Russell Fearn Omnibus Page 47
