John Russell Fearn Omnibus

by John Russell Fearn

  Then, sweeping forward in an immense arc, the leading machine landed and sent a fountain of dust five hundred feet into the air. Uncontrollable, it slithered for nearly half a mile and halted near a ravine. To the rear the second machine performed the same gyrations and finished up at right angles to them.

  The motors stopped, and from somewhere in the power plant came the dull concussion of a small explosion. Fumes began to leak out into the control room from the engine casing.

  “There goes our central transformer unit,” Cal said grimly. “Vaxil was not pretending. He has destroyed our chances of return. Obviously here we are and here we stay.”

  Nobody spoke. The death of the power unit seemed trivial compared to the scene about them. In every direction was a vast desert of sun-blistered sand, cracked by gorges, soaked in the withering heat of a sun only 63,000,000 miles away. It was a planet without the protection of clouds, a planet from which the sun had long since whipped water and nearly all the atmosphere. Vinra—sun-blasted for 720 hours and frozen for another 720—without life, without hope…

  “It’s—it’s frightening,” Iana whispered at last, turning her goggled eyes away from the port.

  Cal Anrax smiled faintly, that look of the eagle on his face.

  “Yet it has to be conquered, dearest. And it will be!”

  Only by degrees, when Iana and the others began to see—as Cal Anrax had seen long since—that their domicile on Vinra was permanent, did they make real effort to conquer its pitiless conditions.

  The terrible sunshine, the scorching winds from the dusty rainless plains, the incessant glare which stung the eyes and blistered the skin, made outside investigation almost impossible during daylight. Seven hundred and twenty hours of it, and a night of almost equal duration—and even worse climatically—when the moon rode the sky in pallid grandeur and thick hoar frost descended the moment the heat of the day had radiated off into the vacuum of space.

  Cal Anrax took the only course and, space suited and goggled, with the strongest men in the party similarly attired to help him, he set about the task of building a habitation for them all—not on the surface though, for two reasons. One was the merciless climate, and the other was because the plan he hoped ultimately to mature demanded underground protection.

  Long, hard, tedious weeks passed into months. Metals sought and found below surface, were fashioned in furnaces with the machine tools and thereafter used for moulding the raw materials into the desired shapes.

  For Iana, and for each man and woman in the group of twenty, there was work to do—and they did it with a will because in such work lay their one hope of salvation and the defeat of the insanity which such a frightful world could easily have caused. They made the first cruiser their base, and through the weary, dragging months of alternate sun and frost they created a small underground city half a mile below the surface.

  At least they could work uninterrupted. There was no sign of life on the dead planet. Apparently it had died young, its vapours dissipating rapidly due to its extreme nearness to the sun.

  Slowly, surely, with the masterful genius of Cal Anrax at the head, the underground city grew from its first crude rudiments into a worthwhile expanse, well lighted, and with all modern amenities. But it took three years of drudging labour to create all the metal buildings they needed. Several were set aside as machine-tool buildings only. There also were well planned streets and synthetically created fields of pulverized rock and fertilizer, irrigated by synthetic water, fields which were already sprouting with the edible roots necessary for staple foods.

  At last Cal reached the crowning point of endeavour. He summoned everybody to his own particular domicile for a conference.

  “We have a habitation, half a mile below the surface of a devil planet,” he said slowly, his fists clenched. “Vaxil thought we would die, and well we might have done so but for our purpose and energy. But the time has come now for vengeance—the vengeance I planned long ago when we became outcasts! And now it becomes doubly necessary because from ultra-short wave messages I have picked up it is clear that revolution has broken out on our home planet and practically all our friends in the Western Hemisphere have been slain. For that Vaxil and his remaining hordes are going to pay a deadly price. I planned it long ago but hesitated over putting it into action because it would have meant destroying many of our own Western people. Now that deterrent is removed.

  “I am going to make this world fertile and destroy Vaxil and his followers at the same time. That, I consider, is just reprisal…”

  “How?” asked Iana quietly.

  “I propose to steal the air and oceans of our home world!”

  There were a few gasps and startled glances.

  “But that’s impossible!” protested Ralix.

  “No, my friend; I have it all worked out— and here is what we shall do. We shall re-quire a tower rearing to a thousand feet, and sunk to half that depth in solid bedrock. We have unlimited metal and power now, so we can do it. Scientifically, we know that gravity is a force, that it can be heterodyned as radio waves can be heterodyned. I propose to direct a heterodyning beam across space to our home world, which, upon striking it, will encompass about a thousand miles of the surface.

  “This beam will be in the centre of what I might call a funnel of force—or in other words walls of vibration solid enough to withstand the sudden uprushing vortex of water and air. With part of the home planet de-gravitated, and this force funnel right over that part, the air and oceans will be sucked up the tunnel by following the course of least resistance. But for our force funnel they would spew sunwards, hence the presence of the funnel to hold them in their fixed path until they deluge down on the surface of this dying world.

  “It means the total destruction of our home planet—on the surface anyway. But for two reasons it must be done: One, as revenge; two, because to expand and grow we must live on the surface. We can do this if my plan works as I think it will…”

  There was a long silence as the assembly thought it out.

  “How long is such a mighty project going to take?” Iana asked.

  “Two years, maybe. Time is not the factor: it is the ultimate result. Place your faith in me again and I guarantee that the science and direction will be there. We can do it, if all of you agree. If you do not, we shall rot out our lives slowly on this dead world, down here. Marriage and children we cannot even contemplate until we are sure we have a worthwhile heritage to hand on. We can have one. That is up to you.”

  Finally Iana made up her mind. She raised her hand in assent. Gradually the others followed suit until every hand was raised. Cal Anrax looked at them and nodded with satisfaction.

  “I thought I could rely on you. So, now to work. Here are the draft plans I’ve worked out.”

  CHAPTER VI

  REPRISAL

  From then on his mighty scheme developed. A nearby mountain range was selected and a site chosen. Scientific machines and implements were transported thither. The outcasts worked like ants against the glaring heights by day, toiled with cold light globes at night, aided by robots, struggling, building, erecting a mighty latticed tower of metal supported by cross-pieces.

  It took a year to complete it, its supports sunk deep into the virgin rock. Then came the harder part which Cal Anrax himself had to supervise in the laboratories—the assembly of the heterodyning apparatus, all of it fixed in massive gimbals to allow universal movement.

  The actual source of power, to pass through the graded lenses of the heterodyners, was deep in the underground city, controlled much the same as his former automatic defensive machinery. And this time there would be no traitor to foil a mighty endeavour.

  Even when the array of tubes, electromagnets, and anode and cathode globes roped together by stout cables was finished, the work was not over for Cal Anrax. He had to calculate to a fraction the positions of Vinra and his home world so that no mistake could happen over that distance of 73,000,000 miles. It was a d
ifficult calculation which needed the mathematical machines to check and double check. But it was done.

  Two years and four months after he had mooted the project he was ready, deep underground with his followers in the special projection-laboratory, the television screens connected with the surface already trained on the tower and the moon-bathed, brazenly clear landscape.

  “We’re ready!” Cal Anrax breathed heavily, his eyes moving to the synchro-clock and his hands on the master switch. “In five seconds exactly.”

  The deliberate seconds ticked by. On the fifth one the master switch closed. Instantly energies, terrific in violence, were released, absorbed as they had been through twelve months from the blazing sun itself. The laboratory quivered in violet flame and reeked with ozone.

  Bolt upon bolt of energy slammed into the transformer chambers and were hurled thence to the complicated apparatus atop the giant tower.

  Every eye fixed on the telescreen. And, suddenly, a lavender beam poured forth from that heterodyner, stabbed like a blinding amethyst searchlight into the starry sky and became lost in remoteness. The arid plain outside hazed with lavender electric interplay.

  Six and half minutes to cross the gulf of 73,000,000 miles.

  The synchroclock sliced onwards as the power remained constant, as the din increased to hellish fury.

  What happened on their home world the Outcasts could only guess. They could imagine the tumult, the inconceivable upheaval which must have suddenly descended out of a clear sky…

  But at last, timed to the second, the visible evidence of their labour was there. The heterodyner atop the tower dimmed as the first conglomerated mass of air and water from the home planet came.

  It spewed out through the centre of the apparatus—a titanic tumult of ice shards which struck the mountain range and rebounded in an avalanche. It became greater, mightier, blotting out the screen, the tower, even the skies themselves. Even down in the underworld the assembly heard the incredible rear of frozen matter thundering down on their dead world.

  Cal Anrax cut the power and smiled like a ghost.

  “A world has died, and another has been born anew,” he said quietly. “With the dawn we shall see what has happened. I fancy that by now Vaxil knows the cost of trying to dominate a planet.”

  The others, even Iana, were silent. The terrific power of the science they had just witnessed had left them subdued and just a little incredulous…

  To the dawn was six hundred hours, and when it came the Outcasts saw more things than a rejuvenated world. Indeed they had hardly gone to the surface and looked out upon a desert turned green, at a distant inland sea, at dense clouds drifting across the sky from the condensed moisture, before other matters took their eye.

  Across the sky, just below the clouds, angry as buzzards, swept massive space war-cruisers, bearing the insignia of the home world.

  Cal and Iana, standing at the sheltered top of the underground funnel, half way up the mountain side and therefore high above the flood waters, watched the fliers for a while as they searched ceaselessly. Then finally they turned and vanished in the clouds.

  “Cal, they guessed.” the girl whispered, catching his arm. “They’ve come to look for us, to destroy us if they can. They must have come while we were below during the night. They had ample time.”

  “They’ll never detect us though,” Cal answered, thoughtful eyes on the sky. “They must have a refuelling base somewhere near at hand. They wouldn’t send just a few cruisers. There’ll be a whole fleet I expect, if they got away in time…A base!” He snapped his fingers. “That gives me an idea. Come on back below.”

  Iana accompanied him to the main laboratories when they arrived in the city again. He went to work immediately with the X-ray telescope, probing through the rock barrier and clouds in all directions, scanning the void above and at the antipode. At last he settled the scanner-lens on the moon and operated the controls swiftly.

  On the mercury-sunk mirror the hard, dead surface of Vinra’s small satellite came into view, and upon it—facing Vinra—were a mass of minute black oblongs in orderly rows.

  “There they are!” Iana cried excitedly. “A whole armada of them!”

  “Yes.” Cal Anrax frowned. “Enough to cause the devil of a lot of trouble if they do find us. We’ve got this world going now, and with clouds and water and vapor it will keep going, because we’ll add to it synthetically and stop evaporation. It is our heritage and we’re going to keep it! One thing is pretty sure; those machines there will contain the cream of the warriors from our home world. If they can all be wiped out to a man there would remain only a few refugees and maybe scientists to master, if we decided to rule our own world again as well as this one.”

  “That’s right,” Iana nodded quickly, as he stood in thought. “Two worlds instead of one.”

  “And it can be done.” Cal Anrax looked at her tensely. “It can be done. Why didn’t I think of it sooner? That heterodyner of ours! The power can be easily converted by altering the rate of vibration. I can change it from heterodyne into pure force—disintegrating force!”

  He swung, studying the power gauges. “Not much juice left in the power plant but it may be just enough. I’m going to risk it. No time to consult the others. This is up to you and me—so come on.”

  He went hurrying out and along to the projection-laboratory, began to calculate swiftly with the mathematical machines. Then he started up the power. Iana watched him make the power conversion, shift the position of the gimbaled projector by impulse vibrations.

  Then he closed that deadly master switch.

  The roar of the power was only brief—not more than thirty seconds. It had hardly died away before its effect became evident. In the relay screen linked to the distant telescope, the moon with its base of warrior machines suddenly cracked in four pieces! These in turn split with terrific violence, hurling their meteoric fragments to the four corners of the screen. The change in gravitational balance was evident a few seconds later on Vinra, too.

  Cal Anrax and the girl clung to the switchboard as the laboratory swayed sickeningly up and down, as they heard outside the roar of disturbed air and pounding ocean, then the lesser sound of feet running down the outer passage.

  Ralix and the other scientists burst into the room in anxious inquiry.

  Slowly the disturbance abated. Cal stood upright again and turned to face them. Quietly he explained what had happened.

  “I destroyed a moon, and them, before they could find and destroy us,” he finished. “It would have been them or us for it. Now we have another task. While this world settles down to its rejuvenation we will travel back to the mother world and deal with those who remain. Our machines are well equipped with weapons now and the motors have been reset for just such a moment as this. Ralix, make the necessary arrangements. The sooner we depart, the better…”

  The physicist nodded, motioned to the others and hurried out.

  *

  But for all their high hopes they found upon returning to the home world that there was a barrier which even the science of Cal Anrax could not break down. Indeed they suspected at first as they flew over the dying, almost water-denuded planet—a few hastily gouged canals visible to eke out the dwindling supply—as they beheld the shattered cities and deserted airways—that those in the space cruisers had been the last of the race, until in one isolated spot they saw a queer semi-transparent hemisphere partly above ground. In fact the spot had at one time marked the entrance to extensive mineral mines.

  Believing the composition was glass, and in no mood for trifling, Cal drove his leading space flyer straight at the dome—but instead of going through it he severely damaged the forward rocket tubes instead. The whole machine rebounded violently and landed on the rough ground below.

  “What is it?” Iana demanded, as she and the others crowded at the ports and stared at the hemisphere intently.

  “Force!” Cal answered laconically “Something I hadn’t reck
oned with.”

  He peered through the dome intently.

  “I think I can see men down there,” he murmured. “But I can’t do anything about it. Take a look.”

  The others moved to his higher elevation at the forward port and looked long and earnestly. There were men visible, apparently at a switchboard, or dotted about in various parts of what was a kind of control room.

  “Vaxil must have taken fright after the seas and most of the air were snatched away,” Cal said. “We’ve seen the hasty canals he’s had made—but they didn’t do him much good apparently. Then he must have used this idea to protect himself and his surviving cronies from further wrath to come. A force shield isn’t a vast scientific problem, anyway, but it is a vast one to break it down unless you know the exact electrical formula which makes it up.”

  “You mean that we can’t get at them?” Iana asked, in obvious disappointment. “That we can’t make them surrender this world?”

  “Just that. A journey in vain. Obviously Vaxil and his men have closed themselves in to be sure of safety.”

  Cal Anrax paused, then smiled as though a deeply significant thought had crossed his mind.

  “By doing this they may have saved us the trouble of having to deal with them,” he added. “Scientific law. We can only tell when we make a return visit. For the moment we can do nothing but return to Vinra.”

  He was the leader and the decision was made, so the others passed no comment. He closed the switches and, due to the faulty rocket control forward, the machine rose in jerks to the limits of the thin atmosphere, began a spasmodic climb into the void.

  “Trouble in those forward tubes,” Cal said with a worried frown. “The compression is faulty.”

  “I’ll take a look at it,” Iana volunteered, and opened the main firing door.

  Hardly had she done it before a terrific explosion, the release of superheated gases, belched forth. She never even knew what happened.