These rooms could be refrigerated, and it was probable that at a low temperature the Centaurians reacted like vegetation on Earth in winter and passed into a dormant, hibernating state. Such an arrangement would allow of an enormous crew being carried, to be revived for landing or battle.
“If they refitted the Adastra for a trip back to Earth on that basis,” said Jack grimly, “they’d carry a hundred and fifty thousand Centaurians at least. Probably more.”
The thought of an assault upon mankind by these creatures was an obsession. Jack was tormented by it. Womanlike, Helen tried to cheer him by their own present safety.
“We volunteered for vivisection,” she told him pitifully, the day after their recovery of consciousness, “and were safe for a while, anyhow. And—we’ve got each other—”
“It’s time for Alstair to communicate again,” said Jack harshly. It was nearly thirty hours after the last signing off. Centaurian routine, like Earth discipline on terrestrial space ships, maintained a period equal to a planet’s daily rotation as the unit of time. “We’d better go listen to him.”
They did. And Alstair’s racked voice came from the queerly shaped speaker. It was more strained, less sane, than the day before. He told them of the progress of the Things in the navigation of the Adastra. The six surviving officers already were not needed to keep the ship’s apparatus functioning. The air-purifying apparatus in particular was shut off, since in clearing the air of carbon dioxide it tended to make the air unbreathable for the Centaurians.
The six men were now permitted to live that they might satisfy the insatiable desire of the plant men for information. They lived a perpetual third degree, with every resource of their brains demanded for record in the weird notation of their captors. The youngest of the six, a subaltern of the air department, went mad under the strain alike of memory and of anticipation. He screamed senselessly for hours, and was killed and his body promptly mummified by the strange, drying chemicals of the Centaurians. The rest were living shadows, starting at a sound.
“Our deceleration’s been changed,” said Alstair, his voice brittle. “You’ll land just two days before we settle down, on the planet these devils call home. Queer they’ve no colonizing instinct. Another one of us is about to break, I think. They’ve taken away our shoes and belts now, by the way. They’re leather. We’d take a gold band from about a watermelon, wouldn’t we? Consistent, these—”
And he raged once, in sudden hysteria:
“I’m a fool! I sent you two off together while I’m living in hell! Gary, I order you to have nothing to do with Helen! I order that the two of you shan’t speak to each other! I order that—”
Another day passed. And another. Alstair called twice more. Each time, by his voice, he was more desperate, more nerve-racked, closer to the bounds of madness. The second time he wept, the while he cursed Jack for being where there were none of the plant men.
“We’re not interesting to the devils, now, except as animals. Our brains don’t count! They’re gutting the ship systematically. Yesterday they got the earthworms from the growing area where we grew crops! There’s a guard on each of us now. Mine pulled out some of my hair this morning and ate it, rocking back and forth in ecstasy. We’ve no woolen shirts. They’re animal!”
Another day still. Then Alstair was semi-hysterical. There were only three men left alive on the ship. He had instructions to give Jack in the landing of the egg-shaped vessel on the uninhabited world. Jack was supposed to help. His destination was close now. The disk of the planet which was to be his and Helen’s prison filled half the heavens. And the other planet toward which the Adastra was bound was a full-sized disk to Alstair.
Beyond the rings of Proxima Centauri there were six planets in all, and the prison planet was next outward from the home of the plant men. It was colder than was congenial to them, though for a thousand years their flesh-hunting expeditions had searched its surface until not a mammal or a bird, no fish or even a crustacean was left upon it. Beyond it again an ice-covered world lay, and still beyond there were frozen shapes whirling in emptiness.
“You know, now, how to take over when the beam releases the atmospheric controls,” said Alstair’s voice. It wavered as if he spoke through teeth which chattered from pure nerve strain. “You’ll have quiet. Trees and flowers and something like grass, if the pictures they’ve made mean anything. We’re running into the greatest celebration in the history of all hell. Every space ship called home. There won’t be a Centaurian on the planet who won’t have a tiny shred of some sort of animal matter to consume. Enough to give him that beastly delight they feel when they get hold of something of animal origin.
“Damn them! Every member of the race! We’re the greatest store of treasure ever dreamed of! They make no bones of talking before me, and I’m mad enough to understand a good bit of what they say to each other. Their most high panjandrum is planning bigger space ships than were ever grown before. He’ll start out for Earth with three hundred space ships, and most of the crews asleep or hibernating. There’ll be three million devils straight from hell on those ships, and they’ve those damned beams that will fuse an earthly ship at ten million miles.”
Talking helped to keep Alstair sane, apparently. The next day Jack’s and Helen’s egg-shaped vessel dropped like a plummet from empty space into an atmosphere which screamed wildly past its smooth sides. Then Jack got the ship under control and it descended slowly and ever more slowly and at last came to a cushioned stop in a green glade hard by a forest of strange but wholly reassuring trees. It was close to sunset on this planet, and darkness fell before they could attempt exploration.
They did little exploring, however, either the next day or the day after. Alstair talked almost continuously.
“Another ship coming from Earth,” he said, and his voice cracked. “Another ship! She started at least four years ago. She’ll get here in four years more. You two may see her, but I’ll be dead or mad by tomorrow night! And here’s the humorous thing! It seems to me that madness is nearest when I think of you, Helen, letting Jack kiss you! I loved you, you know, Helen, when I was a man, before I became a corpse watching my ship being piloted into hell. I loved you very much. I was jealous, and when you looked at Gary with shining eyes I hated him. I still hate him, Helen! Ah, how I hate him!” But Alstair’s voice was the voice of a ghost, now, a ghost in purgatory.
Jack walked about with abstracted, burning eyes. Then he heard Helen at work, somewhere. She seemed to be struggling. It disturbed him. He went to see.
She had just dragged the last of the cages from the Adastra out into the open. She was releasing the little creatures within. Pigeons soared eagerly above her. Rabbits, hardly hopping out of her reach, munched delightedly upon the unfamiliar but satisfactory leafed vegetation underfoot.
Sheep browsed. There were six of them besides a tiny, wabbly-legged lamb. Chickens pecked and scratched. But there were no insects on this world. They would find only seeds and green stuff. Four puppies rolled ecstatically on scratchy green things in the sunlight.
“Anyhow,” said Helen defiantly, “They can be happy for a while! They’re not like us! We have to worry! And this world could be a paradise for humans!”
Jack looked somberly out across the green and beautiful world. No noxious animals. No harmful insects. There could be no diseases on this planet, unless men introduced them of set purpose. It would be a paradise.
The murmur of a human voice came from within the space ship. He went bitterly to listen. Helen came after him. They stood in the strangely shaped cubby-hole which was the control room. Walls, floors, ceiling, instrument cases—all were made of the lusterless dark-brown stuff which had grown into the shapes the Centaurians desired. Alstair’s voice was strangely more calm, less hysterical, wholly steady.
“I hope you’re not off exploring somewhere, Helen and Gary,” it said from the speaker. “They’ve had a celebration here today. The Adastra’s landed. I landed it. I’m the o
nly man left alive. We came down in the center of a city of these devils, in the middle of buildings fit to form the headquarters of hell. The high panjandrum has a sort of palace right next to the open space where I am now.
“And today they celebrated. It’s strange how much animal matter there was on the Adastra. They even found horsehair stiffening in the coats of our uniforms. Woolen blankets. Shoes. Even some of the soaps had an animal origin, and they ‘refined’ it. They can recover any scrap of animal matter as cleverly as our chemists can recover gold and radium. Queer, eh?”
The speaker was silent a moment.
“I’m sane, now,” the voice said steadily. “I think I was mad for a while. But what I saw today cleared my brain. I saw millions of these devils dipping their arms into great tanks, great troughs, in which solutions of all the animal tissues from the Adastra were dissolved. The high panjandrum kept plenty for himself! I saw the things they carried into his palace, through lines of guards. Some of those things had been my friends. I saw a city gone crazy with beastly joy, the devils swaying back and forth in ecstasy as they absorbed the loot from Earth. I heard the high panjandrum hoot a sort of imperial address from the throne. And I’ve learned to understand quite a lot of those hootings.
“He was telling them that Earth is packed with animals. Men. Beasts. Birds. Fish in the oceans. And he told them that the greatest space fleet in history will soon be grown, which will use the propulsion methods of men, our rockets, Gary, and the first fleet will carry uncountable swarms of them to occupy Earth. They’ll send back treasure, too, so that every one of his subjects will have such ecstasy, frequently, as they had today. And the devils, swaying crazily back and forth, gave out that squealing noise of theirs. Millions of them at once.”
Jack groaned softly. Helen covered her eyes as if to shut out the sight her imagination pictured.
“Now, here’s the situation from your standpoint,” said Alstair steadily, millions of miles away and the only human being upon a planet of blood-lusting plant men. “They’re coming here now, their scientists, to have me show them the inside workings of the rockets. Some others will come over to question you two tomorrow. But I’m going to show these devils our rockets. I’m sure—perfectly sure—that every space ship of the race is back on this planet.
“They came to share the celebration when every one of them got as a free gift from the grand panjandrum as much animal tissue as he could hope to acquire in a lifetime of toil. Flesh is a good bit more precious than gold, here. It rates, on a comparative scale, somewhere between platinum and radium. So they all came home. Every one of them! And there’s a space ship on the way here from Earth. It’ll arrive in four years more. Remember that!”
An impatient, distant hooting came from the speaker.
“They’re here,” said Alstair steadily. “I’m going to show them the rockets. Maybe you’ll see the fun. It depends on the time of day where you are. But remember, there’s a sister ship to the Adastra on the way! And Gary, that order I gave you last thing was the act of a madman, but I’m glad I did it. Good-by, you two!”
Small hooting sounds, growing fainter, came from the speaker. Far, far away, amid the city of fiends, Alstair was going with the plant men to show them the rockets’ inner workings. They wished to understand every aspect of the big ship’s propulsion, so that they could build—or grow—ships as large to carry multitudes of their swarming myriads to a solar system where animals were to be found.
“Let’s go outside,” said Jack at last. “He said he’d do it, since he couldn’t get a bit of a machine made that could be depended on to do it. But I believed he’d go mad. It didn’t seem possible to live to their planet. We’ll go outside and look at the sky.”
Helen stumbled. They stood upon the green grass, looking up at the firmament above them. They waited, staring. And Jack’s mind pictured the great rocket chambers of the Adastra. He seemed to see the strange procession enter it; a horde of the ghastly plant men and then Alstair, his face like marble and his hands as steady.
He’d open up the breech of one of the rockets. He’d explain the disintegration field, which collapses the electrons of hydrogen so that it rises in atomic weight to helium, and the helium to lithium, while the oxygen of the water is split literally into neutronium and pure force. Alstair would answer hooted questions. The supersonic generators he would explain as controls of force and direction. He would not speak of the fact that only the material of the rocket tubes, when filled with exactly the frequency those generators produced, could withstand the effect of the disintegration field.
He would not explain that a tube started without those generators in action would catch from the fuel and disintegrate, and that any other substance save one, under any other condition save that one rate of vibration, would catch also and that tubes, ship, and planet alike would vanish in a lambent purple flame.
No; Alstair would not explain that. He would show the Centaurians how to start the Caldwell field.
The man and the girl looked at the sky. And suddenly there was a fierce purple light. It dwarfed the reddish tinge of the ringed sun overhead. For one second, for two, for three, the purple light persisted. There was no sound. There was a momentary blast of intolerable heat. Then all was as before.
The ringed sun shone brightly. Clouds like those of Earth floated serenely in a sky but a little less blue than that of home. The small animals from the Adastra munched contentedly at the leafy stuff underfoot. The pigeons soared joyously, exercising their wings in full freedom.
“He did it,” said Jack. “And every space ship was home. There aren’t any more plant men. There’s nothing left of their planet, their civilization, or their plans to harm our Earth.”
Even out in space, there was nothing where the planet of the Centaurians had been. Not even steam or cooling gases. It was gone as if it had never existed. And the man and woman of Earth stood upon a planet which could be a paradise for human beings, and another ship was coming presently, with more of their kind.
“He did it!” repeated Jack quietly. “Rest his soul! And we—we can think of living, now, instead of death.”
The grimness of his face relaxed slowly. He looked down at Helen. Gently, he put his arm about her shoulders.
She pressed close, gladly, thrusting away all thoughts of what had been. Presently she asked softly: “What was that last order Alstair gave you?”
“I never looked,” said Jack.
He fumbled in his pocket. Pocket-worn and frayed, the order slip came out. He read it and showed it to Helen. By statues passed before the Adastra left Earth, laws and law enforcement on the artificial planet were intrusted to the huge ship’s commander. It had been specially provided that a legal marriage on the Adastra would be constituted by an official order of marriage signed by the commander. And the slip handed to Jack by Alstair, as Jack went to what he’d thought would be an agonizing death, was such an order. It was, in effect, a marriage certificate.
They smiled at each other, those two.
“It—wouldn’t have mattered,” said Helen uncertainly. “I love you. But I’m glad!”
One of the freed pigeons found a straw upon the ground. He tugged at it. His mate inspected it solemnly. They made pigeon noises to each other. They flew away with the straw. After due discussion, they had decided that it was an eminently suitable straw with which to begin the building of a nest.
THE FOURTH-DIMENSIONAL DEMONSTRATOR
Pete Davidson was engaged to Miss Daisy Manners of the Green Paradise floor show. He had just inherited all the properties of an uncle who had been an authority on the fourth dimension, and he was the custodian of an unusually amiable kangaroo named Arthur. But still he was not happy; it showed this morning.
Inside his uncle’s laboratory, Pete scribbled on paper. He added, and ran his hands through his hair in desperation. Then he subtracted, divided and multiplied. But the results were invariably problems as incapable of solution as his deceased relative’s
fourth-dimensional equations. From time to time a long, horse-like, hopeful face peered in at him. That was Thomas, his uncle’s servant, whom Pete was afraid he had also inherited.
“Beg pardon, sir,” said Thomas tentatively.
Pete leaned harassedly back in his chair.
“What is it, Thomas? What has Arthur been doing now?”
“He is browsing in the dahlias, sir. I wished to ask about lunch, sir. What shall I prepare?”
“Anything!” said Pete. “Anything at all! No. On second thought, trying to untangle Uncle Robert’s affairs calls for brains. Give me something rich in phosphorus and vitamins; I need them.”
“Yes, sir,” said Thomas. “But the grocer, sir—”
“Again?” demanded Pete hopelessly.
“Yes, sir,” said Thomas, coming into the laboratory. “I hoped, sir, that matters might be looking better.”
Pete shook his head, regarding his calculations depressedly.
“They aren’t. Cash to pay the grocer’s bill is still a dim and misty hope. It is horrible, Thomas! I remembered my uncle as simply reeking with cash, and I thought the fourth dimension was mathematics, not debauchery. But Uncle Robert must have had positive orgies with quanta and space-time continua! I shan’t break even on the heir business, let alone make a profit!”
Thomas made a noise suggesting sympathy.
“I could stand it for myself alone,” said Pete gloomily. “Even Arthur, in his simple, kangaroo’s heart, bears up well. But Daisy! There’s the rub! Daisy!”
“Daisy, sir?”
“My fiancée,” said Pete. “She’s in the Green Paradise floor show. She is technically Arthur’s owner. I told Daisy, Thomas, that I had inherited a fortune. And she’s going to be disappointed.”
“Too bad, sir,” said Thomas.
“That statement is one of humorous underemphasis, Thomas. Daisy is not a person to take disappointments lightly. When I explain that my uncle’s fortune has flown off into the fourth dimension, Daisy is going to look absent-minded and stop listening. Did you ever try to make love to a girl who looked absent-minded?”
First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster Page 36
