Golden Age of Science Fiction Vol XII

by Various

  At all events, he thought, they were no worse off than Pax when he had made his first trial flight, and they were working with a proven machine, tuned to its fullest efficiency, and one which apparently possessed automatic stability. Atterbury had gone to the condenser room and was waiting for the order to start, while Burke was making the final adjustment of the gyroscopes which would put the Ring on its predetermined course. He came through the door and joined Bennie.

  "Hooker," he said, "we're sure going to have some experience. If I can keep her from turning over, I think I can manage her. The trouble will come when we slant the tractor. I'm not sure how much depends on the atmospheric valve, and how much on me. Things may happen quickly. If we turn over we're done for."

  He held out his hand to Bennie, who gripped it tremulously.

  "Well," remarked the aviator, tossing away his cigarette, "we might as well die now as any time!"

  He walked swiftly over to the speaking-tube which communicated with the condenser room and blew sharply into it.

  "Let her go, Gallagher!" he directed.

  "My God!" ejaculated Bennie. "Wait a second, can't you?"

  But it was too late. He grabbed the rail, trembling. A humming sound filled the air, and the gyroscopes slowly began to revolve. He looked up through the window at the tractor, from which shot streaks of pale vapour with a noise like escaping steam. Somehow it seemed alive.

  The Ring was throbbing as if it, too, was impregnated with life. The discharge of the tractor had risen to a muffled roar. Shaking all over, Bennie crossed to the inside window and looked across the inner space of the Ring. As yet the yellow glow of the discharge was scarcely visible, but the steel sides of the Ring danced and quivered, undulating in waves, and, as the intensity of the blast increased and the turbine commenced to revolve, everything outside went suddenly blurred and indistinct.

  Dropping to his knees, Bennie looked down through the observation window in the floor. A blinding cloud of yellow dust was driving out and away from the base of the landing stage in the form of a gigantic ring. The earth at their feet was hidden in whirls of vapour; and ripples of light and shade chased each other outward in all directions, like shadows on the bottom of a sandy pond rippled by a breeze. It made him dizzy to look down there, and he arose from the window. Burke stood grimly at the control, unmindful of his associate. Bennie crossed to the other side, and as he passed the gyroscopes, the air from the swiftly spinning discs blew back his hair. He could see nothing through the tumult that roared down through the centre of the Ring, like a Niagara of hot steam shot through with a pale yellow phosphorescent light. The floor quivered under his feet, and ominous creaking and snapping sounds reverberated through the outer shell, as the steel girders of the landing stage were gradually relieved of its weight. Just as it seemed to him that everything was going to pieces, suddenly there was silence, save for the purr of the machinery, and Bennie felt his knees sink under him.

  "We're off!" cried Burke. "Watch out!"

  The floor swayed as the Ring, lifted by the tractor, swung to and fro like a pendulum. Bennie threw himself upon his stomach. The earth was dropping away from them like a stone. He felt a sickening sensation.

  "Two thousand feet already," gasped Burke. "The atmospheric valve is set for five thousand. I'll make it ten! It will give us more room to recover in--if anything--goes wrong!"

  He gave the knob another half turn and laid his hand lightly on the lever which controlled the movements of the tractor. Bennie, flattened against the window, gazed below. The great dust ring showed indistinctly through a blue haze no longer directly beneath them, but a quarter of a mile to the north. Evidently they were not rising vertically.

  The valley of the Ring looked like a black crack in a greenish-gray desert of rock and moss, the landing stage like a tiny bird's nest. The floor of the car moved slightly from side to side. Burke's face had gone gray, and he crouched unsteadily, one hand gripping a steel bracket on the wall.

  "My Lord!" he mumbled with dry lips. "My Lord!"

  Bennie, momentarily expecting annihilation, crawled on all fours to Burke's side.

  The needle of the manometer indicated nine thousand five hundred feet, and was rapidly nearing the next division. Suddenly Burke felt the lever move slowly under his hand as though operated by some outside intelligence, and at the same moment the axis of one gyroscope swung slowly in a horizontal plane through an angle of nearly ninety degrees, while that of the other dipped slightly from the vertical. Both men had a ghastly feeling that the ghost of Pax had somehow returned and assumed control of the car. Bennie rotated the map under the gyroscope until the fine black line on the dial again lay across their destination. Then he crept back to his window again. The earth, far below and dimly visible, was sliding slowly northward, and the dust ring which marked their starting-point now lay as a flattened ellipse on the distant horizon. Beneath and behind them in their flight trailed a thin streak of pale bluish fog--the wake of the Flying Ring.

  They were now searing the atmosphere at a height of nearly two miles, and the car was flying on a firm and even keel. There was no sound save the dull roar of the tractor and a slight humming from the vibration of the light steel cables. Bennie no longer felt any disagreeable sensation. A strange detachment possessed him. Dark forests, lakes, and a mighty river appeared to the south--the Moisie--and they followed it as a fishhawk might have done, until the wilderness broke away before them and they saw the broad reach of the St. Lawrence streaked with the smoke of ocean liners.

  And then he lost control of himself for the first time and sobbed like a woman--not from fear, nor weariness, nor excitement, but for joy--the joy of the true scientist who has sought the truth and found it, has achieved that for mankind which but for him it would have lacked, perchance, forever. And he looked up at Burke and smiled.

  The latter nodded.

  "Yes," he remarked prosaically, "this is sure a little bit of all right! All to the good!"

  EPILOGUE

  Meanwhile, during the weeks that Hooker had been engaged in finding the valley of the Ring, unbelievable things had happened in world politics. In spite of the fact that Pax, having decreed the shifting of the Pole and the transformation of Central Europe into the Arctic zone, had refused further communication with mankind, all the nations--and none more zealously than the German Republic--had proceeded immediately to withdraw their armies within their own borders, and under the personal supervision of a General Commission to destroy all their armaments and munitions of war. The lyddite bombs, manufactured in vast quantities by the Krupps for the Relay Gun and all other high explosives, were used to demolish the fortresses upon every frontier of Europe. The contents of every arsenal was loaded upon barges and sunk in mid-Atlantic. And every form of military organization, rank, service, and even uniform, was abolished throughout the world.

  A coalition of nations was formed under a single general government, known as the United States of Europe, which in coöperation with the United States of North and South America, of Asia, and of Africa, arranged for an annual world congress at The Hague, and which enforced its decrees by means of an International Police. In effect all the inhabitants of the globe came under a single control, as far as language and geographical boundaries would permit. Each state enforced local laws, but all were obedient to the higher law--the Law of Humanity--which was uniform through the earth. If an individual offended against the law of one nation, he was held to have offended against all, and was dealt with as such. The international police needed no treaties of extradition. The New York embezzler who fled to Nairobi was sent back as a matter of course without delay.

  Any man was free to go and live where he chose, to manufacture, buy, and sell as he saw fit. And, because the fear and shadow of war were removed, the nations grew rich beyond the imagination of men; great hospitals and research laboratories, universities, schools, and kindergartens, opera houses, theatres, and gardens of every sort sprang up everywhere, paid for
no one quite knew how. The nations ceased to build dreadnoughts, and instead used the money to send great troops of children with the teachers travelling over the world. It was against the law to own or manufacture any weapon that could be used to take human life. And because the nations had nothing to fear from one another, and because there were no scheming diplomatists and bureaucrats to make a living out of imaginary antagonisms, people forgot that they were French or German or Russian or English, just as the people of the United States of America had long before practically disregarded the fact that they came from Ohio or Oregon or Connecticut or Nevada. Russians with weak throats went to live in Italy as a matter of course, and Spaniards who liked German cooking settled in Münich.

  All this, of course, did not happen at once, but came about quite naturally after the abolition of war. And after it had been done, everybody wondered why it had not been done ten centuries before; and people became so interested in destroying all the relics of that despicable employment, warfare, that they almost forgot that the Man Who Rocked the Earth had threatened that he would shift the axis of the globe. So that when the day fixed by him came and everything remained just as it always had been--and everybody still wore linen-mesh underwear in Strassburg and flannels in Archangel--nobody thought very much about it, or commented on the fact that the Flying Ring was no longer to be seen. And the only real difference was that you could take a P. & O. steamer at Marseilles and buy a through ticket to Tasili Ahaggar--if you wanted to go there--and that the shores of the Sahara became the Riviera of the world, crowded with health resorts and watering-places--so that Pax had not lived in vain, nor Thornton, nor Bill Hood, nor Bennie Hooker, nor any of them.

  The whole thing is a matter of record, as it should be. The deliberations of Conference No. 2 broke up in a hubbub, just as Von Helmuth and Von Koenitz had intended, and the transcripts of their discussions proved to be not of the slightest scientific value. But in the files of the old War Department--now called the Department for the Alleviation of Poverty and Human Suffering--can be read the messages interchanged between The Dictator of Human Destiny and the President of the United States, together with all the reports and observations relating thereto, including Professor Hooker's Report to the Smithsonian Institute of his journey to the valley of the Ring and what he found there. Only the secret of the Ring--of thermic induction and atomic disintegration--in short, of the Lavender Ray, is his by right of discovery, or treasure trove, or what you will, and so is his patent on Hooker's Space-Navigating Car, in which he afterward explored the solar system and the uttermost regions of the sidereal ether. But that shall be told hereafter.

  THE END

  * * *

  Contents

  SJAMBAK

  By Jack Vance

  Howard Frayberg, Production Director of Know Your Universe!, was a man of sudden unpredictable moods; and Sam Catlin, the show's Continuity Editor, had learned to expect the worst.

  "Sam," said Frayberg, "regarding the show last night...." He paused to seek the proper words, and Catlin relaxed. Frayberg's frame of mind was merely critical. "Sam, we're in a rut. What's worse, the show's dull!"

  Sam Catlin shrugged, not committing himself.

  "Seaweed Processors of Alphard IX--who cares about seaweed?"

  "It's factual stuff," said Sam, defensive but not wanting to go too far out on a limb. "We bring 'em everything--color, fact, romance, sight, sound, smell.... Next week, it's the Ball Expedition to the Mixtup Mountains on Gropus."

  Frayberg leaned forward. "Sam, we're working the wrong slant on this stuff.... We've got to loosen up, sock 'em! Shift our ground! Give 'em the old human angle--glamor, mystery, thrills!"

  Sam Catlin curled his lips. "I got just what you want."

  "Yeah? Show me."

  Catlin reached into his waste basket. "I filed this just ten minutes ago...." He smoothed out the pages. "'Sequence idea, by Wilbur Murphy. Investigate "Horseman of Space," the man who rides up to meet incoming space-ships.'"

  Frayberg tilted his head to the side. "Rides up on a horse?"

  "That's what Wilbur Murphy says."

  "How far up?"

  "Does it make any difference?"

  "No--I guess not."

  "Well, for your information, it's up ten thousand, twenty thousand miles. He waves to the pilot, takes off his hat to the passengers, then rides back down."

  "And where does all this take place?"

  "On--on--" Catlin frowned. "I can write it, but I can't pronounce it." He printed on his scratch-screen: CIRGAMESÇ.

  "Sirgamesk," read Frayberg.

  Catlin shook his head. "That's what it looks like--but those consonants are all aspirated gutturals. It's more like 'Hrrghameshgrrh'."

  "Where did Murphy get this tip?"

  "I didn't bother to ask."

  "Well," mused Frayberg, "we could always do a show on strange superstitions. Is Murphy around?"

  "He's explaining his expense account to Shifkin."

  "Get him in here; let's talk to him."

  * * * * *

  Wilbur Murphy had a blond crew-cut, a broad freckled nose, and a serious sidelong squint. He looked from his crumpled sequence idea to Catlin and Frayberg. "Didn't like it, eh?"

  "We thought the emphasis should be a little different," explained Catlin. "Instead of 'The Space Horseman,' we'd give it the working title, 'Odd Superstitions of Hrrghameshgrrh'."

  "Oh, hell!" said Frayberg. "Call it Sirgamesk."

  "Anyway," said Catlin, "that's the angle."

  "But it's not superstition," said Murphy.

  "Oh, come, Wilbur ..."

  "I got this for sheer sober-sided fact. A man rides a horse up to meet the incoming ships!"

  "Where did you get this wild fable?"

  "My brother-in-law is purser on the Celestial Traveller. At Riker's Planet they make connection with the feeder line out of Cirgamesç."

  "Wait a minute," said Catlin. "How did you pronounce that?"

  "Cirgamesç. The steward on the shuttle-ship gave out this story, and my brother-in-law passed it along to me."

  "Somebody's pulling somebody's leg."

  "My brother-in-law wasn't, and the steward was cold sober."

  "They've been eating bhang. Sirgamesk is a Javanese planet, isn't it?"

  "Javanese, Arab, Malay."

  "Then they took a bhang supply with them, and hashish, chat, and a few other sociable herbs."

  "Well, this horseman isn't any drug-dream."

  "No? What is it?"

  "So far as I know it's a man on a horse."

  "Ten thousand miles up? In a vacuum?"

  "Exactly."

  "No space-suit?"

  "That's the story."

  Catlin and Frayberg looked at each other.

  "Well, Wilbur," Catlin began.

  Frayberg interrupted. "What we can use, Wilbur, is a sequence on Sirgamesk superstition. Emphasis on voodoo or witchcraft--naked girls dancing--stuff with roots in Earth, but now typically Sirgamesk. Lots of color. Secret rite stuff...."

  "Not much room on Cirgamesç for secret rites."

  "It's a big planet, isn't it?"

  "Not quite as big as Mars. There's no atmosphere. The settlers live in mountain valleys, with air-tight lids over 'em."

  Catlin flipped the pages of Thumbnail Sketches of the Inhabited Worlds. "Says here there's ancient ruins millions of years old. When the atmosphere went, the population went with it."

  Frayberg became animated. "There's lots of material out there! Go get it, Wilbur! Life! Sex! Excitement! Mystery!"

  "Okay," said Wilbur Murphy.

  "But lay off this horseman-in-space. There is a limit to public credulity, and don't you let anyone tell you different."

  * * * * *

  Cirgamesç hung outside the port, twenty thousand miles ahead. The steward leaned over Wilbur Murphy's shoulder and pointed a long brown finger. "It was right out there, sir. He came riding up--"

  "What kind of a man was it? Strange-look
ing?"

  "No. He was Cirgameski."

  "Oh. You saw him with your own eyes, eh?"

  The steward bowed, and his loose white mantle fell forward. "Exactly, sir."

  "No helmet, no space-suit?"

  "He wore a short Singhalût vest and pantaloons and a yellow Hadrasi hat. No more."

  "And the horse?"

  "Ah, the horse! There's a different matter."

  "Different how?"

  "I can't describe the horse. I was intent on the man."

  "Did you recognize him?"

  "By the brow of Lord Allah, it's well not to look too closely when such matters occur."

  "Then--you did recognize him!"

  "I must be at my task, sir."

  Murphy frowned in vexation at the steward's retreating back, then bent over his camera to check the tape-feed. If anything appeared now, and his eyes could see it, the two-hundred million audience of Know Your Universe! could see it with him.

  When he looked up, Murphy made a frantic grab for the stanchion, then relaxed. Cirgamesç had taken the Great Twitch. It was an illusion, a psychological quirk. One instant the planet lay ahead; then a man winked or turned away, and when he looked back, "ahead" had become "below"; the planet had swung an astonishing ninety degrees across the sky, and they were falling!

  Murphy leaned against the stanchion. "'The Great Twitch'," he muttered to himself, "I'd like to get that on two hundred million screens!"

  Several hours passed. Cirgamesç grew. The Sampan Range rose up like a dark scab; the valley sultanates of Singhalût, Hadra, New Batavia, and Boeng-Bohôt showed like glistening chicken-tracks; the Great Rift Colony of Sundaman stretched down through the foothills like the trail of a slug.