The Best of Jack Williamson

by Jack Williamson

  The aurora was fading from a sky grown brilliantly clear. Studded with white points of icebergs, the gray South Pacific was sliding back at three hundred and fifty miles an hour—still a good pace, he thought stubbornly, even if the rockets were three times as fast.

  Leigh was peeling an orange, beginning to hope that all the terror of the night had been the child of fancy and fatigue, when he saw the thing in the northeast. Against the red and green of a suddenly disturbing dawn, it fell like a silver thread.

  A white, spiral vortex—the funnel of a great tornado. He saw a blob of gray mist about the foot of it, marching over the sea. The upper end of it, oddly, was lost above the bright wings of dawn.

  Leigh had never seen a storm just like this one. At first he thought there was no danger to him. But the white, writhing snake of it whipped toward him with an appalling quickness.

  It seized the Phoenix in a sudden blast of wind, sucking the ship toward that racing funnel. Sea and sky spun madly. He was lifted so swiftly that his eardrums ached. Grimly he fought it, with all his calm skill and all the familiar strength of the ship.

  He fought—and won. The white pillar left him fluttering in its wake and marched on into the west. Hurried observation of the higher sun told Leigh that he had been flung fifteen hundred miles northward.

  But he knew, with a sinking in his heart, that the Phoenix was crippled. Her right aileron had been twisted and jammed by the force of that incredible wind. He would have to set her down.

  Whistling the tune of Barbara Allen, which always seemed to cheer him, Leigh searched the maps. He found a pinprick of land named Manumotu—the only possible haven in a thousand miles—and turned the limping amphibian toward it, flying with rudder and throttle.

  One more failure. Two, he reflected bitterly, in a row. For the last flight, two months ago, had failed also, from a cause as strange as that tornado.

  A “bipolar” flight, Tick Tinker had called the last one. Tick was the tireless little publicity man, one-legged and one-eyed, who was Leigh’s partner in his singular business of wresting a living from the air. “ Bipolar,” because the route from Croydon back to Croydon along the prime meridian included both the poles. Leigh had safely rounded the planet, with but three scheduled stops. But the flight had failed just the same, because of the Stellar Shell.

  “We’re an out-of-doors advertising firm, Lucky,” Tick used to say. “You fly for attention value. And I sell it to the makers of oil and piston rings and what-have-you. And it’s a legitimate business, so long as you can keep in the headlines.”

  But all the headlines two months ago had been about the Stellar Shell. Some astronomer named Gayle, the day Leigh took off from Croydon, announced discovery of a mysterious missile plunging out of the depths of space, toward the solar system. The “bipolar” flight had earned no more than a few sticks of space on the inside pages. For the black streamers ran:

  STELLAR SHELL SHOT AT PLANETS;

  WILL OBJECT STRIKE EARTH?

  ASTRONOMERS BAFFLED

  When Leigh came in to Croydon again, the flight completed in three grueling days, there was no crowd to meet him, Staggering away from the dusty, oil-spattered Phoenix, he himself paused to buy a paper.

  COSMIC BULLET HITS MARS;

  EARTH SPARED;

  NATURE OF OBJECT UNKNOWN

  There had been no more news of the Stellar Shell, nothing more than the speculations of bewildered scientists. But the flight was already ruined. Tick Tinker had radiographed:

  CONGRATS ON BIPOLAR FLIGHT. BUT STELLAR SHELL HOGGED THE HEADLINES. FLIGHT TOTAL LOSS FINANCIALLY. YOUR NAME GETTING RAPIDLY UNKNOWN. TESTIMONIALS BEGGING AT CUT RATES. URGENT RELEASE DE-TAILS NEW PUBLICITY FLIGHT. SUGGEST SOMETHING NONSTOP POLAR. USE ZEROLUBE BRAND OILS FOR TESTIMONIAL.

  And so Tick’s message had brought him here, dead with fatigue and heading toward a speck of reck that probably had no inhabitant.

  The motor covered the windshield with a thin spray of oil, and Leigh stopped his whistling briefly to curse all Zerolube products. He plugged in his helmet phones and switched on the little battery transmitter. It was good for just ten minutes of continuous sending—the Phoenix had no room for heavier equipment, not even emergency rations.

  “SOS!” he called. “Pilot Leigh in airplane Phoenix forced down by storm. Will try to land on Manumotu. SOS—” The instant reply surprised him: “Manumotu Station, Gayle Foundation, calling airplane Phoenix. Dr. E. K. Gayle speaking. Land on north beach. I will stand by to assist you Come in, airplane Phoenix”

  “Airplane Phoenix calling Manumotu Station,” gasped Leigh, relieved. “Thanks, doc. I’ll be seeing you, if I can keep out of the water half an hour longer. Signing off.”

  It took an hour—an hour that seemed endless to Carter Leigh fighting the fatigue in him and nursing the crippled plane. But at last Manumotu came out of the sparkling northward haze. A cragged volcanic summit appeared sheer on three sides, edged on the north with a scrap of coral beach.

  He crossed the beach. A broad rocky bench above it was tufted with tropical green. A long shed-like building of white sheet metal stood upon it, a white tent, and a great pile of crates covered with brown tarpaulins. A white flag waved. Then he saw the tiny figure running from the tent toward the beach.

  The landing was hazardous. The crippled wing caught the crest of a wave and covered the plane with spray. She staggered, but came up bravely. He taxied in and rolled up on the blinding coral sand.

  Following the signals of the flag, he brought the Phoenix to a safe dry stop where a rocket must have been moored, for there were deep wheel-marks in the sand, and the hibiscus bushes beyond were scorched black as if from rocket jets.

  Heavily, his legs as stiff as if they never had been straightened before, he climbed out of the cockpit. The person with the dag came to meet him. A slim young figure, in boots and breeches, khaki shirt open at the throat, yellow head bare. A crisp voice, brisk, impersonal, greeted him:

  “Hello. You are the famous Lucky Leigh?”

  “In person” he grinned. “And thanks for showing me the way in, doc—”

  His jaw fell. This was a woman—a girl. Her intent oval face was dark with sun. Her keen blue eyes were scanning his heavy, swaying body—not altogether, he thought, with approval.

  “Oh!” he said. “I thought you were Dr. Gayle.”

  “I am,” she said gravely. “Dr. Elene Kathrine Gayle.”

  His red eyes blinked at her.

  “You—you aren’t the Dr. Gayle who discovered the Stellar Shell?”

  She nodded.

  “My father was a leader in his field of science. He established the Gayle Foundation. But he has been dead five years. I have been trying to carry on his work.” She studied him gravely. “Do you object to my discovery?”

  “You ruined my last flight,” he told her. “I lived through seventy-six hours of hell; I set a record for gasoline flight over both poles. And what with your Stellar Shell, the world never knew I had been off the ground.”

  “And, I suspect, was little the worse for the fact.” Leigh flushed at the hint of sarcasm in her voice. “However—are you hungry?”

  “Famished,” he told her.

  On A rough pine table in the white tent, she slapped down two tin plates, split open cans of meat and butter, indicated a big vacuum urn of coffee, a huge jar of marmalade.

  “Proceed,” she said.

  Leigh’s dull eyes were watching her.

  “You’re the whole crew here?”

  Her boyish yellow head nodded.

  “Emergency,” she said. “The Foundation is establishing twenty new meteorological observatories. Manumotu Station was the most important, because it is directly in the track of the phenomena we are investigating. Therefore, I took charge here myself.”

  “Alone?”

  “I had two assistants. But Dr. French took acute appendicitis, and Cragin flew him out in the rocket. Should have been back yesterday. But didn’t show up. I’m
carrying on. . . . You said you were hungry.”

  She dumped half a can of corned beef into her tin plate, passed the remainder to Leigh. But he sat, wonderment rising against his mist of sleep, staring at her.

  “Emergency?” he questioned.

  She nodded.

  “Something is happening to the atmosphere.”

  “I thought conditions were strange,” he said, “flying over the pole.”

  She pushed back her plate to seize a notebook.

  “What phenomena did you observe?” she demanded eagerly.

  He told her in a tired sleep-fogged voice about the strangely gaudy sunset, the aurora, the phenomenal cold, the unaccountably low barometric pressures, the singular tornado that had crippled the Phoenix.

  “What does it all mean?” he concluded. “What is happening?”

  “I’m here to find out,” she told him. “Sunset and aurora probably due to abnormal electronic bombardment of the ionosphere. But the storms and pressure disturbances are still not accounted for. Unless—”

  Her yellow head shook.

  “The only conceivable answer is too appalling.”

  She looked quickly at her wrist watch, dumped the debris from her plate into a pail beside the table, wiped plate and spoon clean with a paper napkin. She rose.

  “Excuse me. But the duties of both my assistants have fallen upon me. My time is budgeted. I have forty-eight minutes a day for meals. Now I have instruments to read.”

  “So that’s how a lady astronomer lives.”

  Leigh grinned. “If I can help you—”

  She shook her head with evident disapproval.

  “I doubt it. Our work here doesn’t consist of publicity stunts. . . . Eat as much as you like. You’ll find a cot behind the partition. I’ll radio directions to your rescue party. Please keep in mind, when you leave, that it is the policy of the Gayle Foundation to avoid unnecessary publicity. Especially, we don’t want to alarm the world about these current meteorological phenomena, until we have more comprehensive data.”

  Leigh was staring at her, a slow anger rising in him. “Look here, you think I’m a pretty bad egg?”

  Her keen eyes swept him impersonally. “Frankly, Mr. Lucky Leigh,” her cool voice said, “your existence and your stunts annoy me. I can’t see that you serve any creative function. In the precarious early days of gasoline aviation such men as you, testing equipment and exploring routes, may have served a useful end. But now that rockets are as fast and as certain as the sun, you are a mere anachronism.”

  Leigh opened his mouth to protest. But the girl held up a brown imperative hand.

  “I’ve got no time to listen to you,” she said. “Because I have vitally urgent work to do. I am already upsetting my schedule. But I’ve wanted for a long time to tell you a thing or two.”

  Her smooth face was flushed a little. He listened to her, grinning.

  “Now,” she went on swiftly, “if you were trying to fly nonstop to Mars, even if you never got there, that would be a different proposition. Because you would be expanding the horizons of science. You would be doing something different and important.

  “But your old gasoline wreck is as far behind the times as you are, Leigh. It is a rocket that will make the first flight to Mars. I know a man who may pilot the first rocket there. He is Laird Cragin— you never heard of him, because he isn’t a publicity flyer. But he is test pilot for the experimental space rockets that the Foundation has been working on, in association with some Army engineers. You ought to meet him. Because whether he ever gets to Mars or not, he’s trying to do something real.’

  Carter Leigh gulped.

  “Listen, Miss Gayle,” he protested. “You’ve got me all wrong. I used to like the glory, I admit. But now it’s just a business. I’ve come to hate the clamor and the crowds, and I always skip the banquets. Tick Tinker is my contact man; he releases the publicity, does the testimonials, handles ill the business end. We’re just trying to make a living.”

  Her brown chin squared. And, through the gray haze of fatigue that filled his mind, Leigh suddenly perceived that a lady astronomer could still be very good to look at.

  “It is possible,” her cool crisp voice was saying, “to mike a living in a way that helps others besides yourself. Here you are hopping about the planet, with about as much aim and intelligence as a beheaded flea, while God-knows-what is happening to the very air we breathe!” She turned decisively away from him. “You are as extinct as the dodo, Mr. Nonstop Leigh,” she told him. “The only difference is that you don’t know it. Sleep on that. I’ve got a barocyclonometer to read.”

  II

  Carter Leigh sat over the rough table, staring out of the tent after her hastening boyish figure. He had seen suddenly, behind her brisk impersonal efficiency, that she was very tired—and somewhat frightened.

  His brief anger at her frank criticism was all turned back upon himself. After all, it was true that such men as Lindbergh and Byrd and Post and Corrigan hadn’t left much to be accomplished in the field of nonstop gasoline flight.

  No, he deserved her scorn.

  But what had frightened her? What was happening to the atmosphere? Leigh’s mind grappled for a vain moment with the problem, but he could not concentrate now. All he wanted was a chance to sleep.

  He stood up, his body stiff and wooden, and reeled to the cot beyond the canvas partition.

  “Dammit,” he muttered, “what do I care if Lieutenant Laird Cragin flies to Mars on a tissue-paper kite?”

  He was asleep before his head touched the pillow. . . .

  “Leigh! ”

  The crisp voice of Elene Gayle awakened him, tense with a suppressed alarm. The tent was dim in the light of an oddly purple dawn. Pausing at the entrance of the tent, her face so gray and tired he knew she had not slept, she called urgently:

  “That tornado is coming again. You had better see after your ship.”

  He tumbled out of the tent and saw her running ahead toward the long metal shed that covered her precious instruments. The dark ocean seemed ominously calm, and the sunrise above it was as splendid as the last.

  Against it he saw what the girl, with obvious hesitation, had called a tornado.

  It walked out of the flaming east—an endless spiral filament of silver, dropped like some cosmic fishing line from the depthless purple above the fiery sunrise. The foot of it danced across the sea. It moved by incredible bounds. And it was wrapped in a gray wisp of storm.

  Leigh caught his breath and started running toward the plane that was standing unmoored on the ong white beach where he had climbed out of her on the day before.

  But this white funnel of destruction came with the same unthinkable velocity that he had witnessed before. Before he had moved a dozen steps, the white tent sailed over his head. The abrupt, freakish blast of air hurled him flat. His eyes and ears and nostrils were filled with coral sand.

  For no more than twenty seconds the tempest shrieked against the black peak above. Abruptly, then, the air was almost still again. There was only a fluttering queerly chill breeze from the east, following in the storm’s wake.

  Spitting sand and gasping for breath, Leigh staggered to his feet. The funnel of the storm, like the guide-rope, he thought, dangling from some unseen balloon, was bounding away into the gray west. Its sorrowful howling swiftly diminished.

  Leigh turned ruefully toward where he had left the Phoenix, The battered old crate had been neatly flipped over on her back by the prankish blast of wind. Leigh shook his head and whistled a few bars of Barbara Allen.

  “Too bad, old girl,” he muttered. “But, considering the state of Tick’s exchequer and the high cost of salvage, it looks like goodbye for us.”

  He turned to survey the station.

  The tent was gone. The supplies, cooking utensils and blankets that it had covered were scattered across the beach to the uneasy sea. The tarpaulins had been ripped off the long stack of crates; tumbled in confusion were red drum
s of Kappa-concentrate rocket fuel, long cylinders of oxygen, bright tins of gasoline, miscellaneous cases of food and equipment. But where was the lady astronomer?

  A sudden unreasonable alarm tightened Leigh’s throat. He was too well seasoned, he kept telling himself, to get unduly excited over any girl—especially a female scientist who didn’t like him anyhow. But he was running through the wrecked camp, shouting her name with a quaver in his voice.

  “Miss Gayle! Can you hear me? Elene! ” “Dr. Gayle, if you please.”

  Her crisp voice came from the interior of the long observatory shed. Half the metal roof had been ripped off. Most of the equipment inside seemed to have been demolished by a huge boulder the wind had hurled from the dark cliffs above. But the slim calm girl, save for the disorder of her short yellow hair and a smudge of grease on her brown cheek, looked untouched. She was ruefully fingering a tangle of twisted levers and crumpled recording drums.

  “No more barocyclonometer." she said. “But my visual observations make it imperative that we get in touch with the outside world at once. I believe my worst fears are justified."

  “Well, Dr. Gayle" Leigh offered, “if you discover any need of my services, just say so."

  “I doubt that you would be very useful."From the preoccupation of her voice, he knew she gave him less than half her mind; her eyes still measured the smashed equipment. “If you can repair your plane, you had better get away from here before tomorrow morning. Manumotu is an unhealthy locality, just now. And I'm afraid you'll find that the world has got more pressing matters to attend to than organizing relief expeditions to rescue stunt fliers."

  “Thank you, Doctor." Leigh bowed. “I hope you can stand a shock. I believe the flying days of the old Phoenix are over."