The Best of Jack Williamson

by Jack Williamson

  “In that case" —her voice was still abstracted—“you had better salvage what you can of the supplies and equipment. After all, if what I fear is true, it won't make any great difference whether you ever leave Manumotu or not."

  Leigh spent all morning stacking the* tumbled crates and drums so that they made three walls of a tiny low shelter, roofing it with the torn tarpaulins, and collecting there the food and useful articles he found on the beach.

  At noon, when he carried a plate of food and a steaming tin of fresh coffee to the girl in the observatory building, he found her covered with grime, laboring in tight-lipped silence with the starting-crank of a little motor-generator. She waved him aside.

  “I've no time to eat."' she told him. “I’ve data of the utmost importance to send. It’s urgent that I get in touch with Washington and our rocket laboratory at Alamogordo. And there's something wrong with this plant."

  Leigh glanced at the balky mechanism. He set the plate on an empty packing box beside her and roiled up his sleeves.

  “Did it occur to you."' he inquired, “that, having mack a living out of flying gasoline engines fir the past ten years, I might know something about them? I see that your carburetor is smashed. If you’ll eat your dinner, I'll make you a new carburetor out of a milk can."

  Her face showed a weary relief. “If you can do it." she agreed.

  While Leigh found tin snips and an empty can, she sat down on the concrete floor beside the packing box. She gulped the hot coffee, wolfed a sandwich of canned ham, and reached for another. In the middle of it, her yellow head dropped forward on her knees. Leigh heard a long sigh and knew she was asleep.

  “Poor kid." he muttered.

  Even the staccato chek-chek-chek of the little motor ten minutes later did not wake her. Leigh twisted the flap of tin that regulated the mixture, then swiftly checked the hook ap of the short-wave transmitter.

  He snapped or the receiver. Static snarled at him. An unfamiliar sort of static. The whining ululation of it was oddly like the howling of the storm that had passed. It rose and fell regularly.

  Through it, however, he picked up some station—and what he heard stiffened him with fear. For a time he listened, absorbed; then suddenly he harried to wake the girl.

  “It’s fixed?" she gasped, starting up. “I didn’t mean to sleep—there isn’t time."

  He caught anxiously at her slim brown arm.

  “Elene." he demanded, “what’s happening? I was just listening. There’s something frightful going on What is it? Do you know?”

  Her blue eyes stared a t him. They were dark with sleep—and, he thought, terror. Quick and anxious, her low voice demanded:

  “Just what did you got?”

  “Storms,” he said briefly. “Phenomenal storms. Unseasonable bitter cold. Ice storms even in the tropics. Tidal waves. One against the Atlantic seaboard has probably killed a hundred thousand already. Communications broken everywhere, of course. Panic increasing.”

  He drew her light body toward him. “Something has gone wrong with the air, Elene. Do you know what it is? And when it is going to stop?”

  Her head nodded slowly.

  “I'm afraid I know what it is,” she said. “My dispatches can't bring any comfort to the world.”

  “What is it?”

  Her arm twisted free.

  “No time to tell you now,” she said. “I've got to talk to Washington and New Mexico. And to Laird Cragin—if he’s still alive. Our work here has got to be finished tonight. After dawn tomorrow, there may not be any Manumotu. ’

  Leigh gasped. “But—”

  Hastening toward the radio, she paused briefly.

  “I’ll show you tonight,” she promised him. “If the seeing is good enough for the telescope, and if we’re still alive by then.” She had no more attention for him. He prepared food for himself, ate, and then spent an hour making the tiny little shelter more secure against whatever the girl expected to happen at dawn. And then, heavy with accumulated fatigue, he slept again.

  The air was unwontedly cool on the beach when he woke, and another sunset of uncanny splendor flamed red to the zenith. He kindled a fire of driftwood, set out another meal, and called the girl. Sipping gratefully from a tin of scalding coffee, she gave him a brief smile. “You have ability, Leigh,” she told him.

  “Ability that has been wasted.” Her dark eyes studied him. “Now, I’m afraid, you’ve very little opportunity left to make use of it.”

  Sitting silent for a moment in the dancing firelight, she began pouring the cool coral sand through her fingers into little white pyramids.

  “If my deductions check out tonight,” she said, “I’m afraid the creative functions of our present civilization are just about at an end. The planet will doubtless remain habitable for certain forms of life. Men may even survive in such places as Death Valley. But it will be a little strange if the human race ever recovers its supremacy.”

  “Tell me—” Leigh began.

  She looked at her watch and studied the darkling eastward sky.

  “In ten minutes,” she said, “I can show you—show you why the earth is no longer a very safe place for nonstop fliers.”

  Leigh caught his breath.

  He looked from the girl into the low, many-colored flames of the driftwood and slowly back again!

  “Dr. Elene Gayle,” he told her very gravely, “I feel that your frank comments have given me the right to express an equally candid opinion of female astronomers.”

  She nodded and looked back into the east.

  “I haven’t been following my profession altogether for fun, although I enjoy it,” he told her. “I have been trying to save up two hundred thousand dollars. That would be enough to begin the manufacture of a gadget I have invented for the greater comfort of rocket passengers, and to build a home.”

  There was weary loneliness in his voice now.

  “For hundreds and thousands of hours, cramped in the cockpit of the old Phoenix, I have endured fatigue and the need of sleep by dreaming of that home. Sometimes it is on a Florida key and sometimes it is in a little green valley that I have seen in the Colorado Rockies.”

  He looked at the girl across the fire.

  “But always the most important thing about it was the woman who would live in it with me. I have had one in mind and then another. But none of them, Dr. Gayle, has fitted as well as you do—except, I must hasten to add, in certain regards.

  “You must realize that I am telling you this just to make a point—since, what with crackups and your Stellar Shell, Tick Tinker and I have never had more than fifty thousand in a joint account.

  A smile touched his lean face in the firelight.

  Physically,” he told her, “you would do admirably. And you have intelligence, quickness, and, I believe, a sense of humor. But unfortunately you have other qualities that outweigh all these.

  “Try to imagine yourself living a civilized life in a civilized home,” he challenged. “You just couldn’t do it. You wouldn’t fit in—not with a schedule of forty-eight minutes a day for food.

  “I hope I’ve made my point—that female .astronomers who completely ignore the fact that they are women are just as out of place in a civilized world as extreme nonstop fliers.”

  Her first low laugh, and the light of amusement in her eyes, halted his argument. But her laughter grew higher and more breathless until she could not stop. Leigh saw that she was hysterical. He dashed a tin can of cold sea-water into her face. She caught a sobbing breath and mopped at her eyes. With another glance at her watch, she rose abruptly.

  “Come,” she said in a shaken voice. “And let’s see if there’ll be any homes in the world ahead.”

  III

  The squat mass of the twelve-inch reflector looked through a slit in the end of the building that had escaped destruction. Its clockwork, beneath the humming of the little motor-generator, made a muffled ticking.

  Visible in the dim light of a shaded bulb, t
he girl twisted the turret and swiftly set the circles. Before she had done, Leigh knew that her object was the red point of Mars in the east.

  For a long time, sitting with her eye to the lens, she was silent. Leigh could see the trembling of her snail hand, touching the control wheels again and again. At last she rose and stood staring eastward through the slit, rubbing at her red eyes. Her face was bloodless.

  “Well?” said Leigh.

  “It’s what I thought,” she whispered. “Mars!”

  Leigh moved into the seat she had left. His eye found the ocular. In its little disk of darkness, a single star burned with changing red and blue. And the disk of Mars, still too near the horizon for good observation, blurred and rippled as if painted on a black flag flying in the wind.

  Even for a moment of good seeing, when the image steadied, that mistiness did not clear. But he could distinguish the wide dark equatorial ma;-kings—darker, in fact, than he had supposed them—and the white ellipse of the south polar cap.

  Two things he saw that puzzled him. Beside the polar cap was a little dark fleck—the darkest marking on the planet— that had an oddly purplish color. And across the yellow-red of the planet, toward it, was drawn a twisting silver thread.

  The image blurred and shimmered again, and Leigh rose impatiently from the instrument. A little ache throbbed in his unaccustomed eyes. He turned anxiously to the girl.

  “Still I don’t urderstand,” he said. “I saw a little purple circle, not far from the polar cap. And a queer white thread twisting into it. 13ut everything looked hazy.”

  “That’s just it,” her tired voice told him. “Mars is hazed and dim with atmosphere —atmosphere stolen from the Earth. That silver thread is the other end of the tube of force that we h ive been calling a tornado—sucking air from the Earth across to Mars!”

  It took a moment for the full meaning to strike him. Then swiftly he felt the shock of it run through his whole body, and he swayed a little, standing there.

  “But,” he muttered al last, “I thought there were no Martians!”

  “It has been pretty well agreed that there are no intelligent inhabitants,” she said. “My father gave up the last great attempt to signal Mars ten years ago. But since that time something has happened to Mars.”

  “What?”

  “It just happens,” she told him slowly, “that that purple-blue spot, under the other end of the vortex tube, is exactly where the object we called the Stellar Shell struck Mars, two months ago.”

  He stared at her, in the dim observatory. “Then—you think—”

  “The inference is inevitable. The Stellar Shell was a ship. It brought living beings to Mars, from somewhere. They needed a heavier atmosphere for survival. Across on Earth—now, at opposition, less than fifty million miles away—they saw the atmosphere they required. With the same science that built and navigated the Stellar Shell, they have reached across to take what they require.”

  Leigh caught his breath,

  “Why didn’t they land on Earth in the first place?”

  “Why should they, if they are able to reach from one world to another to take what they want? Perhaps Mars, with half the Earth’s sunlight and a third of its gravity, suited them better in other regards.”

  Leigh’s brain was spinning.

  “Stealing the world’s air! How possibly can they do that?”

  “I saw one clue,” the girl told him. “The two satellites are very difficult objects, even with the refinements of this instrument. It was hard to find them. When I did, they were both much too far from the planet. They are plunging out into space, away from their old orbits!” “And that means—”

  “It means that they have been cut off from the gravitational attraction of Mars.

  I think that is because the gravitational pull of the planet, by a power of science quite beyond our grasp, has been focused into a tube of force that reaches fifty million miles across space to our atmosphere.”

  “That queer tornado?”

  “Exactly.” The girl nodded. “Our atmosphere is being drawn up it. It seems to race around the Earth every day, because the Earth is turning under it. The violent air currents it causes, and the very loss of air, generate the storms. The unusual sunsets and auroras are doubtless due to the incidental forces that form and direct the tube.”

  Beside the girl, Leigh peered up through the narrow slit. In the bar of purple sky, Mars was a baleful orange-red point. His staggered mind groped for understanding of its menace.

  “What can they be?” he whispered. The girl’s own voice was dry. “Probably they are interstellar voyagers. They came from the south, quite possibly from one of the nearer stars in Centaurus. Beings capable of such a flight must be as far from our comprehension as we are from that of the ants. And we must be as helpless before them.”

  “Ants can sting,” muttered Leigh. But a breath of night air through the slit seemed strangely cold, and he shuddered again. “When do you suppose they’ll stop?”

  Elene Gayle’s yellow head shook in the dimness, wearily.

  “Who knows? We could spare them half our atmosphere, and still survive in the lowlands, though the climate everywhere would be far more severe. Possibly they will be satisfied in time. Possibly the advance of the Earth in its orbit will break their tube of force—until the next opposition, two years away.”

  “Mars is a smaller planet,” Leigh said. “They shouldn’t need so much air.” “Because of the lighter gravity,” the girl told him, “to get the same pressure and density, they would need more.”

  “So we are at their mercy? Is there nothing to be done?”

  Her face was gray and hopeless. “People will react in the ways predictable from their known characteristics." she said. “Most of the world’s population has already been driven into a helpless panic. The governments that stand will try to mobilize their armies—against an enemy they will never even see before they die. Only a few scientists will try to make a calm analysis of the problem, try to discover what, if anything, can be done. I doubt that anything can be done.”

  IV

  The rocket arrived before midnight.

  Elene Gayle had been at the radio all evening, guiding it in with her signals listening to the reports of planet-wide confusion and terror; and trying in vain to get some message through to her Foundation’s rocket research laboratory on the New Mexico desert.

  When the blue luminescent cathion jets streaked across the stars, Leigh ran with flares to light the beach. It plunged down at an alarming angle, a forward blast checking it in a great cloud of blue flame, and two men tumbled out of it.

  The girl came with Leigh to meet them. The thin gray man with a pointed beard was Dr. Laymon Duval, assistant director of the Foundation. And the tall slender black-helmeted pilot, he knew without asking, was Laird Cragin.

  Cragin was limping, patched with bandages. The girl nodded to the older man, greeted Cragin with a warm handshake. His handsome face smiled at her.

  “Sorry to be late, Gay,” he 'said. “Rut the freak storm cracked me up in the Marquesas Islands. Had to wait for Dr. Duval, in another fire-boat. But here we are!”

  The thin grave voice of the older man cut in, anxiously:

  “You are quite certain, Dr. Gayle— certain of the facts in your code message? You really believe that stellar invaders on

  Mars are robbing the Earth of its air?”

  “Duval,” the girl asked briskly, “do I make mistakes?”

  “Fewer than ary man I know,” he granted. “What action do you suggest?”

  “Return at once,” Elene Gayle said instantly. “Get full support from the President and the War Department. Rush our experimental rocket to completion in New Mexico. Arm it. Send it to Mars to stop the loss of atmosphere.”

  Duval’s gray head shook, doubtfully.

  “The only thing we can do,” he admitted. “Rut you know I have been in charge at Alamogordo. And I’m reasonably certain that our rocket can’t be
completed before the air-loss, continuing at the present rate, will force abandonment of the project.

  “Even,” he added forebodingly, “neglecting the weeks required for the flight—”

  “Anyhow,” the girl broke in, “we must try. I’ll fly back to America with you tonight.”

  “Tonight?” Carter Leigh echoed her last word. He groped instinctively for the girl’s arm.

  “I’ll go with you, Elene,” he said hoarsely. “I’ll fly your rocket to Mars.”

  “Thanks, Leigh.” She turned briefly toward him. “But you’re not a rocket pilot.” She turned back to Cragin. “Load fuel and oxygen. We’ve no time to spare.”

  “Hullo.” In the smooth voice of Laird Cragin was no very cordial recognition. “So you’re Lucky Nonstop Leigh? Well, it looks like you stopped, this time, in a rather unlucky spot. Better watch that storm at dawn. It c its a swath around the world, every day, through the thirties. Perth and Buenos Aires already gone.”

  “Rack in a moment,” the girl said. “I’ve some notes to get.”

  Carter Leigh watched her run back into the dark, toward the observatory. Listening silently to Cragin, as he helped lift aboard a drum of t ie kappa fuel, he tried to hide the despair m him.

  “Sorry, old man ” Cragin was saying. “But I guess the job will fall to me. I’ve been test-hopping the experimental models. If Gay sends her rocket to Mars, I’ll go with it.”

  Leigh caught his breath. Laird Cragin was no doubt a brave and skilful man, even now promising to face certain death for the world’s sake. But suddenly Leigh hated him with a blind savage hatred. He trembled, and his fists balled up. Tears swelled in his eyes, until the girl, running back out of the dark w th a thick brief case, was only a misty shadow.

  “We’d like to give you a lift, old man,” Cragin’s voice was smoothly regretful. “But this is only a three-place job. And we’ve no time—”