“Thanks,” Leigh managed to say. “But I’ve got the old Phoenix ”
Elene Gayle paused to take his hand. Her fingers felt strong and cool.
“Goodbye, Leigh,” she said briskly. “Sorry we must leave you. Watch the storm. Make any use you can of our supplies and equipment here. Get north, if you can, out of its track.”
Leigh did not answer.
Duval was already in tie rocket. Cragin swung the girl in, leapt after her, slid forward the curved transparent hatch. Leigh stood stupidly motionless until the pilot opened it again to shout a warning.
He stumbled back. The blue electronic exhausts bellowed out about him. His skin tingled. Ozone burned hi* lungs. Blinded, he covered his eyes. When he could see again, the rocket was a dim blue star, dropping and dimming, north-northeast.
Carter leigh stood alone on the beach, softly whistling the melancholy notes of Barbara Allen.Alone on Manumotu. It was midnight. Six hours, more or less, until that world-circling funnel should pass again.
Southward, beyond the dark loom of the peak, the strange auora rose again. Sprays of green and orange crossed the zenith. That eerie light showed him the old Phoenix, lying upside down on the pale white beach. He plodded heavily down toward her.
“Well, old girl,” he muttered. “Cracked up or not, it looks like we’ve got to make one more flight—unless we want to be picked up by that wind between the worlds.”
He stopped abruptly on the coral sand. His eyes lifted swiftly from the battered old crate on the beach, up to the red and baleful eye of Mars, now well past the meridian. His mind pictured that silver cord from world to world. And his lips pursed for a soundless whistle.
“Well, why not?”
He stumbled to the old plane. His trembling hand touched the cold metal of her prop. His voice was quick and breathless.
“Why not, old lady?” he muttered again. “There’s air all the way. And where there’s air, you can fly with gasoline. It’s thin and rough, maybe. But we’ve flown high before, and met our share of bumps.”
He walked around the plane, inspected rudder and elevator.
“Quite a wind, I guess. But it will be behind us. And when you’ve got fifty million miles to make, you need the wind behind you!”
He peered in the darkness at the damaged aileron.
“The percentage may be a billion to one against us. But what’s the difference? You’re extinct as the dodo, old girl. And I am, too. And we’re getting wise to the fact.
“After all, why not? She’ll probably be flying to Mars with Cragin, if they get their rocket done. We might as well be there to meet ’em.
“Okay, duchess! Let’s get going!”
He knew it wouldn’t be easy to get the plane righted and repaired and in the air in the six hours that remained before the wind funnel returned. But he had been in spots almost as tight before. There was the time he came down on the arctic tundra with a broken prop, and whittled out one of his own. . . .
Lucky he had the supplies and equipment at the abandoned station. He walked back for ropes and tackle. In an hour the old ship was on her retractable wheels again, with no more than incidental injury. He started the motor, taxied the ship up beside the building where he could have electric light, and went to work on the twisted aileron. When that was crudely mended, he found half a dozen other necessary repairs—and still, for all he knew, there might be some hidden harm that he could not discover till the ship was in the air.
Four precious hours gone before the plane was ready to load. Two things he had to have—gasoline and oxygen. The air was already growing thin on Earth, but it would be thinner still in that tube of force.
Tumbling aside the drums of rocket fuel and cases of supplies, he began carrying crated tins of gasoline and pouring them into the empty tanks. Ten gallons at a trip. The empty tanks held three hundred, and he stacked tins behind the cockpit.
The Southern Cross tilted above the peak. Time fled away. He panted. Even in the chill of morning, he was drenched with sweat. Lucky the Foundation had been so generous with fuel for the motor-generator and the stoves. Lower octane rating than quite agreed with the ancient engine. But, if he started on the other, it would do.
The first ominous promise of dawn was in the east, before that task was done. Now the oxygen. He staggered under the weight of the long steel cylinders. Four of them. That was all he dared load.
Red tongues were leaping up in the east now; the vortex would soon be here. And he'd have to be high to meet it—as high as the Phoenix could climb. And even there, in the softer hands of the upper atmosphere, the odds would be overwhelmingly against him.
He made a last dash for an armload of food. He picked up a well-worn book of Keats, the name in it Elene Gayle. Who’d have thought that female astronomers read poetry? He climbed into the cockpit, and jammed his heel against the starter pedal.
While the starter motor wound up, he adjusted his helmet, tested oxygen tubes and reduction valve. He set altimeter and clock, put rudder and elevator trim tabs in neutral. He engaged the clutch, and the ancient motor caught with a roar.
Fine drops of oil on the windshield reminded him that it was in need of an overhaul. If the*e had been time and tools. . . .
“Crazy,” muttered Leigh. “Off to Mars!” Against the roar, he began to whistle Barbara Allen.
While the motor warmed, he pushed in the knob that flattened the pitch of the prop, and planned the take-off. The beach was now a ghostly strip of gray beneath that strange sunrise—too short for all the load the Phoenix carried.
He taxied to the east end of the beach, turned to face the uneasy west wind, plunged into it with a blast of the gun. The ship was far too heavy. Even with the stick forward all the way, the tail wheel still dragged. And the white spray, flying over black teeth of rock beyond the beach, was rushing at him.
But the tail came off the ground. The wheels tapped the sand, lifted, merely flicked the rocks beyond. Leigh caught a long gasping breath. He pushed the knob that started the wheel-retracting pump. The air-speed net die leapt ahead.
Over the dark unquiet sea north of Manumotu, he wheeled into the east. Moment by moment, the sky was flaming redder. He watched for the thread of silver in it, and trimmed the elevators to hold a steady climb.
He slid the cockpit cover forward. The air about him was suddenly calm. He felt a moment of relaxation before the crisis ahead. His eyes left the banks of instruments for a moment, found the worn little book beside him.
“Sentimental fool,” he muttered. “Elene Gayle wouldn’t carry dead weight to Mars.”
He slid back the cockpit cover, hurled the volume into the shrieking wind. He was immediately sorry he had done so. He scanned the east again. Still no tornado. Would it fail him now?
The Phoenix was lifting twelve hundred feet a minute. The cockpit grew cold. He plugged in the heater units in his suit. His ears ached. His lungs began to labor in the thinning air. He adjusted the faceplate of his helmet, twisted the; oxygen valve.
Then he saw the funnel. It came toward him like a swinging silver rope Automatically, he banked the ship, flew straight toward it. He saw the dancing tip of it touch Manumotu, nearly six miles beneath. All the green vanished magically from its black cliffs, and a mountain of sea rose over them.
V
The first blast of wind overtook him so violent that the ship stalled in it. The dead stick was loose in his hands. He shoved it forward, gunned the motor till the ship lived again, pulled it back.
He was trying to climb beside the silver funnel, to edge into it. But the blast of it caught him with a savage and resistless acceleration. The blood was driven out of his head. Darkness pressed down on him. He fought grimly for consciousness and strength to keep the nose of the plane ahead.
For an endless time he was suspended in that battle. His flying of the ship, the swift and delicate reactions that kept it alive and headed up that twisting bore of silver, his skill was more than half conscious. And he
had no awareness of anything but life.
That killing pressure slackened at last, however. His strained heart beat more easily. He was aware ol the plane again, creaking, twisted, battered—but still miraculously intact.
He turned up the oxygen, adjusted the prop to increase its pitch to the utmost opened the auxiliary supercharger. The cold gas filled his lungs again, and he found awareness for things outside the plane.
It was the strangest moment Leigh had known. The curve of the silver tube seemed quite close, on every side. He knew that
the air in it, and the plane, now had a velocity quite beyond conception. Yet it seemed that an odd calm surrounded him, and he held the plane, the motor at half-throttle, at its center without difficulty.
Though he knew the tube could be nothing material, nothing more than a vortex of etheric force, the walls of it looked curiously real. Almost glass-like.
Whatever they were, he soon knew that he had better not touch them. For a whirling stick in the air ahead had grown into a great black log—the stripped trunk of some mighty tree, snatched, he supposed, from Manumotu. He saw it spin into that glassy wall. Saw it instantly rebound in a thin dissolving puff of dust and splinters.
He twisted in the cockpit and saw the Earth behind him. Beyond the shimmering walls of the tube it was a mighty hemisphere, suspended in darkness. Gray and misty, patched with great circular areas of white cloud. The Americas were crowding near the rim of it—vast stretches white with unseasonable snow. Asia was invisible in darkness.
Perceptibly, the Earth diminished. It was odd, Leigh thought, that it looked smaller and nearer all the time, not more distant. The two Americas thinned and crept very gradually beyond the lighted curve of the world. The blur of Australia came slowly out of the night; the now invisible foot of the tube, he knew, sweeping destructively across it.
A steady pressure held him back against the seat. At first he had hardly noticed it. But it required effort, he realized, to thrust out his arms against it. The muscles of his neck were already aching.
It was that acceleration. Swiftly, ever more swiftly, that resistless suction was drawing him across toward Mars. So far, so good. He guided the plane around a good-sized granite boulder, drawn with him up the funnel.
The thing was incredible. Flying to Mars in the Phoenix—a secondhand crate that Tick Tinker had somehow wangled out of the city fathers of Phoenix, Arizona, six years ago. And the Gayle Foundation, with all its millions, had failed to fly its rockets even to the Moon.
But, incredible or not, it was happening.
After the tension and excitement of the last few hours, Leigh felt the pressure of a maddening monotony. He was already weary from loading the plane. And he found this flight the most exhausting he had made.
The air was too thin—so thin the motor coughed and stuttered, even under both superchargers. Even with the oxygen hissing steadily, he felt faint and oppressed. And the cold was a savage thing. Even the heated suit failed to protect him.
Nothing changed. There was the ship and the silver tube. The Earth was soon a dimming point behind, beside the dimmer Moon, and Mars remained only a reddish point ahead. He ate a little, when the clock told him, from his scanty supplies.
Through the tube’s pale walls space looked very dark. The stars were more brilliant, more colorful, than he had ever imagined them. But in their myriads he found it almost impossible to discover any familiar constellation. He felt lost amid their alien splendor.
He watched the clock. Its hands crept with deadly slowness. One day at last was gone. Another began. His body prickled painfully and then went numb with cold and fatigue. Sleep dragged at his brain.
But the shattering of the log had told him what would happen if his attention wavered.
“If nonstop fliers are extinct,” he muttered once, “it’s a good thing for them.” In his first wild resolve and in all the hazards he had met, he had not thought of what might happen next. But now, in this endless monotony, he had ample time to ponder the question: What will I do when I get to Mars?
He had a .45 autoloading pistol and half a dozen extra clips of ammunition with him in the cockpit—a relic as ancient as the Phoenix. How, with such a weapon, was he to cope wi th the science that had made this interplanetary tube?
Presently his fatigue-drugged mind recoiled from the problem, baffled.
Every dragging revolution of the minute hand seemed an eternity. But Mars at last began to grow beside the endless argent coils of the tube. It became a swelling hypnotic eye.
He shook himself in the grasp of monotony and sleep. But Mars stared at him. It was the ocher-red eve of that sinister intelligence that was stripping the Earth of air. He tried not to look at it. For its red gaze was deadly.
He woke with a start. The old Phoenix creaked and shuddered. The right wing-tip had touched the silver wall, and it was shattered. Twisted metal caught the air, dragged. He set the rudder to compensate.
But the tube had begun to widen. The current of air was slowing. A resistless force pushed him forward in the cockpit. Wind screamed about the Phoenix. She was plunging down toward Mars.
He cut the throttle, pulled the old plane back into a spiral. Savage eddies hammered her. She groaned and strained. Bits of metal whipped away from the damaged wing. More and more, it dragged and fell.
But Mars was swiftly growing.
He studied the clock. Just fifty hours since he climbed off Manumotu beach. He must have come fifty million miles. A million miles an hour— let Laird Cragin beat that in a rocket!
The face of Mars grew broad beneath him. The orange-red of it was white-patched, more and more, with the stolen clouds of Earth. ,3ut he found the white ellipse of the shrinking polar cap the growing purple circle, above its retreating rim, where the Stellar Shell had landed.
Plunging down through widening funnel that cushioned the air-jet from the Earth, he held the steep spiral of the Phoenix toward that purple circle. He would land in the middle of it, he resolved. And try to deal at once, as best he could with exhausted body and inadequate equipment, with the mysterious science of its creators.
A reckless determination rose in him. A wild elation filled him—the first man to cross space. He was the representative of all mankind, and he felt the strength of all men in him. He was invincible. If he must, he thought, he would make a bullet of the Phoenix and dive into whatever seemed the heart of the enemy’s strength.
In his feverish excitement he wanted to push back the cockpit cover and yell. His lungs were burning. Then a glance at the barometic altimeter showed that it was registering. Air pressure was mounting again. He was suffer ng from oxygen intoxication. He partially closed the valve.
For a time a passing; cloud hid the purple spot. With battered binoculars, he studied the surface of tie planet beyond it. New lakes upon the reddish desert were black or mirror-like The olive-green bands around them must be vegetation.
The cloud moved on, and he could see the purple spot again, perhaps only twenty miles below. A patch of dense purple jungle, the binoculars revealed it, far ranker than the olive-green beyond. Had the invaders brought alien seed to Mars?
A green line cut the purple wilderness, opposite the polar crown. And, in the center of the jungle, he saw curious glints and sparklings of green. The glasses picked out machines there. A colossal latticed tube thrust upward.
That mighty metal finger pointed toward the silver funnel, toward the far-off Earth. It was the finger of doom. It, Leigh knew, was the thing he must destroy. He tipped the shuddering old Phoenixinto a steeper dive.
A long, long flight, lis dulled brain thought, just to bring a man to suicide. But for all mankind, for Elene Gayle and her science, even Laird Cragin and his rockets, it was the thing he had to do.
Or so he had resolved. But the gesture was denied him.
That long green finger moved abruptly in the purple jungle. It swung down from the Earth, to point at the diving plane. The Phoenix was struck a staggering
blow. If the power of that needle was the focused gravity of Mars, then a good deal of it, reversed, reacted on the ship. The impact battered Leigh into oblivion.
VI
When Carter Leigh came back to consciousness, the plane was spinning down in a power dive. Her ancient frame quivered; scraps of metal were vanishing from her injured wing. The damaged aileron was jammed again.
He yanked at the stick, fought to bring her out of the dive. He stopped her spinning, and her nose came slowly up. Then he looked below for a landing place. Shallow lakes of yellow rain water patched the red desert. He found a level ridge that looked firm and dry enough, extended the landing gear.
But the air even here at the surface was still very thin. Lesser gravity made a partial compensation, but the landing speed must still be dangerously high. Still he came down.
The red ridge flashed up at him, and he tried to level off. For all his efforts, the dragging right wheel touched first, too hard. The plane bounced, veered dangerously. The bounce carried him abnormally high. He had time to get the plane half straight again. Another bounce, to which the whole plane shook and groaned. Next time, in spite of him, the injured wing grazed and crumpled. He fought to right the ship; but the good wing dipped, plowed into red mud, and was shattered to kindling. The fuselage rebounded; skimmed along on its side for a hundred yards in a spray of crimson mud; at last was still.
Leigh clambered painfully out of the wreckage. He felt his bruised limbs. Despite the stunning finality of the crackup, he found no bones broken. His helmet had been knocked off. His lungs had to labor, but they found oxygen enough.
Pale yellow-green shoots, pulpy and fragile, were pushing up through the wet red soil at his feet. He had come to rest at the margin of a wide shallow lake, that mirrored the drizzling sky. Far beyond, above the gentle red hills patched with fresh olive-green, he could see a long low line of purple darkness. And his ears, after they had become accustomed to the silence, heard a continual distant roaring in the sky.
The Best of Jack Williamson Page 7
