The Best of Jack Williamson

by Jack Williamson

  That roar was the wind of stolen air from Earth. That line was the purple jungle. Beyond it was the great machine of the stellar invaders, that had to be destroyed. Leigh, as wearily confident as if nothing were now impossible, set about that distant project.

  He snapped the action of the old automatic, slipped it in his pocket. Two five-gallon tins of gasoline and the remaining cylinders of oxygen he made into a bale, padded with his thick flying suit.

  On Earth, he could not have moved them. Even here, their weight was eighty pounds, and his own sixty more. The burden simplified the matter of walking. But the effort of breathing taxed his lungs.

  The horizon was closer than it looked. He dwelt upon that fact for encouragement, and walked toward the barrier of the unknown jungle. The roaring grew louder in the sky. He reeled with fatigue. The slow drizzle of stolen moisture continued, interrupted with flurries of sleet. Cold sank into his bones.

  He came at last to the jungle and super-cactus. Jagged purple spines grew with a visible motion; they stabbed into the red mud, sprouted, lifted new barbed lances. It was a barrier too thick and dense to hope to cross.

  Utterly disheartened, he flung down his burden. Mechanically, he ate a can of beans he had slipped into the pack. Then quite suddenly he slipped into sleep.

  The slow thrust of a living bayonet wakened him, drenched and stiff with cold. His chest felt congested and breathing took a painful effort. He picked up his burden and slogged off westward through the red mud, skirting the advancing jungle.

  It was in that direction that he thought he had seen the green slash. An exhausting hour brought him to it—a broad level pavement of some glistening, bright-green stuff. The surface was perfect, but the bank beneath it had a surprising look of antiquity.

  This road came straight out of the north. It cut into the jungle, the walls of purple thorns arching over it. After brief hesitation—lest he meet its masters unawares-—Leigh trudged in upon it.

  The purple shadow of the jungle fell upon him. The roaring continued in the sky; cold rain and sleet fell endlessly. Leigh plodded endlessly on, ignoring fatigue and cold and hunger. Once he stopped to drink from a puddle on the road. A lancing pain stabbed through his chest.

  A humming clatter startled him. He stepped off the road, thrust himself into the purple spines. A huge three-wheeled conveyance came swiftly along the pavement. The bed of it was piled with something pale-green and crystalline—something mined, perhaps, in the equatorial regions.

  Straining his eyes in the purple dusk to see the driver Leigh glimpsed only a gelatinous arm. "That arm and a yellow eye and another translucent waving limb were all he ever saw of the actual invaders. Their nature, the motives and the course of their flight, the mysteries of their science, the extent of their designs upon the solar system—all these remain defined only by conjecture and dread. The invaders remain but a dark-limned shadow of the unknown.

  The brief polar night was already falling when the truck passed. It was bitterly cold. The rain turned again to driving pellets of sleet, and heavy frost crackled over the roadway and the jungle spines.

  The roaring overhead was louder now. A greenish glow filtered down the tunnel of the road. And at last, dead with fatigue,

  Leigh dragged himself to the edge of the central clearing in the jungle.

  He perceived no source of light. But the surrounding wall of thorns and the fantastic structures before him were visible in a dull green radiance. He saw what must have been the remains of the Stellar Shell—a huge projectile, whose nose had plowed deep into the plane t. Half its upper parts had been cut away; it must have served as a mine of the green metal.

  Beyond it, swung between three massive piers, was the latticed tube, now horizontal, pointing across the pole toward the unseen Earth. Leigh caught his breath. Nerved with a last spurt of unsuspected strength, he staggered forward in the green shadow of the Stellar Shell.

  Nothing stopped him. He swayed across a little open space beyond, dropped with his burden in the darkness between the three piers. His hands began shaping a basin in the half-frozen mud.

  A hoarse coughing hoot from some half-seen structure beyond, spurred him to desperate haste. He ripped open his bale, began pouring his ten gallons of gasoline into the basin. An unaccountable rasping rattle lifted the hair at the back of his neck. He heard a metal c alter, nearer.

  Fumbling desperately, he opened the cocks of the oxygen cylinders. The compressed stuff came out with a hissing roar, half liquid, half gas. It evaporated and enveloped him in a cloud of frost.

  He turned the blue jets into the gasoline. Ticklish work. Before the invention of the cathion blast, gasoline and oxygen had been the favorite fuel of rocket experimenters. An efficient mixture of them, as makers of aerial bombs had sometimes demonstrated, had five tines the explosive energy of nitroglycerine.

  This wouldn’t be a very efficient mixture. The gasoline froze into brittle blue chunks, and the oxygen was swiftly boiling away. The results were unpredictable.

  Above the dying hiss of the jets, Leigh heard that rattle and the rasping hoot, very close to him now. He straightened in the thick white fog, an I saw the yellow eye. A huge luminescent yellow pupil, fringed with a ragged membrane.

  A pointed metal rod, glowing with strange green, appeared beneath the eye. It thrust toward him through the fog. Leigh stumbled backward; his numbed fingers found the automatic, fired into the yellow eye. It blinked and vanished, and the rod clattered in the fog.

  Leigh staggered back to the end of the Stellar Shell and began shooting into his mud basin between the three great piers. At his third shot, the world turned to blue flame, and went out utterly.

  The massive green wall of the cosmic projectile shielded him from the blast. And it sheltered him somewhat from the tempest that followed.

  He came to, lying in the freezing mud, nostrils bleeding, head ringing. Dragging himself up behind the shielding barrier, he saw that all the great structures of the invaders had been leveled. The green glow had gone from them.

  He started at some motion in the gray twilight; it was a gelatinous arm, waving slowly above a pool of mud. He emptied the automatic at it—and it sank.

  Then the wind came. The interplanetary air-jet, now that the cushioning forces by which the invaders had sheltered themselves had been removed, came down in a shrieking blast. The mighty walls of the Stellar Shell were all that stood before it.

  For half an hour, battered and half suffocated, Leigh clung to a metal bar in its shelter. The wind blew itself out abruptly, the last of the ravished air. The small sun rose warmingly in a sky suddenly serene, and Leigh slept half the day in its heat.

  In the afternoon, still aching with weariness, he found the roadway again, and plodded back through the flattened jungle toward the wreck of the Phoenix. Hungry, bitter with loneliness, he began to regret that he had survived.

  Some swift decay had attacked the fallen purple thorns, but the native life of Mars was thriving exceedingly. In the changing landscape, it was difficult to find the plane. When at last he reached it, he ate the solitary can of corned beef that remained of his supplies and then rigged up a directional antenna for the transmitter.

  For several reasons, this last hopeless message was important. He wanted to end the fears of the Earth; wanted to help Tick Tinker; and he wanted Dr. Elene Kathrine Gayle to know that he had flown nonstop to Mars, usefully, with gasoline.

  “Mars, calling Earth,” he repeated. “Carter Leigh, on Mars, calling C Q, Earth. Landed here yesterday. Destroyed invaders last night with gasoline bomb. Anticipate no danger further loss of air. Inform Tick Tinker, New York, nonstop flight to Mars made with Zerolube oil. Now marooned on Mars. Goodbye, Earth.”

  He repeated that message, between intervals of sleep, until the little battery was exhausted. Then he set himself, wearily and without hope, to begin the life of the first Robinson Crusoe of space.

  In a pot cut from the end of a gasoline tank, he made stews, quee
r-flavored but edible, from the fruits and seed of some of the native plants. Hoping to reach a less severe climate in the equatorial regions and driven by a desire to learn more of whatever lost people had built the road, he stowed all the useful articles he could salvage upon a sledge made from the elevator of the Phoenix, and set off northward along the straight green pave.

  The Earth, now drawing away from Mars, was a splendid golden morning star. Sight of it, in the frosty dawns when he could not keep warm enough to sleep, filled him with tragic loneliness.

  One day he threw away the gun, to end his desire to use it on himself. The next he turned back along the road, and spent all the day to find it and clean it again. But when it was ready he put it on the sledge and plodded on down the glassy pavement.

  He had counted thirty Martian days. With the slow advance of spring, and his weary progress northward, the climate had become a little more endurable. He was cheered sometimes by the sight of young, familiar-looking shoots—grown from seed borne upon that interplanetary wind.

  But his body was gaunt with privation. He had a recurrent painful cough. Sometimes his meals from the Martian plants brought violent Indigestion. The end, he clearly saw, would be the same, whether he used the gun or not.

  Then the night, the incredible night, when he woke in his chill bed beside a smouldering fire to hear the familiar rhythmic drum of cathion rockets. He saw a blue star following down the roadway from the south. Breathless and quivering, he sprang up to feed his fire.

  Mantled in the blue flame of its forward jets, the rocket came down upon the road. His firelight showed the legend on its side: Gayle Foundation. It would be Laird Cragin, he supposed, another exile—

  But the bare grimy yellow head that appeared, when its thick door swung open, was the head of Elene Gayle.

  “Greetings, Mr. Lucky Leigh,” her brisk voice said. “And congratulations on the aptness of your nickname. . . . You are all right?”

  “Right as rain,” he croaked hoarsely. “Only—surprised! ”

  “We finished the rocket.” She was oddly breathless. “When the guns and explosives were no longer necessary, we loaded it with return fuel and supplies for a few weeks of exploration.”

  “Cragin?” demanded Leigh.

  “There were two places,” said the girl. “After we took off, I made him drop back by parachute.” Her voice was suddenly very crisp. “I have the honor to bring you, Leigh, in token of the gratitude of Earth for your recent remarkable nonstop flight, the medals and awards—”

  Her voice broke abruptly. She stumbled out of the rocket, and came running across the strange pavement to meet him. In his arms, trembling, she clung to him.

  The Crucible of Power

  • • •

  I

  This, my father’s story, must begin with the great pandemic that was the background of his life, as it had been, since the twentieth century, the deadly background of human history. The Falling Sickness first attacked workers in a Greenland radium mine, in 1998. Baffled doctors talked of spores swept to Earth by the light-pressure of the Great Supernova of 1991. More probably, however, the new virus was a radiation-born mutation from some malignant proteide already known—quite possibly, even, from one of those responsible for the “common cold.”

  The disease attacked all nerve tissue. Commonly the ganglions and plexuses of the ear were first affected. The victims were deafened, deprived of sense of balance, usually terrified with a sensation of endless headlong falling—hence the malady’s popular name.

  The Falling Sickness struck without warning. People fell suddenly, at work or in the street, shrieking in fear, clutching wildly at objects about them. The infection spread swiftly from the auditory nerve, causing blindness, agonized paroxysms, nightmarish hallucinations, coma, paralysis, often stoppage of the heart, and death.

  It is impossible, now, to convey anything of the horror and the magnitude of that pandemic. Only one person in five had a natural immunity, and a frantic medical science failed to find either artificial immunization or successful treatment. A third of the victims were dead in three days, and another third were left blind or hopelessly crippled. In a century and a half, three billions died of it—more than the total population of the planet at any one time.

  The clock of civilization was stopped. The brilliant scientific advance of the twentieth century seemed lost in a hundred years of stagnation, dread, and decay. Endless wars rivaled the horrors of the virus.

  By 2100, however, mankind seemed on the way to slow recovery. The plague still claimed ten million lives a year, but immunity, by inexorable natural selection, was increasing. Courage began to return. Government, industry, science, and civilization struggled to resume their interrupted march.

  My father, Garth Hammond, was born in the last year of the Black Century. His life might be accounted for in terms of the dark age that produced him. But I beg the visivox listener to try to see him as something more than the end product of a rugged heredity fighting to survive in a grimly hostile environment. For he was more than that. He was more, even, than the daring explorer of space, the stalwart captain of industry, the dashing Don Juan, the heartless capitalist, the greatest philanthropist, the dictator of the solar system and the conqueror of the Sun. Men have called him the most black-hearted, villainous hero the System ever knew. He was all those things, I know. But, also, he was a human being.

  He was a tall and powerful man. His quick gray eyes had a keenness often disconcerting. Yet always he kept the ready geniality that came from the days when he was an impecunious and nimble-witted stock promoter. Even after the years had whitened the abundant shock of hair above his ruggedly handsome, black-browed face, he retained a vast attraction for women. My mother was not the first whose heart he broke, nor the last.

  Garth Hammond has become the demigod of the whole creed of Success. Billions have been astonished at the penniless boot-boy who rose to be financial dictator of nine worlds. Millions of other boot-boys, I suppose, must have been inspired by his example to frantic application of dye and brush.

  It is true enough that once, for a few months, he attended the boots of passengers on a transatlantic stratoplane. But his rise was due to something more than mere industry. He cultivated a pathetic limp, and told sympathetic travelers a pathetic story of his mother crippled for life by the Falling Sickness—actually she had died from falling down a tenement air shaft when he was two years old. Discharged for such methods of business, he began selling knickknacks and visivox spools about the stations. The eye of a young competitor was blacked by a mysterious assailant, and his missing stock in trade discovered to have been mysteriously shipped—collect—to the Mayor of Zamboanga.

  That is the beginning, crooked enough perhaps, yet with its hint of the imaginative resource that accompanied my father’s ruthless ambition. His commercial career was not really launched, however, until after Cornwall’s spectacular voyage to the Moon, in 2119.

  Captain Thomas Cornwall was a young ordnance engineer, on leave from the army. His rocket was the first to attain the velocity of escape—113 km/sec. His triumphant return, after two weeks on the Moon, won him the world’s frantic acclaim. The feat seemed symbolic of the reawakening of man, after the long night of the Black Century. And it showed my father the way to make his first millions.

  For he was soon engaged in the manufacture of “Hammond’s Lunar Oil.” This elixir, secretly concocted on the prescription of a notorious quack of the time, “Dr.” Emile Molyneaux, was “warranted to contain essential oils from rare lunar shrubs.” It was advertised as a specific for most of the multitudinous ills of the human race. Sales, especially in those parts of the world where the Falling Sickness was still most prevalent, were tremendous.

  Cornwall started legal difficulties with an indignant public statement that he had brought back no plant specimens from the Moon. My father’s reply was to finance a lunar expedition of his own.

  One Dr. Ared Trent, a lean, brilliant, inten
se young astrophysicist, had just rediscovered the cellular principle of rocket construction. Although no larger than Cornwall’s, his rocket was far more efficient. He was able to carry two companions and a good deal of equipment, including a dismantled telescope.

  The “Hammond’s Oil Expedition” remained one hundred days on the Moon, and safely brought back specimens and observations of great scientific value. The adventure was well publicized—and sales of the elixir boomed again.

  In order to meet the enormous demand, however, the compound was varied with cheaper chemicals and an increasing amount of water.

  This, together with Trent’s delay about publishing any description of the supposed plant life found on the Moon, brought more legal trouble. There were charges that mistaken dependence on the elixir had resulted in thousands of deaths. My father finally closed the plant.

  But Garth Hammond had already harvested millions, and he was ready, now, for a greater enterprise. He was not long in finding it. His first attempt led to disaster—for all but himself. Then Trent’s photographic studies of Mars, made from the Moon, precipitated the most momentous events of modern times.

  Reborn after the Black Century, industry soon faced a grave “power famine.” Reserves of oil and coal were depleted; river and tidal power projects had been developed to the practicable limits; increased demands for food cut off conversion of the agricultural surplus into fuel alcohol; direct utilization of solar power still seemed as much a dream as atomic energy. And power, my father realized, was the key to greatness.

  “Power, Chan,” he used to tell me, “is power!”

  Prices rose; wages sank. The rich were the owners of power sites or fuel reserves; the poor, “power starved,” forbidden private transportation, actually hungry, shivered in helpless discontent.