The Best of Jack Williamson

by Jack Williamson

  Garth Hammond saw, in this bitter need, a great opportunity. His first, disastrous attempt to grasp it was suggested by his old associate, Molyneaux. Pseudo-engineer as well as quack doctor, Molyneaux revived an old project: a twelve-mile shaft in the planet’s crust, to tap possible mineral wealth and generate power from volcanic heat.

  The Volcano Steam and Metals Corporation proved to have been a singularly apt name for the enterprise. For, after a billion dollars had been spent to sink the great pit forty thousand feet, the bottom of it suddenly split. Men and refrigerating machines were drowned in flaming lava. A rain of boiling mud drowned the new city of Hammondspit, Virginia, taking twenty thousand lives.

  Molyneaux was killed in the eruption. Full responsibility for the disaster was somehow placed upon him. All the records of the corporation had been destroyed, and its tangled affairs were never entirely straightened. A fact, however, which used to rouse the ire of luckless investors, was that my father seemed to have lost nothing by the failure of the project.

  He remained prosperous enough, indeed, to purchase an entire island in the Aegean. There he built a marble replica of an ancient Roman villa, complete with all modern conveniences. There he took my mother as a bride—his second wife, she was Sabina Calhoun, frail, lovely daughter of an old aristocracy. And it was there, in 2130, the year after the disaster, that I was born.

  It was to that island palace that Trent soon came. Some Napoleonic complex drove my father always onward. He was already restless and uncontent, my mother used to tell me, before that epochal visit, whose results broke her heart and opened the conquest of so many worlds.

  Ared Trent had been busy for five years analyzing and publishing the results of the lunar expedition. He was a lean, tall fellow, habitually silent, methodical of habits, with a brilliant mathematical mind—and now on fire with a stupendous Idea.

  “These things on Mars!” His excitement stopped my father’s weary stalking through the marble halls. “On the Moon, without atmospheric interference, they photographed unmistakably—and they are worlds!”

  He flourished photographs and drawings.

  “Engineering works I About both the ice caps there are drainage channels, dams, pumps. Still operating mind you—for I saw square fields turn olive-green in the spring! The Schiaparelli ‘canals,’ I’m convinced, are cultivated belts!”

  He shuffled the photographs, excitedly.

  “And here’s something else, Hammond—I don’t know what.” An odd note of awe slowed his eager voice. “A thing shaped like . . . well, like a barrel. It’s dark. It’s half a mile thick. It stands alone on the desert plain, a few hundred miles northwest of Syrtis Major. It can be natural. Some construction—I can’t guess what. But—tremendous}”

  I can hear my father’s calm question: “Well, Trent. But what of it?”

  “Machinery!” cried Trent. “Colossal machines—running! But what is their source of power?” His dark eyes stared feverishly at my father. “Coal and hydrocarbon deposits must have been used up ages ago. Without seas, they have no tidal power. Rare atmosphere makes wind plants ineffectual. Sunshine is only about half as intense as here. Atomic power? I couldn’t guess!”

  He waved the papers. “No, Hammond, I don’t know what they have—but it’s something we haven’t got on Earth.”

  “Well, then, Trent,” my father calmly announced his decision, “we’re going out to Mars, you and I—and get it!”

  “To Mars!” The astronomer began to tremble. “Mars—if we could! What an opportunity!” His dark head shook. “But wait, Hammond! It’s hundreds of times as far as the Moon. Enormous technical difficulties. Trip would take two years, between oppositions. And cost millions!”

  “I’ve got the millions,” said Garth Hammond. “You can build the ship. We’re going!”

  My frightened mother pleaded in vain against the project. My father returned to America with Trent the very next day, to begin the preliminary arrangements. My mother, in frail health since my recent birth, remained on the island. He did not come back to live with her. His fancy soon turned to the visivox actress, Nada Vale. The next year my mother was quietly divorced, given the island home and a generous annuity. She was still devoted to Garth Hammond, and the separation was a hurt from which she could not recover.

  The Martian ship was two years building. Finished in 2132, it was a four-step rocket, each step containing thousands of cellules, each of which was a complete rocket motor with its own load of “alumilloid” fuel, to be fired once and then detached.

  The rocket stood on the summit of a mountain: a smaller mountain of glittering metal, tapering toward the top. A spidery ladder led up to a high, tiny opening. Bright sun shimmered on the metal and on the snow, but the December wind was bitterly cold. My mother lifted me off the snow, and so I found that she was sobbing.

  Trent and two others climbed up the ladder. Garth Hammond waited, his smile flashing, talking to a crowd of newsmen. Someone pushed through and thrust a legal paper at him. The investors in the power-pit were still bringing suits and getting out injunctions.

  I heard my father’s roaring laugh, and saw him tear the paper in two.

  “They say the arm of the law is long,” his great voice boomed. “But so is the road to Mars.”

  He whispered something to my weeping mother, and patted me on the head.

  “You used to reach for the Moon, Chan,” he said. “Well, I’m going to bring you something bigger.”

  He turned to mount the ladder, and then I saw another woman clinging to him. She was Nada Vale, the red-haired actress. I thought that she was beautiful, though I knew my mother didn’t like her. She was crying wildly, and hanging to my father. He pushed her away, and swiftly climbed the ladder.

  “Garth! Garth!” she was screaming. “You’ll be killed! You’ll never come back!”

  White-faced and silent, my mother took me down to the little village. From the window of our room in the small hotel, we could see the rocket, like a shining crown on the mountain. A siren moaned. Mother caught her breath. The whole mountain was suddenly swept with smoke and fire. Windows rattled, and there was a huge roar of wind and thunder. And mother pointed out a tiny speck, trailing fire, vanishing in the sky.

  “Your father, Chan,” she whispered. “Off to Mars!” She sat a long time, holding me tight in her arms. I was afraid to move. “That Nada Vale,” she breathed at last. “I . . . I’m sorry for her.”

  We went back to the island, and waited. The whole world waited for the next opposition, when they should return. Astronomers watched the Red Planet, radio hams trained loops on it. But there was no sign or signal. My fifth birthday came and passed. Hurtling Earth overtook Mars in its orbit, and left it swiftly behind.

  And still my father did not return.

  II

  For eight minutes that seemed eight centuries the four men in the ship were deafened and battered and mauled by the wild force of the rockets. Then followed sixty-seven days of silent monotony, as inertia flung them out toward the orbit of Mars.

  The nine tons of “pay load” included concentrated supplies carefully calculated to last two years; the stock of manufactured goods, chemicals, metals, and jewelry, which my father hoped to trade for the precious secret of Mars—and the arsenal of rifles, pistols and grenades, machine guns, a 37 mm. automatic cannon, and an especially designed automobile howitzer firing incendiary and demolition shells, which he I planned to bring into use if the secret were not voluntarily forthcoming.

  The two other men had been carefully selected. Burgess was a famous power engineer, who was also a linguist and therefore an expert in communication. Schlegel was a German artillery engineer, who had been military adviser to a dozen different revolutionists in that many countries, and was reputed to be worth two divisions. The four had drilled and practiced for six months with the weapons aboard—quite unaware of the disaster waiting.

  Every day the Red Planet grew. Engineering works and cultivated strips bec
ame unmistakably clear. And gray rectangular patches hinted of—cities?

  “Cities they are!” at last Trent cried. “And I’ve seen motion—some moving vehicle! Yes, Mars is alive, Hammond. Alive—but dying. Most of the fields are dead and brown. Most of the machines are stopped. Most of the cities are already drifted with the yellow sand.

  “And that . . . that thing, alone in the desert—”

  He turned the telescope again toward that chief riddle of Mars.

  “Looks like a rusty metal barrel,” he whispered. “Round in the middle, with hexagonal ends. Three thousand feet tall! And standing there alone, far from the nearest city, deserted. Its shadow like a mocking finger pointing—What could it be?”

  “Land near it,” my father said, “and we’ll find out before we call on the natives.”

  Trent eagerly agreed. But, when at last the ship was hurtling moonlike about the planet, braking her velocity in the upper atmosphere, one of the cellules in the second step exploded. Years later, a man named Grogan, whose family had all been killed in the power-pit disaster, confessed to willful sabotage in the plant where the cellules had been made. The electric firing system was wrecked. The ship plunged down, out of control.

  Frantic effort averted complete catastrophe. Trent detached the entire second step, began to fire the third. But controls were completely wrecked, and the cellules began to fire one another by conducted heat.

  Realizing that only a few seconds were left, Trent opened the valve, in desperate haste, to the rare atmosphere of Mars. Both of Schlegel’s legs had been broken by the fall. My father helped him out of the wreck, took him on his back, and ran after Trent and Burgess.

  Behind them, the thousands of cellules were thundering and vomiting out a mountain of smoke and fire. They had staggered only a short distance when there was a terrific final explosion. Metal fragments shrieked about them. The German’s head, beside my father’s, was blown completely off. Burgess received a wound in the chest from which he died after Trent had removed a scrap of ragged steel.

  Both injured, Trent and my father survived. But their plight seemed grave enough. Food, water, and oxygen masks were lost. They found the air of Mars, on account of its relatively high oxygen content, breathable, but it did not allow violent or sustained exertion. Their stock in trade was lost, also the collection of models, pictures, books, radio and motion-picture equipment, with which they had hoped to establish communication. The weapons were gone, and their fighting man. Final and most crushing blow, return to Earth seemed forever cut off.

  Blackened and bleeding, Trent stood looking back at the wreckage, wringing his lacerated hands.

  “My free space observations,” he was moaning. “And all our equipment—”

  “Hammond Power has taken a tumble, all right,” my father agreed, and gasped painfully for breath. “But we aren’t sold out!” He wiped at the blood that kept trickling into his eyes, and stared about the flat desolation. In every direction swept an interminable waste of low, rusty dunes. “Where”—a wisp of acrid saffron dust set him to coughing—“where are we?”

  “Ten degrees, probably, north of the equator.” My father’s head still rang from the blast, and Trent’s voice, in the thin air, sounded very small and far away. “At least a thousand miles west of that barrel-thing.”

  My father stared at him and up at the shrunken Sun.

  “The night—”

  “Unless we find shelter,” Trent agreed, “the night will kill us.” He peered southward. “There’s a settled strip. I had just a glimpse, as we came down. Maybe ten miles. Maybe two hundred. I don’t know how fast we were moving.”

  My father nodded suddenly. “We can try. Let’s go.”

  “First,” Trent said, “the others.”

  Very hastily, panting with the effort, they covered Burgess and the

  German in shallow sand graves. A brief search of the vast shell hole where the rocket had fallen revealed no useful article intact. Empty-handed, clad in torn, scorched rags, they plodded southward across the dunes. My father was wearing a pair of inadequate soft slippers. They soon fell apart, and he went on barefoot.

  “Hammond Power,” my father whispered, and coughed again. “Two queer beings on Earth would probably wind up in some zoo—unless some panicky citizen shot them first! Their chance to learn, say, the science of sub-electronics—” He shook his head. “Do you suppose they saw us?”

  “Possible,” said Trent. And, within an hour, they knew that their arrival was known. For a small bright-red aircraft, which had a double streamlined shape, like two thick cigars fastened side by side, came silently over the dunes from the south.

  The two men, in a sudden panic, tried to hide in the sand. The machine circled noiselessly above the wrecked rocket, and then flew back above them, without landing. They ran after it, at last, waving and shouting frantically, but it paid them no heed.

  They struggled on. The rarefied air, Trent commented, and the lesser gravitation, tended toward a physiological balance. But both were coughing. Their lungs had begun to burn. Trent discovered that he had a rising fever.

  Both were tormented by extreme thirst, as the dry atmosphere sucked moisture from their bodies. And there was no water.

  The small Sun was low and red, and a thin, piercing, icy wind had sprung up out of the east before they saw the first actual Martians. It was Trent who looked back from the summit of a low dune, gulped voicelessly, and pointed.

  The Martians came following the two sets of plodding prints in the sand. They rode yellow, ferocious-looking armored beasts that hopped like gigantic fleas. They wore bright leatherlike garments, and flourished gleaming weapons and rode astride and upright, like men.

  Like men. That unexpected pursuit filled Trent and my father with a sudden blind fear. They fled uselessly across the dunes. But still, so strong is man’s anthropomorphism, they thought of those wild riders in essentially human terms.

  Actually, perhaps, the dominant beings of Mars proved more manlike than the explorers had any right to expect. They were bipeds, walking upright. They had two-eyed faces of a sort. They communicated with a guttural, rasping speech.

  For all that, however, the Martians have more in common with the arthropoda. Horny exoskeletons and fine-meshed scales instead of skin, with muscles and vital organs shielded in tubular armor. But in the chemistry of vital fluids and metabolic processes, in the subtler psychological reactions, they are like nothing on Earth.

  This small mounted band had trailed Trent and my father from the wreck. One of the hopping beasts was laden with scraps of twisted metal, and some of the beings had bits of Burgess’ and Schlegel’s blood-soaked clothing.

  The flight was soon ended. The Martians carried long red lances whose hollow metal shafts, it swiftly developed, served also as guns. Angry bullets kicked up rusty dust. The savage riders shrieked. The leaping beasts made a dismal and blood-chilling baying.

  Trent stumbled, suddenly, and couldn’t rise. My father stopped beside him, breathless, with his lungs on fire. The gaunt, inhuman riders bore down upon them. They were an appalling lot, with their unfamiliar visages and their fine-scaled skins brightly hued in red, yellow, and purple. They surrounded the two men, and leapt down to rescue them from the fangs and talons of their beasts.

  The men were hastily bound to a sort of packsaddle on one of the beasts, and the band turned northward again. The red double ship appeared again, before sunset, following from the south. The riders scattered, and began to fire at it with the long red tubes. It circled high above them, dropped a bomb that lifted an ineffectual pillar of dense, angry dust, and returned once more toward its unseen base.

  Events confirmed my father’s surmise that their captors were nomad enemies of the “canal” dwellers. That night, long after dark, the fugitive band took refuge in a labyrinth of burrows that must have been dug by the powerful claws of the hopping creatures. The captives were fed and allowed to sleep. Before dawn, the march was resumed. The resp
iratory trouble of the prisoners became more serious. Both sank into a fevered delirium. By the time they began to recover, the band had taken refuge in a hidden ravine where a tiny spring supplied water and grew a little forage for the beasts.

  There they were held for several months, gradually learning a little of their captors’ language and a few facts about them. Leader of the band was a gnarled, haggard, long-limbed savage, of a rusty-red color, named Zynlid. He and his outlaw clan maintained themselves by raiding the fields and cities of the canal dwellers, keeping up an ancient and bitter feud with the rulers of civilized Mars.

  When my father recovered from the pulmonary fever, he grasped again his original audacious object: to obtain the secret of the Martian power plants. That alone, he told Trent, would possibly enable their return to Earth.

  Zynlid must have taken the two men partly out of mere curiosity, and partly from the hope of ransom. The canal dwellers, it seems, refused to bargain for the prisoners. But, out of their first efforts at communications, came a new and puzzling prestige.

  The gaunt chieftain’s notions of astronomy, it developed, were rather vague. From Trent’s attempts—with drawings on the sand and gestures at the sky—to show that they had come from the third planet, Zynlid jumped to the idea that the two were natives of the Sun.

  And his regard for beings of the Sun was considerable. He ordered their bonds removed, offered them choice food, drinks, and female companions, gave them liberty of the camp, and allowed my father to ride with him on future raids. Trent and my father made no attempt to disabuse him of the misunderstanding.

  Their questions were now eagerly answered, but it was some time before they were able to make any intelligible query about power. Meantime, Trent was allowed to examine the few machines in the possession of the nomads. These included the long guns and the equipment that gave light and heat in the dwelling-burrows.

  The savages, it seemed, had no comprehension of the operation of these machines. There was a taboo, moreover, associated with them, so that Zynlid was horrified when Trent first began to take a little heater-lamp apart, and permitted him to go ahead only on reflection that he was a solar being.