The Best of Jack Williamson

by Jack Williamson

  Trent himself made little of the investigation. The machines were electrical—even the rifles were fired by the sudden vaporization of water with electricity. The current came from little transparent tubes. These were hollow, with a metal electrode fused in one end, and a lump of a curious greenish crystal in the other. In the space between were a few tiny specks of dust, that had a silver-blue color and gave off a pale blue light when the tube was working.

  “It’s that dust, Hammond,” Trent told my father. “A pinch of it will generate thousands of kilowatts, evidently. Lord knows what it is!”

  The outlaw chieftain, when they had more of his confidence and his language, could only tell them that the fine blue grains were “dust of the Sun.” They came, he said, “from the place of the Sun.” And it was forbidden for others than the gorath-wein, the “blood of the Sun,” to touch them. He himself refused even to look at Trent’s dismantled mechanisms.

  Pressed by my father and excited by his own scientific enthusiasm, Trent continued his fumbling experiments until a day when he was almost killed by the terrific explosion of a grain of the blue dust. Fragments of a metal crucible drilled his body like rifle bullets. He was helpless for a month.

  “It’s got me, Hammond,” he admitted hopelessly. “Atomic energy? I don’t know. There’s no key—unless we can get it from the civilized tribes.”

  The accident lowered their prestige as beings of the Sun. Muttering of “the wrath of the Sun” and “the revenge of the holy stone,” Zynlid forbade Trent, on his recovery, to continue the experiments. And it might have gone much harder with the two men had not my father already become a trusted companion of Zynlid.

  That lawless, marauding life seems to have appealed immensely to Garth Hammond. He flung himself into it with his old shrewd daring and all the strength of Earth-muscles. There was a duel with one of Zynlid’s chief lieutenants, who was jealous of the warrior of the Sun. My father killed the savage, and thereafter found himself in possession of the dead Martian’s weapons and mount.

  Although excessive effort soon made him breathless, so that the band nicknamed him “the panting one,” he was able to outdo them all in wrestling and contests of strength. He took a keen delight in the strategy of raid, escape, and ambuscade. Zynlid began to rely on his cleverness. His belt was soon bright with the vivid-hued ear-appendages of the canal folk, taken as trophies.

  He discovered, presently, that the band knew of the immense dark barrel-shaped object that Trent had observed from the Moon. They regarded it with considerable awe. It was the Korduv, the “place of the Sun,” or sometimes “place of the holy stone.” And all save the gorath-wein were forbidden to approach it.

  “There’s your key,” he told Trent. “There’s where the silver dust comes from.”

  As soon as Trent had recovered sufficiently from the explosion, my father arranged an expedition to take them near the mysterious object. The Martians refused to go within a hundred miles of it, and allowed Trent and my father to approach it only on fresh assurance of their solar birth.

  A vast excitement fevered them as their yellow-armored leaping dragons brought them in view of the dark mass looming above the flat and limitless red dunes. Was this the key to exhaustless power and the road back to Earth?

  For many miles they rode forward across the desert, and the red-black enigma loomed vaster and vaster before them. At last, riding through the cold black shadow of it, they came to its base.

  Its stupendous mass was metal, they discovered, pitted with the acid of untold centuries, crusted with dark-red oxides. The dunes were drifted against it; westward the winds had cut out a vast curved hollow. Stunned with awe, they let the beasts carry them around its vast hexagon, and then withdrew to stare upward at it.

  There was no possible opening in its base. Fifteen hundred feet upward, my father saw a square recess that looked like a portal. But that was in the overhanging, cylindrical middle section. There was no possibility of climbing to it. At last, no wiser, they turned back to their rendezvous with ZynLid—to be greeted with an awed surprise that the Sun had permitted their escape.

  “These gorath-wein have got the key, Trent,” my father concluded. “And we’ve got to have it.”

  And he began to discuss with the somewhat horrified Zynlid plans for abducting Anak, who was “Lance of the Sun,” and priest-king of the civilized Martians, ruling from his Sun-temple in the city Ob.

  “Anak knows secrets of peril,” warned Zynlid, apprehensively. “And he is guarded by the hosts of the Sun.”

  “We know secrets also,” my father retorted. “And the Sun sent me to take the place of Anak, who is an impostor in the temple.”

  Still seeking to convince the old nomad, he called on Trent for scientific miracles. All Trent’s equipment had been lost in the wreck. An effort to demonstrate gunpowder now failed for want of free sulphur.

  But at last the astronomer, if he still failed to grasp the mysterious principle of the blue dust of power, was able to repair and operate certain mechanisms that the outlaws had captured.

  One that had lain a mystic but useless relic, gathering dust in a secret treasure-cavern for a full Martian century, now proved to be a weapon. A score of the enigmatic little tubes fed a Niagara of power to transformers and field coils. Its polar plates projected a tight beam of magnetic energy, whose terrific hysteresis effect could fuse metal at twenty miles distance.

  The triumphant demonstration of this rusted war-engine restored all Trent’s shaken prestige, and secured full support of the nomads for my father’s daring plan—although most of them must have been secretly trembling with dread of Anak and his solar powers.

  It was known that the priests of the Sun visited the inexplicable lonely mass of the Korduv at intervals, by air. My father packed the magnetic weapon on one of the hopping creatures, and carried it to a point fifty miles from the stupendous barrel-thing.

  There, braving the heat and the cold, the thirst and the dust of the open desert, he and Trent and a handful of the nomads waited for thirty-eight endless days. At last a double red ship came soaring over the dunes, toward the dark, far-off pillar of the Korduv. The outlaws were suddenly terrified.

  “The gorath-wein!” came their hoarse, uncanny croaks of fear. “Flee I Or the Sun will slay us all!”

  They scrambled to prod their beasts from the sand-burrows and mount them. But the invisible ray, with Trent and my father feverishly busy at the unfamiliar controls, brought down the red ship. The flight turned to a mad attack on the fallen machine.

  Three priests and a priestess aboard were slaughtered. The only survivor was a young female child. Anak, whom my father had hoped to capture, had not been aboard. He soon discovered, however, that the Martian woman had been consort of the priest-king, and that the infant, Asthore, was his daughter.

  Another red ship, sent no doubt to investigate the fate of the first, was also brought down. From the wreckage of the two, aided by two Martians captured in the second, Trent set out to put together one complete vessel. He worked day and night. The outlaws helped, and cheerfully tortured the two prisoners whenever they became reluctant.

  Before the ambitious task was done, however, a land force appeared, marching from the direction of Ob. There were two great machines like tanks, and a hundred lancers on foot. In the desperate battle that followed, Trent never left the ship and his reluctantly persuaded instructors. He was just learning the principle of the ship’s propulsion, by a system of gravity-shielding “spacial fields.”

  For a time the situation looked very bad. My father was able to cripple both war machines with the magnetic ray. But then a similar ray from one of the tanks discovered and fused his own weapon. The bright-scaled lancers charged, howling triumphantly.

  My father gathered his five or six allies at the crest of a low yellow dune, and waited for the charge. As the yelling lancers came down the opposite slope, he walked boldly out alone to meet them, with the grave statement that he was their new rule
r, sent from the Sun.

  That halted proceedings for a ticklish half-hour—until Zynlid arrived with the balance of the bandit band. That was the signal for all hands to fall upon the lancers. They were cut down, to the last Martian. There were new weapons for every outlaw, and my father made himself a triumphant wreath of ear appendages.

  Next day, as scouts brought word that all the eight surviving cities were sending contingents of warriors to Ob, Trent finished his repairs and safely flew the ship. The nomads triumphantly butchered the two captive priests, and ate their brains and livers in a ceremonial feast.

  My father sent Trent aboard the ship with a crew of nomads and the little Martian girl, back into the northern desert. Zynlid, his hopping beasts laden with the spoils of victory, started back toward the hidden ravine. And my father rode alone toward the city of Ob.

  After three lonely, grim days, parched and sunburned and chapped with alkali dust, he guided his beast into the “canal”—a belt of fertile, dark soil, irrigated from underground conduits and covered with lowlying, thick-leaved plants. He parleyed with the warriors who came to meet him, and they conducted him, half a prisoner, into the city.

  Dark buildings sprawled flat and massive behind the walls and hedges that held back the seas of yellow sand. Although the city had several thousand inhabitants, and the central part about the towering conical Sun temple was now thronged with the lancers gathered to avenge the outrage against the sacred ship, by far the greater part of Ob was mere crumbling ruin. Its gaunt, bright-scaled people seemed to my father like lonely ghosts, trying to haunt a far-spreading necropolis. Mars was far gone in death.

  Stating that he was an ambassador from the Sun, my father demanded audience with Anak. Suspiciously, yet with respect born of the unprecedented disaster to the sacred ship, the lancers took my father to the ancient, many-terraced pile of crumbling black masonry that was the temple. There Anak met him.

  The ruler was a tall, gaunt Martian, stiff with pride. Age had darkened his lustrous scales to a purple-black, and the horny carapace that crowned his egg-shaped head was crimson. His dark face was lean, hawklike, deeply wrinkled. Jet-black, yellow-rimmed, his eyes flamed with virulent hatred.

  When my father advanced his old claim to being a dweller in the Sun, Anak shot him a look of startled incredulity that hinted of an astronomical lore greater than Zynlid’s. Ungraciously impatient, he listened. My father told him that his wife and baby daughter were prisoners, and that they would be released safely only in return for certain information.

  What information P—Anak wanted to know. When my father began to hint that it dealt with the mysterious power tubes and the enigmatic mass of the Korduv, the priest-king burst into a savage rage. He snatched at a weapon, rasped and croaked and hissed like something reptilian.

  Finally, menacing my father with a level lance, he champed out the gutturals: “Base and lying stranger, whencesoever you come, I, the true Lance of the Sun, know you never dwelt in his sacred fires. The foul dogs of the desert may believe your imposture, but not I. The holy flame of Life would consume you in an instant.”

  The red shaft thrust viciously.

  “I love my wife Wahneema,” grated Anak. “I love my child Asthore. But better that both should perish by your tortures than that I should desecrate the secrets of the Sun. Go back to the evil beasts that sent you, and die of the Sun’s flaming anger.”

  All my father’s desperate threats and promises—even the ingenious hint that a space fleet was on its way from Earth to rescue him and conquer Mars—proved in vain. Anak grimly resigned him to “the judgment of the Sun.”

  The Martians kept his beast, stripped him of weapons and clothing, and finally released him, naked and alone, in the midst of a sand desert far southward of Ob. This was remote from the usual haunts of the outlaws, and death of thirst and exposure seemed a certainty—until Trent, who had been spying from the sky, picked him up with the captured ship.

  Two nights later, with Zynlid and a picked band of his men, they landed the ship on the topmost terrace of the Sun temple. Under the feeble spark of Phobos, creeping backward across the sky, they slaughtered the surprised temple guard. My father led the howling bandits down into the ancient pile. They found Anak, standing beneath a glowing yellow disk in a chapel of the Sun. He fought savagely, gravely wounding the outlaw chief. But my father snatched away his lance, and he was dragged aboard the vessel before the roused horde of warriors could reach the roof from the temple courtyard.

  The ship launched upward with bullets ringing against her hull. Triumphantly, my father commanded Anak to answer Trent’s excited questions. But the wrinkled old priest refused to talk. Cheerfully jesting, the outlaws began to apply torture. But the seamed dark face merely stiffened stoically.

  It was Zynlid, after Trent had patched up his wounds, who solved the difficulty.

  “He will never talk willingly,” rasped the old bandit “Give him this. It is a key to locked lips.”

  And he handed Trent a tiny hypodermic, loaded with a few drops of some colorless liquid. The drug seemed to resemble scopolamine in being a sort of “truth serum.” It ended Anak’s stubborn silence, and Trent at last began to learn the secret of the blue power-dust.

  The old priest was kept drugged for nearly two months, constantly questioned—except on one occasion, when the injection must have failed to take effect. Then, feigning the influence of the drug, he told a series of clever lies and pretended to demonstrate another secret of the dust. Only my father’s vigilance and a sudden tackle prevented an explosion that would have annihilated them all.

  Finally, they took Anak into the colossal metal hull of the Korduv.

  The frantic searchers from Ob somehow discovered their presence there. My father closed the lofty entrance valve, and, with Zynlid and his band, held it for three weeks against the desperate attackers, while Trent questioned the drugged ruler, explored all the mysterious depths of that ancient desert enigma, and made complete plans of all its colossal mechanisms.

  Slowly, the astronomer pieced together the solution to the riddles of the blue dust and theKorduv and the limitless power that drove the engines of Mars—and found it an astounding revelation. The strange granules, which they came to call “sunstone,” had come, quite literally, from the Sun I

  Trent came at last to my father, in the beleaguered valve, trembling with the import of his discoveries.

  “This is a ship!” he made the startling announcement. “The Korduv is an interplanetary ship. It was built nearly half a million Martian years ago, when the planet was at its peak of civilization. It has made thirty trips to the Sun, at intervals of ten or twenty thousand years, for sunstone.”

  “Sunstone?” echoed my father. “The power-dust?”

  “Pure power!” cried the scientist. “Frozen, portable power—power storage, perfected to the last degree. It is condensed radiant energy—a complex, not of atoms and electrons, but of pure photons.

  “Light particles, fixed! The mathematics of it is revolutionary. A radical extension of quantum physics! It also accounts for the gravity-reflecting space warp that lifts the ship, and the same field of strain can be modified to reflect radiant energy, for protection against any excess of the solar radiations.

  “With a crew of two thousand Martians—the race, in those days, was more numerous and more venturesome—the Korduv was navigated a hundred and forty million miles into the solar photosphere. For ten years it floated there, its crew protected by the fields from a gravitation eighty times that of Mars. Its conversion cells absorbed the energy of the Sun, at a rate that amounts to fifty horsepower per square inch, solidified it into the photon dust. And finally, when the ordeal of heat was ended, the survivors—usually not a tenth of the crew—came back with the previous load of sunstone.”

  “Eh!” My father stared at Trent, digesting this. A dull hammering throbbed faintly through the colossal valve. His weary, bearded face set with triumphant decision. “A ship!” he whispe
red. “Then we’ll take it to Earth, unload what dust is left, and send it to the Sun for more.”

  Trent shook his shaggy, emaciated head. “The Korduv won’t move again,” he said. “It was damaged in the last voyage—that was fifty thousand years ago. Some of the cells failed, and unconverted energy cooked most of the crew and fused half the field coils. A narrow escape from falling into the Sun. The rest of the coils, overloaded, were pretty well burned up on the way back. The thing crashed here. The rest of its crew were killed, but the sunstone was intact.”

  “Wrecked, eh?” My father stared into the strange maze of Cyclopean engines that loomed within the faintly blue-lit gloom beyond the valve, and demanded, “Why didn’t they build another?”

  “Racial senescence, I guess,” said Trent. “They stopped growing, and went to seed. Take old Anak. He knows scientific facts that we wouldn’t have discovered, on Earth, for a thousand years. But they’re frozen, dead. His knowledge is all in the form of elaborate, memorized rituals, mingled with superstitious dogma. He is ruled by the past. Half his knowledge is too sacred to use outside the temple. Any new fact would be rank heresy to the Sun. There is sunstone left to keep the pumps running for two or three thousand years. After that, Mars is doomed. ‘By the will of the Sun.’ ”

  “Well!” My father shrugged impatiently. “If this is wrecked, can you draw plans for another?”

  “For a better one, Hammond,” Trent assured him. “If we were back on Earth.”

  “First thing,” my father observed, “we’ve got to get past our fanatical friends on the outside—but Hammond Power has gone up a thousand points!”

  While the partisans of Anak continued to batter at the great valve, Trent spent three days fitting the little red ship for the Earthward voyage. Its double hull already sealed hermetically, the dusky depths of the Korduv yielded cylinders of oxygen, bottled for fifty thousand years. The hold was filled with sunstone, and certain changes in the wiring of the field coils adapted its drive for the interplanetary trip.