The Best of Jack Williamson

by Jack Williamson

  Then a tiny sunstone bomb opened a new port in the crown of the Korduv’s hull. The little red vessel darted out through the gaping plates, escaped the ray batteries and aircraft of the attackers, and fled safely through darkness to the outlaw’s hidden ravine.

  Old Anak, with his infant daughter, was released at dawn on the desert a few miles from Ob. He learned now that the mother of Asthore had been killed, and he retained memory of all that he had revealed beneath the drug. Rage and horror overwhelmed him. His drawn, dark-scaled face twisted hideously, and his black eyes flamed. He made a desperate, empty-handed attack on my father, screaming prayers and curses.

  “Beware!” he was shrieking, as the vessel rose. “Desecrators of the holy fire, beware the judgment of the Sun!”

  Zynlid had accepted my father’s invitation to visit Earth, with a slave and his two favorite wives. A final raid supplied the vessel with food for the voyage, and Trent guided it out past Deimos into the gulf of space.

  The whole Martian year was already gone. Earth had passed conjunction and was pulling swiftly ahead on its orbit. The rocket could never have overtaken it—but half an ounce of sunstone drove the Martian flier eighty million miles in only ten days.

  In November, 2134, the red ship landed safely in a cornfield near New York. My father announced triumphantly that he had secured the secret of Mars—a cheap source of illimitable power.

  III

  I can still remember how my mother trembled, in her cool, silent, sweet-smelling room, above the twilit Aegean, as her frail, unsteady hand snapped the new visivox spool into the cabinet.

  “Now, Chan,” she whispered, “you . . . your father!”

  She choked, and I knew that she was crying.

  The little screen flickered and lighted. I saw the golden tangle of the broken stalks of corn, and the tiny ship from Mars lying across the rows, like twin red spindles side by side. A small door opened, and Trent and my father came out.

  They were queer-looking men, haggard and shaggy and darkly tanned. My father wore the strange leather garments of the nomads, brilliant with the dried, shell-like ear appendages he had taken. He flourished a long red lance, and his voice croaked a guttural greeting in an unfamiliar tongue.

  But his old smile flashed, infectious as ever, behind the great tangle of his black beard. His strong teeth shone. His gray eyes had squinted a little, against the desert glare, but still they were clear and shrewd and quick.

  “He’s just the same, Chan,” sobbed my mother. “Your father . . . oh, Garth!”

  Her thin face was white, and I saw the great tears on her cheeks.

  Newsmen shot swift, excited questions, and visivox machines were humming. My father bowed grandly, and then beckoned. The Martians came scrambling after him—gaunt, rusty-red Zynlid and his varicolored, red-crowned companions. Their movements were awkward and laborious, and their breathing seemed troubled. They blinked bewilderedly at the feverish, barking newsmen. Garth Hammond stepped before them, and bowed again, and made a little speech of greeting to the Earth.

  “To every man,” he promised, “I will bring more power than a king enjoyed of old. Tomorrow, the Sun Power Corporation—”

  Then Nada Vale, the red-haired actress, came running into the picture. With an eager, muffled cry, she threw herself into my father’s great tanned arms. His old smile flashed eagerly. He lifted her, and crushed his great black beard against her face.

  Then, suddenly, my mother stopped the machine. A moment she stood beside the cabinet, frozen, her face set and white. A thin sob burst from her quivering lips. She ran quickly out of the room. I found her sitting in the darkness on a terrace high above the black sea where the stars danced and vanished, shaking to dry, breathless sobs.

  The conqueror of Mars became the hero of the Earth. That wild tide of enthusiasm drowned all the old accusations against my father. The capital of six billion dollars, for the Sun Power Corporation, was all subscribed in one hectic day.

  Tens of millions paid fat admission fees to see Zynlid and his ménage, in the gravity-shielded, air-conditioned apartment my father provided. The old bandit used to strut proudly before the curious, flourishing his weapons and trophies, and demanding staggering sums for posing for the visivox.

  The tempest of publicity seemed to mean nothing to Ared Trent.

  The public hardly realized that my father had had a companion on Mars. Stern, taciturn priest of science, if Trent had a human side, the world didn’t know it—not then. He gathered sixty skilled draftsmen, in a closely guarded office building, and began drawing up the plans and specifications for the Sun Power Station.

  Far smaller than the ancient Korduv on Mars—only a thousand feet in diameter and fifteen hundred long—the Station was still the greatest engineering feat ever attempted on Earth. The construction took over three years. Directly and indirectly, more than a million men were employed on it. The first six billions were spent, and bonds floated for three billions more.

  Unlike the Martian plant, the Station was intended to float permanently in the Sun’s fiery atmosphere. Ships shielded by special fields would visit it at yearly intervals, to carry supplies and relief to its crew, and bring away the precious sunstone. Eight hundred volunteers were selected, to spend one or two years exiled to the flaming terror of the Sun.

  Designer of the Station, Ared Trent was to have been its first commander. But, a few months before the Station was ready to be launched, came the historic break between my father and Trent.

  That quarrel has puzzled historians. The two had been friends since before my father sent Trent to the Moon. Man of knowledge and man of money, they had seemed to live in a perfect symbiosis. Biographers have suggested, and rightly, I believe, that Trent, although he seemed to have the feelings of a product integraph, actually must have suppressed a deep resentment of my father’s assumption of a dictatorial superiority.

  But the real key to the quarrel, I think, is the suicide of Nada Vale. The actress had obviously been desperately in love with my father. Absorbed at the time in the expedition to Mars and the conquest of power, he can hardly have cared very much for her. It is certain that they were never married. And it seems that she was bitterly jealous of the woman my father did love.

  That woman was lovely Doris Wayne, heir to the Marine Mines billions. My father met her soon after the return from Mars. They were married in 2138. On the wedding night, Nada Vale drank poison in the anteroom of their Manhattan penthouse.

  And Ared Trent, although no one had guessed it, cherished an old infatuation for the actress. She had promised years before to marry him, it seems, if he came back alive from the Moon—perhaps only with a professional eye to future publicity. But, before he came back, she met his backer, my father. Trent was forgotten. And he concealed his deep injury until her suicide broke his old restraint.

  At any rate, Trent suddenly demanded an equal voice with my father in the direction of the Sun Power Corporation. My father refused, astonished. There was a long legal battle, in which Trent was completely defeated. Then my father, to show some gratitude for his services, made him a free gift of ten million dollars. Trent used it to build a new laboratory isolated in South Africa, and went into complete seclusion.

  Command of the Station, meantime, was given to bluff, stocky Tom Cornwall, hero of the Moon. Sitting with my mother in our island villa, I watched the launching of the Station. It was a colossal upright cylinder of massive steel, with curved ends. Incredibly tremendous, it loomed above tiny-seeming tracks and derricks, and the mills and furnaces of the new steel city that had made its metal. The crew had gone aboard. My father, magnificent on the platform, made a speech and shook the hand of Tom Cornwall. The intrepid captain vanished. The cheering multitude—people small and black as crawling insects about the Station—were herded back. Then the steel cylinder flickered curiously, and was lost in a pillar of silver haze—all light reflected by its shielding ether fields. The pillar floated upward. A sudden wind swept the thro
ng, raising a little cloud of dust and hats. And the Station was gone to the Sun.

  There was rioting, that day, on all the stock exchanges. Coal, oil, and water-power stocks dropped ruinously. SPC soared to dizzy heights. A dozen desperate investors killed themselves. My father boasted that in one day, before any wealth had come from the Sun, he had cleared nearly two billion dollars.

  The great relief ship, the Solarion, was built that year in the same Ohio yards. I was not ten years old when it came back from its first voyage to the Sun. It brought hundreds of tons of the wondrous blue substance, frozen power, that went on the market at twelve hundred dollars an ounce.

  Garth Hammond’s star seemed to be shining very brightly. There was hardly a hint of the storm of trouble and disaster that rose with the passing years, to bend his strong shoulders, bleach his hair, ruin SPC, and even to bring all the solar system to the very threshold of disaster.

  But gnarled old Zynlid and his three companions from Mars, in their gravity-shielded tank, were already dead of the Falling Sickness.

  IV

  The frightful shadow of the old pandemic suddenly darkened over all the world. For something had happened to the virus: some reaction, physiologists said, of the malignant molecule with the alien proteins in the bodies of the Martians. Old immunities were destroyed. The new, virulent plague swept the planet. In a single year, a hundred million died. All the horrors of the Black Century threatened to return.

  Among the natives of Mars the disease was even more deadly than on Earth. When my father’s conquering fleet appeared on the red planet, the cities attempted to resist and the Korduv was blown up. It is uncertain whether, as enemies of my father have charged, the Falling Sickness was deliberately spread. But, within a few weeks, it destroyed half the inhabitants of Mars. The planet surrendered. Anak, the old priest-king, was forced into exile. He came to Earth, with his daughter, and established residence in a shabby, century-old building in Washington. His brooding, bitter hatred of my father always grew, and his guarded inner rooms, armored against the gravity and the air of Earth, were an early center of the organized intrigue against Garth Hammond and the SPC.

  My father had brought the Martians to Earth. He was to blame, therefore, for the new epidemic. And the Martians hated him doubly, as the desecrator of their solar religion and the murderer of their race.

  Agitators made him responsible, too, for the horde of new economic ills that threatened to crush the very life from the planet. The epidemic alone, with its fears, illness, and death, was enough to cause vast depression. Added to that was the financial panic and industrial disturbances occasioned by the destruction of the old power industries and the rise of SPC.

  Yet—and an item to my father’s credit—industry must have been stimulated vastly by the exploitation of the other planets. After the conquest of Mars, the new space fleets of SPC explored the Moon, Venus, Mercury, and the satellites of Jupiter. The parent corporation proliferated into a thousand subsidiary development, concessions, mineral, planting, transport, even news and amusement enterprises. There was even a Martian Copyright & Patents Corporation, to exploit the arts and sciences of that ancient planet.

  SPC was suddenly the most powerful—and soon the most hated—entity on Earth. The yearly production of sunstone from the Station ran above one thousand tons. At the standard price, pegged mercilessly at twelve hundred dollars an ounce, that meant a gross annual revenue in excess of forty billion dollars—enough to make Garth Hammond virtual dictator of the Solar System.

  “Trust-busting” legislation was passed by embittered liberal and labor groups—in vain. For national law ceased at the stratosphere. The only ships in space were those marked SPC, and the only law was that enforced by my father’s corporation police, the famous Sun Patrol.

  The law, as always, adapted itself to current reality. SPC was recognized as virtually an independent state, with jurisdiction everywhere beyond Earth’s stratosphere. And Garth Hammond was its absolute ruler—though legally still a citizen of the United States, granted certain immunities as an “employee” of SPC, his only title being chairman of the board of a corporation chartered in New Jersey.

  He was master of the law. The law helped suppress a hundred strikes aimed at SPC. It helped the Sun Patrol to thwart a dozen attempts against his life—in some of which Anak and the fanatical Martian émigrés were suspected of being involved.

  The gravest blow against him came from outside the law, and outside the Earth. The Solarion,in 2146, returning with her seventh cargo of sunstone, was accosted by a strange vessel in space—a slim red arrow of a ship, unlike the mirror spheres of SPC. Heliographs flashed a message, signed “Redlance,” demanding surrender of the ship and cargo, “in the name of liberty and human right.” The captain refused to surrender, and escaped after a running fight. Next year the Solarion went out again, better armed—and never came back.

  When the first attack on the relief ship became known, Anak had let newsmen through the valve into the great steel tank that held a fragment of exiled Mars. His dark-scaled body was now withered and bent, his strange face lined and haggard and terrible with bitterness and hate. Stalking back and forth, like some restless, caged beast, beneath the glowing Sun disk that he had brought from the temple on Mars, he shook a lean, unearthly arm at them.

  “It is the judgment of the Sun,” his flat, guttural voice rasped barely intelligible English. “Garth Hammond despoiled the jewel of the Sun. He defiled the sacred places, and stole the holy secret. He spilled the blood of the Sun, slew my Wahneema!” His black, yellow-rimmed eyes glared with fanatical malice. “And he shall know the judgment of the Sun!”

  Trembling, then, with a savage wrath, he drove the newsmen out.

  It was soon certain, now, that “Redlance” had taken the Solarion, for the Earth was flooded with “bootleg” sunstone. And it seemed probable that the pirates, or at least their leaders, must be vengeful Martians, because the secret of the drive field had never been made public on Earth.

  Trying to run down the sunstone smugglers, Sun Patrol operatives found evidence that linked the ring with Anak’s daughter, Asthore. Grown now, she had become a peculiarly beautiful being, tall and graceful, her fine-scaled skin a nacreous white, her eyes huge and purple beneath a crimson coronal. But her uncanny beauty was quite inhuman, and she shared all her father’s hatred of mankind and Garth Hammond.

  Sun Patrol men, aided by Federal agents, finally closed in on the old house in Washington, with warrants for Anak and his daughter. But the tank was deserted. The exiles had fled. A planetwide search failed to discover them.

  The fleets of the SPC scoured space for the pirate, searched planets and asteroids for a base, in vain. A second, hurriedly constructed relief ship, the Solarion II, was also lost, her wrecked and looted hull being discovered adrift near the orbit of Mercury. The Solarion 111, in 2148, safely reached the Sun and returned. But her holds were empty and she brought appalling news. The Station itself was lost!

  The cause of the disaster could only be surmised. The great plant might have been captured or destroyed by the pirates. Or, frail as a bubble floating in the flaming ocean of the solar photosphere, it might have been obliterated by the titanic forces of the Sun: cyclonic storms of sunspots, whose tremendous vortices might have dragged it down into a very atomic furnace; super-hurricanes of prominences, blasts of flaming hydrogen flung upward at hundreds of thousands of miles an hour; heat inconceivable, 6000 degrees at the surface, intense enough to destroy the Station in an instant if deflection fields or conversion batteries failed. Or it was possible that mutiny or the Falling Sickness had annihilated the crew.

  Whatever its cause, the disaster was crushing. Stocks and bonds of SPC crashed ruinously. My father found it difficult to get capital to begin construction of a new power station, and strikes and sabotage hindered the work.

  The smuggled supplies of sunstone ceased as mysteriously as they had begun. Rusty windmills and turbines turned again. Men grop
ed into abandoned coal mines. Prices rose enormously. Unemployment soared. Farm machines stood idle for want of power. Famine pinched the world—and malnutrition invited a hideous new wave of the Falling Sickness.

  And on my father’s shoulders fell the blame for all these misfortunes of humanity. I was near him, in those black days—with a court order, when I was twelve, he had taken me from my mother. At first I had been resentful. I had hated his luxurious home, and hated his new wife, Doris, for taking my mother’s place. But she had been always kind. I had come to like her. And I couldn’t help a vast admiration for my father, now, and a sympathy for him in his sea of troubles.

  “It’s just about the finish, Chan,” he told me wearily, one day, when I had found him sitting motionless as a black statue at the big desk in his sumptuous office. “It would be four years, or five, before the new station could furnish any revenue—even if the pirates let it be. SPC can’t hold out that long.”

  I tried to encourage him.

  “One chance,” he admitted. “If I could get Trent. The best mind I ever knew. If he would forget—”

  But the search for Trent failed. Years before, with my father’s gift, he had built a great laboratory in South Africa. But the isolated buildings had now been for several years abandoned. And Ared Trent was gone without a trace.

  Upon that failure came the thrust of sharper disaster. My father’s wife, the former Doris Wayne, contracted the Falling Sickness. After two days of agony, clinging to the bed and screaming with that frightful vertigo, she died. It was after that that my father’s hair began to turn white. His big shoulders sagged. Turned to a grim machine, he refused to leave the office for rest or sufficient sleep.

  Without sunstone, it would soon be impossible to navigate space. Revenues from the mines would stop, and the colonies would have to be abandoned. The interplanetary prestige of SPC was vanishing. Hostile groups passed ruinous restriction and taxation measures.