The Long Voyage

by Ron Cocking

  Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

  _When we published Carl Jacobi's last story we had no assurance he would be with us so soon again. For when a uniquely gifted science-fantasy writer becomes radio-active on the entertainment meter and goes voyaging into the unknown, he may be gone from the world we know for as long as yesterday's tomorrow. But Carl Jacobi has not only returned almost with the speed of light--he has brought with him shining new nuggets of wonder and surmise._

  the long voyage

  _by ... Carl Jacobi_

  The secret lay hidden at the end of nine landings, and Medusa-dark was one man's search for it--in the strangest journey ever made.

  A soft gentle rain began to fall as we emerged from the dark woods andcame out onto the shore. There it was, the sea, stretching as far as theeye could reach, gray and sullen, and flecked with green-white froth.The blue _hensorr_ trees, crowding close to the water's edge, were bentbackward as if frightened by the bleakness before them. The sand,visible under the clear patches of water, was a bleached white like theexposed surface of a huge bone.

  We stood there a moment in silence. Then Mason cleared his throathuskily.

  "Well, here goes," he said. "We'll soon see if we have any friendsabout."

  He unslung the packsack from his shoulders, removed its protective outershield and began to assemble the organic surveyor, an egg-shaped ball ofwhite carponium secured to a segmented forty-foot rod. While Brandt andI raised the rod with the aid of an electric fulcrum, Mason carefullyplaced his control cabinet on a piece of outcropping rock and made alast adjustment.

  The moment had come. Even above the sound of the sea, you could hearthe strained breathing of the men. Only Navigator Norris appearedunconcerned. He stood there calmly smoking his pipe, his keen blue eyessquinting against the biting wind.

  Mason switched on the speaker. Its high-frequency scream rosedeafeningly above us and was torn away in unsteady gusts. He began toturn its center dial, at first a quarter circle, and then all the way tothe final backstop of the calibration. All that resulted was acontinuation of that mournful ululation like a wail out of eternity.

  Mason tried again. With stiff wrists he tuned while perspiration stoodout on his forehead, and the rest of us crowded close.

  "It's no use," he said. "This pickup failure proves there isn't avestige of animal life on Stragella--on this hemisphere of the planet,at least."

  Navigator Norris took his pipe from his mouth and nodded. His face wasexpressionless. There was no indication in the man's voice that he hadsuffered another great disappointment, his sixth in less than a year.

  "We'll go back now," he said, "and we'll try again. There must be someplanet in this system that's inhabited. But it's going to be hard totell the women."

  Mason let the surveyor rod down with a crash. I could see the anger andresentment that was gathering in his eyes. Mason was the youngest of ourparty and the leader of the antagonistic group that was slowly butsteadily undermining the authority of the Navigator.

  This was our seventh exploratory trip after our sixth landing sinceentering the field of the sun Ponthis. Ponthis with its sixteenequal-sized planets, each with a single satellite. First there had beenCoulora; then in swift succession, Jama, Tenethon, Mokrell, and R-9. Andnow Stragella. Strange names of strange worlds, revolving about astrange star.

  It was Navigator Norris who told us the names of these planets andtraced their positions on a chart for us. He alone of our group wasfamiliar with astrogation and cosmography. He alone had sailed thespaceways in the days before the automatic pilots were installed andlocked and sealed on every ship.

  A handsome man in his fortieth year, he stood six feet three with broadshoulders and a powerful frame. His eyes were the eyes of a scholar,dreamy yet alive with depth and penetration. I had never seen him losehis temper, and he governed our company with an iron hand.

  He was not perfect, of course. Like all Earthmen, he had his faults.Months before he had joined with that famed Martian scientist,Ganeth-Klae, to invent that all-use material, _Indurate_, the formulafor which had been stolen and which therefore had never appeared on thecommercial market. Norris would talk about that for hours. If youinadvertently started him on the subject a queer glint would enter hiseyes, and he would dig around in his pocket for a chunk of the blacksubstance.

  "Did I ever show you a piece of this?" he would say. "Look at itcarefully. Notice the smooth grainless texture--hard and yet notbrittle. You wouldn't think that it was formed in a gaseous state, thenchanged to a liquid and finally to a clay-like material that could beworked with ease. A thousand years after your body has returned to dust,that piece of _Indurate_ will still exist, unchanged, unworn. Erosionwill have little effect upon it. Beside it granite, steel are nothing.If only I had the formula ..."

  But he had only half the formula, the half he himself had developed. Theother part was locked in the brain of Ganeth-Klae, and Ganeth-Klae haddisappeared. What had become of him was a mystery. Norris perhaps hadfelt the loss more than any one, and he had offered the major part ofhis savings as a reward for information leading to the scientist'swhereabouts.

  Our party--eighteen couples and Navigator Norris--had gathered togetherand subsequently left Earth in answer to a curious advertisement thathad appeared in the Sunday edition of the London _Times_.

  WANTED: _A group of married men and women, young, courageous, educated, tired of political and social restrictions, interested in extra-terrestrial colonization. Financial resources no qualification._

  After we had been weeded out, interviewed and rigorously questioned,Norris had taken us into the hangar, waved a hand toward the _MarieGalante_ and explained the details.

  The _Marie Galante_ was a cruiser-type ship, stripped down to essentialsto maintain speed, but equipped with the latest of everything. For ashort run to Venus, for which it was originally built, it wouldaccommodate a passenger list of ninety.

  But Norris wasn't interested in that kind of run. He had knocked outbulkheads, reconverted music room and ballroom into living quarters. Hehad closed and sealed all observation ports, so that only in the bridgecuddy could one see into space.

  "We shall travel beyond the orbit of the sun," he said. "There will beno turning back; for the search for a new world, a new life, is not atask for cowards."

  Aside to me, he said: "You're to be the physician of this party, Bagley.So I'm going to tell you what to expect when we take off. We're going tohave some mighty sick passengers aboard then."

  "What do you mean, sir?" I said.

  He pointed with his pipe toward the stern of the vessel. "See that ...well, call it a booster. Ganeth-Klae designed it just before hedisappeared, using the last lot of _Indurate_ in existence. It willincrease our take-off speed by five times, and it will probably have abad effect on the passengers."

  So we had left Earth, at night from a field out in Essex. Withoutorders, without clearance papers, without an automatic pilot check.Eighteen couples and one navigator--destination unknown. If theInterstellar Council had known what Norris was up to, it would have beena case for the Space-Time Commission.

  Of that long initial lap of our voyage, perhaps the less said thebetter. As always is the case when monotony begins to wear away theveneer of civilization, character quirks came to the surface, cliquesformed among the passengers, and gossip and personalities became mattersof pre-eminent importance.

  Rising to the foreground out of our thirty-six, came Fielding Mason,tall, taciturn, and handsome, with a keen intellect and a sense ofvalues remarkable in so young a man. Mason was a graduate of Montape,the French outgrowth of St. Cyr. But he had majored in military tactic
s,psychology and sociology and knew nothing at all about astrogation oreven elemental astronomy. He too was a man of good breeding andrefinement. Nevertheless conflict began to develop between him andNavigator Norris. That conflict began the day we landed on Coulora.

  Norris stepped out of the air lock into the cold thin air, glancedbriefly about him and faced the eighteen men assembled.

  "We'll divide into three groups," he said. "Each group to carry anorganic surveyor and take a different direction. Each group will soregulate its marching as to be back here without fail an hour beforedarkness sets in. If you find no sign of animal life, then we will takeoff again immediately on your return."

  Mason paused halfway in the act of strapping on his packsack.

  "What's that got to do with it?" he demanded. "There's vegetation here.That's all that seems to be necessary."

  Norris lit his pipe. "If you find no sign of animal life we will takeoff immediately on your return," he said as if he hadn't heard.

  But the strangeness of Coulora tempered bad feelings then. The blue_hensorr_ trees were actually not trees at all but a huge cat-tail-likegrowth, the stalks of which were quite transparent. In between thestalks grew curious cabbage-like plants that changed from red to yellowas an intruder approached and back to red again after he had passed.Rock outcroppings were everywhere, but all were eroded and in placespolished smooth as glass.

  There was a strange kind of dust that acted as though endowed with life.It quivered when trod upon, and the outline of our footsteps slowlyrose into the air, so that looking back I could see our trail floatingbehind us in irregular layers.

  Above us the star that was this planet's sun shown bright but faintlyred as if it were in the first stages of dying. The air though thin wasfit to breathe, and we found it unnecessary to wear space suits. Wemarched down the corridors of _hensorr_ trees, until we came to an openspot, a kind of glade. And that was the first time Mason tuned hisorganic surveyor and received absolutely nothing.

  There was no animal life on Coulora!

  * * * * *

  Within an hour we had blasted off again. The forward-impact delivered bythe Ganeth-Klae booster was terrific, and nausea and vertigo struck usall simultaneously. But again, with all ports and observation shieldssealed shut, Norris held the secret of our destination.

  On July twenty-second, the ship gave that sickening lurch and came onceagain to a standstill.

  "Same procedure as before," Norris said, stepping out of the airlock."Those of you who desire to have their wives accompany you may do so.Mason, you'll make a final correlation on the organic surveyors. Ifthere is no trace of animal life return here before dark."

  Once our group was out of sight of the ship, Mason threw down hispacksack, sat down on a boulder and lighted a cigarette.

  "Bagley," he said to me, "has the Old Man gone loco?"

  "I think not," I said, frowning. "He's one of the most evenly balancedpersons I know."

  "Then he's hiding something," Mason said. "Why else should he be soconcerned with finding animal life?"

  "You know the answer to that," I said. "We're here to colonize, to starta new life. We can't very well do that on a desert."

  "That's poppycock," Mason replied, flinging away his cigarette. "Whenthe Albertson expedition first landed on Mars, there was no animal lifeon the red planet. Now look at it. Same thing was true when Breslauerfirst settled Pluto. The colonies there got along. I tell you Norris hasgot something up his sleeve, and I don't like it."

  Later, after Mason had taken his negative surveyor reading, the flame oftrouble reached the end of its fuse!

  Norris had given orders to return to the _Marie Galante_, and the restof us were sullenly making ready to start the back trail. Mason,however, deliberately seized his pick and began chopping a hole in therock surface, preparatory apparently to erecting his plastic tent.

  "We'll make temporary camp here," he said calmly. "Brandt, you can goback to the ship and bring back the rest of the women." He turned andsmiled sardonically at Navigator Norris.

  Norris quietly knocked the ashes from his pipe and placed it in hispocket. He strode forward, took the pick from Mason's hands and flung itaway. Then he seized Mason by the coat, whipped him around and drove hisfist hard against the younger man's jaw.

  "When you signed on for this voyage, you agreed to obey my orders," hesaid, not raising his voice. "You'll do just that."

  Mason picked himself up, and there was an ugly glint in his eyes. Hecould have smashed Norris to a pulp, and none knew it better than theNavigator. For a brief instant the younger man swayed there on the ballsof his feet, fists clenched. Then he let his hands drop, walked over andbegan to put on his packsack.

  But I had seen Mason's face, and I knew he had not given in as easily asit appeared. Meanwhile he began to circulate among the passengers,making no offers, yet subtly enlisting backers for a policy, thesignificance of which grew on me slowly. It was mutiny he was plotting!And with his personal charm and magnetism he had little trouble inwinning over converts. I came upon him arguing before a group of thewomen one day, among them his own wife, Estelle. He was standing closeto her.

  "We have clothing and equipment and food concentrate," Mason said."Enough to last two generations. We have brains and intelligence, and wecertainly should be able to establish ourselves without the aid of othervertebrate forms of life.

  "Coulora, Jama, Tenethon, Mokrell, R-9, and Stragella. We could havesettled on any one of those planets, and apparently we should have, forconditions have grown steadily worse at each landing. But always theanswer is no. Why? Because Norris says we must go on until we findanimal life."

  He cleared his throat and gazed at the feminine faces before him. "Gowhere? What makes Norris so sure he'll find life on any planet in thissystem? And incidentally where in the cosmos is this system?"

  One of the women, a tall blonde, stirred uneasily. "What do you mean?"she said.

  "I mean we don't know if our last landing was on Stragella or Coulora. Imean we don't know where we are or where we're going, and I don't thinkNorris does either. _We're lost!_"

  That was in August. By the last of September we had landed on two moreplanets, to which Norris gave the simple names of R-12 and R-14. Eachhad crude forms of vegetable life, represented principally by the blue_hensorr_ trees, but in neither case did the organic surveyor reveal theslightest traces of animal life.

  There was, however, a considerable difference in physical appearancebetween R-12 and R-14, and for a time that fact excited Norristremendously. Up to then, each successive planet, although similar insize, had exhibited signs of greater age than its predecessor. But onR-12 there were definite manifestations of younger geologic development.

  Several pieces of shale lay exposed under a fold of igneous rock. Two ofthose pieces contained fossils of highly developed _ganoids_, similar tothose found on Venus. They were perfectly preserved.

  It meant that animal life had existed on R-12, even if it didn't now. Itmeant that R-12, though a much older planet than Earth, was stillyounger than Stragella or the rest.

  For a while Norris was almost beside himself. He cut out rock samplesand carried them back to the ship. He personally supervised the tuningof the surveyors. And when he finally gave orders to take off, he wasalmost friendly to Mason, whereas before his attitude toward him hadbeen one of cold aloofness.

  But when we reached R-14, our eighth landing, all that passed. For R-14was old again, older than any of the others.

  And then, on October sixteenth, Mason opened the door of the lockedcabin. It happened quite by accident. One of the _arelium-thaxide_conduits broke in the _Marie Galante's_ central passageway, and theresulting explosion grounded the central feed line of the instrumentequipment. In a trice the passageway was a sheet of flame, rapidlyfilling with smoke from burning insulation.

  Norris, of course, was in the bridge cuddy with locked doors between usand him, and now with the wiring burned through t
here was no way ofsignalling him he was wanted for an emergency. In his absence Mason tookcommand.

  That passageway ran the full length of the ship. Midway down it was thedoor leading to the women's lounge. The explosion had jammed that doorshut, and smoke was pouring forth from under the sill. All at once oneof the women rushed forward to announce hysterically that Mason's wife,Estelle, was in the lounge.

  Adjoining the lounge was a small cabin which since the beginning of ourvoyage had remained locked. Norris had given strict orders that thatcabin was not to be disturbed. We all had taken it as a matter of coursethat it contained various kinds of precision instruments.

  Now, however, Mason realized that the only way into the lounge was byway of that locked cabin. If he used a heat blaster on the lounge doorthere was no telling what would happen to the woman inside.

  He ripped the emergency blaster from its wall mounting, pressed it tothe magnetic latch of the sealed cabin door and pressed the stud. Aninstant later he was leading his frightened wife, Estelle, out throughthe smoke.

  The fire was quickly extinguished after that and the wiring spliced.Then when the others had drifted off, Mason called Brandt and me aside.

  "We've been wondering for a long time what happened to Ganeth-Klae, theMartian inventor who worked with Norris to invent _Indurate_," he saidvery quietly. "Well, we don't need to wonder any more. He's in there."

  Brandt and I stepped forward over the sill--and drew up short.Ganeth-Klae was there all right, but he would never trouble himselfabout making a voyage in a locked cabin. His rigid body was encased in atransparent block of amber-colored solidifex, the