Hell Stuff For Planet X

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  I didn’t have to ask to grasp the chain of events that had brought about the tableau I now beheld. Some time tonight, red and white fire must have spurted in Alcatraz, the gray old prison meant for real criminals, and not men like Spud.

  I knew without asking how Spud made his break. Uranium tetramekalate, the new rocket fuel developed by Fred Vandon, a scientist that Lorson had broken ruthlessly. The stuff is about as healthy to monkey with as the insides of a star, for when the fuel gets going, it breaks down into atomic energy.

  Spud had dug out those little spheres he had buried in his arm. Tiny bombs, but devilish with heat and power. He must have blasted down part of the walls. Then no one, surely, had tried to stop him. It had been easy for him to win his way out, on a slender thread of bluff alone. None of the guards knew that he would not have exploded that last capsule, that killing and injuring those who only did their duty was not his way. They had let him pass through the walls, and to a boat that must have taken him to the mainland. Then he had stolen a rocket plane, got hold of Lorson somehow, and come here.

  Law against law—for law. A strange paradox. It scared me now. Real science and humanity against a cheap tyrant’s cruelties and obstructions to progress. There was no room to quibble.

  I grinned at Spud.

  “The Silver Pall’s our next stop, eh?’’ I said.

  He nodded tiredly.

  “And Lorson, here, goes along with us,” he added. “I think he’ll be useful, Buck.”

  I got some clothes for Spud and Lorson. Then I dressed hurriedly, longing for the smell of the inside of a space suit. In another five minutes I’d have one on again. There were several aboard the Martia. It is best to wear them as much as possible when you’re out in space. For if a meteor large enough punctures your ship, and lets the air out—

  We carried Lorson to the hangar and into the Martia’s slender hull. Quickly we got his inert form into a suit, and fixed ourselves up similarly. Then we strapped ourselves prone, Lorson lashed between us.

  Spud pressed the starting arm, and as though the fires of Hell broke all around us, the Martia shot into the unknown, screaming like a banshee....

  When we were three hours out from Earth, and still accelerating, Nicolas Lorson finally woke up from the kayo Spud had given him. Why he chose this particular time to regain his senses, I don’t know, because both Spud and I were close to passing out completely. It must have been sheer fright that brought Lorson around—a physiological reaction to the stimulus of, to him, terrible danger. Call it self-preservation if you will.

  I knew the story. Nicolas Lorson, master of the Lorson Ether and Interplanetary Projects, had never been in space before! And he was mortally afraid.

  He lay there between Spud and me, held down by his safety straps. Now he gave a little wavering moan. I turned my head to look at him, my own vision blurred and darkened. I’ve seen rookies’ reactions to their first ether flight, and it’s sickening. It isn’t just drooling lips and pasty faces and eyes that are half mad. It’s something hideous that you can’t quite grasp at or pin down—like seeing a human soul suddenly waking up and finding itself inhabiting a horrible, alien form.

  LORSON gave me one awful, startled look. His face, inside his lightweight, transparent oxygen helmet, was blank with something more than terror. Then he began to writhe in his lashings like a trapped snake. His back, in his light, metal-and-rubber fabric armor, humped spiderishly. I heard the straps creak, even above the din of the Martia’s rockets. His muscles were going beyond themselves, as his eyes took in the gleaming instruments of the space ship, telling him where he was.

  Nicolas Lorson, who had made pawns of thousands of other human lives in space, was the worst rookie I had ever seen. He squirmed, he retched, he laughed hideously. The opened face plate of his helmet clapped and rattled on its hinge, like a ghastly accompaniment to his evidences of mad terror.

  I was afraid his straining muscles would dislocate a joint. That happens sometimes. I was even afraid he might break the stout web safety straps we had put around him. If he did the latter and tried to stand up, the way the Martia was accelerating he would break his neck, or die from an overstrained heart.

  I leaned over toward him and freed an arm from my own lashings. I was going to remove his helmet and bop him one on the jaw to put him to sleep again. But Spud shouted from his opened face plate, telling me to stop.

  “Don’t do that yet, Buck,” he said, panting with the strain on his own heart and lungs. “Let Lorson take it for awhile. Maybe it’ll do him some good. Maybe it’ll bring him around—make a man of him.”

  I could see what Spud meant, all right. Once in awhile space can change character. Out of hell-fire and distance and bizarre beauty, a new person can be born—sometimes. If that happened to Lorson, a lot of problems would be solved. But I’m not an idealistic optimist like Spud. I knew that it was hopeless to try to rebuild Nicolas Lorson. And I sensed, too, that Spud was just asking for trouble by hoping.

  But I didn’t swing at Lorson’s chin, then. I wanted to give him a chance, too, even if there was no good in it. I had a fair idea of what was passing through his mind, in all his terror and confusion.

  Now he was seeing what space ships are like—just fragile shells, made as light and strong as possible for a given weight. Just shells, everything sort of pared out in their structure to decrease mass, and yet, by careful mathematical calculation, braced in such a way as to give the greatest strength, gram for gram.

  Space ships had to be like that, for though the active part of the fuel carried was uranium tetramekalate, replacing older atomically unstable substances, it couldn’t be used as a pure fuel by any means.

  It was too violent, and though it was cheap to produce by the new transmutation processes, it had to be highly diluted with baser substances, for, in addition, it didn’t have near enough mass to provide the proper rocket-thrust. So this was an added load for a space ship, fighting the gravity of a large planet, to carry.

  Lorson wasn’t reasoning it all out, of course. You don’t reason out things like that, not when you’re accelerating into space for the first time, anyway. You just feel it. All the mathematical formulae you’ve ever known just hangs in the background then, like a lot of little imps, sneering and snickering at you, and making you crazy.

  “Don’t! Don’t!” Lorson screamed. “Take me back! I can’t stand it... Please! I’m scared!”

  IT was pitiful and contemptible, Lorson’s wild raving. But I thought then that he might be seeing for the first time what scientific problems we were fighting, and against what opposition. Then I thought of Avery and his daughter Edna, out there alone on the Silver Pall for so long. Maybe they were still alive, maybe dead, maybe insane. No one knew.

  As I had realized before, it was foolish to hope for a change in Lorson. For half a minute he pleaded, then he took to mockery, and to threats and promises of destruction.

  “Think you’re smart, eh?” he raved. “Well, I’ve fooled you before, and I’ll fool you again! Prison for one of you, that was nothing! Sure it was crooked! Why not? That’s the way to get ahead in the world. You poor idiots! By now a police ship is following you. You think I’ll be your shield, eh? That the police won’t fire because I’m aboard?

  “Well, what of it? They’ll keep following and following, until they track you down. Better take good care of me, you dirty kidnapers, because if I happened to die— Well maybe someday I’ll tell you where the Silver Pall plague really came from. You poor, stupid, childish dupes!”

  I gasped, startled, at Lorson’s half-admission of guilt. In my sudden cold surprise and anger, I think I would have leaned over and tried to hammer a complete confession out of him. But then fate intervened. We were already out of the region, in the immediate vicinity of Earth, where patrol rockets keep most of the meteors destroyed.

  I can’t describe what happens and what you feel when a meteor strikes, though I’ve been around often when they’ve hit, and though i
t is all very vivid in my mind. It happens before you know it, and then you think back—if you’re still alive. Five to thirty miles a second is terribly fast, when you’re dealing with only a few yards distance.

  You remember a streak of blue-white heat, produced by the friction of impact. It’s almost too swift for your eyes to catch.

  There were four meteors on this particular occasion and they came close together, like old-fashioned machine-gun slugs. They couldn’t have been any bigger than small marbles, which was lucky for us. But they went right straight through the Martia. None of us was touched, and as it developed, there wasn’t any danger.

  You see, there is one simple safety device that can take care of these little fellows, though it’s no good at all with anything a few inches in diameter. But it helps a lot. Frank Avery developed it, and then had to sell it to Lorson’s outfit for a pittance, considering what it was really worth.

  The Martia was equipped with this invention, too. Its hull was double-walled. Between the walls was a quick-hardening, tarry substance squeezed by compressed air. It closes the holes quickly, before more than a few puffs of atmosphere can get out, and hardens.

  So we could breathe again, Spud and I. Lorson didn’t have any wind in his lungs to scream with. And he couldn’t seem to move, either. He just stared at the place in the curved steel wall where one of the meteors had exited. There was a hole in the steel, as neatly punched as anything you’ve ever seen. And there were little marks around it, where splinters of the meteor had sort of splattered. It was planetary velocity, applied to a plate of metal, man-made.

  “I hope you like the looks of that hole,” Spud told Lorson ironically.

  But Nicolas Lorson’s gaunt, powerful frame had stiffened and then gone limp. He had fainted.

  CHAPTER III

  The Silver Pall

  SOME minutes later, I shut off our rockets. A space ship can never go any faster than the speed of its blasts, and we had reached that speed. To keep the rockets going would only have wasted fuel.

  Far astern we had sighted a pursuing craft—a little silvery sliver in the spatial sunshine. It was a police boat. They must have already identified us through their telescope, our number plate and all.

  It had been easy to connect Spud’s escape with Lorson’s abduction. And it had been easy to put me, Spud’s brother, under suspicion, and hence the Martia too, which was numbered CV4931.

  I switched on the radio, knowing beforehand what would come out of it.

  “Stop, Martia!” came the order. “Stop in the name of the law.”

  Spud winced, and for a moment I almost hated myself. Then I remembered. Avery was out there with Edna and all we were fighting for.

  I set the radio for transmission.

  “Cannot stop,” I said into the microphone. “Nicolas Lorson, of Lorson Ether and Interplanetary Projects, on board. Do not fire but follow us.” Lorson was a good shield, for no shells came over the miles of distance, bursting in our stern, tearing us apart, putting an inglorious end to our troubles, and stamping us forever as criminals.

  The Martia was as fast as anything in the spaceways, so long as it was undamaged. The police boat, swift though it was, couldn’t get any nearer. And that was something in our favor.

  So our flight toward the Silver Pall comet, and toward a black question mark of unsolved mysteries and hopes and fears, settled down to a steady grind. Hours, days, weeks.

  Lorson was always troublesome, though in the main we tried to treat him kindly. He denied all knowledge of the cause of the Silver Pall plague now, refuting the hint he had made in his first spatial mania, that he knew its real origin. I tried to bulldoze the truth out of him at first, but when he had whimpered and pleaded, Spud had told me to stop. It seemed a little illogical that he should know the ancestry of so mysterious a disease, anyway, when even famous physicians were puzzled.

  Still, there was always a light of hidden knowledge in his eyes when he made his denials. At least I suspected as much, and later it turned out I was right.

  We didn’t know what tricks Lorson might try to pull and had to watch him constantly. Several times during the course of journey other small meteors struck the Martia, and Lorson was horribly frightened. On other occasions he would curse us for hours. He was like a supremely crafty child that you could never trust.

  Within three weeks we crossed the orbit of Mars and shot on, nearing the ominous Silver Pall comet. It was ugly and beautiful at the same time—a great swirling bulk of cosmic dust and debris, and intensely rarified gas.

  It chilled me a little, watching it there in the feeble sunshine, all silvery with fine dust, part of which, Spud told me, was calcium and barium sulphide. Somewhere beneath that magnificent, rolling fearsome curtain was either victory or defeat. Reunion, or perhaps the silence of death. We didn’t know.

  Spud’s face was strained as he guided the Martia nearer to the comet. There was just one way to get into the heart of that swirling, stubby-tailed monster, and that was through a sort of vortex-like throat, for the comet spun on its axis like a planet. That is, all of the solid parts of it, for the gaseous tail remained fixed, away from the Sun.

  Down and down through that vortex-throat, which corresponded to a pole of the Earth, the Martia dropped. It grew dusky and dark beyond the ports of the ship, as the depth of ever-agitated meteoric dust and fragments above us thickened. It was ticklish business, getting through, but Spud was skillful and he knew the way.

  CENTRIFUGAL force kept the whirling vortex-path fairly clear, but now and then cosmic wreckage rattled dangerously against our ship’s hull. They were meteors, really, yet in their circular, orbital motion, they could attain only a tiny fraction of the velocity of meteors in free space. Had they gone faster than they did, centrifugal force would have catapulted them all into the open void.

  The feeble gravity of the Silver Pall, augmented a little by the attraction of some of its terrifically heavy central particles, would have been too weak to chain them, had their velocity been greater.

  There was danger in that journey down. These meteors were moving only with bullet speed this time, not cosmic speed. But you can’t disregard even such minor rates of motion.

  At last Spud landed the Martia on a great, meteoric lump a quarter of a mile in average diameter, which coursed round and round swiftly but regularly at the outer fringe of the Silver Pall’s core. The landing, too, was a ticklish job. But Spud accomplished it without a hitch.

  We had arrived, at least. The police ship that had followed us from Earth wouldn’t bother us for awhile, anyway, for they had been some distance behind us, and before they could actually invade the Silver Pall they would have to find that deceptive dimple in the mist of dust. And that wasn’t easy.

  Dressed in space armor, and shod with magnetic boots that would hold us by their attraction to the nickel-iron alloy of the huge, rugged mass on which we had landed, Spud and I went forth from the Martia to make our fateful exploration. We took Lorson with us, since we did not know how else to trust him. His wrist was secured to mine by means of stout cord, since we didn’t have a pair of hand-cuffs.

  Hunching low, we crept over that rough, rusty surface, which was marked with many queer, meteoric upjuttings. In the eerie gray light that sifted down from above, our adventure was like invading the lair of some demon of legend.

  There was no visible life, though Doctor Frank Avery had found microscopic bacteria growing inside porous rock outcroppings, where a little moisture and oxygen existed, sealed up. And his discovery had been used against him, and Spud, his co-worker. For some obscure variety of these bacteria was supposed to be the germ of the Silver Pall plague.

  We got to the Avery encampment at last. It was in a hollow, near one of the pointed ends of our meteor bulk. Looking down the steep slant, we could see part of the deeper core of the comet. Huger, vastly heavier lumps, rotating steadily, too, around a common center of gravity. But we did not look at them long....

  Not
hing could have been more desolate and eerie than that camp. Nothing more expressive of defeat and failure and desertion. My heart sank, it seemed, into my heavy boots. No explorer’s encampment left desolate for a hundred years on the wastes of Mars, or in a valley of the Moon, could have been more weird and depressing.

  “God!” I heard Spud gasp, through the communicator-phone.

  I knew how he felt, standing there in the empty silence. There was the sealed entrance to the living quarters, dug cavern-like into the mass of the meteor. There was the test-catapult, and other paraphernalia with which Avery, Spud, and Edna had been working. There was their furnace, for preparing super-hardened alloys. There, in neat rows, were Avery’s foot-long samples of meteor armor, the metal of them blurred now with a fine sifting of dust from above.

  Each sample was neatly and lightly prepared. The principle of each was the same, only the forms were different. The armor had double walls, and between, slanting or curved blades. Meteors were expected to puncture the outer shell, but on coming into contact with the slanted surfaces within, it was hoped that they would glance off. It was the principle of the inclined plane.

  AVERY had attached each of those samples to the end of a cylinder, which fitted inside the barrel of his catapult-like projectile—the catapult was a super-speed gun, really. The scientist had fired the samples upward at all the terrific velocity that the super-gun of his possessed against the ceiling of swarming meteors above.

  They were slow meteors, it was true, and they were of little danger to us here, for the larger mass on which we stood was moving in the same direction, and at about the same speed. But they had served their purpose in Avery’s tests. It was the catapult that had imparted the necessary velocity to the samples themselves, duplicating the conditions of the impact of swift meteors with a space ship in flight.