We didn’t have to wait long. We tuned our receivers to pick up waves from the Martia’s powerful static-penetrating transmitter, and heard Lorson speaking again to the commander of the police boat.
“I will guide you down the passage through the dust and meteor swarms, Commander,” he was saying in a conversational tone. “It is really quite easy, if you follow my instructions. But you must be ready to execute instantly any sudden order I may give you.”
It didn’t require much thinking for us to figure out how Lorson meant to get rid of that police boat. One look upward at the inner mouth of that vortex-like passage through the whirling dust and meteors was enough to tell us.
Lorson would give a “sudden order” that would throw the police craft against the wall of the vortex. The meteors were slow, traveling perhaps at less than a thousand feet per second, but that was swift enough, when mass and numbers were involved. The little ship would be completely smashed.
It was an easy trick, and a sure one. Lorson had been crafty enough to betray no suspicion in his voice. Thus he had guarded against his own semi-belief that they knew of his wrongs. From his own angle he had judged well, reasoning that if the police had learned of his misdeeds, they would still believe that he had no inkling of their knowledge.
So they would trust his word now, realizing that he must need their help, and could not endanger them. They would trust his technical judgment, too. He was scientifically clever and educated, even though he had never flown in space before.
Perfect psychology, and sure destruction. I gulped hard.
“What’ll we do, Spud?” I demanded hoarsely. “Our communicators aren’t strong enough for us to get even a whisper of warning through to that police commander.”
Spud didn’t heed my words at all. Our radios were still tuned to space ship wave length, and I had forgotten. But I saw that Spud’s face was stony with strain and checkmated determination, as he stared upward like a trapped tiger.
I felt the same. The damnable irony of it all. We had the solution to the problem of meteors, and other immeasurable improvements to space flight. Edna Avery was back there, waiting to be awakened. And then Lorson slaughtering his way to victory. No doubt he would see that the Averys died permanently with us.
And then, if he so chose, he would steal the greatest Avery invention, or else keep it secret if he thought it would injure his business. It would be easy to hide his crimes out here. No one would ever know what happened to that police boat.
CHAPTER V
A New Era Is Born
Helpless we were waiting to witness wholesale murder, Spud and I. Far up that vortex-throat we saw the glow of breaking rockets. The police boat was coming down now. The commander acknowledged Lorson’s treacherous words.
“Descending, Mr. Lorson,” he said. “Guide us.”
Then Spud took his almost useless blast pistol from his side pouch. I thought it was just a gesture of wildness at first. He pressed the trigger, and the thing sputtered feebly. His finger worked, making dots and dashes of a message.
Sure it was crazy. No light that anybody could see could ever get through those miles of dust above, I was positive. The pistol wasn’t even emitting any visible light here.
But wait! Upon the dust curtain above, there was a brilliant circular spot of luminescence, flickering out code in unison to Spud’s movement of the blast pistol’s trigger! My heart pounded with a tiny bit of optimism. Though the pistol’s charge was almost burnt out, it was still delivering a beam of radiations consisting largely of X-rays—powerful X-rays by old time standards.
And in that dust up there, there was calcium and barium sulphide, which becomes fluorescent, giving off light under X-ray stimulation! From above that streaming curtain of dust, Spud’s signals would be visible, too, as a flickering circle of light.
I was like a man in a dream as I read the flashes of Spud’s message:
Lorson is treacherous... Be on guard... Keep your weapons ready... Trust your own judgment... He is trying to destroy you... Descend carefully by your own observations... This is Spud MacCauley... Lorson wants to smash you against the side of the vortex....
Did they see the message? There should be observers posted at every port on that space boat. What would they think? Lorson was speaking to them by radio. And at the same time Spud MacCauley was speaking to them in another manner, telling them an opposite story. Spud MacCauley, by repute a notorious criminal. Whom would the police believe?
My breathing and heart action seemed to stop as I waited. The police boat was already quite a way down the vortex-tunnel, though its form was blurred by the fire from its exhaust jets.
And I could still hear Nicolas Lorson talking to the commander. As yet, Lorson seemed quite unaware that Spud had signaled them. Perhaps he was too occupied with his own plans to notice the slight flickering beyond the ports of the Martia.
“Easy,” he was saying. “Nothing to it, unless—”
And then he sprang his trick. His calm tone suddenly dissolved into a shout of almost hysterical excitement.
“Quick!” he yelled. “All the starboard tubes—full! Quick, Commander! Meteors!”
That was the moment when everything hung in the balance. A sudden, startling order, with every hair-trigger nervous reflex tending to obey. Everything seemed in Lorson’s favor then. In another instant that police boat should be hurtling sideward, to be chewed and battered beyond recognition by those spinning meteors of the vortex wall.
It was a moment without breath or heart beat. Spud’s face was a mask of pleading. Then that moment was over. The police boat was coming steadily down, without a change of course!
Why? Because Spud’s warning had taken away the element of surprise, I think. If Spud had been recognized as the blackest desperado, I believe it still would have worked. They were on guard, those cops, and took a second of time to think the order out. Now the commander depended on his own skill as a navigator.
Lorson was shouting with real hysterical fury now.
“Hurry up, you damn fool!” he screamed. “You’ll all be killed!”
BUT it was too late now. The small, heavily armed craft continued its unruffled descent.
In my radiophones I heard blasting curses from Lorson. Then the waves went dead. For fifteen seconds more, the Martia continued to rest quietly there in the hollow. Then fire jetted dazzlingly from its rockets, and it ripped clear of the great meteor mass.
Sensing that the occupants of that police boat understood the treachery he had attempted against them, Lorson was trying to get away, driven by mad fear. If he had been cooler, he might have succeeded.
He managed to guide the Martia parallel to the rotation of the great rusty lumps that formed the nucleus of the Silver Pall. And the vortex-throat was clear now, for the police boat was out of it.
But Nicolas Lorson didn’t make it. His maddened nerves weren’t steady enough, and he came up at too long a slant. Sparks flew like lightning as the Martia struck the wall of the vortex, and crumpled like a battered bit of tinfoil, its fragments to be absorbed by the whirling holocaust....
I looked at Spud then, and he was grinning. Funny, but the next moment we were shaking hands like a couple of dopes....
And then? Well, we gave ourselves up to Commander Parsons, and were put under technical arrest.
“There isn’t much doubt that your names will be cleared, boys,” he told us, after we had given him our side of the story. “What Lorson told you about the cause of the Silver Pall plague is quite probable, and can be checked easily enough. As for Lorson, we’ve known for a long time that murder and theft were part of his methods. But he kept out of our reach, as far as evidence went, and we had to protect him. You’ve rendered society a service.... And now will you lead us to the Avery camp? We’ll investigate the space ship idea of Frank Avery’s immediately afterward....”
Heat and heart-stimulating drugs brought Edna Avery around easily enough. After two hours in the tiny hospital c
ubby of the police craft, she was smiling weakly up at Spud, happy as anything. I didn’t hang around to listen to what they said to each other. It was none of my business when they had so much to say.
Old Frank was gone, though. We hadn’t told Edna that yet, of course. His sick old body hadn’t been able to survive suspended animation. But he was a martyr. The idea kind of stuck in my throat.
Especially when, twenty hours after the landing of the police crate, we started flying that huge new meteor-ship back toward Earth. Crude she was, and unfinished. But she had a soul—a soul of safety and might. It would take a meteor indeed to hurt her, or to penetrate into the little cavern dwelling dug in her heart. And nestled into a hollow in her crust was the police craft, firmly lashed into place, and pretty well protected on all sides. We had food and air enough now, so everything was all right.
White flame, touched off by a blast pistol, jetted from her tunneled rocket tube, and she accelerated slowly but mightily straight through the texture of the Silver Pall comet, and took her baptism of starlight. It was magnificent.
We would have to improve her, build her over, dig more caverns in her and make them homelike, put her in service and give her a name. The Avery. A name that would go ringing down the ages. The first ship made never to land.
I forgot all about Nicolas Lorson, and the trouble he had caused. That didn’t matter now. This was magnificence.
The End
************************************
Gears for Nemesis,
by Raymond Z. Gallun
Startling Stories Jan. 1942
Short Story - 7012 words
There Was One Way to Save the Day for the Passengers of the
Trail Blazer—and That Was to Give Them Both Day and Night!
COMMANDER Ned Kilmer was the man who discovered the sabotage of the atomic generators. Irreplaceable vital parts had been carefully removed, there in the ship’s deserted engine-room.
“Good Lord!” the old leader gasped, realizing all too vividly what the results of this disabling of the machinery would be. “Who would do a thing like this?”
Without power from the atomic generators, the intricate propulsive mechanisms of the interstellar craft, Trail Blazer, could not operate, even though, ordinarily, they could hurl the star cruiser across the hyper-dimensional shortcuts of space, traversing light-years of distance in months' time.
And without power, the heating system of the ship was useless, too. Which was unfortunate, for the Trail Blazer was grounded among the impassable, frozen-air mountains of the eternally dark and unthinkably cold hemisphere of Nemesis, single small planet of the dwarf star, Olympia!
Rugged Commander Kilmer knew that the Survey Group aboard the ship—some fifty people in all—who had been investigating the fabulous mineral riches in the grottoes of Nemesis, were doomed to die. They would meet a slow, freezing death on the night-half of a world that rotated on its axis only once, every time it revolved around its dwarf star primary. A contrasting hell-world, it was—its sunward face a searing inferno of heat and eternal daylight, its dark side congealed and timeless, and almost equally deadly.
The Group had plenty of food to last through the months, until a rescue ship could come from Earth. But with warmth seeping through the insulation of their ship, and no way of replacing the loss effectively, they would all be icy corpses soon.
“Either there’s a crazy man among us,” Kilmer thought anguishedly, “or an exceptionally clever crook, who wants to grab the mines—the mineral treasures of Nemesis—for himself. Jandrium, dorsium, and a half-dozen other commercially important elements, above uranium in atomic number, which can’t be obtained on Earth.”
Kilmer decided to announce his discovery of the sabotage to the other members of the Survey Group. He pressed a signal button on the gleaming duralumin wall of the engine-room. This was his last act.
There was the slither of a boot on the greasy engine-room floor. A shadow-blurred shape arose from behind the flanged bulk of a transformer. The gleaming illuminator-bulbs on the ceiling, efficient, and drawing the little power they needed from efficient storage batteries, seemed to watch sardonically.
In a moment of time there was a hiss, a puff of sparks, a short gasp, and a soft thumping....
Not more than a minute afterward, the personnel of the Trail Blazer were gathering, pale-faced and strained, around the remains of their chief. His head and shoulders and legs were still perfectly intact, while his torso and lower arms were gone—burned to fluffy ashes that floated like loose feathers in the slightly drafty air of the engine-room. And there was a pungent, singed smell....
“Rayed,” Dr. Welden, physician of the Survey Group said briefly, his plump face taut. “I guess that makes you our boss, now, Mr. St. Claire, since you were second in command. You’re our best scientist, now.”
Arnold St. Claire’s dark, effeminate features did not change.
By now most of the members of the Survey Group had recovered sufficiently from the stunning shock of their beloved leader’s ghastly murder to discover that the atomic generators had been sabotaged, their vitals stolen.
No one really needed to say a word, then. It was starkly clear to those hard spacemen that circumstance spelled doom. Creeping death from cold, far, far from home, and in an utterly alien environment.
And it was equally plain to them that there was somebody among their number who was guilty, as yet unsuspected.
“My God!” a big bulking man named Peters choked thickly, brushing a muscular, oil-smeared arm across his forehead in a confused gesture. But the others were still too dazed to speak.
PERHAPS a half hour later, a slender young man with a crooked and singularly sinister grin pulling his lips perpetually to one side, entered the Trail Blazer's office.
He approached Arnold St. Claire, the new commander of the Survey Group, sitting there behind his desk.
“Mr. St. Claire,” he said almost timidly. “I hope you’ll forgive me for busting in on you like this. But maybe we won’t have to freeze after all. There’s a way to save us, I think. If you’ll give me all the radite explosive on the ship, I’ll do the rest.”
St. Claire looked startled for a second.
“That would be an extraordinary request for anyone to make—just at present!” he burst out at last. “Both radite and undiscovered criminals are dangerous! Together, they’re sure poison. Trust you with our stock of explosive? Not on your life, Mr. Knobs Hartley! One look at that face of yours is enough to tell me that you’d be glad to sell your own brother to the Venusian cannibals for a chew of karab gum!”
Knobs Hartley, one of the Trail Blazer's mechanics, had nice eyes, wavy hair, an innocuously slight build, and a habit of exercising with a pair of dumb-bells when nobody was around. But there was one thing bad about his appearance.
Five years in the endless interstellar distances, helping to expand the gigantic colonial empire of Earth, had not been without its mishaps for young Hartley. Once a flying fragment of steel, from a minor atomic generator blow-out, had severed a tendon in his neck. Hasty emergency surgery had saved him, but at the cost of shortening the tendon. Thus Knobs Hartley’s mouth was pulled into a constant, one-sided leer, evil to say the least, though acquired in line of duty.
He struggled now, rather ineffectually, to straighten out his grin. He felt hurt, and regretted that he’d never taken time to go to the medicos to have his face fixed up. But he was determined to be tactful.
“I know you’ve got to be mighty careful, Mr. St, Claire,” he said seriously, “until we find our saboteur and murderer. But I really have got an idea to save our lives, and I hope you'll listen. With that radite explosive I think I can speed up Nemesis’ rotation on its axis a little—give both hemispheres a night and day period again! We couldn’t freeze with a lot of heat and light from Olympia, the dwarf star, flooding this side of the planet half of the time!”
Knobs paused to get his breath; but Arnold St. Claire arched his la
dy-like brows in derisive startlement.
“What in the name of sense are you talking about, Hartley?” he roared. “Of course planets have been speeded up on their axes before, giving them a twenty-four hour Earth-day for colonial purposes. Mercury, in our own Solar System, was one of these planets, originally keeping the same face turned toward the Sun, just as Nemesis does with Olympia. But such speed-ups have only been accomplished at terrific cost, by means of gigantic drive-units, like those used to propel space ships. What could you do with the fifty pounds, Earth-weight, of radite, that we have in stock—tremendous atomic explosive though it certainly is? Nemesis is three thousand miles in diameter. Turning it any faster than it does normally, would take real power!”
“BUT we’ve got the power!” Knobs urged eagerly. “Not in the radite, but in something else. The trick I'm thinking of was known in every college physics lab, even in the Eighteenth Century, a thousand years ago. The facts about Nemesis will cooperate nicely with my scheme. First, it rotates on its axis once in about seven Earth-days—the same time that it takes to revolve in its orbit around the dwarf star, Olympia, which is very near, hardly bigger than the Earth, but very heavy. Second, we’re stranded here close to the equator of Nemesis. Third, this is a porous world, as we’ve discovered both by actual exploration and radio-beam soundings. Nemesis is full of cooled volcanic caverns, almost to its core.
“Explosives, properly placed, would make some of those caverns collapse. The heavy rocks of their floors and roofs would fall toward the center of this world. That in itself will make Nemesis turn a little more rapidly on its axis! Thus it will catch up with itself in its rotation, and the dark hemisphere here will move around toward Olympia!”
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