Then and Now : A Collection of SF

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  A few minutes later they were digging their way through broken, smoldering rock. Yellow daylight streamed in upon them. Like grotesque imps from a nether region, they scrambled up through the pit which the explosive had blasted in the surface crust of the Earth.

  With mixed feelings of awe, wonder and dread, they looked about them, knowing that this was the moment during which their future would be revealed.

  Low in the west the Sun was shining. It was not a very different Sun from that which had been familiar during the old peaceful days. It was a trifle larger, perhaps, but otherwise it was the same. It was evident that after the noval outburst it had contracted rapidly, incorporating the substance of the huge meteoric cloud into its mass.

  Perhaps the cloud had been the means of saving it from the near extinction of stars that burst out madly. Had the cause of the noval activity been entirely internal, providing no means of replacing destroyed matter, Sol’s condition might have been different. But now it was such a Sun as might have burned above the primeval, azoic Earth.

  Around it, along the horizon, hung heavy clouds, black-centered, yellow-fringed, ominous and majestic as volcanic palls. A murky haze of steam veiled everything, and through its lazily shifting layers loomed grotesque buttes of rocks, harsh and jagged and grand as something torn from the vitals of creation. A great, sleepy lava pit in the near distance sent up slim pencilings of smoke. The ground all about exuded a steamy vapor.

  Brad Keyston felt an unpleasant warmth seeping through the vacuum compartments of his soles. He saw the ghostly threads of noxious volcanic gas wreathing about his helmet.

  Roger Leeds had taken a little thermostat from a pocket in the asbestos garment he wore. Brad and Maysie heard his voice croaking thickly in the radiophones over their ears.

  “A hundred and thirty-four degrees Centigrade!” he pronounced. “The air is heated thirty-four degrees above the boiling point of water!’’

  They all knew the truth now.

  Maysie’s pert little chin trembled behind the glazed front of her oxygen helmet. Yet she smiled. “Old Killjoy ought to be tickled to death about this,’’ she said. “I suppose we ought to send the good news from Ghent to Aix at once.”

  Brad laughed. "The bad news from Gehenna to Hades, did you say? Soon, but there’s no need to hurry about flattering Dr. Heth. Let’s look around a bit first.”

  THE SUN had sunk into the sulphurous clouds. Dusk began to settle. The three outlandishly clad humans picked their way with deft caution through the smoldering debris beneath their feet, as they wandered aimlessly about the pit.

  Lightning flashed on the heavy horizon. Thunder grumbled. Through a gap in the cloud bank two great stars gleamed. Perhaps one was Venus, if Venus still existed. The other looked brighter, as if it blazed with an incandescence of its own. Maybe it was a new planet, shot from the body of the exploding Sun.

  As the darkness deepened, a white glow illuminated the eastern sky, as if, somewhere beyond the serrated grandeur of the hills, a vast lake of white flame burned.

  A whispering vibration found its way through the helmets of the three adventurers. Swiftly it grew louder. Something was coming out of that eastern glow, something strange and outre that blazed like molten magnesium behind a shell of glass. It was long and slim, shaped like a zeppelin, and it was flying swiftly westward at an altitude of several thousand feet.

  But it was nothing that man could have made. It seemed unsubstantial, as if it were fabricated from an ethereal plasma, lying on the border line between matter and energy.

  With mounting velocity it hurtled nearer, climbing steadily into the darkening yellow haze of the sky. It was like a great, elongated bubble, whose flexible integument seemed fuzzy and vague, as if it had no definite surface.

  Behind the veiling, unsubstantial enigma of its shell, shapes moved, as if motivated by reasonable purposes which, however, were beyond the grasp of humankind. They burned a dazzling white behind the blurred film that incased them. Their forms were irregular, amoebal, and they thrust out and withdrew threadlike pseudopods of luminous gas.

  Only a brief glimpse the adventurers had of these incomprehensible mysteries. Then the thing in which they rode had thundered overhead and had begun to diminish into the leprous, unhealthy colors of the sunset. Ascending steadily, it became a minute speck that appeared to vanish into the depths of space itself.

  When it was gone, three whitened faces exchanged awed looks.

  “Was that a machine?” Maysie stammered. “A machine made of something that isn’t truly solid—isn’t a—a substance at all?”

  Brad Keyston was conscious that his muscles had tightened defensively. “Maybe,” he stated in a level tone that betrayed his efforts to control himself.

  “Then they’re alive!” Roger burst out. “They’re thinking beings. But they’re not like us! They are a different order of life entirely. But where did they come from? Or did some evolutionary process produce them here after the nova subsided? In two thousand years? That’s too short a time!”

  Keyston tried to shrug nonchalantly; but for the present, in the face of this new marvel, he had forgotten even the plight of himself and his people in this alien inferno.

  “We’ll find out what we can,” he said with forced calm. “We’ll phone down to the vaults for help. A plane will have to be hoisted up here and assembled; and we will need to rig up some sort of a landing platform.” He nodded toward the east where the white glow, hinting of unimaginable things, still blazed in the sulphurous dusk. “Then we’ll be able to fly over there and see what is causing that anyway,” he added.

  A few moments later they had made their way back into the surface chamber from which they had so recently emerged. Brad spoke with Dr. Heth over the telephone, telling him what they had seen and what they wanted.

  “It all sounds far too intriguing to be true,” Heth replied with his usual pessimism. “Conditions up there must be pretty bad to make you imagine such wonders. But I suppose we shall have to humor you until we find out definitely that you are insane.”

  The elevator was kept busy for many hours while it hoisted workers and supplies to the surface.

  People who had once enjoyed routine existences as employees of Heth & Keyston Chemicals, donned fantastic attire and slaved at tasks about which, in that other peaceful time, they had never even dreamed.

  THE infernal night wore on. A gusty, steam-laden wind tore out of the southwest, shrieking a devil’s tune. Hot rain from the cooler regions of the sky tumbled down, to vaporize with a hiss as it struck the sizzling crust of the Earth. Lightning blazed, revealing a hell of distorted crags and hills. Thunder crashed. Through rifts in the ragged clouds the Moon shone now and then.

  It was a different Moon from that of olden times, for the same cataclysmic forces which had transformed the Earth had transformed its satellite. Luna’s surface features had changed, and around her clung the halo of an atmosphere, which had perhaps been baked out of the substance of her crust.

  “The old Moon’s had its face lifted!” a pert, red-headed little stenographer who was one of several women that had insisted on coming to the surface, commented gleefully.

  In spite of their handicaps the workers toiled on, arranging plates of metal over the hardening lava to serve as a landing platform. When dawn came, red and threatening, the plane was assembled and ready for flight.

  Dr. Heth took the controls. The rocket tubes sent back their propulsive streams with powerful thrusts, lifting the craft quickly from the ground. Heth circled, wigwagging the wings in a salute to the goblin figures of the people on the landing platform.

  Maysie, Roger and Brad were with him. They stared intently forward and down as he sent the ship hurtling eastward. There beyond the steam-wrapped crags and hollows, the auroral glow still blazed mysteriously.

  It was only a short hop to the scene of the enigma which they sought to penetrate—twenty miles, perhaps.

  Beneath them now was a broad plain which see
med to have been artificially smoothed. Seven structures, arranged to form a geometric cluster, had been erected on its glassy floor. All were alike. They were huge, circular fabrications, a half mile across. Their roofs were very low, and were formed like flattened domes. They were made of the same strange, ethereal, transparent plasma as the aircraft that had flown westward the evening before. It could be seen that each structure was divided radially into triangular compartments, after the fashion of the sections of an orange.

  All but one of the buildings looked deserted and lonely. A single, wedge-shaped compartment of one of the structures was filled with a blotchy mass of incandescence. It was from this that the glow, seen from a distance, had originated. Specks of flame swarmed and writhed within it. The rest of the great flattened dome was dark.

  For several minutes Heth guided the plane back and forth above the fantastic citadel or camp. His companions felt the soul-tweaking thrill of uncertainty. Were they in danger? They did not know. The doctor’s caution was instinctive.

  At the base of the dome, where the lighted compartment touched the outer wall, a curious phenomenon was taking place. A huge blister or bubble seemed to be forming. Rapidly its misty substance swelled, as fiery, amoebal forms forced their way into it. The process took many minutes. Then, with a sudden jerk, the thing detached itself from the dome and arose balloonlike into the air. In a matter of seconds it elongated, becoming a zeppelin-shaped aircraft.

  “They’re coming up to attack us!” Maysie cried.

  It was not so, however. The thing came close as it ascended skyward—close enough for the occupants of the plane to capture a clear, photographic glimpse of the entities inside the energy bubble.

  The sentient blobs of incandescence moved around and around within the confines of their plasmic envelope, like dust motes swirling in a vortex, or like men working a treadmill.

  Perhaps this second comparison was not too far-fetched to have points of fact. What man, viewing this demonstration of an utterly alien science, could say that these marvelous unknowns were not propelling their weird vehicle by means of an energy derived from their own bodies? Before the thought had a chance to form in the minds of the observers, the dazzling craft had flashed eastward to vanish into the glare of the morning Sun.

  “I’m going down to see what this is all about!” Heth announced with a grimness that was quite unlike his usual self. His attitude suggested a bewildered but determined bear.

  Below, white flame belched from the opening in the side of the dome, whence the huge bubble had emerged. Within the triangular compartment the glow was fading, as if it were no longer needed. The other deserted compartments seemed like creations of mist, fuzzy and vague, and almost perfectly transparent.

  Without thought of danger, Dr. Heth brought the rocket ship to rest on the hard, glassy ground on which the dome city had been built.

  THE ADVENTURERS hurried toward the structure which had so recently been evacuated. The blast of escaping flame held them back.

  The bearded scientist looked in helpless questioning at his younger colleague. “The temperature of the gas inside that compartment must be at least four thousand degrees Centigrade!” he cried.

  “How could anything alive withstand such heat?” Maysie demanded.

  Brad Keyston was bewildered, yet from out of his bewilderment he captured a thread of understanding. Eagerly he pounced upon it, seeking to broaden his first vague inspiration.

  “Those beings do not belong to Earth,” he stated quietly. “Let us say that they came to our planet to escape cataclysmic conditions which broke out in their native habitat. Earth began to cool once more. They could not stand the cooling, for they needed heat. So they built these fire domes in which to live. Now conditions are again favorable on their native sphere, so they have gone home.”

  “What are you talking about?” Heth asked in brusque puzzlement.

  “Remember that their first craft went west at dusk, and that this other went east at dawn?” Brad reminded him. “They were headed for the Sun—headed for home.”

  “But nothing could live in the temperatures that exist on the Sun!” Heth protested. "Protoplasm—”

  “Who said anything about protoplasm?” Keyston demanded. “Obviously those things aren’t composed of protoplasm. Superheated gas, they must be, functioning through the agency of forces and processes about which we know very little. Atomic energy; disorganized electrons and protons. It’s what we would have called impossible once because our experience wasn’t broad enough. But it’s true. You saw that it was true!”

  Gradually the facts soaked into befuddled minds. Life even on the Sun. Intelligence, science, invention; comforts, fears, aspirations. Incredible but true—

  “Splendid deduction, Brad,” Roger Leeds said calmly. “But maybe there is another fact that is more interesting to us from a personal angle. Come along!”

  The three followed him. He led them around the dome to an opening from which another space ship must have departed. But there was no escaping flame here. Without hesitation Roger entered the vaporous doorway. The others came after him.

  They were in a vast, triangular compartment, through the sides and roof of which, Sunlight sifted. The floor was misty and vague, yet it supported their weight like a great mat of live rubber. And here, at close quarters, it glowed and sparkled with myriad prismatic hues. What the strange plasma from which the dome was constructed might be, no man could guess with any certainty; for it was the product of another science. Perhaps it was some form of crystallized energy, dim and diaphanous, yet permanent as the rocks of Earth itself.

  Roger consulted his pocket thermostat. “One hundred and thirty-four degrees outside; one hundred and twenty- five here. Nine degrees cooler,” he pronounced. Then he touched the wall. It gave a little, like rubber.

  “The perfect insulator,” he said. “It kept the heat the Sun people needed, in; and it should keep the heat we don’t need out. We have the chemicals to make soil out of lava. We have tractors, we have air purifiers. We can bring our soil here, seal the entrance, cool the atmosphere with liquefied oxygen, plant our crops—and live! There probably are many other deserted dome cities throughout the world, if we need them.”

  His audience stared at him for a long moment. Then the curious, hard calm which Maysie had maintained since the awakening, collapsed, and she leaned on Brad’s shoulder and sobbed with relief.

  The bewhiskered Heth swore thickly. He seemed more than ever like a lost and doubtful bear. But in his eyes there was an ecstatic light.

  The End

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  The Scarab,

  by Raymond Z. Gallun

  Astounding Aug. 1936

  Short Story - 3790 words

  A fascinating idea—and possible!

  THE MESSAGE sped through the ether at 7:40 p.m., Eastern Standard Time. At 7:43 the Scarab crept out on a window ledge of the room topping a tall building popularly known as the N. J. House.

  The Scarab paused on its perch for a moment, as if to determine for itself whether it was perfectly fit for action. It was a tiny thing, scarcely more than an inch and a half in length. The fancy of the craftsman who had made it, had given to the Scarab the form of the beetle after which it was named. But its body had a metallic sheen, and its vitals were far more intricate than those of the finest watch.

  The Scarab rubbed its hind legs together, as flies will do when at rest. Then, apparently satisfied that it was in condition, it unfolded the coleoptera-like plates over its wings. With a buzz that any uninformed person would have mistaken for that of a beetle, it started out on its journey.

  There were only two who observed its departure. Both were in the uppermost chamber of the N. J. House. One was a hard-faced fellow who watched the Scarab with keen interest; the other was a slight, wizened chap, whose legs were off at the knee. The latter sat in a wheel chair before a white screen, beneath which were many strange instruments, levers, and but
tons.

  The pair conversed in low tones, making frequent mention of Dr. Clyde Allison, best-known scientist of the year, 1947. Their features were gaunt with strain.

  But the Scarab itself betrayed no evidence of any emotional upset. The nervous quickness of its movements spoke only of swift, smooth efficiency.

  It dipped in its flight; and its quartz-lensed eyes took in the scene below. There was unusual activity in the city streets. Crowds of people, drawn suddenly from work and amusement alike, stared fearfully at the evening sky. Lights winked with a suggestion of feverish tension.

  There were excited shouts and cries detectable to the sensitive, microphonic ears of the Scarab. The noise of traffic was a steady roar. Stubby, waspish ships patrolled the air; and on the ground, in park and plaza, gleaming, high-angle guns were already being wheeled into position.

  The Scarab’s inspection of these preparations, was brief but intense. No one saw the tiny, metal fabrication; or if they did they thought it only a large, vagrant insect. But the Scarab possessed more than an insect’s powers. Steeply, and at terrific speed, it arose, until it reached the cold, unresistant texture of the stratosphere. There it straightened out and tore southward, the minute motor that drove its purring wings drawing its energy from the same wireless power plants which supplied most of the larger mechanisms, on the ground and in the air.

  A HALF HOUR WENT BY. The miles reeled past beneath, far more rapidly than the fleeting minutes. The distant, cloud-flecked terrain was gray and blurred in the thickening dusk; for all lights in the cities and villages had now been extinguished as a precautionary measure.