Then and Now : A Collection of SF

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  “Utilizing much the same methods, they reduced animals and plants in proportion. And now they are a people which must number many millions of individuals, living complex, civilized, and comfortable lives inside the sealed caverns which they have excavated in a great rock. No wonder their refuge wasn’t found before this!”

  Al Kerny looked a trifle dazed. “Well,” he said, “that ends the Paxtonian mystery, doesn’t it? There’s nothing left to do but knock over that damned ant hill and wipe out every bug inside it! The torpedo projector in the war turret is made for that kind of work!”

  Kerny glanced toward the door, his gray eyes glinting with the light of vengeance. Then, suddenly, most of the grimness of him softened.

  “We know how to fight them now,” he said irrelevantly. “They aren’t dangerous any more, if we’re careful.” He paused, and then went on: "They were probably scared; that’s why they blew up those commercial ships and killed the boys. In their position, we’d have done the same, if we had the nerve. Besides, they’ve already paid the price in blood. Maybe, when they find out that Earthmen aren’t such bad eggs, they’ll make friends. Earth ought to be able to learn a lot from them. Say, Doc, let’s just scram and leave the little devils alone! There probably are a few of their spheres still somewhere on the ship; but with the super Scarab to watch, we’ll be fairly safe.”

  Rolf smiled. “I was almost sure you would have a change of heart, my friend,” he said. “And yes, here comes the Scarab, back.”

  Through the tiny hole in the wall of the conning tower flew a pin prick of hot, white light—

  The End

  ****************************************

  Magician of Dream Valley,

  by Raymond Z. Gallun

  Astounding Oct. 1938

  Short Story - 5692 words

  In a haunted, dreaded valley on the Moon,

  the Hexagon Lights wavered—flickered—

  Inexplicable, till a man went to investigate—

  and was investigated!

  JACK VICKERS felt a twinge of dread sweep through him as he reached the top of the pass and looked down into Dream Valley. Cupped in the mountains just beyond the western rim of Mare Imbrium, the Lunar “sea”, the valley swarmed with Hexagon Lights, ancient and now vanishing miracles of the Moon. Tenuous as the fabric of an aurora, they winked and throbbed and changed their forms and their gorgeous colors like the ghosts of gigantic snowflakes.

  Jack Vickers was a newscast reporter. He’d had some tough assignments during his career, and this one topped them all. Right now he couldn’t figure out where all his former eagerness had come from—or gone!

  “I want you to get the straight dope about this Magician of Dream Valley,” his chief, back on Earth, had told him. “This queer old guy has become quite notorious among the men at Imbrium City. Not one of those men will go near him. His name is Athelstane—Clyde Athelstane, recently connected with the physics department of Columbia U. But now he’s reported to be a regular sorcerer who can accomplish things that nobody else can understand. His original purpose in coming to the Moon, it seems, was to study the Hexagon Lights. So go ahead and do your stuff, Jack! The public eats up any info that’s out of the usual rut.”

  Jack Vickers had accepted this order with a song in his heart. For he was young, and this looked like a real opportunity. He'd never been off the Earth before, for one thing.

  Cold reality had put his enthusiasm on a less romantic basis. Imbrium City was tough and practical, and full of men of a similar character—except for that Athelstane quirk of theirs. Sweeping around the ugly and eternally threatening squatness of the rocket fuel plant, which was beyond the little settlement itself, were the gray plains of a “sea” which, on the quick-cooling Moon, had never contained water in any mentionable quantity. The aspect of those gently undulating expanses of billion-year-old lava was too awesome now, under the grimly factual stars, for any preconceived idea of romance in connection with them to overbalance their depressing suggestion of eternal death.

  However, Jack Vickers had a purpose, and he was not the type who quits easily. Presently, steeped in a new Lunar lore acquired from the talk of hard-bitten old Moon-colonists, he had sallied forth from the settlement.

  HIS EQUIPMENT consisted chiefly of a highly developed space armor. The thing was massive. Each foot was a miniature atom-powered tractor. A man within the suit could withdraw his arms from the sleeves of the intricate, versatile thing, and reach the food supplies contained in pockets arranged all around the spacious interior. There were air-purifiers, of course, and water generators. The leg joints of the armor could be locked so that a man could sleep—if he could sleep in an erect position—while the little tractors on his boots carried him on and on.

  And so, guided by the eternally glowing stars, young Vickers had started out on his mission, warnings, and even expressions of resentment at what he was attempting, ringing in his ears. The fuel plant, the vast slag heaps, and the atmosphere-dome of the settlement, had sunk rapidly under the horizon behind him. The greenly phosphorescent pall of radioactive waste-vapors ejected from the chimneys of the plant had been the last landmark of the colony to disappear.

  Luna solitudes. Occasional Hexagon Lights, mysterious and haunting, dancing like Will-o’-the-Wisps in the distance— Jack had crossed to the rim of Mare Imbrium. Guiding his tractor boots carefully, he had climbed the rugged mountain pass.

  And now he was looking down into the weird, crag-walled pocket that was Dream Valley itself.

  Its entire expanse was in view, except where the inky, undiffused shadows masked most of the details of its opposite edge. But into those shadows the Hexagon Lights intruded now and then, quivering over the ash of long-extinct volcanoes, and offering a little varicolored illumination. The jagged, uneroded barriers of the valley brooded moveless and dull gray, giving a suggestion of subtle evil.

  Jack swallowed nervously, and his eyes blinked into the dazzling sunshine, as he searched for the sealed dwelling of the man he had come to interview. But nowhere in sight, as far as he could discover, was any man-made building.

  “Damn!” Jack cursed softly. “This must be the place! I couldn’t have gotten my directions mixed up! Unless those yarns about Athelstane being able to make things vanish and reappear again are true!”

  Definitely uneasy, yet a bit disgusted with himself for the unwonted superstitious fear that had come over him, young Vickers stood motionless for a few moments. A host of writhing Hexagon Lights were gathered there below him, like a mass of phosphorescent vacuum, engrained with a million winking geometric patterns that shone with all the colors of the spectrum. The sunshine gave those Hexagon Lights a kind of rainbow transparency.

  Jack Vickers had never before seen a display of the great Lunar miracle that even dimly approached this in magnificence. Once the Hexagon Lights had been common all over the surface of the Moon, but no more. The manufacture of radioactive rocket fuel at Imbrium City was supposed to have something to do with their gradual disappearance.

  DREAM VALLEY! Hexagon Lights! Composed only of a soft, auroral luminescence as far as anyone could see, they altered their shapes and colors constantly. Now they were simple, diaphanous planes of a six-sided form. And now they took on all the beauty and geometric complexity of a snowflake expanded to colossal size.

  Yet they were, according to accepted scientific opinions, no more than phenomena related to terrestrial auroras, being induced in the minute trace of Lunar atmosphere by incoming electro-magnetic waves from the sun. Some odd, natural condition, peculiar to the Moon, was supposed to give them their crystalline shapes by reflecting in some manner, and in enormously magnified size, the forms of minute ice crystals still floating in what little remained of the Lunar shell of air. At least, like ice, and no matter how much they changed in appearance otherwise, they always retained that fundamental hexagonal form.

  Jack Vickers suppressed a shudder. The tweaking sense of unease that crawled along his spine
made him want to get the distasteful things ahead over and done with as soon as possible. He searched the valley floor again for the dwelling of the Magician. Thus, presently, he spied a low, square structure which blended well with the general, sombre hue of the ground beneath the diaphanous splendor of the Hexagon Lights.

  “Dr. Athelstane’s laboratory,” he muttered. “I’m almost certain it wasn’t there before. Still—it must have been! My eyes must have been tricking me, just as the eyes of those other few men who saw this place were tricked. Even on Earth there are desert mirages. Some parallel, though unrelated phenomenon here, evidently—”

  Jack began to climb down the rugged slope toward the bottom of Dream Valley. His armor was massive, but the low Lunar gravity gave it little weight, and his tractor boots, though clumsy, were equipped with sharp lugs that gripped well the pumice-like rock.

  Entering the level where the Hexagon Lights swarmed was somehow, dimly, like being immersed in water. There was almost the same sense of being enveloped and covered by a medium which had treacherous possibilities. Almost at once Jack Vickers’ head began to ache dully. This was a disquieting symptom which the earlier colonists of the Moon had noticed, and which the present colonists avoided carefully. It was evidently produced by a too-close contact with the Hexagon Lights. The result, perhaps, of an emanation which was thrown off from their ghostly forms.

  Tense with nerve strain, Jack hurried as much as he could. Once on the valley floor, he set his tractor boots to top speed. Thus he rushed forward, straight through the myriad shapes of Hexagon Lights, as tenuous as a vacuum, but beautiful as a designer’s most fragile vision—beautiful and cold, and apart from anything the newscast man had ever encountered before in his past life.

  FEELING somewhat shaken, he reached the entrance of the laboratory structure. Beside the entrance there was a little push button. Jack pressed it to signal his arrival. Slowly, then, after a brief wait, the external valve of the air-lock opened. Jack entered and the valve closed behind him. In another minute, after the compartment had filled with air, he proceeded to remove his space armor, leaving it standing rigid against the wall beside another similar armor.

  “Hello, my young friend! I see you are a bit upset by my beauties, by my wonderful star-flowers! But it is only natural! They are strange, so utterly strange! When you become used to them you will love them even as I do! Nevertheless, I am glad you are here—very glad! I need help in my work. During several months I have tried occasionally to get someone to come here to assist me. But no, it was not easy to do! The people at Imbrium City are stupid provincials full of superstition unworthy of our age! You are not like them! I can see that you are not like them! You are educated! Cultured! You will help in the most wonderful research that has ever been attempted!”

  The voice rattled on with the almost hysterical garrulity of one suddenly relieved from long solitude. Half startled, Jack Vickers looked at the speaker. He saw not a sombre wizard, but a little, rosy-cheeked benignant man in his middle fifties, who had entered the air-lock compartment through the now-open inner valve.

  But still, Jack could not forget that this was the Magician of Dream Valley. The man who, according to vague reports circulated at Imbrium City, had appeared close to the settlement’s atmosphere dome on several occasions, and had gone away again—without leaving any permanent tracks in the dust where his tractor boots had trod!

  All talk, of course. Yet here in this little air-lock compartment, where metal gleamed dully, it was easy to fall into the grip of a dim fear that was like dark enchantment. Jack fought the insidious, creeping approach of that fear with all the will power at his command. The memory of the weird Hexagon Lights was still vivid in his mind.

  He smiled. "Perhaps I will help you with your investigations, Sir—if you find that I’m qualified, ” he said guardedly, feeling somehow that in the almost-pleading insistence of the little man there was—in some manner—a trap. "I’m Jack Vickers of Fortune Newscast. You, I take it, are Dr. Clyde Athelstane.”

  "You’ve come here specially to see me?” the savant questioned in obvious pleasure.

  Jack had made no move to conceal his identity, for he had heard from fairly accurate sources that Athelstane really wanted publicity. So now he proceeded to carry his scheme of flattery through.

  "Of course, Sir!” he said. “You must tell me all about your work!”

  The scientist beamed. "That is splendid!” he enthused. “Come with me!”

  Athelstane led his guest into the comfortable, though compactly arranged living quarters.

  “Sit down! Sit down!” he invited.

  JACK DROPPED into a big easy chair, his outward calm fairly restored, but an inward turmoil troubling him as much, or more, than ever. His head still ached furiously, and mixed with this physical discomfort was the consciousness of a thousand disquieting and mysterious circumstances that lurked around him. It was quite possible that Athelstane was a madman, wasn’t it? Certainly it must be easy for one to lose his mind here cooped up in this tiny building, with the age-old vacuum of the Moon all around! Moveless crags, brooding and sullen. Ancient ash and scoria of long-dead volcanoes. Almost nothing that moved except the Hexagon Lights. In Athelstane’s faded blue eyes there seemed to be weird reflections of Lunar stars. And his whole body, ordinary though his appearance was, appeared to be wrapped in an impalpable aura of the fantastic.

  Jack thought of the possibility of being murdered in some bizarre experiment here, and he didn’t like the idea at all. But then—perhaps he was only allowing his imagination to run away with him.

  Athelstane paced the floor restlessly. “Do you believe in conservation, young man?” he asked. “That is, the conservation of natural things—wild life and so forth?”

  “With reservations, yes,” Jack responded at once.

  “You agree with me then on one point,” the scientist responded. "My beauties, my Hexagon Lights, are the greatest natural miracles of the Moon! They must be preserved from the extinction which threatens them. During the time that I have studied them, I have learned much. They are not quite what they are supposed to be. But it is true that they are basically phenomena of the ether, just as are wireless waves, X-rays, cosmic rays, heat and light waves and so forth. The great difference between the Hexagon Lights and the phenomena with which I have compared them lies in the fact that they are much more complexly organized. That is what they are—organisms of the ether, just as we are organisms of matter! Ether has been much misunderstood. It has not been distinguished from an absolute vacuum simply because no absolute vacuum—separate from the ether—has ever been produced by men. Ether is not mere emptiness; it is a medium, more truly comparable to a solid than to a true vacuum. That we do not perceive its material properties is simply because we have not the right organs of sense to do so.

  "Thus far, boy, I believe you follow me. And you know, of course, why the rocket fuel plant, which serves half of the Solar System, was established on the Moon. Manufacturing rocket fuel consists in taking aluminum, extracted from rock, lava, and so forth, and rebuilding its atoms, thus transmuting it into complex, heavy radioactive elements in which is concentrated terrific atomic power. The radiations incident upon such a reconstructive process would be dangerous on Earth, killing vegetation, and producing morbid sores on unprotected men and animals. In addition to this, there is always danger of a fearful atomic explosion. In consequence, Imbrium City was built on the deserted Lunar surface, where the fuel plant would not threaten the dense populace of Earth.

  “THUS the Hexagon Lights were brought face to face with the promise of doom. For to them, with the fine balance of etheric forces that is theirs, the radiations of the manufacture of rocket fuel are far more dangerous than they are to humans. Gradually, gradually, they are being destroyed. And if there were to be an explosion at the plant—producing a wave of fearful etheric power, and throwing a thin shell of radioactive gases all around the Moon—they would all be wiped out in a few hours!r />
  “Oh, don’t you see, boy? I am a student of all the miracles of the universe! And now, when I find the greatest, the most thrilling miracle of all—it is about to be snuffed out of existence, even before I am given a chance to complete my study of it. This must not happen! I will not let it happen! Never! Never! Never! These rocket fuel people must be driven from the Moon! They can establish another plant on one of the larger asteroids just as well. To drive them away is my first objective. With your help, Jack Vickers, I can accomplish it quite easily!”

  Jack was a little dazed at this stunningly direct statement. With wonder and doubt and half belief growing in his mind, he had listened to all that Athelstane had said, not without a certain sympathy. But he was sure, now, that his host’s motives were backed up by reasoning faculties that were a bit blurred, making him the monomaniac champion of a beautiful, outre, and perhaps dangerous, unknown.

  “You’re being rather drastic, aren’t you, Doctor?” he fenced. “After all, the plant at Imbrium City represents an enormous investment, in which hundreds of thousands of people are involved to supply the financial backing. Our first loyalty is theirs, since they are our own kind—”

  “Finance! Loyalty!” Athelstane almost shouted. “How do you know that you do not match those stupid words against the very existence of living souls? Yes, I have reason to suspect it! The Hexagon Lights may have intellects even as we! Wait!”

  The scientist pushed a heavy curtain away from a window, revealing the expanse of Dream Valley, and the forms of its strange inhabitants.