With the power turned almost full on, Mac swung eastward, seeking to parallel the ship’s orbit. Slowly it crept closer, until it was abreast with the flier. At an even velocity they coursed along side by side. Though the speed of the two bodies must have been many miles a second, it seemed to Sandhurst and his companions that they hung almost motionless in space.
Cautiously McLennan was edging nearer to the arching dome of crystals that spread out beside them, like a serrated forest of spikes. It was fully fifteen hundred feet in diameter.
“It looks as though the coast is clear,” McLennan stated. “Shall we land?”
“Not yet, Mac,” Sandhurst said. “They may have some kind of a trap set for us. We’ll test them out first.” He was toying with a small machine inclosed in a box of polished hardwood.
Fay was searching the sky toward the rear. “The invaders are catching up with us,” she warned.
Sandhurst saw that the two rockets were in sight, but were still a long distance away. Their propelling mechanism had not reached full efficiency until they had escaped from the atmosphere. He smiled grimly. No need to bother about them yet.
His fingers deftly manipulated dials and buttons on the control panel of the box. Responding to his commands and directions sent to it by radio, a small cylinder detached itself from the rack under the hull of the flier, and with quick darting movements, resembling those of a dragon fly, it propelled itself toward the invader’s ship. For a small part of a moment it maneuvered, then it dived and crashed against the hemispherical boss on the metal belt of the ship. A puff of smoke, mingled with flying fragments of the hemisphere, was the only evidence that an explosion had taken place. There was no sound. A thin, white vapor steamed up out of the rent.
Sandhurst sent another torpedo upon its way. This one he guided into the hole which the first had made. The result of its detonation was immediate. The compulsion waves, pouring from the ship, winked out.
At a warning from the girl, Sandhurst turned his attention to the pair of invading rockets which were now almost upon them. Streams of flaming gas boiled fiercely from their stern nozzles. So close had they come that the hate-filled eyes of the invaders who piloted them were plainly visible through their transparent walls. From the nose of each rocket a thin rod was reaching out—pointing suggestively at the occupants of the flier.
However, the latter never learned the sinister nature of the enemy’s weapon. Sandhurst quickly accounted for the rockets with his torpedoes. The torn bits of wreckage drifted slowly to the surface of the ship.
“Nine—ten—out!” Mac called briskly. “How about making contact?”
Sandhurst nodded assent.
The flier settled to a landing, grating lightly against the sharp, crystalline surface of the great ship, whose gravity was barely adequate to keep the craft from drifting away.
Through the transparent hull, the adventurers could look down into the interior where the hemispherical structure had been. Vapor still poured from the hole, causing a faint patch of frost-work to form on the side of the flier, but this scarcely hampered their view. Far down, perhaps fifty feet or so, they saw, amid a tangle of junk which had once been an intricate device, a bloody, bulbous thing. Its body was gashed and torn, and hideously swollen because of its sudden exposure to the vacuum of space. Its form was that of an invader, yet it was much larger than any that had been seen on earth.
“The controlling entity,” Sandhurst announced softly, with a touch of awe in his words. “Here he sat, like a little god, and for almost a month, ruled the world, sending his commands out over the compulsion waves. And now he is dead.”
“Thanks to Mac and you, Mr. Sandhurst,” Vance said seriously.
Mac laughed in mock scorn. “Don’t give us big palookas all the credit. It ain’t right. Remember that Fay and yourself and a lot o’ luck are in on this, too.”
“Mac is certainly right,” Sandhurst put in briefly but emphatically.
He was examining the interior of the great ship. It was deeply pitted with many large ellipsoidal cavities. Thin tendrils, like those of some kind of plant, looped out of several of them. With a puzzled frown he peered through the hull of the vessel at the crystals which had not been touched by the explosions. Dimly, far down in their depths he could make out many large oval shapes which looked like huge bubbles. They were connected with one another by passages which seemed to be carefully drilled. In each cavity, grotesque forms of an odd vegetation were visible.
Sandhurst nodded understandingly.
“What is it? What have you found out—Chief?” Fay inquired.
“Something I’ve been wondering about for a long time, Miss Gatewood. I never could imagine where the invaders came from. You see, oxygen and water are necessary for the existence of all forms of life that we know of. I thought that oxygen and water couldn’t be held on this ship long enough for them to come from—wherever they originated. But these people had an endless number of novel tricks up their sleeves. Look down at those cavities. See all the queer things growing in them.”
“YES, but how—?”
“It's quite simple, I think,” Sandhurst continued. “When this ship was made and when still in a hot and plastic condition, vast bubbles were formed in its thick, transparent crust. When the crust hardened, the steam that had formed the bubbles condensed into water. The air that had been mixed with the steam of course remained as a gas. Both of these requisites of life were thus sealed in the bubble cavities where they could not leak away. The rays of the sun could penetrate to those cavities through the light-transmitting rock. Conditions were ideal for life, and so, inevitably, it appeared, and began its slow evolutionary climb. Here the invaders evolved, amassed knowledge, increased in numbers and became ambitious. Here they made the plans which I believe and hope will be their destruction.”
Fay insisted that they go on a tour of exploration over the entire ship.
For over an hour they glided low over its surface, searching out the myriad artificial caverns in the amorphous, glassy substance beneath the crystals. Most of them were filled with vegetation, but in some, the vague forms of strange machines could be made out. Nowhere was a single invader to be seen. Apparently the entire population, with the exception of the controlling entity, had been recruited to serve on earth. They could not come back, for the atmosphere of their world was leaking rapidly into the void through the opening the torpedoes had made. In a short time it would be completely dissipated.
The flier arose from the earth’s adopted satellite and with snowflake lightness, dropped toward the blue-gray haze of the great air-ocean below.
McLennan was looking back at the receding bulk of the purple ship. “Curtains,” he said musingly, “fine show.”
There was a shadow of a smile on his lips, and it hinted of something which one would not have thought belonged in the personality of the burly, practical Mac.
To all four members of the party, it seemed that a sudden, soothing calm had taken possession of the universe.
On earth the work of reconstruction went quickly forward. The invaders, coming as they did, from a small world, were not numerous. The slaves, once again masters of their own bodies, destroyed them one by one. The old routine reasserted itself, and presently only great, silent enigmatic devices standing neglected and alone, were left as reminders of the days of terror that had been.
A month after his first invasion of space, Sandhurst received a telegram from Borden, the astronomer whose phone call had heralded the coming of the purple meteor. The message was dated from Flagstaff, Arizona. Borden tendered his congratulations, and informed Sandhurst that he had been a slave in that city.
A short time later, Vance Pierre dropped in at the laboratory. “The world is more than its old happy self to me now, Mr. Sandhurst,” he told the scientist gaily. “Fay and I are going to be married day after tomorrow.”
Sandhurst wished Vance good luck, but his own words seemed somehow flat and colorless to him. He wonde
red why. He had come to look upon the boy almost as a son. There were things he would have liked to confide to Vance—things which came dimly to him from the days of his own youth, before the hard-hearted mistress of his ambition had claimed him. Yet he kept silent, for such was his way.
The End
*******************************************
Derelict,
by Raymond Z. Gallun
Astounding Oct. 1935
Short Story - 5303 words
All discovery is not confined to the planets.
Here is a gripping reminder of tragedy in the spaceways.
IT DRIFTED there in space, to the right of the Sun, its spherical hull half illumined and half in shadow. No native of the solar system could have guessed either its age or its origin. Battered, lifeless, desolate and forlorn, it betrayed a kinship both with the remote past and with the distant stars against the sharp pin points of which its bulk was limned.
Jan Van Tyren should have felt a surge of enthusiasm over his discovery of this derelict vessel of the void. Yet he did not. Within him there was room for little but the gnawing ache of grief. Listlessly preoccupied, he stood before the periscope screen of his own trim craft, watching with only a shadow of interest the spheroid pictured in it.
His big, loose body seemed to droop without animation before his instruments. A tuft of yellow hair protruded, cynical and slovenly, from beneath his leather helmet. All the strength had been drained out of him. His blue eyes were clouded, as if he gazed less at reality than at some horror of memory.
He had seen blood often during his years with the Jupiter company. He’d seen death and revolt. Such things were incidental to colonization, to progress. But Greta and little Jan—they had been safe. That any one, even the horrid Loathi of the Jovian moon, Ganymede, might harm them, had seemed inconceivable. His young wife, his baby—murdered. The torturing vision of what had happened had been with him for days now. Three? Four? He didn’t want to recall anything related to that vision.
He didn’t want to forget it either. Nor was it possible to forget. He kept hearing the weird screams of the Loathi echoing inside him; he kept seeing their long, keen beaks, and their bat-like bodies swooping crazily out of the Ganymedean night. Here, where no one could observe, he allowed himself the relief of a silent snarl. The look on his gaunt, weather-beaten face was not an expression of hatred. He was past hatred. He was numb and lost, like an engine without a governor.
That was why he was out here in the void, with the cold stars around him. He was trying to escape from—he wasn’t completely sure what. He was going back to Earth to paint pictures, and to seek in its mellow atmosphere of peace something that was lacking in the cruel environment of Joraanin, the outpost of which he had been master. He was quitting cold—returning home to heal his soul.
Small wonder then that even a space ship which had floated without aim across the light years, perhaps from another galaxy, could not awaken in him a spark of real enthusiasm. Mystery and the promise of adventure no longer had any direct appeal.
Yet Jan Van Tyren was still a creature of habit. Though his mind was caught up in a maelstrom of pain, still the automatic part of him continued to function with some semblance of normalcy. He was an artist; so, almost unconsciously, the channels which his hobby had established in his brain began their intended work—taking note of form and color.
He saw the contrasts of light and shade playing their bizarre tricks with the details of the great globular hull. He saw the deep grooves that stray meteors had scored in a crisscross pattern on the lusterless gray shell of the derelict.
He took note of the slender rods projecting like the prongs of a bur from the vessel’s form, and of the rows of windows that met his gaze blankly, as if they were eyes that wondered in an uncomprehending way what he and his flier might be. All this could have been a picture that a man might paint, starkly beautiful against the black background of the universe.
Then too, Jan Van Tyren was an engineer by profession; and though he wished to leave such matters buried in the past, once more the habit of long experience had its way. Something deep in Jan’s being, detached from his other thoughts, wondered what marvels of invention and science a survey of the derelict might reveal.
These combined forces gave to him that small thread of interest. Life had no strong purpose any more, and he was in no hurry to continue the two months of continuous flying that would bring him across the etheric desert to his native planet.
Van Tyren’s hands flashed over controls with careless ease, as if they moved without the guidance of his brain. The space boat turned, beginning the graceful curve that would bring it alongside the spheroid. Across the periscope screen stars reeled; then Jupiter appeared, a tiny belted bead millions of miles away. Around it were the specks of radiance that were its moons.
Finally the derelict came back into view, gigantic and near. It appeared to be some three hundred feet in diameter. The feeble light of the distant Sun shone on it, revealing in its lower hemisphere a ragged rent whose depths were shrouded in shadow.
JAN steered his flier into a position from which he could get a better glimpse of the interior of the spheroid, beyond the torn opening in its shell. Spear points of light pierced the thick shadows there, revealing crumpled masses of metal. But there was sufficient room for his purpose.
Without considering the possible danger of the move, and in fact quite indifferent now to such danger, Jan worked the guide levers and throttle of his craft. There were sharp bursts of incandescence from its rocket vents. It turned, swaying; then glided into the hole in the side of the derelict and came to rest amid the wreckage.
With what might have been a fragment of his old active spirit, Jan Van Tyren donned space armor. But his memories were still with him. He cursed once. No, it was not really a curse; the fury was lacking. There was only anguish in it. It was like the whimper of a big dog with a thorn in its foot.
He climbed through the airlock, and for a minute stood quietly, viewing his surroundings. Somewhere gravity plates continued to function in this ancient wreck, for he had weight here—perhaps one third Earth-normal. Junk was everywhere in the cavernous interior, distorted and crumpled grotesquely. Yet the metal was bright and new.
Whatever colossal weapon had ripped the globular vessel open like this might have done so within the hour or a billion years ago, as far as any one could tell from visual inspection. There was no air; oxides didn’t form; nothing moved, nothing changed. There was no sound in Jan’s ears save the rustle of his own pulse. It was as if time had stopped in this minute speck of the universe. Only the derelict's aura of desertion, and the memory of the countless meteor scorings on its outer shell, suggested to Van Tyren its vast age.
Meteors are too rare to constitute a menace in the traveled lanes of the solar system, and in the interstellar void they are rare indeed. Lifetimes might go by before one of those minor collisions took place; and they were numbered in thousands.
Rearing from the debris was a stairway. Jan learned later to think of it by that term, though it was not a stairway such as men would find convenient to use. It was a pillar, fluted spirally after the fashion of the threads of a screw. At regular intervals pegs were set along these threads, to provide a grip for some kind of prehensile member.
The pillar swept upward to meet a broad roof. Sunlight, stabbing in from space, awoke an opalescent gleam on the metal surfaces of this queer means of ascent to whatever lay in the bulk of the derelict overhead.
Jan took hold of the pegs of the fluted column, and with easy surges hoisted his loose, muscular frame toward the top. Beside the place where the pillar joined the ceiling was a trapdoor. He fumbled with the lever that latched it. It slid aside, allowing him to pass through into a tiny square compartment which appeared to have the function of an airlock—for there was another similar trapdoor in its roof.
The lower entrance had closed beneath him, and now he unfastened the valve over his head and c
limbed into the chamber above.
DUST and silence and motionless mechanical grandeur reminiscent of the tomb of a dead Cyclops—that in brief was a description of the place. It was much larger than the room below. Through windows along one wall the Sun shone, gilding inert engines whose monstrous forms seemed capable of generating sufficient power to tear a planet from its orbit. Huge cylinders of opalescent metal reared upward. Flywheels which on Earth would have weighed hundreds of tons, rested in their pivot sockets. Cables, wires, and pipettes ran between colossal, generator-like contrivances. Crystal tubes stood in webby tripods, or were supported in framework attached to the ceiling; but no energy flowed in the delicate filaments that formed their vitals, and there was no way for a man to tell what purposes they were intended to fulfill.
Between the windows massive rods were mounted, pointing through the external wall of the sphere, as the weapons of a battleship would do. Whatever the race that had been responsible for this outlay, it was certain that it had been a race of fighters.
Jan Van Tyren, browsing listlessly among these wonders of another solar system, obtained his first direct hint of what the owners of the ship had been like. Sinuous patches of gray ash, contorted so as to still portray the agonies of death, sprawled here and there on the floor. Brown flakes, resembling bits of parchment, were mixed with the ash—the remnant, probably, of chitinous exoskeletons.
The crew of the derelict had been slain. The pitted plating of the floor around the remains of each of their bodies, showed that clearly. Something hot and corrosive had blasted them out of existence. They had battled valiantly, but they had been overcome.
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