Around it men and loyal Loathi were intrenched, fighting off hordes of rebel Loathi that circled on bat-like wings above, their long beaks gleaming. The revolt was still in progress. A strong hand was needed there to end this chaos and death. Yes, needed. The Bensonium mines—
Jan Van Tyren stood with the oxygen helmet in his hands, his mouth puckering pensively. A thousand thoughts swarmed in his brain; problems which he was sure he’d thrashed out before. Impressions of courage, of fear, of loyalty and of love. The Loathi. Greta. Little Jan. Revenge. No, not revenge—constructive cooperation. That was his policy. But he didn’t have a policy any more, did he? An empire builder. But he’d given up empire building. Or had he?
Jan’s eyes roved the gleaming, segmented form of Khambee beside him. All at once truth came out of the muddle. He saw one of the robot’s purposes clearly at last. Khambee had been the slave of a fighting race. A worker, and when the occasion demanded—a dealer. He, Jan Van Tyren, had been healed and freshened. His sense of responsibilities to come had returned, and he was ready for them now.
“I suppose I could still choose to leave the solar system, and you would obey me,” he said. “But you probably knew all along what my final choice would be. Return to your cabinet, Khambee. I’m going back to Joraanin—alone. It’s my job.”
Khambee helped him gather his various possessions together, and to carry them down to the space boat. The exit door of the compartment rolled aside. Sunlight stabbed inward, causing the automaton’s body to reflect a thousand shifting, iridescent colors.
Just as Van Tyren was entering the flier, Khambee thrust a paper into his hands. It was the paper on which Jan had recorded his astronomical measurements and had calculated the orbit and velocity of the derelict.
He felt more than ever that Khambee could read his innermost thoughts. There was a bit of tightness in his throat then.
“Thanks, Khambee,” he said very seriously. “This might be useful. I may want to come back some time. I may need to come back.”
The flier was in space. Jan Van Tyren hummed a tune that was lost in the growl of the rockets. Ahead lay Jupiter and its satellites. Beyond them the bright stars seemed to smile.
The End
******************************************
Nova Solis,
by Raymond Z. Gallun
Astounding Dec. 1935
{as by "E. V. Raymond"}
Short Story - 5078 words
A glance at history yet to be written—
when the world is old and men are desperate
THE TIME had passed now: Two thousand years measured by the slow deterioration of a speck of radium smaller than the head of a pin. More than half its atoms had lost their radioactivity, becoming atoms of inert lead.
Through the centuries the guardian instruments had kept watch, noting with perfect precision the gradual wane of the emanations. So much decrease in the activity of the radium meant so many hours gone by. The moment had come now for the instruments to fulfill their purpose. Soullessly they proceeded.
Relays clicked. In response, lights burned in the buried vault, where there had been no light in two millenniums. Like prodded monsters from a dead past, heavier mechanisms throbbed and moved, breaking the ancient stillness.
Pumps sucked dense, life-suspending vapors from the interiors of the three hundred black boxes that lined the subterranean hall. Oxygen, rich and vivifying, was forced into the sealed caskets of the sleepers. Static electricity played over their bodies, stimulating long-discontinued functions back toward normalcy. Hearts began to beat; lungs began to breathe, and minds merged slowly toward consciousness, taking up the faded threads of existences that had escaped not only their natural end, but the end of life on Earth.
Brad Keyston was among the first to realize that he lived. It was a curious sensation, like that of emerging from nowhere, without a past, without a purpose, and without an understanding of anything, for his memory was rusty and retarded.
Thick darkness was around him, and he was lying on a soft, spongy material. His hands grouped out like a babe’s, and touched cold barriers close to his body. He heard sounds which he could not yet interpret.
His brow puckered in puzzlement, and he began to fight the veil that blurred his faculties. Bit by bit his memory was resurrected, not coherently at first, but in disordered though vivid fragments that resembled the jangled impressions of delirium.
Fear and dread— The year, 1957— A great, unheralded cloud from space, darkening the Sun at first— Cold. Then heat, growing and growing inexorably. Meteors flashing in the sky. The old superstition about meteors and death. The Sun gone crazy—exploding— Nature in anger, terribly grand, arousing in feeble human emotions the tumult of doom. Other suns had burst out wildly like that. There had been Nova Herculis back in ’35—
Brad saw in his mind’s eye smoldering plains which once had been verdant, cities in chaos, and human faces contorted with terror and beaded with sweat. He heard in the same fashion the scream and rattle and thud of a civilization crumbling under the radiations of a star that had run amuck.
And like a man half aroused from a nightmare, he mistook those events he remembered for present reality. Words and names and phrases that belonged to that merciless time two thousand years ago, burst from his dry lips:
“Dr. Heth! We’re finished unless we hurry! Hibemite! The vault! Our only chance— Maysie! Maysie girl! Are you all right? Are—”
His hoarse words were flung back deafeningly into his ears by the casket lid, close to his face. The sound jarred his snarled thoughts into a sane pattern. He knew now where he was, and why he was there. Trembling with relief, he relaxed. The first phase of the adventure was over. He could see all its details clearly at last.
THE ARRIVAL of the cloud of meteoric refuse from interstellar space had been the initial incident. Drawn by the tremendous solar gravity, the innumerable billions of tons of cosmic dust and stones had fallen toward the Sun, stoking its fires until they had raged with a fierceness far above normal. Vast tongues of flame had jetted from the photosphere, until they had almost touched the orbit of Mercury. Solar prominences, they were, exaggerated enormously, shooting spaceward at velocities of many miles per second.
The cloud of cosmic debris had screened off much of the unnatural radiant energy in the beginning; but the Sun was swiftly absorbing that cloud. The end of things had become apparent. The process of slow roasting had already commenced; many savants had predicted other, more spectacular developments.
They had seen that Sol was now comparable to an overheated boiler. Internal, subatomic processes, provoked by the deluge of meteors, were responsible. Might not the Sun burst out with a fury beside which its present madness would seem feeble? It would be a true nova then—an exploding star which, at a later date, would lapse back into a much less violent condition.
In any case humankind had apparently reached its ultimate calamity. Brad and his associate, the pessimistic Dr. Heth, had found the only possible means of survival—the gaseous drug, hibernite.
Enlisting the loyal employees of their little company, Heth & Keyston Chemicals, they had drilled a tube seven miles into the crust of the Earth. With new tools they had blasted out vaults at its bottom; they had collected supplies; they had constructed their apparatus, shielding everything with stout fire walls.
There had been enough hibernite to save only three hundred people for the doubtful future. About equal numbers of men and women were in the employ of Heth & Keyston Chemicals. They almost filled the roster. The others bad been selected from the few refugees that had managed to make their way at night across the hot plains to the scene of operations.
Brad had been among the last to descend into the subterranean chambers. He had taken a final look at the Sun through a plate of darkened quartz. With a slow majesty it had seemed to swell, and to lose its spherical form, becoming a great, irregular blotch of intolerable incandescence. Predictions had proved true. Nova Solis.
Yes, Brad Keyston remembered the facts.
Now he groped through the gloom with unsteady fingers, locating a small metal wheel. He wrenched it savagely. Unlatched, the counterpoised lid of the compartment folded upward, admitting the light of electric bulbs. Weakly he raised his gaunt, hard form from the casket and dropped to the floor.
Perhaps twenty of his companions had already deserted their metal cocoons, and stood here and there, uncertain what to do. There were both men and women in the group, clad alike in silvery garments of metallic fabric. Factory hands, chemists, stenographers—this was the stock that hoped to repeople a world.
Their faces were pale and haggard, their bodies were thinner than usual; for though their vital processes had ceased during the sleep, and no tissue had been consumed to furnish food for active cells, still much of the water in their systems had evaporated.
Keyston heard a dry voice whispering close to his ear: “Will we be all right now, Brad? Will we be able to start over up there on the surface? Will it be cool enough for us to live?”
HE TURNED. Behind him was Roger Leeds, his wife’s brother. There was concern written in the youth’s wasted features, concern which might easily be mistaken for fear. He was a serious-minded kid, always seeking to know the circumstances next to be faced, and to prepare for them. He felt, as all the others must, the grueling uncertainty of their position.
Because Roger’s question spelled the difference between survival and extinction, and because he knew the probabilities, Brad was slightly irritated. Yet he controlled his irritation.
“Dunno, Roger,” he remarked hoarsely. “We’ll see.”
Brad’s eyes sought the casket in which his wife had sealed herself. The lid was still down. Panic rising within him, Brad staggered toward the compartment, but before he could reach it the cover arose abruptly. Maysie was wan but smiling. In a moment he felt the reassuring caress of her yellow curls against his weathered cheek.
“You did right that time, Keyston!” some one announced loudly and confidently from the other end of the hall. “Always expect the worst! It saves disappointments!”
Even though the voice was parched as ashes, they didn’t need to look up to know that it was Dr. Elias Heth who spoke.
There he was, a bit pale now, where his face showed above an immense black beard that would have made Sennacherib envious. But his jovial eyes were twinkling.
“It’s old Killjoy!” Maysie burst out.
“Killjoy? Oh, no! Not me!” Heth asserted as he approached them. “I just believe in facing the facts, and then being joyful in spite of them. The idea is a lot better than trying to fool yourself and not succeeding!”
With a sort of half-truculent, half-ludicrous bearishness the bewhiskered savant glanced about him. Most of the compartments had disgorged their occupants, and those few that still remained closed were clanging open, in twos and threes every second.
“Most of us are awake, I see,” Heth remarked. “Fine! This is an important event. A speech is required, and I like to make speeches. It won’t be long, because my throat is dry and my breath is short.”
Heth paused, then flung his hand out in a gesture of facetious grandiloquence. “My friends,” he orated, “we have come through twenty centuries just for the privilege of meeting a special and exclusive kind of death. Every one of you, including our leader, Bradford Keyston, knows the facts; but only I am willing to state them boldly. We have, stored in these vaults, sufficient food and other essentials to last a year—enough time for us to plant and raise mythical crops which we won’t be able to raise. We have equipment to free oxygen from its compounds, and we have the means to filter and purify water. We are even supplied with chemicals that can reduce hardened lava, changing it to fertile soil.
“All our preparations, however, are useless. Any scientist worthy of the name can state, sight unseen, the conditions which now prevail on the surface of our planet. The period during which the solar nova lasted must have been a matter of at least several months. During that time the normal intensity of the Sun’s radiations was multiplied by many thousands. The exploding photosphere, incredibly hot though tenuous, must actually have bathed the crust of our world for a considerable period, fusing the rocks and soil to a depth of a mile at least.
“The Earth survived because it was too solid to be destroyed by a barrage of rarefied gases, yet it is certainly unfit to be inhabited by protoplasmic organisms to-day. Two thousand years is nothing in the life of a planet. Ages would be required to lose all the heat that was absorbed during the reign of Nova Solis. Earth now is a hell of volcanic forces such as existed at the very dawn of things, long before life appeared. Its ground is only half solid; its atmosphere is polluted by noxious gases. Possibly the Sun has almost burned itself out after its mighty spree.
“If there were not a definite limit to the period of time during which a human system can endure the influence of hibernite, we might have remained dormant until conditions were again favorable to our reception. But that was, of course, impossible. Nor would we dare enter the sleep a second time for several months, even if we had the materials from which to manufacture a fresh supply of hibernite.”
THE DOCTOR’S tone and manner had changed imperceptibly. Starting in facetious lightness, it had grown more and more serious. Now it became light again:
“We’re doomed,” he went on. “But we’ve a year in which to enjoy ourselves, to study, to learn, to sing and dance and make love in an entirely novel environment! We’re lucky. The rest of the race missed this glorious vacation. Now let’s fill ourselves comfortably with food and water before Brad suggests ascending to the surface for a look-around!”
As he finished there was a heavy hush among his listeners.
Maysie broke it. “Eat, drink and be merry, and all the rest of it!” she cried with a reckless gayety.
Responding partly to her mood and partly to Heth’s paradoxically jovial pessimism the three hundred survivors awoke echoes in the metal vault with their cheers and clapping.
“You may be right, old Killjoy,” Brad Keyston commented in the same spirit. “Still, there’s going to be a lot of work done within the next year. We’re going to try hard to hang onto this mortal plane anyway!”
“Splendid!” said Elias Heth, his voice curiously unsteady.
They ate from the stored rations, hermetically sealed and kept fresh through the centuries. They drew drinking water from great glass tanks. Some chatted and laughed hopefully; others conversed in hushed tones. A few tried to sing. Elias Heth produced a fiddle and played the rollicking tunes of a culture that had passed. And after a while they all slept a little.
Brad Keyston, however, allowed himself a nap of only a few minutes before he began inspecting the elevator. Three motor-driven gears, set at evenly spaced points around the circumference of the little car, were arranged so as to engage three cogged tracks along the sides of the surface tube, and could thus lift the vehicle toward the upper world.
Everything seemed in order. Satisfied, Brad donned a doped asbestos garment, and inspected two similar garments and their oxygen helmets.
Roger Leeds was the only other person who was awake. Keyston winked at the boy meaningly, and then grinned down at Maysie where she lay huddled on the floor asleep. He rumpled her blond curls to arouse her.
“Come along, you two,” he invited. “This is our chance to beat the others in a tour of inspection!”
The tiny elevator, operating in a tube scarcely more than a yard in diameter, could accommodate but three passengers. Tools and explosives were packed into its upper compartments.
Under Roger’s guidance it began to ascend swiftly. The tube extended, dimly lighted by small neon bulbs, above.
The first five miles of the climb were made without incident. But above the point thus reached the thermometers registered a swift and ominous rise. The lusterless gray alloy from which the tube was made, stout and almost infusible, protected against heat by every device
known to science, still had been warped in many places. During the period of noval activity the tube must have been surrounded here by seething, incandescent lava.
With grave misgivings the passengers waited. Three hundred feet below ground, the car refused to go farther. The tracks were so twisted the driving gears were jammed. It would be necessary to ascend the rest of the way by means of the ladder along the sides of the tube. Through thick darkness, for the neon bulbs did not work here, the adventurers raised themselves, lighting the way with flashlights.
Presently they reached the exit chamber, just beneath the surface. The stillness was hot and black. The rotunda, firmly buttressed, shielded by multiple vacuum compartments and layers of asbestos, still had bulged downward dangerously.
NO ONE SPOKE. Driven by feverish unrest they did the things that had to be done. Cutting tools whirred in their gauntleted hands, biting into twisted plates of a compound which only the best electric furnaces could have melted. Thus a warped trapdoor was pried open. Into the dark tunnel beyond, Brad thrust a cylinder of explosive. After setting the time fuse, he and his companions returned back into the tube.
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.
Then and Now: Another Collection of Science Fiction Page 12
