The Best of Jack Williamson, Page 2

  ‘I walked off north around the rim. I had no very definite plan, except to try to find a way out over the cliffs. If I failed in that, it would be time to hunt the plane. I had a mortal fear of going near it, or of encountering the strange lights I had seen floating about it. As I went I saw none of them. I suppose they slept when it was day.

  ‘I went on until it must have been noon, though my watch had stopped. Occasionally I passed metal trees that had fallen from above, and once, the metallic body of a bear that had slipped off a path above, some time in past ages. And there were metal birds without number. They must have been accumulating through geological ages. All along up to this, the cliff had risen perpendicularly to the limit of my vision, but now I saw a wide ledge, with a sloping wall beyond it, dimly visible above. But the sheer wall rose a full hundred feet to the shelf, and I cursed at my inability to surmount it. For a time I stood there, devising impractical means for climbing it, driven almost to tears by my impotence. I was ravenously hungry, and thirsty as well.

  ‘At last I went on.

  ‘In an hour I came upon it. A slender cylinder of black metal, that towered a hundred feet into the greenish mist, and carried at the top, a great mushroom-shaped orange flame. It was a strange thing. The fire was as big as a balloon, bright and steady. It looked much like a great jet of combustible gas, burning as it streamed from the cylinder. I stood petrified in amazement, wondering vaguely at the what and why of the thing.

  ‘And then I saw more of them back of it, dimly—scores of them—a whole forest of flames.

  ‘I crouched back against the cliff, while I considered. Here I supposed, was the city of the lights. They were sleeping now, but still I had not the courage to enter. According to my calculations I had gone about fifteen miles. Then I must be, I thought, almost diametrically opposite the place where the crimson river flowed under the wall, with half of the rim unexplored. If I wished to continue my journey, I must go around the city, if I may call it that.

  ‘So I left the wall. Soon it was lost to view. I tried to keep in view of the orange flames, but abruptly they were gone in the mist. I walked more to the left, but I came upon nothing but the wastes of red sand, with the green murk above. On and on I wandered. Then the sand and the air grew slowly brighter and I knew that night had fallen. The lights were soon passing to and fro. I had seen lights the night before, but they traveled high and fast. These, on the other hand, sailed low, and I felt that they were searching.

  ‘I knew that they were hunting for me. I lay down in a little hollow in the sand. Vague, mist-veiled points of light came near and passed. And then one stopped directly overhead. It descended and the circle of radiance grew about it. I knew that it was useless to run, and I could not have done so, for my terror. Down and down it came.

  ‘And then I saw its form. The thing was of a glittering, blazing crystal. A great-six-sided, upright prism of red, a dozen feet in length, it was, with a six-pointed structure like a snowflake about the center, deep blue, with pointed blue flanges running from the points of the star to angles of the prism! Soft scarlet fire flowed from the points. And on each face of the prism, above and below the star, was a purple cone that must have been an eye. Strange pulsating lights flickered in the crystal. It was alive with light.

  ‘It fell straight toward me!

  ‘It was a terribly, utterly alien form of life. It was not human, not animal—not even life as we know it at all. And yet it had intelligence. But it was strange and foreign and devoid of feeling. It is curious to say that even then, as I lay beneath it, the thought came to me, that the thing and its fellows must have crystallized when the waters of the ancient sea dried out of the crater. Crystallizing salts take intricate forms.

  ‘I drew my automatic and fired three times, but the bullets ricocheted harmlessly off the polished facets.

  ‘It dropped until the gleaming lower point of the prism was not a yard above me. Then the scarlet fire reached out caressingly—flowed over my body. My weight grew less. I was lifted, held against the point. You may see its mark upon my chest. The thing floated into the air, carrying me. Soon others were drifting about. I was overcome with nausea. The scene grew black and I knew no more.

  ‘I awoke floating free in a brilliant orange light. I touched no solid object. I writhed, kicked about—at nothingness. I could not move or turn over, because I could get a hold on nothing. My memory of the last two days seemed a nightmare. My clothing was still upon me. My canteen still hung, or rather floated, by my shoulder. And my automatic was in my pocket. I had the sensation that a great space of time had passed. There was a curious stiffness in my side. I examined it and found a red scar. I believe those crystal things had cut into me. And I found, with a horror you cannot understand, the mark upon my chest. Presently it dawned upon me that I was floating, devoid of gravity and free as an object in space, in the orange flame at the top of one of the black cylinders. The crystals knew the secret of gravity. It was vital to them. And peering about, I discerned, with infinite repulsion, a great flashing body, a few yards away. But its inner lights were dead, so I knew that it was day, and that the strange beings were sleeping.

  ‘If I was ever to escape, this was the opportunity. I kicked, clawed desperately at the air, all in vain. I did not move an inch. If they had chained me, I could not have been more secure. I drew my automatic, resolved on a desperate measure. They would not find me again, alive. And as I had it in my hand, an idea came into my mind. I pointed the gun to the side, and fired six rapid shots. And the recoil of each explosion sent me drifting faster, rocket-wise, toward the edge.

  ‘I shot out into the green. Had my gravity been suddenly restored, I might have been killed by the fall, but I descended slowly, and felt a curious lightness for several minutes. And to my surprise, when I struck the ground, the airplane was right before me! They had drawn it up by the base of the tower. It seemed to be intact. I started the engine with nervous haste, and sprang into the cockpit. As I started, another black tower loomed up abruptly before me, but I veered around it, and took off in safety.

  ‘In a few moments I was above the green. I half expected the gravitational wave to be turned on me again, but higher and higher I rose unhindered until the accursed black walls were about me no longer. The sun blazed high in the heavens. Soon I had landed again at Vaca Morena.

  ‘I had had enough of radium hunting. On the beach, where I landed, I sold the plane to a rancher at his own price, and told him to reserve a place for me on the next steamer, which was due in three days. Then I went to the town’s single inn, ate, and went to bed. At noon the next day, when I got up, I found that my shoes and the pockets of my clothes contained a good bit of the red sand from the crater that had been collected as I crawled about in flight from the crystal lights. I saved some of it for curiosity alone, but when I analyzed it I found it a radium compound so rich that the little handful was worth millions of dollars.

  ‘But the fortune was of little value, for, despite frequent doses of the fluid from my canteen, and the best medical aid, I have suffered continually, and now that my canteen is empty, I am doomed.

  Your friend, Thomas Kelvin’

  Thus the manuscript ends. If the reader doubts the truth of the letter, he may see the Metal Man in the Tyburn Museum.

  Dead Star Station

  • • •

  The difference between a fool and a genius can be stated in one word—success. And success had not found Gideon Clew. We all tolerated the old man; most of us pitied him; some of us genuinely liked him. A neat, trim old fellow, white-haired, marvelously erect for his age, with cheeks like wrinkled red apples, and bright, sober blue eyes.

  The lisp in his speech made him unintentionally droll. That must have been the chief reason why he had been so long scorned and obscure. For the lisp increased with his earnestness; he could never put his great idea into words without inadvertently rousing a desire to laugh.

  Fourteen of us were waiting on Dead Star Station,
in the wild, lonely Orion Passage, for the coming of the space liner Bellatrix. Thirteen men and a girl. Twelve of us made up the crew of the station. And the thirteenth man was Gideon Clew.

  The old man, of course, had no official right to be upon the station. But mild old Captain Manners was softhearted, and the rest of us sympathetic. Gideon Clew had been aboard since before most of us were born—fifty years, he said. Fifty years is a long time for a man to be shut up in a little metal world, away from life. He had lost his place outside; he had no one to go to. It would have been cruelty to send him away.

  He had been a generator-man until, ten years before, the service had automatically retired him, sent out another man to take his place. We let him stay aboard, wrapped up in the Great Idea that—had success chosen to crown it—would have made him famous. We even dug into our own pockets to make up his quarterly pay check, to provide funds to carry on the experiment that was the old man’s life.

  And the girl was Tonia Andros.

  Eight years old, she was, a slim little wisp of elfin gravity. She was not actually a beautiful child; her mouth was too wide and her nose turned up impudently. But her dark eyes were wistfully grave, and all of us loved her. After all, men so far from home, from family, from all that is life, could not be critical of her.

  The story of Tonia Andros must have been another of those adventures of space that are the stuff of romance. We knew but a chance fragment of it. Months before, we had found the wrecked freighter drifting. A meteor stream from the nebula had struck it; the rusty hull was riddled, and all on board—save Tonia—were frozen and dead.

  She had been sealed between the valves of the main air lock, where some one must have placed her after the catastrophe. The tube of oxygen in the little cavity with her was exhausted; she was unconscious from asphyxiation and cold. But we reached her in time.

  But not in time to save the ship. The wreck was already fast in the relentless gravitation-field of the Dead Star. It went plunging down to incandescent ruin upon that black and dying sun, carrying with it the history of Tonia Andros, and whatever patrimony may have been hers.

  The experience must have been painful; her tortured mind may have sought relief by blotting that time out of memory. Whether she remembered more we never knew, but she would tell us only her name.

  Tonia was a friend to each of us. But she and old Gideon Clew felt a particular affinity. The little girl haunted his cabin, and he seemed not to fear her hands upon the precious apparatus he had gathered there.

  The child must have brought something of the warm glow of life back into a nature that had been shut off from life too long. Gideon turned aside from his invention to make toys for her, with his skilled old hands. Yet he worked ever harder, and he told us that he was going to adopt her, give her home and education, when his discovery was perfected.

  ‘When his discovery was perfected’—that phrase had been in his talk for forty years and more.

  Still the thing was not done, and all of us save Gideon Clew knew that it was chimera. Now we were waiting for the Bellatrix to come down the passage. Captain Manners was retiring; our new officer was to come upon the liner. Manners was to take Tonia with him—though the child was not eager to leave Gideon Clew—to try to find a home for her.

  The old man himself was torn between impatience and relief as we waited for the liner. It was almost breaking his heart to part with the child, who must have been his only really intimate companion in those five decades. But he was madly anxious for the vessel to come with a shipment of parts for his invention, that he had ordered a year before.

  Time can pass slowly on Dead Star Station. A small world, completely isolated. The station is really an obsolete war-rocket, too antiquated to fly with the system’s fleets. A corroded metal hull, some two hundred feet long. Space aboard is limited, quarters cramped, means of diversion lacking.

  But beyond the station’s vitrolar ports is space in abundance. The view must be the most weirdly colossal, the most awesome, in all the galaxy. The Great Nebula spans the sky like an octopus of living flame. A vast, angry sea of swirling white fire, eerily tinged with the green ofnebulium, its twisting streamers reaching out like incandescent tentacles.

  Unthinkably vast, those tentacles seem to grasp the Dead Star. That cyclopean cold sun is a little black disk limned against livid flame. Its dark face is patched with marks of sullen crimson—inimitable seas of yet molten lava, for the Dead Star is not utterly dead.

  The hurtling meteor-streams and the seas of incandescent gas that make up the Great Nebula of Orion form the most stupendous barrier to trans-stellar navigation in the entire galaxy. Light itself, at one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second, takes three years and more to cross it.

  But there is a way through. The Orion Passage. A lane kept cleared of darting meteors and burning gas by the colossal gravitation of the Dead Star, a titanic dark sun that lurks like a black spider in the bright web of the nebula, reaching out with resistless, invisible force for what it may draw to destruction.

  No ship has ever visited the Dead Star. No rocket could pull away from its inconceivable surface gravity. It is estimated that a human body would weigh well over a hundred tons upon its surface—enough so that the bones would break and the flesh run away from them like water. The idea is unpleasant.

  The station, equipped with powerful electron-blast motors to keep her clear of the giant sun’s inexorable pull, was established as an aid to navigation in the passage, her duties being to chart the continually shifting meteor-streams, inform passing shipping by photophone of the safer courses, and to go to the aid of any endangered vessels.

  Time passed slowly upon the tiny metal world of the station, that was but a mote hung between titan black sun and the changeless fiery glory of the nebula. But at last the Bellatrix came. And from dull weeks of waiting, we were plunged incontinently into mad confusion.

  The Bellatrix was a new vessel, of three times the station’s tonnage, regularly plying the passage. Those of us who could went aboard the liner during the little time the valves were coupled, to enjoy briefly the spaciousness of the vessel, her cosmopolitan atmosphere, the gossip of her curious passengers.

  Vance, our photophone operator, returned with one interesting bit. He talked to one of her passengers, a man in an invalid chair, with a bandaged head. This man told him that the Bellatrixcarried an immensely valuable cargo of uranium ingots, and that her officers had been warned to beware of Skal Doon, the inter-stellar buccaneer.

  Even so, there was no great novelty in a warning against Skal Doon. He was one of the last freebooters of space, the most notorious and daring. For three decades he had been a terror of the void, escaping capture partly by a flair for originality, party by ruthless cruelty in the elimination of opponents, and largely by an intimate knowledge of the mazes and fiery ways of the Great Nebula, which he knew as no other man. It is curious that men spoke of him with a certain admiration and respect, which he deserved as little as a human being could.

  Gideon Clew and Tonia Andros parted at the valves. The child’s wistful eyes were frankly tearful as Captain Manners led her away, and old Gideon’s lisping voice choked oddly. And then the old man went to claim the long, carefully wrapped package that had come for him—the anxiously awaited parts for his invention.

  Presently the new captain came aboard the station. Clive Kempton was his name. A tall young man, in severe white uniform, with the eagle insignia of the service on his cap. His face was lean and stern. We saw at once that he was the sort that takes responsibility very seriously, that considers regulations much more holy than they are—perhaps because of a subconscious fear of criticism.

  A little time of bustling, mad confusion. Stores coming aboard, cylinders of oxygen, drums of fuel for our generators. Then the last shout of farewell. The valves were sealed again, uncoupled. And the Bellatrix went on.

  We upon the station were left—or so we supposed—to wait through other weary weeks, unt
il another vessel picked its way between the flaming walls of the passage. None of us had premonition we were to see the liner again, so soon and under such distressing circumstances.

  Hume, the station’s mate, was in the bridge room with the new captain, when Gideon Clew limped hesitantly in, with a hopeful smile upon his red, wrinkled face.

  ‘Captain, thir?’ he lisped, a little timidly.

  ‘What is it?’ Kempton asked brusquely. ‘What’s your name?’

  He did not intend to be unkind. He was taking his new command much too seriously. The vague, blind hostility and the supernal power of the Great Nebula and the titanic Dead Star had already set their print of terror in his soul.

  ‘Gideon Clew, thir. You thee, thir, I have invented a gravity-screen. I’ve just installed the last parts, that came on the Bellatrix. Pleathe, thir, may I use power from the ship’s generators to test it?’

  ‘What’s this? A shield, you mean, against the force of gravitation?’

  ‘Yeth, thir. I’ve been working on it many yearth, thir.’

  Perhaps, if it had not been for Gideon’s lisp, Kempton would have listened. But the lisp made the bright-eyed, apple-cheeked little man unconsciously and pathetically funny; and the more serious he became, the worse his lisp. And Kempton was young; he had not yet learned that regulations are made to be broken.

  ‘How much power do you need?’ he asked.

  ‘Two hundred thousand kilowatts, thir.’

  Kempton, astonished, looked inquiringly around at Hume.

  ‘Why, that’s the full capacity of our generators?’

  ‘I know, thir. But just a few minuteth—’

  ‘Just who are you, anyhow?’ the captain demanded.

  Gideon’s wide blue eyes stared at him in bewilderment, and Hume spoke to explain the old fellow’s status upon the station.