Fletcher Pratt (10 page)

* Another instance of defective scientific knowledge resulting in empty rhetoric on Schierstedt's part. Nobody any longer seriously believes that nothing can exist at absolute zero.

But I had no time to notice my sensations.

Ashembe had turned his flash on the rocks and, brighter than the light of the car's interior, the impact of it lighted up the stones for a minute in a circle at the opening.

Then they appeared to move back out of sight in a dancing circle of sparks. Instantaneously a tunnel appeared in the edges of rock. But it did not endure. With a rumble that became a thin rattle in the airless void, more rocks tumbled in upon the burning ray, to be again dissolved into nothingness as they fell. One small stone came right through, even to fall beside us on the floor of the car, a round, smooth object, its surface covered with tears of fused material where the tough granite had melted under the impact of the ray.

"How long will your flash last?" I asked, looking over Ashembe's shoulder into the ever-deepening tunnel where solid rock was disappearing forever in a flash of sparkling light. He paid no attention, holding his instrument steadily on the circle of stone. I tapped him on the shoulder and repeated the question.

The flash went off and he turned the blank mask of the atotta helmet toward me. "Ee—ee—r," I heard, hardly louder than a mouse's squeak. The vacuum did cut off sound then.

The flash went on again. This time, by some freak of pressure, the overarching blocks of stone held, and we could follow the track of the flash far down into the black heart of the Mercurian mountain. Ashembe turned his weapon slightly upward, bearing on the rocks overhead. For a moment they too held, then as some key-piece dissolved in the ray came crashing down. A big block, scored to concavity down one side by the ray, rolled right in under his outstretched arm, striking him heavily on the knee and bending in one of the racks as it caromed off. Ashembe went down like a nine-pin, dropping the flash.

My
eyes caught an instantaneous impression of the deadly tube swinging in a wide arch as it fell. Ashembe writhed in agony, trying to reach it to turn it off, and as he did so it cut a neat semi-circular hole through the wall of the car and bored a new tunnel into the rocks in that direction. All this happened in an instant—in the next I had the flash off and was bending over my companion with questions as to whether he was hurt, forgetting that the vacuum imposed silence upon us.

Evidently injured, he strove to rise, but could not make it, and fell back on the floor of the chamber, pointing to the inner door. I snapped back the locks and with the strength of desperation pulled him inside as though he were a doll. Fortunately I had sense enough to close the door behind me and turn on a cylinder of liquid air to make up for the atmosphere that had rushed out at us in a cloud of vapor congealing to white hoar-frost when I first opened it.

As the air filled the inner compartment, I turned to Ashembe. "Are you badly hurt?"

"I think that not," was his astonishing reply. "Only a broken leg bone."

A broken leg seemed to me no cause for cheerfulness, but as long as he thought so it was all right. With some difficulty I managed to get him through the succeeding doors into the inner compartment. Then I found why he considered it trivial.

He had me lay bare the injured member and place him on the floor of the compartment. Under his instructions I then set up one of the mercury tubes he had used in the transmutation experiments at Joyous Gard, so that it bore on the leg just where the fracture had occurred and inserted between the tube and its objective a slide I found in one of the racks. Still following his directions, I next hooked up a helium motor to the tube and then turned it on at about one-quarter speed.

When the low hum of the motor began, instead of the vivid glare that came from the tube at full speed and without the screen, it exuded a soft radiance, not unlike that of the sensitized quartz that supplied us with light. Ashembe lay back and closed his eyes.

"Nothing more to do," said he, "but await the reconstruction of the bone."

"What is it and how does it operate?" I asked.

"You see what is it," he answered. "It operates by stimulating to the high point all interior metabolic activities. The bone is set in proper position. By being held in the same position, it would knit slowly and normally. But softened emanations from the tube cause the process to take place with speed."

That was all there was to it. When he called me, however, it was to have me turn off the motor and anoint the leg with the healing ointment that had taken the weariness from my limbs the day of our invasion of Venus. "There is some pain," he told me, "and the ointment is merely for this purpose. Otherwise cure will care for itself. Your medical work, unlike your astronomic work, is very far behind. Your doctors do not know that natural methods of cure are always better. They have not yet attained simplicity. Drugs are very bad except for rare cases of stimulants. What is needed is something to speed up metabolic processes, which always cure if allowed to do so."

The curing of the leg took three days by my watch. I say "days," though there was no difference between day and night either within or without the car, and we were spinning around the sun on a planet which has neither day nor night and whose year lasted barely ninety earthly days. Indeed, it was not until that period when Ashembe's leg was setting that I realized how much of an empirical creation of our earth-bound scientists is time. The screen at the top of the car revealed the same vista of blank heavens with insolently shining stars, whether it was day or night according to my watch. Events within the car flowed along the same as ever. When I was hungry I ate and when sleepy slept, but I no longer thought of regulating either eating or sleeping by the time of day. After a while, indeed, I merely kept it going and ticked off the flowing days on the flyleaf of a book to give myself something to do. I was quite uncertain of how much time I had dropped out during the journey to Venus and the intervening hours we had spent there. And, lacking any means of discovering what day or what time of day it was on Earth, I simply opened a new calendar of my own, making January 1, year 1, date from the time I wound my watch, halfway between Venus and Mercury. The dates mentioned in this account hereafter are expressed in that measurement.

Ashembe ate prodigiously during his convalescence, more than I had ever seen him eat. He explained that the heightened metabolic processes in his leg caused the difference. "The leg is living faster," he expressed it. "If I were very sick with interior disease and had the tube turned on my whole body, it would cause me to live faster throughout and still more nourishment would be needed. You see?"

"Not quite."

"Stupidity. Attend. On your planet, when you are sick, it takes you three, four weeks to recover from illness, not so? Good. You recover because body resists illness and finally throws it off through metabolic processes. Ray tube hastens these processes, compressing three or four weeks to three or four days. You see? Consequently you need the amount of food that metabolic processes would ask for in three or four weeks."

"Oh. It's as if you sacrificed three or four weeks of your life in order quickly to get over being sick."

"Yes, but one avoids the tearing down that illness always brings, thereby lengthening life. Consequently you really sacrifice nothing."

Whatever the theory behind the method, it certainly healed the broken leg rapidly. On the fourth day from the injury (January 6, year 1) Ashembe was able to test it by, taking a few tentative steps. He subjected it to further baking in the ray and on the next day was about again, though somewhat limpingly.

We had discussed at length the possibility of getting out of the rock piled above us by further use of the destructive flash and finally abandoned it as impractical. "It is evident from what I did accomplish," said Ashembe, "that upon that side we are against the rocks of the mountain. The more we used the ray on these rocks, the more they tumbled from above upon us. We will have to blow the Shoraru out of this place by the use of motors, I highly fear. We have already wrecked the outer shell of one compartment where the ray bored through it and it would be dangerous to run chances of doing the same on the opposite side."

He insisted on waiting two days more, giving his injured leg intermittent baths in the ray to bring it to full strength before we attempted the perilous experiment of blowing out. And then one morning he announced briskly, "Come, all is prepared for our trial."

We lay on the floor of the car side by side, but facing in opposite directions. At the word of command, we were both to turn on all the motors within reach, then turn them off again quickly so that the blow should not be so violent as to carry us clear away from the planet, whose small gravity would exert none too strong a hold on us. The impact of the first discharge of the motors, we surmised, would carry us free from our trap.

As we stretched out, Ashembe opened a cylinder of liquid atotta, and as a final safety measure cast small belts of the material around both of us, to hold us in position for the expected jerk. A moment later he gave the word. "Preparation," he said, and then "Now!"

He was half a second before me, and as he was on the lower side, I think this saved us. I felt the Shoraru give a violent lurch, turned all the keys I could reach, and then, as we swung clear with a rending crash that reverberated through even to the central car, turned them off again. The breath was knocked from my body by the shock, and, before I had recovered it, there came another and equally violent impact, and we were rolled over and over as the space ship struck again and tumbled down some peak of the planet.

For a few minutes we lay still, half-dazed by the impact. Ashembe was the first to recover, and producing a knife from his pocket, began to cut loose the atotta belt he had cast around himself. A moment later he had me also loose, and was helping me to my feet. The Shoraru now lay on one side with a slight upward angle, and the screen at the base, which was the first we turned on, showed us a landscape of rock, a wide open plain, seamed across with deep cracks. (What if we had fallen into one? I thought. Not all our motors would have gotten us out again.)

The whole prospect was bathed in a blazing brilliance of light, a refulgence so intense that it seemed to turn the rocks on which it rested to polished metal. Far in the distance (several miles, as nearly as I could judge distances in that clear and airless void) a ring of low hills lay round the plain. We were evidently in one of those wide crater plateaus which on Mercury, as on the moon, cover the entire landscape.

We turned to the screens at the peak. On this side we were nearer to the ring of the crater—all around the view presented we could see mountains running away and around in the distance; very mountainous, indeed, taller than anything on Earth but the highest of the Rockies, and like the Rockies, nude of vegetation, bare and cold even in the intense sunlight. They stood out with astonishing clarity against the black star-studded nothingness of space, no interrupting atmosphere softening the grim outlines, and had it not been for the effect of perspective, even the most distant would have seemed right upon us.

The screen that lay upward above our heads revealed nothing but the now familiar background of star-studded night, now curiously crossed and woven about with vague lines of brightness like the auroral light of Earth. But when Ashembe turned on the screen on the opposite side to the mountains, we both staggered back with a cry, for the light that entered and filled the whole chamber with a fiery radiance was more than our eyes could stand. Even indirectly we could not bear to glance at it, for we were looking directly into the eye of the sun—and such a sun! A sun hardly farther from us than the moon is from the Earth.

For a second only its light paled the quartz that illumined the chamber and then, even as Ashembe reached to turn it off, there was a snap somewhere and everything seemed to go dark. "Malediction!" cried my companion. "It has burned out the photoelectric cell."

We hurried into our atotta suits, and after loading himself with a ray motor and two or three cylinders, Ashembe led the way cautiously to the outside of the Shoraru.

We found we had fallen with the wrecked outer compartment of the space ship underneath us, and the only door left to emerge by lay at the top of the car, several feet from the ground. Unburdened as I was, I led the way, and balancing with difficulty on the round, smooth surface of the outside of the ship, reached down a hand to pull Ashembe up. He glanced around for a moment as he came through, then handed me his cylinders and then dived back into the interior to return after an interval with a pliable ladder of atotta, which he fixed to the inside of the door, so that it dangled down over the smooth surface of the shell.

As I waited, I experienced a curious sensation. My back and one side were exposed to the sun as I lay on the car, and even through the insulation of the atotta suit, these began to feel uncomfortably warm. On the other hand, a shiver of cold ran through me from the opposite side, and I realized that in this atmosphereless land, wherever the sun struck, the heat was as intense as was the cold of the shadows. It was like sitting before a huge bonfire on a zero night.

We lowered ourselves down the swinging ladder, and without paying the slightest attention to the lanscape (I had expected him to strike out on a journey of exploration) Ashembe set down one of his cylinders and began to rig the motor up beside it. This done, he took from the pocket of his suit a tiny apparatus like a windmill, with sails which, when unfolded, were about six inches long. This was fitted over the top of the cylinder, and to it was connected the motor. Two more cylinders were similarly treated, and when all three were connected he turned the switch sending the sails on his miniature windmills spinning merrily.

The motioning me to follow, he started back to the interior of the Shoraru.

When the entrance compartment had acquired its quota of atmosphere from a cylinder of liquid air, he explained. "Pleci," said he, "for certain exists in the outer atmosphere of your sun, and being extremely tenuous is blows outward by radiation pressure. It exists about here in very small quantity—so small that the finest of the artificial vacuna you produce in your laboratories have more matter in them than there is pleci in the hereabout. But since we are so far from your sun as this, there is nothing floating about but pleci. Nothing else is so light as to be so far cast out from the sun by radiation pressure. Therefore, we obtain pure pleci. The apparatus installed is one for concentration of the same. It produces both chemical and physical concentration * and the cylinders being valved, installs pleci therein. Come, we must set up more cylinders or the project is uneconomic."