Fletcher Pratt (12 page)
Authors: Alien Planet
The months
that followed were divided almost evenly between periods of intense labor and periods of intense boredom. Every ten hours we took observations (I soon learned to assist Ashembe in this work), made calculations of speed, distance and direction, and translated them into action by cutting off the power of the motors on this side or that.
This done (it was far more arduous than it sounds) there was nothing left but study or amusement with Ashembe's three-dimensional chessboard. More and more I came to wonder at his mental equipment. For something over two years he had been shut up alone in a narrow car the duplicate of this, practically without occupation, on a voyage not toward his home, but to an unknown destination, whose terrors he could only guess at, and from which he ran about an even chance of never returning at all. He had come through that ordeal with sanity and cheerfulness unimpaired, and now here he was debonair and happy, attempting a second such leap.
Sometime after we made the turn, Ashembe announced that as the fuel in the outer shell was exhausted, he would cut it loose. He scrambled into his atotta suit, and taking the destructive flash, let himself through the inner compartments. Within an hour he was back, bidding me look through the screen at the base.
I saw a dark object of uncertain shape fitfully outlined against the stars behind us, following on with a velocity but little less than our own.
"The outer shell," I was told.
The acceleration by this time was approaching the dizzy heights predicted by Ashembe at the beginning of the trip, and one day, after making his observations, he stepped briskly to the motors at the base of the projectile and turned them all off, announcing that we had reached a speed sufficient to carry us the rest of the way without further acceleration.
In those hours of spinning down the grooves of space, a miniature universe in ourselves, motorless and silent, I learned how false were all my ideas of interstellar travel. In the scientific romances of Jules Verne, in the lunary adventure tales of H. G. Wells and of their successors, it is only sufficient for the painstaking scientist to construct a space car. As if by magic he is whisked from one world to another and plunges at once into a set of new and thrilling adventures. I have never found in one of them a word of the intense boredom of such travel, besides which the accumulated boredoms of Earth are as nothing.
In the romances, the space traveler passes his time agreeably enough. He is entertained by the glittering conversation of his companions, by dazzling scientific explanations of what he had thought impossible, by sights and sounds and wonders of the universe beyond the Earth. (An exceptionally crowded universe it is, too, in the books.) Forgive me for insisting upon the point, but nothing could be more inaccurate. I set it down because the point deserves emphasis.
I have recorded here practically every word of importance that passed between us, omitting only such matters as "Please pass some more of that green stuff. It isn't bad," and "Well, p equals 4.74 times v prime minus v, divided by V sine lambda, doesn't it?" Aside from these minutia of our everyday life and the conversation that centered around cubical chess, there was absolutely nothing to talk about. Subjects for conversation were as lacking as they would be in a shack in the Arctic Circle, and talk as infrequent. One is almost totally thrown in upon one's own resources. Imagine the few scraps of conversation of which I have given examples, lasting two human beings for the whole duration of three years!
As for sights and sounds, there were none. The sight of the blazing stars on their velvet background, so impressive when first seen on the voyage between the earth and Venus, had become a monotony to which I paid no more attention than did Ashembe. We were now long since beyond the system of any sun; there was no remotest possibility of collision with planet or meteor; in fact, we reached the stage where we would have welcomed the spice of danger as a relief from the all-embracing ennui of existence in that circular apartment of seven rooms with its soft lights and eternal sameness.
All things have an end, however, even interstellar travel. The screens at the bow began to show the star toward which we were traveling larger and larger on our sight till it stood out sharp and bold. Now there came a day when Ashembe finished his observations by turning on the bow motor, checking down our run before we should enter the system of Murashema.
And now, as we drew in upon the Murasheman sun, our calculations showed that though our velocity was only a ,, little short of that of light itself, the bow motor was cutting ' it down at the rate of twenty kilometers every second, and Ashembe had finally to turn it off lest we approach too slowly.
It was July of my year 3 when we really began to drift into the outer limits of the system of Murashema, with all motors silent, swinging along at a furious pace, with our inertia to drive us. I remember well my first view of a
Murasheman planet, gained through the bow screens as we bore down upon it from a distance; a round, green object like some huge melon, larger and darker than was Uranus, when we had passed it on our outward voyage from the Earth.
"Radil," Ashembe called it, as we made our observations and by means of it calculated our velocity and direction more closely than we could by using the stars. They showed that we were still moving too rapidly—or perhaps that the Murasheman sun had begun to exercise some gravitational pull, for immediately after the observation we had to turn on the bow motor again and check down our speed.
Immense though the distances are in the system, as in ours, they are as choked with the chances of collision as a crowded street compared with the blank space through which we had been traveling. In September we passed a second planet, larger than Radil, lighter in color, and attended by a caracolling flock of moons of all sizes; at least eleven or twelve of them there must have been, some small and barren, like Mercury, showing their craggy character in the faint light, some larger and, like the planet itself, lost in sea-green obscurity.
October, November and December whirled by as we passed slowly through the Murasheman system, losing speed against the day of our landing. Twice more we passed planets, one a large, cold and lifeless orb like Radil of the outer planets or our own Uranus, and the other, smaller and more like the earth in size and makeup, but long since sunk in the death-silence that ultimately awaits every world.
"It is the outermost of the once-habitable planets," he said. "About as far from our sun as your Jupiter. But it is useless to do with. Our explorers have encountered it much. Even I have been there. Long ago it lost nearly all atmosphere, and liquids on its surface are frozen. It contained life once, however. We find many fossils and some few ruins. It is a planet of the otherwise proper type for the development of men, but unfortunately too far away from the sun."
Murashema
I first saw as a silver crescent early in April of the year 4; silver on black. It was pointed out to me by Ashembe with the nearest approach to emotion I ever saw him show.
We plunged along now with the bow motor always and one of those at the base generally going, correcting our course by small degrees to this side or that to bring the space ship to Murashema at the right point.
To reduce the speed at which we would enter the planet's atmosphere, our course had been turned so that we swung in behind it along the line of its orbit, so we should overtake it. Even then, as we bore down on this new world below us, we could detect a quickening of motion as we came within the predominating influence of the planet's gravity.*
* Gravity seems about the only scientific idea Schierstedt's head was capable of holding—probably because it is the simplest of physical phenomena for one who is neither by training nor disposition a scientist. The nonscientific reader of this manuscript should beware of ascribing to gravity all the effects Schierstedt does.
Only half of it was in the light from our point of view, and the light seemed less vigorous and redder than that of our own sun, though the computations, which I was by now competent to make, showed us that Murashema lay nearer its sun than Earth does to ours. Taken by and large, the planet also showed considerably less space given to ocean and considerably more of the yellow-brown streakings that Ashembe had taught me were due to deserts.
A few hours more and the planet had lost the form of a ball; the horizon was rising about us, and the edge of light where the day struck drawing away from us. The bow motor had been turned to nearly full speed to soften the inevitable shock of the fall to Murashema's surface, and now cast a huge plume of sparkling light across the picture on the screen. A little farther and the sparks changed color as we penetrated the atmosphere, and then, abruptly, they died away and fell altogether silent. Ashembe looked at me. "Out of fuel," was his brief comment. We had made Murashema, but with nothing to spare.
Our penetration of the denser layers of air announced itself by a loud hissing sound on the outside and a series of quick, disturbing jerks. The point of the projectile had long since become our floor as we entered Murashema's gravitational field, but the effect was now redoubled, and for the first time in many months I felt that there was something solid beneath my feet. The jerking increased; so did the hissing from the outside of the car, and Ashembe looked anxiously about him. In spite of the repeated layers of atotta that lined the machine and its chambered construction, it began to grow warm within.
I went to turn on the screen, but my companion stopped me. "Useless," he said. "The heat of passage through this atmosphere has already sufficiently corroded the outer layers to make vision impossible." I wondered how much farther we would have to go before landing, and as I wondered, with a shock that threw me halfway up the car and back again with a savage jounce, we struck.
When I had picked myself up and a cursory examination showed that none of my bruises were of a serious character, I began at once to climb toward what had been the base of the car with the idea of getting out at once. Ashembe restrained me with the comment that I would lose no more than my life by emerging in the present heated state of the exterior, and I desisted. A moment later there was a violent explosion.
"What is it?"
"Part of one of the outer shells," said Ashembe. "Under the extreme heat and pressure of progress through the atmosphere, the outer shells melt and while in this state absorb gases. The gases are now emitted with violence." So, unwillingly on my part, and calmly on his, we made our beds in the central chamber—the first time we had done so. Like a child on Christmas morn, I found difficulty in going to sleep, and when I did, dreamed lively dreams that kept me alternately waking and dozing all night. Oh, to be out in the air again! When I finally could sleep no more, I sat up. Ashembe was sitting beside me, but my watch showed that only five hours had passed.
"Can we go out now?" I asked. He shook his head, and for another fifteen hours we stood or sat around the interior of the car, avid with excitement, waiting for it to cool enough to permit egress.
At last Ashembe rose, and taking down his atotta suit, began to put it on. "Do we need the suits?" I asked, scrambling into my own, so as not to be left behind.
"Perchance we will need to use the ray for escaping," he answered, "and the heat developed in this small space would be highly discomforting until we succeeded in obtaining egress."
And seizing the instrument mentioned in one hand, he began to climb the racks to the door, with me close behind him. It shot back readily enough, but as we emerged into the second chamber, we saw at once evidences of the terrific forces that had played on our space ship as it rushed through the Murasheman atmosphere. The next door outward sagged to one side as though it had been made of clay and damaged in the making, and all round its edges an ooze of little black bubbles of fused metal had broken through the atotta lining, scorching and searing it where they had passed. Toward the peak of the car (now the bottom) the atotta was everywhere bulged and pitted and in some places burned clean through by fires fiercer than the heat of the sun on Mercury. At one place near the peak, indeed, there was evidently a hole right through the side of the vessel, for clean white sand had poured through the gap into a little cone against the side of the chamber. Most of the wall racks were twisted out of shape by the sagging of the walls and several had parted from their moorings.
Testing his footing as he went, Ashembe worked his way around the walls and when he reached the point where the door still stood in its distorted frame, began to work on its edges with his flash ray.
A glow of light, like that from an electric welding machine, filled the chamber and a rain of bright sparks ran down. Evidently the atotta lining of the shell was high in resisting power, for it was some moments before Ashembe, working slowly, was able to make even a narrow slit.
Ten minutes more and the door was free on three sides. Ashembe switched off his flash, made a vain effort to move it, and bent to his work again.
At last he got the thing so loose that it hung only by a thread of metal, and reaching up he gave it a vigorous blow. It fell with a thud outside somewhere, and the opening was immediately blocked by Ashembe's body as he clambered through. I was after him in less time than it takes to tell it.
Once outside, we had a five-foot drop to the ground, Ashembe catching me neatly to break the force of the fall as I made it. Silently we stripped off the atotta suits and then for the first time I was able to look about me.
The ground beneath my feet seemed all sand, in which I sank almost to the ankles. We were among sandy dunes on a flat plain, gently rolling away to the distance where there was a vista of purple-hazed hills. All about was a low forest of scrub, just a little taller than a man and appearing very open until one tried to see through it to a distance, when it became evident that the trees stood much closer than they seemed at first. The sand seemed universal-white, soft and fine, and our space ship stood half buried in it.
It was twilight. The whole landscape was suffused by the slow light of dying day, and a monstrous ruddy sun was just sinking from sight behind the range of hills in the distance. I turned round and saw the same landscape of rolling levels and scrub forest, unrelieved, save by the monstrous form of the Shoraru.
Ashembe stood at gaze with me for a moment. Then, reaching down to the pocket of his atotta suit for the destructive flash, he stepped over to one of the dwarfed trees, and in a moment cut it down. Dragging it back to the car, he set it against the side, and motioning me to come on, said, "Quick. We must return within at once."
"What's the matter?" I asked.
"This is the hunting land," he replied briefly, fixing the point of his improvised ladder in the ground and offering me a hand to help me up.*