Fletcher Pratt (4 page)

Merrick went back to the city and arranged for the delivery of equipment; and while the successful, though crude, experiments were going on, Ashembe was also beginning work on what he described as a "cometary car" in English, and a "Shoraru" in his own language.

The beginnings of Ashembe's "cometary car" were made in the woods some two hundred feet back from the shore line, where a jutting outcrop of rock made a natural platform about five feet each way. With infinite, labor I had cleared off the trees around this rock to enlarge the space to a crude circle something over twenty feet in diameter, and under Ashembe's direction had cut up the trees thus removed into convenient lengths for transformation into charcoal. "Important," he had said, "to have large supply of pure carbon. Charcoal is easy form to refine."

In the center of the clearing, on the rock, he was building his apparatus, not amid a towering pile of scaffolding, as I had somehow expected, but flat on the rock. He began by forming a circular plate of the chrome-nickel steel, flattening and welding it readily with his heat-flash, handling with marvelous dexterity the instrument and the two little spreading tools he had made. As he worked, he treated the plate with the iridium he had made from the cobalt and again treated the whole with the mercury tube.

Using the destructive flash, he now punched a large hole through the exact center of the plate and a row of smaller holes around the edges. From the plate he now proceeded to build up sides, arching them in to form a projectile-shaped whole, almost twelve feet tall, and leaving a small doorway through which a man could just crawl conveniently, near the base. Around the top, at the point of the projectile, the steel was reinforced by a row of thin nickel plates, and the big central hole at the base was similarly treated.

Just below each of the nickel plates, and at one side of the round nickel plate at the base, a little aluminum shelf was welded to the shell. The whole interior of the shell was now lined with aluminum racks, just about big enough to hold the cylinders in which Merrick had shipped the mercury.

This much completed, I set to work gathering heaps of dead leaves. These were assembled into a couple of goodsized portable bathtubs Merrick had sent up and bathed in chemicals, then treated with the ray tube and given another chemical bath. When the process was finished, a gelatinous, transparent mass remained in the bathtubs.

"Atotta," Ashembe explained to us. "What you could call artificial rubber, only different in important characters. Is effective insulator against heat, which your rubber is not. Also effective insulator against shock, which your rubber is. The same is produced from juice of plant in my country, but is more easier to manufacture by synthesis."

He moved off to the shell with a bathtub load of stuff, staggering under the weight.

Up at the clearing, where the "cometary car" was building, Ashembe was brushing his atotta over the inside surface of the structure, covering it all but the tops of the little aluminum racks. As he brushed it on, it hardened into the same gray, stiff substance Merrick and I had noticed on the inner side of the lid of the car in which he had arrived.

"Finished," he said finally, laying down his brush.

"The whole thing finished?" I inquired.

"Ahno," he said, all one word. "This is only interior-central chamber. Very much more to be made yet."

I gazed at the fat, glittering shape that towered above us. "But the one you arrived in couldn't have been much bigger than this."

"Certain—ly. Action of atmosphere caused the destruction of outer chambers. Also, some discarded in coming here from considerable distance."

I made an inarticulate sound indicating a desire for further enlightenment.

"I perceive non-comprehension," Ashembe remarked. "Mark you well. The propulsive force of the cometary car is the pleci ray. Incidental, I do not find your word for pleci. In traveling, the car goes long distance. Pleci is very little used up but long distances are so long that it gradually exhausts. Consequential, very large quantities is required—the same being stored in outer shells of cometary car, like this in all respects but larger. You follow?"

I nodded.

"Excellent. The next thing is that when pleci in one outer shell is complete exhausted, the shell must be allowed to discard to reduce unnecessary mass. Complete car is made of several shells. You follow?

"In order to discard properly, explorer must be able to reach outer shells to cast off when pleci contained therein-under is exhaust. Consequential, pleci is carried only in the upper point portion of the shell, the same being partitioned off lightly, and lower portion being fitted for access by the explorer, since pleci has corrosive activity.

"Now since explorer must have access to lower portions, he may easily have comfort in them also. Lower portions accordingly receive fittings for living. You follow?

"Last interior shell, but one, is not to discard. Necessary for protection of explorer. Similar to the present instance. Upon arriving at planet with atmosphere, the impact at high speeds maintained by cometary car is very serious. Oxidation of outer shell occurs, and heat would oxidize explorer within unless he had additional protection besides wall of inner shell. I personally was much overcome by heat at the interior of shell on arrival within your atmosphere, and perchance would have suffered complete damage by falling into water or otherwise because unable to rise and steer the cometary car. But I personally had no choice. I had come such long distance that all my shells but one were gone upon arrival. If not encountering your planet, would have failed for lack of materials to eat, "In early days of exploration by our people many did this same, and many more were oxidized or torn apart by solar attractions within space. You follow?"

Yes, I followed—all too clearly. Before my mind's eye rose a picture of Ashembe's home, that Murashema he mentioned always with an almost religious patriotism. A world like our own, a tiny ball adrift in space; its people harnessing the huge forces of a malign nature through long centuries of development, and as their knowledge grew, faced with the fact that their world was dying, their home surely turning to a ball of ice, within which there can be no life. It would be discussed gravely at meetings of scientific societies, first, as a novel and interesting theory, and then as evidence accumulated, would seep down and down through all the levels of intelligence until the certainty of destruction was ever before all men. Philosopher, scientist and economist would know that death was the only end of their long ages of evolution from the slime, and religion would be asked to explain the fact that man had been created only for the purpose of being extinguished in cold and fear.

Yes, I followed. I could even picture the bankruptcy of spiritual leadership at such a moment, the decay of all philosophy to a despairing and debased hedonism. And through all a few proud souls would work oh amid the universal wreck; a few stern Puritans of science, fighting their battle for a world which would give them little time. A decade of this, a century perhaps, and the glad tidings that the world was out of danger—saved.

Saved for how long? The cycle would only begin anew. For it would become apparent that life was measured in the terms of the mercury it could find. There would be anxious conferences, inventions, until one day some bold genius ventured out on the ways of space in the first cometary car, seeking for a new source of the element that would keep the world.

I could picture the lonely men in those cars, like the one before me, gradually discarding shell after shell on their journeys from their island homes, driven from apartment to apartment within them, searching perhaps vainly for some place to land. Many of them would never land at all, would spin forever in the vast loneliness of space, fuel-less and dark. Many more would land on strange planets peopled by fearful monsters or filled with noxious gases, or so massive that the very gravitational forces would crush the explorers, before they put foot on land. Only a few, a very few, would ever return, and of those few, fewer still would bring back any encouragement. Does such a future hang before our own world, I wonder?

"Come," Ashembe said, "I am hungry."

Four automobile jacks were Ashembe's means of getting the inner chamber of his cometary car off the ground to place the plates for the base of the next shell beneath it, a system of fine arches carrying the weight of the inner projectile not more than two feet above the base of the outer.

The outer shell was oval in section. A small living chamber about four feet each way and-about eight feet high was located in the longer axis of the oval and was partitioned off from the upper section of the projectile. In the large space above (which extended some five or six feet beyond the inner chamber) the fuel was to be carried. From this space a complex series of tubes led down to the base of the inner chamber by way of the narrow space between the shorter axis of the oval and the outside of the inner shell.

Like the inner chamber, the outer was provided with nickel plates at point and base, Ashembe taking the greatest care to fit them to the inner layer of plates. At the very point of the inner projectile a stout duralumin (or some similar metal) column, which spread out into a heavy capital, carried the peak of the outer shell. This much done, Ashembe lined the interior of the new living chambers with atotta as he had the inner ones, and set to work on a third shell.

This was constructed on the same lines as the second, save that its section was circular, thus bringing the whole projectile again to a circular shape, and providing two more chambers of considerable size at the points where the short axis of the oval second chamber had fallen. The tubes leading down from the points of the two outer shells were now carried to the space below the inner chamber, where they were led into an arrangement of valves that cost Ashembe several days' work. When he had finished there was a rod with a key attached, which ran up through every other one of the series of holes he had punched in the base of the inner shell.

"This is the propulsive force of the Shoraru," he explained as I watched him forging one of the delicate little keys. "Pleci is admitted to small chambers underneath, also small amount of hydrogen. Violent reaction ensues, giving propulsive force under mercury ray. The slight additional reaction is obtained by bringing in small amount of fresh pleci to displace that spent in the previous reaction. Entire process is controlled from the central chamber. You comprehend?" *