Fletcher Pratt (5 page)
Authors: Alien Planet
Getting a
cylinder of helium, or a supply of it in any other form, Merrick wrote me, was a troublesome job. It was deep in December, the snow lay thick on the ground, and Ashembe had completed a fourth and final outer shell to the cometary car, with all its complex arrangement of tubes, valves and sheathing, before Merrick reported victory in the helium hunt, and a small iron cylinder of the precious gas was delivered at Fort Ann. By this time the lake was nearly impassable for a canoe, so congested it was with slush and ice, and every shipment of materials meant a long trek through the woods around the shore with a heavy load packed on one's back. I was glad the cylinder was no larger. Fortunately five months in the woods had made me hard as nails.
Meanwhile, Ashembe was engaged on the interior fittings of his space ship. His first care had been to make three complete suits of flexible atotta, covering his hands with gloves and his head with a crude helmet we managed to botch together out of cloth, and having me paint the hot liquid over his clothes. A narrow space was left in front to be closed with some kind of fastener, and after the suit had been finished, this was fitted with a tongue like that of a, shoe, also of atotta. When complete, the outfit looked like those worn by Arctic explorers, save that it was of the heavy, soft atotta instead of fur. One stepped into it, closed the front and closed down the hood over the face.
For the eyes, Ashembe made a pair of lenses, refining his own glasses in the crucible, and inside the suit, just where the chin leaves a little notch above the chest, he fitted a respirator, connected with a small vessel which was filled with liquid air and provided with a heating arrangement to warm it as it emerged from the vessel.
The suits, when made, were stored in the central chamber of the space car in three of the aluminum racks that had interested me when they were being installed. The car itself, complete as to its outward semblance, now towered above the trees in the clearing, its huge metallic flanks reflecting the frosty light of winter, filling the whole of the open space at the base and rising up to a height of something over thirty feet. Inside one crawled through the various chambers, each lighted by a soft glow from a piece of quartz which Ashembe had exposed to his mercury tube for a time and then installed under a glass hood.
He was hard at work now on the fittings for the interior chamber. A hole was bored down through the centers of the columns connecting the peaks of the shells and another valve like those at the base was installed where the hole debouched into the central chamber. "To check the momentum of the Shoraru upon arrival at the desirable destination," he explained. Just below it, where the nickel plates had been set into the point of the projectile, a small telescope carefully insulated with atotta, was placed on a swinging arm. Below this again, and in the upper racks of the outer chambers, Ashembe began installing boxes of thin metal filled with food.
This food he produced himself, using the charcoal I had prepared for him, water, and various chemical reagents, as the raw materials. When he completed his work with each batch, a dun-colored liquid that hardened shortly after being placed in the boxes resulted. At Ashembe's behest, I sampled some of these synthetic provisions. The first lot had a taste not unlike that of a nectarine or peach—sweet and pungent; and it was extraordinarily filling for its bulk. Another lot, if eaten with closed eyes, one could have sworn to be roast beef. But all these foods possessed one characteristic in common. They were all soft and not very "chewy." I began to understand why our visitor had refused our knives and forks on his arrival.
And speaking of the mercury tube, I am reminded that by this time the acetylene heater for running the dynamo had been discarded. From a bag of kitchen salt Ashembe had produced chlorine, which was subjected to the mercury tube, then placed in a cylinder just behind a motor he had constructed, not unlike a small model of a turbine engine. When a key was turned in this apparatus, it became a veritable speed demon—indeed, the first time it was used on the dynamo that piece of earth-born machinery burned out its bearings. "Highly ionized chlorine," going through the process of atomic decomposition into fluorine and oxygen, Ashembe explained his power plant, as he took it apart one day to scrape from the flanges of the interior a dull deposit which he assured me was caused by the action of the nascent fluorine on the interior of the mechanism.*
* Again a reaction not clear in the light of our chemical knowledge. The atomic weight of chlorine is 35 (plus a fraction), that of oxygen 16 and that of fluorine 19. So much is clear. But from what we know of atomic decomposition, the natural process (supposing we had any means of decomposing the chlorine atom, which we have not) would be for the chlorine atom to shoot off a number of alpha and beta particles and come to rest as an atom of Argon or Carbon, both of which are much more stable elements than either oxygen or fluorine. Moreover, the breaking up of the chlorine atom should absorb, not release energy—but it may be assumed that the reaction of the mercury tube caused this effect.
A stinging, cough-producing odor rose from the machine, and when Ashembe made a duplicate of it for the interior of his Shoraru, he provided it with a hood terminating in a metallic flask "to catch the fluorine emerging," he remarked. "Very bad it is to have fluorine in the atmosphere of cometary cars."
The big day was that following the one when I dragged into the camp in the evening, dead beat and with a cylinder of helium weighing down my shoulders. Ashembe had built what was essentially a model of his space ship, providing it with an upper and a lower chamber and a valve set into the latter. That very evening he put the helium under the rays of the mercury tube, and the first thing he did in the morning was to run it from the cylinder (where it had been replaced following its exposure to the decomposing ray) into the upper part of the small model he had made.
The lower chamber was now filled with some of the liquid hydrogen he had produced after having made the gas by electrolyzing water.
These arrangements completed, he lifted a cup of coffee in a toast to the model where it stood, braced between two rocks at the side of the lake, a few feet from the spot where he had emerged from the car that had brought him.
"The great moment has arrived," he declared. "Whether I return to Murashema or remain citizen of this-interesting but backward Earth, will now become evident." With a flourish he drained the coffee, then bent down and turned the key at the base of the model.
For a moment nothing at all happened. I glanced at Ashembe, saw his face flash from anticipation to disappointment, and in that instant there was a reaction—a gentle hiss from the model. I turned back—it was rocking slightly—and then with a rumbling explosion of sound it rose like a rocket, gained speed, swerved a trifle, and went winging slantwise up, like a bullet, leaving not even a trail of smoke to mark its progress.
"Success!" shouted Ashembe, capering with delight, and then, "But not altogether success. I must make the other test."
"The other test" proved a laboratory one, and I went off to examine the line of traps I had set out. When I got back, I found Ashembe at work in the kitchen-laboratory.
"How did it come out?" I inquired, tossing on the table the one rabbit I had harvested.
"Moderate success," he answered. "The power contained in helium is insufficient for me to reach Murashema without enlarging the Shoraru to unwieldy and heretofore unuseful dimensions. Nevertheless, it will be complete to carry me beyond the gravitational attraction of this Earth and to one of the planets nearer your star, whereupon I trust coronium will be available due to the nearness of the sun to these planets. In the last emergency I can always return to this orb and rebuild."
That night a big snowstorm came down on the wings of a tearing northwest wind and we were winter-bound. For a whole week there was no possible chance of getting as far as Fort Ann to send off a letter for more helium; and on the last day of the week, we actually began to run short of provisions. The only compensation in it was that good thick ice formed right across the lake and I could trot out a handsledge with plates, or a pair of skis I had been wise enough to provide myself with, and make the trip to Fort Ann for more provisions in a comparatively short time.
To Ashembe the bad weather made no difference. He had been working on the interior fittings of his craft and he merely continued to work on them. It was liquid hydrogen now—he was using water from the lake for electrolysis, liquefying the hydrogen that resulted and storing it in cylinders in the aluminum racks with which the whole interior of the car was lined. The cylinders in which he stored it were of his own manufacture, lined within and without with the heat-insulating atotta.
In the racks also went a smaller number of cylinders of liquid air, each fitted with the same tiny heating apparatus he had installed in the suits. But the most curious of the supplies, he did not place in the car at all. It consisted of a connecting series of tubes underneath a tray on which a kind of green jelly was exposed.
"This is a chlorophyllic substance," Ashembe told me, as he arranged a bank of a dozen or more of these trays behind the kitchen stove. "Chlorophyll is substance that causes leaves to absorb carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. These things do the work of many plants and keep atmosphere in the cometary car forever pure for breathing. The action is chemical with delicate catalyzers. But the same must be in constant use or the chemical action will stop and the apparatus decay. Therefore I keep them here where there is plentiful supply of carbon dioxide."
I was thinking of the completeness and efficiency of Ashembe's arrangements for navigating space and how great an advance over our own somewhat stumbling science they represented, as I made my way across the white-sheathed lake, the snow creaking sharply under my skis. Soon he would be on his way again and we would have missed opportunities for knowledge that would almost certainly change our whole civilization. Perhaps Merrick and I had been wrong after all in urging him to withhold his formulae.
At the postoffice there was a mass of mail and a few packages. I opened the office mail first to make sure there was nothing requiring urgent attention, secured my supplies and the one or two packages to the sled, dispatched a telegram to Merrick for more helium, stuffed the letters bearing his return address into my pocket for later perusal at Joyous Gard, and set out, anxious not to be caught on the way by night or by storm.
When I did open Merrick's letters, I found ominous news: "The world's finest police force," he began, "seems to be getting excited about me." He told of being arrested on a spurious traffic charge, and an interview with an Inspector Grant, who wanted to know where he got all the gold."I told him it was none of his business where I got it, and threw a line about legal complications and suits for false arrest, and he quieted down. There isn't anything they can do about it, but they'll probably check up on me closer than ever and it's quite on the cards that they'll find I'm getting it by mail from you. In that case, you may have them up there any time. Better tell Ashembe to be careful, or even to stop making gold for a while. He's paid for all the stuff sent so far, and some over."
This would never do. Again I cursed the practical difficulties of our situation, for if the New York police got to meddling with the affair, it would take just long enough for them to get back to the city for the whole story to get out of the bag.
I laid the whole case before Ashembe, explaining to the best of my ability the police system which made it necessary for officers to check up on any supply of the precious metals appearing in unusual quantity, and he agreed to stop sending gold for the time being. "How if I manufacture instead other objects of value?" he asked, anxious to do something for us. "Silver, or the crystalline jewels persons of your planet do treasure?"
"Silver isn't worth enough," I said, "but can you make jewels? Surely, though, you ought to be able to make them. Can you make diamonds?"
"What is diamond? Oh, crystallized carbon, I remember. Certainly, I can make." And he set to work to make diamonds as calmly as he had gold.
But from this day onward something of the idyllic contest with which I had stayed in the woods began to be lost. I was forever expecting men in the blue of the New York police to come popping out of the forest. In spite of these troubles, two more cylinders of helium duly arrived at the railroad station just after Christmas, together with a note saying he was sending more at New Year.
We made a little holiday of Christmas at Joyous Gard.I had explained to Ashembe that it was our great religious festival, and though I fear he misunderstood the purpose of it (he called it an interesting survival of "heliocentric solar worship marking the turn of the year") he fell into the spirit of the occasion with an avidity which surprised me.
"In Murashema," he informed me, "we also have holidays, recreational periods having been determined upon as necessary at certain times."
Upon a small spruce we rigged some lights; I had procured the material for a plum pudding in the village, and Ashembe's contribution was a game which he described as "played during recreational periods by my people." As near as I could make out, it was a kind of three-dimensional chess, played in a cube ten squares long on each side, and made of some transparent material that allowed one to perceive the pieces within. Each floor of this arrangement was fitted with a hinge at the back and a little clasp at the front so that in moving a piece, one simply released the clasp at the desired level and swung the whole top of the cube back. The pieces moved in all three dimensions.*