Fletcher Pratt (6 page)
Authors: Alien Planet
* It is interesting to recall that the players of the Marshall Chess Club of New York City tried out a form of three-dimensional chess after Capablanca's demonstration that the old two-dimensional chess is becoming obsolete through lacking in complication for modern minds. The earthly form of three-dimensional chess was played on several boards simultaneously, these boards being only imagined as one above the other; and the total dimensions of the cube used were four squares by eight by eight. It would require a supermathematician to play the game Shierstedt describes.
I am no world-beater at chess, although I play a fairly strong game, and it was perhaps only natural that Ashembe should prove so much my superior at this more virulent form of it.
The holiday over, Ashembe went to work on his machine again. It did not take him more than a couple of days to pass the helium we had on hand through the emanations from the mercury tube and store it in the point of the shell, and then he went to work on a small generator which was to furnish the current for the mercury tube he proposed to carry in the car, as the motor he had already made was to furnish power.
Meanwhile, I made a couple of trips to town, and mailed Merrick some of Ashembe's diamonds. Not indeed, his first effort—I had perhaps unwisely told the interplanetary traveler that the larger the stone, the more it was worth, and he had naively produced a huge rock all of six inches in diameter and of the purest lustre—quite enough to give us publicity for the rest of our lives. I buried the monster with some care, back in the woods. There's a fine shock awaiting the man who someday digs it out.
Even on the smaller stones that followed this experimental effort Merrick reported difficulties. Dealers, he said, were reluctant to handle such large and perfect diamonds without being sure of the pedigrees, and he was finally forced to consent to an arrangement by which they were to sell them for him on commission. The third shipment of helium came through with a note promising a fourth, and the days wheeled by to the middle of January.
Then events resolved themselves rapidly. I could see now that time was short, and the best thing to be done was to get Ashembe away before the police or other investigators came down on us. I laid the case before him; he agreed; and though doubtful of helium as a source of power and not entirely satisfied with the supply of it he had on hand, he began next morning to carry some of his supplies to the car and put the finishing touches on it, while I went in to Fort Ann to send off a final letter to Merrick, cancelling all orders for supplies.
However, neither of us had counted on the speed with which those normally elephantine gentlemen, the police, can move at times. As I stepped out of the postoffice after mailing the letter, I almost ran into old Marvin Pritchard, village constable. "Oh, Mr. Schierstedt," he said.
"Yes?" I said, bending down to strap on my ski.
"Can you come over to my place for a minute? There's something I want to ask you."
"What is it?" I asked, tightening the second strap and standing up. "I can't spare much time."
"Well, I wouldn't like to say right here, now. It's about a complaint I got."
"I'm in rather a hurry. Suppose we got into it tomorrow. I'll be in," I temporized, taking a step away.
" 'Fraid it won't wait, young man. Gov'ment business. Come—" I let him get no further; I turned suddenly and with both hands pushed—not struck him—violently in the chest. Over he went, into the high-piled soft snow, head and shoulders going right out of sight, feet waving grotesquely. I started, heading for the back of the houses, where the slope away from the town would give my skis a decided advantage over the pursuit in the deep snow.
"Stop!" I heard behind me as I cleared the edge of the house. "Stop! You're under arrest!" The end of the fence, sticking a post a few inches through the drift, and the crest of the hill. Would he shoot? More shouts behind. I was over the crest, and my skis began to gain a momentum of their own on the down-slant. I dared not risk a long look back, but cast a quick glance over one shoulder and caught a flashing glimpse of the cobbler-constable just floundering through the snow round the corner of the house, and other bobbing heads behind him.
The winter day had already run into indigo shadows and silence when I made it, stumbling, tired and famished. Barely pausing to kick loose my skis, I flung myself through the door into the kitchen, crying, "Did they get here yet?"
Ashembe, working on the bench at one side of the room, looked up in cool astonishment. "They are persons who perform a visit?" he inquired.
"Yes," I snapped. "The police. They're on their way. Here any minute now. You can't wait ten minutes. You must go right away, or we'll have trouble."
He gazed at me for a minute, doubtless meditating on the curiosity of a world where it is necessary for science to evade the law, and then, with wordless efficiency, began to gather up his materials and carry them to the space ship. Trembling with exhaustion and excitement, I sank into a chair, but only for a moment. Ashembe had carried only a portion of his materials out. The chlorophyll trays, for instance, were still in their place behind the stove. He would need all the help I could give him. Fortunately, the coffee-pot was full, and a long drink of the steaming liquid made a new man of me. I began to help my guest carry his impedimenta to the clearing where the cometary car stood, pointed toward the heavens like a projectile for some monstrous piece of artillery. We formed a division of labor in which my part was to bring things to Ashembe, who met me at the door of the space ship and carried them back through the tortuous rooms to be stored in the center.
I have no very clear memory of how many trips I accomplished up the path beaten in the snow under the silent stars. My weariness had left me and I was febrile with excitement. It was like a dream; the shack, the toil up the path among the clutching branches, and Ashembe at the end, meeting me in the moonlike radiance that flowed from the interior of the car and carrying things back in with swift movements, like an efficient machine.
It had to end sometime, of course. As I came down the path on one of my return trips to the shack, I heard the crunch of feet in the snow, and saw the glow of a flashlight snapped on and heard voices.
"Nobody here," said someone. "Try around the back, Ed."
I stopped, listening.
"Here's a path," called a voice. "Maybe they've gone this way. They haven't gone long. The lights still are on." Abruptly the flashlight ran up the path toward me, and I moved quickly enough. The light caught my arm for a second, held it, and then switched it full into my face. A yell.
"Stop! Hands up! This way, Jerry, I see him!"
I turned toward the car, running. "Stop!" "Where is he?" I heard behind. Then, past my head there was the vicious
wheen
of a bullet, and the pistol report sounded like a cannon.
The door of the car was right ahead, with Ashembe's bent form outlined against the interior light. Without even thinking, I dived for it; there was another report as I dived and a bullet smacked against the steely side of the car. I was inside, striking my knee a savage blow as I went through the low opening. Footsteps sounded behind me, more shouts and a clang of metal as Ashembe lifted the door to slide it into place. I writhed to hands and knees, turned and saw that someone had gripped' the door from outside and was trying to keep Ashembe from closing it, but even as I reached out to help him, my visitor let go his hold, fumbled at his belt and produced the destructive flash.
"No!" I cried, but too late. The beam of intense violet radiance leaped from the screen, striking the bent figure on the outside fairly in the middle. I heard a low "Augh!" of agony and the figure collapsed in the snow as the door slid into place with a clang.
Without even a glance at me, Ashembe produced the welding flash and began to weld the edges of the door indissolubly into place. The realization that I was a prisoner in the cometary car and an accessory to a murder, suddenly struck me, and all at once I felt the accumulated muscular and nervous fatigue of the day. A whirling universe of sparks danced before my eyes, and I lost consciousness.
My
first
sensation was one of extreme annoyance that it should be morning before I had half the sleep I wanted. Dreamily I turned over to gather the covers about me for that last delightful five minutes of doze before clambering out into a cold world. My hands met neither blanket nor sheet and, startled into consciousness, I looked up to see above me not the beams of the shack but the tapering, tan-colored interior of the Shoraru, lined with its rows of racks and apparatus. Then I remembered.
I sat up with difficulty. I was in the central chamber of the car, on the floor, and beside me was Ashembe, locking tight the joints of the interior door and closing the cracks with atotta. A dull tapping sound, like the racket of a distant woodpecker, filled the place.
"Hello!" I remarked rather fatuously. (I could think of nothing else to say.)
"You are revivified," he said, turning from his task with a smile. "I am happy. You do not objection to journeying with me? I can return you here after a trip to your interior planets."
I became aware of the pain in my knee, and memory rushed in upon me. "Why, yes," I said, rubbing the injured member. "There's nothing else for me to do. I'm afraid you killed that policeman, and they'd probably hang me if I went back now."
"Hang you? Oh, you signify execution. But you did not do it."
"I know," I said. "But I was present. That makes me an accessory or something. What's that noise?"
"Your police anxious to enter herein. However, no matter. We depart upon the instant."
I realized that the police were trying to batter down the outer door of the car—that massive steel and iridium door. Ashembe turned to the control keys of the car. Then— "But won't the explosion when you start injure some of them?" I asked.
He looked up in perfectly genuine surprise. "Certainly," he said. "But no matter of that. They would do us harm." And this extraordinary individual, who would not give us information, unless we promised to altruistically surrender it to the whole world, calmly turned the keys that would very likely blow half a dozen men to bits.
Nothing happened. The hammering on the distant periphery of the car did not even stop. There was only a gentle hissing. It rose to a rattle, and then, just as I was about to speak, a tremendous explosion burst that sent me caroming off the side wall of the chamber to the floor of the car. We were off.
After that first burst of sound, however, there was neither noise nor perceptible motion. I raised myself somewhat cautiously to my hands and knees, then to my feet, and looked around. Everything in the car was the same as before; the soft daylight radiance from Ashembe's quartz flooded the interior of the narrow chamber; the various pieces of apparatus and metal cylinders of liquefied gases stood firmly in their racks. Below them others held materials that remained in the cases sent from New York, removed to the car in that state during our last hasty moments of flight.
Ashembe had seated himself cross-legged on the floor and was gazing intently into the workings of one of his mercury motors, which apparently had something wrong with it. Everything was perfectly serene, almost monotonously so, as though instead of sitting in a cometary car bound across those vast wildernesses of space, which even light takes centuries to cross, we might have been back in the shack. In the shack, but for the shape of the room and —a thought struck me suddenly.
"Why, how can you tell where we're going?" I asked. "There aren't any windows."
Ashembe smiled up at me. "Gramercy," he said. "I forget you are a novice. Perceive." He fumbled a minute with keys, making adjustments. A little ring-shaped heater around the hole at the center of the base of the car, the one he had windowed with nickel, sprang into activity. There was a snap as though a shutter somewhere had slid back, and simultaneously one of the mercury tubes, placed above and to one side of the nickel plate, began to play a stream of radiance upon it.
Under the impact of the ray, the gleaming metal lost its lustre, turned to a bluish, milky plate, became translucent and then transparent. It was as though it had been slid aside and one could see right through the space to the background of the black heavens picked out with the blazing points of stars. I gave a cry of surprise.
"Simple," said Ashembe in answer to my unspoken query. "The other side of the nickel has been sensitized— like the thing your scientists call the 'photo-glow' tube. It responds perfectly to all change in intensity of light thrown on it. Such changes are transmitted through reflection of the tube within which throws them on nickel plate on inside. Much like periscope in your submarine ships. You comprehend?"
I didn't. "Why not use glass?"
"Glass transmits harmful emanations. While in atmosphere of planet, said atmosphere is sufficient insulation against emanatory radiation which are dangerous to life. Glass is not opaque to them, but properly treated metals are. Also there is question of heat. We would be overwarmed by the effect of your sun if glass were used, since we have no atmospheric insulation. Ah, you are enchanted by the vista."
I was; it was the most magnificent panorama ever beheld by the eye of man. I saw it as though through an enormous porthole. (My conjecture that the nickel plate was lens-shaped for a wider field of vision was later confirmed by Ashembe.) *
* He apparently means a fish-eye lens. Schierstedt's lack of scientific knowledge throughout obscures details that might be both interesting and useful. In this same paragraph he speaks of "single electrons or ions," which, of course, are not at all the same thing; neither does the casting of single electrons or ions fit in with any rational theory of the source of power of the car.