After we had been weeded out, interviewed and rigorously questioned, Norris had taken us into the hangar, waved a hand toward the Marie Galante and explained the details.
The Marie Galante was a cruiser-type ship, stripped down to essentials to maintain speed, but equipped with the latest of everything. For a short run to Venus, for which it was originally built, it would accommodate a pa.s.senger list of ninety.
But Norris wasn"t interested in that kind of run. He had knocked out bulkheads, reconverted music room and ballroom into living quarters. He had closed and sealed all observation ports, so that only in the bridge cuddy could one see into s.p.a.ce.
"We shall travel beyond the orbit of the sun," he said. "There will be no turning back; for the search for a new world, a new life, is not a task for cowards."
Aside to me, he said: "You"re to be the physician of this party, Bagley. So I"m going to tell you what to expect when we take off. We"re going to have some mighty sick pa.s.sengers aboard then."
"What do you mean, sir?" I said.
He pointed with his pipe toward the stern of the vessel. "See that ... well, call it a booster. Ganeth-Klae designed it just before he disappeared, using the last lot of Indurate in existence. It will increase our take-off speed by five times, and it will probably have a bad effect on the pa.s.sengers."
So we had left Earth, at night from a field out in Ess.e.x. Without orders, without clearance papers, without an automatic pilot check. Eighteen couples and one navigator--destination unknown. If the Interstellar Council had known what Norris was up to, it would have been a case for the s.p.a.ce-Time Commission.
Of that long initial lap of our voyage, perhaps the less said the better. As always is the case when monotony begins to wear away the veneer of civilization, character quirks came to the surface, cliques formed among the pa.s.sengers, and gossip and personalities became matters of pre-eminent importance.
Rising to the foreground out of our thirty-six, came Fielding Mason, tall, taciturn, and handsome, with a keen intellect and a sense of values remarkable in so young a man. Mason was a graduate of Montape, the French outgrowth of St. Cyr. But he had majored in military tactics, psychology and sociology and knew nothing at all about astrogation or even elemental astronomy. He too was a man of good breeding and refinement. Nevertheless conflict began to develop between him and Navigator Norris. That conflict began the day we landed on Coulora.
Norris stepped out of the air lock into the cold thin air, glanced briefly about him and faced the eighteen men a.s.sembled.
"We"ll divide into three groups," he said. "Each group to carry an organic surveyor and take a different direction. Each group will so regulate its marching as to be back here without fail an hour before darkness sets in. If you find no sign of animal life, then we will take off again immediately on your return."
Mason paused halfway in the act of strapping on his packsack.
"What"s that got to do with it?" he demanded. "There"s vegetation here. That"s all that seems to be necessary."
Norris lit his pipe. "If you find no sign of animal life we will take off immediately on your return," he said as if he hadn"t heard.
But the strangeness of Coulora tempered bad feelings then. The blue hensorr trees were actually not trees at all but a huge cat-tail-like growth, the stalks of which were quite transparent. In between the stalks grew curious cabbage-like plants that changed from red to yellow as an intruder approached and back to red again after he had pa.s.sed. Rock outcroppings were everywhere, but all were eroded and in places polished smooth as gla.s.s.
There was a strange kind of dust that acted as though endowed with life. It quivered when trod upon, and the outline of our footsteps slowly rose into the air, so that looking back I could see our trail floating behind us in irregular layers.
Above us the star that was this planet"s sun shown bright but faintly red as if it were in the first stages of dying. The air though thin was fit to breathe, and we found it unnecessary to wear s.p.a.ce suits. We marched down the corridors of hensorr trees, until we came to an open spot, a kind of glade. And that was the first time Mason tuned his organic surveyor and received absolutely nothing.
There was no animal life on Coulora!
Within an hour we had blasted off again. The forward-impact delivered by the Ganeth-Klae booster was terrific, and nausea and vertigo struck us all simultaneously. But again, with all ports and observation shields sealed shut, Norris held the secret of our destination.
On July twenty-second, the ship gave that sickening lurch and came once again to a standstill.
"Same procedure as before," Norris said, stepping out of the airlock. "Those of you who desire to have their wives accompany you may do so. Mason, you"ll make a final correlation on the organic surveyors. If there is no trace of animal life return here before dark."
Once our group was out of sight of the ship, Mason threw down his packsack, sat down on a boulder and lighted a cigarette.
"Bagley," he said to me, "has the Old Man gone loco?"
"I think not," I said, frowning. "He"s one of the most evenly balanced persons I know."
"Then he"s hiding something," Mason said. "Why else should he be so concerned with finding animal life?"
"You know the answer to that," I said. "We"re here to colonize, to start a new life. We can"t very well do that on a desert."
"That"s poppyc.o.c.k," Mason replied, flinging away his cigarette. "When the Albertson expedition first landed on Mars, there was no animal life on the red planet. Now look at it. Same thing was true when Breslauer first settled Pluto. The colonies there got along. I tell you Norris has got something up his sleeve, and I don"t like it."
Later, after Mason had taken his negative surveyor reading, the flame of trouble reached the end of its fuse!
Norris had given orders to return to the Marie Galante, and the rest of us were sullenly making ready to start the back trail. Mason, however, deliberately seized his pick and began chopping a hole in the rock surface, preparatory apparently to erecting his plastic tent.
"We"ll make temporary camp here," he said calmly. "Brandt, you can go back to the ship and bring back the rest of the women." He turned and smiled sardonically at Navigator Norris.
Norris quietly knocked the ashes from his pipe and placed it in his pocket. He strode forward, took the pick from Mason"s hands and flung it away. Then he seized Mason by the coat, whipped him around and drove his fist hard against the younger man"s jaw.
"When you signed on for this voyage, you agreed to obey my orders," he said, not raising his voice. "You"ll do just that."
Mason picked himself up, and there was an ugly glint in his eyes. He could have smashed Norris to a pulp, and none knew it better than the Navigator. For a brief instant the younger man swayed there on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet, fists clenched. Then he let his hands drop, walked over and began to put on his packsack.
But I had seen Mason"s face, and I knew he had not given in as easily as it appeared. Meanwhile he began to circulate among the pa.s.sengers, making no offers, yet subtly enlisting backers for a policy, the significance of which grew on me slowly. It was mutiny he was plotting! And with his personal charm and magnetism he had little trouble in winning over converts. I came upon him arguing before a group of the women one day, among them his own wife, Estelle. He was standing close to her.
"We have clothing and equipment and food concentrate," Mason said. "Enough to last two generations. We have brains and intelligence, and we certainly should be able to establish ourselves without the aid of other vertebrate forms of life.
"Coulora, Jama, Tenethon, Mokrell, R-9, and Stragella. We could have settled on any one of those planets, and apparently we should have, for conditions have grown steadily worse at each landing. But always the answer is no. Why? Because Norris says we must go on until we find animal life."
He cleared his throat and gazed at the feminine faces before him. "Go where? What makes Norris so sure he"ll find life on any planet in this system? And incidentally where in the cosmos is this system?"
One of the women, a tall blonde, stirred uneasily. "What do you mean?" she said.
"I mean we don"t know if our last landing was on Stragella or Coulora. I mean we don"t know where we are or where we"re going, and I don"t think Norris does either. We"re lost!"
That was in August. By the last of September we had landed on two more planets, to which Norris gave the simple names of R-12 and R-14. Each had crude forms of vegetable life, represented princ.i.p.ally by the blue hensorr trees, but in neither case did the organic surveyor reveal the slightest traces of animal life.
There was, however, a considerable difference in physical appearance between R-12 and R-14, and for a time that fact excited Norris tremendously. Up to then, each successive planet, although similar in size, had exhibited signs of greater age than its predecessor. But on R-12 there were definite manifestations of younger geologic development.
Several pieces of shale lay exposed under a fold of igneous rock. Two of those pieces contained fossils of highly developed ganoids, similar to those found on Venus. They were perfectly preserved.
It meant that animal life had existed on R-12, even if it didn"t now. It meant that R-12, though a much older planet than Earth, was still younger than Stragella or the rest.
For a while Norris was almost beside himself. He cut out rock samples and carried them back to the ship. He personally supervised the tuning of the surveyors. And when he finally gave orders to take off, he was almost friendly to Mason, whereas before his att.i.tude toward him had been one of cold aloofness.
But when we reached R-14, our eighth landing, all that pa.s.sed. For R-14 was old again, older than any of the others.
And then, on October sixteenth, Mason opened the door of the locked cabin. It happened quite by accident. One of the arelium-thaxide conduits broke in the Marie Galante"s central pa.s.sageway, and the resulting explosion grounded the central feed line of the instrument equipment. In a trice the pa.s.sageway was a sheet of flame, rapidly filling with smoke from burning insulation.
Norris, of course, was in the bridge cuddy with locked doors between us and him, and now with the wiring burned through there was no way of signalling him he was wanted for an emergency. In his absence Mason took command.
That pa.s.sageway ran the full length of the ship. Midway down it was the door leading to the women"s lounge. The explosion had jammed that door shut, and smoke was pouring forth from under the sill. All at once one of the women rushed forward to announce hysterically that Mason"s wife, Estelle, was in the lounge.
Adjoining the lounge was a small cabin which since the beginning of our voyage had remained locked. Norris had given strict orders that that cabin was not to be disturbed. We all had taken it as a matter of course that it contained various kinds of precision instruments.
Now, however, Mason realized that the only way into the lounge was by way of that locked cabin. If he used a heat blaster on the lounge door there was no telling what would happen to the woman inside.
He ripped the emergency blaster from its wall mounting, pressed it to the magnetic latch of the sealed cabin door and pressed the stud. An instant later he was leading his frightened wife, Estelle, out through the smoke.
The fire was quickly extinguished after that and the wiring spliced. Then when the others had drifted off, Mason called Brandt and me aside.
"We"ve been wondering for a long time what happened to Ganeth-Klae, the Martian inventor who worked with Norris to invent Indurate," he said very quietly. "Well, we don"t need to wonder any more. He"s in there."
Brandt and I stepped forward over the sill--and drew up short. Ganeth-Klae was there all right, but he would never trouble himself about making a voyage in a locked cabin. His rigid body was encased in a transparent block of amber-colored solidifex, the after-death preservative used by all Martians.
Both of us recognized his still features at once, and in addition his name-tattoo, required by Martian law, was clearly visible on his left forearm.
For a brief instant the discovery stunned us. Klae dead? Klae whose IQ had become a measuring guide for the entire system, whose Martian head held more ordinary horse sense, in addition to radical postulations on theoretical physics, than anyone on the planets. It wasn"t possible.
And what was the significance of his body on Norris" ship? Why had Norris kept its presence a secret and why had he given out the story of Klae"s disappearance?
Mason"s face was cold as ice. "Come with me, you two," he said. "We"re going to get the answer to this right now."
We went along the pa.s.sage to the circular staircase. We climbed the steps, pa.s.sed through the scuttle and came to the door of the bridge cuddy. Mason drew the bar and we pa.s.sed in. Norris was bent over the chart table. He looked up sharply at the sound of our steps.
"What is the meaning of this intrusion?" he said.
It didn"t take Mason long to explain. When he had finished, he stood there, jaw set, eyes smouldering.
Norris paled. Then quickly he got control of himself, and his old bland smile returned.
"I expected you to blunder into Klae"s body one of these days," he said. "The explanation is quite simple. Klae had been ill for many months, and he knew his time was up. His one desire in life was to go on this expedition with me, and he made me promise to bury him at the site of our new colony. The pact was between him and me, and I"ve followed it to the letter, telling no one."
Mason"s lips curled in a sneer. "And just what makes you think we"re going to believe that story?" he demanded.
Norris lit a cigar. "It"s entirely immaterial to me whether you believe it or not."
But the story was believed, especially by the women, to whom the romantic angle appealed and Mason"s embryonic mutiny died without being born, and the Marie Galante sailed on through uncharted s.p.a.ce toward her ninth and last landing.
As the days dragged by and no word came from the bridge cuddy, restlessness began to grow amongst us. Rumor succeeded rumor, each story wilder and more incredible than the rest. Then just as the tension had mounted to fever pitch, there came the sickening lurch and grinding vibration of another landing.
Norris dispensed with his usual talk before marching out from the ship. After testing the atmosphere with the ozonometer, he pa.s.sed out the heat pistols and distributed the various instruments for computing radioactivity and cosmic radiation.
"This is the planet Nizar," he said shortly. "Largest in the field of the sun Ponthis. You will make your survey as one group this time. I will remain here."
He stood watching us as we marched off down the cliff side. Then the blue hensorr trees rose up to swallow him from view. Mason swung along at the head of our column, eyes bright, a figure of aggressive action. We had gone but a hundred yards when it became apparent that, as a planet, Nizar was entirely different from its predecessors. There was considerable top soil, and here grew a tall reed-shaped plant that gave off varying chords of sound when the wind blew.
It was as if we were progressing through the nave of a mighty church with a muted organ in the distance. There was animal life too, a strange lizard-like bird that rose up in flocks ahead of us and flew screaming overhead.
"I don"t exactly like it, Bagley," he said. "There"s something unwholesome about this planet. The evolution is obviously in an early state of development, but I get the impression that it has gone backward; that the planet is really old and has reverted to its earlier life."
Above us the sky was heavily overcast, and a tenuous white mist rising up from the hensorr trees formed curious shapes and designs. In the distance I could hear the swashing of waves on a beach.
Suddenly Mason stopped. "Look!" he said.
Below us stretched the sh.o.r.e of a great sea. But it was the structure rising up from that sh.o.r.e that drew a sharp exclamation from me. Shaped in a rough ellipse, yet mounted high toward a common point, was a large building of multiple hues and colors. The upper portion was eroded to crumbling ruins, the lower part studded with many bas-reliefs and triangular doorways.
"Let"s go," Mason said, breaking out into a fast loping run.
The building was farther away than we had thought, but when we finally came up to it, we saw that it was even more of a ruin than it had at first appeared. It was only a sh.e.l.l with but two walls standing, alone and forlorn. Whatever race had lived here, they had come and gone.
We prowled about the ruins for more than an hour. The carvings on the walls were in the form of geometric designs and cabalistic symbols, giving no clue to the city"s former occupants" ident.i.ty.
And then Mason found the stairs leading to the lower crypts. He switched on his ato-flash and led the way down cautiously. Level one ... level two ... three ... we descended lower and lower. Here water from the nearby sea oozed in little rivulets that glittered in the light of the flash.
We emerged at length on a wide underground plaisance, a kind of amphitheater, with tier on tier of seats surrounding it and extending back into the shadows.
"Judging from what we"ve seen," Mason said, "I would say that the race that built this place had reached approximately a grade C-5 of civilization, according to the Mokart scale. This apparently was their council chamber."
"What are those rectangular stone blocks depending from the ceiling?" I said.
Mason turned the light beam upward. "I don"t know," he said. "But my guess is that they are burial vaults. Perhaps the creatures were ornithoid."
Away from the flash the floor of the plaisance appeared to be a great mirror that caught our reflections and distorted them fantastically and horribly. We saw then that it was a form of living mold, composed of millions of tiny plants, each with an eye-like iris at its center. Those eyes seemed to be watching us, and as we strode forward, a great sigh rose up, as if in resentment at our intrusion.
There was a small triangular dais in the center of the chamber, and in the middle of it stood an irregular black object. As we drew nearer, I saw that it had been carved roughly in the shape of this central building and that it was in a perfect state of preservation.
Mason walked around this carving several times, examining it curiously.
"Odd," he said. "It looks to be an object of religious veneration, but I never heard before of a race worshipping a replica of their own living quarters."
Suddenly his voice died off. He bent closer to the black stone, studying it in the light of the powerful ato-flash. He got a small magnifying gla.s.s out of his pocket and focused it on one of the miniature bas-reliefs midway toward the top of the stone. Unfastening his geologic hammer from his belt, he managed, with a sharp, swinging blow, to break off a small protruding piece.
He drew in his breath sharply, and I saw his face go pale. I stared at him in alarm.
"What"s wrong?" I asked.
He motioned that I follow and led the way silently past the others toward the stair shaft. Climbing to the top level was a heart-pounding task, but Mason almost ran up those steps. At the surface he leaned against a pillar, his lips quivering spasmodically.
"Tell me I"m sane, Bagley," he said huskily. "Or rather, don"t say anything until we"ve seen Norris. Come on. We"ve got to see Norris."
All the way back to the Marie Galante, I sought to soothe him, but he was a man possessed. He rushed up the ship"s gangway, burst into central quarters and drew up before Navigator Norris like a runner stopping at the tape.
"You d.a.m.ned lying hypocrite!" he yelled.
Norris looked at him in his quiet way. "Take it easy, Mason," he said. "Sit down and explain yourself."
But Mason didn"t sit down. He thrust his hand in his pocket, pulled out the piece of black stone he had chipped off the image in the cavern and handed it to Norris.