The Complete Serials Read online

  “There’s one in a cabinet beside the air lock,” she told him. “Probably it’s still in good condition.”

  “Anything you want to take?” he asked. “Anything I can get together for you.”

  She made an impatient motion.

  “No,” she said. “I want to forget this place.”

  III.

  THE SPACE PUP arrowed steadily toward Pluto. From the engine room came the subdued hum of the geosectors. The vision-plate looked out on ebon space with its far-flung way posts of tiny, steely stars. The speedometer needle was climbing up toward the thousand-mile-per-second mark.

  Caroline Martin leaned forward in her seat and stared out at the vastness that stretched eternally ahead. “I could stay and watch forever,” she exulted.

  Gary, lounging back in the pilot’s seat, said quietly: “I’ve been thinking about that name of yours. It seems to me I’ve heard it somewhere. Read it in a book.”

  She glanced at him swiftly and then stared out into space again.

  “Perhaps you have,” she said, finally.

  There was a silence, unbroken except by the humming of the geosectors.

  The girl turned back to Gary, cupped her chin in her hands.

  “Probably you have read about me,” she said. “Perhaps the name of Caroline Martin is mentioned in your histories. You see, I was a member of the old Mars-Earth Research Commission during the war with Jupiter. I was so proud of the appointment. Just four years out of school and I was trying so hard to get a good job in some scientific research work. I wanted to earn money to go to school again.”

  “I am beginning to remember now,” said Gary, “but there must be something wrong. The histories say you were a traitor. They say you were condemned to death.”

  “I was a traitor,” she said and a thread of ancient bitterness ran through her words. “I refused to turn over a discovery I made. A discovery that would have won the war. It also would have wrecked the Solar System. I told them so. But they were men at war. They were desperate men. We were losing then.”

  “We never really did win,” said Gary.

  “They condemned me,” she said, “to worse than death. They sentenced me to space. They put me in that shell you found me in, and a war cruiser towed it out to Pluto’s orbit and turned it loose. It was an old condemned craft, its machinery outmoded. They ripped out the rocket tubes and turned it into a prison for me.”

  “Why, that’s a foul trick—foul even for that half-civilized crowd of a thousand years ago,” roared Herb.

  “Just men at war,” said the girl. “Cruel men. They put the laboratory in the control room as a final ironic jest. So I could carry out my experiments. Ones, they said, I’d never need to turn over to them.”

  “Would your discovery have wrecked the System?” asked Gary.

  “Yes,” she said. “It would have. That’s why I refused to give it to the military board. For that they called me traitor.”

  “They never found your notes,” said Gary.

  She tapped her forehead with a slender finger. “My notes were here,” she said.

  He looked amazed.

  “And still are,” she added.

  “But how did you get the drugs to carry out your suspended animation plans?” asked Gary.

  She waited for long minutes.

  “That’s the part I hate,” she said. “The part that’s hard to think about. You see, I worked with a young man. About my age, then. He must be dead these many years.”

  SHE STOPPED and Gary could see that she was trying to marshal in her mind what next to say. “We were in love,” she said. “Together we discovered the suspended animation process. Worked on it secretly for months and were ready to announce it when I was taken before the military tribunal. They never let me see him after that. I was allowed no visitors.

  “Out in space, after the war cruiser left, I almost went insane. I invented all sorts of tasks to do. I arranged and rearranged my chemicals and apparatus and then one day I found the drugs, skillfully hidden in a box of chemicals I had never bothered to unpack. Only one person in the world beside myself knew about them. The drugs and two hypodermic syringes.”

  Gary’s pipe had gone out and he relit it.

  The girl went on.

  “I knew it would be a gamble,” she said. “I knew that he intended I should take that gamble. Maybe he had a wild scheme of coming out and hunting for me. Maybe something happened and he couldn’t start. Maybe he tried and failed. Maybe . . . the war got him. But he had given me a chance, a desperate chance to beat the fate the military court had set for me. I removed the steel partition in the engine room to make the tank. That took many weeks. I etched the copper plate. I went out on the shell and etched the lines beside the lock. I’m afraid that wasn’t a very good job.”

  “And then,” said Herb, “you put yourself to sleep.”

  “Not exactly sleep,” she said. “Because my brain still worked. I thought and thought for almost a thousand years. My mind set up problems and worked them out. I developed a flair for pure deduction, since my mind was the only thing left for me to work with. I believe I even developed telepathic powers.”

  “You mean,” asked Herb, “that you can read our thoughts?”

  She nodded, then hastened on. “But I wouldn’t,” she said. “I wouldn’t do that to my friends. I knew when Gary first came to the shell. I read the wonder and amazement in his thoughts. I was so afraid he’d go away and leave me alone again. I tried to talk to him with my thoughts, hut he was so upset he couldn’t understand.”

  Gary shook his head. “Who wouldn’t have been upset?” he asked.

  “But,” exploded Herb, “think of the chances that you took. It was just pure luck we found you. Your drug wouldn’t have held up forever. Another thousand years perhaps, but scarcely longer. Then there was the chance that the atmosphere generators might have failed. Or that a big meteor would come along. There were a thousand things that might have happened.”

  She agreed with him. “It was a long chance. I knew it was. A gamble. But there was no other way. I could have sat still and done nothing, grown old and died.”

  She was silent for a moment.

  “It would have been easy,” she declared then, “if I hadn’t made that one mistake. A thousand years of thought is something I wouldn’t want to try again.”

  “Weren’t you frightened?” Gary asked.

  Her eyes widened slightly and she nodded.

  “I heard voices,” she said. “Voices coming out of space, out of the void that lies between the galaxies. Things talking over many light-years with one another. Things to which the human race would appear mere insects. At first I was frightened. Frightened at the things they said, at the horrible hints I sensed in the things I couldn’t understand. Then, growing desperate, I tried to talk back to them. I wasn’t afraid of them any more. I thought maybe they could help. I didn’t care much what happened just so some one would help me.”

  Gary lit his pipe again and silence fell for just a space.

  “Voices,” said Herb. “Voices out of space.”

  THEY ALL STARED out into the blackness that hemmed them in. Gary felt the hairs bristle at the nape of his neck. Some cold wind from far away had brushed across his face. An unnamable terror out of the cosmos reaching out, searching for him. Things that talked across the back-yard fence of many light-years. Things that hurled pure thought across the deserts of emptiness that lie between the galaxies.

  “Tell me,” said Caroline, and her voice, too, seemed to come from far away, “how did the war come out?”

  “The war?” asked Gary.

  Then he understood.

  “Oh, the war,” he said. “Why, Earth and Mars finally won. Or so the histories claim. There was a battle out near Ganymede, and both fleets limped home pretty badly battered up. The Jovians went back to Jupiter. The Earth-Mars fleet pulled into Sandebar on Mats. For months the two inner planets built up their fleets and strengthened home d
efense. But the Jovians never came out again, and our fleet didn’t dare invade Jupiter. Even today we haven’t developed a ship that dares go into Jupiter’s atmosphere. Our geosectors might take us there and bring us back, but you can’t use them near a planetary body. They work on the principle of warping space—”

  “Warping space?” asked the girl, suddenly sitting upright.

  “Sure,” said Gary. “Anything peculiar about it?”

  “Why, no,” she said. “I don’t suppose there is.”

  Then: “I wouldn’t exactly call that a victory.”

  “That’s what the histories call it,” Gary shrugged. “They claim we run the Jovians to cover and they’ve been afraid to come out ever since. Earth and Mars have taken over Jupiter’s moons and colonized them, but to this day no one has ever sighted a Jovian or a Jovian ship. Not since that day back in 5980.”

  “It’s just one of those things,” declared Herb.

  (The girl was staring out at space again. Hungry for seeing, hungry for living, but with the scars of awful memory etched into her brain. A thousand years of thought.)

  Gary shuddered. Alone, she had taken a magnificent gamble and had won. Won against time and space and the brutality of man.

  (What had she thought of during those, long years? What problems had she solved? What kind of a person could she be?)

  Gary nursed the hot bowl of the pipe in his hands and gazed at her head, outlined against the vision-glass. Square chin, high forehead, the braided strands wrapped about her head.

  (What was she thinking of now? Of that lover of a thousand years ago? Of how he might have tried to find her, of how he may have searched through space and failed? Or was she thinking of those voices . . . the voices talking back and forth across the gulfs of empty space?)

  The teletype, squatting in the corner, broke into a gibbering chatter.

  Gary sprang to his feet.

  “Now what?” he asked.

  Caroline had swung around. Herb was on his feet.

  The chattering ceased and the machine settled down to the click-clack of a message.

  Gary hurried forward. The other two pressed close behind, looked over his shoulder.

  “NELSON, ABOARD SPACE PUP, NEARING PLUTO. DOCTOR KINGSLEY ON PLUTO REPORTS RECEIVING STRANGE MESSAGES FROM SOMEWHERE OUT OF SOLAR SYSTEM. UNABLE TO EVEN GUESS AT SOURCE. REFUSES TO GIVE CIRCUMSTANCES UNDER WHICH MESSAGES WERE RECEIVED OR CONTEXT OF THEM IF, IN FACT, HE KNOWS CONTEXT. URGENT THAT YOU GET STORY IMMEDIATELY UPON ARRIVAL. REGARDS.”

  “EVENING ROCKET.”

  The machine’s stuttering came to an end.

  The three stared at one another.

  Again the cold wind from outer space seemed to brush against Gary’s face. He raised his hand and scrubbed his chin. Two days’ growth of beard made a grating sound.

  Herb looked at him with widening eyes. “Messages out of space,” he said.

  Gary shook his head. He stole a swift glance at the girl. Her face seemed pale. Perhaps she was remembering.

  “Herb,” he said, “there’s something funny going on.”

  IV.

  TRAIL’S END, Pluto’s single community, crouching at the foot of a towering black mountain, seemed deserted. There was no stir of life about the buildings that huddled between the space-field and the mountains. The spiraling tower of the radio station climbed dizzily spaceward and beside it squatted the tiny radio shack. Behind it stood the fueling station and the hangar, while half a mile away loomed the larger building that housed the laboratories of the Solar Science Commission.

  Caroline moved closer to Gary.

  “It seems so lonely,” she whispered. “I don’t like loneliness now after—”

  Gary stirred uneasily, scraping the heavy boots of his spacesuit over the pitted rock. “It’s always lonely enough,” he said. “I wonder where they are.”

  As he spoke, the lock of the radio shack opened and a spacesuited figure strode across the field to meet them.

  His voice crackled in their helmet-phones. “You must be Nelson,” it said. “I’m Ted Smith, operator here. Dr. Kingsley told me to bring you up to the house right away.”

  “Fine,” said Gary. “Glad to be here. I suppose Evans is still around.”

  “He is,” said Smith. “He’s up at the house now. His ship is in the hangar. Personally, I figure he is planning to take off and let the SCC try to chase him.”

  Smith fell in step with them. “It’s good to see new faces,” he declared, “specially a woman. We don’t have women visitors very often.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Gary. “I forgot.”

  He introduced Caroline and Herb to Smith as they plodded past the radio shack and started for the laboratory.

  “It gets lonesome out here,” said Smith. “This is a hellish place, if I do say so myself. No wind. No moon. Nothing. Very little difference between night and day, because there’s never any clouds to cover the stars and even in the daytime the Sun is no better than a star.”

  His tongue, loosened by visitors to talk to, rambled on.

  “A fellow gets kind of queer out here,” he told them. “It’s enough to make anyone get queer. I think the doctor is half crazy from staying here too long. He thinks he’s getting messages from some place far away. Acts mysterious about it.”

  “You think he just imagines it?” asked Herb.

  “I’m not saying one way or the other,” declared Smith, “but I ask you . . . where would you get messages from? Think of the power it would take just to send a message from Alpha Centauri. And that isn’t so very far away. Not as far as stars go. Right next door you might say.”

  “Evans is going to fly there and back,” Herb reminded him.

  “Evans is space-nuts,” said Smith. “With all the Solar System to fool around in, he has to go gallivanting off to the stars. He hasn’t got a chance. I told him so, but he laughed at me. I’m sorry for him. He’s a nice young fellow.”

  They mounted the steps, hewn out of living stone, which led to the main air lock of the laboratory building. Smith pressed the buzzer button and they waited.

  “I suppose you’ll want Andy to put your ship in the hangar and go over it,” Smith suggested.

  “Sure,” said Gary. “Tell him to take good care of it.”

  “Andy is the fueling-station man,” the radio operator explained. “But he hasn’t much to do now. Most of the ships use geosectors. There’s only a few old tubs, one or two a year, that need any fuel. Used to be a good business, but not any more.”

  The space lock swung open and the three stepped inside. Smith remained by the doorway.

  “I have to go back to the shack,” he said. “I’ll see you again before you leave.”

  The lock hissed shut behind them and the inner screw began to turn. It swung open and they stepped into a small room that was lined with spacesuits hanging on the wall.

  A man was standing in the center of the room. A big man, with broad shoulders and hands like hams. His unruly shock of hair was jet-black and his voice boomed jovially at them.

  “Glad to see all of you,” he said and laughed, a deep, thunderous laugh that seemed to shake the room.

  Gary swung back the helmet of his suit and thrust out a gloved hand.

  “You are Dr. Kingsley?” he asked.

  “That’s who I am,” boomed the mighty voice. “And who are these folks with you?”

  Gary introduced them.

  “I didn’t know there was a lady in the party,” said the doctor.

  “There wasn’t,” said Herb. “Not until just recently.”

  “Mean to tell me they’ve taken to hitch-hiking out in space?”

  Gary laughed. “Even better than that, doctor,” he said. “There’s a little story about Miss Martin you’ll enjoy.”

  “Come on,” he roared at them. “Get out of your duds. I got some coffee brewing. And you’ll want to meet Tommy Evans. He’s that young fool who thinks he’s going to fly four light-years out to old A. C.
”

  And at just that moment Tommy Evans burst into the room.

  “Doc,” he shouted, “that damn machine of yours is at it again.”

  Dr. Kingsley turned and lumbered out, shouting back at them.

  “Come along. Never mind the suits.”

  THEY RAN behind him as he lumbered along. Through what obviously were the laboratory’s living quarters, through a tiny kitchen that smelled of boiling coffee, into a workroom bare of everything except a machine that stood in one corner. A red light atop the machine was blinking rapidly.

  The machine was a wonder in complexity, a spidery confusion of tubes and wires, an elaborate network of metal parts.

  Dr. Kingsley lowered his huge frame into a chair before it, lifted a domed helmet and set it on his head. A pencil lay beside a pad of paper and he clutched at it, poised it over the pad as if to write. But the pencil remained poised and lines of concentration deepened in Kingsley’s face. His left hand went up to the helmet and twisted knobs and dials.

  Gary watched in amazement.

  It must be over this contraption that Kingsley was receiving his mysterious messages. But he seemed to be having trouble. The message apparently wasn’t coming in right.

  The red light went dead and the doctor snatched the helmet from his head.

  “Nothing again,” he said, swinging about in his chair.

  He rose slowly and there were lines of disappointment on his face, but his voice boomed as jovially as ever.

  He flipped a hand at Tommy Evans.

  “Meet Evans,” he said. He introduced them in turn.

  “Newspaper folks,” he explained. “Out writing up the Solar System. Doing a good job of it, too. The last supply ship brought some Evening Rockets. Read your articles about the moons of Jupiter. Mighty interesting.”

  He lumbered back to the kitchen and poured coffee while they took off their spacesuits.

  “I suppose,” he said, “you’re wondering what it’s all about.”

  Gary nodded. “My office notified me,” he replied. “Asked me to get a story about it. I hope you can help me out.”