Part 1

Cosmic Castaway

By CARL JACOBI

Within a year Earth would be a vassal world, with the Sirian invaders triumphant. Only Standish, Earth's Defense Engineer, could halt that last victorious onslaught--and he was helpless, the lone survivor of a prison ship wrecked in uncharted space.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Standish came back to consciousness, a dull pain surging in his head and a feeling of nausea in his midsection. The room about him was strange: grey _arelium_ walls, a single light burning above the iron cot, and a low vibration that trembled the floor beneath his feet.

For a time he lay there, fighting off a cloud of dizziness. Then he groped unsteadily to his feet. As he did, the vibration ceased, and far off he fancied he heard voices pitched in alarm. A bell clanged hollowly several times.

He recognized those sounds now, as his thoughts struggled to bridge the gap in his brain and the memory of past events came rushing to him.

He was on a Sirian prison ship!

The silence grew upon him, and he stood there uncertainly, listening. Something was wrong. There was no familiar drone of atomic motors, and there should be....

When the shock came, he was hurled completely across the room to the far bulkhead. Yet it wasn't a severe shock. It was as if the ship faltered suddenly and heeled over on her side.

Above him, Standish saw induction and exhaust pipes, coated with sulphur dioxide frost, writhe and twist like so many serpents. The explosion that followed was deafening. The floor buckled upward under the pressure. The door to the cabin was torn from its hinges, and a sheet of flame and a column of smoke gushed inward.

In an instant, Standish understood. The prison ship, well on its voyage from Earth, had entered the danger zone, that part of space swarming with planetoids and miniature planets. A sleepy pilot had failed to make the proper gravitational allowances. They had struck!

The ship was almost over on her beam ends now. It righted slowly, and Standish fought his way into the outer passageway, every muscle tensed for instant action.

The corridor was empty. Gas and smoke searing his nostrils, the Earthman made his way to the companion. Up he climbed. Emerging on the second level, he stood rigid, stark horror gripping him.

The cages were there. Tier after tier of them stretching into the bowels of the space ship as far as the grey light permitted him to see. In those cages, he knew, were men of his own race: Earth soldiers, prisoners of war.

But over each cage the heavy ceiling plates had been ripped free by the force of the explosion, and where the imprisoned men had been, only twisted bars and sheets of _arelium_ steel were visible. The entire level was a tomb of silence.

Standish choked back a sob. His men all dead! Crushed like rats in a trap.

He crossed to the ladder leading to the third and main level, climbing slowly.

Reaching the crew deck, he rocked backward again with a cry of dismay. Here, too, the fearful destruction was evident on all sides. Uniformed Sirians lay dead in the scuppers. The entire bridge house was a mass of fallen girders and broken metal.

The officers' quarters had been crushed like an eggshell. Only the steering cuddy and control room had been spared. But here, too, Standish found death had not spared the occupants. A pintax bar, ripped free from its rocker arms, had jammed itself like an exploded cartridge into the pilot's skull. All in the control room had died of fumes forced into the chamber when the motors backcharged through the instrument pipes.

* * * * *

From cabin to cabin Standish went from the living quarters of the crew in the forecastle, to the ammunition chamber in the stern. Everywhere he found destruction and death.

And slowly the fact dawned upon him that he alone aboard was alive. He had been spared because he had been imprisoned in the lower hull, and that section of the ship had escaped damage. Slowly he sank onto a settee and tried to reconstruct his thoughts.

A few hours ago as defense engineer for Earth, he had generaled a daring undercover attack against the Sirian's main base at San Francisco. For ten years--since 3010--the war between Earth and Sirius had been going on, with Earth the stage for all battles of the conflict. The cause of the war was long forgotten. Earth people only knew that the Sirians, greedy for more land, had successfully vanquished Mars and Venus and were steadily closing in on terrestrial territory.

Already Australia and Asia had fallen. With every known device of interplanetary warfare, the Sirians had captured district after district, until the American continent alone remained untrampled by the invaders.

But Standish's story had begun a week before. Through an operative in his vast espionage system, he had learned that the Sirians under command of the ruthless Drum Faggard, were preparing for the "big push."

With a dozen chosen companions disguised as Sirians, the Earth engineer had successfully passed through the enemy lines. He had hoped to capture Drum Faggard and a number of his officers-of-staff and race with them back to the Earth's front line breastworks at Omaha. It was a wild scheme; but Standish knew if Faggard were captured, the war would collapse.

The plan had failed. Counter-spies had warned the Sirians. The little band of twelve had been permitted to penetrate deep into Sirian territory, then had been overwhelmed. And after that--Standish's fists clenched--he had been brought face to face with Drum Faggard.

He was a renegade, this Sirian master of conquest. He had been born on Earth of low parentage, but at the beginning of hostilities he had wormed his way into the graces of the Sirians and by cunning and force of will had risen to Chief of Command.

The Sirians were a wafter-headed race with featureless faces and short barrel-like bodies. Their legs were the same as those of the men of Earth, but their arms possessed tumor-like swellings above the wrists, secondary nerve centers. Faggard, a huge man with a gross face, pig-like eyes and thin lips, had smiled sardonically when Standish was brought before him.

"So your little plan failed, eh?" he said, swallowing a glass of Sirian whiskey and wiping his mouth with the flat of his hand. "Well, Standish, you may as well realize it, you're quite in our power now, and you'll be treated with no more consideration than the rest of the prisoners, unless you answer a few questions."

"What sort of questions?" Standish had demanded.

Faggard smiled again. "Now that your connections with Earth have been forever severed, it can be of little concern to you what happens to that planet. What I want to know is this: How many anti-rocket guns has Earth located at its Omaha base? What is the number of strato-cruisers stationed at Powerville? How heavy are the reserves in the Electra City sector?

"Answer those question, Standish, and you will be virtually a free man. You will be released on our colony planet of Pluto, with five hundred _planetoles_ in your pocket. That money will enable you to live a life of ease for the rest of your days."

For a moment Standish had stood there, face emotionless. Then like an uncapped bottle spewing forth, he had given in to blind rage. He lunged across the room, seized Faggard's thick throat and pounded his right fist into the smirking lips. Twice he had struck before a guard had rushed forward and pulled him off. Then something hard and heavy had crashed down upon his skull, and he knew no more.

He had awakened on this prison ship. But had not this accident occurred he knew well enough the fate that would have been in store for him. All prisoners captured by the Sirian army were transported back to Sirius where they were put to work as slaves in the marsh fields, extracting hydro-carbon gas for use in the food-distillation plants. It was said a terrestrial man could live only one year there.

Only one thing puzzled the Earthman. Why had he been given special quarters on the prison ship instead of being placed in one of the cages with the other prisoners? To that he could give no answer, and as the ringing silence of space closed in on him, he got to his feet and made his way slowly back to the control room.

II

Glass 5 showed that the forepeak and secondary chamber had been ripped open. Glass 5 also showed that bulkhead doors there had automatically closed. For the rest, excluding the motors, everything seemed in order.

The oxygen suppliers were functioning smoothly on auxiliary batteries. Likewise the heat units, one for each level, showed normal operation. All lights were lit.

Standish glanced out the port. Whatever the ship had struck, it was out of his vision range now. Propelled by the forward surge of the dying motors, the ship must have advanced a great distance since the fatal crash.

Now the ship was drifting. Drifting without steerageway.

"Derelict," Standish said slowly. "It looks like I've got a one-way ticket to eternity."

He took the elevator down to the lower level again and made his way along the grating to the engine room. Carefully he examined the six ato-turbines with an experienced eye.

Standish had grown up with atomic motors. He had served an apprenticeship at his father's solar plant at Sun City, and he had graduated from the New York School of Technology. As a boy of sixteen, he had built his first minature atom smasher during vacation days.

Now he moved along the narrow catwalk between the motors, touching a wire here, an armature there. The two port engines, he found, were wrecked completely. Likewise the two starboard. Two forward machines remained, and of these he saw one had an inch-wide crack in its combustion chamber. But the other....

Standish drew in a breath of satisfaction. The last motor was disabled but not beyond repair. Without further ado, he peeled off his coat, seized a Stillson wrench and fell to work.

It took him a long time, and the task drew his mind away from the horror about him. With the patience of long experience, Standish made his repairs. At length it was completed, and he paused with bated breath while he pressed the starting button.

The motor began, sluggishly at first, then faster and faster. Presently it was droning evenly as if nothing had almost wrecked it earlier.

"One motor isn't much," he told himself. "But it may be enough."

For the third time he returned to the control room. There, triumph met his gaze. The master indicator showed a definite forward movement through space. The crippled ship was moving, though slowly.

Standish turned his attention next to the visiscreens and emergency radio with which the liner had kept in contact with Earth and Sirius. Neither the transmitting nor the receiving sets showed any response when he turned on the control switch. A glance back of the panels showed shattered tubes and broken apparatus.

He went out on the deck and climbed to the pilot cuddy. One look through the three-directional glassite shield told a grim story. But it was a full minute before the significance of it all probed into him.

The view ahead was utterly unfamiliar. Strange stars and constellations glowed in the void. Far off to his left was the white radiance of a spiral nebula. To the right, the galaxies seemed to blend in a bewildering array of light and matter, stretching on into infinitude.

Standish's knowledge of cosmography was limited. He knew that straight lines connecting Sirius with Procyon and Betelguese would constitute a nearly equilateral triangle. He knew, too, that Betelguese, Sirius and Regel--all of the first magnitude--formed a lozenge-shaped figure, with Orion's belt in the center.

But try as he would, he could locate none of these stellar landmarks.

* * * * *

Turning, he looked for the liner's log. With information as to the ship's time of departure from Earth and an average calculation of her speed, he might hope to chart his position.

The log, however, had not been filled out. The Sirians apparently had grown careless in their repeated trips through space.

Standish's teeth came down hard on his pipe stem. He was lost! Hopelessly lost! A solitary spark of life in a man-made projectile, wandering the immensities of the Universe.

Mechanically, the Earthman set the automatic directionscope for a larger spot of light far ahead and threw in the massmeter which would effectually warn him of any body within collision range in his path. Had the liner pilot paid attention to that dial, he reflected, the crash might have been avoided.

Stars paraded, swung past. The Big Dipper flamed away, curiously changed in outlines. Or was it the Big Dipper? Standish didn't know.

Material thoughts supplanted cosmic ones then. There was work to be done, ghoulish work which common decency demanded he perform. The dead must be disposed of.

It was a hard task, and he accomplished it by carrying the bodies of the Sirian officers and crew to the baggage chamber in the stern and casting them free through the airlock. On the second level which had held the Earth prisoners the work was even more difficult. Heavy bars and plates had to be lifted free. But at length Standish stood alone on the ship.

He recognized the gnawing sensation in his midsection then as hunger. Finding the galley supplied with both fresh meats and vegetables as well as food concentrates, he ate well. The food served to restore some of his confidence.

When he returned to the pilot cuddy, he saw that the bright spot for which he had set the directionscope had enlarged to a great orange globe that covered the entire glassite shield. Even as he watched, the outlines of land and seas took form.

The needle of the massmeter began to quiver spasmodically, but Standish held to his course. It had occurred to him that this world might possibly be inhabited and that he might obtain aid for his return to Earth, or at least the proper directions.

But as he drew closer, the land resolved itself into thick jungle and smooth eroded mountain tops, barren of any building or structure. The planet, on this hemisphere at least, was devoid of life.

A bell clanged above the massmeter, warning him the ship was in the danger zone. He seized the wheel and turned it hard over. At the same time he moved the power switch to the last notch.

The liner swung sluggishly. And then the thing Standish had feared happened! The single motor buckled under the strain and ceased. Without resistance, the ship swept full into the gravitational field of the planet and plunged downward.

Like a man in a dream Standish saw jungle rush up to meet him. An instant later there was a terrific crash, and he felt himself hurled into oblivion.

III

An eternity seemed to have passed before he opened his eyes. He was conscious immediately of his left arm which was pinioned under a heavy rock. He wrenched it free and staggered erect, looking about dazedly.

His eyes opened in bewilderment. He lay on a shelf, a small escarpment projecting from the side of a cliff. Far below him, smashed and broken in two, amid jagged boulders, lay the prison ship. And sweeping on and on to the horizon was a dense matted jungle.

The trees resembled giant cat-tails. Without branches, the trunks towered up a full three hundred feet to form a huge green protruberance at the top. The rock of the cliff was neither igneous nor sedimentary. Instead it was smooth and almost translucent, like glass.

In the sky above, two suns blazed, one at the zenith, one a fiery ball dipping over the horizon. The air was warm and humid, and Standish knew the oxygen content must be almost the same as on Earth.

Nature-formed rock slabs led in stair formation down the cliff. While he stood there, slowly regaining his strength, the Earthman tried to trace the path of the crashing liner. He saw where it had struck, ripping open the entire side and casting him out. Then it had rolled end over end down into the ravine.

At length, Standish began his descent. The moment he swung his body over the edge to hang by his hands, he gave an exclamation of amazement. His body seemed to weigh nothing at all. This planet must be of smaller size than Earth, and, therefore, the gravitational attraction was less.

On the ravine floor he looked about him warily. Titanic rock, smooth and polished from erosion, littered the expanse but stopped at the jungle edge. The trees were all the same, of equal height and girth. They seemed to be arranged in corridors or galleries, the way between them dark and shadow-filled. Standish knew he must exercise caution until he could explore those depths.

The significance of his plight now swept upon him. He was alone on an alien planet. Even granting the Sirians would send out scouts to locate their prison ship when it failed to arrive, the chances of his being found were remote.

Yet on the other hand, he alone had been spared death. And he had come upon a world, one perhaps in millions, which had an atmosphere capable of supporting human life.

A sudden high-pitched drone broke the silence. Rising up from behind a pile of boulders a hideous winged shape shot toward him!

Half bird, half saurian, the thing's head was enormous with an inflated cobra hood. Even as the creature closed in with incredible speed, Standish wheeled and ran for the safety of the wrecked space ship.

He reached it and wormed his way through a gaping rent in the hull. The lizard-bird stopped short a few yards from the ship to stare perplexedly. Then with its queer droning cry still sounding, it zoomed into the air and flew out of sight.

"_Holy Hell!_"

Standish inhaled deeply. Dangers here were imminent. He must take steps to protect himself at once.

Although the liner lay on one side with the three entrances and emergency airlock underneath, the hole through which he had entered was the only opening. The hull bottom had been crushed by the great impact. Yet the glassite ports and vision shield of the pilot cuddy were unbroken.

Standish crawled back along the passage to the officers' quarters. On the well of one of the cabins he found two genithode pistols and a portable ray gun. He realized then that his first move toward self preservation lay in making the space ship livable and impregnable to outside attack.

He accomplished the latter by removing two bulkhead doors and jamming them across the opening in the hull. The last door he arranged on a swivel so that it could be locked from either side. Then, exhausted by the hours of activity, he fell asleep.

* * * * *

When he awoke and went outside, he saw that the two suns had exactly altered their position. The larger was at the zenith now; the smaller, low on the horizon. The temperature was unchanged, and the air was crystal clear, with only a few fleecy clouds floating overhead.

Standish ate a hearty breakfast, then strapped one genithode pistol about his waist and headed across the ravine to begin his first trip of exploration.

The moment he entered the jungle he was conscious of an electric something that passed before him, telegraphed from tree to tree. The strange plants, neither cyads nor conifers, seemed aware of his presence, whispering among themselves.

Experimentally he touched one of the trunks. It quivered, the bark split apart, and a spongy tentacle whipped out to drive straight at his throat. Standish escaped the clawing coil by inches. The tree quivered again, and the tentacle returned to its hiding place.

He kept well away from the trees after that. But as he went on, he saw other forms of life, all manifesting an evolution in mixed stages of development. There was a low plant, brilliant purple in color which gave off a mewling cry whenever he stepped on one of its fronds. There were small lizard-birds, and occasionally he saw bluish masses growing melon-like on the ground. These had a single eye in the center of a spongy body. They watched him as he passed.

Once a small animal darted out before him. But when he approached, the creature instead of running for safety, thrust one paw in the soft earth, and a whitish blossom leaped up on a wavering stalk from its head. Within the flick of an eye, the thing had changed from animal to plant life.

It was at high noon by his Earth-time watch that Standish emerged into the glade. He stopped short, staring, then uttered a short cry.

Before him were buildings, low mushroom-like buildings arranged in a semi-circle. Fashioned of the same translucent rock he had seen on the cliff, they resembled the igloos of his own north country. Overhead a network of thick yellowish wire ran back and forth, separated at intervals by heavy white insulators.

He saw then that the structures were old. The wires hung slack, and in many places were broken in two. A heavy silk-like grass had sprung up in thick clumps between the buildings.

With steps suddenly grown heavy, Standish advanced to the nearest house. The rotting remnants of a wooden door hung from elliptical hinges.

Inside was desertion. There were no furnishings of any kind. Over everything lay a heavy coating of dust.

There were twelve buildings in the glade, and he examined them one by one. In one he found a skeleton with a skull of enormous size and three leg appendages instead of two. In the last a strange looking machine, partially dismantled, was mounted on the wall. Every detail of it, from the mildewed control panel to the eccentric wheels and cogs were unfamiliar to him. On the floor was a stone tablet covered with hieroglyphics.

But that was all!

Depression swept over Standish as he mentally supplied the missing details. Some race had been here long ago; a foreign race, for the glade was undoubtedly a temporary camp. The wire entanglement and the machine had been constructed as some sort of protection against the animal life of this planet.

But whoever these people were, they had come and gone!

IV

Standish left the glade with a heavy heart and returned to the space ship. In the ravine, he made two discoveries. There was a spring of clear water pouring from a fissure in the cliff side. Growing about it was an edible variety of moss. Although he had concentrated food in the liner's galley to keep him for a long time, these finds were reassuring.

He also found that the combination of the mineral soil and the two suns affected growth tremendously. Planting a few dried kernels of corn, he was amazed to see them take root almost instantly and reach full maturity within a few hours.

He now set upon a task which he had been mulling over in his brain for some time.

There were ray cannons mounted on the space liner's stern. Two of these had broken muzzles, but the third was intact. Standish went down into the bowels of the ship and found a dozen old message projectiles. Cigar-shaped objects of heat-resisting corodite, these projectiles were a part of all space crafts' emergency equipment. They were used for distress signals when radio or visiscreen equipment failed.

In the hollow chamber of each of the twelve projectiles he placed the same message:

Castaway. Mason Standish. Lieutenant-defense-engineer Earth. On unknown planet, somewhere near Sirius-Earth Route. December 28, 3020.

He had no means of astronomical calculation. So he aimed the gun at twelve different points of the heavens and fired haphazardly. Chances of intelligent life ever finding those projectiles were millions to one against him. But whatever the odds, he must miss no opportunity.