Part 1

REVOLT IN THE ICE EMPIRE

By RAY CUMMINGS

Frozen little Zura was a stellar Utopia, until the Earthmen came to topple the rule of its gentle queen with the cankerous weapons of revolt.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1940. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

So much has been written into the permanent chronologies of science concerning our pioneer voyage to the little asteroid of Zura--facts and figures and sociological deductions, most of which are, of actuality, erroneous--that even now after these many years, I feel constrained to set down, as simply as I can, exactly what occurred. All my life I have shunned publicity; my wife has shunned it. Zura, weird little wandering world, has never returned. Why, after coming in from the realms of outer space at least twice and rounding our Sun upon an elliptic orbit, it should now have failed to reappear--I will leave that to the astronomers to imagine. But no one from Earth, quite obviously, will ever go to Zura again. Tara and I, so to speak, are sole survivors.

So at least I think I am qualified to tell what happened; to correct the Official Chronolograph in its implications that Zura was a model little world, from which our Earth might learn much. As my grandfather might have quoted his grandfather saying, that is the bunk. When you put humans on a planet, you will get love--but also hate; honesty, but dishonesty; peace, but also war. The weird people of Zura were weird to us only because their environment had made them outwardly different from us. Like us they were human--and there could never have been Utopia evolved from them.

I am no philosopher, but at least I must have my say on this. Tara was misguided. She admits it now. Indeed, at heart she is more opposed than most of you who read this, to those crusaders here on earth who talk of revolutions and bloodshed so that some new Social Order may evolve and bring the world Utopia. The ideals are often sound, but always impossible of fulfillment. And those who sponsor them usually are intelligent enough to know it, advancing themselves upon the pitiful hopes of the ignorant, who think they are being led upward when in reality they are often worse off than before.

Do I seem prefacing some weighty analysis of mankind's frailties? That is wrong. I am prefacing what might better be called a love story. I am an old man now, but it colors my memory still with a warm glow like a sunrise spreading glorious colors on the drabness of a twilight sky. That, to my young life, was the coming of Tara....

I was just twenty, that spring morning of 1990 when Dr. Robert Livingston's message came to me.

"Strange good news, John. I have picked our destination, but it must be secret. Fly up and see me tonight."

Strange good news! There was a note of suppressed excitement in those three words which somehow communicated to me so that as I flew my little car up to the Maine woods that evening I was tensed to hear what it could be. My name is John Taine, as naturally you must have realized from my preface. There is nothing of me that can be of interest to this narrative previous to that spring morning of 1990. I quite imagine I was a drab enough sort of young fellow. Certainly my work as mechanic in the building of stratosphere ships had brought me little money and no claim to achievement.

But Dr. Livingston liked me; for a year now I had been working for him, building to his specifications that primitive little space ship with which he hoped to pioneer on an exploratory flight to some other world. Livingston was an inventor and scientist of very great genius. But unfortunately, being a dreamer, a gentle fellow and trusting--completely no businessman--he had gone through life impoverished.

We had been much pinched for funds in our work. Our little flyer indeed was now not finished, and I was on an enforced vacation, with our funds exhausted, waiting until Dr. Livingston might find some sponsor to refinance us. Strange good news? Assuredly I was hoping that he would have a few decimars in hand now--or even a few thousand gold dollars with which we might continue the work.

* * * * *

His pleasure and excitement were obvious when he greeted me in the laboratory of his isolated little Maine home, upon my arrival just after dusk that evening.

"Good news, John. It certainly is. I couldn't tell you before what I've been trying to do here while work on the _Planeteer_ had to stop. But I've accomplished my purpose."

"Money--" I said.

"Money, yes. Oh, yes, indeed, John. And fame. The accomplishment of our desire--to make a flight into Interplanetary space, and come back again. We've got it all within our reach now. Sit down, John--I'll tell you what I've done."

I had never seen Dr. Livingston so excited. He was a small man, forty perhaps, though he looked somewhat older with his thin face and his shaggy, longish iron-gray hair. He had no family; he lived here alone, with only one deaf old woman for his housekeeper. We were in his chemical laboratory now--a littered room on the ground floor of his home, which was a few miles out in the country from a small town of the Maine coast. We were building the _Planeteer_ here, in a big impromptu frame hangar which was set on the wooded hilltop a hundred yards or so from the house.

But work on the _Planeteer_ had ceased. Our two assistants who had been engaged with me now, like myself, were laid off. There was no one here tonight save Livingston and me and the old woman who now had gone to her room upstairs.

"We've got to be absolutely secret," Livingston said. He lowered his voice and flung a glance at the window oval where the moonlight was gleaming with a silver sheen. "There's big money involved in this. I'm going to trust you, John, but no one else."

"What is it?" I murmured.

A little half-smile of excited triumph was playing about his thin lips. "Let me ask you," he said, "have you ever heard of Xalite?"

"Well--just vaguely."

"The new element which was discovered a few years ago. I needn't explain its technical uses--"

"A germ-killer," I said. "I remember hearing a technological newscast--you bombard diseased tissues--"

"Exactly. To kill certain virulent germs without injuring the living human tissue. And they're thinking now they could use it in the new atomic engines--perhaps the one thing which would make them really commercially practical--"

"Except that Xalite costs about ten thousand gold-dollars a grain," I observed.

"Quite so. As a matter of fact, what little was discovered here on earth is now in use. No more can be found--and it's an unstable element. Within another year we will have no Xalite." He paused, and then abruptly he added, still more softly,

"I've discovered an unlimited quantity, John. Xalite in quantity beyond anyone's wildest dreams--"

"Where?" I gasped.

"Not here on earth. Don't you see how it fits with our plans for the _Planeteer_?"

I sat silent, tense as he told me. There was, this year, coming in from the realms of Interplanetary space, a little asteroid. Astronomers for their charts had named it Zura--a dark, cold little world of perhaps five hundred miles diameter.

"It seems this is its second visit," he said. "Some sixteen years ago it first made its appearance--came into our Solar System, rounded the Sun and went out again. The elements of its orbit, sixteen years ago, were computed. A narrow ellipse, taking it in between Mercury and Vulcan, and out beyond Pluto."

* * * * *

In his laboratory here, Dr. Livingston had erected a small, but ultra-modern, electroscope. He took me to it now. The dark little Zura, he told me, already had cut the orbit of Mars and was fairly close to us. It was in the northern sky now, near the zenith. The night was clear, glittering with a myriad stars like gems profusely strewn on the deep purple velvet of the Heavens. I gazed at little Zura as he swung the high-powered little instrument almost to its full intensity of magnification. What I saw was a round, blurred, dark-gray disc, dimly mottled with heavy cloudbanks.

"What has this to do with us, and Xalite?" I murmured.

"I'll show you, John. If we can get a break in those clouds--it sometimes occurs--"

We waited perhaps an hour, with the spectroscope attached so that the vague reflected light from Zura was spread before us in its prismatic colors. And then, momentarily, a break in the swirling, turgid atmosphere of the dark little world, let us through to its bleak, blurred, dark surface. Light was coming from there; light inherent to the little world. On the spectroscope band I saw a new dark line.

"Xalite!" Livingston murmured. "You see it? Unmistakable. Deposits of Xalite exist there. Xalite in quantities which to us and our needs will be enormous. So that's the destination of our exploratory flight in the _Planeteer_! It's not a question of money with us now, John. The Anglo-American Medical Research Society--and the U. S. Government Dept. of Power--have financed us for all we need."

I could only gaze at him with excitement thrilling me, matching his own. All our money troubles ended. And a double purpose to our adventure now. The conquest of Interplanetary flight; and the giving to the world an element it so greatly needed.

Little Dr. Livingston was bending over me, gripping me. "You realize the need of secrecy?" he murmured. "You and I, if we get this Xalite, it will make us independently rich, of course. Enough for our life's needs. But beyond that, the world will have it. Xalite, to be cheap as old-fashioned petroleum." His voice had risen with his excitement, but suddenly he lowered it again.

"But John, suppose we were unscrupulous. To keep the price of Xalite up--to deal it out, only to the rich--to make ourselves fabulously wealthy at the expense of the poor--"

"I see," I agreed. I wonder why my glance, like his, strayed idly to our moonlit window oval, here on the ground floor of his home? I am not the least bit psychic; there is, of course, no such thing anyway.

"We'll finish up the _Planeteer_ now," Livingston was saying. "Pete Duroh and Carruthers--that's all you'll need. And as we agreed, we'll take them with us. Four of us--that's enough to man the little _Planeteer_. But nothing must be said of Xalite. You understand?"

"Yes, of course."

"So far as the world will know, the _Planeteer_ is starting merely on a trial flight into Space. We don't want any publicity anyway. And Duroh and Carruthers--they must know only that we're hoping we might reach this wandering little asteroid. Nothing about Xalite. That can come later. We don't want to take the least chance of this thing leaking out--"

He checked himself suddenly. We both heard it--the sound of what seemed padding footsteps, retreating from our laboratory doorway. Someone furtively slinking away in the house corridor.

"Why--good Lord--!" I gasped.

I dashed into the dim corridor. There was nothing; and then I heard a distant outer door close. The intruder had escaped from the house. And then, from the laboratory, came Dr. Livingston's gasp: "John, look--"

I swung back to him. In the moonlight at the laboratory window a face showed behind the filmy curtains--a man's face peering in at us. It was just an instant glimpse.... Staring, wild, red-rimmed eyes--the face wearing a bluish stubble of beard. By no chance could it have been the person who had escaped me in the corridor.

In that second, I dashed for the window. The face had gone. I got there only in time to see a dark blob scurrying away into the shadows of the moonlit woods.

II

"All ready, Dr. Livingston," I said.

"Eh? Oh, yes. Well, that's fine, John. We'll start at once."

"I checked the ventilators," Duroh said.

The big, beetle-browed Peter Duroh--dark-haired, handsome young giant who had been working for us nearly a year--stood beside me. It was the great night--our time of departure at last had arrived, with the little _Planeteer_ glistening and ready.

To you who read this, familiar now with the great finned cylinders which the last half century has produced on earth for the conquest of Interplanetary space, our little space-ship was inadequate and queer indeed. Unlike modern vessels, Dr. Livingston had built the _Planeteer_ in the shape of a huge bell-like globe. Huge, to us then. But its maximum equatorial diameter was a scant fifty feet.

Strange little ship indeed. Its interior was of three stories--the largest--the middle one--our several rooms of living quarters, ample enough for four of us. Below that, in the base, were the mechanism rooms. And the top level, fairly near the apex, was in effect a mere circular turret, with a glassite dome over it completing that segment of the outer shell.

It is not my purpose here to describe Dr. Livingston's pioneer mechanisms. All that is technological history in the chronicles of the development of space-navigation. But I do wish to point out that Dr. Livingston, in his essentials of mechanism, has not been improved upon even in this last half century. The _Planeteer_ was double-shelled, the six-inch space between the reinforced walls containing the swiftly vibrating, oscillating electronic current now known as the Erentz principle--the absorption of the outer pressure, translated by the swiftly flying electrons of the current into harmless kinetic energy. And we had, in segments, throughout the globe-shaped walls, gravity plates for the neutralization of gravity; its intensification; and the negative force of repulsion.

We had air-renewers--antiquated now, I admit--but still very serviceable to us; and ventilating and temperature systems. We had no electronic rocket-streams for atmospheric flight; that, as you all know, came much later.

It was, by earth-time, just midnight when we were ready to start. Dr. Livingston was excited, confused now that the time was at hand. But the other three of us, outwardly at least, were calm enough, eager only to be sure every preparation was in order.

There was no public celebration. Like Livingston, I had no close family, so that only a few of the family and friends of Peter Duroh and James Carruthers, our other assistant, were here on this momentous night in the little board hangar to see us off.

"Tell him to come in," Dr. Livingston was saying. "I want to start on the midnight hour."

The big, dark-haired young Duroh went to the incline that led down from the upper control turret room where we were now standing and shouted to Carruthers, who was still down, bidding good-bye to the visitors on the hangar floor.

"All right," he shouted up to us. "I'm coming." He came in a moment. He was Livingston's most competent technician, this James Carruthers. Like young Duroh, he had been with us almost from the start of the building of the _Planeteer_. He was an older man, rather a small, tight-lipped, sandy-haired fellow. Grim of aspect, usually silent, listening with alert, keen gray eyes.

"All ready," he said.

"Yes, bolt the door," Dr. Livingston agreed.

We waved our last farewells to the silent, awed little group of men and women down in the hangar, and I swung the big glassite bull's-eye door closed, bolted it and admitted the Erentz current into it.

Departure from earth.... There was no one who could have seen that pioneer departure, much less be on it, without a surging thrill and a trembling. Certainly I felt it. Excitement--and fear. There is no one who can face the unknown without a little shudder, no matter how adventurous and reckless he may be. I recall that we four, in the dimly starlit little turret--starlight which came down through the open roof of the hangar and through our glassite dome--stood grim, silent and awed. Then Dr. Livingston flung the current into the base gravity plates set for the repelling negation.

The _Planeteer_ trembled just a little; and then slowly, silently was rising....

* * * * *

Departure from earth.... And we were just the second party of all earth people in history who had ever seriously tried it. The first, as you all recall, had been sixteen years before. The ill-fated Blake expedition--six men, one of them the strange, humanity-hating George Simpson, joining the explorers at the last moment, declaiming publicly that he wanted to leave the earth forever! Vowing that if Blake landed anywhere in the Universe, he, George Simpson, would remain there in preference to coming back to earth!

Well, the fanatic Simpson certainly had had his way in that! The Blake ship--even more antiquated than our _Planeteer_--safely left earth's atmosphere and plunged away. And never was heard of again!

Dr. Livingston's clutch on my arm and his excited murmured words jerked me out of my roving awed thoughts. "We're starting, boy--good luck to us--"

I could only nod and try to smile as I swallowed the lump in my throat. Leaving earth. There was a jumbled prayer then in my mind and heart that the great Creator would take care of us and give us luck....

The little group of people down on the hangar floor were waving now, queerly foreshortened as in a second they dropped away. Then we were up in the starlight; mounting with the bleak Maine coast and its string of lights shrinking beneath us.... Swift acceleration. Soon we were in the stratosphere; and then in a great curving crescent--product of our repulsion and the tangental force of the earth's rotation--we were hurled off into space....

"Well, we did it, John--we did, didn't we?" Dr. Livingston said. "Now--do you want some rest? Go on down if you like." He was seated in his shirtsleeves by his little instrument table, with its humming bank of dials and levels. He mopped his dripping forehead with his handkerchief. It was hot as the shades of hell now in the _Planeteer's_ interior--the friction of our rapid rise through the atmosphere, with which our temperature-controls were unable to cope. But we knew it would cool off quick enough presently.

"I'll stay here with you a while," I said. "I can't get used to it yet--wonderful, sort of frightening, isn't it?"

"And beautiful, John. Profitable, too--with the Xalite we'll bring back--turn it over to the authorities. And then, with our money, build another ship. A larger one. I'm going to devote my life to the development of space-travel. Why, John, can't you envisage--a big vessel, with passengers, bringing people from Mars maybe, if it's inhabited--"

Poor Dr. Livingston. His life was destined to be cut so short! How wise of the Creator that he so seldom gives us any hint of what is to come, so that at least we may dream....

We had said nothing to Duroh and Carruthers about the Xalite, fearing that they might be tempted to tell others, family and friends, and before our departure the secret would be out. When we reached Zura, it was our plan to tell them, of course. And from the beginning Dr. Livingston had always insisted that he would see they shared equally with him and me.

My mind went back now to that night when he had first told me our plans; that weird face at our window, and someone who simultaneously had seemed to be eavesdropping upon us from the corridor. We had been apprehensive--if our secret was known--that something might occur to stop our departure, that some other expedition might hurriedly be made ready to try and get to Zura. But so far as we could know, nothing of the kind had happened.

"You see, John, with what we know now of space-flying," Dr. Livingston was saying, "the whole realm of the Solar System will be open to us in another twenty or thirty years. Why, with real money at our command, you and I--"

A shout from the living compartments under us checked him. Then there was the sound of a scuffle, and big Peter Duroh's roar:

"Why, damn you, come out of there! Grab him, Jim!"

And Carruthers' grim, quiet voice: "I've got him--"

They came clattering up into the starlit turret, dragging a man between them. Numbly Dr. Livingston and I stared. The face we had seen that night, peering at us through the laboratory window--wild-eyed, pallid, with a stubble of beard! We saw now that it was a thin, youthful face, with rumpled curly black hair above it. A boy, certainly no more than sixteen or seventeen. He was clad in tattered, dirty clothes, his whole appearance unkempt, his figure thin, almost emaciated as though he had been long without adequate nourishment. He cowered between Duroh and Carruthers, shaking with terror.

"Don't--don't kill me," he gasped. "I'll do what you want--I'll help on the trip. I just want something to eat and drink--"

"Cast him loose," I said. I swung on him. "Who in the devil are you--"

"Alan Grant," he gasped. "Oh, I guess you've heard of me, all right." He stood wild-eyed, trembling as Carruthers and Duroh let go of him. "Where are we? We've left the earth, haven't we? Well, that's all right--but don't you take me back. I'm not going to let anybody take me back--"

Alan Grant. We knew him then. For months televised images of the lad had been flung around the world. A wanted man--wanted for multiple murder--with a price of a decimar on his head for anyone who would take him, dead or alive!

III

"You think we should approach from this side, John?" Dr. Livingston said.

I shrugged. "How can you tell?"

"True enough. If only those damnable clouds would act decently and open up now."

Dr. Livingston and I were seated in the turret, bathed in the brilliant sunlight. Zura at which we were rushing broadside, so to speak, was now, even to the naked eye, a huge full-round disc, with the sunlight gleaming turgid in its sullen, swirling cloud-masses of atmosphere. By a queer mischance, we had had no break in the Zurian clouds since leaving earth. At which side had we best approach? Our only purpose was to land near some deposit of the Xalite.

But there was so much that we did not know. Were deposits of the precious metal widespread over the little asteroid? Would it be found only in a gaseous state, perhaps, so that we could not secure it? This atmosphere--would we be able to breathe it; or would our air-masks be necessary?

So much that we did not know, but there were many things about the strange little world which already we had learned. Apparently it was of a very great density. Dr. Livingston had calculated that back on earth. Its gravity, despite its five hundred-mile diameter, was, he thought, perhaps not much less than that of earth. And we knew now that it was not presenting one side always to the sun, but was rotating on its axis. A swift procession of days and nights, each some three or four hours long.

It is far from my purpose to detail the trip of the _Planeteer_ from earth to Zura. All that has been written many times--with embellishments--and space-flying today has lost its novelty. Ours was a swift, uneventful passage, save that to us it was awe-inspiring indeed. Alan Grant, the young outlaw-killer who had so unexpectedly thrust himself upon us, had been a problem. His own case has now become history; I need not detail that either, except to say that by my experience with him, one may be a murderer and still inspire pity.

It is really horrible how quickly one may plunge downward in life. Alan Grant was only a boy really. Jealous over a worthless woman, and befuddled by alcoholite, in ten minutes he had changed himself from a decent, self-respecting lad into a bloodstained, multiple killer. All in ten minutes--with all the rest of his life to pay the penalty.