Chapter 2

Her craft capsized. At the same time the other driver--a man--maneuvered so as to spiral exactly around the wreck as it fell. When it came right side up again--now only a half a mile away--he drove down so close that his machine nearly grazed the woman's head. As he did so, he leaned over and tried to unfasten her. But the unsteadiness of her craft prevented this.

He made a second try. This time his own machine narrowly escaped injury; he steered it hastily away from that damaged wing. And then he made a supreme effort.

Bringing his machine directly across the top of the other as it once more righted itself, he touched one of his controls, so that his own flier's spiral increased in steepness. Straightening up, he poised himself while he coolly measured the distance; and then he calmly leaped a matter of ten or twelve feet, over and down to the top of the other craft.

The shock of his landing steadied it. Clinging fast with one hand, the man bent and unbuckled the woman's strap. Next instant he had lifted her, a dead weight, into his arms and then over his shoulders.

His own machine was still scooting downward, its speed even greater than that of the broken flier. When the man saw it swinging past and below him, he instantly clambered, burden and all, to the edge of the cockpit. For a second he stood, balancing precariously; and then, half jumping, half diving, he plunged once more.

Man and woman landed in a heap in the sound machine. In a flash the rescuer snatched his controls, and tried with all his might to "straighten out." But it began to skid; and Smith saw, despite the shakiness with which his excited agent held the binoculars, that the craft was hopelessly out of control. Next instant the man caught sight of the ship, not a hundred yards away; and steered straight for her.

Smith's agent rushed back to the engine-room, where he immediately located a new group of instruments. Smith recognized a telephone and some wireless apparatus; then found himself staring into some sort of a compound mirror system. Probably it was an illuminated tunnel affair, opening into a long white cabin. Seemingly the place was an emergency-ward.

A moment later the unconscious forms of the two aviators were brought within perhaps twenty feet. Smith could hear nothing; the apparatus seemed made for looking only. But he saw the doctors hurry in, saw restoratives administered, and saw both people revive.

The man was first to become conscious. He looked around, seemed to take in the situation at a glance, and swiftly got to his feet. The doctors laid restraining hands upon him, but he shook them off with a laugh.

He was a powerfully built man, considerably taller than normal and very deep in the chest. He was decidedly blond, and good looking in a cheerful, reckless sort of way.

His concern was for the woman. She regained her senses in half a minute, and shortly was sitting up and looking around. And Smith, ordinarily unobservant of the other sex, found himself staring with all his eyes.

She was young; for that matter, the man was under thirty, also. And the white bandage on her forehead only emphasized the dark eyes and vivid coloring of her face. Smith was half angry that he could not see her more distinctly. He decided that every feature was exquisitely modeled, that he had never seen such delicate lines, nor eyes as large, as appealing and as soft.

Then he was watching the man again. He approached the woman and took her outstretched hand. He was laughing easily; she, smiling tremulously and gratefully. They looked into one another's eyes quite as though there were no one else in the cabin to be looked at. Next second one of the doctors stepped up bruskly, and Smith saw a swift blush come to the girl's cheeks. The man reddened, too, and turned away laughing to hide his confusion.

Smith's connection with his agent ended right there. When he reported to the other three, later on, he had to admit that, so far as he knew, the man and the girl were still holding hands.

IV

NEW HEARTS FOR OLD

Billie's experience was totally different. She found herself transformed into a mental humming-bird.

Her mind seemed to be darting with infinite rapidity, here and there throughout the universe. She got only the most lightninglike glimpse of any one spot; flash after flash of unfamiliar, indescribable situations succeeded each other like the speeded-up scenes of a photoplay farce. For an unguessable length of time this helter-skelter process occupied her mind.

Then there came a scene which stayed. It was dim at first; she was more thoroughly aware of the sound of voices than anything else. Then she saw clearly.

She--that is, her agent--was in some sort of a room, giving instructions to a group of white-clad figures. Before Billie could concentrate upon what was being said the talk ceased; and next moment, amid perfect silence, the agent bent over something which lay on a high table.

Whereupon Billie got a severe jolt. For, unless she was most woefully mistaken, the thing she was now looking at was the unconscious form of a patient; the place was the operating-room of a hospital; and the eyes she was using belonged to a surgeon.

She watched breathlessly. The surgeon's nimble fingers proceeded with the utmost unconcern to open wide the patient's torso. Other pairs of hands, belonging to nurses, aided in this; and Billie found the intricate process decidedly interesting rather than otherwise. Of course she was spared the odor of blood.

As soon as the ribs were entirely displaced, the lungs were carefully laid aside. Extraordinary delicacy seemed called for here. Billie shortly began to wonder if it were not high time to quit when her agent, assisted as before, calmly exposed the patient's heart to full view.

Billie could see it throbbing; more, she could hear it. She watched in wonder for the next step.

They consisted in forcibly untangling the mass of tubes and arteries all about the organ. Presently everything was clear; and then, without delay, the nurses brought forward a strange-looking device.

It was of silver, shaped like a flattened egg, and a trifle smaller than that laboring, human blood-pump; To it was attached a pair of long, flexible, silver pipes, which led to Billie knew not where. And near one extremity the egg was provided with eight curious nozzles.

At times the flying hands partly interfered with Billie's vision; yet she saw nearly all that amazing process, from beginning to end. To put it briefly, the eight nozzles were boldly introduced, almost at a single operation, into tiny incisions in the eight corresponding tubes of the heart. In they were forced, until they filled the arteries and veins; and once inserted, silver clamps were instantly tightened on the outsides of the tubes. All this was done in two or three seconds; and when all was complete, the heart itself had been entirely isolated and its place absolutely taken by that little silver egg.

The patient gave no sign that anything out of the ordinary had occurred. Not a drop of blood had been spilled except in the process of getting at the organ; but now, with a few deft motions of certain instruments, the heart was sliced away from the surrounding tissues, the tubes were severed, and the whole powerful pump, still beating faintly, was removed from the body altogether.

Next, the surgeon proceeded to stanch the bleeding of the tubes; that is, of the stubs projecting below those tight silver nozzles. This done, the nimble fingers calmly replaced the lungs and other items, quite as though they were reassembling a piece of machinery. Lastly, the opening was sewed up in a manner which would have delighted any seamstress.

The two long silver pipes were left protruding. Now, for the first time, Billie saw where they led to.

On a stand alongisde the operating-table stood an extremely small, flat box, with its lid open. The pipes ended there. And as the surgeon inspected the outfit Billie saw that it comprised, in effect, a pair of diminutive air-pumps. There were two tiny dials, a regulating device, some sort of an automatic electric switch, and what looked like a steel storage tank; all on a watchlike scale.

Looking more closely, Billie made out two pairs of electric wires running from this case to another of the same size. The surgeon lifted its lid, disclosing two electric storage batteries, each with its own circuit.

In short, the arrangement provided duplicate sources, in vest-pocket size, of power for operating a mechanical heart. The electricity worked the air-pumps, which in turn supplied the little silver egg--implanted in the patient--with both pressure and vacuum, while doubtless the artificial organ itself housed a valve system which did the rest. The regulating device kept the blood circulating at the proper rate.

The surgeon seemed satisfied with it all, and, after another critical examination of the patient, glanced about the room, straightened up, took a deep breath, and spoke:

"Quick work. Thanks very much, everybody."

And Billie did not know which to be the more astonished at: the fact that the voice was unmistakably a woman's, or that she, Billie, was able to understand all that was said. She did not fully appreciate until afterward that it was her own brain which did the translating; the surgeon's subconscious mind had merely furnished a thought-image which would have been exactly the same, regardless of language.

"Any special instructions, Surgeon Aldor?" inquired one of the white-clad, face-swathed figures.

"No. The usual handling. Simply keep the batteries charged in rotation."

The surgeon took off a mouth mask and a blood-soaked apron, and then swiftly washed her hands. Next she stepped briskly from the room; and the architect who was using her eyes rejoiced to see the door-knobs of the standard height of thirty-five inches, indicating that this agent of hers was of about her own height. From the sound of her footsteps, however, Billie concluded that she was somewhat heavier than herself.

Reaching another room, the surgeon proceeded to don hat and coat. Next, she stepped in front of a long mirror; but the action was so quick, and it took Billie so completely by surprise, she was not able to inspect the image closely. To be frank, she looked first at the woman's clothes, finding that her suit was a very trim affair of blue leather, cut in a semi-military fashion. Slashes of dark-red material across the sleeves were repeated about the collar, while the cap, a jaunty affair with a bell crown, matched the suit. The lower ends of the breeches, much like ordinary riding trousers, were tucked into high lace-up boots of red leather.

Before Billie could see any more other than that the surgeon was small-featured in striking contrast to the robustness of her body, she stepped from the room. A moment later an automatic elevator took her to a lower floor, where she was greeted by a person whom Billie assumed to be a head nurse.

"Anything out of the ordinary, surgeon?"

"No," with a bruskness which was startling by comparison with her cheeriness upstairs. "I understand that Dr. Norbith wishes to go home as soon as possible?"

"Yes."

"He may go as soon as the cast is hard. Make sure his machine is a smooth one."

The nurse simply nodded as the surgeon stepped on, through a very ordinary pair of sliding doors, and so on out into an anteroom and thence to a porch, where she stood looking into the street for a moment.

It was exceedingly broad, and lined on both sides with imposing structures whose architecture was entirely strange to Billie. She would liked to have examined them all in detail; but she had no control over her agent, who straightway walked down a short flight of steps and thence to a sidewalk.

Here Billie became perfectly willing to neglect the architecture. People were coming and going; people apparently quite as human as herself. Except for a certain gorgeous voluminousness of dress, they seemed for the most part simply men and women of affairs.

For it was comparatively easy to distinguish the sexes. The women's garments, while not making any display of the strictly feminine lines, nevertheless did not attempt to disguise them. Billie saw that loose breeches had completely displaced the skirt with these women; while the men invariably wore either knickerbockers or some other form of short trousers; so that the general effect was very youthful. She saw no men with beards, although several wore their hair long, down to their shoulders, as though to compensate for those women who chose to wear theirs short.

The surgeon seemed to have more leisure than most doctors. She stood for some minutes, greeting perhaps a score of passers-by, all of whom seemed to be proud of the acquaintance. Presently, however, the sidewalk became temporarily clear of pedestrians; and then Billie heard the surgeon mutter something to herself, such as was past all understanding at the time:

"The fools! The poor, ignorant cattle!"

And she turned and stepped to the middle of the street, where Billie had already marked a large number of flying-machines. In fact, the space from curb to curb was practically filled with them, all neatly parked.

Without exception they were ornithopters; that is, machines built on the bird-wing principle, sustaining themselves by a flapping motion rather than by air-pressure due to a propeller. Their size varied from one-seater affairs of very small size to craft large enough to hold a score. Most were gaudily painted.

The surgeon's own machine was a two-seater, small but powerful in design. She stepped up a short ladder into a comfortable cockpit, provided with a folding top, which at that time was laid back out of the way. She proceeded to adjust various levers and hand-wheels, glanced at certain dials, touched a button, and immediately the craft took flight, its wings beating the air with a dull leathery rhythm which drowned out the faint clanking of the machinery.

A moment later the flier was high above the street. To Billie's disappointment, the surgeon did not glance down enough to tell the architect whether the street belonged to a city of any size. Instead, her agent drove carefully through the traffic, which Billie would have called dangerously dense. She remembered that she had seen nothing but aircraft in that street; no automobiles at all.

And then the flier was rushing through the air at a lively rate. Billie caught quick glimpses of innumerable machines, few of which were moving in the same direction as the surgeon's.

A few minutes more elapsed, and then Billie was experiencing a much higher level, with the machine flying at what must have been a tremendous velocity. Shortly it was all but alone in the sky.

After a while the surgeon's eyes made out something far below, which puzzled Billie exceedingly. It seemed to be a ship under full sail; only, so far as she could see the craft was resting upon clouds, not air. It was still a long way ahead.

And then Billie was given a glance aloft, where she saw another craft, a small flapping affair like the surgeon's. It was just rising on a long slant so as to cross above her course. And at that very instant there came a sharp crack, followed by a splintering crash. The surgeon's flier lurched heavily to one side.

Next second the woman was staring at her left wing. It was broken about the middle and thrashing wildly. Another instant, and a part of the thing came loose, flew off, and struck the surgeon on the top of her head. A muffled cry, and then blackness came.

And the next thing Billie saw was the emergency ward of Smith's great skycruiser, with the surgeon, blinking as she recovered, looking up into the smiling face of her big blond rescuer.

V

CAPELLA'S DAUGHTER

The first thing that met the doctor's gaze, when his mind entered that of his distant agent, was a clock. It was a very ordinary sort of an instrument, such as one sees in schools and offices; it had two hands, and a pendulum of the usual size and length.

However, this pendulum was swinging at a very rapid rate; nearly twice as fast, judged the doctor, as that of his own chronometer. And its dial was divided into twenty-five equal parts, instead of twelve, each of these parts being further divided into five equal portions. At the moment, these two hands indicated what would have been called, on the earth, about half past three.

Before the doctor could speculate on this, his unknown agent shifted his gaze to a newspaper on a desk before him. Apparently he was thinking of something entirely different; for he absently turned the pages, one by one, his subconscious mind taking it all in.

And the doctor saw that the paper was called simply The Hourly Journal; that it was of very nearly the size of most sheets; and that it consisted of about ten pages. The front and back pages, only, contained news items; the remainder were packed solid with advertisements. Not one of these were striking enough for the doctor to remember; he said they were exactly like large-size professional "cards," except that they applied to every business, from candy to bridges. As for the news items, each was short, unsensational, with the simplest kind of head-lines. More the doctor had no chance to observe.

Abruptly the agent stowed the paper away, and looked up. Presumably he was seated in some sort of a theater. Directly ahead was the familiar white rectangle of a photoplay-house screen. And all about him were heads and shoulders, seemingly belonging to young folks, of about high-school age. Even to "low necks" for the girls and white collars for the boys, they were identically like people of the earth.

In fact, if it had not been for that clock the doctor would have concluded that there was some mistake, and have ended the experiment. For some time he learned little; the place was filled with a confused murmur. His agent, however, took no part in the conversation that produced this effect; once or twice he yawned.

Suddenly the buzz came to a stop; and next moment a tall figure stepped upon the platform in front of the screen.

"Class," began this person immediately, "to-day we will summarize what we have learned during the past week about the solar system of which our planet is one element."

And as he spoke the doctor saw that there had been no mistake. For, although the agent's subconscious mind had served to translate what was said into language understandable by the doctor, yet his eyes plainly told him that the professor's lips were saying something else.

There was no doubt about it. For all that the doctor could tell by watching the speaker's mouth, he might have been talking in Eskimo. But his meaning was quite as clear as though he had said it in English.

"We will begin with a picture of the sun herself." As the words were spoken, a motion-picture film was projected on the screen. The doctor instantly noted the natural colors, stereoscopic effect, and marvelous clearness, such as branded this exhibition as not of the earth. But the professor was saying:

"The sun controls, besides this world, no less than thirty others"--and the doctor knew, as well as other people know their A B C's, that the earth's planetary family consists of only eight--"no less than thirty others, of which eight are now without life." The speaker turned toward a student on the far left. "Tell us how many of the thirty are still too hot to support life, Miss Ballens."

The girl did not get to her feet. "Ten," was her answer.

"Which leaves, of course, twelve besides our own planet which now possess life in one form or another. Mr. Ernol, can you give us some idea of conditions on any one of these?"

To the doctor's immense satisfaction, the brain whose loan he was enjoying responded to the question. "On Saloni, the vertebrates have not yet appeared. None but the lowest forms of life have been found."

"Is this planet larger or smaller than ours, Mr. Ernol?"

"Larger. It will be a matter of millions of centuries before such beings as humans are evolved there."

"How do we know these facts?"

As though it were a signal, the entire class, with one accord, uttered a single word: "Runled!"

And the doctor found his agent's eyes turned, together with those of every other student in the room, toward the portrait of a highly intellectual-looking man; it hung in the most conspicuous spot on the wall.

"We must never forget," continued the man on the platform, "that, but for the explorations of this man and his space-boat, some eighty years ago, we should know very little. Can any one tell me why his explorations have never been repeated?"

Two hands went up. The professor nodded to a girl seated next to the young fellow whom the doctor now knew as "Ernol." This girl spoke very clearly: "Because the expedition was extremely costly, and the commission has never been willing to appropriate enough to duplicate the work."

"The commission's judgment is, of course, sound," commented the professor calmly. Then he signaled for a change in the picture, which had been showing, in rapid succession, glimpses of world after world. The new picture was more leisurely.

"The planet Alma. Can any one explain why it is of special interest to us?"

For a moment there was no comment, and the doctor found himself studying a "panorama" of some exceedingly striking people. There was quite a crowd; and the doctor was amazed to note how much like the Venusians they were. Without exception they were delicately built, with thin, shriveled legs; all were seated, none standing, in cigar-shaped aircraft of a type entirely new to the doctor.

"The people of Alma," spoke up a boy out of sight of Ernol, "are especially interesting to us because they are, so far as is known, the most highly developed beings in existence."

"In what way are they like us?"

"They are vertebrates, mammals, primates, just as we are."

"And how do they differ from us?"

"They are 'cooperative democrats'; that is, they do not compete with each other for a living, but work together in all things, in complete equality. In this way they have become so wonderfully advanced that--"

The professor interrupted. "We will not go into that." The scene shifted from people to things: a large, complicated-looking column of some sort was being shown. "What does this tell us?"

"It tells us," spoke up some one, "that Alma is entirely surrounded and covered by a great roof, which stands several miles above the surface." [Footnote: Compare with Venus. It would seem that, whenever a planet reached a certain age, its people will always take steps to preserve its atmosphere; that is, provided their civilization is high enough.]

"What is the purpose of this roof?"

"To keep in the air and moisture, which all other planets are steadily losing. Alma is a much older planet than ours, which is why her people are so far advanced."

Next came "close-ups" of some inhabitants. At once the doctor saw that these were not Venusians; they had facial expressions as sour and cynical as the typical Venusian's had been pleasant and wise.

"You will note," commented the professor very quietly, "that these people are far from happy."

The class seemed to take it for granted; but the doctor's trained ears instantly caught a false note in the speaker's voice. Was the man sure of his statement?

At the same time the doctor became aware of a certain dullness in the vision he was borrowing. Also, the speaking became much less distinct. It occurred to him that the boy might be drowsy; and an unmistakable nodding shortly made this certain.

"As we see from these photographs," droned the voice on the platform, "happiness does not exist on Alma. And if not there, where else can we expect to find it? Certainly not among the less developed planets.