Part 1
THE RAIDERS OF SATURN'S RING
By RAYMOND Z. GALLUN
Only one man could save Titan's Earth colony from the merciless legions of the furred Callistans. But between Ron Leiccsen and his goal lay Saturn's whirling, deadly Rings.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Everywhere in Leiccsenland the farms were burning. Silvery Callistan ships, slim arrows of destruction, flew above the countryside methodically. Splendid grain and hay crops were blazing. Barns and dwellings, too.
The thin, clear air trailed streamers of blue smoke, that blurred the ringed globe of monster Saturn, visible at the horizon, above the craggy surrounding hills.
The Earth-Colony here on Titan, largest of Saturn's satellites, seemed doomed. The invaders were firing everything they could reach.
Angry farmers were gathered in front of the Community Bank in Leiccsendale. Old Arne Reynaud, who kept a great orchard and flower-garden beyond the village outskirts, stood on the concrete steps of the bank building, and shouted to the assembled group of bitter faces.
"Twenty-three Earth-years, Terrestrials have been here in Leiccsenland!" he shrilled grimly. "Ain't nobody gonna drive us out now! Not even these damned Callistans from their moon back Jupiter-way! Titan, so far from the sun, was a frozen world when we came. Its water was ice. Even its air lay in frozen snowdrifts in the awful cold! We slaved and starved and spent almost every cent we had, getting started here! Setting up Bart Mallory's atomic sun-ray towers, to make the climate warm! Cultivating the soil, that hadn't had any life in it for a billion years, since Saturn cooled too much to radiate any heat to Titan! Bringing in seeds and cattle and hogs! Even bumble-bees to pollinate the flowers! Ain't no dirty, fuzzy Callistan devils gonna take Titan away from us now! We made us a little heaven, here, with the sweat of our brows! And we're gonna keep it! Ain't no--"
Arne Reynaud got this far in his speech, his shrill, scratchy old voice vibrant with mingled grief and wild determination. But just then a second voice, from the rear of the little crowd, cut in like a whetted knife-blade, keen and caustic and condemning:
"Shut up, Reynaud! That Iron-Made language of yours is completely out of place, now! It only makes things worse! So, for God's sake, shut up! Stop talking like a damned fool!"
The words fairly snapped and snarled with bitterness. No Callistan heat-bomb, dropped into the center of the little gathering itself, could have produced more emotional startlement. Two hundred pairs of haggard eyes turned as one toward the man who had broken a spell. Surprise was too great to allow anger to awaken, yet. There was only wonder as to who this rude traitor could be.
He stood there at the edge of the side-walk, with half his gaunt weight leaned against a maple sapling. But his eyes glowed tensely, under a broad-brimmed colonial hat, denying the indolence of his posture. A crooked smile showed white teeth, and traced a line of derision in one narrow, bronzed cheek. Youth and strength and sadness and broken dreams, were in the curve of his brow and lips. But above all, there was realism--the will to do the best, most reasonable thing, in the face of heart-breaking defeat.
A girl, as forceful as himself--in her own pert way--was the one who answered him. "You!" she stormed. "You--Ron Leiccsen--nephew of the man who explored this world, and died from the effects of hardships here, soon after his return to Earth! The man who made our Titanian Colony possible! And you tell Arne Reynaud to shut up, when he talks patriotism! You're not fit to bear the same name as Jan Leiccsen!"
The girl was Anna Charles, a teacher in the school at the village. There was a moment of strained silence, after her furious, accusing words tumbled out. Her tiny fists were clutched so firmly that the knuckles showed white. Her heart-shaped face had gone pale with fury, defiance, contempt! Her dark eyes blazed narrowly, and her whole, small, reckless body trembled with emotion. Anna Charles, daughter of a champion space pilot, killed several years before, was a tornado from her golden head to the tips of her tiny boots!
* * * * *
But she was only part of the situation, now. Everyone, among those hard, bristly-cheeked colonists, waited for Ron Leiccsen to answer the girl's withering challenge. Ron had been a respected machinist bearing an honored name--before. But his caustic attitude, now, made a difference. Most of those grim men scowled at him. Many of them fingered their smooth, trim-barreled atom-rifles in a silent threat to a dissenter. Even old Arne Reynaud, on his impromptu orator's rostrum before the Community Bank, said nothing. His withered features only looked startled. His thin shoulders sagged in his shapeless overcoat.
The nearest great sun-ray globe, rising on its tall, steel-girdered tower above Leiccsendale, purred softly, shedding its warmth and brilliant light, and its special, invisible radiations, which acted as a stimulus to all vegetable growth, over the scene. Smoke from rich, ripe cornfields nearby, tanged in the cool air, like a questioning ghost. Even the far-off sun itself, scarcely more than a great star in the vast distance, seemed to wait, to see what would happen during the next tense moment.
Ron Leiccsen's grin became a trifle more crooked. Otherwise he scarcely moved, though his eyes admired Anna Charles' vigorous spirit.
"I apologize, if I've hurt anyone's feelings--without good reason," he said at last. "I look up to anyone with plenty of nerve, like Arne Reynaud, or Miss Charles, here. But we can't successfully fight Callistan heat-bombs, and their horde of heavily armed ships. We can't expect any aid from Earth, since the Callistan space navy is supreme in this part of the void. To continue to resist alone, is just plain stupid. We'd all be killed or enslaved--Titan taken away from us anyway, in the end. And we have women and kids, remember! Miss Charles, who is a school teacher, should know that we have kids, here, as well as anybody else! Tots. Who wants to see them enslaved, abused, massacred? So, though it will hurt plenty to do it, let's face facts! Let's leave Titan before these laughing devils from Callisto can fly so many war-craft out from their world that even escape will be cut off!"
Ron Leiccsen paused for just a moment, to let his arguments sink home, and to let the grim truth register in the minds of his hard, embattled listeners. Then he went on.
"Of course, if Arne Reynaud has any information," he said, "any new trick, or any means at all that might give us hope of defeating these furry giants from Jupiter's outermost large moon, let him speak up! Otherwise his talk of fighting is exactly what I implied before--just senseless, foolish courage!"
When Ron Leiccsen finished speaking, farmers looked at each other, their faces puzzled. It was easy to see that common-sense was tempering their defiance against the Callistan hordes, now. Their wives. Their children. Even Anna Charles' features showed a sheepish, apologetic petulance for a moment, as though maybe she realized that the man whom she had as good as accused of traitorous cowardice, might have told the truth.
From the distance, over the blazing fields and farm buildings, a slim, silvery shape flew silently, coming closer. And the atom-guns which had so far kept the hamlet of Leiccsendale itself, safe from the bombs and heat-rays of the Callistan raiders, began to spit their whining darts up from the village outskirts.
But now old Arne Reynaud lifted a shaky hand. "Ron Leiccsen," he shouted sincerely, "you got real, honest-to-gosh, good judgment! Talk without backing don't get anybody anywhere! But I haven't been just shooting off my mouth! There _is_ a way to lick them damned Callistans, as I was gonna tell you all before! Everything's fixed, except for the last tough part of the job!"
It was Ron Leiccsen's turn to be surprised, now. His brows creased in mingled doubt and hope. He stood erect now, taut and ready.
"All right, Arne," he urged eagerly. "I'll eat those words of mine, down to the last sour syllable, if I've said anything out of place! Tell us what you've got up your sleeve."
"Just this, friends," Arne returned seriously. "Mighty few Callistans ever visit Earth. Even though they're immune to our germ diseases, they don't thrive so well there, at certain seasons. Me and a brother of mine, back home, are probably the only men, either Earthian or Callistan, who realize why Callistans get very sick at certain times on Earth, though it's so simple. I saw one die once, in New York State, in summer. It ain't just the density of the air. They can stand that. It's something else--and I've got the password. I found out.
"Quite a while ago, I wrote a letter to my brother. But everybody knew, already, that the trouble with the Callistans was coming. My brother has quite a lot of money, and I asked him to do me a favor. Just a few hours ago I got his space-radiogram, probably one of the last that got through the Callistan interference barrages."
Arne had taken a slip of yellow paper from his pocket. He cleared his throat, and read the message aloud:
"'Dear Arne: Shipload of stuff you asked for is at Vananis, on Mars. Have just learned that crew deserted, refusing to go farther into zone patrolled by hostile Callistan craft. Delivery up to you colonists. Luck. Tony.'"
* * * * *
Arne Reynaud ran his fingers through his ragged gray hair, as he finished the radiogram. "You see, folks?" he continued. "That space freighter is waiting on Mars right now, for somebody to go and get it. All we have to do is sprinkle its cargo all over Leiccsenland, and as much more of Titan as we can...."
The old horticulturist's words were cut short here, as the silvery Callistan ship that had been approaching, swept close, overhead. It had won through the outer defenses of the village. The ominous shadow of the craft, which was small but deadly, slid swiftly over the ground. Sparks of molten metal shot from the tower of the sun-ray globe, as an unseen sword-beam of intense heat lashed at its girders. Steel crumpled and snapped. There was an ugly, creaking, groaning sound, like that which a great tree makes when it begins to fall, after the lumber-jacks have severed its trunk. The tower leaned, like a man shot, and crashed with a thunderous noise onto a row of stores and houses along the street.
Fire spurted, as the great sun-ray globe of heat-resistent carbon-glass shattered, spilling its seething, white-hot contents on the wreckage. Flames lashed up, blazing furiously.
Everyone had crouched down, seeking whatever cover was available, as the enemy ship, glinting in the pale sunshine, and reflecting the glare of the conflagration, circled above. The hiss of its propelling mechanism was almost a whisper. So low that the wild, challenging laughter of the gray-furred Callistan pilot, leaning over its side, could be plainly heard.
The beam of heat that had wrecked the tower, swung downward. It hit the front of the Community Bank, and the latter's windows, with the gold lettering on them, cracked and wilted. Old Arne Reynaud, hunched now behind the stone blocks that flanked the steps, was hit. His whole back was raked by that invisible sword of concentrated heat waves. Flesh and clothing alike was burned away from his spine.
But even as this was happening, slender atom-rifles and pistols were brought into play--sobbing and whirring. Ron Leiccsen was among the other marksmen, firing with his pistol from beneath the foliage of the maple sapling, where he had drawn Anna Charles.
The swift missiles struck the invader craft. Incandescent spots, bluer and more eye-hurting than the glare of an electric arc, blotched its burnished hull. It sagged in its flight like a mass of wet paper, and plummeted to the street. From the wreck was hurled a big-chested, furry, half-human form, bloodied, and spattered with its own brains, its broken, slender limbs tangled in the wires of a house-yard fence.
Ron Leiccsen leaped to where Arne Reynaud lay on the heat-racked bank steps. There was still a flicker of life in his faded blue eyes, glazed with agony. But he was past all help.
"Ron," he muttered, as the youth bent over him. "You didn't believe me--anyhow at first.... But I ain't a liar.... I told the truth.... Mars.... That ship there.... Do what I said--please.... It'll lick the Callistans.... You got nerve--cleverness--plenty. A swell space-pilot, too--the others aren't so good.... Bring the freighter to Titan.... Sprinkle the stuff in the hold all over Leiccsenland.... The cargo is--is...."
And there old Arne's heart stopped beating. His charred body relaxed in its last sleep. His brain ceased to think. And a vast question-mark seemed to hang over him. While in Leiccsenland, chaos thundered. Fire crackled and roared.
Anna Charles was bending close to the old man's body, too, her face a mask of dumb horror. But she had become challenging again, now. "You heard what he said, didn't you, Ron Leiccsen?" she flung at him with a taut, cold softness. "Your idea that we should all leave Titan may be wrong! There's that ship on Mars, which might save our colony! And he--Arne--appointed you to go and bring it here!"
* * * * *
No one could ever have traced the course of the tumultuous hatred and doubt that seethed in Ron Leiccsen's mind just then. Red hate of the laughing fiends of Callisto! Little, withered Arne Reynaud--murdered! He was a hero--an inspiration! And yet, maybe he was just an old fool with an empty, hair-brained scheme that wouldn't work! Another crackpot--a kind of fanatical inventor, perhaps, who deluded himself into believing in a worthless idea! A ship on Mars, loaded with something. What?
Ron struggled to be reasonable, fighting the mad fury that prompted him to be rash, to believe what the old horticulturist had said and fly to Mars. Such action might give the colonists here on Titan false hope. Hope that would encourage them to stay, when maybe they should be leaving with their wives and children.
"It's stupid!" Ron growled at last. "A shipload of some kind of mysterious elixer! Scatter the stuff around on Titan! It'll defeat the Callistans! Bunk! What kind of a magic charm is this, anyway? Arne was a swell old guy, all right; but he fussed too much with his flower garden, and dreamed and wished too much!" All of Ron's cynical, bitter, doubting viewpoint, seemed to boil from his lips. "I've got to see that the colonists leave Titan!"
"I won't leave for one!" Edward Clay, a hard-bitten young farmer with a craggy jaw, stated definitely. "Me and Pa and my wife have been here five years. Not a chance of me going, now! I'll stick, if only to even the odds for Arne Reynaud! Maybe he was an idiot, but he had courage!"
Bart Mallory, who had invented the atomic sun-ray towers, and held their patent rights for the exclusive use of the Titan Colony, was present, too. All of his small, nervous body, even his neatly kept Van Dyke beard, trembled with rage and grief.
"Arne was a good, practical man, when it came to taking care of fruit trees," he said. "But he was certainly no highly trained scientist. I haven't much faith in whatever his idea can be, either. Still, he was my friend. If I ran away from Titan, now that he's been killed, I'd feel like a dirty, yellow coward!"
Most of the other farmers had left the front of the bank building, to fight the fire across the street. But several of those who remained, nodded agreement with Bart Mallory. After all, everything they owned was on Titan. It was their home.
"If you don't go to Mars for that ship, Ron Leiccsen," Anna Charles said quietly, "I will! I know how to fly space-crafts as well as you do, anyway. My father was a racing pilot, and he taught me a few tricks of the trade! What Arne Reynaud said may be bunk; but there's a chance!"
Ron Leiccsen only growled inarticulately, and hurried off toward the blazing buildings. He had to fight something to expend some of his physical energies so that he could think, and clear his brain. Fighting the fire might do this. The release of atomic heat in the incandescent substance from the shattered sun-ray globe had ceased when the tower had collapsed; for the catalytic forces which induced the breakdown of the atoms had been cut off with the disruption of the apparatus. But the spilled contents of the globe were still terrifically hot. Only sand, poured on that dazzling fury, could cool and insulate it. And water was needed to quench the blazing debris of the buildings. So Ron Leiccsen worked like a demon with the other men.
And from the village jailhouse, opposite the row of fire-wracked ruins, hollow, booming laughter mocked him. There a Callistan combat pilot, captured some time ago when his ship had been shot down, clutched the bars of his prison's window with slender, furry, three-fingered hands, and made derisive, gloating remarks in his sketchy English.
"Eart'men! Vaah!" he taunted, his words rumbling in his vast chest. "Very little while--all done--you--here--Titan! Titan be--Mado-Achar--New Achar--New Callisto! Very little while we build shiny metal house here! You find out! You know already! Eart'men! Vaah! Huah!"
And then he would laugh, the breath sizzling in his wide nostrils, his little, close-set eyes, that peeped, like a poodle-dog's through the thick fur that covered his face, reflecting the flames and seeming to glow in appreciation of the situation, and of the choice Acharian insults he had hurled.
As he helped fight down the fire, Ron Leiccsen glanced often toward the defiant captive, wondering intently about all his kind. Tough and hardy, and immune to all terrestrial germ diseases, the Callistans came from a strange world of spore-plants and burnished, bizarre cities, over which a steady, cool climate brooded. Achar--Callisto--being a satellite of Jupiter, was far from the sun, too. But because Achar had a radioactive core, generating heat constantly, its surface was far warmer than would otherwise have been possible. And so there was life, there. It was a different kind of life, in many minor respects, than that of Earth. In that thin, cool atmosphere, nature had omitted certain biological phenomena.
Others of the fire-fighters hurled insults back at the captive Callistan--furious, defiant curses which showed that no sane argument could ever win a good half of them to retreat.
* * * * *
Anna Charles was climbing into the cabin of her sleek, black space flier, which rested on the landing platform on the flat roof of the house where she lived.
She was prepared to seal the door, when a booted foot was thrust against it, preventing her action. A slow, admiring grin was turned upon her. The sullen, half-humorous line in the intruder's bronzed cheek, was like a steel wall, against which her fury and her surprise and contempt lashed in vain.
"Ron Leiccsen!" she choked. "I was ready to start for Mars! What do _you_ want? You and your negative talk!"
Ron entered the ship's cabin. "To Mars, then," he drawled. "But not all by yourself. You see, I've changed my mind, Miss Charles. About half the colonists will stay on Titan, no matter what advice is given, though I hope they'll have sense enough to get most of the kids out. Result of this stubbornness, as far as they're concerned--well--Arne Reynaud's shipload of I-don't-know-what is the one barely possible salvation. So, not being able to rescue my friends with argument, I have no choice. If I deserted them now, I'd only prove myself to be the yellow rat you seem to think I am. Anyway, this trick of bringing that ship back from Mars, is a real, man-size job."
Deliberately, Ron closed the flier's door. He worked the controls. The ship shot up over the blackened, smoke-wreathed plains of Leiccsenland, where splendid corn and grain had grown, under the stimulus of special vitalizing radiations, mixed with the ordinary light and heat that Bart Mallory's sun-ray globes emitted.
In a twinkling, Leiccsenland and Titan were dwindling away, below. In brief minutes, even the bulk of giant Saturn and his Rings and ten glowing moons were shrinking away astern. Ahead was the tiny sun, Mars and Earth and Venus completely lost in its rays.
"Pray for speed, Miss Charles," Ron grated grimly. "Pray that we make this trip in time! And that Arne Reynaud's idea is something better than the froth of an addled brain!"
Their velocity was demoniac. But the distance they had to go was tremendous. They plotted a course across the orbit of Jupiter, and through the dangerous Belt of Asteroids. Luckily, Mars and Saturn, in their respective orbital positions, were near their closest possible approach to each other. So the journey was about as short as it could ever be.
The spacial stars leered sardonically, and Ron and Anna stuck to their posts like fiends, charting, piloting, keeping watch for meteors in that dangerous region of cosmic debris, the Asteroid Belt. There was no time for quarreling, there was no time for sentiment, there was little enough time to eat, and only moments for sleep.
Thus they reached Vananis, the gigantic spaceport set amidst the rusty red deserts of Mars. But even then it was only the beginning. Two Earth-weeks it had taken to come. And it would take longer to return; for on their trip back their ship would not be a slim scout, but a heavy freighter instead.
They were directed to it there at the quays. _The Barbarian_ was the name painted on its beetling black prow. It was a black ship, as were all the space craft of Earth--slender, quite speedy, judging from its lines and the power rating of its engines and gravity repulsion plates. It was an old grain-carrying ship. Its cargo hatches were battened down firmly, and could not easily have been removed.
"What does its cargo consist of?" Ron Leiccsen asked, after Anna and he had presented their credentials, identifying themselves as Titanian colonists and licensed space pilots--the only necessary formalities in their taking control of the freighter; for special orders had been radioed to Mars by Arne Reynaud's brother, weeks before.
"I don't know what the cargo is," the brown-skinned Martian official returned indifferently. "You realize the crew deserted, not caring to go any nearer to Titan, with the Callistan trouble brewing. And we don't care especially what the _Barbarian's_ hold contains, so long as it's not going to be unloaded here in Vananis."
There was no time for further investigations of what the tightly closed hatches might conceal. It would have been useless to attempt to radio Earth, and try to find out from Arne Reynaud's brother; for that would take an hour at least, and besides, there was a barrage of static even in this region, thrown out from a great station on Callisto as a wartime blockade measure. No message could have gotten through.
Ron Leiccsen and Anna Charles cast longing, wondering glances at the huge grain discharge-spout, under the flairing stern of the craft. But there were no precious minutes to spare, to investigate what lay beyond that spout, within the bowels of the ship, itself. They begrudged even the moments it took to climb the narrow ladders to the control turret of the _Barbarian_.
At Ron's manipulation of switches and levers, the engines that fed power to the gravity plates began to whine. Like a black cloud, the old freighter arose from the quays.
* * * * *