The Man Without A World Read online

  As the two men stepped into the upper control room Rador greeted the navigator in charge with a salute. On the forward panel he quickly checked the various control instruments coordinating the Ark’s intricate propulsion mechanism.

  The electro-propulsion apparatus nullified and controlled gravitational attraction by making use of the fact that like electrical charges repel and unlike charges attract. Tremendous electrical potential, both positive and negative, was induced within the Ark’s great fore and aft storage batteries as the ship passed within the magnetic fields of various heavenly bodies on its journey. These stored-up charges were used as repellent and attractive forces to guide the Ark and keep it from being sucked into some holocaustic sun or dead planet, and to steer it clear of the ruinous pelting of any chance gigantic meteoric stream.

  Mai studied a great celestial map in the control room which accurately marked the position of the Ark in space. Six inches away on the map was the great star of Sirius, actually still millions of miles distant but approaching rapidly. Mai glanced at a large dial in the control panel, his brow knitted.

  Ador guessed his thoughts. “As you see,” he explained, “Sirius is beginning to exert a tremendous pull. Already I have ordered a 20 percent increase in our forward repellent charge. In twenty-five years we shall be passing so close to Sirius itself that we’ll be using our maximum potential.”

  “But with a forty percent increase now,” pointed out Mai, “we could skirt Sirius with no difficulty and within an Earth year be well out of her pull.” Mai studied Rador’s line-etched face for a moment. “You must have some reason that makes it necessary to skirt Sirius so closely.”

  “I have,” said Rador. “For a year now your father and I have observed Sirius and checked her planets. Every one we tested—there are eighteen— we determined spectrographically to be uninhabitable for one reason or another. We kept this out of the newspaper, hoping against hope for some error in our calculations, but we checked and double-checked. Our figures always tallied. Three periods ago we had given up hope. That was why Commander Mandark was so worried over the possible inroads of the weasarks.”

  “And now?” Mai’s skin tingled. Rador sighted through the eyepiece of the telescope, moved the great control wheels.

  “But our figures,” he continued without looking up, “always showed an inexplicable orbital eccentricity of several planets in Sirius’ realm. We hoped it meant one more planet somewhere that we had not observed.” The old man looked up at Mai with shining eyes. “Last night I saw it — moving out from eclipse behind Sirius. I called it Nova Terra — New Earth,” and the old scientist wiped his eyes. “Nova Terra has an atmosphere favorable for our life, and of course, water. Its mass gives indications of gravity approximating that we once had on Earth.”

  There suddenly flashed on the wet photographic emulsion screen the image of a gorgeous blue planet, now only the size of a baseball — but weird and beautiful and majestic.

  “Our course,” said Rador, “forces us to pass close to Sirius so there’ll be no danger of missing Nova Terra as she hurtles by us — for its tremendous orbit would take it a century to be around here again.”

  Upon the living photographic image Rador turned the powerful corpuscular enlarger which sent the atoms that composed the image speeding into greater orbits thereby tremendously enlarging the original image, and bringing Nova Terra so close that the planet filled the huge emulsion screen before them.

  “I have seen many heavenly wonders on that screen, my boy, but Nova Terra surpasses them all in beauty!” Rador said reverently.

  A great blue atmospheric haze, probably clouds, obscured the surface of the planet. Occasionally, yellow flashes seemed to lighten the clouds from beneath. It was a gorgeous, thrilling spectacle to these worldless spacemen in the control room of the Ark.

  “There, please God,” said Mai softly, “man will build anew.”

  “But for some unforeseen circumstance,” said Rador, “we shall land upon Nova Terra within twenty-five years.”

  “Will I live to stand on Nova Terra? Will we land there during my life’s span?” Through Mai’s brain raced again the thought that had tormented him all his life. He had been born in space; was he doomed to die in space? A man without a world!

  One question in Mai’s mind he kept to himself: “What caused the yellow flashes that even now were visible beneath the clouds that hovered over Nova Terra?”

  Life flowed on in a more or less even tenor while men and women rejoiced that the epic voyage was nearing its close. Work and education of the young was shaped anew to prepare for the great day of landing. But Mai alone was the only person who troubled to bury himself in the lore of the past.

  Once in his workshop Tem Zuick looked at Mai through the sights of his new, untried space gun and said to him:

  “Don’t be a fool, Mai! Why waste your time dabbling in the outworn science and history of a dead and forgotten world? Reaching Nova Terra and living there will be a problem to be met by new thoughts, new weapons!” And Tem Zuick patted his space gun affectionately. Again, Mai saw a strange, wild light in the eyes of his friend. “Why don’t you devote more time to the wooing of Valia?”

  -----

  In the two hundred and fifteenth year of the voyage, by Earth time computation, a great banquet was held in celebration of the coming landing. Mai Mandark, now in his fortieth year, was commander of the Arkadia. With his beautiful wife, Valia, he celebrated also the fifth anniversary of their son’s birthday.

  In all its years in space, the Ark had never known such reveling and merriment. The great dining hall was resplendent with decorations. Miniature blue planets, like Nova Terra, hovered over the banquet table as tiny toy Arks sailed about them. And as a joke, Engineer Rador, dressed as Father Time, presented the new commander with a big golden pumpkin, with green letters reading, “The New Earth, from Father Time.”

  And little moon-faced Roto, about as round as a planet now himself, danced out dressed as a baby, with a pennant flowing behind him that read, “Baby Earth, coming up!”

  It was all silly, but everybody laughed — everybody save Tem Zuick. He sat with burning eyes flashing from Mai to Valia where they sat at the far end of the huge banquet table.

  Presently Zuick rose, a shaking wine glass in his hand, and called for a toast. Mai caught again the wild light in his friend’s eyes, and he wondered. But Tem Zuick had been but little in his company of late years.

  Zuick made a good speech, and a sincere one, complimenting Mai and expressing the genuine admiration of all Arkadia for their new commander. Then he raised his glass high.

  “To Mai Mandark,” shouted Zuick, "who knows more about the lost Earth than the Earthmen did themselves — and to Valia, his gorgeous mate! May the misbegotten spawn of a dead world never gnaw into their happiness!”

  And Zuick hurled his glass against the pumpkin in the center of the table and ran from the hall.

  There was a strained silence. Then Mai rose and lifted his glass.

  “To the memory of our ancestors,” he said gravely.

  It was an hour later while Mai was dancing with his wife that Major Roto tapped his commander’s arm.

  “Attendant on the official visi-screen, Mai. Something’s gone wrong below!”

  On the televisiphone screen in a booth at one end of the banquet hall, Mai looked into the fear-stricken face of the corridor captain speaking from level four.

  “The weasarks!” the man cried. “They’ve broken out of the second level. They’re coming this way up the main ramp! I just slammed the gate in time.”

  MAL flicked off the image, tried to contact the gate attendant at level three. There was no reply. The delicate coils in the oxygenator rooms! The sensitive dials and plates in the battery vaults — all were on the third level, and the gateman was off duty or dead!

  Again Mai flicked for an answer, this time from the atmosphere chambers on level three. For ten long seconds he waited. Then:

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bsp; “Lieutenant Didras reporting from the atmosphere chambers,” came the voice; and now the image of the young officer came into focus. He was holding his space gun — pitifully inadequate weapon against weasarks.

  “The weasarks have not yet reached this room. Forward batteries three, five, six and eight have been partially destroyed. Send help immediately! Wait!” Didras turned toward the rear. On the screen Mai caught a brief out-of-focus glimpse of a dark, giant form over Didras’ shoulder — a glimpse of grinning rodent teeth! Then Didras’ voice came again.

  “They’re coming into the atmosphere plant! Hordes of them! For God’s sake, hurry!”

  Mai leaped from the booth. Too late to warn the battery - vault men! Didras’ last words beat in his ears:

  “The oxygen is escaping. I am trying to turn off the valve—”

  To a captain at his side Mai shouted as he ran.

  “Seal every opening leading down from this level. Be prepared to open the auxiliary oxygen valves when I give you the signal!”

  With Roto and ten other armed officers Mai shot downward in the gravity lift toward the lower levels of the Ark. Moments seemed like years to him. Incredible that the giant weasarks were loose! Twenty years ago he himself had placed the seals on the portals of the storage vault on level two—seals that could be broken only from the outside! But how? Who? Then suddenly Mai knew.

  CHAPTER III - Tem Zuick’s Gun

  At the ramp leading down to level two Tem Zuick was sprawled, crushed upon the floor.

  The vault door was open, the great seals ripped away by a crowbar which Tem still grasped. Clutched tightly in the other hand was the gun Mai recognized as the one his friend had been working on for many years. Tem had never had a chance to fire it! He had labored in vain.

  Taking the queer looking weapon from the dead man’s hand, Mai raced down the ramp toward the lowest levels of the Ark; toward the oxygenator chambers and the storage batteries. Maddening thoughts gripped his brain. If the atmosphere plant were destroyed — suffocation in space! If the batteries were ruined — no repellent charge to fight off Sirius’ pull!

  At the next turn he slid to a grinding stop; the Zuick disintegrator gun clenched in a grip of steel. Death was gliding toward him in the form of grinning teeth of a monstrous creature nearly twice the size of that which had killed his father long years before. It jammed the passageway, slithering along on its belly toward Mai. This fact may have saved Mai’s life, for it gave him time to whip into action Tem Zuick’s gun. Familiar with its operation, Mai coolly trusted his life to its efficiency. He had faith in the burning-eyed Tem Zuick.

  The weasark was not more than fifteen feet away when Mai’s forefinger pressed the trigger. A blast of bluish, ultra-violet flame belched from the muzzle. There was no sound. Only the sizzling of burning flesh as the monster’s head disappeared. The weasark slumped, lifeless, to the floor.

  Mai smiled grimly as he bounded forward, raying the dead rodent neatly out of existence. God bless Tem Zuick! His men at his heels, Mai plunged to the entrance of the battery vault. Another weasark thrust its head from the doorway. Mai swung to one side. A blast of light flashed from the Zuick gun, and the rodent was no more. Mai slammed the battery vault door shut. But in that brief moment he caught a glimpse of other giant rodents milling and squealing about the sensitive coils and delicate plates of the storage batteries.

  “Quick!” shouted Roto. “The atmosphere plant!”

  With a bound Mai leaped across a pool of blood. The door leading to the atmosphere vault was closed. As Mai swung it in upon its massive hinges, a hissing and screeching of escaping oxygen blasted his ears.

  Didras was there, dead. But even in death his hand clutched the control valve. In an instant Mai had closed it to stop the flow of precious oxygen.

  At the far end of the room three gargantuan weasarks squatted. Their hulking bodies, even as they breathed, were shattering and crushing delicate glass tubes, sensitive mixing chambers ! Again a blast shot from the gun in Mai’s right hand. The charge seared completely through the nearest beast, blotting it and the one directly behind it out.

  “Look out!” shrieked Roto.

  With a frenzied squeal the third rodent sprang forward. In its path lay a maze of delicate oxygenator equipment. And in that same instant a vivid violet flame flashed from Mai’s gun hand. The animal passed out of existence just before it would have shattered the equipment.

  “Take this gun,” Mai commanded one of the officers behind him, “and kill the rest of these damned beasts in the battery vault. Do it from the doorway. Don’t take any chances, and don’t lose this gun!” As he handed the Zuick gun to one of the men, he gave it a fond pat.

  “Poor Tem. Too bad he didn’t live to see that gun work. Come with me, Roto.”

  “Great cosmic cucumbers!” expostulated Roto, sweating. “Lucky if any of us lives much longer than Tem!”

  Ten minutes later Mai and Roto were in the control room. Engineer Rador and seven other stern-visaged officers faced him anxiously. Mai loomed in height above them all, held their attention compellingly.

  “The weasarks are under temporary control,” he reported, “but they’ve severely crippled the oxygenator plant. The forward storage batteries are badly damaged. Their remaining charge is almost completely ineffectual. Thanks to Rador’s alertness, our maximum repellent charge was thrown on just before the rodents broke into the battery vault, and we barely managed to cross the balance point between Sirius’ pull and Nova Terra’s. Gentlemen, we are slowly descending toward Nova Terra. In a few hours we shall have reached our goal!”

  There was a spontaneous murmur of relief from the little group of Arkian officers huddled in the lonely control room.

  “Thank God,” barked Slooken, commander of the guards, “that we have no farther to go!”

  Rador stepped forward. His face was like a specter of death.

  “We will never reach Nova Terra,” he said sadly, “or any other world — alive!”

  Mai heard the old man’s words long before their true meaning seared into his brain. Then the coldness of space shot into his stomach as Rador turned to him.

  “Do you remember those peculiar flashes of light we observed that day we first saw Nova Terra —those flashes visible through the clouds of the dense upper atmosphere? Look at them now with this new telescope adapter!”

  Mai focused the giant telescope. Nova Terra’s primary image completely filled the luminous screen. Rador flicked into position the new model magni-corpuscular enlarger. Instantly the planet swelled, seemed to zoom in upon them. The officers instinctively jumped back.

  “Great Void!” gasped Mai.

  The brilliant rays from the giant sun, Sirius, shone gorgeously upon the upper atmosphere of Nova Terra, making it glisten like a blue sapphire. An atmosphere that had before appeared far away and lifeless now became a seething, boiling mass of gigantic clouds. Those dim puzzling flashes of yellow light were now great blinding arms of livid flame that shot downward through momentary breaks in the clouds which revealed glimpses of a huge forest, a sea, mountains, great open plains.

  But always those tremendous flashes shot downward. They illuminated the clouds from beneath like night artillery bombardments of their ancient world. They were occurring with astounding frequency. And with each bolt the clouds momentarily separated to disclose what appeared to be seared and smoking vegetation.

  Mai bounded from the screen to the flight control panel. As he spun the great wheel, the dial beneath it flashed from “FULL SPEED” to “HALF SPEED” and finally to “STOP.” His face was tense as he turned to Rador.

  “We can’t land there! We’d all be dead in five minutes!” he said grimly. “Those flashes are gigantic bolts of lightning!”

  “Right,” said Rador resignedly. “The entire atmosphere is supercharged with electricity. Those storms dwarf into nothingness the electrical storms that were said to have occurred upon Earth.” The old man sank slowly into a chair. “It is
the end! The Ark could never survive those bolts of lightning. Fifty-two trillion miles of space have we crossed to arrive at a conclusion we should have reached twenty years ago.” “This should have been known before,” blustered Colonel Slooken, “so that our course could be changed to another planet! If our learned commander had spent more time studying immediate Arkian problems and less time dabbling in decadent and musty Earth volumes, this unhappy situation would never have arisen!”

  “Don’t be absurd, man!” exploded Rador. “There’s no other Sirian satellite we could live on! And if there were, how do you expect us to get there with crippled batteries and an oxygenator that’ll have us suffocating before long? Besides that, our food supply would never last us long enough to find another solar system — thanks to the depredations of the weasarks.”

  Roto chuckled, satisfied. Mai stood before the control panels. He had heard none of those bitter words. Ringing in his ears was his father’s voice speaking out of eternity:

  “To you, Mai, I leave the future of all mankind!”

  “My God!” gasped Rador. The engineer’s eyes were glued upon the control panel. “The altimeter! We’re falling!”

  Mai sprang to the panel. The gravity repulsion dial read “STOP,” yet the altimeter graph indicated a slow but steady fall. There could be no doubt of it. The planet’s gravitational pull was too much for the Ark’s weakened batteries.

  “Galactic goosefeathers!” breathed Roto, following Mai from the control room.

  All color had fled from Colonel Slooken’s face; and with it shrank his pompousness.

  “What can we do?” he whimpered. “We’ll all be killed!” His terror stricken eyes searched wildly about the room. “Where’s Mandark?” he suddenly shrieked.

  In the excitement of the impending catastrophe no one had seen Mai and Roto step quickly from the chamber. Three minutes later the two men sprang from the gravity lift at the lowest level of the Ark. Quickly Mai unbolted the door leading to his workshop in the seldom-visited starboard storage vault.