Into the Unknown
ADRIFT IN SPACE! BLAINE CARSON worked frantically at the controls, his jaw set in grim lines and his eyes narrowed to anxious slits as he peered into the diamond-studded ebon of the heavens. A million miles astern he knew the red disk of the planet Mars was receding rapidly into the blackness. And the RX8 was streaking into the outer void at a terrific pace—out of control.
Something had warned him when they left Earth; the Martian cargo of k-metal was of enormous value and a direct invitation to piracy. Of course there was the attempt at secrecy and the shippers had sent along those guards. His engineer, Tom Farley, was thoroughly reliable, too. But this failure of the control rocket-tubes, missing their destination as a result—there was something queer about it.
“Tommy,” he called into the mike. “Find anything yet?”
“We-e-ll, something,” the audio-phone drawled after a moment: “I’m coming up.”
“What is it, Tom?” he asked when the engineer’s round face appeared at the head of the engine room companionway.
Farley dropped his voice and his customary smile was gone. “I found the stern rocket-tube ignition jammed so it’s firing continuously,” he said; “and the others are all dead: won’t fire at all. That’s why she doesn’t swing to the controls?”
“Can’t you fix it? Lord, man, we’re headed out into the belt of planetoids. We’ll be wrecked.”
“Nothing I can do, Blaine, without shutting down the atomic engines. Then we’d freeze to death and run out of oxygen. These ships ought to have a spare engine just to take care of the heating and air conditioning. I always said so.”
“What happened to the ignition system?”
Tom Farley looked over his shoulder apprehensively. “Dirty work, Blaine,” he whispered. “I’m sure of it. Tool marks on the breech of the stern tube. And there’s one of those guards I don’t like the looks of.”
“Nonsense. The k-metal people know their men; they picked these three especially for the job.”
“Who else could do it? There’s only the five of us on board.”
There might be something in what Tommy said, at that. A thing like this couldn’t just happen by itself. And, come to think of it, one of those guards was a queer looking bird: dwarfed and hunch-backed, sort of, and with long dangling arms. It would be better to investigate.
“Get ‘em up here, Tommy,” Blaine said.
THE RX8 drove on and on through the uncharted wastes outside the orbit of Mars. None of the space ships of the inner planets ever ventured out this far, and Blaine knew there was grave danger of colliding with some of the small bodies with which the zone was infested. If one of those guards was the traitor he was risking his own neck as well as theirs.
Two of them entered the control room with Tom Farley, big, husky fellows of stolid countenance and armed with regulation flame-ray pistols and gas grenades.
“Where’s the other, the dwarf?” Blaine asked, his suspicions mounting immediately.
“In his bunk,” Tom replied with a meaning look. “He said he’d be up in a few minutes.”
The pilot-commander addressed the guards. “Fellows,” he said, “I suppose you know we’re in a serious fix. The ship is out of control and we’ve missed Mars, where your metal was to be delivered. We’re speeding out into the unknown, out past the limits of space-travel toward the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus—God knows where. And my engineer thinks that one of your number has tampered with the machinery. Know anything about it?” Blaine eyed them keenly.
One of the guards, Mahoney, flushed hotly. “No, sir,” he snapped. “At least Kelly and meself had nothin’ to do with it. But we’ve been suspicionin’ that little Antazzo ever since we came out. It’s a peculiar way he has about him, the divil.”
“You think he—”
AN incisive voice from the doorway way interrupted, “Never mind what he thinks, Carson. I’ll do the thinking from now on.”
At one man they turned to face the speaker. It was the guard, Antazzo, and he was clothed from neck to ankles in a garment of bright metallic stuff that shimmered with shifting colors like those of a soap bubble. A mask of similar stuff covered his face, and in each hand there was a weapon resembling a ray pistol but of strangely unfamiliar design.
Mahoney shot from the hip and his stabbing ray splashed full on the hunchback’s chest—but harmlessly. That lustrous garment was an insulating armor; the traitorous guard should have been shriveled to a cinder at the contact. Antazzo laughed evilly as his own weapons loosed strange and terrible energies.
Tom Farley ducked, and Blaine watched in horrified amazement as the crackling streamers of blue radiance from the dwarf’s pistols found their marks. Mahoney and Kelly, standing there, bathed for a brief instant in horrid blue fire: tottering, swaying, their mouths opened wide in a last agonized effort, to cry out. Tiny pinpoints of brilliant pyrotechnics flashing and exploding within the columns of blue fire. Then, nothing! Where the two husky guards had stood there was utter emptiness; not even a shred of clothing remained. The air in the control room became heavy and acrid.
“Antazzo!” White-faced and shaking, Blaine cried out in futile protest, “My God, man, what have you done? What does this mean?”
And then, in a blaze of rage, he was on his feet. Murder was in his heart as he set himself for a crashing charge that would sweep the beast from his feet. His own flame-pistol was missing; it was a case of killing this monster with his bare hands. Tom was circling, over there, cursing horribly. One of them would get him. Strangely, Antazzo had lowered the muzzles of his pistols.
ATERRIFIC punch, started from the floor, never reached its mark. Blaine saw a tiny puff of pinkish vapor that spurted from the bosom of that metallic garment. He was coughing and gasping; helpless. Muscles refused to do his bidding. With a moan he dropped into the pilot’s seat, knowing that Antazzo’s will compelled him. That gas had hypnotic powers. Mechanically, his fingers strayed to the controls.
And Tom—good old Tommy—he was under the influence of the stuff too, creeping there on hands and knees toward the engine room companionway.
Antazzo was talking. “We come now to the matter of instructions,” he said. “You, Farley, will assist me in restoring the ignition system to normal. You, Carson, will keep to the controls and will lay a course to Jupiter as soon as the control rocket-tubes will respond. Understand?”
Tom growled reluctant assent from where he was crawling.
Strange, this hypnotic gas! Blaine’s mind functioned clearly enough, yet he was utterly at the mercy of this madman’s will—a robot of flesh and blood. “Jupiter!” he exclaimed. “Why man, it’s nearly a half billion miles from the sun. Not habitable, either.”
Antazzo had removed his mask and now smiled a superior smile. “We’ll reach it,” he said: “the RX8 is very fast. And it’s not the planet itself we’re bound for, but its second satellite. Io, your astronomers call this body, and it’s a world sadly in need of this marvelous k-metal.”
“But—but—”
“Enough!” The hunchback snarled his rebuke in Blaine’s face and turned to Tom. “Come, Farley,” he said, as if talking to a child, “we must get to work.”
IN a daze of conflicting emotions, Blaine turned to gaze through the forward port when the two had left the control room. The RX8 was accelerating rapidly under the steady discharge of gases from the stern rocket-tube and had already reached the speed of one thousand miles a second. If one of those tiny asteroids, even one no larger than a marble, should meet up with them it would crash through the hull plates as if they were paper. His heart went cold at the thought.
Oddly enough, he found himself wanting to make this trip with the demoniac Antazzo. It was the effects of the pink gas. Even with the misshapen guard down there in the engine room the power of his will was effective. The devil must be an Ionian, he thought. But how in the name of the sky-lane imps had he reached Earth? How had he wormed his way into the confidence of the k-metal people? He must have been there several years, working to this very end.
There was a tinkling crash on the starboard side amidships; a screaming swish as something slithered along the side and caromed off into the void. One of those little planetoids. Probably no bigger than a pea, and luckily they had struck it glancingly. He wiped the sudden perspiration from his forehead.
Pressure on the directive rocket controls brought no response. Would they never finish with that ignition system?
A gleaming light-fleck segregated itself from the mass of stars ahead. At first he thought he imagined it, but a second examination, this time through the telescope, convinced him it was growing larger. Drawing nearer, it was, and resolving itself into a well defined orb that was directly in their path. Fifteen hundred miles a second, the indicator read now! They’d never know what happened when they struck.
“Tommy!” he bellowed into the mike. “Are you fellows ever going to finish down there?”
THERE was no reply for a moment, and the blue-white globe drove madly toward them. He consulted the chart. Pallas—an asteroid some three hundred miles in diameter. Not very big as celestial bodies go, but big enough!
“Just one minute now.” It was Tommy’s voice coming drearily, unnaturally through the audiophone. A minute! Ninety thousand miles! It seemed the asteroid was that close already.
Antazzo was in the control room then, and the effect of his mental dominance became more pronounced. Suddenly the dwarf let out a shriek of terror when he looked through the port and saw the brilliant body that now loomed so close. Blaine experienced a savage joy in the knowledge that the hunchback was mortally afraid.
“Latza! Latza!” In his fear Antazzo lapsed into his own tongue. Then, remembering, he shouted, “We’re ready, Carson. Swing wide!”
The directive rockets answered to their controls now. Quick pressure on this, a swift pull on that, swinging the energy value to maximum, brought results. The little vessel groaned and shivered under the strain as a full blast from the forward tubes retarded them. Her hull plates twisted and screeched as the steering tubes belched full energy in swinging them from their course. They were thrown forward violently, though the deceleration compensators were working to the utmost.
Pallas swung around in their field of vision, and there was a fleeting glimpse of sun-lit spires of mountains, shadowed valleys, and mysterious crevasses from which clouds of steam and yellow vapor curled. Still it seemed they must crash against one of those slender pinnacles. Nearer it came like a flash; a dizzying blur, now, that drove directly in their straining faces.
And then, abruptly, it was gone. Already thousands of miles astern, the danger was past. Miraculously, they had escaped.
Antazzo laughed; a hollow mirthless cackle. His fingers shook crazily when he untwisted them from their grip on the port rail.
“Good work, my friend. Very good, indeed,” he jabbered, his chin quivering in nervous reaction. “And now we carry on—on to Io.”
Blaine Carson, almost wishing they had collided with the spire, set himself grimly to the task. He was powerless to refuse.
The Second Satellite
WHEN, EVENTUALLY, THEY SWUNG INTO the orbit of Jupiter and headed in toward the enormous red-belted body, the two Earth men were heartily disgusted with the voyage and with themselves. Repeated doses of the pink gas—the ignominy of their utter subservience to the will of Antazzo—had worn them down no less than had the hard work and loss of sleep. Both were in vile humor. They endured the triumphant chatter of their captor in bitter silence.
“Over there, my friends,” he said, pointing; “see? It is our destination. The golden crescent, Io, is something over a quarter million of your miles from the mother planet. See it? It is home, my friends; home to me and for yourselves in the future—if the Zara spares your lives. Lay your course to the body, Carson.”
Blaine growled as he sighted through the telescope. Yet, in spite of his fury, he could not overcome the feeling of excitement that came to him when the powerful glass brought the satellite near. This body was like nothing else in the heavens. Antazzo had called it the golden crescent. Rather, it was of gleaming coppery hue, and now, as they swung around, it was fully illuminated—a brilliant sphere of unbroken contour. Smoothly globular, there was not one projection or indentation to indicate the existence of land or sea, mountain or valley, on its surface. It was like a ball of solid copper, scintillant there in the weak sunlight and the reflected light from its great mother planet.
Antazzo laughed over his absorption. “Looks peculiar to you, does it not?” he asked; “rather different from any of the bodies you have visited, you are thinking.”
Blaine grunted wordless assent. The globe that was Io rushed in to meet them, growing ever larger in the field of the telescope. Now it appeared that there were tiny seams in the smooth surface, a regular criss-cross pattern of fine lines that looked like—Lord, yes, that was it! The body was constructed from an infinite number of copper plates, riveted or brazed together to form a perfect sphere.
“WHY, the thing’s made of copper!” Blaine gasped. “Copper plates. It’s a man-made world; artificial. But where are the inhabitants?”
Antazzo laughed uproariously. “Not man-made, my friend,” he corrected, “but preserved by man for his own salvation. A dying world, it was, and the cleverest scientists in the universe saved it and themselves from certain death. What you see is merely a shell of copper, the covering they constructed to retain an atmosphere and make continuation of life possible—inside.”
“Your people live inside that shell?” Blaine was incredulous.
“What else? We must have air to breathe and warmth for our bodies. How else could we have retained it?”
It was staggering, this revelation. The young pilot could not conceive of a completely enclosed world with inhabitants forever shut off from the light of the sun by day and from the beauties of the heavens by night. Yet here it was, drawing ever nearer, a colossal monument to the ingenuity and handiwork of a highly intelligent civilization who had labored probably for centuries to preserve their kind. A titanic task! Who could imagine a sphere of metal more than twenty-four hundred miles in diameter enclosing a world and its peoples? A copper-clad world!
They were coming in close now, and the gravitational pull of the body made itself felt. Blaine was busy with the controls, sending tremendous blasts from the forward rocket-tubes to retard their speed for a safe landing. The incredibly smooth copper surface was just beneath them, stretching miles away to the horizon in all directions.