Spacehounds of IPC Part 14

"Not quite." Stevens had in a measure recovered from his stunned surprise. "We are from Tellus, the third planet," and he revealed rapidly the events leading up to their present situation, concluding: "The people in the other sphere were, we believe, natives of Jupiter or of one of the satellites. We know nothing of them, since we could not look through their screens. You rescued us from them; do you not know them?"

"No. Our visirays also were stopped by their screens of force--screens entirely foreign to our science. This is the first time that any vessel from our Saturnian system has ever succeeded in reaching the neighborhood of Jupiter. We came in peace, but they attacked us at sight and we were obliged to destroy them. Now we must hurry back to t.i.tan, for two reasons. First, because we are already at the extreme limit of our power range and Jupiter is getting further and further away from Saturn. Second because our mirrors, which we had thought perfect reflectors of all frequencies possible of generation, are not perfect.

Enough of those forces came through the mirrors to volatilize half our crew, and in a few minutes more none of us would have been left alive.

Why, in some places our very atmosphere became almost hot enough to melt water! If another of those vessels should attack us, in all probability we should all be lost. Therefore we are leaving as rapidly as is possible."

"You are taking the pieces of our s.h.i.+p along--we do not want to enc.u.mber you."

"It is no enc.u.mbrance, since we have ample supplies of power. In fact, we are now employing the highest acceleration we t.i.tanians can endure for any length of time."

Stevens pondered long, forgetting that his thoughts were plain as print to the t.i.tanian commander. Thank Heaven these strangers had sense enough to be friendly--all intelligent races should be friends, for mutual advancement. But it was a mighty long stretch to Saturn and this acceleration wasn't so much. How long would it take to get there? Could they get back? Wouldn't they save time by casting themselves adrift, making the repairs most urgently needed, and going back to Ganymede under their own power? But would they have enough power left in the wreck to get even that far? And how about the big tube? He was interrupted by an insistent thought from Barkovis.

"You will save time, Stevens, by coming with us to t.i.tan. There we shall aid you in repairing your vessel and in completing your transmitting tube, in which we shall be deeply interested. Our power plants shall supply you with energy for your return journey until you are close enough to Jupiter to recover your own beam. You are tired. I would suggest that you rest--that you sleep long and peacefully."

"You seem to be handling the _Forlorn Hope_ without any trouble--the pieces aren't grinding at all. We'd better live there, hadn't we?"

"Yes that would be best, for all of us. You could not live a minute here without your suits; and, efficiently insulated as those suits are, yet your incandescent body temperature makes our rooms unbearably hot--so hot that any of us must wear a s.p.a.ce-suit while in the same room with you, to avoid being burned to death."

"The incandescently hot" Terrestrials were wafted into the open airlock of their lifeboat upon a wand of force, and soon had prepared a long overdue supper, over which Stevens cast his infectious, boyish grin at Nadia.

"Sweetheart, you are undoubtedly a 'warm number,' and you have often remarked that I 'burn you up.' Nevertheless I think that we were both considerably surprised to discover that we are both hot enough actually to consume persons unfortunate enough to be confined in the same room with us!"

"You're funny, Steve--like a crutch," she rebuked him, but smiled back, an elusive dimple playing in one lovely brown cheek. "Looking right through anybody is too ghastly for words, but I think they're perfectly all x, anyway, in spite of their being so hideous and so cold-blooded!"

CHAPTER VI

A Frigid Civilization

"Hi, Percival Van Schravendyck Stevens!" Nadia strode purposely into Stevens' room and seized him by the shoulder. "Are you going to sleep all the way to Saturn? You answered me when I pounded on the part.i.tion with a hammer, but I don't believe that you woke up at all. Get up, you--breakfast will be all spoiled directly!"

"Huh?" Stevens opened one sluggish eye; then, as the full force of the insult penetrated his consciousness, he came wide awake. "Lay off those names, ace, or you'll find yourself walking back home!" he threatened.

"All x by me!" she retorted. "I might as well go home if you're going to sleep _all_ the time!" and she widened her expressive eyes at him impishly as she danced blithely back into the control room. As she went out she slammed his door with a resounding clang, and Stevens pried himself out of his bunk one joint at a time, dressed, and made himself presentable.

"Gos.h.!.+" he yawned mightily as he joined the girl at breakfast. "I don't know when I've had such a gorgeous sleep. How do you get by on so little?"

"I don't. I sleep a lot, but I do it every night, instead of working for four days and nights on end and then trying to make up all those four nights' sleep at once. I'm going to break you of that, too, Steve, if it's the last thing I ever do."

"There might be certain advantages in it, at that," he conceded, "but sometimes you've got to do work when it's got to be done, instead of just between sleeps. However, I'll try to do better. Certainly it is a wonderful relief to get out of that mess, isn't it?"

"I'll say it is! But I wish that those folks were more like people.

They're nice, I think, really, but they're so ... so ... well, so ghastly that it simply gives me the blue s.h.i.+vers just to look at one of them!"

"They're pretty gruesome, no fooling," he agreed, "but you get used to things like that. I just about threw a fit the first time I ever saw a Martian, and the Venerians are even worse in some ways--they're so clammy and dead-looking--but now I've got real friends on both planets.

One thing, though, gives me the pip. I read a story a while ago--the latest best-seller thing of Thornton's named 'Interstellar Slush' or some such tr...."

"Cleophora--An Interstellar Romance," she corrected him. "I thought it was wonderful!"

"I didn't. It's fundamentally unsound. Look at our nearest neighbors, who probably came from the same original stock we did. A Tellurian can admire, respect, or like a Venerian, yes. But for _loving_ one of them--wow! Beauty is purely relative, you know. For instance, I think that you are the most perfectly beautiful thing I ever saw; but no Venerian would think so. Far from it. Any Martian that hadn't seen many of us would have to go rest his eyes after taking one good look at you. Considering what love means, it doesn't stand to reason that any Tellurian woman could possibly fall in love with any man not of her own breed. Any writer is wrong who indulges in interplanetary love affairs and mad pa.s.sions. They simply don't exist. They _can't_ exist--they're against all human instincts."

"Inter-planetary--in this solar system--yes. But the Dacrovos were just like us, only nicer."

"That's what gives me the pip. If our own cousins of the same solar system are so repulsive to us, how would we be affected by entirely alien forms of intelligence?"

"May be you're right, of course--but you may be wrong, too," she insisted. "The Universe is big enough, so that people like the Dacrovos may possibly exist in it somewhere. May be the Big Three will discover a means of interstellar travel--then I'll get to see them myself, perhaps."

"Yes, and _if_ we do, and _if_ you ever see any such people, I'll bet that the sight of them will make your hair curl right up into a ball, too! But about Barkovis--remember how diplomatic the thoughts were that he sent us? He described our structure as being 'compact,' but I got the undertone of his real thoughts, as well. Didn't you?"

"Yes, now that you mention it, I did. He really thought that we were white-hot, under-sized, overpowered, warty, hairy, hideously opaque and generally repulsive little monstrosities--thoroughly unpleasant and distasteful. But he was friendly, just the same. Heavens, Steve! Do you suppose that he read our real thoughts, too?"

"Sure he did; but he is intelligent enough to make allowances, the same as we are doing. He isn't any more insulted than we are. He knows that such feelings are ingrained and cannot be changed."

Breakfast over, they experienced a new sensation. For the first time in months they had nothing to do! Used as they were to being surrounded by pressing tasks, they enjoyed their holiday immensely for a few hours.

Sitting idly at the communicator plate, they scanned the sparkling heavens with keen interest. Beneath them Jupiter was a brilliant crescent not far from the sun in appearance, which latter had already grown perceptibly smaller and less bright. Above them, and to their right, Saturn shone refulgently, his spectacular rings plainly visible.

All about them were the glories of the firmament, which never fail to awe the most seasoned observer. But idleness soon became irksome to those two active spirits, and Stevens prowled restlessly about their narrow quarters.

"I'm going to go to work before I go dippy," he soon declared. "They've got lots of power, and we can rig up a transmitter unit to send it over here to our receptor. Then I can start welding the old _Hope_ together without waiting until we get to t.i.tan to start it. Think I'll signal Barkovis to come over, and see what he thinks about it."

The t.i.tanian commander approved the idea, and the transmitting field was quickly installed. Nadia insisted that she, too, needed to work, and that she was altogether too good a mechanic to waste; therefore the two again labored mightily together, day after day. But the girl limited rigidly their hours of work to those of the working day; and evening after evening Barkovis visited with them for hours. Dressed in his heavy s.p.a.ce-suit and supported by a tractor beam well out of range of what seemed to him terrific heat radiated by the bodies of the Terrestrials, he floated along unconcernedly; while over the multiplex cable of the thought-exchanger he conversed with the man and woman seated just inside the open outer door of their air-lock. The t.i.tanian's appet.i.te for information was insatiable--particularly did he relish everything pertaining to the earth and to the other inner planets, forever barred to him and to his kind. In return Stevens and Nadia came gradually to know the story of the humanity of t.i.tan.

"I am glad beyond measure to have known you," Barkovis mused, one night.

"Your existence proves that there is truth in mythology, as some of us have always believed. Your visit to t.i.tan will create a furor in scientific circles, for you are impossibility incarnate--personifications of the preposterous. In you, wildest fancy had become commonplace.

According to many of our scientists, it is utterly impossible for you to exist. Yet you say, and it must be, that there are millions upon millions of similar beings. Think of it! Venerians, Tellurians, Martians, the satellite dwellers of the lost s.p.a.ce-s.h.i.+p, and us--so similar mentally, yet physically how different!"

"But where does the mythology come in?" thought Nadia.

"We have unthinkably ancient legends which say that once t.i.tan was extremely hot, and that our remote ancestors were beings of fire, in whose veins ran molten water instead of blood. Since our recorded history goes back some tens of thousands of Saturnian years, and since in that long period there has been no measurable change in us, few of us have believed in the legends at all. They have been thought the surviving figments of a barbarous, prehistoric wors.h.i.+p of the sun.

However, such a condition is not in conflict with the known facts of cosmogony, and since there actually exists such a humanity as yours--a humanity whose bodily tissues actually _are_ composed largely of molten water--those ancient legends must indeed have been based upon truth.

"What an evolution! Century after century of slowly decreasing temperature--one continuous struggle to adapt the physique to a constantly changing environment. First they must have tried to maintain their high temperature by covering and heating their cities.--Then, as vegetation died, they must have bred into their plants the ability to use as sap purely chemical liquids, such as our present natural fluids--which also may have been partly synthetic then--instead of the molten water to which they had been accustomed. They must have modified similarly the outer atmosphere; must have made it more reactive, to compensate for the lowered temperature at which metabolism must take place. As t.i.tan grew colder and colder they probably dug their cities deeper and ever deeper; until humanity came finally to realize that it must itself change completely or perish utterly.

"Then we may picture them as aiding evolution in changing their body chemistry. For thousands, and thousands of years there must have gone on the gradual adaptation of blood stream and tissue to more and more volatile liquids, and to lower and still lower temperatures. This must have continued until t.i.tan arrived at the condition which has now obtained for ages--a condition of thermal equilibrium with s.p.a.ce upon one hand and upon the other the sun, which changes appreciably only in millions upon millions of years. In equilibrium at last--with our bodily and atmospheric temperatures finally constant at their present values, which seem as low to you as yours appear high to us. Truly, an evolution astounding to contemplate!"

"But how about power?" asked Stevens. "You seem to have all you want, and yet it doesn't stand to reason that there could be very much generated upon a satellite so old and so cold."

"You are right. For ages there has been but little power produced upon t.i.tan. Many cycles ago, however, our scientists had developed rocket-driven s.p.a.ce-s.h.i.+ps, with which they explored our neighboring satellites, and even Saturn itself. It is from power plants upon Saturn that we draw energy. Their construction was difficult in the extreme, since the pioneers had to work in braces because of the enormous force of gravity. Then, too, they had to be protected from the overwhelming pressure and poisonous qualities of the air, and insulated from a temperature far above the melting point of water. In such awful heat, of course, our customary building material, water, could not be employed...."

"But all our instruments have indicated that Saturn is _cold_!" Stevens interrupted.

"Its surface temperature, as read from afar, would be low," conceded Barkovis, "but the actual surface of the planet is extremely hot, and is highly volcanic. Practically none of its heat is radiated because of the great density and depth of its atmosphere, which extends for many hundreds of your kilometers. It required many thousands of lives and many years of time to build and install those automatic power plants, but once they were in operation, we were a.s.sured of power for many tens of thousands of years to come."

"Our system of power transmission is more or less like yours, but we haven't anything like your range. Suppose you'd be willing to teach me the computation of your fields?"

"Yes, we shall be glad to give you the formulae. Being an older race, it is perhaps natural that we should have developed certain refinements as yet unknown to you. But I am, I perceived, detaining you from your time of rest--goodbye," and Barkovis was wafted back toward his mirrored globe.