Microcosmic God (39 page)

With a sob I tore open the repair doors in front of the water jacket, squeezed myself in, hugging the plates. It was hotter than the furnace in Hell’s cellar in there, even with an insulated spacesuit on. But what did I care about that? I was going to die anyway. I might as well die doing something about it.

But I’d already done it. The purple glow faded and died, and I knew I was safe. I kissed the hot plates, and I’ll have scarred lips for the rest of my life because of it. I broke down and cried like a baby.

It must have been an hour later when I crawled out and pulled myself together. As I climbed out of the suit and strapped it up and turned on the grav again, I thought deliriously of being alive again. Yes, and not only that—rich! Any way you look at it—suppose I was, as I had guessed, possessed of a neutral electric charge? Why, the biggest passenger lines in the System would bid against each other for me! And more—if I handled it right, I could grab me the Space Prize for the most important contribution to space commerce when this five-year period was up—five hundred thousand bucks, no less, on the very strong chance that my adventure had some hint in it that the lab boys could develop into something salable. No more worries! No more debts!

And that’s how I came in to Eros, laughing like a loon and calling up every newspaper and laboratory in the place. They sent their scientists to look over the old can, and they wined me and dined me and after they found what they found in the ship they very nearly laughed me out of the System. Why?

Well, it’s this way. The purple light signal was all right. The quench-field was all right. And there
had
been an imminent atomic explosion
in the ship. But not in the ship’s power plant. I shouldn’t have thought of bailing out. I shouldn’t, being a mere space pilot, have tried to think I was an atomic physicist. And—I shouldn’t have opened my face about it. Because that atomic explosion was building up in the power plant of my
spacesuit
. And I killed it by crawling into the heart of the ship’s big and potent quench-field.

S
LIMMY
C
OB AND
his hair stood up short, tough and wiry. His eyes were slitted like his mouth, both emitting, from his dark face, thin lines of blue-white. “Blow!” he gritted, and his finger tightened on the trigger of the snub-nosed weapon he held.

The other man in the ship raised his face by making his pillar of neck disappear into great hunched shoulders. I was afraid of this, he thought, and his fingers froze over the control panel. “Better put that toy away,” he said softly.

“I want a chance to unload it,” said Slimmy, and he moved the muzzle coldly across the back of Bell Bellew’s hairless skull. “And I’ll sure get my chance unless you get out of that bucket seat and let me land the ship. Ain’t kiddin’, son.”

Bell grinned tightly, jammed his knees into the recesses provided for them under the board, and with one dazzling movement threw two switches. The gravity plates under Slimmy’s feet went dead and those in the overhead whipped the little man upward. He hung there, spitting and swearing like an angry kitten. Wrenching one pinned arm away, he aimed and fired. An opaque white liquid squirted downward, lathering the big man’s skull, running down over his ears and eyes, down his neck. Bell swore chokingly, clawing at his face. He felt swiftly over the panel, his practiced fingers finding the right switches as if they were tipped with eyes. Slimmy fell heavily to the deck plates, and Bell pounced on him.

Great fingers wrapped themselves around Slimmy’s throat, through which gasped the words, “Dammit! Why didn’t I try to kill you outright instead of poisoning you?” His jaws champed, and his slot of a mouth closed as his slitted eyes opened wide and began to pop.

On the arid, shining planet below the silver ship, three naked, leather-skinned Martians crouched around a compact recording
instrument, their implacable logical minds cubbyholing the above happenings. Their recorder, receiving by means of a tight beam vibration from the control room of the Earthlings’ ship, showed in its screen every detail of the chamber, clearly sounded every word. A slight drift of the ship above moved it away from the spy beam, and the signals faded out. One of the Martians bent swiftly to the instrument while the others spoke in their high, monotonous voices.

“They are unaccountable as ever,” said the first. His words were spoken syllable by syllable, with no emphasis on any of them, with no rise or fall of tone at the end of his sentence. The language of Mars is necessarily that way, since Martians are tone-deaf.

“It is beyond understanding,” said the other, “that these two humans, who have come from the Solar System to this planet of Procyon, should have lived so amicably together until the day they arrive here on Artna, and then strive to kill one another.”

“At least,” said the first, “we have discovered their purpose in coming here.”

“Yes. I trust that they will meet with no success.”

“If they fail, they will have done no more than we have. The Artnans are far from hostile, but guard their secret closely. However, it seems reasonable to me to dispatch these Earthmen. Their presence here accomplishes nothing for us.”

The third Martian turned from the still-dead recording machine at this. “I would advise against that,” he piped. “He,” by the way, is a term of convenience. Martians are parthenogenetic, or self-germinating females. Variation of racial strains is accomplished by a periodic mutual absorption. “Earthmen, involved and unnecessary as their thought-processes are, have achieved a certain degree of development. Hampered by such inefficient and wandering mentalities, they could only have developed so far by possessing some unexplained influence over the laws of chance. Should that quality be used here, they might discover the secret we are after—how the Artnans produce U-235 so cheaply that they can undersell Martian and Terrestrial atomic fuel.”

“There is reason in that,” said the first Martian, than which there is no higher compliment to a Martian. “If we cannot discover the
secret ourselves, we may conceivably secure it from any who get it before us.” He turned back to his machine, but to no avail. The little silver ship had disappeared over the horizon, and the Martian spy ray was strictly a sight-line proposition.

When the blue began to show through Slimmy’s tanned skin, Bell Bellew let go the little man’s throat, took one wizened ear between each great forefinger and thumb, and began to rap on the deck plates with Slimmy’s skull. A little of this, and the gun toter called it quits. Bell sat on his prostrate shipmate and grinned broadly.

“Get off,” wheezed Slimmy. “I feel all crummy, lying under this big pile of—”

Bell put a hand under his chin and slammed the wiry head on the deck again.

“O.K.—O.K. You got me. Now what?”

“What was it you loaded that gun with?” asked Bill.

“Zinc stearate, lug, in an emulsion of carbohydrates and hydrogen oxide. I couldn’t think of anything you needed more or liked less.”

“Soap and water,” nodded Bell. “Couldn’t believe it, that’s all, coming from you.” He climbed off. “Enough horseplay, little one. We got to get to work. We’re over the horizon, anyway. That spy ray of theirs won’t see any more of this dray-ma.”

Slimmy got his feet under him uncertainly, and shook his spinning head. “Now that we’re here, what do we do?”

“We land as near as we can get to the Artnan’s transmutation plant and see if we can get a gander how to make U-235 out of U-238.”

“You really believe they can do that?”

“They must. I used to think they mined it, but they don’t. Artna has an atmosphere much like Earth’s, except that there’s more xenon and neon and less nitrogen in the air. Also considerable water; and you know as well as I do that ’235 can’t exist where there’s water.”

“I dunno,” said Slimmy. “The fact that they produce so much, so cheaply, is a contradiction in terms. Uranium is a little more plentiful here than it is on Earth, but it has less than Mars. And the ratio of ’238 to ’235 is 140 to 1, same as anywhere else. Damn, boy,” he
burst out suddenly, “won’t it be something if we crack this racket?”

“Sure will,” breathed Bell.

The simple words bore a weight of profound meaning, for in spite of their skylarking tendencies, Cob and Bellew never belittled the importance of their mission. Its history went back nearly five hundred years, to the ill-fated days when Earth first flung her pioneer ships out into space, to bring back their tales of other, older civilizations. They found the dead remains of titans of Jupiter, and they brought back miles of visigraph records from the steaming swamps of Venus. But from Mars they brought undreamed-of power; a beam of broadcast energy from the old red planet that seemed inexhaustible. Earthmen were free to come and go; Earthmen saw the broadcasting towers that gave them their power, and the measureless stores of purest U-235 that fed it. The only thing they were not allowed to see was the plant which supplied the ’235. Earth did not care much about that—why should they? They got power from Mars for a fraction of what it cost them to produce it themselves, so they took the Martian power and shut down their own plants.

Of course, there were one or two small rights which the Martians exacted in exchange—little matters concerning the rights to Earth’s mineral resources, occasional requests to the effect that Earthmen must stop researches in certain directions, must prevent the publication of certain books, must limit their travel in certain directions … The edicts came far apart, and were applied with gentle and efficient firmness. Occasionally a group of Earthly hotheads would find reason to resent the increasing Martian influence. They were disciplined, usually by the greater mass of their own race, the hypnotized sheep who blathered of “beneficent dictatorship”; quoted interminably the Mars-schooled leader of men who burned his speeches into the souls of all—Hyatte Grove, who said, “To Mars we owe our power, our transportation, our every industry. To Mars we owe our daily bread, our warless, uneventful, steadily progressive lives. The Martian power beam is the beating heart of our world.”

Earthmen outnumbered Martians ten to one. Martians outlived Earthmen eight to one. The advantage was with Mars. The Martian conquest was applied without blood, without pain. There was no
war of worlds, no great fleet of ray-equipped ships. There was just the warming, friendly power beam, and the great generosity of Earth’s “Elder Sister.” Generation after generation of men lived and died, and each of them was gradually led deeper into the slow-spun web of the red planet. Earth entered into a new era, one of passive peace, submission, slavery.

Some men knew it for what it was, and did not care. Some cared, but could think of nothing to do about it. Some did something about it, and were quietly killed. Most of humanity didn’t bother about what happened. You were born and cared for. You grew up and were given a job. You were comfortable. Sometimes you were allowed to marry and have children, if it was all right with Mars. Married or single, there was room for everyone. When you were too old to be useful, you begged and were cared for by your fellows—that was easy, for everyone had so much. Then you died, and they dropped your carcass into the disintegrating furnaces. So what difference could it make whether man or Martian ran the show?

When man owned the Earth, you were told, he made a mess of it. No one killed now, or stole or broke any law. It was better. No one thought very deeply or clearly; no one had ambition, pride, freedom. That was better, too—for Mars. Mars grew fat on Earth’s endeavor.

But some Earthmen didn’t know when they were well off. They read the forbidden books, and studied the forbidden sciences, and most of them were killed off before they could add anything; but some did, and in a few centuries they had accomplished something. They knew these things:

Earth had a soul of her own, and they were determined to restore it to her.

Mars was the master—but Mars herself was a slave! And power had enslaved the red planet even as it had Earth. A thousand years and more before the first clumsy Earth ships had landed on Mars. Mars, too, had had great plants for the transmutation of ’238 into ’235. But one night an object was found on the Great Plain near the city of Lanamarn. It had appeared without a whisper; it was an irregular cylinder containing various simple objects—spheres, cubes, triangular
and square plane surfaces of a tough alloy. Each was marked by a symbol. The Martians experimented with the things, drew some shrewd conclusions, and deposited other objects in the cylinder, replacing the cap. There was a shrill whine; on removing the cap again, the Martians found that their offerings had disappeared and were replaced by still other objects, each of which also bore a symbol.

After long and painstaking effort, a written language was established between Mars and the mystery from space which had sent the cylinder. The Martians learned that it had come from Artna, a planet of the Procyon system, and that the method of transmission was by way of the probability wave, a scientific refinement beyond the understanding even of Mars. It worked on the principle that matter cannot be destroyed; if it is annihilated in one portion of space, it must necessarily appear somewhere else. The transmission is instantaneous; as soon as it is negated at its source, it simply occurs at its destination.

And the Artnans had a proposition, to wit: Perhaps there was some little thing the Martians would like in return for the boron which showed up so strongly on the Artnan’s teleospectrographs. The Martians sent out a sample of U-238 and asked if the Artnans could transmute it, in bulk, to U-235. The Artnans could, and did. They cheerfully sent plans for construction of a tremendous plant on the plain. U-238 was dumped into hoppers, stored by machinery in bins deep in the heart of the apparatus, and disappeared. Elsewhere in the plant pure ’235 poured out in pulverized, greenish-black abundance.

So Martian transmutation plants shut down, and Mars used Artnan atomic fuel exclusively. While boron was cheap, the arrangement was greatly to Mars’ advantage. But the Artnans easily realized their advantage when they had cornered the power market, and they jumped the price. They kept it at just the level that would make it impossible for the Martians to reopen their own plants, until they had nearly exhausted the Martians’ supply of both uranium and boron. They would accept no substitute for the boron; Mars faced an extreme economic reversal when the fortunate fact of communications with Earth was established. Hence Mars’ economic penetration of Earth’s
resources; and now, Mars could afford to sit back and enjoy her position. Earthmen slaved in the boron mines; cargo after cargo of Terrestrial uranium was freighted to Mars to feed the maw of the gigantic “transmutation” plant on the Great Plain.