Triplanetary
it braked its terrific speed. A third of the circumference of Nevia's
mighty globe was traversed before the velocity of the craft could be
reduced sufficiently to make a landing possible. Then, approaching the
twilight zone, the vessel dived vertically downward, and it became
evident that Nevia was neither entirely aqueous nor devoid of
intelligent life. For the blunt nose of the space-ship was pointing
toward what was evidently a half-submerged city, a city whose buildings
were flat-topped, hexagonal towers, exactly alike in size, shape, color,
and material. These buildings were arranged as the cells of a honeycomb
would be if each cell were separated from its neighbors by a relatively
narrow channel of water, and all were built of the same white metal.
Many bridges and more tubes extended through the air from building to
building, and the watery "streets" teemed with surface craft, and with
submarines.
The pilot, stationed immediately below the conical prow of the
space-ship, peered intently through the thick windows of crystal-clear
metal which afforded unobstructed vision in every direction except
vertically upward and behind him. His four huge and contractile eyes
were active, each operating independently in sending its own message to
his peculiar but capable brain. One was watching the instruments, the
others scanned narrowly the immense, swelling curve of the ship's belly,
the water upon which his vessel was to land, and the floating dock to
which it was to be moored. Four hands--if hands they could be
called--manipulated levers and wheels with infinite delicacy of touch,
and with scarcely a splash the immense mass of the Nevian sky-wanderer
struck the water and glided to a stop within a foot of its exact berth.
Four mooring bars dropped neatly into their sockets and the
captain-pilot, after locking his controls in neutral, released his
safety straps and leaped lightly from his padded bench to the floor.
Scuttling across the floor and down a runway upon his four short,
powerful, heavily scaled legs, he slipped smoothly into the water and
flashed away, far below the surface. For Nevians are true amphibians.
Their blood is cold; they use with equal comfort and efficiency gills
and lungs for breathing; their scaly bodies are equally at home in the
water or in the air; their broad, flat feet serve equally well for
running about upon a solid surface or for driving their stream-lined
bodies through the water at a pace few of our fishes can equal.
Through the water the Nevian commander darted along, steering his course
accurately by means of his short, vaned tail. Through an opening in a
wall he sped and along a submarine hallway, emerging upon a broad ramp.
He scurried up the incline and into an elevator which lifted him to the
top floor of the hexagon, directly into the office of the Secretary of
Commerce of all Nevia.
"Welcome, Captain Nerado!" The Secretary waved a tentacular arm and the
visitor sprang lightly upon a softly cushioned bench, where he lay at
ease, facing the official across his low, flat "desk." "We congratulate
you upon the success of your final trial flight. We received all your
reports, even while you were traveling with many times the velocity of
light. With the last difficulties overcome, you are now ready to start?"
"We are ready," the captain-scientist replied, soberly. "Mechanically,
the ship is as nearly perfect as our finest minds can make her. She is
stocked for two years. All the iron-bearing suns within reach have been
plotted. Everything is ready except the iron. Of course the Council
refused to allow us any of the national supply--how much were you able
to purchase for us in the market?"
"Nearly ten pounds...."
"Ten pounds! Why, the securities we left with you could not have bought
two pounds, even at the price then prevailing!"
"No, but you have friends. Many of us believe in you, and have dipped
into our own resources. You and your fellow scientists of the expedition
have each contributed his entire personal fortune; why should not some
of the rest of us also contribute, as private citizens?"
"Wonderful--we thank you. Ten pounds!" The captain's great triangular
eyes glowed with an intense violet light. "A full year of cruising. But
... what if, after all, we should be wrong?"
"In that case you shall have consumed ten pounds of irreplaceable
metal." The Secretary was unmoved. "That is the viewpoint of the Council
and of almost everyone else. It is not the waste of treasure they object
to; it is the fact that ten pounds of iron will be forever lost."
"A high price truly," the Columbus of Nevia assented, "And after all, I
may be wrong."
"You probably are--of course you are wrong," his host made a startling
answer. "It is practically certain--it is almost a demonstrable
mathematical fact--that no other sun within hundreds of thousands of
light-years of our own has a planet. In all probability Nevia is the
only planet in the entire Universe. We are the only intelligent life in
the Universe. But there is one chance in numberless millions that,
somewhere with the cruising range of your newly perfected space-ship,
there may be an iron-bearing planet upon which you can effect a landing,
and it is upon that infinitesimal chance that some of us are staking a
portion of our wealth. We expect no return whatever, but if you _should_
by some miracle happen to find stores of iron somewhere in space, what
then? Deep seas being made shallow, civilization extending itself over
the globe, science advancing by leaps and bounds, Nevia becoming
populated as she should be peopled--that, my friend, is a chance well
worth taking!"
The Secretary called in a group of guards, who escorted the small
package of priceless metal to the space-ship, and before the massive
door was sealed the friends bade each other farewell.
" ... I will keep in touch with you on the ultra-wave," the Captain
concluded. "After all, I do not blame the Council for refusing to allow
the other ship to go with us. Ten pounds of iron will be a fearful loss
to the world. If we _should_ find iron, however, see to it that the
other vessel loses no time in following us."
"No fear of that! If you find iron all space will be full of vessels, as
soon as they can possibly be built--good-bye!"
The last opening was sealed and Nerado shot the great vessel into the
air. Up and up, out beyond the last tenuous trace of atmosphere, on and
on through space it flew with ever-increasing velocity until Nevia's
gigantic blue sun had been left so far behind that it became a splendid
blue-white star. Then, projectors cut off to save the precious iron
whose disintegration furnished them power, for week after week Captain
Nerado and his venturesome crew of scientists drifted idly through the
illimitable void. Sun after sun, as visible in their ultra-instruments
as though the flying vessel were moving slower than light, they studied
without finding a single planet.
Three months passed. Nerado had already applied the slight power which
was to swing the vessel around in an immense circle, back toward his
native world. In that course he was rapidly approaching a sun, an
ordinary G-type dwarf, whose spectrum revealed a blaze of lines of the
precious element for which he was searching. Now at close observing
range--he had long since abandoned his former eager habit of studying a
sun as soon as it showed the tiniest perceptible disk in his most
powerful telescope--he turned on his powerful visiray beam without
enthusiasm, swung it upon that very commonplace sun, and shrieked aloud
in exultation. Not only one planet had that yellowish luminary--it had
six, seven, eight; yes, possibly nine or ten; and several of those
planets were themselves apparently centers of attraction around which
were circling other tiny worlds! Nerado thrilled with joy as he applied
a full retarding force, and every creature aboard that great vessel had
to peer into a plate or through a telescope, before he could believe
that planets other than Nevia did in reality exist!
Velocity checked to the merest crawl, as space-speed goes, and with
electro-magnetic detector screens full out, the Nevian vessel crept
toward our sun. Finally the detectors encountered an obstacle, a
conductive substance which the patterns showed conclusively to be
practically pure iron. Iron--an enormous mass of it--floating alone out
in space! Without waiting to investigate the nature, appearance, or
structure of the precious mass, Nerado ordered power into the converters
and drove an enormous softening field of force upon the object--a force
of such a nature that it would condense the metallic iron into an
allotropic modification of much smaller bulk; a red, viscous, extremely
dense and heavy liquid which could be stored conveniently in his tanks.
No sooner had the precious fluid been stored away than the detectors
again broke into an uproar. In one direction was an enormous mass of
iron, scarcely detectable; in another a great number of smaller masses;
in a third an isolated mass, comparatively small in size. Space seemed
to be full of iron, and Nerado drove his most powerful beam toward
distant Nevia and sent an exultant message.
"We have found iron--easily obtained and in unthinkable quantity--not in
fractions of milligrams, but in millions upon unmeasured millions of
tons! Send our sister ship here as once!"
"Nerado!" The captain was called to one of the observation plates as
soon as he had opened his key. "I have been investigating the mass of
iron now nearest us, the small one. It is an artificial structure, a
small space-boat, and there are three creatures in it--monstrosities
certainly, but they must possess some intelligence or they could not be
navigating space."
"What? Impossible!" exclaimed the chief explorer. "Probably, then, the
other was--but no matter, we had to have the iron. Bring the boat in
without converting it, so that we may study at our leisure both the
beings and their mechanisms," and Nerado swung his own visiray beam into
the emergency boat, seeing there the armored figures of Clio Marsden and
the two Triplanetary officers.
"They are indeed intelligent," Nerado commented, as he detected and
silenced Costigan's ultra-beam communicator. "Not, however, as
intelligent as I had supposed," he went on, after studying the peculiar
creatures and their tiny space-ship more in detail. "They have immense
stores of iron, yet use it for nothing other than building material.
They apparently have a rudimentary knowledge of ultra-waves, but do not
use them intelligently--they cannot neutralize even these ordinary
forces we are now employing. They are of course more intelligent than
the lower ganoids, or even than some of the higher fishes, but by no
stretch of the imagination can they be compared to us. I am quite
relieved--I was afraid that in my haste I might slay members of a highly
developed race."
The helpless boat, all her forces neutralized, was brought up close to
the immense flying fish. There flaming knives of force sliced her neatly
into sections and the three rigid armored figures, after being bereft of
their external weapons, were brought through the air-locks and into the
control room, while the pieces of their boat were stored away for future
study. The Nevian scientists first analyzed the air inside the
space-suits of the Terrestrials, then removed without ado the protective
covering of the captives.
Costigan--fully conscious through it all and now able to move a little,
since the peculiar temporary paralysis was wearing off--braced himself
for he knew not what shock, but it was needless; their grotesque captors
were not torturers. The air, while somewhat less dense than earth's and