Leinster, Murray - Planet of Sand

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2024-12-23 0 0 161.04KB 24 页 5.9玖币
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PLANET OF SAND
I
THERE WAS bright, pitiless light in the prison corridor of the Stallifer, There was the hum of the air
renewal system. Once in every so often there was a cushioned thud as some item of the space ship's
machinery operated a relay somewhere. But it is very tedious to be in a confinement cell. Stan Huckley—
lieutenant, j.g., Space Guard, under charges and restraint—found it rather more than tedious. He should
have been upheld, perhaps, by the fact that he was innocent of the charges made against him by Rob
Torren, formerly his immediate superior officer. But the feeling of innocence did not help. He sat in his
cell, holding himself still with a grim resolution. But a deep, a savage, a corrosive anger grew and grew
and grew within him. It had been growing in just this manner for weeks.
The Stallifer bored on through space. From her ports the cosmos was not that hostile, immobile curtain of
unwinking stars the early interstellar travelers knew. At twelve hundred light-speeds with the Bowdoin-
Hall field collapsing forty times per second for velocity control, the stars moved visibly. Forty glimpses of
the galaxy about the ship in every second made it seem that the .universe were always in view. And the
stars moved. The nearest ones moved swiftly and the farther ones more slowly, but all moved. From force
of habit the motion gave the feeling of perspective, so that the stars appeared to be distributed in three
dimensions. From the ship they seemed very small,
like fireflies. All the cosmos seemed small and almost cosy. The Rim itself appeared no more than a few
miles away. The Stallifer headed for Earth and Rhesi II. She had been days upon her journey; she had
come a distance which it would stagger the imagination to compute.
In his cell, though, Stan Buckley could see only four walls. There was no variation of light; no sign of
morning or night or afternoon. At intervals, a guard brought hurl food. That was all—except that his deep
and fierce and terrible anger grew until it seemed that he would go mad with it.
He had no idea of the hour or the day when, quite suddenly, the pitiless light in the corridor dimmed. Then
the door he had not seen since his entrance into the prison corridor clanked open. Footsteps came toward
the cell. It was not the guard who fed him. He knew that much. It was a variation of routine, which should
not have varied until his arrival on Earth.
He sat still, his hands clenched. A figure loomed outside the cell door. He looked up coldly. Then fury so
great as almost to be frenzy filled him. Rob Torren looked in at him.
There was silence. Stan Buckley's muscles tensed until it seemed that the bones of his body creaked. Then
Rob Torren said caustically:
"It's lucky there are bars, or there'd be no chance to talk! Either you'd kill me and be beamed for
murder, or I'd kill you and Esther would think me a murderer. I've come to get you out of this if you'll
accept my terms."
Stan Buckley made an inarticulate, growling noise.
"Oh, surely!" said Rob Torren. "I denounced you, and I'm the witness against you. At your trial, I'll be
believed and you won't. You'll be broken and disgraced. Even Esther wouldn't marry you under such
circumstances. Or maybe," he added sardonically, "maybe you wouldn't let her."
Stan Buckley licked his lips. He longed so terribly to get his hands about his enemy's throat that he could
hardly hear the other's words.
"The trouble is," said Rob Torren, "that she probably wouldn't marry me either, if you were disgraced by
my
means. So I offer a bargain. I'll help you to escape—I've got it all arranged—on your word of honor to
fight me. A duel. To the death."
His eyes were cold. His tone was cold. His manner was almost contemptuous. Stan Buckley said hoarsely:
"I'll fight you anywhere, under any conditions!"
"The conditions," Rob Torren told him coldly," are that I will help you to escape. You will then write a
letter to Esther, saying that I did so and outlining the conditions of the duel as we agree upon them. I will,
in turn, write a letter to the Space Guard brass, withdrawing my charges against you. We will fight. The
survivor will destroy his own letter and make use of the other. Do you agree to that?"
"I'll agree to anything," said Stan Buckley fiercely," that will get my hands about your throat!"
Rob Torren shrugged.
"I've turned off the guard photocells," he said shortly. "I've a key for your cell. I'm going to let you out. I
can't afford to kill you except under the conditions I named or I'll have no chance to win Esther. If you kill
me under any other conditions, you'll simply be beamed as a murderer." He paused, and said shortly, "And
I have to come and fight you because a letter from you admitting that I've behaved honorably is the only
possible thing that would satisfy Esther. You give your word to wait until you've escaped and I come for
you before you try to kill me?"
Stan Buckley hesitated a long, long time. Then he said hi a thick voice:
"I give my word."
Without hesitation, Rob Torren put a key in the cell door and turned it. He stood aside. Stan Buckley
walked out, his hands clenched. Torren closed the door and re-locked it. He turned his back and walked
down the corridor. He opened the door at its end. Again he stood aside. Stan Buckley went through.
Torren closed the door, took a bit of cloth from his pocket, wiped off the key, hung it up again on a tiny
hook, with the same bit of cloth threw a switch, and put the cloth back in his pocket.
"The photocells are back on," he said in a dry voice. "They say you're still in your cell. When the guard
con-
tradicts them, you'll seem to have vanished into thin air."
"I'm doing this," said Stan hoarsely, "to get a chance to kill you. Of course I've no real chance to
escape!"
That was obvious. The Stallifer was deep in the void of interstellar space. She traveled at twelve
hundred tunes the speed of light. Escape from the ship itself was absurd. And concealment past
discovery when the ship docked was preposterous.
"That remains to be seen," said Torren coldly. "Come this way."
Down a hallway. He slipped into a narrow doorway, invisible unless one looked. Stan followed. He
found himself in that narrow, compartmented space between the ship's inner and outer skins. A door,
another compartment; another door. Then a tiny airlock—used for the egress or a single man to
inspect or repair such exterior apparatus as the scanners for the ship's vision screens. There was a
heap of assorted apparatus beside the airlock door.
"I prepared for this," said Torren curtly. "There's a spacesuit. Put it on. Here's a meteor miner's space
skid. There are supplies. I brought this stuff as luggage, in watertight cases. I'll fill the cases with my
bath water and get off the ship with the same weight of luggage I had when I came on. That's my
coverup."
"And I?" asked Stan harshly.
"You'll take this chrono. It's synchronized with the ship's navigating clock. At two-two even you push
oft from the outside of the ship. The drive field fluctuates. When it collapses, you'll be outside it.
When it expands—"
Stan Buckley raised his eyebrows. This was clever! The Bowdoin-Hall field which permits of faster
than speed of light travel is like a pulsating bubble expanding and contracting at rates ranging from
hundreds of thousands of times per second to the forty per second of deep space speed. When the
field is expanding, and bars of an artificial allotrope of carbon are acted upon by electrostatic forces
in a certain particular fashion, a ship and all its contents accelerate at a rate so great that it simply has
no meaning. As the field contracts, a ship decelerates again. That is the theory, at any rate. There is no
proof in sensations or instrument readings that such is the case. But velocity is
inversely proportional to the speed of the field's pulsations, and only hi deep space does a ship dare
slow the pulsations too greatly, for fear of complications.
A man in a spacesuit could detach himself from a space ship traveling by the Bowdoin-Hall field,
though. He could float free at the instant of the field's collapse, and be left behind when it expanded
again. But he would be left alone in illimitable emptiness.
"You'll straddle the space skid," said Torren shortly. "It's full-powered—good for some millions of
miles. At two-two exactly the Stallifer will be as close to Khor Alpha as it will go. Khor Alpha's a
dwarf white star that's used as a course marker. It has one planet that the directories say has a
breathable atmosphere, and list as a possible landing refuge, but which they also say is unexamined.
You'll make for that planet and land. You'll make for that planet and wait for me. I'll come!"
Stan Buckley said in soft ferocity:
"I hope so!"
Torren's rage flared.
"Do you think I'm not as anxious to kill you as you are to kill me?"
For an instant the two tensed, as if for a struggle to the death there between the two skins of the space
ship. Then Torren turned away.
"Get in your suit," he said curtly. "I'll get a private flier and come after you as soon as the hearing
about your disappearance is over. Push off at two-two even. Make it exact!"
He went angrily away, and Stan Buckley stared after him, hating him, and then grimly turned to the
apparatus on an untidy heap beside the airlock door.
Five minutes later he opened the outer door of the lock. He was clad in space armor and carried with
him a small pack of supplies—the standard abandon ship kit—and the little space drive unit. The unit
was one of those space skids used by meteor miners—merely a shaft which contained the drive and
power unit, a seat, and a crossshaft by which it was steered. It was absurdly like a hobby-horse for a
man in a spacesuit, and it was totally unsuitable for interplanetary work because it consumed too
much power
when fighting gravity. For Stan, though, starting in mid-space with only one landing to make, it
should be adequate.
He locked the chrono where he could see it on the steering bar. He strapped the supply kit in place.
He closed the airlock door very softly, he waited, clinging to the outer skin of the ship with magnetic
shoes.
The cosmos seemed very small and quite improbable. The specks of light which were suns seemed to
crawl here and there. Because of their motion it was impossible to think of them as gigantic, revening
balls of unquenchable fire. They moved! To all appearances, the Stallifer flowed onward in a cosmos
perhaps a dozen miles in diameter, in which many varicolored fireflies moved with vast deliberations.
The hand of the chrono moved, and moved, and moved. At two-two exactly, Stan pressed the drive
stud. At one instant he and his improbable space steed rested firmly against a thousand-foot hill of
glistening chrome steel. The waverings of the Bowdoin-Hall field were imperceptible. The cosmos
was small and limited and the Stallifer was huge. Then the skid's drive came on. It shot away from the
hull—and the ship vanished as utterly as a blown out candle flame. The universe was so vast as to
produce a cringing sensation hi the man who straddled an absurd small device hi such emptiness, with
one cold white sun— barely near enough to show a disk—and innumerable remote and indifferent
stars on every hand.
On the instant the ship's field contracted and left him outside, Stan had lost the incredible velocity the
field imparts. In the infinitesimal fraction of a second required for the field to finish its contraction
after leaving him, the ship had traveled literally thousands of miles. In the slightly greater fraction of
a second required for it to expand again, it had moved on some millions of miles. By the time Stan's
mind had actually grasped the fact that he was alone in space, the ship from which he had separated
himself was probably fifty of sixty millions of miles away.
He was absolutely secure against recapture, of course. If his escape went unnoticed for even half a
minute, it would take all the ships of all the Space-Guard a thousand years to search the volume of
space in whiich one small space-
suited figure might be found. It was unlikely that his escape would be noticed for hours.
He was very terribly alone. A dwarf white sun glowed palely, many, many millions of miles away.
Stars gazed at him incuriously, separated by light centuries of space.
He started the minute gyroscopes that enabled him to steer the skid. He started hi toward the sun. He
had a planet to find and land on. Of course, Rob Torren could simply have contrived his escape to
emptiness so that he might die and shrivel hi the void, and never, never, never through all eternity be
found again. But somehow, Stan had a vast faith in the hatred which existed between the two of them.
2
IT WAS TWO days later when he approached the solitary planet of Khor Alpha. The air in his spacesuit
had acquired that deadly staleness which is proof that good air is more than merely a mixture of
oxygen and nitrogen. He felt sluggish discomfort which comes of bottled, repurified breathing
mixture. As the disk of the planet grew large, he saw little or nothing to make him feel more cheerful.
The planet rotated as he drew near, and it seemed to be absolutely featureless. The terminator—the
shadow line as sunlight encroached on the planet's night side—was a perfect line. There were, then,
no mountains. There were no clouds. There seemed to be no vegetation. There was, though, a tiny
polar icecap—so small that at first he did not discover it. It was not even a dazzling white, but a mere
whitishness where a polar cap should be, as if it were hoar frost instead of ice.
He went slanting down to match the planet's ground speed hi his approach. Astride the tiny space
skid, he looked rather like an improbable witch astride an incredible broomstick. And he was very,
very tired.
Coming up in a straight line, half the planet's disk was night. Half the day side was hidden by the
planet's bulge.
He actually saw no more than a quarter of the surface at this near approach, and that without
magnification. Any large features would have been spotted from far away, but he had given up hope
of any variation from monotony when —just as he was about to enter the atmosphere—one dark
patch hi the planet's uniformly dazzling white surface appeared at the very edge of day. It was at the
very border of the dawn belt. He could only be sure of its existence, and that it had sharp, specifically
straight edges. He saw rectangular extensions from the main mass of it Then he hit atmosphere, and
the thin stuff thrust at him violently because of his velocity, and he blinked and automatically turned
his head aside, so that he did not see the dark patch again before his descent put it below the horizon.
Even so near, no features, no natural formations appeared. There was only a vast brightness below
him. He could make no guess as to his height nor—after he had slowed until the wind against his
body was not detectable through the spacesuit—of his speed with relation to the ground. It was
extraordinary. It occurred to him to drop something to get some idea, even if a vague one, of his
altitude above the ground.
He did, an oil soaked rag from the tool kit. It went fluttering down and down—and abruptly vanished,
relatively a short distance below him. It had not landed. It had been blotted out.
Tired as he was, it took him minutes to think of turning on the suit microphone which would enable
him to hear sounds hi this extraordinary world. But when he flicked the switch he heard a dull,
droning, moaning noise which was unmistakable. Wind. Below him there was a sandstorm. He was
riding just above its upper surface. He could not see the actual ground because there was an opaque
wall of sand between. There might be five hundred feet between him and solidity, or five thousand, or
there might be no actual solid, immovable ground at all. In any case, he could not possibly land.
He rose again and headed for the dark area he had noted. But a space skid is not intended for use in
atmosphere. Its power is great, to be sure, when its power unit is filled. But Stan had come a very
long way indeed since his departure from the Stallifer. And his drive had blown a fuse, once,
which cost him power. Unquestionably, the blown fuse had been caused by the impinging of a
Bowdoin-Hall field upon the skid. Some other space ship that the Stallifer, using Khor Alpha as a
course guide, had flashed past the one planet system at many hundred tunes the speed of light. The
pulsations of its drive field had struck the skid and drained its drive of power, and unquestionably had
registered the surge. But it was not likely that it would be linked with Stan's disappearance. The other
ship might be headed for a star system which was light centuries from Earth, and a minute—relatively
minute—joggte of its meters would not be a cause for comment. The real seriousness of the affair was
that the skid had drained power before its fuse blew.
That property of a Bowdoin-Hall field, incidentally— its trick of draining power from any drive unit
in its range— is the reason that hampers its use save in deep space. Liners have to be elaborately
equipped with fuses lest in shorting each other's drive they wreck their own. In interplanetary work,
fuses are not even practical because they might be blown a hundred times in a single voyage. Within
solar systems high frequency pulsations are used, so that no short can last more than the hundred-
thousandth of a second, in which not even allotropic graphite can be ruined.
Stan, then, was desperately short of power and had to use it in a gravitational field which was
prodigally wasteful of it. He had to rise high above the sandstorm before he saw the black area again
at the planet's very rim. He headed for it in the straightest of straight lines. As he drove, the power
gauge needle flickered steadily over toward zero. A meteor miner does not often use as much as one
earth gravity acceleration, and Stan had to use that much merely to stay aloft. The black area, too, was
all of a hundred-odd miles away, and after some millions of miles of space travel, the skid was hard
put to make it.
He dived for the black thing as it drew near, and on his approach it appeared simply impossible. It
was a maze, a grid, of rectangular girders upholding a seemingly infinite number of monstrous dead-
black slabs. There was a single layer of those slabs, supported by innumerable spiderly slender
columns. Here, in the dawnbelt, there was no wind and Stan could see clearly. Sloping down, he saw
that ten-
foot columns of some dark metal rose straight and uncompromising from a floor of sand to the height
of three hundred feet or more. At their top was the grid and the slabs, forming a roof some thirty
stories above the ground. There were no underfloors, no crossways, no structural features of any sort
between the sand from which the columns rose and that queer and discontinuous roof.
Stan landed on the ground at the structure's edge. He could see streaks and bars of sky between the
slabs. He looked down utterly empty aisles between the corridors and saw nothing but the columns
and the roof until the shafts merged in the distance. There was utter stillness here. The sand was
untroubled and undisturbed. If the structure were a shelter, it sheltered nothing. Yet it stretched for at
least a hundred miles in at least one direction, as he had seen from aloft. As nearly as he could tell,
there was no reason for its existence and no purpose it could serve. Yet it was not the abandoned
skeleton of something no longer used. It was plainly in perfect repair. The streaks of sky to be seen
between its sections were invariably exact in size and alignment. They were absolutely uniform.
There was no delapidation and no defect anywhere. The whole structure was certainly artificial and
certainly purposeful, and it implied enormous resources of civilization. But there was no sign of its
makers, and Stan could not even guess at the reason for its construction.
But he was too worn out to guess. On board the Staltifer, he'd been so sick with rage that he could not
rest. On the space skid, riding in an enormous loneliness about a dwarf sun whose single planet had
never been examined by men, he had to be alert. He had to find the system's one planet, and then he
had to make a landing with practically no instruments. When he landed at the base of the huge grid,
he examined his surroundings wearily, but with the cautious suspicion needful on an unknown world.
Then he made the sort of camp the situation seemed to call for. He clamped the space skid and his
supplies to his spacesuit belt, lay down hard by one of the columns, and incontinently fell asleep.
He was wakened by a horrific roaring in his earphones. He lay still for one instant. When he tried to
stir, it was only with enormous difficulty that he could move his arms and
legs. He felt as if he were gripped by quicksand. Then suddenly, he was wide awake. He fought
himself free of clinging incumbrances. He had been half-buried in sand. He was in the center of a
roaring swirling sand devil which broke upon the nearby column and built up mounds of sand and
摘要：

PLANETOFSANDITHEREWASbright,pitilesslightintheprisoncorridoroftheStallifer,Therewasthehumoftheairrenewalsystem.Onceineverysooftentherewasacushionedthudassomeitemofthespaceship'smachineryoperatedarelaysomewhere.Butitisverytedioustobeinaconfinementcell.StanHuckley—lieutenant,j.g.,SpaceGuard,undercharg...

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