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DAUGHTERS
OF DOOM
By H. B. HICKEY
Deep in space lay a weird and threatening world. And it was there that Ben Sessions found the evil daughters . . .
Beyond Ventura B there was no life; there was nothing but one worn out sunafter another, each with its retinue of cold planets and its trail of darkasteroids. At least that was what the books showed, and the books had beenwritten by men who knew their business. Yet, despite the books and the menwho had written them, Ben Sessions went past Ventura B, deliberately andall alone and knowing that the odds were against his returning alive.
He went because of a file clerk's error. More correctly, he went as thefinal result of a chain of events which had begun with the clerk's mistake.
The clerk's name was Gilbert Wayne and he worked at the Las VegasInterplanetary Port. It was Wayne's job to put through the orders forroutine overhaul of interplanetary rockets. Usually Wayne was quiteefficient, but even efficient men have bad days, and on one of those daysWayne had removed from the active list the name of Astra instead of itssister ship, the Storan.
The very next morning the Astra had been turned over to Maintenance.Maintenance asked no questions. It was that department's job to take theship apart, fix what needed fixing, and put it. Ten minutes later Jacobssaw Armando Gomez was the mechanic detailed to check the rocket tubes.
Gomez, who always got that job because he was small and slender, dutifullydropped his instruments into his overall pockets and crawled into the leftfiring tube. Half an hour later he stuck his head out of the tube andyelled to Jacobs, who was in charge of the job:
"Amigo! How many hours this ship she got?"
Jacobs ran his finger down a chart and discovered to his surprise that theAstra had only two hundred hours on its log since the last overhaul.Ordinarily a ship was checked each thousand hours. He scratched his headbut decided that if Operations wanted the Astra tuned it was none of hisbusiness. So he told Gomez not to ask useless questions and to get back inthe tube.
Anyone else but Gomez would have obeyed orders and forgotten all about it.Ten minutes later Jacobs saw Armando's head appear.
"Amigo!" Gomez shouted. "How many hours?"
"Two hundred!" Jacobs shouted back, knowing he would have no peace untilGomez was answered. "Now get to work! We ain't got all year."
But Gomez was out of the tube again in five minutes and yelling for theforeman.
"What do you want now?" Jacobs demanded. He swung himself up on the catwalkbeside Gomez.
"Something very funny in here, amigo," Gomez replied. "One plate she is tooclean."
"Less work for you," Jacobs grunted. "So why complain?"
Nevertheless he took a look at the plate, which was near the mouth of thetube. It should have been lightly encrusted with the oxides of rocket fuel.Instead, it was only beginning to dull, in strange contrast to itsneighbors which were welded to it.
"That is queer," Jacobs muttered.
"_Si._ As you say, amigo. Queer."
Once Jacob's interest was aroused he was also not one to let a matter drop;he told Gomez to work on another tube while he consulted the front office.The front office was not especially interested, but at Jacobs' insistencethey called in a metallurgist. The metallurgist, whose name was Britton,was fortunately a thorough young man. He ordered the plate removed and sentto his laboratory for complete analysis.
After that things happened fast. Britton scanned the analysis of the plateand without hesitation called in his superior who ordered a second testjust to be safe, and then notified Washington. Washington turned it over toInterplanetary Intelligence, of which Carson was chief of staff.
One week later Ben Sessions stood before Carson's desk.
* * * * *
Sessions was only thirty-five, but in his few years with "Two Eyes," as theorganization was known, he had rung up an enviable record. Tall, lithe,darkly handsome, he was well liked by the men who worked with him. At themoment there was a puzzled frown on his face, lengthening the line made bya scar which ran from his forehead down the side of his nose. The scar wasthe result of a crash landing on Neptune.
"I don't get it, sir," he said. "A single plate from a rocket tube . . . Sowhat if it didn't oxidize?"
"That makes me feel much better." Carson smiled, an inner bitterness makingthe smile wry. "I didn't get it either," he went on. "A mechanic namedGomez got it; a foreman named Jacobs got it; a lab man named Britton gotit; but the chief of "Two Eyes" missed the boat. I feel swell about that."He rose suddenly and hammered his fist on the desk. "Every one of us inIntelligence ought to be cashiered!"
"Take it easy," Ben cautioned. "All because of that plate?"
Carson slumped back into his chair. "Yes. And because we have failed in ourduty. Our only hope is that we may have time to make it up. I'll give youthe facts:
"Those tubes are made of Virium, but even Virium develops scale. After nextweek it will develop even more, because next week we make the changeover tothe new fuel. If Wayne had made his mistake two weeks later there wouldhave been so much deposit in the tubes that Gomez would not have noticedthe difference.
"Now, Virium is one of the most standardized products in the world. SoGomez was rightly astonished that the tube didn't oxidize evenly. Jacobssaw further. Virium is the toughest metal we know of; if this piece wastougher it might be a discovery of major importance. So Britton analyzedthe plate."
"Now we get to the point," Sessions grinned.
Carson stabbed a finger at him. "Right. And the point is that this onesection of plate is not Virium! In fact, it is a substance which we arepositive does not exist in our system!"
"Wait a second. What do you mean by 'system'?"
"I mean every single bit of matter that lies between here and Ventura B."
"Maybe it's not a natural substance. Not an element."
"We thought of that. It's an element, and one we know nothing of."
"Do you mind if I sit down, sir?" Ben asked suddenly.
The enormity of the thing had struck him, almost dazzling him with itsimplications. Carson laughed bitterly and waved him to a chair, then wenton talking.
"Precisely, Ben. The question is: How did this strange substance get intothe tube of an Interplanetary rocket called the Astra? To answer that wechecked on the ship. The Astra is one of the few ships which have ever gonebeyond Ventura B!"
"I almost expected to hear that," Sessions said.
"It adds up, all right, doesn't it? A foreign substance, a foreign system.But this substance had been made into a plate. That means the work ofintelligent beings."
"Who took the Astra on that trip?" Sessions asked, his body tense.
"A licensed space explorer named Murchison. Two others went with him but hereturned alone. Claims they fell into a chasm."
"But no explorer has reported life beyond Ventura B," Sessions said, takingup the thread of thought. He whistled softly. "You must have been busy thislast week."
"Busy is no word for it. It's only three years since anyone has beenallowed to go outside our system. For the purpose of science InterstellarFlight granted permits to six licensed explorers. All returned with chartsshowing only a desolate waste. In our own quiet way we have checked on eachof these six men, including Murchison, in the last week."
"And . . . ?"
"And we discovered something very interesting. The six who returned frombeyond Ventura B were not the same six who went! They are identical inevery facial, bodily, and mental characteristic, identical enough to fool
even the families of the lost explorers. But when we secretly photographedthem with infra-red light we found that their skins contained elementsforeign to our system!"
Ventura A and its sister star were the twin beacons that marked the lastoutposts of the Earth System. Past them was only a trackless waste ofinter-stellar space. Ben Sessions knew that the charts he carried wereprobably worse than useless, were likely downright traps.
He and Carson had planned the trip. Carson had wanted to send a fightingfleet but Ben had opposed the idea. Wayne's mistake had led them to theuncovering of a gigantic hoax, a hoax which could have only a sinisterpurpose. Somewhere in the void ahead were sentient beings. To send a fleetwould be to let them know that their