Was it because the air was poison? But no, he didn’t seem to be poisoned, only unsatisfied. He stood there and blinked in the bright daylight at the lovely trees.
He looked at the brook. The water was laughing, but was it laughing at him? He scooped some up in his fingers, half expecting it to turn into vitriol, but it was cool and moist and pleasant. He opened his helmet air lock and inserted a cup of it, and when he got it through and got the swallow down he was instantly sorry. It came right back up.
It wasn’t that it tasted bad; that would be a relief. It just wasn’t the sort of thing his stomach wanted and his stomach didn’t know why.
This made Chuck a trifle bitter.
A pretty brook, lovely clouds, obvious air. He made a hurried recheck of his oxygen supply and decided he had enough for a couple of months if he was careful of it. But what of his lovely kingdom?
He did not see that he had real live subjects until he had gone nearly a kilometer and then he saw the cluster of huts, neatly blended into a river bend’s trees.
The village probably contained a couple of hundred people or things and Chuck instantly loosened up his gun in its holster and went forward quietly. But if he had just now seen them, they had long since seen him and there wasn’t so much as a pet in that village.
He looked it over. Comical huts, fitted with round thatch roofs, floored with river reeds. There were metal cooking pots and metal weapons. And a real, live fire smoldered in the middle of the main hut. It was common. It was almost uninteresting except that these beings were sentient and skilled in a certain culture.
Perhaps he would not have had any intercourse with them at all if he had not, just as he was leaving, found the old woman.
She was too old to be spry and she was too scared to hide all of her in the hay pile and so Chuck tapped her gently and coaxed her out.
“Oof! Oof!” she screamed, meaning “Don’t kill me!”
Chuck looked her over. The features were not quite right but this creature was a biped, looked remarkably like Earth women and certainly didn’t offer him any menace.
Chuck made her understand, amid many “oofs,” that nothing untoward was intended. His efforts to communicate the facts by signs, that he was the owner of this planet and that these people were his subjects were received round-eyed and interpreted in some outlandish fashion he was never to know.
After a while she finally took him to the village center where a bucket of water stood beside a big stone square and Chuck sat down. He knew he couldn’t drink the water but he wanted to appear mild and tractable, the way a true planet owner should.
She went off and yelled around in the reeds and after some time a number of men, hairy fellows, mostly forehead and biceps, came back, carefully extending their spears to be ready to repel boarders, and finally saw that Chuck sat there mildly enough.
This was all very satisfying to Chuck. This was the way it should be. They considered him a superior being and he began with many “oofs” to convince them how very safe and mild he was and how they would benefit from his rule. They got rather near and finally relaxed enough to ground their spear butts. Chuck grew expansive. He was talking through his electronic speaker, which was turned up rather high, and his voice must have reached a good long ways, for more and more people came curiously to see what was happening.
Finally a young maiden whom Chuck found not at all ugly crept forward and touched his foot. This excited some wonder. She looked bravely up at him and he felt elevated. She took a stick and began to clean the clay off his boots with short pries and Chuck, in middle sentence, found himself getting lighter and lighter. He was a foot off the ground before the end of his uncomprehended paragraph and was beginning to accelerate when his audience took off with one long scream of alarm.
The girl crouched where she had been, looking up. Chuck rose to a hundred feet, going faster, got his jets going at last and came down.
The girl crouched where she had been, looking up. Chuck rose to a hundred feet, going faster, got his jets going at last and came down.
The girl cringed, head bowed, shivering. Chuck touched her hair and then a jet spluttered and he went up once more. Altogether he considered the interview at an entire end. Humiliated, he navigated himself over the center of the village, looked sadly down at the frightened eyes peering from the reeds and then changed his course back to the ship. Enough was enough for one day.
He sat for a long time on his cabin ceiling, thinking about fate that night. He wrote a letter to Isabel in which he confessed himself entirely confounded and disheartened. Before he finished it he was beginning to get mad at Madman Murphy.
Eleven years. Eleven hard, toilsome years for a planet he couldn’t even walk upon!
He crept out about midnight and looked at the stars, holding on hard to the cave lip to keep from flying away into space, and then it occurred to him that he had a legal course.
He went back to it and worked it out. It was true. He was on the extreme perimeter of the galaxy. The star in whose system his planet lay was not, contrary to ordinary behavior, traveling outwards from the hub but was traveling inwards at a fast rate. Elementary calculation showed that it was making some thousand miles a second into the galaxy. If he could claim that this was not, as the contract stated, a system belonging to the Earth Galaxy, then he could have Madman up before the courts and have his money back. With that he could buy another place, a few thousand acres on some proven colonial orb, and he and Isabel could settle down and raise kids. And then he got to thinking about the vagaries of law and the money lawyers cost and realized that Madman Murphy would never have to refund a penny.
This almost crushed him.
He had a planet on which he could not possibly live, whose air he could not breathe, whose water he could not drink, and the owning of it had taken the best of his life. He was almost ready to end it all when he heard a rustling outside.
There was a clink-clink.
Visions of a combat, blaster against spears, drove all thought of suicide away and he helmeted himself promptly and passed through his air lock to find, not warriors, but the girl who had cleaned his boots.
It was hard standing on the ceiling shining a light down upon her. She was very humble. She had a bowl of white liquid which was probably milk and a little piece of bread and she made shivery motions at them.
Instantly Chuck knew he was a god.
Now there have been many men in the human race who have found themselves gods and never once has it failed to bolster their drooping spirits nor spur their lagging wits. She had come like a brave little thing to leave food for the goblin and if she died in the consequence, she had done it all for her village. It was plain.
Chuck hand-holded down his ship side and came near her. He knew better than to try to eat that food and it wasn’t food he was interested in. It was the fact that she walked on the ground and he couldn’t. She had some beads around her neck, metal spheres of some brilliance. He held his hand for them and she took them off and gave them to him. He gave her a fountain pen which had ceased to work and when she accidentally let it go, he brought it down from the ceiling and returned it to her. She tied it with a dress string and there it bobbed, trying to rise.
“Oof, oof,” she said, meaning “Thank you.”
“Thank you,” Chuck said, meaning “Oof, oof.”
He remembered, as he looked at these beads, the clay on his boots and he swiftly put several handfuls of rocks in his pockets. They kept him down. This was nerving. He went for a walk with her in the starlight.
It is certain they did not talk about much. It is also certain that Chuck did a terrible lot of thinking. He did a lot of calculating in an elementary way and then, suddenly, things came right to him.
Madman Murphy had skunked him. There was no recourse. But it had been an adventure.
He was taking her back to the ridge so that she could descend to her valley and tell people it wasn’t so tough talking with gods after all and that they did not always go spinning off into space on you. But just before they reached the place he would leave her she stopped and pointed into a hole in the hill.
There were lots of holes in the hill but she was insistent about this one as one of the local sights and he obliged her and startled her into a screech by turning on a flashlight and shining it down.
He almost screeched himself.
The whole hole was glittering yellow.
Chuck went wonderingly forward and put out a gingerish hand. The entire place was studded with pure metal. Pure yellow metal. Where ore came in veins on Earth, it came in solid elements up here. As far as he could estimate he was looking, down this tunnel centuries old, at about a thousand million tons of metal.
This was what they made into spears and vessels, and he had missed the quality of these items only because spears and vessels get dirty. He was afraid to examine it closer. He could see from where he was that if there was this much in one hole . . .
Chuck took a piece and tested it. But it was very hard. He pounded at it a bit. It was still too hard. He looked at it and let it fall. He put a knife into a crack and tried to pry out a bigger piece and the knife slipped and went up and lay against the roof of the drift.
Chuck stood there and thought about it. Then he raced back to the ship, leaving the girl where she was, and returned carrying whatever was of weight he had been able to grab. He went to work.
Two months later, Chuck Lambert sat behind a big desk in the Universe Building in New York City.
The newspaper reporters even were awed by the proportions of this office and the scientists and businessmen present were very polite.
Chuck had his feet up and sat mostly on the back of his neck.
“Boys,” he said, “you’ve got all the story there. How I made the trip, what I found, what I intend to do. I think that’s about it.”
“Mr. Lambert,” said a Ledger reporter politely, “as a matter of human interest, could you let me have some personal details. Some little thing— You mentioned a girl named Isabel—”
“Married,” said Chuck. “Married yesterday up at the City Hall. That’s why,” he added with a big grin, “I don’t want to drag on here.”
“But this girl on 19453X—” said another reporter.
“Rich. She’ll be richer. They’ll all be rich even if I don’t ever see my subjects again. Now if you don’t mind—”
“Mr. Lambert,” said the business manager of International Flyways, “you are sure you can deliver enough of this material—”
“Enough,” chimed in Ross of Ross Construction, “to make skyscrapers—”
“And bridges—” added the bridge builder.
“And spaceships,” said Intercolonial’s man.
“Gentlemen,” said Chuck, “I towed down a piece of that metal as big as the village men could hack out and melt up for me. That was with crude stuff. Just a sample. I’ve got billions, billions of cubic yards of it and no cost to transport. It’s cheap and since I filed on the rest of the planets in that system, I’m afraid this is a monopoly. But just the same, the price is the same as steel to you. Now if you don’t mind—”
They were satisfied and they filed out, all but one thick-lensed little man.
“Mr. Lambert, I know you are in a hurry, being new-married and all, but I was so far in the back—”
Chuck beamed on him. The little man took heart.
“I’m from Daily Topics, you know,” said the little man. “Our readers . . . well, they like to get a pretty lucid account—”
“Sure,” said Chuck. “Sure.” He waved a hand at the glittering nodules of metal on his desk which were encased in lead holders. He took one out and it promptly lifted and went up to the ceiling where it stuck. Chuck, after a few jumps, got it down again.
“That’s Lambert metal for you,” said Chuck. “Floats. Rises. Negative weight. Point nine-tenths the tensile strength of steel. Can be forged—”
“But I don’t understand what makes it rise,” pleaded the little man.
“Planet 19453X—which I have rechristened Isabel—is part of a renegade system which moved in from another galaxy after some interminable crossing of space. It is traveling toward our hub but it won’t get there for another three or four billion years. Its matter is made of another kind of energy from ours, which, making up in usual atomic and molecular forms, has no affinity or repulsion for our own matter. It is very simple. It just isn’t made of the same kind of energy.”
“But what makes it rise?”
“Planets revolve and things on their surface have centrifugal force. This material still has mass, and so it seeks to rise. Therefore it will make bridges which need no abutments, ships which have to be cargoed to be kept in the atmosphere, skyscrapers which will have to be anchored, not founded—but I am sure you understand.”
The little man blinked. He released one of the balls of Lambert metal and it went up to the ceiling. He fled.
Chuck Lambert went home to Isabel to plan out a ninety-room house on Long Island and five kids.
Madman Murphy has a big picture of Chuck in his window and a fine argument about wildcat planets. But don’t trust him. There was only one 19453X.
The Conroy Diary
The Conroy Diary
IT is with considerable surprise that the researcher into ancient and forgotten lore first encounters the “Conroy Diary.” Inevitably, if he neglects the foreword before perusing the text, he is startled by the flamboyant style, the indelicacy of the anecdotes and the altogether royal presence of mind of the redoubtable Conroy. He will look hurriedly for explanation in the beginning and find it.
“Dear reader,” the foreword of any original edition will say. “Do not be too amazed by the brilliant exploits of our dashing hero. Conroy, alas, lives only in the mind of Fitz Mallory, his creator, and any resemblance to persons, places and planets is purely extraordinary and probably fortuitous.”
It is well that the diary so begins. It was a work of fiction written by one of the most remarkable characters Earth ever produced, the fabulous Fitz Mallory.
In a day when adventure languished and the life of man seemed trite, Fitz Mallory came upon the scene as a God-given boon to mankind. He made an entire generation rock with laughter and gape with amazement, and what is far more important, Fitz Mallory sold the idea of space conquest to the human race.
Mallory’s inevitable good fortune was something of a legend. He was a man of inexhaustible resources, material or mental, and he lavished both upon his race with a hand so prodigal that, once, he nearly wrecked the economy of the United States, a nation of the original Earth.
Since Mallory’s time our race has produced richer and more powerful men, gaudier or more important figures. But none of these people ranked him in the service he performed. In the ensuing hundred thousand years people still recalled Mallory even when they had forgotten his book.
“Conroy’s Diary” makes wild sport of every accomplishment known to man and it particularly plays the buffoon about space travel. To quote it is no purpose here for it can be found rather easily in the libraries of any major galaxy. To tell the story of Fitz Mallory is the thing which needs to be done. He was not, as so many school children seem to believe, a god of an ancient mythology. He was a flesh-and-blood man. Crowned, perhaps, with more than his share of luck and wit, he still had his mortality. His tomb in the Earth National Park is a popular shrine and few days pass when fresh flowers or wreaths are not hung about it by some individual or organization. It is surmounte
d by a statue of Mallory, life-size, garbed in the space gear of that time, his head back in a magnificent laugh. The several times it has been restored have distorted the features a trifle. The garments are a bit chipped, but the laugh is still there. He is indeed Fitz Mallory, Crown Prince of Space.
In piecing together this remarkable man’s life, the historian is quickly struck by the absence of actual facts. So coated, buttered and floodlighted is the reputation that to discover the man under it is difficult.
He seems to have begun his career in an orphan’s home and the record appears to be entirely innocent of proper schooling. But there were not and are not schools to teach what Mallory had to learn.
At ten he was with Krinsky on the Pluto Expedition. Just how he got there is obscure but the logs of Krinsky carry continual mention of a mascot he calls Mr. Luck and it can be assumed that this was Mallory. According to these records and the news stories of the expedition, the fifty-man company found itself to be fifty-one the first day out or, as Krinsky says, fifty and a half.
If he did anything on Pluto, Mallory himself never seems to have mentioned it. But it was one of those fortunate expeditions which sail smoothly along a careful plan and all fifty and a half returned.
At fourteen Mallory deserted civilization again in favor of the Roberts Rescue Expedition which took the bodies of the ill-fated Lombard off Saturn. The sight of the bodies does not appear to have damped Mallory any, for at seventeen he is to be found aboard the Golden Lion on the Mars run as second mate, or so the shipping records of the day declare.