Frozen little Zura was a stellar Utopia, until
the Earthmen came to topple the rule of its gentle
queen with the cankerous weapons of revolt.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Fall 1940.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
So much has been written into the permanent chronologies of science
concerning our pioneer voyage to the little asteroid of Zura--facts
and figures and sociological deductions, most of which are, of
actuality, erroneous--that even now after these many years, I feel
constrained to set down, as simply as I can, exactly what occurred.
All my life I have shunned publicity; my wife has shunned it. Zura,
weird little wandering world, has never returned. Why, after coming
in from the realms of outer space at least twice and rounding our Sun
upon an elliptic orbit, it should now have failed to reappear--I will
leave that to the astronomers to imagine. But no one from Earth, quite
obviously, will ever go to Zura again. Tara and I, so to speak, are
sole survivors.
So at least I think I am qualified to tell what happened; to correct
the Official Chronolograph in its implications that Zura was a model
little world, from which our Earth might learn much. As my grandfather
might have quoted his grandfather saying, that is the bunk. When you
put humans on a planet, you will get love--but also hate; honesty, but
dishonesty; peace, but also war. The weird people of Zura were weird
to us only because their environment had made them outwardly different
from us. Like us they were human--and there could never have been
Utopia evolved from them.
I am no philosopher, but at least I must have my say on this. Tara was
misguided. She admits it now. Indeed, at heart she is more opposed than
most of you who read this, to those crusaders here on earth who talk
of revolutions and bloodshed so that some new Social Order may evolve
and bring the world Utopia. The ideals are often sound, but always
impossible of fulfillment. And those who sponsor them usually are
intelligent enough to know it, advancing themselves upon the pitiful
hopes of the ignorant, who think they are being led upward when in
reality they are often worse off than before.
Do I seem prefacing some weighty analysis of mankind's frailties? That
is wrong. I am prefacing what might better be called a love story. I
am an old man now, but it colors my memory still with a warm glow like
a sunrise spreading glorious colors on the drabness of a twilight sky.
That, to my young life, was the coming of Tara....
I was just twenty, that spring morning of 1990 when Dr. Robert
Livingston's message came to me.
"Strange good news, John. I have picked our destination, but it
must be secret. Fly up and see me tonight."
Strange good news! There was a note of suppressed excitement in those
three words which somehow communicated to me so that as I flew my
little car up to the Maine woods that evening I was tensed to hear what
it could be. My name is John Taine, as naturally you must have realized
from my preface. There is nothing of me that can be of interest to this
narrative previous to that spring morning of 1990. I quite imagine I
was a drab enough sort of young fellow. Certainly my work as mechanic
in the building of stratosphere ships had brought me little money and
no claim to achievement.
But Dr. Livingston liked me; for a year now I had been working for
him, building to his specifications that primitive little space
ship with which he hoped to pioneer on an exploratory flight to
some other world. Livingston was an inventor and scientist of very
great genius. But unfortunately, being a dreamer, a gentle fellow
and trusting--completely no businessman--he had gone through life
impoverished.
We had been much pinched for funds in our work. Our little flyer indeed
was now not finished, and I was on an enforced vacation, with our funds
exhausted, waiting until Dr. Livingston might find some sponsor to
refinance us. Strange good news? Assuredly I was hoping that he would
have a few decimars in hand now--or even a few thousand gold dollars
with which we might continue the work.
* * * * *
His pleasure and excitement were obvious when he greeted me in the
laboratory of his isolated little Maine home, upon my arrival just
after dusk that evening.
"Good news, John. It certainly is. I couldn't tell you before what I've
been trying to do here while work on the _Planeteer_ had to stop. But
I've accomplished my purpose."
"Money--" I said.
"Money, yes. Oh, yes, indeed, John. And fame. The accomplishment of
our desire--to make a flight into Interplanetary space, and come back
again. We've got it all within our reach now. Sit down, John--I'll tell
you what I've done."
I had never seen Dr. Livingston so excited. He was a small man, forty
perhaps, though he looked somewhat older with his thin face and his
shaggy, longish iron-gray hair. He had no family; he lived here alone,
with only one deaf old woman for his housekeeper. We were in his
chemical laboratory now--a littered room on the ground floor of his
home, which was a few miles out in the country from a small town of the
Maine coast. We were building the _Planeteer_ here, in a big impromptu
frame hangar which was set on the wooded hilltop a hundred yards or so
from the house.
But work on the _Planeteer_ had ceased. Our two assistants who had been
engaged with me now, like myself, were laid off. There was no one here
tonight save Livingston and me and the old woman who now had gone to
her room upstairs.
"We've got to be absolutely secret," Livingston said. He lowered his
voice and flung a glance at the window oval where the moonlight was
gleaming with a silver sheen. "There's big money involved in this. I'm
going to trust you, John, but no one else."
"What is it?" I murmured.
A little half-smile of excited triumph was playing about his thin lips.
"Let me ask you," he said, "have you ever heard of Xalite?"
"Well--just vaguely."
"The new element which was discovered a few years ago. I needn't
explain its technical uses--"
"A germ-killer," I said. "I remember hearing a technological
newscast--you bombard diseased tissues--"
"Exactly. To kill certain virulent germs without injuring the living
human tissue. And they're thinking now they could use it in the new
atomic engines--perhaps the one thing which would make them really
commercially practical--"
"Except that Xalite costs about ten thousand gold-dollars a grain," I
observed.
"Quite so. As a matter of fact, what little was discovered here on
earth is now in use. No more can be found--and it's an unstable
element. Within another year we will have no Xalite." He paused, and
then abruptly he added, still more softly,
"I've discovered an unlimited quantity, John. Xalite in quantity beyond
anyone's wildest dreams--"
"Where?" I gasped.
"Not here on earth. Don't you see how it fits with our plans for the
_Planeteer_?"
I sat silent, tense as he told me. There was, this year, coming in from
the realms of Interplanetary space, a little asteroid. Astronomers for
their charts had named it Zura--a dark, cold little world of perhaps
five hundred miles diameter.
"It seems this is its second visit," he said. "Some sixteen years ago
it first made its appearance--came into our Solar System, rounded the
Sun and went out again. The elements of its orbit, sixteen years ago,
were computed. A narrow ellipse, taking it in between Mercury and
Vulcan, and out beyond Pluto."
* * * * *
In his laboratory here, Dr. Livingston had erected a small, but
ultra-modern, electroscope. He took me to it now. The dark little Zura,
he told me, already had cut the orbit of Mars and was fairly close to
us. It was in the northern sky now, near the zenith. The night was
clear, glittering with a myriad stars like gems profusely strewn on the
deep purple velvet of the Heavens. I gazed at little Zura as he swung
the high-powered little instrument almost to its full intensity of
magnification. What I saw was a round, blurred, dark-gray disc, dimly
mottled with heavy cloudbanks.
"What has this to do with us, and Xalite?" I murmured.
"I'll show you, John. If we can get a break in those clouds--it
sometimes occurs--"
We waited perhaps an hour, with the spectroscope attached so that the
vague reflected light from Zura was spread before us in its prismatic
colors. And then, momentarily, a break in the swirling, turgid
atmosphere of the dark little world, let us through to its bleak,
blurred, dark surface. Light was coming from there; light inherent to
the little world. On the spectroscope band I saw a new dark line.
"Xalite!" Livingston murmured. "You see it? Unmistakable. Deposits of
Xalite exist there. Xalite in quantities which to us and our needs will
be enormous. So that's the destination of our exploratory flight in
the _Planeteer_! It's not a question of money with us now, John. The
Anglo-American Medical Research Society--and the U. S. Government Dept.
of Power--have financed us for all we need."
I could only gaze at him with excitement thrilling me, matching
his own. All our money troubles ended. And a double purpose to our
adventure now. The conquest of Interplanetary flight; and the giving to
the world an element it so greatly needed.
Little Dr. Livingston was bending over me, gripping me. "You realize
the need of secrecy?" he murmured. "You and I, if we get this Xalite,
it will make us independently rich, of course. Enough for our life's
needs. But beyond that, the world will have it. Xalite, to be cheap as
old-fashioned petroleum." His voice had risen with his excitement, but
suddenly he lowered it again.
"But John, suppose we were unscrupulous. To keep the price of Xalite
up--to deal it out, only to the rich--to make ourselves fabulously
wealthy at the expense of the poor--"
"I see," I agreed. I wonder why my glance, like his, strayed idly to
our moonlit window oval, here on the ground floor of his home? I am not
the least bit psychic; there is, of course, no such thing anyway.
"We'll finish up the _Planeteer_ now," Livingston was saying. "Pete
Duroh and Carruthers--that's all you'll need. And as we agreed,
we'll take them with us. Four of us--that's enough to man the little
_Planeteer_. But nothing must be said of Xalite. You understand?"
"Yes, of course."
"So far as the world will know, the _Planeteer_ is starting merely on a
trial flight into Space. We don't want any publicity anyway. And Duroh
and Carruthers--they must know only that we're hoping we might reach
this wandering little asteroid. Nothing about Xalite. That can come
later. We don't want to take the least chance of this thing leaking
out--"
He checked himself suddenly. We both heard it--the sound of what seemed
padding footsteps, retreating from our laboratory doorway. Someone
furtively slinking away in the house corridor.
"Why--good Lord--!" I gasped.
I dashed into the dim corridor. There was nothing; and then I heard a
distant outer door close. The intruder had escaped from the house. And
then, from the laboratory, came Dr. Livingston's gasp: "John, look--"
I swung back to him. In the moonlight at the laboratory window a face
showed behind the filmy curtains--a man's face peering in at us. It was
just an instant glimpse.... Staring, wild, red-rimmed eyes--the face
wearing a bluish stubble of beard. By no chance could it have been the
person who had escaped me in the corridor.
In that second, I dashed for the window. The face had gone. I got there
only in time to see a dark blob scurrying away into the shadows of the
moonlit woods.