Читать книгу Vandals of the Void - James Morgan Walsh - Страница 5
ОглавлениеThe Lunar Call
I AWOKE to the sound of buzzing in my ears. It came to me that I had overslept, that this was the warning note of the breakfast call. How many, I wondered, would face the tables this morning.
Not many, I fancied. Even in these enlightened days a goodly proportion of folk still suffer from a kind of space-sickness akin, no doubt, to the mal-de-mer that once used to attack travellers on Earth's oceans.
However the tables were fairly crowded when I reached the saloon. Either our doctor was not a popular man--there was a fair sprinkling of ladies present--or else he knew his work so well that he preferred prevention to cure.
Hume, heavy-eyed and with his face lined was halfway through his meal when I appeared. He caught my glance as I entered and beckoned me to a vacant space beside him. I noted as I took my seat that my name had already been affixed to the chair-back.
A Martian woman was my opposite, quite the loveliest creature I had ever seen. She could not have been more than twenty-five and the full glow of health made her fine eyes sparkle and her dark cheeks glow with a greater vitality than we Earth people are used to seeing on our own planet. Strange how, despite their height, these Martian girls seem so wonderful. Her name, I learnt as introductions went around, was Jansca Dirka.
The man who sat a plate away was a Dirka too but it did not transpire whether he was her father or her brother and there was nothing outwardly to show which he was. The way that they wear their age is, to an Earthman, another puzzling feature of the Martians. I have heard it said that they retain their bloom right to the very last, then fade and die almost in a night.
Knowing Hume's leaning towards his wife's folk I was not surprised to find I was the only Tellurian at the table. I had expected more Martians if anything. Instead the remaining four were Venusians, those quaint, not unlovable people, who somehow remind one almost equally of a bird and a butterfly.
Father, mother and two daughters they were, the latter three very interested in everything strange and new, yet with an interest that one felt was purely evanescent. That, I am told, is the impression one always receives on first making contact with Venusians. How far from true of the race as a whole it is may be judged from the fact that it was the Venusians who first discovered for us the practically inexhaustible deposits of rolgar on our moon.
Rolgar, as everyone knows nowadays, is the substance--one can hardly call it a mineral--without which space-flying could not have attained its present ease and safety. The Venusian himself was an official of the Rolgar Company, he told me, and was bound for the Archimedes Landing on the Moon with a party of Earth miners. His wife and daughter were stopping over with him. "No place for women," I hazarded.
"Not such a wilderness as used to be imagined," he answered me. "Little troubles to be faced-due to variations of pressure and extremes of temperature but on the whole quite a change for short period."
His wife and daughters seemed anxious to sample the new experience as all women, no matter what their planet, welcome a novel sensation. Mir Ong himself--such was his name--had paid more than one visit to our satellite, so counted himself something of an authority on it.
HUME rose from his seat in the midst of our talk, gave me a careless nod, then as he came round the back of my chair dropped a whispered word in my ear. "Control room as soon you're ready," he said.
I could have lingered there at the table merely for the sake of stealing glances at Jansca Dirka but something in Hume's look more than his speech made me imagine an urgency behind h parting words. Also, oddly now I come to think of it, I had a wish to see what Nomo Kell looked like in the flesh.
As I came out onto the promenade deck I glanced through the quartzite windows. We were veering in now towards the Moon and its disk was beginning to fill the void ahead of us. The Earth behind was dwindling, though its size was still considerable. I judged we had not yet reached the midpoint gravity, for an odd quiver of the hull showed the propulsive power of the rolgar engines was still on. In a little they would be cut off and we could use the moon's attraction to draw us onward until it became necessary to counteract the pull and decelerate.
"A light-message for you," said Hume as I entered. He took an envelope from the drawer and handed it to me. "I thought it better not to mention the matter at table. One never knows."
Cautious, extra cautious man. Well, better that than a loose-lipped babbler. I spread the flimsy out in front of me and translated as I read. Though it came over Harran's signature it was merely an acknowledgement of my overnight report, with the added note that if in the event of a Guard's ship being handy when anything untoward occurred I need not interrupt my holiday but could hand over investigation to the patrol.
"Formal acknowledgment of my last night's report merely," I said off-handedly to Hume.
"I thought as much," was his comment. "Though if more of these messages keep coming and going our operators will be getting headches. It's a code none of them has handled before."
"If they'd lived a century ago," I said a mite incautiously, "it would have been child's play for them to read it."
He flashed a glance at me. "A dead language," he remarked and said no more about it.
"By the way," I asked, not that it mattered much, but it gave him something new to think about, "these Dirkas--who are they?"
"They're friends of my wife and myself. Dirka himself--her father--is a Dirrector of the Martian Canal Company. The girl is nothing. Being a Martian woman she need not work for a living."
That, from an Earth-man, was a subtle jibe at conditions on his own planet or rather the planet of his race. I passed it by, however. There was nothing to be gained by retorting that on Earth many women preferred to work.
He eyed me curiously. "Sanders, how old are you?"
"Thirty-three," I said. "Why?"
"And unmarried as yet," he went on. "Well, there's time and, friend of mine, by the comet's tail, the best I wish you is no worse luck than I had myself."
I grinned. Thoughts of love had never come to me. Even now they seemed as remote in thought as Alpha Centauri was in fact.
He ran on. "I suppose you have the whole ship's company more or less neatly taped by now."
"No need of that," I returned.
"There's only one person aboard this ship that I'm interested in and that only as a matter of curiosity."
"Who?" he said with a lift of the eyebrows. "I had no idea we were harbouring any interesting personages--from your point of view--this trip."
"Nomo Kell," I said.
He drew his eyebrows together at that, as though the name seemed familiar, yet he could not quite place it. Briefly I described the fellow to him.
"Queer," he remarked. "It strikes something in my memory, something I wish I could recall clearly," he explained. "I can't, though. Some legend of my wife's people."
"Perhaps the other Martians on board?" I hazarded.
He shook his head. "They would not know," he said quite definitely but did not explain why.
AS I passed back along the promenade deck I met Nomo Kell himself for the first time in the flesh. It was well that I had been warned of his appearance. Had I come upon him without foreknowledge of what I would see I don't quite know how it would have affected me. Yet he was not fearsome. It was the utter unexpectedness of him that astounded.
Nomo Kell's print had flattered him. Leave out the flaring purple of his magnetic eyes, the crested abnormality of his head--size of his body apart--and there was little to differentiate him from the ordinary planetarian.
But seen now, walking within a few paces of me, I sensed something else. A force, perhaps--a radiation. I could not tell.
He gave me a fleeting incurious glance and passed by. I might have stood there staring after him but for a voice in my ear and the touch of a hand on my arm.
"You find him interesting, Mr. Sanders?"
It was Jansca Dirka at my elbow. I reddened. I had been caught in an act of rudeness, no light matter when one is likely to trench on touchy interplanetary conventions.
"And a little more, Miss Dirka," I said, using the Earth style of address. I have never quite accustomed myself to the long string of phrases, flowery and complimentary, which these Martians employ.
"I thought you would," she said gravely. "You have noticed his steps?"
I had not. I hardly gave them a glance until she drew my attention to them. Now I saw that he walked with a peculiar mincing gait, a sort of gingerliness, as though each movement was carefully timed and measured.
"He seems," I said slowly as it dawned on me, "to be deliberately shorten his steps, walking with extra care as we would on the Moon's surface."
"Exactly. The Cosmos is adjusted Earth gravity. We travelled Martians and Venusians have become so accustomed to its variations from our planets that our reaction is automatic, But he..." She flung out her hands with a curiously expressive gesture.
I caught the flash of the idea in mind. "It looks almost," I said, still a trifle doubtfully, "as though he was used to a larger planet than we."
"It looks like that," she mimicked "I might even suggest it would be well not to let such an idea--or its opposite--lie dormant in the back of your mind."
With that and a tingling glance she turned and was gone, leaving me wondering. What did she see or know I could or did not? What indeed made her suggest anything of the sort to me? No hint of my office, I could swear, escaped Hume. I could only think I somehow, uncannily, she may have guessed.
Our engines shuddered, a shiver ran through our whole framework, then died away. We had passed the midpoint of gravity, and with our motors off were utilizing the Moon's pull to draw us rapidly towards her.
