Читать книгу World Beneath Ice - John Russell Fearn - Страница 7

CHAPTER ONE

INTO THE SUN

Hour after hour the woman sat tirelessly at the controls of her spaceship, the Ultra, unable to trust the plan she had in mind to the automatic pilot. With ever-mounting velocity, followed faithfully by the pursuing alien spacecraft she had earlier attacked—and thereby provoked into following her—she streaked in the direction of Mercury’s orbit. Mercury—a far-flung erratic little world, a withered walnut of a planet, scorched on his sunward side so that metals boiled.

The woman’s attention was not concentrated on little Mercury away to her left in the void, however. Instead, she dropped a layer of dark shields over the outlook ports, and through them looked at the awe-inspiring majesty of the sun, lord of the solar system. With every second that passed the Ultra was speeding nearer to him, his brilliance becoming gradually so intense that she had to pile up more layers of darkening glass to ease her aching eyes.

Through hours that seemed endless, she still sped on, keeping a wary eye on the instruments that registered the power of solar drag. Here, increasingly near the lord of light, space itself was slightly buckled out of true by the vast gravitational strains. The Ultra was inside the orbit of Mercury and still hurtling onwards, the shields over the ports now so dense that they were several inches thick; yet even at this, the intolerable sea of flame raging ahead made the woman fear that her sight would be permanently impaired. Yet, on the other hand, she dared not take her gaze away from that cauldron of fluid energies: upon it depended the success of her plan.

Solar prominences reached out unfathomably into space: the corona filled all the void behind, that mighty searing circle sweeping ever nearer— Then, as the instruments showed that the deadline had been reached, she swung the Ultra violently sideways, and with a terrific burst of power swept diagonally to her former course, the sun to one side of her instead of straight ahead.

According to the gauges, she had just crossed the divisional margin of safety between outer space and the gravitational field of the sun. Of necessity she gave the atomic power plant every vestige of energy in a desperate bid to tear free of the sun’s inexorable grip and fight back into the region where his influence would progressively weaken.

Then, with a numbed feeling of horror, she began to wonder if she had left things until too late. She was not making any headway. Even though the Ultra was moving diagonally to the sea of flame, it was also drifting slowly towards it.

With grim eyes she stared through the shields, satisfied at least that her plan, in essence, had worked. In a chain, unable to save themselves, the entire armada of alien spacecraft had followed her across the line and was streaming down towards that inconceivable furnace of boiling energies, utterly lost, unable to tear free, bearing with them the remains of an alien race. Her plan, to trick the invading fleet into hurling itself into the sun, had proven a success. Even as she watched, the vessels became remote against the screen-darkened cauldron, and finally they vanished.

Quickly she switched in the auxiliary engines, which had the effect of doubling the power impetus. The Ultra jerked and strained, but it still did not check its sunward drift. Jumping out of the control-chair, the girl went over to the power plant and stared at the readings. The block of copper from which the energy was derived was shrinking at an alarming speed. Once it had entirely dissipated, there was nothing to stop the Ultra following the doomed alien craft to destruction.

Turning, she raced out of the control room to one of the storage chambers, and brought forth two more copper blocks. Of necessity she had to switch off the current whilst she fixed the blocks into place using remote control apparatus, and in that time she lost half a million miles of distance.

The heat in the control room increased to intolerable proportions, even though the heavily insulated shell. Motionless, she sat at the control board, peering through slit eyes at the terrifying vision outside. Playing tag with solar gravity was one trick she had never attempted before, and she was wondering if, in destroying the aliens, she had tempted fate too far.

The power plant hummed and whined incessantly as she gave it the maximum load. The needles remained motionless on the dials. The vessel was still travelling diagonally to the sun, but neither pulling away from nor going towards it. There was also the danger that beneath the furious heat blasting through space the rocket-tubes themselves would fuse, and so stop the power plant operating.

Half-blinded, the woman still manoeuvred the switches, giving a little power here, removing it there, edging the vessel mile by mile—twisting, wriggling, diving. The windows were no longer blazing shields. They seemed to be dancing with darkness, and the girl knew with growing horror that, masked though the solar glare was, the radiations were seeping through and damaging her sight.

Weakly she got up and found a pair of dense goggles, which she slipped over her face. They blinded her completely, but she prayed that they would at least stop the radiations driving at her eyes.

By touch alone she continued operating the switches, her body sensitive to every surge and movement of the machine she herself had designed; then at last to her intense relief she heard the sudden intake of power by the plant, which announced it was ceasing its laborious struggle against a superior gravity.

It was a note that grew. Breathing hard, drenched in perspiration, the girl played her fingers up and down the control switches until at last the note in the power plant became steady. She wrenched the goggles from her eyes and looked at the gauges. They were clouded with darkness, and her eyes throbbed unmercifully.

The needles were swinging free. The Ultra was slowly pulling away from that titanic maw in space, gaining speed with every second. With her eyes shut she sped onwards, until finally the Ultra had crossed the demarcation line and was back in free space.

Slowly relaxing, the girl snapped the automatic pilot in position and staggered away from the control chair to lie down on the wall bed. For nearly an hour she lay flat, a hand over her eyes; then she reached out and snapped the switch which raised the screens from the ports.

At first, even the brilliant sunshine seemed faded and weak and the shadows impenetrably dark; then with the passage of time the darkness began to lift and the intolerable pressure behind her eyes faded. The radiations, which had been more than sufficient to forever destroy the sight of a normal person, had with her super-normal physique only numbed the optic nerves. Now the numbness was dissipating, and with it came a clear return of sight and gathering bodily strength.

Slowly she got up and gave a glance outside. She was far enough away from the sun now to be sure of safety. Infinitely distant, shining with the brilliance of a diamond, was Venus; and in the nearer foreground, erratic little Mercury.

Turning to the shortwave radio, she switched it on, contacting Earth by direct transmission. It was several minutes, partly because of distance, and partly because of an increasingly severe static warp from the sun, before any clear answer came through from Earth; then there was another delay whilst Chris Wilson, Controller of the Dodd Space Line, was connected. His voice, speaking over nearly ninety million miles of space, sounded reedy and abysmal.

“Then you’re still safe, Vi? That’s fine hearing....”

“Yes, I’m safe,” she agreed, her voice heavy. “I very nearly wasn’t, though. I’m only three millions miles from the sun, and into it have gone all the alien invaders we needed to worry about. They actually flung themselves—but I admit I led them into it. That chapter is finished, Chris. The Earth is safe....”

On faraway Earth it took nearly eight minutes for the radio message to be received, and Chris Wilson frowned as he listened to the girl’s words as they became increasingly distorted by sizzling static interference from the sun:

“...The Earth is safe. However. I’m concerned that the....”

Whatever the girl was going to say next was swamped by the solar static. All radio contact had been lost.

* * * *

Eighteen Months Later

Morris Arnside, autocratic chief of the World Food Combine, could not quite believe the figures he was studying. In earlier times he could easily have thought that statisticians had erred in their calculations, or perhaps that there was some double-dealing going on somewhere—but in this latter part of the twenty-first century there was no room for doubt. Men racked their brains no more with calculations. Flawless machines computed everything to the last fraction, and they never made a mistake—for which reason the report was all the more mystifying.

“Beyond me,” Arnside confessed to himself.

For a moment or two he sat gazing out of the window.

Light snow was falling, driven by flurries of bitter wind. It might have been mid-January instead of late May—but then it had been intensely cold for six months and more.

Finally Arnside pressed a button on his desk and his chief assistant and deputy food controller entered.

“Good morning Mr. Arnside,” he greeted—and Arnside glared at him with prominent grey eyes.

“I’ll be hanged if it is! Sit down, Mathers. There’s something I want to talk over with you.”

The assistant settled in the chair at the opposite side of the desk and waited. For Morris Arnside to be short-tempered was nothing new. He lived well, ate heartily, took little exercise, and was always volcanic in consequence. But for him to be anxious was definitely unusual.

“I’ve just had the reports for the first three months of this year,” Arnside said at length. “They’re staggering! Crops and staple foods are nearly eighty percent below the normal yield. If things go on at this rate, there won’t be enough to feed the world’s population by the end of the year, and that means we’ll have to fall back on synthetic products, something which the majority of people hate.”

“Yes, sir.” Mathers agreed imperturbably.

“I’ve been trying to think of some reason for this tremendous falling off,” Arnside added, his fleshy jowls wagging with the emphasis of his words. “I’ll be hanged if I can, though. What has happened to our own British agriculture, the Canadian wheat fields, the United States grain-growing areas? All of them are just dying, man! Dying!”

“It has puzzled me,” Mathers responded. “The reports are similar from all sources. The seasons are said to be changing. Take today, for instance, and we’re right in the middle of spring. Snowing fast, and looks likely to continue. And the temperature hasn’t rose much over freezing point since December of last year. I have been gathering weather reports from all over the world recently, and in every case there is a marked decline in mean temperatures—even in the tropics. Crops in consequence are far behind normal.”

“The members of the combine must be made to produce eighty percent more than they usually do,” Arnside decided. “If they don’t, there’ll be a penalty, and I’ll issue a directive to that effect. It’s the only way. Laziness, that’s what it is! Living in a world of plenty, they think they can relax. They can’t—and most certainly they’re not going to make an unusually cold spring the excuse. I’ll settle it!”

“Yes, sir,” Mathers murmured.

“It would help,” Arnside added, “if you showed a little more enthusiasm.”

“I’m afraid I can’t, sir. I think I know what we are fighting, and it rather terrifies me.”

The food controller stared. “A slowing up in crop production terrifies you? Don’t be an idiot, man!”

Mathers knew his chief far too well to take offence at his brusqueness. “I have been studying this business pretty thoroughly—not entirely for professional reasons, but because I’m naturally curious. I may be wrong, but I don’t think we’ll ever get the crops to rights again. And I don’t think we’ll ever get warm weather again, either.”

“Do you mind telling me what on earth you’re talking about?” Arnside demanded.

Mathers rose and went to the immense window. He stood gazing out over the fantastically lofty roofs of New London; then he turned and motioned his superior. Arnside joined him and they stood gazing through the whirling snow into the grey sky.

“Well?” Arnside asked bluntly.

“Through the cloud breaks, sir, you can see the sun,” Mathers said, pointing. “There—practically overhead at this hour.”

Arnside peered diagonally through the glass. “Yes, I see it,” he acknowledged. “Look pretty yellow, too. More like a foggy sun than a spring one. Mist intervening, I suppose.”

“Partly,” Mathers acknowledged, “but look at the sun itself. What do you notice about it?”

Arnside did not think it strange at that moment that he could gaze at the sun without difficulty. It hurt the eye no more than if seen through dense, orange-tinted glass. Curious for it to be so dim in late spring. For some moments he stared, then clouds drifted across and hid the view.

“It looks a bit speckled,” he decided. “Rather like a pudding into which somebody has spattered currants.”

“An apt simile, sir,” Mathers observed. “Sunspots.”

The food controller thumped the window frame. “Look here, Mathers, talk sense, will you? What have sunspots got to do with it? There have been sunspots ever since—well, ever since the sun came into being, I suppose. They cause trouble, sure—such as radio interference, thunderstorms, and so forth, but they can’t interfere with crops, surely?”

“Not directly, sir, but I think that an excess of them is causing the cool weather. The sun has not been free of spots for the last two years. I know, because I’m an amateur astronomer and I’m interested in such things. The average citizen hardly seems to know what a sunspot looks like, and he certainly doesn’t study them. It’s extraordinary for sunspots to keep on growing on the sun’s disc. They usually abate after their normal cycle is complete. This time they haven’t.”

There was something tremendously wrong up there in the bleak grey sky, Arnside realized. He knew Mathers intimately. He was a cold-blooded, youngish man, a clever scientist in his way, and certainly not given to exaggeration.

Arnside groped for words. “Are you telling me that the sun’s gone haywire or something?”

“There is that possibility,” Mathers replied. “It is as prone to disorder and death as any other living thing. Scientists are perfectly aware that the sun must die someday from some cause or other, and I have the uneasy feeling that that day may not be far distant.”

This time Arnside did not say anything. The situation was too preposterous to grasp.

“Only one person or group of persons can solve this,” he said at last. “The astronomers. And if they have been withholding vital information, I’ll tell them publicly exactly what I think about them! Book me a reservation on the next helicoliner following the Mount Everest route. I’m going to find out what Dr. Blandish has to say.”

Dr. Luke Blandish was the astronomer-in-chief of Everest Observatory, that lofty eminence built ten years earlier and jointly controlled by every nation on the Earth. Here, above the clouds, surrounded by scientific appliances, which brought a tempered warmth to the former climbers’ paradise, the spare, middle-aged Blandish with his quiet voice and profound thinking kept a constant watch on the heavens, pooling the information supplied him by his own army of assistants, and from the orbiting satellites and other observatories scattered about the world.

With space travel as common as flying, the presence of any danger in outer space was his responsibility. Thousands might die if he made one miscalculation upon a flying meteorite or deadly cosmic gas area.

He confessed to a certain inner surprise when from his office he saw the London-Tibet helicoliner detouring from its normal course to land in the observatory grounds. He was even more surprised when only one passenger alighted, and almost immediately he recognized the heavy figure and blunt features of the food controller.

When Arnside had been shown into the office Dr. Blandish said: “Unexpected pleasure. Have a seat.” And glancing through the window he added: “I take it you are not returning immediately, since you have permitted the liner to continue its journey?”

“I expect to be here quite a few hours,” Arnside replied. “I’m going to dig for information—lots of it! My job and maybe the fate of the world’s population may depend on how much you can tell me.”

“Indeed? What’s the trouble?”

“What in blazes is the matter with the sun?”

“You have anticipated me by a few days,” Blandish remarked. “I was—and still am—intending to make an announcement after consultation with the various officials responsible for the world’s well-being.... Yourself included, of course.”

Arnside said: “Dr. Blandish, my assistant—a keen amateur astronomer—tells me that the sun is going crazy or something. That it has spots longer than it should have. Now, I’m a commercial man. But even I can’t help but notice that the sun looks queer. What do you think is going to happen?”

“I think,” Blandish answered, “that we are witnessing the death of a monarch, and the inevitable end of the world.”

The food controller sat motionless.

Blandish went on: “You must be aware of the lowering temperature all over the world? Even the tropical regions are chilly compared to what they should be.”

“That I know. I’m here because crops are failing and I’ve got to find out why.”

“I’m afraid there is nothing you can do—except provide synthetic foods. I have withheld the facts for as long as possible to be sure that there’s no possibility of a mistake. Now I am forced to the staggering truth. The sun is dying. One might call it a solar cancer.” The astronomer got to his feet. “Come with me, controller, and let me explain in more detail. You will merely have a preview of what all the world will have to know shortly.”

Arnside rose and followed Blandish through an adjoining doorway and into the filing room. Blandish took some pictures from a cabinet.

“These,” he said, as the food controller looked on, “are spectro-heliograph plates of the sun taken in the last eighteen months. You wish me to be as non-technical as possible, of course?”

“Yes, I’m a practical man.”

“Well, then, normally sunspot cycles reach a certain maximum and then fade out. These show the beginning of the present cycle eighteen months ago.”

Blandish laid down a series of plates. The sun was flawlessly photographed with two irregular marks on the centre of his disc.

Blandish continued: “Last year, and the plates showed as many as six sunspots, with the two original ones vastly enlarged. And this was taken two days ago,” Blandish finished. Arnside stared at the final plate with a queer feeling at his heart. The sun was visible as a circle, but all over his face were mottled holes and chasms, infinitely more of them than the naked eye could see. The sun looked like a football spattered with mud.

“Never before,” the astronomer resumed, “have sunspots spread to the solar poles, where they are now. Instead of passing away after their normal cycle, they have gone on multiplying.” A shade of emotion quavered his voice. “Imagine our feelings when we saw this happening—when we could watch it in a movie film photographed day by day. The death pangs of the lord of day and—”

Arnside interrupted impatiently. “What’s the cause of it? Can’t we stop it? We’ve got space travel. We can reach the sun if we want—”

“And do what?” Blandish shook his head. “The explanation is scientific, Mr. Arnside, and perfectly in accord with astronomical law. There are two types of stars in the universe—main sequence or red stars, and white dwarfs. Our sun is a main-sequence star with a stellar absolute magnitude of 4.85. The absolute magnitude is between 4.88 and 3.54. Therefore, our sun being at 4.85 was dangerously near the line of instability. You follow me?”

“What’s that got to do with his spots?”

“The internal temperature of our sun was about thirty-two million degrees when it was normal. It was a star in which the atoms were still surrounded by the K-rings of electrons, while the exterior rings had been stripped away by the tremendous heat. But any substantial rise in the internal temperature of the sun would cause the atoms to no longer exist as such. There’d only be free electrons and stripped nuclei. The star would rapidly become unstable and gradually move on to the next state of instability—that of the white dwarf.”

“And what would that mean—in plain language?”

“That the sun would never again recover his radiation. It would become small and useless—like the Companion of Sirius.”

The astronomer seemed impossibly calm considering what he was saying. Nor had he finished. He continued quietly:

“Something—we are not certain what—caused the sun’s internal temperature to become enormously increased for a brief time. It coincided with an abnormal number of spots. The spots, with their cooling blanket, kept in the sun’s internal heat and the atoms were stripped. It was, in effect a vast cave-in, of which the sunspots are the outward sign. Finally the sun’s photosphere will collapse, and the white dwarf stage will then have been reached. Some of those sun spots are even now tens of thousands of miles across.”

Arnside gazed up again through the window on the yellow orb. It looked a mockery as it hung there, blotched and ugly. About it stars were faintly visible in the violet-tinged heaven. Arnside’s own thoughts of a holiday in Florida under blue skies upon sun-drenched beaches suddenly underwent a drastic revision. With difficulty he found words.

“There’s—no possibility of a mistake?”

“I wish there were.” The astronomer returned the file to its cabinet and stood with hands in pockets, musing. “It is for the government of the World Council to decide what shall be done. As I see it, there are two alternatives facing the human race. One is to go underground and there be prepared to spend the rest of its life until Earth crumbles away with age—or to somehow create another sun.” He shook his head and smiled wanly. “Great though our science is, it is not great enough for that.”

The first shock having abated somewhat, Arnside stood musing. Then presently he spoke:

“Doctor, there must be some reason why the sun increased its internal temperature as it did. It just couldn’t do it in the ordinary way, could it?”

“It could, but it is most unlikely,” Blandish responded. “Stray matter in space, drawn into the sun and exploded atomically by the terrific heat might have caused it. But I don’t think it that it was such an accident....”

“Why not?” the food controller asked sharply.

The astronomer said: “Two years ago the Earth was invaded by robotic probes that settled into close orbits above our planet. Naturally, they were eventually destroyed by interceptor craft and our missile defences, but by that time they had already completed their work—which was to spy out the land. Captured probes proved that—they were all equipped with transmitting cameras and electronic apparatus of obviously alien origin. Not long afterwards an alien armada was detected entering our solar system and headed for Earth. The implication was obvious—we were about to be invaded. So Violet Ray Brant—or as she is more popularly called, the Golden Amazon—flew into space to try and deal with them. Her private vessel the Ultra was the only spaceship capable of intercepting them whilst they were still in deep space. She then somehow caused them to be hurled into the sun and destroyed....”

Arnside frowned heavily: “But how could something as relatively tiny as a fleet of spaceships affect the sun?”

Blandish shrugged. “Don’t forget they were alien machines. To have crossed an interstellar gulf they must have had fantastically powerful engines. The power plants in those machines employed technologies unknown to us, perhaps utilizing contra-terrene matter. Could not that armada and the exploding contra-terrene engines—if such they were—set up a vast solar disturbance?”

Blandish paused thoughtfully, then added: “There, I think, you have the answer. It occurred to me long ago, and the time of the disturbance’s commencement dates from when that armada fell in the sun, hurled there by the Golden Amazon. Whatever the initial cause, we have to face the consequences.”

“You mean the Golden Amazon has,” Arnside snapped. “If she hadn’t caused that armada to be flung into the sun it wouldn’t be dying now! That makes her directly responsible!”

“But unwittingly,” the astronomer protested. “She risked her life to destroy that armada. It saved the world from horrible invasion. It would be preposterous to accuse the Amazon of being the cause of our troubles.”

The food controller gave a grim smile. “That’s a matter of opinion, doctor. As a scientist you probably admire the Amazon because she is also a scientist. I am one of her enemies. I believe that back of her mind she has never had but one thought—to destroy this world of ours and all it contains. She tried it once in her early days, remember—and failed. Why shouldn’t she try it this way, masking her treachery under the cloak of bravery by destroying the aliens, potential enemies, at the same time?”

The astronomer gave a shrug. “I have nothing but the frankest admiration for her. She is certainly the greatest scientist the world has ever known, and sometimes I wonder where we would have been without her. She revolutionized our uses of atomic power, helped to commercialize space travel, bringing about the colonization of other worlds, destroyed all menaces likely to afflict us.”

“She is still a dangerous woman with only one objective, doctor—to either master or destroy the people of this planet. Concerning this business with the sun.... Have you asked her for an opinion?”

“It was the first thing I tried to do—over eighteen months ago when the trouble first became apparent and I realized what was coming. Unfortunately, she can’t be located.”

The food controller thought for a while, then he said: “With your permission, doctor, I will stay here for a day or so and take down all the necessary facts concerning this solar trouble so I can report to the World Council, and explain the crop failures. You, I assume, will support me later when you make your own statement?”

“Of course.” The astronomer moved to the door. “Come this way, controller. I am sure everything can be arranged for your comfort as long as you wish to stay.”