Читать книгу World Beneath Ice - John Russell Fearn - Страница 8

CHAPTER TWO

THE PLOT

One evening some days later Morris Arnside called upon Brice Torrington, the metals king, at his Surrey residence. Though it was the first day of June, Arnside’s limousine wound its way between banks of snow that marked the drive of the Torrington house. The evening had darkened prematurely, as did all evenings now, the yellow globe hanging over the horizon dispensing hardly any light or heat.

Brice Torrington was in his library, expecting his visitor. Tall and lean, with a mouth like a spring trap, he was undisputed boss of world metals.

“I’m here for two reasons,” Arnside said. “The present solar trouble—and the Golden Amazon. The end of the world is within sight. I thought you should know that. In a day or two Dr. Blandish will be telling everybody about it.”

“End of the world?” Torrington repeated, musing. “From a materialist like you that’s a remarkable statement.”

Arnside gave the facts as they had been given to him by Blandish, but without the technical details. Torrington brooded as he listened, his eyes narrowed.

“There’ll be a way around it,” he said finally.

“Blandish is going to suggest deep shelters and underworld galleries when he addresses the Council. According to him, the surface of the Earth will be uninhabitable in two years. By then every man, woman, and child must be below ground, warmed and lighted by atomic power. You, as metals king, will naturally be called upon to supply the shelters. You’ll make your already tremendous fortune six or seven times as large.”

“What else is on your mind?”

“The Golden Amazon. I think we have a chance at last to get rid of her—legally, I mean. She is as much your enemy as mine. Blandish thinks that the alien armada being thrown into the sun caused it to start decaying. That makes the Golden Amazon directly responsible. What is more significant is the fact that she cannot be found anywhere in this moment of deadly crisis when her scientific knowledge is so desperately needed. Doesn’t it look as though she deliberately set out to ruin the sun, and then vanished? Doesn’t it look like revenge on her part? She found that she could not control this world as she wanted, and apparently reversed her tactics and gave her knowledge freely to advance mankind—but I believe she has only been waiting for the supreme chance to hit back, and has done so.”

“Perhaps,” Torrington muttered.

Arnside said: “If she remains absent we can convince the Council that she’s the cause of our troubles. We can insist that she be found, brought to trial, and then banished as a menace to society. We can be rid of her. Without her cold-blooded supervision, you could do much more. So could I. So could Swainson of Atomic Corporation, Ranleigh of Transport, and many others. We wouldn’t get the Dodd Space Line behind us, of course, because the Dodds and Wilsons are indirectly related to the Amazon.”

Torrington said: “To be rid of the Golden Amazon has been the ambition of my life. I’ll call a conference at my office of Swainson, Ranleigh, and others. We’ll agree on a policy, and state it at the World Council when Blandish makes his statement. In the meantime, let’s hope the Amazon stops away and so blackens her case.”

While Arnside and Torrington were talking, the space liner Atom Cloud was landing at the spaceport, in central London, at the end of a journey from Mars. Aboard it, one of the 200 passengers was Ethel Wilson, daughter of the Controller of the Earth terminal of the Dodd Space Line.

She hurried through the customs and routine medical checks, her VIP status as daughter of the Controller ensuring that she was fast-tracked. She was slim, dark-headed, blue-eyed, and completely self-assured. In the administration building she took an elevator to the twentieth floor.

Ethel hurried along the corridor to the door at the far end. She tapped lightly and entered. The grey-haired, heavy-shouldered man at the big desk glanced up in the glow of the cold-light globes in the ceiling.

“Rosy Cheeks!” he exclaimed, jumping to his feet. “Am I glad to see you again.”

“Hello dad.” The girl giggled affectionately as her father embraced her. “And please stop calling me Rosy Cheeks!”

“But they are!”

“In a wind like this, what else do you expect? It’s my childhood name, though, and I am twenty-eight.”

Chris Wilson, head of the Earth Space Line terminal, smiled and drew up a chair for his daughter. When she was seated, he stood surveying her.

“Grand to have you back,” he said. “Your mother and I have missed you a lot. Have a good time with the Kerrigans on Mars? How are Ruth and the Commander?”

“Ruth is fine, and so is Howard,” the girl answered. Ruth Kerrigan—formerly Dodd—was the daughter of the man who had designed the first successful commercial space line. She had married the chief pilot of the line, and through her friendship with the Wilsons, had gained the services—when she deigned to give them—of the Golden Amazon as Chief Scientist. They ran the Mars terminal of the Dodd space line, whilst Chris Wilson and his wife Beatrice—the Amazon’s foster-sister—controlled the Earth end. Ethel frowned and went on:

“But as I told you over the space-radio, I thought it was time I flew back and discussed something with you. Something very important.”

“I’ve been looking forward to it ever since I got your message. Well, what is this important something? A boy friend?”

“No, dad. It’s the sun.”

“The sun!” Wilson repeated. “The only topic of conversation everywhere one goes.”

“What’s happened to it?” Ethel broke in. “On Mars, where the temperature was never very high, it’s fallen by more than half. It has been like that for nearly a year now, and getting cooler all the time. I also noticed as we left the planet that the Martian ice caps extended halfway down to his equator now, whereas Earth is splotched all over with ice drifts. As for the sun we didn’t even need the screens up during our voyage. His light’s feeble, and his heat enormously decreased. Then there are those terrific dark marks all over him. What’s happened, dad? Are we running into a spatial glacial epoch or something?”

“I’ve heard reports,” Chris Wilson answered slowly, “to the effect that the sun is dying. All things die, even suns—but this has happened millions of years before science expected it.”

Ethel reflected. She did not appear frightened, as indeed she was not. She had been in too many tight comers to be easily scared.

“I sort of suspected something like that,” she said at last. “Í thought first-hand information on how space looks, and the conditions on Mars, might help you and Aunt Vi. Naturally she is going to try to do something?”

His daughter’s unswerving loyalty to the Golden Amazon—whom she called her Aunt Vi—was something which always made Chris Wilson smile.

“I don’t doubt your Aunt Vi would do something if she were available,” Chris Wilson replied, “but she isn’t—and I can’t locate her. For the past eighteen months she’s been missing—about the same length of time you’ve been away.”

“But she’s got to be found,” Ethel said. “The Earth is in danger of extinction—and in fact the whole solar system is if the sun should die. We can’t fight a thing so vast by ourselves. Our science isn’t up to it.”

Chris Wilson said nothing. There was nothing he could say. He and the Golden Amazon were friends—nothing more—and that only in the line of business. The Golden Amazon had no real affection for anybody, unless it were for Ethel. Risking the Amazon’s anger in an attempt to locate her was more than Chris Wilson dared do.

Ethel resumed. “She hadn’t returned from space before I left for Mars, to stay with the Kerrigans—”

“She never did come back—at least as far as I know. In her last message from space—before static swamped it—she was about to express her concern about something. I haven’t seen her since—eighteen months ago.”

“Surely, before things get really bad, she’ll turn up and help us?”

“I sincerely hope so.”

“If Aunt Vi doesn’t come back, what is going to be done?”

“I don’t know. Man always survives. We might go underground. The World Council is meeting tomorrow to make a statement. I’ve made private plans. We’re giving up our London residence and going to Brazil. There’s still warmth there, enough to keep us comfortable for maybe a year. England is becoming impossible to live in these days.”

Ethel had no particular wish to go to Brazil. Her father had maintained a residence there for some years, chiefly for the use of the Amazon when she required it, for her researches often took her to the tropics. But the place was lonely, miles from anywhere, on the very edge of the trackless forest.

She said: “I hope nothing’s happened to Aunt Vi. She takes such fantastic risks sometimes. What can she be doing, I wonder?”

Her father reached for his coat. “No use conjecturing, I’m afraid. Let’s get along and give your mother a pleasant surprise. She’s aching to have you back home. Tomorrow we’ll see what the Council has to say. I have to attend it. You might as well come too.”

* * * *

On the following day there was little change in the weather.

The sky was grey, the wind biting, the daylight dim. Chris Wilson and Ethel found their car held up at times by traffic blocks and snowdrifts as they were driven to the World Council meeting in the centre of the city; then upon entering the great edifice, they partly forgot the external discomfort in the midst of the light and warmth which greeted them.

In the assembly hall, its huge cupola of roof lined with batteries of cameras and television transmitters, were gathered delegates from every land, all of them members of the World Council, the elected body of the people of Earth whose duty it was to rule, extending the same justice and protection to all races and creeds.

Chris Wilson took his place, Ethel beside him, and waited. He recognized scientists, engineers, commercial giants, astronomers—every type and profession. Then he turned his attention to the rostrum as President Vancourt, head of the World Council, rose to speak.

“My friends....” His voice was steady but filled with a definite air of sombreness. “We are here today to listen to a statement by Dr. Blandish, our chief astronomer—a statement of such profound significance that I beg you to listen to every word without interruption. It concerns the strange condition of the sun. Dr. Blandish will explain what has happened, and the conditions which must be expected in the near future.”

The president sat down and Dr. Blandish rose. In essence his address covered in detail the facts he had given Morris Arnside. When he finished, a murmur went over the gathering. Then Brice Torrington got up.

“Dr. Standish, the information you have given us is appalling to the last degree. In your opinion, how long have we before the sun becomes extinct?”

“At the most, two years. Maybe less.”

“And at the end of that period?”

“I foresee nothing but a frozen planet from which all life has been driven—probably underground. The seas and the air will freeze, to later escape into the vacuum of interstellar space. The light of the sun will be equal to that of a full moon, and its heat no greater.”

“And is there no scientific way in which the sun can be revived before it finally becomes a white dwarf?” the president asked anxiously.

“No way that we know of, Mr. President,” said Blandish. “I had hoped that there might have been present among us one person who could perhaps have helped us. I mean Miss Brant—or, as she is more popularly called—the Golden Amazon. Her science alone might be of an order to restore the sun, but I have tried for many months to get in touch with her without success. Doesn’t anybody know where she is?” he implored, spreading his hands. “Mr. Wilson, she is partly a relative of yours, is she not? Have you no idea?”

Chris Wilson stood up to reply. “She does not tell me or my family any more than she tells anybody eke, doctor. I have not the least idea what has become of her this last eighteen months.”

“As regards that,” Torrington said, “I have something to say, if I am permitted the floor, Mr. President?”

“By all means, Mr. Torrington!”

“I believe,” Torrington said deliberately, “that this superwoman—this scientific creature with the strength of ten men and the scientific skill of a witch—has taken revenge upon us people of Earth and departed to places unknown, perhaps another solar system! From the very outset of her career, her avowed aim has been to control the world. Fifty years ago, at three years of age, she was orphaned, a casualty of an attack on London. Dr. Axton, a surgical genius and idealist who believed that men had made a mess of the world, used her in an illegal experiment. He altered her gland structure, and believed that under his guidance she would grow up into a woman who could blot out war. But Axton was killed soon after his experiment, and she was adopted by the Brant family, the parents of Mr. Wilson’s wife. She grew up alongside the girl whom Mr. Wilson later married. The girl’s altered gland structure gave her the strength of ten powerful men together with a beauty never seen in a normal woman. And ageless life! Long has she boasted that she will live at least 500 years. When last seen eighteen months ago she looked only twenty-five.”

“This is purely a recital of known facts,” the president commented.

“Mr. President, I am refreshing the memory of those who forget this woman’s real upbringing. When she became a woman, the wonder girl’s staggering strength and mental power made her attempt the conquest of Britain as a prelude to mastering the world. She might have succeeded, but at the last moment she was apparently persuaded to turn over a new leaf by her natural mother.

“Instead of conquest, she gave us valuable scientific secrets—such as safe atomic power using copper instead of dangerous radioactive material. This led to the mastery of space and the colonisation of other worlds. But this woman is not a natural person! Alone of her kind, she hates humanity! She has said so time and again. Therefore, what more natural that when she had the chance, she should try and destroy us all?”

“You mean that you think she is the cause of this solar disaster?” the president asked, puzzled.

“There’s no doubt about it! Ask Dr. Blandish. If she had not flung that alien armada into the sun, it would have been as normal as ever today. I insist that she did it knowing what the later effect would be. Unable to conquer us by her own methods, she has used cosmic means to do it. Probably, even now, she is somewhere in space, listening and laughing at our discomfiture.”

“That’s a lie!” Ethel cried, leaping up with flaming cheeks beside her father. “You’ve no right to accuse my Aunt Vi like that!”

“She is not your aunt, Miss Wilson,” Torrington corrected, with a cynical smile. “However, I assume you call her such purely as a term of endearment.”

“Never mind what I call her! There isn’t a word of truth in your statement— Stop tugging at me, dad!” Ethel broke off angrily. “I’m going to have my say! Listen, all of you. I know Miss Brant better than any of you. I’ve been with her during her exploration of other worlds. She has saved my life many times, and all of yours, and not taken a scrap of credit. How dare you say she’s trying to destroy us?”

The metal king said: “Miss Brant is not a normal woman with feminine sentiments, but a scientific machine utterly pitiless in her methods. If she is not waiting to let us die in the midst of this solar catastrophe, why doesn’t she come forward in our hour of dire need?”

“There must be a good reason,” Ethel retorted.

“Yes, indeed!” Torrington agreed.

“Sit down, Rosy!” Chris urged.

“I’ll not have Aunt Vi’s name blackened in her absence. If she were here herself, Mr. Torrington wouldn’t dare say such things.”

“If she were here there’d be no need,” Torrington observed. He turned to face the president again.

“Mr. President, unless the Amazon returns and explains her conduct satisfactorily, it is the opinion of myself and my colleagues that she should be put under technical arrest. That is, should she ever be found, she must be brought to trial to explain why she has remained absent and deprived us of her scientific skill. She is a servant of the public, and knows it.”

“You mean she should be brought to the bar of the Tribunal of Justice?” the president asked.

“I do. I am prepared to admit that in many ways, she has helped us in the past, but deep down she has always been a menace—and I remain unshaken in my belief that she only threw that alien armada into the sun because she knew it would destroy the sun and us. She stands today in our eyes as the greatest scientific criminal in history.”

Torrington did not stop here. His speech obviously had been prepared in consultation with the higher-ups in world affairs, and so skillfully did he emphasize his points that at the finish there did not appear to be a single redeeming feature in the character of the mysteriously absent Amazon.

“Very well,” the president agreed. “Should Miss Brant return, she will be put under arrest and made to explain her actions in court. Now, we must turn to the vital matter at issue. How do we save ourselves from this disaster?”

“We must go underground,” Dr. Blandish answered. “I am not an engineer, but I understand from Mr. Torrington and others that the problem of tunnelling below the earth and installing vast underground habitats filled with every modern necessity is not beyond possibility. If we do not do this, we shall die in the frozen wastes that are inevitably coming. Travelling to other worlds in the system will not help us, either, since they rely on the same sun.”

Torrington got on his feet again. “This, Mr. President, is surely a matter to be settled in a more personal atmosphere? I have around me the men who can build the shelters, arrange the food distribution, control the transport.... It will mean that every living being must be indexed, and all available space must be mapped out—”

Chris Wilson and Ethel did not wait to hear anymore. They went out silently from the hall, and Ethel asked: “Do you scent a deliberate plot, dad?”

Chris nodded soberly. “As far as the technical arrest of your Aunt Vi is concerned, yes—but it doesn’t worry me unduly, because if she ever does return, she knows how to take care of herself and I’m pretty sure she’ll have a reasonable explanation. What does worry me is that Torrington will be in charge of building the shelters. I don’t trust him. I remember once when he had an order for four new space liners, and each one of them had faulty metal. They’d have sent thousands of people to their deaths if your aunt hadn’t discovered the flaws with testing equipment. Torrington had to put things right—and I think that incident, with others, is lingering in his mind. That, no doubt, is one reason why be wants your aunt’s arrest.”