Читать книгу Onslaught of the Druid Girls - Raymond King Cummings - Страница 4
ОглавлениеA World Beyond the Moon
I am addressing this, mathematically as close as I can, to my grandfather and grandmother, Dr. and Mrs. Robert Blaine, of Delavan, Wisconsin. However, if it should not reach them, but someone else, I will introduce myself.
I am an orphan. My name, Lee Blaine. I was twelve when my father and mother were killed in a laboratory explosion during a research experiment on atomic power. After their death, my grandfather devoted himself to me and my scientific training.
At twenty I was a technical assistant to a famous Chicago inventor. He and I were working secretly on artificial gravity control. He was a believer in doing, not talking, so he insisted on secrecy. And he had been successful. We had, in the laboratory, a little twenty-foot, one-man space-rocket, if you want to call it that. A finned, tubular steelite cylinder some six feet in diameter. As yet untested, but we were sure it would operate correctly.
Some of the technical details were mine, but I feel that it is not fitting for me to give them here. The anti-gravity force in the alumite-iridium alloys was the work of the inventor. Yet, with a humorous smile on this thin lips—he was already sixty years old—he named the machine for me. He called it the Blaine-rocket.
So much for me, Lee Blaine, and the original Blaine-rocket. You who read this may perhaps know far more details than that, anyway ...
I must get on to the factors that ultimately led to my first—and last—voyage into space in that Blaine-rocket.
It all began when I got a letter from grandfather Blaine. It said simply, among the other homey things that a letter from the "folks" always brings, that grandfather's theory of a second moon had been rejected by the Astronomical Society.
But the papers said more. Far more! They picked up the story, and overnight, because of the strange sense of humor of a conscienceless newspaper writer, it became the laugh of the nation. "Astronomer Moonstruck!" ran the headlines. "Sees Double!"
For days the nation laughed at the poor old man in Wisconsin who claimed to have discovered a new moon, a second satellite of Earth, out beyond the orbit of Luna, some 440,000 miles away. No other astronomers would support the theory. None had observed it. Not even Grandfather had seen it. But he could prove its existence to his own satisfaction. He had called it Zonara.[1]
I myself believed there was a second moon. My own father had suspected its existence, when he had been helping Grandfather in his observations. A tiny asteroid, with perhaps a strange form of atmosphere incapable of reflecting sunlight, so that its small, dark object had not been visible in Earth telescopes. They had located it approximately, and remembering, I could recall some of their computations. I could point to the spot in the sky where it should be.
I believed in it so much that thinking of it, and of Grandfather's justification, one day when a test was to be made of the new Blaine-rocket, the inspiration came to me.
Ordinarily, my employer, the inventor, would have gone on the maiden voyage himself. But he was sixty; too old to withstand the rigors of such an experience. So he hired a "suicide-volunteer"—a professional hazard-man as they are called, to test our mechanism ...
My idea was simple. I defrauded that hazard-man of his job. The night before he was to make his flight, when all was in readiness, I sneaked to the take-off field, stepped into the Blaine-rocket, and blasted off!
A fool stunt? The thoughtless act of a youngster? Perhaps, but was it any more thoughtless than the "stunt" of a newspaper writer who made an old man the laughing stock of millions?
I think I need not detail that pioneer spaceflight now. Certainly it is not important to my narrative of explanation ... I was unconscious surely for the first half of the trip, with only my youth and strength saving me. Perhaps the hazard-man would not have fared so well.
The shock of the explosive take-off rendered me unconscious; I was well beyond the attraction of the Earth, perhaps being pulled by Zonara itself, when I recovered.
Then at last I could see my destination. I was still within the giant cone of the Earth's shadow, with the huge half-moon far to one side and now behind me, when slowly the drab, round disk of Zonara became visible. And then it was a monstrous, cloud-banked surface, filling all the Heavens under me as with retarded velocity I dropped down upon it.
I could see a forest along the edge of a lake; the lake itself winding about with mountain peaks off to one side. You may guess the pounding of my heart, my tense excitement as now, in the dim effulgence of the Zonara night, I came down under the cloud banks with the small, convex surface of the little world close beneath me. Dark little mountains, ragged with starlit metal spires; rivers and little lakes; and a vast, blue-black and brown forest, lying in patches ... dark, mysterious. And queerly ominous ...
I had the sudden feeling of menace, down there in the darkness of the forest surface. It was as though the aura of a strange fear down in its depths reached up at me ...
I crashed through the forest-top and smashed the little Blaine-rocket to the ground. Inexpert; and certainly with primitive mechanisms at my command. At all events, again I was knocked unconscious. For how long I do not know. Then at last I was dimly aware that I was smothering; that I must get out of the cylinder ...
Zonara!
My first awareness of it was that I was staggering out into darkness. The air was strangely heavy, choking so that my head reeled and sang with new violence. I felt myself sinking to a soft, mouldy ground. The lush smell of vegetation was in the night air. Weird gnarled shapes of trees were thick around me; clustering air-vines were like tangled ropes everywhere—vines with pods and great elephant-eared leaves.
A jungle primeval. I did not quite sink back into unconsciousness this time. I recall that over my head, far up, faint straggling starlight was visible. And then suddenly I tensed, struggling up on one elbow as I stared.
A little brown shape, white-limbed, was running up there through the trees along giant boughs. A girl! I gasped in utter amazement. A lovely girl, human, here on a tiny world that Earth and humankind didn't even suspect existed! It was incredible.
She was swinging down on the vines as she descended.
The crash of my landing of course had been obvious. I saw her, fifty feet over me, and to one side, grip a dangling rope-like vine. And as she swung free, her weight came with it in a great swaying arc. Her hair and her little draped brown garment fluttered. Then she lightly struck the ground, with her skilled motion so that she kept on at a run until she was beside me.
Her long hair, gold among the tangled vines and leaves, fell loosely from her head, with a night breeze rippling it like a cloak about her brown-clothed body—a single, simple little brown garment from shoulders to thighs, with her pink-white rounded limbs glistening in the starlight.
There was fear upon her as she gripped me. Fear perhaps of me—but it seemed not so much that as fear of something else. In the darkness here she was only a blob, murmuring vehement, unintelligible words, with her hands pulling frantically at my jacket.
