The Project Gutenberg eBook of Atomic Station

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Title: Atomic Station

Author: Frank Belknap Long

Release date: October 30, 2022 [eBook #69264]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Standard Magazines, Inc, 1945

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ATOMIC STATION ***

ATOMIC STATION

By FRANK BELKNAP LONG

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Thrilling Wonder Stories Winter 1946.

Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that

the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

It was incredible and a little frightening. The rocket ship was within a half million miles of the Station, but as yet no reply had come to the frantic signals which Roger Sheldon had been sending out at ten second intervals.

He sat before the observation glass in the control room, a big man with the competent hands of an experienced navigator, and a curious mobility of expression which seemed out of keeping with the precise movements which those hands were making on the board.

His face was that of a man who had gazed on great unfathomable star fields smouldering in the depths of space and then—had deliberately curbed his exaltation and turned back to concern himself with the little affairs of Earth.

In three months and two days Roger Sheldon had passed completely beyond the Sun's gravitational tug into the utter darkness, the chill bleak immensity of interstellar space. To have accomplished more he would have bartered all the years of his youth. He had hardly dared hope to accomplish as much.

Now he was returning to the Station with his thoughts in a turmoil. His nerves were so taut he was afraid to relax even for the brief instant it would have taken him to shake a few grains of amytal into his palm and inhale the fumes.

For two generations the Station had encircled the Earth, an outpost of security bright with promise, the concrete embodiment of humanity's determination not to destroy itself.

While atomic research had remained in the uranium fission stage, the vast laboratory facilities of Earth had not endangered humanity. Even the first atomic bombs had not placed an intolerable strain on man's capacity to survive the hazards of working together toward a shared goal.

But the tremendous series of explosions which had rocked the Earth on June sixteenth, in 1969, had convinced even men of good will that a controlled, disciplined release of the mighty forces locked up within the atom could no longer take place on Earth.

It could only be allowed in an orbit far enough removed from Earth to jeopardize only the Station itself and the lives of a few men. Carefully integrated psychometric tests had shown that not more than a dozen men could coordinate their efforts under the constant threat of annihilation without developing personality quirks as dangerous as trigger neutrons would have been in the days of the New Mexico experiment.

Seventy million miles from the Earth the Station moved through the interplanetary night, a mile-long floating laboratory. This laboratory was equipped with every safety device known to modern science for the control of energies powerful enough to disrupt every vestige of matter within a half million miles of its orbit.

In 2022 a dozen men could have destroyed the Earth. Instead, on that little self-contained macrocosm, containing accommodations for fewer than a hundred men, women and children, the first interstellar ship had been constructed and powered with undreamed of energies.

To that little macrocosm the ship was now returning, piloted by one of those twelve men.

Sheldon would have thrown back his head and laughed long and heartily if someone had suggested that power could go to the head of a man like John Gale. Nominally Gale, a great bundle of immense kindliness, as selfless as a carven Buddha, was in command of the Station. But it was of no great consequence who was in command, because those men really could be trusted.

Sheldon stiffened abruptly. His eyes shifted from the control board to the observation glass. Unmistakably the gravity scanners had picked up a moving object in the darkness ahead, and were transmitting it to the glass, line by hazy line until a filmy opacity was hovering in the precise middle of the instrument.

Sheldon recognized the Station from the peculiar flatness of its contours. At a quarter million miles it showed up as a misty ovoid, flattened at both ends and faintly rimmed with light. By pressing hard with its thumb on both sides of a clay egg a child could have produced a fair facsimile of the Station as it appeared in the glass, except that the image was in rapid motion.

At a hundred million miles Sheldon cut all but two of the stern jets, and prepared to bring the ship in. His face was haggard with strain. He had given up trying to contact Gale. He'd know in a moment, he told himself grimly, why his signals had been ignored. Until he did know it was useless to speculate about the reason, or reasons, for Gale's silence.

The ship made a perfect nine-point landing, almost drifting in over the uppermost of the two sectional metal platforms which jutted out from the Station's central section like the wings of a colossal, space-spawned bat.

Five minutes later Sheldon was emerging from the gravity lock into a glow which lighted the darkness about him in all directions. Beyond the glow immense shadows crouched. When he raised his eyes he could see the stars, clusters of them winking just beyond the rim of the great bulk of floating metal from which he'd taken off six months previously.

His features were almost unbelievably haggard now, and he felt as though he'd left a part of himself in the vast reaches of utter darkness which lay between the stars.

He had left the shadow cast by the ship and was moving toward the edge of the platform when he heard a voice.

"Stop!" it yelled. "Who you?"

Startled, Sheldon swung about. As he did so a gaunt, massive-browed figure detached itself slowly from the shadows and came shambling toward him.

For an instant Sheldon stared in utter disbelief, a coldness encircling his scalp. The figure was that of a seven foot giant, with bulging biceps and a tangle of coarse black hair on his chest. His features were repulsively apelike. His apparel consisted solely of a soiled and tattered waist-cloth which encircled his hips, and clung loosely to his hairy thighs.

As Sheldon returned the brutish creature's stare he perceived with sudden horror that he wasn't clasping a modern weapon of science but an enormous wooden hatchet which gleamed dully in the steady glow.

Even the blade of the weapon was made of wood, but so sharply edged was it that Sheldon was under no illusion as to what would happen if he gave the giant an excuse to send it crashing against his skull.

"Where's Gale?" he demanded, realizing the futility of the question even as he asked it. "I've got to talk to him. You hear? Gale!"

Sheldon wasn't prepared for the convulsive hate which flared in the giant's stare the instant he recognized the elderly scientist's name. That the savage creature did recognize Gale's name was startlingly evident, for he repeated it slowly, his lips writhing back from his teeth.

"Gale!" he snarled. "Him very old. Many years dead."

It seemed to Sheldon that an abyss had opened up beneath him, filled with a blackness so bottomless that he was powerless to adjust himself to it. He stood staring at the giant in stunned disbelief, his face a bloodless mask.

With terrifying suddenness the giant's immense hairy hand shot out to fasten on Sheldon's shoulders.

"You come to find Gale?" he snarled.

Sheldon struggled then. Foolishly he tried to free himself, clasping the giant's wrist, and tugging at it with all his strength. With a desperation born of terror he even tried to wrench the hatchet from the savage creature's clasp.

He succeeded only in further enraging the brute. Shaking his arm free, the giant snarled savagely, raised the hatchet, and brought it down on Sheldon's skull.

Just how violently Sheldon was not to know, for the instant the blade struck him a terrible, light-lanced blackness exploded inside his head. With a groan he sank down, rolled over, and lay still.

He did not see the giant raise his arms skyward, grimace hideously, and dance wildly up and down beneath the pale stars. Faster and faster, his body bending sharply as convulsive tremors shook him. Shrieking, whirling, bending and straightening, the hatchet in his clasp gleaming redly in the steady light as he danced.

Sheldon's head was aching when he sat up. Instinctively he pressed his hand to his temple and withdrew it with a groan of pain.

Curiously, consciousness hadn't returned slowly, leaving him confused. It had returned swiftly. He knew that there was a deep gash in his forehead and that he was fortunate to be alive.

Painstakingly he explored the gash again. It was still bleeding a little, but he was quite sure that the ax hadn't penetrated his skull. His vision was much too clear, his faculties too abnormally alert.

He could make out every detail of the small, metal-walled room into which he'd been carried by his brutish assailant.

Carried or dragged. He had no way of knowing. He only knew that he was now sitting up with his back to a firm metal wall, staring straight across the room at a low metal bench.

On the bench sat a dozen rosy-cheeked, almost doll-like little figures clothed in fantastically bright garments that seemed to be made of tissue paper.

The little figures had the pudgy hands and dimpled legs of very young infants, and they were staring at him out of wide dark eyes that stubbornly refused to blink.

It all seemed like a dream. But Sheldon knew that it wasn't. He even knew that the little figures were not infants. They were more like Lilliputians, except that Lilliputians could blink.

Was that because they lacked power to move, he wondered wildly. If only they would walk, shift their positions a little or cease to regard him with that fixed, unwavering stare.

Suddenly the door opened, and a girl came into the room. A full-bosomed, strikingly pretty girl, wearing a plain white smock which descended from her shoulders to just above her knees.

A girl with raven-black hair and lustrous dark eyes, a perfectly normal girl carrying a cracked earthenware bowl.

Seemingly the bowl contained milk, for the instant the girl saw Sheldon her pupils dilated, and it fell from her hands, splintering into fragments and spilling a thin white fluid which snaked in all directions over the floor.

The next instant she was on her knees before him, staring at him out of wide eyes, running her hands over his face and almost fearfully patting his hair. For a moment she continued to explore the contours of his face, as though amazed that his features were not coarse and thick like the features of the brute who had struck him down.

Then astonishment and a fierce, almost maternal solicitude filled her eyes.

"You're hurt!" she murmured. "Here! Let me bind up your head."

Sheldon had started to get up. But before he could regain his feet, she'd ripped a strip of cloth from her smock, and was winding it about his head. Her breath fell warm against his face. He sank back against the wall, and let her have her way. Deftly she knotted the bandage, and adjusted it so that it rested comfortably upon his head.

"A man like myself!" she murmured, incredulously.

Sheldon stared at her, a tightness in his throat.

Yes, there—there was a resemblance. Faint, but unmistakable. Not to himself, but to Gale. She had Gale's almost incredible width of forehead—a feature which, oddly enough, did not detract from her loveliness. And when she smiled something about her mouth reminded him of Gale.

She was smiling now, nodding and smiling at him, her eyes strangely moist.

"I've seen pictures of men like you in the micro-audiovisual films," she said.

Then as she raised her head Sheldon saw that she had Gale's eyes.

"Where's John Gale?" Sheldon said, quickly. As he spoke he leaned forward, and gripped the girl's wrist. "Where is he?"

For a moment the girl's eyes grew so large they seemed to fill her face.

"Truly, you do not know?"

"I only know that he isn't here to welcome me," Sheldon said, moistening his dry lips. "Instead, I received a very surprising kind of welcome just now. Where is Gale?"

"My great grandfather has been dead for seventy years," the girl said, as though she were addressing a very strange sort of child. "If you are from Earth you would not know, perhaps. No one has come to the Station since grandfather died." Her eyes clouded. "Why, I do not know. There is so much that I would like to know, that I cannot hope to know."

"What—what year is this?" Sheldon asked, running a hand over his bandaged forehead.

The girl shook her head. "I can't tell you that. We have lost track of the years. Since Gale died there have been fewer and fewer of us. Mother was like me, and the man to whom she was wed. But they are not alive now. I am the last."

She turned abruptly and pointed to the immobile, staring little figures on the bench,

"These are my aunt's children."

Sheldon felt a coldness start up his spine.

"Children!" he cried, in horror.

"They are human mutants," the girl said, simply. "Zombie mutants, the micro-films call them. They can obey when spoken to, but they cannot speak or act of their own free will. But the pituitary mutants are far more primitive, really. Giganticism. Atavistic giganticism. It's all very clearly explained in the micro-films. Pituitary giants they are, with the physical characteristics of primitives. Dawn men."

Sheldon rubbed his burning brow.

"If I had returned a hundred years in the future what you say would not have seemed incredible," he muttered, dazedly. "The radiations produced by atomic fission on an almost undreamed of scale might alter human genes, yes. Alter the microscopic carriers of human inheritance, stunting the body's growth or reversing the course of human evolution."

"Yes, yes," the girl said. "That is exactly what happened. I have what mother called the equivalent of a modern scientific education. That's why I understand so much, and so little. There are gaps. Gale destroyed many of the films. There were things he did not want even my mother's mother to know."

"We were releasing energies up and down the scale of matter," Sheldon said, slowly. "Disrupting every known element and its isotope. Controlling the chain reactions, of course, using every safeguard. But the radiations which escaped might well have given rise to mutations on the biological scale."

He turned and glanced at the little figures on the bench.

"Infantile type with schizophrenic mentalities." Sheldon drew a quick breath. "Or primitive types with thick, coarse features. The mechanism of evolutionary retrogression lies dormant in all of us. A disease like acromegaly will touch it off, causing man to regress to the brute. An alteration in human genes before birth might very well result in a more deep-seated primitiveness. Acromegaliacs only regress physically."

A faint smile hovered for an instant on the girl's pale lips.

"You're talking like a micro-film lecturer," she said. "You have the scientific temperament, that's plain."

"Yes," Sheldon said. "Yes, I have. If the world fell on me, I'd want to know how it happened. I'd stop and talk about it."

"I'm like that too, a little," the girl said.

A sadness crept into her gaze. "I do not fear them," she said. "I have only compassion for them. I nurse them when they are ill, just as I feed these helpless little ones. And in so far as they are capable of affection, they have for me a certain tenderness."

She started and drew back, as though frightened by the look which had come into Sheldon's face.

"If I had returned a century from now I might have believed you," he said. "But I left the station exactly six months ago."

"You left the Station?" The girl stared at him. "What is your name?"

"Roger Sheldon."

"You made the first attempt ever made by man to conquer the utter black night of space!" The girl's eyes had begun to shine. "Yes, yes. There are micro-film recordings of your ship taking off. Long, long ago, in the dawn. Gale—Gale left a message for you. It was his wish that it be given to you on your return, if you ever did return. I have it safely locked away. Mother made me promise I would not break the seal."

Her hands were suddenly warm about his, tightening, drawing him toward the door.

"Oh, it's unbelievable! I'm glad now I didn't project the recording. I was tempted to. It was a torture not to. But somehow I could not. I'm funny that way."

Funny that way! It was the first time the girl had used a colloquial expression. Oddly enough, it made her seem more akin, in some strange way closer to him.

"I'll take you to the micro-film library," she whispered. "But we must be careful. The shaggy ones will be watching us. They are creatures of impulse, dangerous when provoked. You must have done something to antagonize them."

"I only saw one," Sheldon said. "He struck me down when I demanded that he take me to Gale."

Slowly the girl paled. "That was the most dangerous thing you could have said. Just before he died Gale had to adopt stern measures. The shaggy ones—we have always called them that—were getting out of control. To them he is a terrifying, half-mythical symbol of wrath.

"You must believe me," she pleaded, as though aware of his thoughts. "They have developed a peculiar tribal organization of their own. They're like the savage tribes of Earth I've seen in the micro-films. Wouldn't you regard them as dangerous?"

"Dangerous, yes," Sheldon said, slowly. "I wonder why he didn't kill me. Why did he bring me here?"

"He did not want you to die," the girl said. "I told you they were like savage children. A child may strike another child in a fit of rage and not want him to die. When the shaggy ones are sick or injured they come here, and I bind up their wounds, when their wounds are not too grievous. To them this room is a place of healing."

"Then I was brought here to be healed."

"Yes." She was by the door now, pulling it open. "Follow me," she pleaded. "Keep close to me, and if you see one of the shaggy ones try not to look startled. It's best to ignore them. By now they're probably swarming all over your ship, and wondering about you."

"I don't doubt that," Sheldon muttered, but made no protest.

The room opened on a narrow corridor suffused with cold light. It seemed vaguely familiar. Suddenly Sheldon realized that he was close to the three large rooms which Gale had occupied six months previously.

Six months or a century? Could a man lose track of time in the gulfs between the stars? Could time sweep past, in some strange fashion leaving him utterly untouched?

"Hurry," the girl whispered. "Keep close to me. They won't harm you if we move like twin shadows in some secret dream!"

Sheldon turned and stared at her, amazed by the startlingly poetic quality of her speech. Amazed as well by something warm and shining that had crept into her glance. Almost it seemed as though a rose had unfolded in his clasp and was filling the corridor with its fragrance.

A moment later they had passed the photo-electric heat cone which guarded Gale's quarters, and were standing at a turn in the corridor.

"Straight ahead," the girl said. "The library's at the end of the corridor."

"I—I thought it was on the level above," Sheldon muttered, dazedly.

The girl shook her head. "Gale may have moved it. I do not know. Many of the rooms have been moved since mother was a little girl. But I do not remember about the library."

Withdrawing his gaze from the massive door which loomed behind the heat cone Sheldon turned, and followed her down a narrower corridor to where another cone loomed in shadows.

To his dismay his companion walked straight toward the cone without stopping to cut the beam.

"Look out!" he warned. "You'll be seared."

The girl swung about, her eyes widening in puzzlement. "What do you mean?" she asked.

"The photo-electric circuit which activates the cone!" Sheldon's voice was choked. "You started to walk right through it."

"Well?"

"You'll be seared to a crisp unless you cut that circuit with a combination disk. Haven't you got one?"

For answer the girl turned and advanced toward the door with her shoulders squared.

She was within a foot of the beam when Sheldon leapt toward her, swung her about and dragged her forcibly backwards.

The next moment her lips were glued to his, her arms having gone up to encircle his shoulders. It was a miracle so unexpected that for an instant he stood as though frozen.

Then he was holding her tightly and smoothing her hair as he returned her caresses in full measure, a man fiercely, crazily, primitively in love with a girl whose name he did not even know.

When he released her her eyes were shining.

"It happened quickly, didn't it?" she said. "The micro-films show scenes of courtship ridiculously drawn out. As though a man needed time to wonder about a woman and a woman still more time to wonder about a man."

"It happened quickly because you were walking straight to your death," Sheldon said, his eyes wide with doubt. "Did you do that deliberately?"

The girl flushed.

"I wasn't in any danger," she said. "There's no circuit now, no need for a circuit. The Shaggy Ones shun the library because the projection screen terrifies them. To them it is an instrument of sorcery which seeks out the dead and brings them back to life."

"Yes?" Sheldon said, looking at her. "Tell me, what is your name?"

"Anne," the girl said, simply. "Do you like it?"

"There's nothing wrong with it," Sheldon said.

Anne's face became suddenly grave. "My name isn't nearly as important as Gale's message," she said. "Come."

The library exuded a faint mustiness. There were cobwebs around the ceiling. Shadows seemed to follow them as they crossed to the micro-film cabinets which filled every inch of wall space on three sides of the room. On the fourth side a six foot screen, surmounted by a cold light bulb, faced a micro-film projector on a circular metal stand.

In utter silence Anne removed a small gleaming key from her smock, and unlocked one of the cabinets. Sheldon watched her, a breathless expectancy surging up through him.

Perspiration was beading his forehead when she turned abruptly and handed him a tiny sealed roll of micro-film.

"Break the seal and thread the film into the projector," she urged. "Hurry!"

Sheldon looked at her. "Is this Gale's message?"

Anne nodded. "Yes. Oh, make haste. They shun the library, but your presence here may serve to arouse their curiosity. It may even do more."

Sheldon nodded grimly, and moved toward the projector. His hands shook as he broke the seal and threaded the serrated end of the film into the instrument. A moment later he was standing with his arm about the girl's shoulder, staring at the screen. His brain felt strangely cold, as though icy currents were swirling around and around inside his head.

For an instant there was only a dull flickering. Then a bright, steady glow filled the screen, and Gale's face came sharply into view.

Sheldon ceased to breathe.

The Gale who looked out at him from the glow was a much older Gale than he had known. Older, and shockingly changed, for his face was haggard with torment, his eyes so deeply sunken they seemed more like holes in a skull than the eyes of a living man whose thoughts had once moved in an orbit of immense kindliness and calm grandeur.

Suddenly he was speaking.

"I knew you'd come back, Roger. Not even the variable nature of time can prevent my saying to you: I knew you'd come back!"

The tight lips relaxed a little and a smile spread over the tired old face. "Remarkable, isn't it? I'm gone, but we're really meeting again, lad. Just as surely as though I were standing here talking to you in the flesh."

Gale's face grew suddenly grave again. "I wanted to tell you, Roger. Believe me, I did. But the others wouldn't have it. It's no light matter to deprive a man of his world by exposing him to a time lag of well over a century."

Sheldon cried out.

"We decided not to tell you the six months you'd be gone would be a hundred and ten years here. Thought you might not be able to endure the thought of not aging at all while we aged normally in normal space. So we didn't tell you just how accurately we'd measured the lag by checking your initial velocity against the limiting velocity of light. Harsley and Wells did the checking, lad. Their computations would be incomprehensible to you, but Harsley, as you know, is not in the habit of making mistakes when he's working with a Tov-calculator. Wells would have caught him up if he had."

For an instant Gale paused to smile briefly. There seemed to be small explosions in his sunken eyes as he continued.

"You'll be traveling through a complete arc on the Lorentz scale—an arc which will carry you into non-Euclidean space. You'll return a century from now, Roger. You'll pass through a segment of the continuum looped back on itself—a very small temporal-spatial warp as warps go, but large enough to lop off a hundred and ten years in our space."

For an instant there was a roaring in Sheldon's ears. A dizziness swept over him, blurring his faculties and causing the image on the screen to waver and recede. For an instant he heard only an unintelligible jumble of syllables, saw only a vague splotch of light where Gale's face had been. Then his vision grew sharp again, and Gale's words came clearly.

"The earliest atomic experiments did not alter human genes as far as we could determine. Certainly uranium fission didn't, but—as you know, Roger, we were releasing energies up and down the scale of matter."

"That's what you said!" Anne cried. "He's repeating your very words, Roger."

Sheldon had stiffened, but at the sound of the girl's voice a little of the tenseness went out of his features. He nodded and tightened his hold on her shoulder.

"The first mutant was born five years after you left, Roger. Now a future bright with promise has turned into a future charged with a danger so great that only a courageous humanity, a humanity willing to turn its back forever on the kind of experiments we've been conducting here can hope to survive.

"I shall lay all the facts before the wisest men I know. Fortunately a good many of these men are in key administrative positions on Earth. But unless my decision is accepted without question, unless all men of wisdom and good will join in a united effort humanity will cease to be humanity as we know it.

"There must be—a quarantine. The Station must be sealed off, isolated. No one from Earth must ever venture within its orbit."

For a moment the great scientist paused, then resumed in steady tones.

"What will happen to the Station in the course of the years I do not know. I cannot bring myself to do what perhaps should be done—destroy a source of infection which no power known to science can cleanse. The radiations are too continuous and pervasive. The Station is drenched with them, and the disintegration of matter which is still taking place here will continue for generations.

"We have confined that disintegration to the Station's eighty-nine power units, but it cannot be arrested without destroying the Station.

"I do not know what kind of Station you will find when you return, Roger. But this much I know. You will have the resolution to do what I cannot bring myself to do.

"I do not believe the mutants will endanger Earth, at least not during my lifetime. There are not too many of them, and it would be unnecessarily cruel to hospitalize them on Earth. It is best, I think, that we order our affairs here so that the mutants may be spared. This place is where they belong. We understand them because we are linked to them by ties of kinship.

"But you are not, Roger. If, when you return, you feel that the Station should be destroyed—well, lad, there are weapons in the weapon room you will know how to use.

"Lad, I leave the future of the Station in your hands. Safe hands they are, kindly hands, but hands courageous enough to do what must be done. Goodbye, lad, and good luck!"

The screen went blank.

"Gale come back talk to man from sky!" a harsh voice shouted. "Him we slay!"

Sheldon swung about, all the blood draining from his face. A dozen shaggy brutes, their wooden axes gleaming in the cold light, were advancing stealthily upon him. In horror he saw that the one closest to him had seized Anne and was pinning her arms to her side.

"Roger, save yourself!" the struggling girl screamed. "They'll kill you!"

Sheldon's spine seemed to turn to ice. Probably he had never thought faster in his life. Or moved faster. With a sudden, desperate lunge he grabbed the projector, raised it and swung it fiercely toward the skull of the nearest brute.

Sheldon grabbed the projector, swung it fiercely toward the skull of the nearest brute.

There was a splintering crash, and a blinding flash of light shot from the collapsing instrument. It was followed by a pinwheeling blur of light which encircled the screen and then shot up toward the ceiling. The next instant all the lights in the library went out, suddenly plunging the big room in total darkness.

In the darkness Sheldon was aware of harsh breathing, grunts and savage snarls. For an instant he crouched close to the screen, trembling, collecting his wits. Then he stumbled forward, not breathing at all. He could feel perspiration running over his body, drenching him under his clothes.

Suddenly soft flesh brushed his arm and groping hands found his. He could see the girl's eyes in the darkness, bright with terror.

"Don't let go of me," she whispered hoarsely, "I can find the door. Let me guide you."

A moment later Sheldon was out in the corridor, running, with Anne at his side.

"We've got to get to the ship!" Sheldon's voice was taut with urgency. "It's our only chance."

"I never thought they'd turn on me!" Anne almost sobbed. "But they're crazed—maddened by what they saw. They think you've come back to rule them at Gale's bidding."

Up a narrow stairway they raced, and along another corridor, and then out beneath the stars.

From the shadows the ship loomed, immense, shadowy, a shape that seemed all gleaming angles and spiraling curves.

A weird feeling of unreality took hold of Sheldon as he swung open the port, almost pushed Anne in and stumbled in after her.

But once inside his mind seemed to clear. In less than a minute he was at the controls.

White and trembling, he sat with his back to the terrified girl, his hands moving swiftly over the board. He could feel her body's warmth through his clothes. She was bending over him, her heart beating a wild tattoo against his shoulders, her breath fanning his face.

Suddenly she cried out.

"Roger, here they come!"

Sheldon stiffened with revulsion. He could see them now in the observation glass, a dozen stooped and shambling figures close to the yawning aperture of the central surface vent, their arms encircling short, massive weapons which gleamed in the steady light.

"They must have raided the weapon room!" Anne cried. "Those are atomic blast weapons. Pedal blast disintegrators, the micro-films call them."

Sheldon swung about.

"You didn't tell me they knew how to operate disintegrators!" he said, wildly. He gripped her shoulders as he spoke, so fiercely that she cried out.

"No, no, you don't understand. Gale forbade them to approach the weapon room under penalty of death. To them the room was taboo, the power weapons terrible living shapes of wrath. But rage does strange things to the mind. They must have heard what Gale said to you."

"But if they've never used such weapons, what does this mean?"

"That means nothing," she said, her lips shaking. "How much intelligence does it take to depress a pedal blast release? A child could try, couldn't he? Couldn't he, Roger?"

"Yes," Sheldon said, quietly. "A child could try. And those weapons would be far more dangerous in the hands of a child than they would be in our hands."

The veins on Sheldon's forehead were thick blue cords, and sweat dripped onto his fingers as he stared into the glass.

Suddenly a convulsive shudder shook him. In utter silence he swung back to the board and started tugging and jerking at the controls. Thirty seconds passed. A minute. Two.

In the glass a terrifying scene was taking place. The savages had drawn closer to the ship, and were converging upon it from three sides. As they advanced their lips writhed back from their teeth, and their hands tugged and jerked at the massive weapons which they were clasping now to their shaggy breasts.

"They're not—going to get—a chance to try," Sheldon muttered, fiercely. "Not much of a chance, anyway."

As he spoke the board began to vibrate and a dull, steady droning filled the control room.

Under the fierce blasts of her atomic jets the ship took off with a roar. It took off and then swept back over the Station as Sheldon strove to avoid the shattering backlash of a too suddenly released energy surge.

He swooped very low, almost skimming the highest of the Station's seven towers, and bringing the elevated central section so near that the landing platform filled the glass.

For a terrifying brief instant the tiny figures moving far below were visible in the glass. Then gigantic bursts of flame came in livid spurts from the almost invisible weapons in their clasp, blotting them from view, and sending a wave of thick, black smoke swirling over the platform.

Before the smoke could clear the ship was hurtling skyward, the Station dwindling in the glass.

It was some moments before Sheldon spoke.

"All those blasters went off simultaneously," he said, in a stunned voice. "For an instant I thought those devils were smarter than we'd given them credit for. But it wasn't their blind fumblings which exploded the weapons. It was the surge of energy from our stern atomic jets."

Sheldon's words died.

In the precise middle of the plate the Station hovered, enveloped in a luminous haze. The explosion began at the edges of that haze. It began with something which reminded Sheldon of the sparking of crisscrossing electric wires in a turgid blanket of mist.

The sparking continued for a full minute, increasing rapidly in brightness and seeming almost to detach itself from the glass. It was followed by a tremendous surge of light that appeared almost to shatter the glass.

The instant the flash vanished the Station split in two. The two parts shot away from each other to hang for an instant suspended in the void. Then each part began to jerk about and split up into smaller and smaller fragments, while blast after blast lit up the screen.

The explosions continued for several minutes. When they stopped nothing remained of the Station but a hazy spiral of dissolving smoke.

Sheldon swung about slowly. He saw that Anne was crying. She was pressing a handkerchief to her face and weeping quietly into it.

Gently he put his arm about her and drew her toward him.

"The Station was an atomic tinder box," he said, tenderly. "The exploding weapons must have touched off a chain reaction. But it was swift and merciful, even for the little ones."

"I fed them when they were hungry, nursed them when they were ill," Anne said, in a choked voice.

Sheldon nodded. "You loved them, didn't you?"

Anne looked at him. Her eyes were eloquent.

"I know," Sheldon said, smoothing her hair. "Go ahead. Cry. You'll feel better if you don't try to fight it."

A small thing the Earth seemed at first, a mere pinpoint of winking greenness in the immense round glass. But it did not remain small. Its oceans and great continental land masses swept first into view. Then the surface of the land, spreading out and almost filling the glass, and finally—green fields and landscaped terraces, and little blue houses which seemed all windows, with old oaks and birches about them, on a high white cliff overlooking the sea.

Sheldon's eyes were shining as he set the ship down.

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Table of Contents

ATOMIC STATION

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE