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Title: Forgotten world

Author: Edmond Hamilton

Release date: November 15, 2022 [eBook #69357]

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 FORGOTTEN WORLD ***

FORGOTTEN WORLD

By EDMOND HAMILTON

[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.]

CHAPTER I

Stranger from the Stars

Carlin was the only one of the four hundred passengers on the "Larkoom" who hated the star-ship and everything about it.

He was bored with the vessel and everyone aboard. A pack of chattering idiots! For the hundredth time since leaving Canopus, he told himself that he was a monumental fool to let that psychotherapist talk him into this crazy trip.

A blond girl from Altair Four came tripping along the deck and favored Laird Carlin with the bright smile that all the younger feminine tourists had practised on the tall, dark, dour-looking young man.

The blonde from Altair Four favored the tall dour-looking young man with a bright smile.

"Oh, Mr, Carlin, the annunciators just said that we're only eight hours from Sol. By night, we'll be on Earth! Isn't it thrilling?"

"Just what is thrilling about it?" Carlin asked sourly.

The girl was a little dumfounded. "Why, I mean, Earth! All the ancient history we study in schools, about how men first came from there two thousand years ago. Or was it twenty-one hundred?"

She prattled on, voicing all the appropriate clichés.

"Just think, all of us in this ship came from different stars and worlds, yet long ago all our ancestors lived on that one little world Earth. And they say it's still much the same as it was then. Isn't it wonderful?"

Carlin could not see anything wonderful about it, and a little wearily he said so.

The girl flushed in exasperation. "Then why are you going to Earth at all?"

Why indeed, Carlin wondered savagely? Why the devil wasn't he back on the other side of the galaxy where he belonged, supervising establishment of the new star-ship line to Algol Six, spending his leaves in Sun City with Nila?

Nila—he yearned for her, for her gay, mocking humor, her cool beauty, her quick, clever mind. What was he doing here with a bunch of bird-brained tourists who were conscientiously tripping for local color to an old, forgotten world?

This whole part of the galaxy was a stagnant, half-dead area. This side of Vega there weren't a score of suns with worlds of any importance. And the old "Larkoom," a second-rate star-ship that couldn't make more than eighty light-speeds, was plodding determinedly and monotonously on into it.

Curse that psychotherapist anyway! Why had he been crazy enough to listen to the fellow? That smug, pink, blinking Arcturian had smiled as gently as a well-bred pussy-cat as he told Carlin what his trouble was.

"Star-sick?" Carlin had flared. "What do you mean, star-sick? I've made the trip to Algol ten times in the last three months."

The psychotherapist had nodded. "Yes. And that was nine times too many. You've been overdoing it for a long time, Mr. Carlin."

Before Carlin could protest, the other man had referred to the dossier on his desk.

"I have your record here. Born at Aldebaran four thirty years ago. Graduated at twenty-two from Canopus University with the degree of Cosmic Engineer. Worked since then establishing spaceports for star-ship lines between Rigel, Sharak, Tibor, Algol and other stars."

The psychotherapist looked up gravely. "The point is that you've spent fifty per cent of your time in the last eight years in star-ships. The average has been seventy per cent since you took charge of establishing the new Algol line. And that's too much time in space for any man. No wonder you're star-sick."

"Blast it, I'm not star-sick!" Carlin exploded. "What kind of therapist are you? I come here to have you treat a perfectly simple syndrome of reflex-fatigue, and you tell me all this!"

The Arcturian shook his head wisely. "Your case was only simple on the surface, Mr. Carlin. The hypnosis showed up your trouble unmistakably. Want to hear the record?"

Carlin heard it. And it wasn't pretty. Not pretty, to hear his hypnosis-freed subconscious yelling out a frantic hatred of space and star-ships and everything connected with them.

"You see?" said the Arcturian gently. "This has been building up in you for a long time."

Carlin was stunned. He had known of other men who had got star-sick and had had to drop their work and quit traveling space for a while. Other men—but he'd always laughed contemptuously at them for it.

The psychos might declare that it was perfectly natural for a man to develop a subconscious aversion to space if he crowded his work, but the hard-bitten engineers of Carlin's set believed that a star-sick man was nine times in ten a shirker. And now he himself was told he was star-sick.

"You've got to quit work and stay out of space for a while," the Arcturian therapist told him.

Carlin felt sick at heart. "Then all my work in building up the Algol line will go into young Brewer's hands."

Still, he thought after a moment, it might not be so bad. Working in his line's main offices here on Canopus Two, he could keep in touch. And he would have more time here with Nila.

But the psychotherapist shook his head quite decisively at that.

"No, Mr. Carlin. Your case is too dangerous for that. Your subconscious is twisted into a knot that is going to be hard to untie." He hesitated a moment as though he knew what reaction his next words would provoke. "In fact, there's only one way in which you can be normalized. That's the Earth-treatment."

"Earth-treatment?" Carlin didn't even know what it meant. "You mean, some treatment that has reference to the old planet over on the other side of the galaxy?"

The Arcturian nodded. "Yes, our ancestral planet Earth. Where all our race came from, two thousand years ago. Where you're going back to, for perhaps a year."

Carlin was knocked breathless by that calm statement.

"Me going to Earth for a year? Are you crazy? Why should I go there?"

"Because," the therapist said soberly, "if you don't I'm afraid you won't last another six months as a star-line man."

"But why can't I take a rest right here on Canopus Two?" Carlin demanded heatedly. "Why send me to that moldering, forgotten old planet where there's nothing now but a few historical monuments?"

"You've never been to Earth, I take it?" the psychotherapist asked thoughtfully.

Carlin made an impatient gesture. "I'm not interested in ancient history. That part of the galaxy is all a backwater."

"Yes," the expert said. "I know all that. But old and small and forgotten as it is these days, Earth is still important."

"To historians," Carlin snapped. "To people who like to poke in the dusty past."

The Arcturian nodded, and shrugged.

"And to psychologists," he said quietly. "Most people these days don't realize something. They don't realize that we, all of us, are still really Earthmen in a way." He held up a protesting hand. "Oh, I know we don't think of ourselves like that! Since those first Earthmen pioneered to their neighbor planets and then to the stars, since our civilization spread out over most of the galaxy, a hundred generations of us have been born on different star-worlds from Rigel to Fomalhaut. But except for local modifications, the type of humanity has persisted since our ancestors left Earth and Sol long ago.

"That's because we've altered star-world conditions to fit ourselves, instead of adapting ourselves to those conditions. We've cunningly changed atmospheres, gravities, everything, wherever we went. We've kept ourselves one race, one type, that way. But it's a type that is still indexed to that old plane Earth as its norm."

"Does that explain why I have to give up my work and go live on the old relic for a year?" Carlin demanded furiously.

"Yes, it does," the Arcturian replied. "We're a star-traveling race now. But the mind can take only so much of the strain of star-travel. Overdo that strain and you get a revulsion, you get star-sickness. Then the only cure is rest for the mind in completely normal conditions. And complete normality, for us descendants of Earthmen, is—Earth."

Carlin had stormed. He carried his wrathful resistance to the last pitch.

And then the psychotherapist had crushed him.

"I've turned in your psycho-record to your star-ship line. You'll not be allowed to work there until you're cured."

And that, Laird Carlin thought bitterly, was why he was sprawled in a deck-chair here on the "Larkoom" as the old tub creaked and labored and plodded through space toward the yellow spark of Sol.

"A year!" he thought in impotent rage. "A year in that hole! I might as well be dead."

The psychotherapist had held out the hope that it might not take a year. Some cases of star-sickness responded quickly to Earth-treatment. But even a few months seemed an eternity to Carlin.

The passengers of the "Larkoom" were crowding toward the transparent wall of the deck. Earth was coming into sight. And these people—men and women bronzed by the glare of Canopus, reddened by the desert winds of Rigel's worlds, paled by the mists of Altair's planets—all were watching with an intense and eager expectation.

Carlin walked wearily over to the deck wall and watched with them. Sol, ahead, was a small and undistinguished yellow sun. Its orb was unimpressive to eyes that had looked on Antares and Altair.

And the planets that circled it were so little that Carlin could hardly make them out. He remembered half-forgotten names from ancient history—Saturn, Jupiter, Mars. And that little gray-green dot beyond must be Earth.

"Isn't it tiny?" babbled a rapturous, overweight woman beside Carlin. "I think it's cute!"

A very young man from Mizar Seven proudly aired his knowledge.

"That satellite beyond it is Luna, its moon."

"The moon is almost as big as the little planet!" exclaimed someone, laughing.

Carlin found their chatter getting on his nerves, and edged further along the deck. In gloomy silence, he looked down as the "Larkoom" swept in swift, almost soundless rush toward the little planet.

A gray-green, cloud-screened ball spinning around a second-rate sun—it looked like the end of the universe to Carlin. And he might have to spend a year here! His spirits sank still lower.

"They say you can get the most wonderful souvenirs here," one of the tourists' voices reached him.

Carlin writhed. He would be glad to get out even at Earth, to get away from this bunch of babbling fools.

He realized his irritability was extreme, unreasonable. It was the result of his star-sickness, he supposed. But that didn't make it any more endurable.

"Landing in ten minutes," spoke the annunciators throughout the ship. "Stasis going on."

The dim glow of the force-stasis that cushioned everything in the ship against pressure of deceleration came on like a tangible medium around them. The big propulsion-wave generators droned in lower key.

Swaddled in the cushioning force, they felt no discomfort as the "Larkoom" quickly dropped toward the little planet. Atmosphere screamed briefly outside the ship. They came down through a belt of clouds.

"That's the city New York!" cried an eager voice. "The oldest human city in the galaxy!"

CHAPTER II

Ancient Town

Carlin looked with a jaundiced eye on the scene widening out below them. There was a blue ocean stretching eastward, a long green coast, and an island that was covered by the grotesquely lofty buildings of an extremely antiquated type of city.

This ancient town called New York was like a memento of the primitive past. Not for a thousand years had men crowded their structures so crazily together, or built them to such insane heights.

"It's like one of the bird-people's lofts on Polaris One!" exclaimed a girl, laughing. "And how old it looks!"

Old? Yes. Pitifully old, like a withered beldame who endeavors still to maintain stiff dignity. The city looked only half-occupied, vines growing on some of the grotesque towers, parks ragged around the edges.

The spaceport, some distance northward amid low rolling hills, was so small as to be inadequate for any decent world. Carlin's practised eyes condemned the cracked, blackened tarmac, the ill-placed rows of docks, the insufficient hangar and repair buildings.

The "Larkoom" landed softly. Carlin waited wearily until the squealing rush of tourists was over, and then walked out into the soft yellow sunshine. He looked around without interest. Landing on a new world was no novelty to him.

But for a moment, he was startled by the air he breathed. It was so sweet, so buoyant, so right. It was subtly stimulating, exhilarating to the lungs. Then he realized the cause. All over the galaxy, the descendants of Earthmen had conditioned planetary atmospheres with this atmosphere of Earth as the desired norm.

He looked around uncertainly. The tourists were already being shepherded by their tour-conductors toward some old monuments at the far end of the spaceport. But he had no desire to follow them.

The psychotherapist had told him, "Live as nearly an ordinary Earth life as you can. Your cure will be quicker if you do. Best thing would be to lodge in some typical Earth home, if you can."

Carlin wondered where he could find such a lodging. There were a few Earthmen about, spacemen, port officials and the like. He could ask one of them.

He had met Earthmen before throughout the galaxy, for many of them followed space as a trade. And he didn't much like them. A proud, taciturn, half-sulky lot, they had always seemed to him.

"Can you tell me where I could find lodgings around here?" He asked a lanky, lantern-jawed man in faded clothes.

The Earthman contemplated Laird Carlin with unfriendly eyes, taking in his sun-darkened face, his pearl-colored synthesilk slacks and jacket, every detail of his appearance that was alien here.

"Well, no," the fellow drawled coolly. "Don't know where a stranger could get lodgin's round here."

He slouched on. Carlin flushed with anger at the scarcely veiled hostility in the fellow's manner.

These blasted yokels of Earth! Living here on an old, outworn, fifth-rate planet, resenting the progress and prosperity of the great star-worlds, talking of everybody but themselves as "strangers"!

"And I'm supposed to live among them for a year!" he thought bitterly.

He started across the spaceport. He had noted a spick-and-span chromaloy building with a half-dozen trim Control cruisers parked nearby, and with the Control Council emblem on its wall. He could find out something there.

The spaceport was a somnolent, slovenly place to Carlin's eyes. A few star-ships, all of them freighters except the tubby "Larkoom," a scattering of little inter-planet craft, a few workers lounging about. Even the smallest world of the great stars would be ashamed of such a port.

That soft yellow sun, he found, had a deceptive warmth. And walking was tiring after days of the ship's artificial gravity. Then Carlin stopped as he came abreast of a rickety little planet-ship.

Two Earthmen were inspecting its stern drive-plates—one of them a stocky, red-faced young man, the other a lame younger fellow with a crutch. Carlin asked them his question.

The red-faced individual answered with the same hostility of manner.

"You'll find no lodgings around here. Better go with the rest of your crowd. There's a big tourist hotel down in the city."

Carlin swore. "Blast it, I'm not a tourist. I'm an engineer sent here by a crazy psycho to spend a year on Earth—heaven knows why!"

The lame young Earthman looked at Carlin more closely. He had a thin, pleasant brown face with intelligent blue eyes.

"Oh, an Earth-treatment man?" he said. "A few come in all the time." He asked interestedly, "You're a Cosmic Engineer? Do you mind telling me what field?"

"Star-ship line chief surveyor," Carlin said wearily. "That means I lay out spaceport and beacon routes between star-worlds."

"I know what it means." The lame youngster nodded quietly. He hesitated, frowning slightly as though weighing something. Then, as if deciding, he spoke. "I'm Jonny Land. I think we could fix you up with lodgings if you don't mind putting up with a little discomfort."

"You mean, in your own home?" Carlin asked doubtfully. "Where is it?"

Jonny Land pointed to one of the low green ridges west of the spaceport.

"Just up on the ridge there. There's only my grandfather, my brother and sister, and myself. And we have an extra room."

The red-faced young Earthman made a sharp protest. "Jonny, what the blazes are you thinking of? You don't want this fellow in with you!"

The violence of his protest seemed uncalled-for to Carlin, even granting the general Earthman hostility to strangers.

Jonny Land quietly quelled the outburst. "I'm doing this, Loesser." He looked at Carlin. "Well, what about it? I warn you that you won't find the comforts of a big star-world apartment."

"I don't expect anything like that here," Carlin answered tiredly. He felt worn out by the voyage, the discouragingly primitive aspect of this place where he must live, the open unfriendliness. He nodded. "I'll try it. The name is Laird Carlin."

"If you'll get your luggage, I'll take you up," Jonny Land suggested. "I have a truck. I'll meet you over at the terminal."

Carlin came out of the shabby terminal a little later with his two kitbags and found the lame youngster waiting at the wheel of a disreputable-looking old ato-truck.

Loesser, the red-faced young man, was standing beside it voicing emphatic protest about something. Carlin overheard a few words.

"—ruin everything by taking this fellow in!" he was saying violently. "How do you know he isn't a Control spy?"

"I know what I'm doing, Loesser," Jonny Land repeated firmly.

They broke off as they saw Carlin coming. But Loesser gave him a hot, angry glare as he climbed into the machine.

The old truck ran westward across the bumpy tarmac and started climbing an ancient, cracked concrete road toward the green ridge.

Carlin wondered wearily what these Earthmen were up to that made them afraid of Control? Smuggling, maybe? He didn't much care. He was hot, tired, grimy with dust, and unutterably disgusted with Earth.

The concrete road that climbed the ridge looked as though it was centuries old. And its engineering had been timid, for it wound around hills instead of cutting through them, bridged small streams instead of trampling over them. But the battered truck had difficulty negotiating even these easy grades. Its ato-motor drumming noisily as it climbed.

Carlin looked out gloomily at the sunset-lit landscape. He could not get used to the vivid, dominating green of all vegetation here. And he was shocked by the unkempt, ragged look of everything. Untended fields of weeds and clumps of woods grew right up to the road. It was dismayingly different from the groomed, parklike planets of Canopus.

The houses Carlin glimpsed along the road added to his dislike. They were mostly old ferroconcrete dwellings half-hidden by trees and bright flowers, with behind them the big tanks used in hydroponic farming. Hydroponic farming was so old-fashioned he had thought it had disappeared from the galaxy. What was the matter with these people that they didn't directly synthesize their food as others did?

Young Jonny Land was speaking to him.

"You've never been here before? You must find Earth a little odd."

Carlin shrugged. "It's all right, I suppose. But I just can't understand how you people could let your planet get into this kind of shape. Why haven't you spread out more, instead of huddling around a few archaic centralized cities like that one back yonder?"

The lame young Earthman answered slowly, his thin, brown face turned to the road ahead.

"The answer to that is simple. One word, in fact. And that word is 'power.' We just don't have power enough here on Earth to smooth it out into a garden-planet like your star-worlds, to come and go around it any distance at will."

"Atomic power is about the easiest thing to produce there is," Carlin commented skeptically.

"Yes, if you have copper fuel," Jonny Land replied. "If we had enough copper we could make a garden of this world too, could spread all around its loveliest spots and come and go by fast flier, could give up the old hydroponic farming and synthesize our food, and produce the luxuries you people have on the star-worlds.

"But we have little copper. Earth, and its sister-planets here, are all starved for it. Once, we had a lot. But not now. And it's economically impossible to haul copper in sufficient quantities from other stars. That's why we're power-starved, unable to progress."

Carlin made no further comment. He was not much interested. He was only wondering sickly how long he would have to stay on this unkempt, stagnant planet.

The sun was burning his neck, for the old truck was topless. He was jolted by holes in the ancient road. The sweetness of the air had lost its magic for him, for now with the twilight had appeared swarms of evil little gnats and midges.

"This is the house," said Jonny Land, pulling up the truck in front of a square dwelling.

Laird Carlin's heart sank. It was like the other houses he had seen, a ferroconcrete structure festooned with climbing flower-vines, surrounded by tall, untrimmed trees except on the side that looked down into the twilit valley. Primitive hydroponic tanks gleamed dully beyond the trees.

He followed the lame youngster into a dim, cool living room. It looked like an antique stage set to Carlin, with its ridiculous cloth curtains at the windows, its obsolete krypton light bulbs in the ceiling, its massive furniture that was actually made of wood.

Jonny Land had been making explanations in lowered tones to the two people at the other end of the room. They came forward, a spry old man and a girl.

"This is Gramp Land, my grandfather," Jonny introduced. "And my sister Marn."

The old man looked at Laird Carlin with inquisitive, bright eyes, and his gnarled hand reached for an old-fashioned handshake.

"Come from Canopus, do you?" he chirped. "Well, that's a long way off. I was there once years ago when I followed space. And my grandson Harb has been there lots of times when he was a star-ship man."

The girl, Marn, looked doubtful and troubled as she murmured a word of greeting to Carlin. He sensed that his coming had disturbed her.

She was a rather small girl, with a thick mop of ash-colored hair carelessly combed back. Her eyes were grave blue. She wore a faded old slack-suit that he thought the most barbaric feminine garment he had seen.

"I hope we can make you comfortable here, Mr. Carlin," she said, troubled. "We've never had any lodger before. I can't understand why Jonny made the suggestion."

A heavy step at the door cut her short. Her look of distress and worry deepened.

"There's my brother Harb, now."

Harb Land was a gangling young giant with a craggy face and slate-colored eyes that looked at Carlin with instant hostility. Jonny had limped forward and was quickly explaining Carlin's presence.

"He's going to live here with us for a while, Harb."

Harb Land's reaction was violent. "Have you gone out of your mind, Jonny?" he flared. "We can't have him here."

Disgusted, Carlin started to turn away. But Jonny Land stopped him with a gesture. There was a quiet, unsuspected strength in his thin brown face as he spoke to his lowering brother.

"He's going to stay, Harb. We'll talk about it later."

Harb Land made no reply, but glared at Carlin. And Carlin felt an unutterable weariness and dislike.

These primitive, backward, suspicious Earth yokels, quarreling over the privilege of staying in their grotesque old house. As though he would stay on their cursed planet one minute if he didn't have to!

"I'm very tired," he said heavily. "If you could show me where the room is, I should like to rest."

Marn uttered an apologetic exclamation. "Oh, I'm sorry! Of course you're tired. Come with me, Mr. Carlin."

She led upstairs. There was no grav-lift, just old-fashioned steps going up a dark hall. And the bedroom on the upper floor to which she took him was as bad as he had expected.

It was clean, of course, spotlessly so. But it was more like a museum exhibit than a sleeping chamber, to Carlin. There were no aerators, just open windows with crude screens across them. No somnigrav pad, just a high, old-style bed. There wasn't even a video.

Yet the girl made no apologies for it, seemed not to think any necessary.

"We'll bring your bags up after dinner," she said. "It will be soon."

CHAPTER III

Old Planet

When Marn had gone, Carlin lay down wearily on the lumpy, sagging bed. He closed his eyes. The reaction to the long, slow voyage had set in. No doubt about it, he was star-sick all right. Time was when no voyage could have made him feel like this.

But it wasn't the voyage so much as this world to which he had been condemned. How was he going to live here for months, for a whole year maybe?

The sound of an angry voice came up dimly through the twilight, from the lower floor of the house. He recognized Harb Land's angry tones.

"—if Control Operations finds out what we're doing!"

There was a murmur of lower voices, and then the argument seemed to stop. Carlin remembered what he had overheard the red-faced Loesser saying at the spaceport.

What were these Earthmen doing that they were so secretive about? It must be something against the laws by which Control Council governed the galaxy, or they would not fear discovery by Control Operations.

When Carlin went down to dinner, he expected open hostility from the gangling older brother. But Harb Land muttered a curt greeting, his half-civil manner indicating his angry protests had been overridden.

Carlin stared dismayedly at the food set before them. Instead of the clear, colored synthetic jellies and liquids he was used to, the food was served in what seemed barbarically primitive state. Cooked whole vegetables, natural eggs, natural milk—everything rawly natural.

He ate what he could, which was little. His weariness was drugging him, and Harb Land's smothered hostility gave a sense of strain.

Gramp Land carried on most of the conversation, questioning Carlin about the far-away star-worlds. Carlin answered wearily.

"Saw a lot of them worlds myself once," the old man said. He added proudly, "Following space runs in my family. My mother was a direct descendant of Gorham Johnson himself."

"Gorham Johnson?" Carlin asked. "Who was he?"

The question was unfortunate.

"What do they teach out in your star-world schools?" Gramp exploded. "Don't you know that Gorham Johnson was the first man ever to travel space? That he was an Earthman, who took off from down in the valley here two thousand years ago?"

Gramp's pride was outraged. Carlin remembered the old galaxy proverb—"Proud as an Earthman." They were all like that, inordinately vain of the fact that their world's people had first conquered space.

"Sorry," he said tiredly. "I remember the name now. Anyway, I had too much cosmic physics to study to spend much time on ancient history."

Gramp still spluttered, but Jonny intervened, questioning Carlin on his work.

"Did you study sub-atomics or just straight dynamics?"

"Sub-atomics," Carlin answered. And, to another question, "Yes, I had electronic mechanics too."

He caught the swift, triumphant glance that Jonny Land shot at his brother. It puzzled him.

"Jonny knows all that stuff," boasted Gramp, his good humor restored. "He's a Cosmic Engineer graduate from Canopus University, too."

Laird Carlin was genuinely surprised. He looked at the quiet, thin-faced youngster.

"You're a Canopus graduate? Why the devil is a man of your training wasting your time here on Earth?"

"I just like Earth," Jonny answered evenly, "and wanted to come back here when my education was finished."

"Oh, sure." Carlin nodded. "But if this world is as outworn as it looks, there's no field here for a CE. You ought to be out at Algol."

"You star-world people are all the same—always advising us to leave Earth!" Harb Land interrupted with suppressed passion. "That's what Control Council keeps harping on as a solution to all our poverty and problems. They keep asking, 'Why don't you emigrate to other stars?'"

Gramp Land shook his head. "We don't leave our planet as lightly as some folks do. No matter how far an Earthman goes, he always comes home."

"Still, you can hardly blame Control Council for giving you good advice," Carlin said, exasperated. "After all, it's your own fault if you foolishly squandered the copper resources of your planet and now lack power."

Harb Land's craggy face darkened. "Yes, we squandered our copper foolishly. We did it twenty centuries ago, when Earth was opening up the whole galaxy to travel. We spent our copper establishing the galactic civilization that's forgotten all about our power-starved world."

"Harb, please!" said Marn in a low voice, distress in her face.

A silence fell, and they finished the dinner without further conversation. But Jonny Land spoke to Carlin before he went upstairs.

"Don't take Harb too seriously. A lot of people here on Earth are so embittered about our lack of power that they're unreasonable."

Carlin found his bedroom dark. No automatic lights came on when he entered, and he could not find the switch. He gave it up, and got into bed and lay looking heavily out into the night.

Soft wind was stirring the trees around the house. Heavy scent of flowers drifted on it, stirring the window curtains. Down in the valley gleamed the spaceport beacons, and beyond lay a thin rim of glimmering sea over which the quarter-phase shield of Luna was rising.

He felt utterly miserable, homesick, wretched. If he were back at Canopus right now, he would be dancing with Nila in Sun City ballroom, or wandering in Yellow Gardens.

He drifted off to sleep despite himself, in his lumpy bed....

Carlin awoke with bright sunrise splashing his face. He reached sleepily for the aerator and refreshment buttons—then remembered.

To his surprise, he was feeling much better. He had slept well in the primitive bed, and fatigue had drained out of him.

Queer, musical notes that he guessed were calls of birds came to his ears. The air that snapped the curtains was chill now, but pure and sweet, subtly intoxicating.

"They do have finer air on this old world than any aerator can furnish," he thought.

He put on a zipper-suit that was dark brown and rough in weave.

"Going native," he thought with a sour grin, and went downstairs.

Marn Land was the only person he found in the sunny rooms. She still wore those barbaric faded old slacks, but had a red flower in her ashen hair. A little frown of worry in her forehead disappeared as she looked at him.

"You're feeling better, aren't you?" she asked.

"A lot," Carlin admitted. "I'm afraid I was rather rude last night, you know."

"You were tired," she said gravely. "Just sit down. I'll get your breakfast."

It was a new experience to Carlin to sit chatting in a sunny old kitchen while a girl in faded slacks prepared his breakfast on an electrode stove. Instead of punching the refreshment-button for it.

"Jonny and Harb have gone down to the spaceport," she said over her shoulder. "They and a few friends have an old planet-ship there that they're fixing up for a trip to Mercury."

"Mercury?" he said. "Oh, that's the innermost of these planets, isn't it?"

"Yes. Men here on Earth are always going prospecting for copper on its Hot Side. Jonny got up this prospecting expedition."

The breakfast she put before Carlin was of coarse wheaten bread, more of the natural eggs and milk, and a curious brown beverage made from stewing certain dried berries. She informed him its name was coffee. Carlin tried it, found it bitter and unpalatable.

A little surprised by his own action, he ate nearly everything else. The food was coarse, but satisfying enough, and he would have to get used to it if he were to stay here.

"I'll try not to be any trouble to you," he told Marn. "I'm just supposed to take it easy, do anything I want to."

She nodded. "I know. Some of our neighbors had Earth-treatment visitors as lodgers. They all got to like Earth a lot before they left."

Carlin did not voice his pessimism on that point. He went to the door and stood looking out into the sun-bright, flowery yard.

He felt at a loss. It was baffling to find himself without anything to do, no work crowding up that must be hurried through, no crews of ato-men to supervise in blasting spaceports out of untamed planets.

Marn looked at him understandingly. "You've always been busy, haven't you? Earth must seem slow and dull to you."

Carlin shrugged. "I might as well get used to it. I think I'll take a look around."

"You'll find Gramp fishing up at the north brook if you go that far," Marn called after him as he walked across the yard.

Carlin sauntered past a big, locked ferroconcrete workshop of some kind, and some tall storage sheds, then on past the flat, wide hydroponic tanks that were now loaded with their masses of green growth.

He found a road beyond them that he did not recognize as a road, at first. It was a mere wide track gouged northward along the wooded ridge, the first dirt road that he had ever seen on a civilized world.

"A poor planet, all right," Carlin thought. "Can't even build decent roads."

There were hardly even any ato-fliers in the sky, only an occasional one flitting across the blue vault.

"No wonder these poverty-stricken devils resent the rest of the galaxy," he thought. "I suppose I would too, if it had been my bad luck to be born here."

The road was crazily illogical, winding westward along the woods-clad ridge in serpentine fashion. It twisted accomodatingly to avoid big boulders, a spring, a small gully.

The woods on either side was deplorably unkempt to Carlin's eyes. Big and small trees jumbled together, saplings choking each other out, dead brush and thorns and vines everywhere. There was even wild life in the woods, furry rodents scuttling away, hosts of birds.

This sort of thing was what you expected on some unpeopled planet that hadn't yet been pioneered and civilized. But Earth was the oldest human-peopled world in the whole galaxy.

Yet Carlin had to admit that there were certain compensations here. That winelike air was still an experience to him. And walking now came more easily to his muscles here than on any world. It seemed odd to be walking with such perfect ease, without wearing a de-grav.

He could not find the brook Marn had mentioned. He sat down on a log by the roadside, musing on the drowsy, dull quiet of this place. There was not a sound of human activity. Didn't these Earth people ever get bored with the sleepiness of the place?

Carlin found he was still tired. He watched a small, brilliant insect fluttering over a flower near by. Soft wind breathed through the ragged woods, stirring the green leaves and making a dappled, dancing pattern of sunlight on the ground. A distant bird called rustily.

"An old, outworn planet, dreaming," he thought. "These people, all of them, living in its past."

Carlin finally got up stiffly, and lounged back along the road. He was surprised to find that time had passed quickly, that the sun was now at the zenith. And that, somehow, his taut nerves had relaxed.

The big workshop behind the house had its doors open now. He glanced through them and was surprised to see that the cavernous room in there was a fairly well-equipped atomic-engineering laboratory.

Interested, Carlin started toward it. In the center of the big room he had glimpsed a towering, massive machine whose inner mechanism was concealed by a cylindrical metal cover.

"Looks like it might be a big field-generator of some kind," he muttered. "I wonder what it really is?"

There was a violent exclamation as an Earthman came running out from behind the machine to block his entrance.

Carlin recognized the broad red face, angry eyes and stocky figure of Loesser, the man who had argued with Jonny at the spaceport.

"What are you doing here?" Loesser demanded harshly.

Carlin was bewildered by his vehemence. "Why, I just wanted to take a look at this machine."

"I thought so!" blazed Loesser, his eyes raging. "I told Jonny that was why you came here!"

He snatched an object from his jacket pocket. To Carlin's thunderstruck amazement, the object was a stubby atom-pistol that Loesser was furiously leveling at him.

CHAPTER IV

Mystery Machine

Laird Carlin was child of a galactic civilization in which violence between men was rare. There was plenty of danger yet, in pioneering new star-worlds, but over the civilized worlds themselves the unchallenged law of the Control Council maintained unbroken order. A man could go a lifetime without ever seeing violence.

The atom-pistol in Loesser's hand and the obvious murderous intention in the man's face stupefied Carlin. He was simply unable to adjust his thinking to the possibility that the enraged Earthman before him meant to blast him down.

"Why, what's the matter?" he began, puzzled and stunned.

He knew later how near he had been to death. At the moment, he so little recognized it that he felt no relief at the interruption that came now. Harb and Jonny Land came running forward from the cavernous interior of the workshop.

"Loesser, put that gun down!" snapped Jonny.

Loesser turned violently. "This fellow was spying on us! I saw him at the door!"

Harb Land's craggy face darkened ominously.

"I warned you what might happen," he said harshly to his brother.

"Is this man crazy?" Laird Carlin demanded bewilderedly of Jonny.

The lame youngster limped quickly forward. "Get back to work," he told the other two briefly. "Carlin, I'm sorry about this. I'll explain."

He walked beside Carlin toward the house. It was not until later that Carlin realized how deftly and unobtrusively he had been steered away from the workshop.

"Harb and Loesser and I, and a few others, are planning an expedition to Mercury to prospect for copper," Jonny was explaining. "In that ship you saw down at the spaceport. We've devised a new metal-finder of the radiolocator type, with which we hope to be able to locate new copper deposits. That's the machine in the workshop.

"We've maintained a certain secrecy about it," he went on, "because naturally we don't want other prospectors stealing the idea of our new finder and beating us to it. And I'm afraid Loesser thought you were spying on us. People here are always a little suspicious of strangers."

"So I've noticed," Carlin answered dryly. "This is the first world in the galaxy where I've ever felt completely unwelcome."

"Oh, I wouldn't say that," replied the other. "But put yourself in our place, Carlin. Figure how you would feel if you were an Earthman, your world starved for power because its copper was spent to establish a galactic civilization that now neglects it."

Jonny's thin brown face was earnest, his blue eyes watching Carlin as though eager to convince him. Carlin shook his head.

"I can see your problem in lacking copper," he said. "But the remedy for it is so simple. Nine-tenths of you should emigrate to other, better worlds as the Control Council advised."

Jonny smiled. "There you come up against the obstinacy of my people. We've an older planetary tradition, a deeper, more ancient love for our world, than any other people in the galaxy."

"I think you people live too much in the past," Carlin answered frankly. "But it's none of my business. Anyway, I hope your expedition brings home copper."

"Thanks," Jonny said softly. "I think we have a good chance."

Carlin went back to the veranda of the old house and sat there pondering. Something about Jonny's explanation had been vaguely unsatisfying.

To his trained eyes, the glimpse he had had of that towering machine had not suggested any metal-finding device. There had somehow been a suggestion in its half-glimpsed bulk of something quite different; something vaguely disturbing, almost menacing.

"The devil, I must have knots in my subconscious to start getting premonitions like that," Carlin swore. "The poor devils are just secretive about their plans because everyone else here is that way."

He lounged boredly around the house during the hot, sleepy afternoon. There was no one to talk to, for the brothers stayed out in their workshop and Marn was out tending the big hydroponic tanks.

He tinkered with the old video set in the living room but the only stations he could get were local Earth ones, and lectures on hydroponics and gossip about unknown people didn't interest him.

He finally gave up and stretched out on the veranda, staring sleepily down into the green cup of the valley and cursing the psychotherapist whose insane idea had sent him here to die of boredom. He dozed until he was awakened by the sputter of an arriving ato-truck.

It contained three lanky young men, tall Earthmen who went back to the workshop without stopping at the house. The other partners in the prospecting expedition, Carlin supposed sleepily.

Again he felt that queer sense of something threatening, that vague premonition that had clung to him ever since he glanced into the workshop. If only he could remember what that machine reminded him of.

Days passed and Carlin still could not remember that, though his disturbing doubt persisted. There was no chance of another look into the workshop for it was always locked except when Jonny and Harb and their half-dozen partners worked in it.

"The trouble with me," Carlin told himself ironically, "is that I haven't anything else to occupy my mind on this blamed world."

Yet Carlin's first repelled dislike of Earth had faded much by now. The crudities of existence, the lack of civilized conveniences, no longer bothered him so much. He had to admit that whether or not Earth-treatment was benefiting his twisted subconscious, this sleepy old planet was a fine place for a rest.

He spent his mornings idly rambling the twisting roads, his afternoons lounging on the cool, shady veranda of the old house, or helping Marn tend the hydroponic tanks. Or fishing with Gramp in the foaming brook below the ridge, while that oldster told interminable tales of the old days when he had followed space.

Neighbors, hydroponic farmers up and down the valley, dropped in at the Land house in the evenings. Carlin did not intrude, and gradually their first stiff suspicion of him abated and they talked freely before him. The talk always swung to the paramount consideration on this power-starved planet—the need for copper. It made Carlin feel a little guilty to remember how much of it was wasted on other worlds.

"I have to drive down to the spaceport for Jonny, to get some instruments he left in the ship," Marn said to him after dinner one evening. "Do you want to go along?"

Carlin grinned. "I've legged it so much lately that riding anywhere would be a change."

The old ato-truck swung down the twisting road in the blaring sunset. The heavens behind them were a glory of fusing colors as the red ball of Sol dipped majestically toward the horizon.

Despite his appreciation of that wild splendor, Carlin felt a vague uneasiness. Why should the loveliness of the evening bring disturbing recollection of Jonny Land's puzzling machine into his mind?

"You're getting to like it better here, aren't you?" asked Marn.

She was usually so silent with him that Carlin glanced quickly at her profile as she drove. It struck him with surprise that she had a certain beauty. Her thick mop of ashen hair, and firm-chinned face, and small, competent hands grasping the wheel, were oddly attractive. It wasn't the fine-edged, shimmering beauty that Nila had, but it had appeal.

"Yes, I must be getting more accustomed to it," he answered her question. "And it's not as provincial as I thought. Nearly every man you meet here has been to space some time or other."

"Every Earth boy runs away to space sooner or later," she said, and smiled. "Following space is in our blood. And our planet's so poor now that it's the only way most of our men can make a living." She added, "Some of our men never come back. My father didn't. And my mother died, when he was lost."

It was dusk when they reached the spaceport. As he walked with the girl along its edge toward her brothers' ship, she drew him aside toward a tall shaft that loomed up spectrally in the twilight.

"This is where the first Earthman went away to space," she told him.

He looked at the deeply engraved legend on the pedestal of the soaring column. It was the Monument to the Space-Pioneers.

"Gorham Johnson took off in his first flight from this very spot," Marn said.

Carlin strained his eyes in the dusk to read the roll of names and dates engraved on the pedestal.

Gorham Johnson, 1991

Mark Carew, 1998

Jan Wenzi, 2006

John North, 2012

Names of the men who long ago had first dared space, the men who had first followed a dream to the nearby planets that then had seemed so far, the men who had first hurtled starward and opened up the galaxy.

"Lord, more than two thousand years ago," Carlin murmured. "Queer little ships they must have had."

His imagination was touched. This simple roll of names of men long dead somehow brought it all close to him for the first time.

Those old, pathetically flimsy ships, the enormous courage of those men to whom space was all one unknown abyss. He began to understand why tourists came from all the galaxy to see these mementoes.

"They and their little ships started it all, the whole galactic civilization, the vast human empire," he said musingly.

Marn was looking up at the spire towering in the dusk.

"People criticize us Earthmen for our pride. But this is why we're proud. We're the people who opened up the frontiers of the Universe."

Carlin nodded thoughtfully. "You've a great heritage. But perhaps you remember it too well. This is the present, not the past."

"You're like all the others, you think Earth's history is over," Marn said defiantly. "You'll find out differently. Earthmen will open up the last frontier of all—" She checked herself suddenly, and then said, crestfallen, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to quarrel."

Carlin wanted to ask what she had meant, but Marn started on again through the deepening darkness toward her brother's ship.

He walked with her into the battered planet-cruiser and looked around curiously. It was a medium craft designed for a minimum crew, with oversize cyclotrons and propulsion-wave equipment, drive-plates fore and aft, and an unusually heavy set of heat-screen generators.

"The Hot Side of Mercury is terrible," Marn said when she saw him glancing at the generators. "You need the heaviest heat-screens you can get to prospect there."

Amidships, Carlin noticed a big, empty round room or hold. There was nothing in it but a skeleton of girders designed to hold something over a sliding plate in the floor.

He remembered Jonny's big machine in the workshop. It would fit into this frame. He would have liked to make further inspection but Marn had found the instruments she had come after.

As they emerged from the ship, a lean, uniformed figure in the dusk greeted them in a pleasant voice.

"Hello, Marn. I saw you walking across the tarmac. How is Jonny coming with his plans?"

It was a young man in the gray uniform of Control Operations, the agency of law and order throughout the galaxy. He bowed to Carlin.

"I'm Ross Floring, Control Operations commander here. You're the Earth-treatment chap staying with the Lands? Glad to meet you."

Floring was not more than thirty, an alert, clean-cut, likable young man. He turned back to Marn.

"How soon are Jonny and his friends planning to take off for Mercury?"

Marn looked uncomfortable. "I don't know, Ross. They have some more preparations to make, they say."

Carlin somehow sensed a strain in the atmosphere. There was an earnestness in Floring's manner that was not accounted for by his words.

"I like Jonny a lot, Marn," he said seriously. "You know that. I'd hate to see him have trouble on this expedition."

Marn seemed to evade his meaning. "Jonny won't have any trouble. A trip to Mercury is nothing for Harb and him."

"I sincerely hope he won't," Floring said quietly. "Copper isn't worth risking too much for. Tell him I said so, will you? And tell him I'm coming up some day to talk with him."

Marn was obviously eager to get away. Carlin, puzzled, followed her.

"I'll see you again, Mr. Carlin," Floring called after him pleasantly. "We can have a talk about home. Yes, I come from Canopus too."

It wasn't until they were in the ato-truck driving homeward that Carlin realized he hadn't told Floring his name or origin. Why would Control Operations have taken the trouble to check up on that?

"Floring seemed like a nice chap," he told Marn. The girl nodded, troubled.

"He is—one of the best," she said. "And he likes Jonny. But he'd forget everything else for his duty."

She was, obviously, thinking aloud rather than answering Carlin. He wondered again about that queer feeling of strain. It had sounded almost as though Floring were warning her.

CHAPTER V

Desperate Play

The truck wheezed and groaned up the dark old road to the ridge. In the velvet black skies, the stars were chains of glittering light. Vega, Arcturus, Altair—they looked far away.

The house was dark when Marn stopped the truck behind it, though there were still lights out in the workshop. There was a solemn, buzzing hush about the starlit summer night.

"I have to take these things back to Jonny," said the girl.

"Marn, what are your brothers really planning?" Carlin asked her. "Does Floring know?"

She twisted uncomfortably. "Jonny told you all about their plans himself, didn't he?"

She was such a poor liar, she was so oddly appealing a figure in the starlight as she looked up at him with troubled white face, that sudden impulse made Carlin bend and kiss her.

Her small body was firm and warm in his hands and there was a breathlessness about her cool lips. But she did not move.

He looked down at her. "You don't mind, do you?" he asked.

"No, I don't mind," Marn said, her voice toneless, "It's all right for a star-world visitor to have a little flirtation with an Earth girl before he goes away, isn't it?"

"But it isn't that!" Carlin started to protest, and then stopped.

After all, what was it but that? What could it be but that?

"It's all right, but please don't again," Marn said quietly. "Good night, Laird."

He went into the house feeling depressed and thoughtful. He wished now that he hadn't had that impulse. Marn wasn't the sophisticated sort.

Lying in his bed and looking out the window at the distant spaceport beacons down in the valley, Carlin heard her come in and retire. Apparently Jonny and Harb were still working.

What were they working at really? Why had Floring been so grave in his veiled warning?

"Oh, the devil, it's none of my business," Carlin yawned. "There isn't much in this little system for them to get into trouble about. Nothing but eight or nine small planets and one medium sun."

Carlin suddenly sat bolt upright in bed as his mind dwelt on that last thought.

"The Sun? Good glory, that's what they're up to! It must be! Sun-mining!"

He was dismayed, horrified by the sudden flash of revelation. The disquieting mystery that had puzzled him since his first coming here suddenly shaped clearly as pieces fell together in his mind.

"They wouldn't be so crazy as to try it, surely! Yet it all fits together—the heat-screens on their ship, the secrecy about it all. And that machine I saw could be a big magnetic dredge!"

Sun-mining! Most strictly forbidden of enterprises, banned by the Control Council for years since the first disastrous attempts at it had almost wrecked certain planetary systems.

Visions of frightening possibilities crowded Carlin's mind, of a desperately reckless attempt unchaining catastrophe on the inner planets of this little system.

"But Jonny Land wouldn't try it! He's a CE, he knows what would happen."

Carlin could not convince himself. He remembered only too clearly Jonny's intense obsession with Earth's copper shortage, his quiet determination.

And Floring must suspect something of the truth! That was what had made the Control Officer give his grave hinted warning.

Carlin got up and feverishly dressed. He had to find out the truth, now, at once. If the Land brothers and their friends were really bent on such a mad enterprise, it would have to be stopped even if it meant his informing Control Operations.

"If I could get one good look at the inside of that machine of theirs, I could soon tell whether it's really a magnetic dredge," he thought.

He went quietly down through the dark house and out into the starlight. Light and sounds of activity still came from the workshop.

Carlin crept toward it. He hated this spying. But he had to know. He couldn't permit a crazy attempt to unloose disaster here.

The workshop was closed, and there were no windows. But as he stood irresolute, the big front doors opened and Loesser and two other young Earthmen came out, wearily mopping their brows.

"We'll be back tomorrow, Jonny," Loesser called back into the building. "Ought to finish her up in a few days now."

The three strode wearily toward their ato-truck and drove away. The doors remained open for the moment.

Carlin stepped forward and from his vantage in the dark peered into the big lighted room. Jonny and Harb Land were putting back the metal cover on the central mechanism, before they too quit work.

One glance at the interior of that machine was enough for Carlin's trained eyes. Those big magnetic-current coils, that massive beam-head, that battery of Markheim filters—he had been right, they spelled disaster.

A small, hard object prodded Carlin's back and a voice throbbing with anger spoke in his ear.

"This is an atom-pistol. Raise your hands. I don't want to harm you."

"Marn!" he exclaimed, stunned.

"Don't turn!" warned the girl. Her voice was choked with wrath. "I heard you get up and I followed you out here. You are a spy!"

"Don't turn!" warned the girl. "I followed you here. You are a spy!"

Carlin was so stunned with horror by his discovery of the brothers' catastrophic plans, that he reacted by sheer, desperate impulse to the weapon in his back. He swung around and grabbed for the atom-pistol.

It would have been suicidal, had another than Marn been holding the weapon. But Marn, as much a stranger as he to deadly violence, let her finger hesitate on the trigger too long. Perhaps she would not have fired in any case. Pondering it later, he was not sure.

What happened was that he got his hand on the slim pistol and snatched it out of her grasp before her hesitation ended. Marn, her face white, called frantically:

"Harb! Jonny!"

The two brothers came running out from the rear of the lighted workshop, Harb's craggy face dark and deadly as he saw them.

Carlin jumped back, leveled the weapon he had just taken from the girl.

"Get back!" he ordered hoarsely. And as Harb Land, blindly raging, came on: "I don't want to kill anybody!"

Jonny's voice rang command. The lame youngster's thin brown face was set, but he had not lost calm.

"Harb, stop!"

The thing froze into a queer sort of tableau as Harb Land pulled up and stood there, his giant figure quivering with wrath, his big fists clenched as he glared at Carlin.

"I told you," Harb said thickly over his shoulder to his brother. "I told you what would happen if we took him in."

Marn had run toward them, her face pale and stricken.

"It's my fault, Jonny," she said despairingly. "I heard him come out and followed him, but let him take my gun instead of shooting."

"Quiet, Marn," soothed Jonny. "It's going to be all right. Carlin just doesn't understand."

The lame youngster, in this taut moment of strain, was suddenly the biggest of them, the dominating personality here.

"I understand, all right," Carlin said hotly. "I guessed it tonight, and one look at that magnetic dredge confirmed my guess." His voice crackled with the rising wrath he felt. "Going to Mercury prospecting, were you? You never had any such plan. You and your partners have been getting ready to attempt sun-mining."

Jonny's eyes and voice were calm as he said:

"Carlin, Earth's starved for power. You've seen for yourself. To get the power that will revive our world, we've got to have copper. And the copper in our planets was exhausted long ago. But there's still billions of tons of copper in our System, in one place. The Sun. It's there in hot gases, more copper than Earth and our sister-planets will need for millenniums to come. It's our only possible source of copper and we intend to tap it."

"You and the others have brooded so long over your need for copper that you've gone crazy!" Carlin said, his voice whipped with anger.

"What's crazy about our using the copper of the Sun for our planet?" Jonny asked evenly.

"You, a CE, ask me that?" cried Carlin. "You know as well as I do that sun-mining brings catastrophe! Oh, you can get close enough to the Sun in your ship, I know. You can suck up all the gaseous copper you want from it, with that magnetic dredge. But what happens on your Sun when you do it?

"You know as well as I what would happen, what has always happened when it was tried. The suction creates a whirl in the solar surface, a tiny Sun-spot that grows and grows until it's grown into a terrific solar typhoon that pours disastrous increased heat and electric force onto its planets. You know it's happened every time Sun-mining was ever tried, and that that's why Control Council forbids Sun-mining."

Jonny Land nodded calmly. "I know all that. But suppose I've found a way to do Sun-mining without starting Sun-spots?"

Disbelief hardened Carlin's voice. "You haven't. Nobody ever has. There just isn't any way—suck out gases from any point on the Sun and you lower pressure at that point, and lowered pressure automatically starts a whirl."

"Carlin, I have found such a way! I tell you, with it we can suck unlimited copper from the Sun without creating one tiny Sun-spot!"

Laird Carlin stared. "You're telling me that, because you know I'm going to report your plans to Control Operations."

"You wouldn't do that!" cried Marn, incredulously.

Carlin nodded firmly. "I don't want to but I've got to. I can't let a bunch of crazy men bring on a disaster that might scorch life itself off your inner planets."

Jonny Land's thin face flared irritable emotion as he limped forward unheeding of the gun in Carlin's hand.

"Carlin, man, be reasonable! Why do you suppose I had you come here and live with us? It was because you're a CE and I'll need another trained engineer's help in operating this thing. And do you suppose I ever thought I could get your help unless I could convince you I've found the way to safe Sun-mining? I can convince you, Carlin!"

Carlin felt the conviction in Jonny's voice. What the crippled young man said did logically explain something otherwise puzzling—why they had taken him into their home when their work was so secret.

He remembered now that it was not until Jonny Land had learned he was a CE, on his first arrival on Earth, that the young Earthman had shown interest and offered him lodgings.

"All I ask," Jonny was saying earnestly, "is that you give me a chance to explain our plans to you. I know I can convince you that we can mine the Sun without the slightest danger of disaster."

"If that's so," Carlin demanded skeptically, "why didn't you convince the Control Council of that, and get permission for Sun-mining instead of trying to do all this in secret?"

"Carlin, I did try to convince the Council," Jonny Land declared. "I made one petition to them after another, giving them full details of my plan. But Council isn't composed of engineers. And the popular prejudice against Sun-mining, due to those past disasters, is so strong that Council refused us permission to make the attempt."

"That's why Ross Floring and the others down at Control Operations watch my brothers so closely, Laird," Marn added quickly. "They know about our petitions, and Floring suspects that Jonny is going to try this thing anyway."

It all fitted together logically, Carlin had to admit. Yet he still stood irresolute, the atom-gun in his hand.

"Here's a proposition, Carlin," said Jonny. "I'll explain every detail of our plan to you in the morning. If you don't admit then that the plan's completely without danger of disaster, I'll let you go and tell everything to Floring. I give you my word on it."

Carlin looked at him doubtfully. "Jonny, you'd break your word as cheerfully as your neck to carry out your purpose for Earth."

Jonny Land grinned crookedly. "That's true. But on the other hand, I'm still hoping for your help in this project. That's why I want to convince you, and that's the best guarantee I can give you."

Carlin shrugged, but he slowly lowered the weapon.

"I can tell you right now that I'll have no part in any such illegal venture," he said flatly. "But I'm willing to hear your explanation."

"Well," Jonny said, with a tired sigh, "we've had enough dramatics for one evening. Harb, lock up the workshop and we'll all turn in for tonight."

Carlin looked a little awkwardly at Marn as he handed her back the atom-pistol.

"I'm sorry if I appear ungrateful for your hospitality," he told her. "It's just that I can't stand by and do nothing if a crazy attempt threatens to bring on catastrophe."

"I know," Marn said soberly, and there was no hostility in her face. "But you'll find out that Jonny knows what he's doing."

Out of the darkness behind them spoke a shrill voice that made Laird Carlin swing around in astonishment.

"Well, I'm blamed glad you people quit arguin' for tonight, anyway. It's time all decent folks was in bed."

Gramp Land stood back there in the dark where he had apparently been standing for some time. There was a grin on his withered face as he lowered the heavy atom-gun he had been holding.

"Sure got tired holdin' this thing aimed at your back, Mr. Carlin," he chuckled.

CHAPTER VI

"You Owe a Chance to Earth!"

Doubts assailed Carlin almost as soon as he retired. He could not sleep, the rest of that night.

Had he been childish to let Jonny persuade him into giving the plan a hearing? Jonny was sincere enough, but he was a fanatic on this one subject of securing power for Earth.

The recklessness of Earthmen was proverbial. These men, made desperate by long brooding over the poverty of their world, might think little of the danger of provoking solar catastrophe in their obsessed desire to secure copper.

Carlin chilled. He remembered what had happened years ago at the star Mizar when Sun-mining had been attempted. The suck of magnetic dredges swiftly creating a whirl in the star's surface gases, a Sun-spot maelstrom that had expanded with disastrous swiftness. And then the engulfing of the mining ships in the sudden outpour of increased heat, the scorching of inner planets that wreaked ruin before the spots subsided.

It had been the same later at Polaris, and at Delta Gemini. No wonder that such a popular wrath against Sun-mining had arisen that Control Council had strictly forbidden further attempts! Man's science, great as it was, was not yet great enough to dare tampering with stars.

Yet he could see, too, how these Earthmen would inevitably turn their thoughts to Sun-mining. There was not any copper left in their System except in one body—their Sun. And that had limitless amounts of the power-metal, in vaporized form. No wonder they had been led into the plan to tap the metal of their Sun.

Carlin dozed before daybreak, but woke with the sunrise and went down, to find the others already at breakfast. They greeted him with a word, all but Harb Land who maintained a stony, dangerous silence.

"We'll go out and show you our work, as soon as you have breakfast," Jonny said quietly.

Gramp Land was the only one in good spirits. The old man twitted Carlin.

"It's sure a good thing you got reasonable last night. I would have hated to blast you."

Marn smiled slightly. "You wouldn't have done it. You're too chicken-hearted even to kill a fly."

"Ho, what are you talking about?" exclaimed Gramp indignantly. "When I was young, they called me the toughest Earthman in space."

Carlin walked silently out to the workshop with Harb and Jonny. The lame youngster opened the building, and then gestured toward the tall, cylindrical machine.

"Take a look for yourself, first," he invited.

Carlin scanned the mechanism with trained eyes. Magnetic dredges were a little out of his line, yet the principle of the mechanism was clear enough.

"You understand the basic idea of Sun-mining?" Jonny was saying. "A ship approaches the photosphere or visible surface of the Sun as closely as possible, protected by heavy heat-screens from the radiation. The magnetic dredge is then turned on. The dredge generates a high-powered magnetic field concentrated into a beam. That beam drives down into the swirling super-hot gases of the solar surface.

"Those gases consist of dozens of metals and other elements in vaporized form—iron, copper, sodium, calcium and so on, all mixed together. The beam sucks a column of those solar gases up to the ship. For its magnetic pull powerfully attracts the iron vapor in the mixture, and so the whole mixture is rapidly sucked upward."

He pointed to the massive flared nozzles in the downward projector-face of the great machine.

"The gases are sucked in there, through Markheim filters which can be set to screen out the atoms of any desired element. The copper gases are screened out, solidified by cooling, and stored. The other gases go on through the filters."

Carlin nodded curtly. "And those unwanted gases are ejected into space, and more of the solar mixture continuously drawn up, and so on until your ship is filled with copper. Yes, it's the same scheme that was used by the Mizar and Polaris Sun-miners. And it will have exactly the same result! Sucking gases out of any point in the solar surface will lower pressure at that point. And lowered pressure at any point of the photosphere instantly and inevitably starts a whirl of gases, a growing maelstrom or Sun-spot!"

Jonny Land shook his head. "Carlin, you're jumping to conclusions. This dredge does not simply eject its unwanted gases into space like former designs. Take a look at that beam-head more closely."

Carlin looked. And he was puzzled, after a brief inspection of the curious concentric construction of the beam-head.

"I don't get it. It looks like you have two circular beam-heads, one inside the other."

"That," said Jonny, "is the secret of my scheme. Lowered pressure in the solar surface at the point of suction creates a whirl, a Sun-spot. But suppose we can suck up gases without lowering pressure?"

Carlin stared. "How?"

"The two beam-heads," reminded the lame youngster eagerly. "The inner one is the one that beams down a positive magnetic pull to suck up solar vapors. The outer one is designed to use a simultaneous negative magnetism to shoot the unwanted vapors back down into the Sun."

The whole meaning of the explanation flashed over Carlin, and the possibilities of it dawned across his brain.

He said nothing, but crawled under the towering dredge and for minutes inspected inside and outside of the beam-head, feed-tubes and cut-offs. He finally came back out to them.

"Well?" challenged Jonny Land.

Carlin bit his lip. "I've got to admit your scheme looks practical enough. You should be able to suck up gases without any Sun-spotting effect, by using that continuous kickback. But—"

"But what?" demanded Harb Land, frowning.

Carlin shook his head. "Blast it, I can't see why the Council would turn down your petition if this is as workable as it seems."

Jonny shrugged. "I told you why. Control Council contains the finest statesmen in the galaxy. Statesmen, not engineers. They admitted their experts' reports on this showed it theoretically workable. But they said it was too dangerous to take a chance on theory when it comes to tampering with suns. We don't need copper that badly, they said."

His fists clenched in sudden passion. "We don't need copper! The galaxy as a whole doesn't need it, they meant. And what does it matter if one little world called Earth is fading and dying for lack of the copper it squandered to open up the galaxy? What does it matter, except to Earthmen?"

It was the first time that Carlin had ever seen Jonny Land give way to emotion. The superhuman strain that drove and dominated this lame, thin youngster for a moment flared hot and anguished on his face. Then his narrow shoulders sagged. He stood looking at the towering dredge with brooding eyes, before turning to Carlin.

"Carlin," he said then, "there's only one way to prove to the Council this way of Sun-mining is safe—and that's by doing it! That's what we're going to do. We're going to the Sun and come back with a shipload of copper. They'll see then that it's wholly safe. They'll have to give permission then. And a fleet of ships equipped with dredges can suck enough copper from the Sun to give Earth all the power it needs hereafter.

"You've seen the dredge and you know our plans. You've seen enough of Earth to know how much our success would mean to this world. Carlin, do you still want to tell Floring about this?"

"You couldn't!" exclaimed Harb Land harshly. "You couldn't destroy all the hope that's left for our world's people. You—all you star-world people—you owe this chance to Earth!"

Carlin stood there, torn by conflicting feelings. Strong among them was his intense admiration as an engineer for the ingenuity and daring of Jonny Land's solution to the problem.

But there were other things to consider. There was the duty he and every citizen had to support the Control Council. That support was what kept galactic civilization going. Yet these Earthmen, this little band fighting so fiercely for their ancient, worn world would flout it.

"Jonny!" came Marn's sharp cry from outside. "Jonny!"

"Something's wrong!" Jonny exclaimed, limping hastily forward.

They hurried out into the sunlight. Marn was running toward them and at the same moment they heard the drumming of an approaching ato-car.

"It's Ross Floring coming here!" Marn panted. "I recognized his car coming up the hill!"

Harb uttered a fierce exclamation, but Jonny cut in quickly:

"He's only coming up here to look around. He suspects what we're up to, but he can't be sure. Don't show any excitement."

Harb gestured fiercely toward Carlin. "But if he says anything, Floring will know."

A pleasant voice hailed them. Ross Floring, lean in his gray uniform, drove up behind the house and climbed out of his ato-car.

"Hello, folks," he greeted. "Thought I'd come up and see you. Jonny, I haven't seen you for weeks. Every time you come down to the spaceport, you spend all your time buried in that ship."

Jonny smiled. "It's keeping us pretty busy, getting ready."

Laird Carlin sensed genuine liking between the Control Operations officer and the lame young engineer. Yet there was unspoken tension too. It showed behind Jonny's cool smile and Floring's pleasant eyes.

Floring was looking past them, through the open doors of the workshop at the towering magnetic dredge.

"Is that your new metal-finding dingus, Jonny? The thing you're going to use to locate copper on Mercury?"

He stepped toward it. Harb Land made a violent movement forward, but a flat look from his brother stopped him.

"Yes, that's it," Jonny said. "Want to look it over, Ross?"

Floring stood, cocking his head at the towering machine. He laughed at the question.

"Jonny, you know I'm no engineer. A thing like this is beyond me." He turned toward Carlin. "But Mr. Carlin, you're a CE. What do you think of this new metal-finding device of Jonny's?"

Breathless silence held the group for a moment. Floring's face was unmoved, pleasant, but his purpose was obvious now. Knowing that Carlin had come to Earth merely as an Earth-treatment case, he was counting on Carlin's unbiased truthfulness.

Carlin felt their eyes on him. Now was the time, he knew, to play the part of a good galactic citizen and inform Floring just what was going on. It was his duty to do it.

But he couldn't! He couldn't betray the last desperate hope of a gallant old planet's people in their struggle against destiny! He had known he couldn't, from the time Floring had first appeared. He spoke as casually as he could.

"Yes, I've looked it over. It's one of the most ingenious metal-finders I've ever seen."

Carlin felt a queer relief that was almost happiness, as he spoke. For he knew now that he could never have obstructed these people in their brave, desperate struggle to revive their planet.

But Ross Floring looked astounded. A little blank frown of surprise came into his face and he stared steadily at Carlin.

"Then you approve of Jonny's plans?" he said quietly, "But, of course, I might have known that he'd convince you."

There was double meaning to the Control officer's words, clear to all of them. Yet they all ignored it.

Floring was temporarily defeated. He couldn't take action without expert opinion that the machine before him was for Sun-mining. He had expected such an opinion from Carlin, and had been disappointed.

But he was not completely frustrated. Carlin found out now how thorough and resourceful was this pleasant young officer.

"It would be a shame, Jonny," Floring remarked casually, "if you should run into disaster on this trip and the design of your new apparatus be lost. A metal-finder like this is too valuable to lose."

They were momentarily puzzled by the comment. But in the next moment, Floring showed what he had in mind. He drew from his jacket pocket a tiny tri-dimen camera, stepped close to the towering dredge, and before anyone could prevent it had snapped a half-dozen pictures of its interior mechanism.

Harb Land started forward with a smothered oath. But it was too late. Floring was already pocketing the camera.

"I'll keep these films," he said calmly. "If your machine should ever be lost, the design of it will be preserved this way."

"You can't keep those films!" Harb Land exclaimed angrily. "You've no right!"

"You surely don't think I would steal the design from you?" Floring said, with a look of surprise.

"It isn't that," Harb protested. "But—"

"But what?" the officer asked calmly.

Harb was silent, his craggy face a mixture of emotions as he looked appealingly at Jonny.

Carlin understood Floring's cleverness. They could not protest the films without giving the real reason for their protest, and that they could not do.

"It's all right for him to keep those pictures, Harb," Jonny said quietly.

Floring turned, bidding a pleasant farewell.

"I'll be seeing you again soon," he promised.

CHAPTER VII

Last Frontier

As soon as Floring's ato-car had purred away, the little group stood in the sunlight outside the workshop, in stricken silence.

Carlin put into words what was in all their minds.

"Jonny, you know why he took those pictures! He'll telephoto them to Canopus headquarters to be examined by engineer experts, and they'll send back word that the machine is a magnetic dredge for Sun-mining!"

Jonny nodded. "Yes, of course. Floring has suspected our plans all along, and now he's going to make sure."

"And when word comes back from Canopus, he'll seize our dredge and ship to stop our expedition!" groaned Harb.

"I know that," Jonny Land said, as his blue eyes swept them. "But it will take fourteen or fifteen hours before he gets that report back. Before that time ends, we've got to be on our way to the Sun!"

Laird Carlin felt a shock of astonishment, but before he could comment, Jonny was speaking swiftly on.

"It's our only chance now—to get away before Floring receives the proof that will authorize him to stop us! The dredge here is almost finished. If we can install it in the 'Phoenix' and take off tonight, we'll have our chance to prove to the galaxy that Sun-mining can be safe."

"Install the dredge tonight?" cried Harb Land. The gangling giant's face was sick with anxiety. "Jonny, we can't do it! Not that soon."

"We've got to!" Jonny's voice cut like a steel rapier. "Harb, you go get Loesser and Vito and the other boys. Have them bring the big truck with them. If we work hard enough, we should be able to have the dredge ready to roll by dark. Once we get it into the 'Phoenix', we can take off and complete installation in space."

"You can't do it," groaned his brother. "You know you figured on taking a week yet for that installation."

Carlin stepped forward. He had long ago reached his decision. He had reached it in that moment when he had answered Floring.

"I'm a CE, you know," he reminded. "I can help a lot in that installation."

Marn stared at him, amazement and dawning gladness in her eyes. And Harb Land's tortured face turned haggardly on Carlin.

"You'd do that? You'd help us? By heaven, if you would, we might make it!"

Jonny's brilliant blue eyes bored Carlin's face.

"Carlin, I was hoping for this. I knew from the first I'd need another engineer's help in installing and operating the dredge. I brought you home because I was hoping I could enlist your aid before we started on the expedition. But all the same, I've got to warn you. We're directly bucking a Control Council order. You can lose your certificate and go to Rigel prison, even if our plan succeeds. And if it doesn't succeed, it may mean perishing with us. And after all, Earth isn't your world."

"Who the devil is doing anything for Earth?" Carlin retorted. "This old planet of yours means nothing to me either way."

"Laird, are you so sure of that?" Marn asked him, her eyes very bright.

"Do we have to get emotional?" Carlin asked roughly. "I'm an engineer, and this is the biggest engineering experiment to be tried for centuries. Don't you think I want to be in on it?" He added crushingly, "And as for my getting mixed up in the blame, I'm already blasted well mixed in it. When I denied to Floring that this was a magnetic dredge, I implicated myself right there in the whole business. I've got to make it succeed, now."

Harb Land was already running toward his truck. Jonny shot sharp orders at his sister.

"Marn, I want you and Gramp to watch the road this afternoon. Floring might come back. Carlin, you and I haven't a moment to lose."

Carlin strode after the limping youngster into the workshop, and Jonny there rapidly explained what remained to be done.

"The kickback feed-pipes to the beam-head have to be hooked up, the cooling coils to solidify the copper are not yet in place, and the whole dredge has to be fastened in its frame so it'll be ready to swing aboard the truck tonight."

Carlin was appalled by the amount of work that remained, for two pairs of hands. But Jonny added an encouraging qualification.

"Loesser and Harb and the others can help in the ato-welding and cable work if we set it up for them. They're all veteran spacemen and know how to handle ordinary tools."

Carlin plunged into the work with Jonny. But as they toiled to set up the coils and feed-pipes of the massive mechanism, an inward aghastness at what he was doing oppressed Carlin's mind.

Why was he doing it, breaking Control law and endangering his certificate and even his liberty? Why under heaven should he be sharing the risks of these men for a planet he hadn't even seen until a few weeks ago?

"I must still be star-sick, unstable," he thought dismally. "Or I'd never have got mixed up in this mad business. Sun-mining!"

Blind reaction was dominating him. Curse it, he wasn't the type to join Quixotic forlorn hopes. He was Laird Carlin, sober, hard-working engineer, who ought right now to be far across the galaxy at the job to which he belonged.

And all the time Carlin's mind spun miserably to this whirl of self-reproach and foreboding, he was working with Jonny at topmost speed, squeezing into the frame of the great dredge where the lame youngster could not go, fastening Veer-clamps, hooking self-sealing leads to the flat Markheim filters.

The sound of ato-trucks rocked the noon air, and Harb Land came running heavily into the workshop.

"I got the others—Loesser's bringing in the big truck now," panted Harb. "What do you want us to do, Jonny?"

Loesser, and Vito, and the other four young Earthmen who came hastening after Harb were dominated by excitement. Loesser's broad red face was shining with emotion as he came up to Carlin.

"I want to apologize. I never thought any star-world stranger would come in with us and help us."

"Save it, and get the welders on those rear feed-pipes," Carlin retorted. "Get in here—I'll show you."

Through the hot afternoon hours, the hiss of ato-welders and reek of fusing metal stifled the workshop.

Dripping with perspiration, stiff from cramped postures, Carlin worked on inside the great dredge.

And all those hours, in rhythm with the welders' hiss and the clang of wrenches, his thoughts beat a mocking tempo through his brain.

"All this, for no reason! For somebody else's world, a world that ought to have been evacuated long ago! Even if it succeeds, you win nothing. And if it fails, the Sun licks you all up like midges."

Yet he labored blindly on. It might be crazy, but what he had started, he would finish.

It was work against an inexorable time limit that rapidly was approaching. As the shadows lengthened, as the sun went down, they still had not finished.

Jonny Land limped unsteadily to turn on the workshop lights. His face was a gray mask of fatigue and sweat as he turned to the others.

"Two more hours," he said huskily. "We can't take more, if we're to get the dredge into the 'Phoenix' and take off before midnight."

Those two hours, afterward, seemed weeks in length to Carlin. And the mocking devil in his brain kept taunting, "It's no business of yours, you know!"

"That's near enough!" Jonny's hoarse voice finally declared. "We can hook up those last cables on the way. All the work that require heavy tools is done—and we daren't take more time."

They were, all of them, drunk with fatigue, staggering with the furious drive of twelve hours of unbroken toil. Blackened by welder flare, glistening with sweat, they looked to Carlin like a crew of devils.

Jonny's driving energy remained unconquerable.

"Marn," he ordered, "back the big truck in here. Harb, you and Carlin rig the hoist."

The big, flat-bodied ato-truck backed ponderously into the workshop and they swung the massive magnetic dredge carefully aboard. Loesser and the others then hastily chained it to the bed of the truck.

Jonny limped toward the cab. "All right, we're starting. Harb, you drive. No, Marn—you're not going to the spaceport with us."

Marn, face white and eyes big with fear, saw the gleam of the atom-pistol that Harb was thrusting into his pocket.

"Oh, Jonny, not that, no matter what happens!"

Jonny's blue eyes flashed arctic light. "That, or anything, now," he rasped. "You know what this means to our people, Marn."

Then his face softened, and he patted her arm.

Tears streaked her cheeks as she kissed and clung to him, and then to Harb.

Carlin was climbing heavily onto the truck when he felt her touch on his arm.

"You too, Laird," she whispered, quivering lips blindly pressing his cheek. "All of you must come back."

"Get on!" cried Harb Land, and then the truck went into gear.

Carlin jumped for the cab, and under the starry night they were rolling at increasing speed down the twisting road toward the valley.

And suddenly all the nightmare mocking in Carlin's brain was gone and there was only the rush of sweet air against his face, and the splash of the lamps ahead, and the jolt and rumble of the big machine as they raced down toward the spaceport's distant beacons.

Earth air and Earth smells in Carlin's nostrils, sleepy Earth sounds in his ears; the shine of the old spaceport's beacons, and the soaring loom of the distant tower that marked the spot where a man of long ago had first dared space. This world, this little Earth, was worth risking death for, even for a stranger from far stars!

He knew he was a little crazy, he still had a corner of his mind that told him all this was mere intoxication of emotion which was sweeping away reason. But the mocking devil in Carlin's mind was gone, and he was one in mind and purpose with his companions, now.

The others too were feeling that wild reaction, for Loesser clapped Carlin's shoulder, crying:

"It's like getting out of prison to get started!"

"We're not off Earth yet!" warned Jonny. "Cut the lights and drive around to the north end of the spaceport, Harb. Ease the truck to the 'Phoenix' as quietly as you can." A little later he warned, "Slower, slower. Keep to the edge of the tarmac."

Lightless, its motors a mere low rumble, the big truck crept around the dark edge of the spaceport toward the "Phoenix." The little planet-ship took black shape in the darkness, a low, torpedo bulk brooding beneath the stars. Harb backed the truck toward its side, as they jumped out of the cab.

Light flashed on them from a hand-krypton in the door of the "Phoenix!" A lean, uniformed figure stood there, gun in hand, looking at them.

"I thought you would be coming," said Ross Floring quietly. "Jonny, I'm sorry about this."

Carlin was as frozen as his companions, by the disastrous overturn of their attempt at secrecy. Floring stepped out of the ship.

"I've been looking through your ship while I waited," he said. "You have triple as much heat-screen coverage as you'd need for the Hot Side of Mercury. You were going to the Sun."

"You can't prove it, Ross," Jonny said levelly. "You've no proof."

"I've enough to prohibit this ship from clearing Earth until investigation," Floring replied. "A certain report will reach me from Canopus by morning. Then we'll see."

Carlin saw it then, saw the dark giant figure of Harb Land stealing around the truck and looming up behind Floring. He glimpsed the gleam of Harb's raised atom-pistol.

Then Harb struck. The butt of the weapon came down on Floring's head and the officer crumpled limply to the tarmac.

"See if anyone else is in the ship!" Jonny said swiftly. "Loesser, watch the Control station!"

Then he bent with Carlin over the unconscious man.

"We'll have to take him with us," Jonny said. "If we leave him here he'd soon be found, then the Control cruisers would be after us."

A few weeks before, Laird Carlin would have been aghast at seeing a semi-sacred officer of Control Operations struck down. With what spirit of reckless defiance of law had his companions infected him? He marveled at himself as he coolly picked up the limp figure.

"Tie him into one of the chairs in the pilot room," Jonny was saying.

Harb came plunging out of the ship. "Nobody else aboard. He came over here alone."

By the time Carlin had the unconscious man secured in the pilot room, Harb and the others had slid open the big hatch in the side of the "Phoenix." Hastily, fumbling in darkness, they ran out the ship hoist and hooked onto the big magnetic dredge.

Then, with infinite labor, they swung the massive mechanism into the hold amidships. Mere short flashes of hand lamps had to suffice to guide the beam-head of the dredge down into the round keel opening.

"Fasten half the frame bolts—they'll hold till we get into space," panted Jonny.

Carlin skinned his knuckles in the dark, fumbling with bolts and wrench. Every instant he expected to hear an alarm from Loesser that Control officers were coming.

"That'll have to hold," said the sweating Jonny. "Run the truck off the tarmac. Harb, make ready for take-off!"

CHAPTER VIII

Solar Struggle

Oxygenators started throbbing, doors clanged, as the others tumbled aboard. Harb Land, smeared with dirt and oil, his shock of hair wild, climbed into the pilot seat and expertly touched controls.

"Generators coming on!" sang Loesser's breathless voice from the interphone, as the low, deep hum began.

"Stasis on," said Harb rapidly, his fingers busy. The blue cushion of force was around them as Carlin slumped drunkenly into a seat. "Zero, two and five acceleration schedule. Here we go!"

And the "Phoenix" swept up with a rush from the spaceport, the propulsion-waves streaming from its drive-plates hurling it out and upward into the star-sown sky, the spaceport lamps and the southward blinking lights of New York falling swiftly away.

"Authorization!" yelped a startled voice from the universal communic on the panel. "Give authorization for take-off!"

"Authorization already given," Harb Land rapped back, then cut the communic. He laughed. "That'll puzzle them a while."

Crazy, reckless, suicidal, to Carlin seemed the way that Harb was taking them out from Earth. The atmosphere of the planet had no sooner started a shrill, rising scream around them than it fell and faded as they came out of the envelope of air.

Luna burst up out of the eastern heavens like a great globe of dull gold against the stars. And then Carlin's eyes were smitten by the flare and glare of the brilliant disk of Sol, of the Sun.

And then the "Phoenix" lined out and was plunging headlong through the void at a speed that Carlin knew was flatly illegal to use inside any System, a rush toward that distant Sun flare.

"Cut down, cut down!" cried Jonny to his brother. "Any more speed and you'll not be able to decelerate in time to orbit around the Sun."

Harb Land turned a wild, dirty face aflame with emotion. "By heaven, we're on our way at last! We'll show them now that Earthmen can still blaze a space-trail nobody else has dared!"

And from back amidships came a hoarse voice jubilantly singing the old Earth space-song:

Blast away toward the stars—

Jonny Land's voice lashed them, his thin face dripping and determined.

"You're all of you blowing your tops with excitement. This hasn't even started yet. Look at what we're heading for!"

Carlin heard the others fall silent and himself felt a chill of awe as he looked ahead at the giant fire orb toward which the "Phoenix" was plunging.

"We'll be orbiting before we have the dredge set up, unless we hurry," Jonny prodded. "Come on, help me with it."

The big magnetic dredge had to be bolted into place, the coils and pipes had to be hooked to their connections inside the ship, the cables to the generators, the cooling coils to the compressor, the outlets of the Markheim filters to the bunkers astern.

Thrumming, creaking, shivering in every strut to the blind thrust of power that was hurling it on, the "Phoenix" rocked and shook about them as Carlin labored with Jonny and two of the other men to make those last connections. The cramped space in the hold around the dredge was hot, stifling, for the oxygenators couldn't keep the air there pure.

"All ready!" Jonny called finally, after eternal-seeming hours of toil. "And none too soon. We're getting there fast. Harb has put out most of the heat-screens."

Through the windows, the ship seemed enveloped by a halo of dim light, the force-screens that repelled radiations of heat.

But when Carlin stumbled with Jonny into the pilot room, they were half blinded even through the screens by the fierce, blazing glare from ahead.

Half the sky ahead was Sun, a gigantic abyss of roaring flame that crushed the mind by its magnitude. All directions of space seemed canceled, and they were falling, falling, into an inferno of fire.

Harb turned a sweating face. "We'll cut off to orbit in less than an hour," he informed.

Ross Floring spoke from the chair in which he was tied, and in which he had come back into consciousness.

"Jonny, I've been waiting for you! Harb wouldn't listen to me. You've got to turn back!"

Jonny shook his head. "No use, Ross, I know you're only doing your duty. And I'm sorry to drag you into this danger. But we're not stopping now."

"But you'll never get there!" Floring exclaimed. "Control cruisers must already be after you. They'll have found out where I am by now."

"Empty threats!" Harb jeered. "They can't know where he is."

"Jonny, look at my badge!" cried Floring. "See the tiny radio bulb in the back of it? It's a 'finder' by which any Control officer can be located at any distance. When I didn't report back, they'd use it to spot me out here."

"If that's true," said Jonny Land, his thin face suddenly haggard, "they'll be after us by now. Harb, cut the communic back in!"

Harb obeyed. Roar of static from the gigantic orb ahead was a dull background to the sharp voice that came from the instrument.

"Control Operations squadron four hundred thirty-three nine calling 'Phoenix!' Last warning! We are overhauling you and will shell you unless you turn and surrender."

Startled, Harb Land jabbed a button and twisted the knob of the visor-screen. The far-seeing eye quartered space behind them, and then the black space scene held steady. There against the stars came a little pattern of four tiny triangles of light. Triangles—galaxy-wide sign of Control.

"By heaven, they actually have come after us!" cried Harb. "Jonny, they're only minutes behind us and pulling up fast!"

"We broadside as soon as we range you unless you turn now," warned the steely voice from the communic.

Laird Carlin, only a few weeks before, would no more have dreamed of disobeying a Control Operations command than he would have of picking stars from the sky. Galaxy citizens were trained to revere the great organization that had made the Universe a place of law and order.

But the ancient independence of these men of Earth was strong in him now. They had already risked so much, had incurred certain penalty even if they now surrendered.

"Keep going!" Carlin exclaimed. "They can't follow us once you start orbiting close to the Sun's photosphere. No ordinary Control cruiser has heavy enough heat-screens to follow us into that!"

"By Jupiter, it's so!" exclaimed Harb, faint hope lighting his face. "But I daren't crowd on more speed now. I've got to start decelerating if we're to orbit correctly."

"Decelerate by plan," Jonny said grimly. "They may not range us in time. We'll soon know."

The "Phoenix," flying at a tangent toward the gigantic sphere of the Sun, was aiming to swing into an orbit around Sol as close as possible to its photosphere or gaseous surface.

It had to be so. No ship would ever have power enough to go that close to the Sun's colossal pull and hold its position by its own energy. To get that close and to stay that close to Sol without being drawn in to it, a ship had to go into an orbit around it like a tiny satellite.

The air in the "Phoenix" was already stifling hot. Jonny switched in another of the heat-screens, and the dim halo around the flying ship deepened.

Harb's fingers were flashing over the controls, decelerating, steering the ship in a closing spiral toward the Sun.

"Carlin, talk them out of this madness!" cried Ross Floring, aghast. "The cruisers will be broadsiding us in moments."

Carlin paid no attention. His eyes were on the visor-screen where the four cruisers now loomed big as they came closer.

Then it came. Silent, deadly, four blinding gouts of flame burst near the "Phoenix." Four salvos of atomic shells whose wave of force rocked the plunging ship. Loesser came tumbling into the pilot room, red face glistening.

"They'll bracket us next salvo or two!" he yelled. "What's our chance?"

"Turn on heat-screens Six and Seven!" roared Harb Land, without looking around. "I'm going into orbit now!"

"It's too soon!" Jonny cried warning. "It's—"

Carlin saw that Harb hadn't even heard. The giant was recklessly cutting the elements of their plotted course, depending on their own power to pull into orbit in time.

The heat-screens, all they had, were on full now. Another salvo burst to spaceward of them. Carlin knew the men behind realized Floring was aboard. But Control Operations would sacrifice any men to prevent the Sun-mining that always before had meant disastrous solar disturbances.

"Great blazing stars!" breathed Loesser, staring. "Look at that!"

Forgotten, the deadly shells that were groping for them. For now the "Phoenix" was deep in the awesome corona of the star and was curving in closer through heat that was over two thousand degrees.

Carlin's mind shook to the fearful spectacle that was the firmament. Not he, nor any other living man, had ever come so close to a star. They were entering a region of such violent energies that all laws of space and time here seemed cancelled.

Blinding, eye-dazing even through the strong protective filter of the heat-screens, the brilliance of Sol stunned them. They looked on a vast, raging ocean of flaming gases, a sea of vaporized metallic and non-metallic elements that was like a cosmic furnace.

Even through the heat-screens, the radiance heated the air in the ship scorchingly. But now the visor-screen showed that the Control cruisers were falling back and disappearing from sight behind.

Blinding, eye-dazing even through the filter of the heat-screens, the brilliance of Sol stunned them.

"They couldn't follow us this close to the photosphere!" Harb cried exultantly. "We've shaken them and we're almost in orbit."

"You can't orbit the Sun!" Floring pleaded. "And even if you could, the cruisers will lay to outside the heat and range you by locator and fire till they destroy us! Put about!"

The man Vito, choking and gasping for breath, came into the pilot room from the engine rooms astern.

"Heat-screens won't take another dyne! If we go closer, we're done for."

"We're orbiting now," Jonny said huskily. "Wait!"

Harb Land was engaged in the most difficult operation of spacemanship, bringing a ship into exact balanced orbit around a celestial body.

Most difficult, even when the body was a planet. Impossible, nearly, when the body was a Titanic star!

Carlin saw the giant's face a frozen mask as he centered his dial needles, fed force with infinite delicacy, guided, changed—and changed again.

Harb reached and slammed open a switch. The hum of propulsion waves died. The "Phoenix" was without driving power. And the needle of the gravi-gauges remained constant, the ship's path around the Sun was unvarying.

"We've orbited!" Harb Land's voice was a hoarse, exhausted sound.

Carlin wanted to shout, "By heaven, there are no spacemen in the galaxy except Earthmen—none!"

The "Phoenix" was circling the Sun, deep in the corona and reversing layer and close to the photosphere or light-emitting surface which was the vague boundary of the star itself.

Their sensation was that of men suspended over a Universe of raging flame and force. The mind shook to the impact of it. They were here where no men, no life, had ever been intended to be. They were violating the sanctity of a star.

"Now—the dredge," Jonny said hoarsely. "We've not power enough to force the heat-screens like this for long. Come on, Carlin."

Carlin stumbled back with him into the stifling hold. The men around the towering magnetic dredge were like sooty devils staring with wild eyes.

The metal was so hot its touch made him cry out as he closed the circuit of the generators with the ato-turbines. The rotors began their whine, building up a magnetic field.

The whole ship suddenly shook and quivered. Harb came plunging back into the hold.

"Those Control Cruisers are starting to salvo us by radiolocator!"

"We only need a little time," panted Jonny Land. "The cooler coils, Carlin!"

Carlin felt like a man in a dream as he sweated with Jonny to get the magnetic dredge started. The field was building steadily, and the great nozzles of the beam-head had been lowered below the keel. Jonny's brilliant eyes clung to the panel of gauges, and finally he opened the field-switch.

"Now!"

They crowded around the view-plate in the keel, peering half-blindly down against the glare of the raging Sun-sea below. The dredge was projecting a powerful, concentrated magnetic field down into that ocean of flaming gas like a sucking straw. But for moments they saw nothing. Time that seemed endless went by. Then—

"Here she comes!" yelled Loesser.

A column of flaming vapor was shooting up from the fiery ocean below. Compared to the gigantic mass of Sol, it was the merest filament, the flimsiest thread of fire.

But it was rushing up and up toward the hovering "Phoenix," a finger of fiery vaporized elements drawn irresistibly up along the beam of magnetism to the ship.

Another salvo of shells went off in space somewhere close by and rocked the ship with its wave of force. But next instant came a heavier impact, as the fiery column of gas reached the nozzles below the ship.

They heard a deafening roar. That up-sucked stream of vaporized elements was being drawn through the heat-proof nozzles and intakes, through the Markheim filters that screened out its copper atoms, and was then being shot downward again by the kickback's negative field.

"The kickback's working!" Jonny Land yelled. "If the effect of it is what we calculated, we've done it!"

CHAPTER IX

An Earthman Comes Home

For the moment, none of them paid any attention to the fact that precious copper was solidifying in the cooler coils into granules of metal that were being blown into the bunkers. The real test was what their beam of magnetic force was doing to the surface of the Sun.

Did it seem incredible, as it almost did to Carlin, that such a fragile finger of force could in the least disturb the mighty orb below? He knew better. He knew the unnaturally delicate balance of a star's surface, which a slight change of pressure artificially induced could stir into a whirl that would expand in giant Sun-spots. If that happened, it would mean chaos.

"No sign of a whirl yet," Jonny breathed, peering down through black glare-proof lenses. "No sign at all."

There was no moment of crisis, no clean-cut moment of triumph. There was just the time speeding by, the flow of copper into the ship, and the constant reports of Jonny—"No whirl forming yet."

Salvos shook the ship as the Control cruisers far outside the sun glare fired more and more accurately. But they went unheeded. Success or failure of the most audacious engineering exploit in the galaxy's history hinged upon Jonny's muttered reports.

"No whirl yet."

Jonny Land finally raised his head, looked at them as they stood with wild surmise on their faces.

"We've done it," he said, almost unbelievingly. "We've nearly filled the bunkers with copper and there's no whirl down there, no disturbance to grow into a spot. We've made Sun-mining possible."

Tears were running down Loesser's face. Harb Land looked dazed. But Jonny walked across the hold to the wall through which the cooler coils fed into the bunkers. He peered through a quartz view-plate.

They looked with him. The bunker rooms were heaped high with shining red granules. Copper, virgin-pure, blown into the rooms and already almost filling them. Copper milked from the Sun!

"Copper for Earth!" whispered Jonny, his thin face blazing now. "Power, and new life, for the old planet!"

The "Phoenix" rocked wildly and metal screeched rendingly as they were flung from their feet by a salvo that had finally bracketed the ship.

"The feed-pipes!" screeched Loesser, scrambling to his feet beside Carlin.

Carlin saw. The ship's walls had held, but the shock had snapped strained cables and cooler coils. Two intake tubes were giving way, white-hot copper vapor forcing out through cracks in them.

"Veer-clamps on those two pipes!" yelled Jonny. "If they give, everything goes!"

Knowledge of what it meant if the pipes gave way, if super-heated metallic vapor blew out into the hold, flung Carlin in a crazy rush for the Veer-clamps and wrenches.

He got a clamp around one of the pipes, and the man Vito started spinning shut the bolts that would hold the fracture tightly. He swung round toward the other pipe.

"Clamp!" yelled Jonny Land, in a cry that was like a hoarse howl of agony.

Carlin's blood left his heart as he glimpsed the most horrible and heroic sight he had ever beheld. The other strained tube had been about to blow open, and Jonny Land had flung his arms around it and was holding it together by agonized effort while the white-hot vapor sprayed his body.

Harb Land wildly snatched his brother away as Carlin flung the big clamp around the pipe and convulsively spun its bolts shut.

He staggered around then. Harb was bending over his brother.

"Jonny! Jonny!"

Jonny's whole chest and neck were blackened and blasted. His face was a ghastly, sooted mask as his eyes looked up at them.

Another salvo went off close by, and again the "Phoenix" rocked wildly.

"Cut the dredge!" Carlin cried. "We've proved the process is successful, and we can't stay here now or your brother will die!"

Loesser cut off the dredge and Harb Land rushed for the pilot room. Carlin heard him shouting there into the communic:

"Control cruisers from 'Phoenix!' We're putting out to surrender. Be ready to give injured man medical treatment."

"Break out of your orbit at once and we'll contact you for surrender by locator when you're outside the corona," came the sharp, fast answer.

The generators of the "Phoenix" started roaring their shrillest note as Harb Land frantically flung power into the drive-plates. Beneath the thrust of its propulsion vibrations the battered ship began to move, to fight its way out of the gigantic pull of Sol, breaking slowly out in a tangent off its orbit.

Carlin, Loesser, all of them in the hold, were bending over Jonny Land when Floring, released by Harb, came back. The officer looked down and then shook his head somberly.

"No chance," he said. "He won't even last until we reach the cruisers."

Jonny was lying, unhearing, fighting for breath, looking up at them without seeing them, his sooted face a writhing mask. Carlin felt tears sting his eyes, and saw everything through a blur.

"Jonny, we did it—you did it!" Loesser was choking. "Made Sun-mining possible! Why, soon now there'll be scores of ships, new, big ships, coming here and getting all the copper Earth needs!"

He was, Carlin knew, trying to reach home to the dimming mind with that reassurance, that assurance that the dying man had not given away life in vain.

It didn't reach Jonny Land. He wasn't Jonny Land any longer, he was just a living creature dying in pain, and he couldn't feel or know anything but pain. And then the pain went, and life went with it, and his face was a lax, empty mask that had no meaning for them.

Loesser sobbed: "He didn't know—he didn't know what I was saying!"

Carlin felt dull, tired, drained of emotion. He had just seen the only hero he had ever known die, but a hero's death was just death, just mortal pang and final release.

He went forward to the pilot room.

"Jonny's dead," he said to Harb Land.

Harb's shoulders sagged, but he did not turn as he guided the "Phoenix" on spaceward to where the grim Control cruisers waited.

Control Court here in New York was only a small room in the building by the spaceport. There were no officials in it except the three middle-aged judges who sat behind a small table and prepared to pass sentence on Laird Carlin and his seven comrades.

There were no lawyers, no oratory, no jurymen. They were not needed. The government psychologists who had quietly questioned the accused men during their four days in prison had submitted the factual hypnosis records which were complete and incontrovertible evidence.

The chief judge, the man in the middle, quietly read the decision as Carlin and the others faced him.

"This court is placed in a peculiarly difficult position in assessing your offense. On the one hand, you men deliberately broke a Control Council regulation and defied its officers. On the other hand, your action has proved the practicability of a process of Sun-mining which will be of incalculable value to this and every other System in the galaxy.

"To forgive your offense because the ultimate result was good would be to set a fatal precedent. It would establish the principle that illegal means do not matter if end-purposes are good. We cannot permit such a precedent to be established. Therefore, regretfully, this court must pass the prescribed punishment for your offense."

Carlin could not deny the crystalline logic. He had known from the first that this must be the issue, and he was too tired to care.

"You are sentenced to two years imprisonment in Rigel Prison and also to the loss of your spacemen's licenses or Cosmic Engineer's certificate, whichever you hold. Such sentence is obligatory in this case." He added quickly, "It is, however, within our discretion to suspend the prison term and to limit cancellation of your certificates to one year from date. Such is the sentence of this court."

Loesser drew a gusty breath of relief. "For a minute, I thought it was Rigel for us sure enough!"

The chief judge had risen. "Speaking personally," he added quietly, "we would like to congratulate you men upon a great achievement."

Ross Floring came to their side.

"A year's suspension isn't long," he said, and Carlin nodded wearily.

When, with Harb Land's giant figure leading them, they emerged from the building into the sunlight, a roar that deafened them came from the waiting crowd outside. The people of Earth, at least, had no need to temper their gratitude.

Harb was grimly silent as he pushed through the crowd toward Marn and old Gramp Land. Carlin found himself buffeted by eager hands, assailed by joyful faces and voices, as he followed.

A grizzled, excited man clapped his shoulder. "We Earthmen showed 'em we could still conquer space, didn't we?"

We Earthmen? Somehow, for the first time in all these days, Carlin's dulled mind felt a stir of pride as though at an accolade.

He didn't like to meet Marn's pale face. But she spoke steadily.

"It's all right, Laird, about Jonny. Women of Earth for two thousand years have seen their men go out into space—and not all come back."

Floring had followed them. "I want you to see something," he said.

He led the way toward the towering Monument of the Space-Pioneers. Carlin looked at the roll of names. Then his eyes suddenly blurred as he saw that, for the first time in several centuries, a new name had been added to the bottom of that great roll.

JON LAND

Marn's eyes were shining. And her giant brother looked long, with haggard face somehow comforted. But old Gramp Land turned sadly away.

"A name on a stone is poor exchange for my boy," he muttered. "I'm gettin' old."

That evening, in the old house up on the ridge, they were subdued and silent at dinner. The table was too big, and they looked around too often as if listening for a familiar limping step and a cheerful voice.

Carlin was doubly oppressed because of the thing that he had not yet told them. He hated, somehow, to break the news.

"There's something they found out when they made our psycho-records for the trial," he said finally. "Mine showed that I had no instability of coordination, no star-sickness any longer."

"You mean, you're cured?" said Harb, surprised. "Why, that's fine. I never thought of it, but you made the trip Sunward all right, so I should have known."

"The psychos say," Carlin told them, "that some people out in the galaxy now and then approximate much closer to the original Earth stock than the average. Such people respond rapidly to Earth-treatment. I'm one of them, it seems." He added uncomfortably, "I can go back home to Canopus now, though I'll have to work at a desk job for a year. The only thing is that there's a ship for Canopus tonight, and there won't be another for weeks."

"You're not going tonight?" exclaimed Harb. "Not as soon as that?"

Carlin felt a little heartsick. "I wish I didn't have to, so soon. But there's nothing for me to do here now that I'm all okay."

He had somehow expected Marn to protest too. But she did not. She only said quietly:

"I'll drive you down to the spaceport."

"I think I'd rather walk down," Carlin said slowly. "I don't know why, but I would. It's not far and I sent my bags on down."

"Then I'll walk a little of the way with you," said Marn.

Twilight had changed into soft summer darkness by the time Carlin had exchanged a last old-fashioned hand grip with Harb and Gramp Land, and started down the road with Marn.

She went only around the first turn of the old road with him, and then stopped.

"Good-by, Marn," he said, but she only averted her face.

Carlin hesitated, then turned and walked on. Luna was lifting its shining shield in the east, and the silver summer silence lay over everything, hardly broken by the stir of branches and the low buzz of insects. The night was warm and still.

He had a lump in his throat and he tried to laugh at himself because he had it. A man couldn't let illogical emotions overrule his reason. This crazy, heroic old planet Earth and its people—he would never forget them, but he had to return to his own life and work, he had to go home.

Laird Carlin suddenly stopped. He knew, abruptly, why dull oppression had gnawed his mind all day. It wasn't because he was going home. It was because he was leaving home. He was leaving the only place where his spirit had ever found something it had always lacked, a peace, an ancient certitude, a kinship that had grown and grown.

Carlin turned and strode rapidly back up the road. Not until he was almost upon her did he perceive that Marn Land was still standing in the silvered road where he had left her.

"I was waiting for you," she said simply. "I knew you wouldn't go."

His hands grasped her shoulders as he spoke in a rush.

"Marn, I couldn't! I thought of Canopus, I thought of friends there and a girl who likes me and the garden cities I used to love, and it was all unreal, I'm tied somehow to this queer old planet, to Jonny and Harb and all of the others, and to you!"

She came into his arms quietly. "I know. There's been more than one like you, more than one who came to Earth and found he somehow couldn't leave. This old world is in the blood of our race, Laird." She looked up. "A year's not long. We'll need you here to replace Jonny, to supervise the Sun-mining. And I need you. I always will."

Carlin held her closely, all tiredness and doubts gone now, strangely content. He looked up at the summer stars and thought of worlds out there, but it was all far away, far away.

And Earth was close, its ancient quiet night enfolding him. Soft wind stirred leafing branches in the moonlight, and the road wound up white and sure toward the old house, and out of the vastness of time and space, an Earthman had come home.

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