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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.

[Illustration: 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!"

[Illustration: "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.

[Illustration: 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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