First Lensman · Chapter 9 (2/3)

At night, therefore, it rains: and by comparison a Tellurian downpour of one inch per hour is scarcely a drizzle. Upon Trenco it really rains⁠—forty seven feet and five inches of precipitation, every night of every Trenconian year. And this tremendous condensation of course causes wind. Willoughby’s graphs were accurate. Except at Trenco’s very poles there is not a spot in which or a time at which an Earthly gale would not constitute a dead calm; and along the equator, at every sunrise and every sunset, the wind blows from the day side into the night side at a velocity which no Tellurian hurricane or cyclone, however violent, has even distantly approached.

Also, therefore, there is lightning. Not in the mild and occasional flashes which we of gentle Terra know, but in a continuous, blinding glare which outshines a normal sun; in battering, shattering, multi-billion-volt discharges which not only make darkness unknown there, but also distort beyond recognition and beyond function the warp and the woof of space itself. Sight is almost completely useless in that fantastically altered medium. So is the ultra-beam.

Landing on the daylight side, except possibly at exact noon, would be impossible because of the wind, nor could the ship stay landed for more than a couple of minutes. Landing on the night side would be practically as bad, because of the terrific charge the boat would pick up⁠—unless the boat carried something that could be rebuilt into a leaker. Did it? It did.

Time after time, from pole to pole and from midnight around the clock, Samms stabbed Visibeam and spy-ray down toward Trenco’s falsely-visible surface, with consistently and meaninglessly impossible results. The planet tipped, lurched, spun, and danced. It broke up into chunks, each of which began insanely to follow mathematically impossible paths.

Finally, in desperation, he rammed a beam down and held it down. Again he saw the planet break up before his eyes, but this time he held on. He knew that he was well out of the stratosphere, a good two hundred miles up. Nevertheless, he saw a tremendous mass of jagged rock falling straight down, with terrific velocity, upon his tiny lifeboat!

Unfortunately the crew, to whom he had not been paying overmuch attention of late, saw it, too; and one of them, with a bestial yell, leaped toward Samms and the controls. Samms, reaching for pistol and blackjack, whirled around just in time to see the big redhead lay the would-be attacker out cold with a vicious hand’s-edge chop at the base of the skull.

“Thanks, Tworn. Why?”

“Because I want to get out of this alive, and he’d’ve had us all in hell in fifteen minutes. You know a hell of a lot more than we do, so I’m playin’ it your way. See?”

“I see. Can you use a sap?”

“An artist,” the big man admitted, modestly. “Just tell me how long you want a guy to be out and I won’t miss it a minute, either way. But you’d better blow that crumb’s brains out, right now. He ain’t no damn good.”

“Not until after I see whether he can work or not. You’re a Procian, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. Midlands⁠—North Central.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing much, at first. Just killed a guy that needed killing; but the goddam louse had a lot of money, so they give me twenty five years. I didn’t like it very well, and acted rough, so they give me solitary⁠—boot, bandage, and so on. So I tried a break⁠—killed six or eight, maybe a dozen, guards⁠—but didn’t quite make it. So they slated me for the big whiff. That’s all, boss.”

“I’m promoting you, now, to squad leader. Here’s the sap.” He handed Tworn his blackjack. “Watch ’em⁠—I’ll be too busy to. This landing is going to be tough.”

“Gotcha, boss.” Tworn was calibrating his weapon by slugging himself experimentally on the leg. “Go ahead. As far as these crumbs are concerned, you’ve got this air-tank all to yourself.”

Samms had finally decided what he was going to do. He located the terminator on the morning side, poised his little ship somewhat nearer to dawn than to midnight, and “cut the rope.” He took one quick reading on the sun, cut off his plates, and let her drop, watching only his pressure gages and gyros.

One hundred millimeters of mercury. Three hundred. Five hundred. He slowed her down. He was going to hit a thin liquid, but if he hit it too hard he would smash the boat, and he had no idea what the atmospheric pressure at Trenco’s surface would be. Six hundred. Even this late at night, it might be greater than Earth’s⁠ ⁠… and it might be a lot less. Seven hundred.

Slower and slower he crept downward, his tension mounting infinitely faster than did the needle of the gage. This was an instrument landing with a vengeance! Eight hundred. How was the crew taking it? How many of them had Tworn had to disable? He glanced quickly around. None! Now that they could not see the hallucinatory images upon the plates, they were not suffering at all⁠—he himself was the only one aboard who was feeling the strain!

Nine hundred⁠ ⁠… nine hundred forty. The boat “hit the drink” with a crashing, splashing impact. Its pace was slow enough, however, and the liquid was deep enough, so that no damage was done. Samms applied a little driving power and swung his craft’s sharp nose into the line toward the sun. The little ship plowed slowly forward, as nearly just awash as Samms could keep her; grounded as gently as a river steamboat upon a mud-flat. The starkly incredible downpour slackened; the Lensman knew that the second critical moment was at hand.

“Strap down, men, until we see what this wind is going to do to us.”

The atmosphere, moving at a velocity well above that of sound, was in effect not a gas, but a solid. Even a spaceboat’s hard skin of alloy plate, with all its bracing, could not take what was coming next. Inert, she would be split open, smashed, flattened out, and twisted into pretzels. Samms’ finger stabbed down; the Berg went into action; the lifeboat went free just as that raging blast of quasi-solid vapor wrenched her into the air.

The second descent was much faster and much easier than the first. Nor, this time, did Samms remain surfaced or drive toward shore. Knowing now that this ocean was not deep enough to harm his vessel, he let her sink to the bottom. More, he turned her on her side and drove her at a flat angle into the bottom; so deep that the rim of her starboard lock was flush with the ocean’s floor. Again they waited; and this time the wind did not blow the lifeboat away.

Upon purely theoretical grounds Samms had reasoned that the weird distortion of vision must be a function of distance, and his observations so far had been in accord with that hypothesis. Now, slowly and cautiously, he sent out a visibeam. Ten feet⁠ ⁠… twenty⁠ ⁠… forty⁠ ⁠… all clear. At fifty the seeing was definitely bad; at sixty it became impossible. He shortened back to forty and began to study the vegetation, growing with such fantastic speed that the leaves, pressed flat to the ground by the gale and anchored there by heavy rootlets, were already inches long. There was also what seemed to be animal life, of sorts, but Samms was not, at the moment, interested in Trenconian zoology.

“Are them the plants we’re going to get, boss?” Tworn asked, staring into the plate over Samms’ shoulder. “Shall we go out now an’ start pickin’ ’em?”

“Not yet. Even if we could open the port the blast would wreck us. Also, it would shear your head off, flush with the coaming, as fast as you stuck it out. This wind should ease off after a while; we’ll go out a little before noon. In the meantime we’ll get ready. Have the boys break out a couple of spare Number Twelve struts, some clamps and chain, four snatch blocks, and a hundred feet of heavy space-line.⁠ ⁠…

“Good,” he went on, when the order had been obeyed. “Rig the line from the winch through snatch blocks here, and here, and here, so I can haul you back against the wind. While you are doing that I’ll rig a remote control on the winch.”

Shortly before Trenco’s fierce, blue-white sun reached meridian, the six men donned spacesuits and Samms cautiously opened the airlock ports. They worked. The wind was now scarcely more than an Earthly hurricane; the wildly whipping broadleaf plants, struggling upward, were almost halfway to the vertical. The leaves were apparently almost fully grown.

Four men clamped their suits to the line. The line was paid out. Each man selected two leaves; the largest, fattest, purplest ones he could reach. Samms hauled them back and received the loot; Tworn stowed the leaves away. Again⁠—again⁠—again.

With noon there came a few minutes of “calm.” A strong man could stand against the now highly variable wind; could move around without being blown beyond the horizon; and during those few minutes all six men gathered leaves. That time, however, was very short. The wind steadied into the reverse direction with ever-increasing fury; winch and space-line again came into play. And in a scant half hour, when the line began to hum an almost musical note under its load, Samms decided to call it quits.

“That’ll be all for today, boys,” he announced. “About twice more and this line will part. You’ve done too good a job to lose you. Secure ship.”

“Shall I blow the air, sir?” Tworn asked.

“I don’t think so.” Samms thought for a moment. “No. I’m afraid to take the chance. This stuff, whatever it is, is probably as poisonous as cyanide. We’ll keep our suits on and exhaust into space.”

Time passed. “Night” came; the rain and the flood. The bottom softened. Samms blasted the lifeboat out of the mud and away from the planet. He opened the bleeder valves, then both airlock ports; the contaminated air was replaced by the ultra-hard vacuum of the interplanetary void. He signaled the Virgin Queen; the lifeboat was taken aboard.

“Quick trip, Olmstead,” Willoughby congratulated him. “I’m surprised that you got back at all, to say nothing of with so much stuff and not losing a man. Give me the weight, mister, fast!”

“Three hundred and forty eight pounds, sir,” the supercargo reported.

“My God! And all pure broadleaf! Nobody ever did that before! How did you do it, Olmstead?”

“I don’t know whether that would be any of your business or not.” Samms’ mien was not insulting; merely thoughtful. “Not that I give a damn, but my way might not help anybody else much, and I think I had better report to the main office first, and let them do the telling. Fair enough?”

“Fair enough,” the skipper conceded, ungrudgingly. “What a load! And no losses!”

“One boatload of air, is all; but air is expensive out here.” Samms made a point, deliberately.

“Air!” Willoughby snorted. “I’ll swap you a hundred flasks of air, any time, for any one of those leaves!” Which was what Samms wanted to know.

Captain Willoughby was smart. He knew that the way to succeed was to use and then to trample upon his inferiors; to toady to such superiors as were too strong to be pulled down and thus supplanted. He knew this Olmstead had what it took to be a big shot. Therefore:

“They told me to keep you in the dark until we got to Trenco,” he more than half apologized to his Fourth Officer shortly after the Virgin Queen blasted away from the Trenconian system. “But they didn’t say anything about afterwards⁠—maybe they figured you wouldn’t be aboard any more, as usual⁠—but anyway, you can stay right here in the control room if you want to.”

“Thanks, Skipper, but mightn’t it be just as well,” he jerked his head inconspicuously toward the other officers, “to play the string out, this trip? I don’t care where we’re going, and we don’t want anybody to get any funny ideas.”

“That’d be a lot better, of course⁠—as long as you know that your cards are all aces, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Thanks, Willoughby. I’ll remember that.”

Samms had not been entirely frank with the private captain. From the time required to make the trip, he knew to within a few parsecs Trenco’s distance from Sol. He did not know the direction, since the distance was so great that he had not been able to recognize any star or constellation. He did know, however, the course upon which the vessel then was, and he would know courses and distances from then on. He was well content.

A couple of uneventful days passed. Samms was again called into the control room, to see that the ship was approaching a three-sun solar system.

“This where we’re going to land?” he asked, indifferently.

“We ain’t going to land,” Willoughby told him. “You are going to take the broadleaf down in your boat, close enough so that you can parachute it down to where it has to go. Way ’nuff, pilot, go inert and match intrinsics. Now, Olmstead, watch. You’ve seen systems like this before?”

“No, but I know about them. Those two suns over there are a hell of a lot bigger and further away than they look, and this one here, much smaller, is in the Trojan position. Have those big suns got any planets?”

“Five or six apiece, they say; all hotter and dryer than the brazen hinges of hell. This sun here has seven, but Number Two⁠—‘Cavenda,’ they call it⁠—is the only Tellurian planet in the system. The first thing we look for is a big, diamond-shaped continent⁠ ⁠… there’s only one of that shape⁠ ⁠… there it is, over there. Notice that one end is bigger than the other⁠—that end is north. Strike a line to split the continent in two and measure from the north end one-third of the length of the line. That’s the point we’re diving at now⁠ ⁠… see that crater?”

“Yes.” The Virgin Queen, although still hundreds of miles up, was slowing rapidly. “It must be a big one.”

“It’s a good fifty miles across. Go down until you’re dead sure that the box will land somewhere inside the rim of that crater. Then dump it. The parachute and the sender are automatic. Understand?”

“Yes, sir; I understand,” and Samms took off.

He was vastly more interested in the stars, however, than in delivering the broadleaf. The constellation directly beyond Sol from wherever he was might be recognizable. Its shape would be smaller and more or less distorted; its smaller stars, brilliant to Earthly eyes only because of their nearness, would be dimmer, perhaps invisible; the picture would be further confused by intervening, nearby, brilliant strangers; but such giants as Canopus and Rigel and Betelgeuse and Deneb would certainly be highly visible if he could only recognize them. From Trenco his search had failed; but he was still trying.

There was something vaguely familiar! Sweating with the mental effort, he blocked out the too-near, too-bright stars and studied intensively those that were left. A blue-white and a red were most prominent. Rigel and Betelgeuse? Could that constellation be Orion? The Belt was very faint, but it was there. Then Sirius ought to be about there, and Pollux about there; and, at this distance, about equally bright. They were. Aldebaran would be orange, and about one magnitude brighter than Pollux; and Capella would be yellow, and half a magnitude brighter still. There they were! Not too close to where they should be, but close enough⁠—it was Orion! And this thionite way-station, then, was somewhere near right ascension seventeen hours and declination plus ten degrees!

He returned to the Virgin Queen. She blasted off. Samms asked very few questions and Willoughby volunteered very little information; nevertheless the First Lensman learned more than anyone of his fellow pirates would have believed possible. Aloof, taciturn, disinterested to a degree, he seemed to spend practically all of his time in his cabin when he was not actually at work; but he kept his eyes and his ears wide open. And Virgil Samms, as has been intimated, had a brain.