Three Worlds to Conquer Read online

  When the instruments showed air density equivalent to Earth’s at twenty miles—here, the altitude was much less—Fraser cut the space drive and went over to the aerodynamic system. The uppermost stratum of ammonia clouds was immediately beneath him. He entered it.

  Blackness closed in, above, around, below. He switched the screens to infrared conversion, reducing the wavelengths that penetrated this far, or were produced thermally, to ones that he could see. But little appeared except blue-green whirls. He advanced cautiously. The time grew long that he spent in formlessness. The ship clove atmosphere with an ever deeper sound that seemed at last to permeate his whole being, take him up into itself so that he rode in a Nirvana of thunder.

  An electric discharge flashed white, lighting up cliffs and canyons of cloud for mile after vertical mile, each bank the size of a terrestrial continent. The noise and the gust that followed made the ship plunge like a roweled horse. Instruments danced crazily. Fraser’s body slammed against his harness with the whole brutal weight of four hundred and twenty pounds that now burdened him. Each movement was an effort. His touch on the controls made the console ring. But he was too absorbed in grandeur to pay heed.

  The turbulence fell behind; once more the Olympia droned through an abyssal calm. In one sense, it was illusory, for the pressure at this level would have crumpled any other ship men had ever built. And still it rose as she descended.

  But she was meant for this place. Cabin and engine room were burrows in an ovoid block of alloy steel whose near-perfect crystals locked each molecule with a force close to the ultimate. Only the airlock and the cargo compartment doors broke that surface, and they were equally massive, squeezed ever more tightly shut by the outside atmosphere. There were no ports to be shattered. Instruments and viewscreens employed solid state devices akin to those which had been landed on Jupiter. As far as sheer strength was concerned, this part of the Olympia could have gone some way below the solar photosphere.

  About a fourth of the hold was similarly constructed, in order to bring back minerals whose allotropy required Jovian surface conditions. The rest, though sturdier than spaceship hulls to be found anywhere else, amounted only to a number of cells which would take samples of atmosphere at various higher altitudes. At the moment, they were all open and had no net force on them.

  Engine energy had been shunted from the rockets to a set of turbojets. And above, a flexible, immensely tough bag had expanded. Controlled by a barometer, pumps filled it with gas supplied by the breakdown of carbohydrate; heat flowed in to keep the interior less dense than the cold native hydrogen-helium which surrounded it at equal pressure. Thus the overall effective weight of the system was almost nil.

  The Olympia was, in effect, a space-going bathyscaphe. She did not so much fly as swim through the Jovian sky.

  Almost like old times, in the seas of Earth, Fraser dreamed. Then again the hull rocked and yawed, a wolf howl ripped at him, he heard the clang of ammonia hailstones and felt the metal shudder beneath their blows. Lorraine’s cry came tiny: “They must be as massive as I am! What if they tear the bag open?”

  “Then we’re done for,” he said between his teeth and fought the controls.

  By halting the gas pumps, lowering the nose, and pouring on power, he broke through the bottom of the storm. It didn’t reach the ground against the pressure from below; it couldn’t! When once again they were in a green calm, Fraser needed several minutes to stop shaking.

  His god-sense was gone. He felt very mortal. But suddenly he entered into wonder.

  The surface became visible.

  No little distorted glimpses through a screen, no clumsy Jovian attempt at description, had prepared him for this. Overhead arched a golden heaven, where the lowest clouds floated turquoise, ultramarine and copper. Rain rushed from one bank on the northern horizon, a cataract to dwarf Niagara, silver-glinting, with lightning in the smoke-blue caverns above. Dusk lingered over an ocean in the west; and under it each wave shone, spouting sparks. Rollers more huge and rapid than a tidal wave at home marched east into daylight, shining like damascened steel. They burst on the shore and flung foam so high that it made a continuous glitter in the air. Beyond, a plain stretched boundless, blue and yellow bushes, a forest whose branches rippled in the wind and shook forth eerily shaped clusters of leaves, until the eastern edge of the world lost itself in gold-bronze vapors. A low escarpment rose in the south, blackly and metallically agleam, ice cliffs down which a river leaped foaming toward the sea.

  Stunned into muteness, Fraser and Lorraine hung there and looked, lost themselves in the scene, for a time beyond time. Nothing but the memory of Theor roused the man.

  Reluctantly, he studied his instruments. The powerful automatic radio beacon that had been landed close to Nyarr in anticipation of the human visit registered faintly. So his dead reckoning as he came down hadn’t been too far off! He reduced altitude and drove the ship northward.

  “Look.” Lorraine pointed.

  A flock of devilfish shapes winged half a mile away. They shone as if burnished. Down on the plain, a herd of six-legged animals with magnificent horns bolted when the Olympia passed over. There were thousands of them; the earthquake roll of their feet reached so high that it was picked up by the sonic relays.

  “And I always thought Jupiter was . . . was a kind of frozen hell,” she faltered.

  “To the Jovians, Earth is a kind of hot hell,” he replied.

  “But, I mean well, this splendor! This much life!”

  He nodded his heavy head. “Uh-huh. That’s the real wonder of the universe, I suppose. Life.”

  Her bitterness returned. “And we have such a short time alive, and still people spoil it.”

  “Jovians do too. They aren’t so very unlike us, eh?”

  “Your friend Theor,” she said uncertainly. “He’s got a family, didn’t you tell me?”

  “Yes. He’s quite devoted to them.”

  “Lucky fellow.”

  He gave her a startled glance, but she had averted her face.

  Presently he spied a river that must be the Brantor. He followed it until the radio compass said he was above Nyarr, and hovered for a look. There was plainly an extensive artificial area below, though it resembled more a cultivated maze than any city he had imagined. Through high magnification, he saw crowds scurry about, staring and gesturing at him.

  He activated the neutrino set. “Theor, are you still okay? How goes the fight?”

  “Worse for us than we hoped. Nigh had I despaired of you, Mark. They have not yet driven us off the hilltop, but each attack they make thins our lines. Where are you?”

  “At your home town.”

  “Lives the city yet?”

  “Yes. No one’s camped outside, either. But they haven’t tried to contact me.”

  “Give them time, the councillors who know how to use the equipment. You must be a fearful apparition.”

  “We can’t wait for diem, you and I. Now describe your location exactly, and your people, so I won’t attack the wrong army. Then get your commander to start his retreat during the next lull in the fighting, over the hill to the other side.”

  Fraser stopped. Only now did the implications of his tactics become clear to him. He shrank from them. “Hold on!” he said waveringly. “Can you communicate with the enemy?”

  “I believe Chalkhiz, their leader, understands our drum code as well as our language.”

  “Warn him that the Oracle is coming, and will destroy him if he doesn’t surrender.”

  “How he will laugh!”

  “No doubt. But still, with some advance notice, they may suffer fewer casualties.”

  “You do not know what they have done to us, Mark, or you would have no care for them.”

  “I like to think that I would.”

  “For your sake, then, it shall be done. Now, as to the information you need—” Fraser had known Theor long enough to recognize the joy behind those few crisp words. It heartened him a
little.

  “Check,” he said. “One more thing. Warn your own people not to look at me after I arrive. They’re to cover their faces, and crawl behind their shields if possible. Got it? Tm on my way.”

  The Olympia surged forward. Lorraine regarded Fraser long. “Isn’t your idea working yet?” she asked. “You look like death.”

  “Oh, it is,” he bit off. “That’s what’s wrong!”

  The time was all too short before he passed over the ships and sea monsters of Ulunt-Khazul. Beyond, the forest opened on undulant country with another ice range in the north. It seethed with Jovians.

  Fraser’s untrained eye could make little sense of the ordering and movement, but he saw that a lesser group were bunched on one slope of a hill while a larger one was advancing from the river side. The crest between was littered with dead; they looked as empty and pathetic as any slain man.

  “Theor, are you ready?”

  “Aye!”

  Fraser brought the ship down.

  He had cherished a hope that the invaders would flee at sight of him. But they had too much discipline, too much bravery. The sonics brought him a challenge cry, an eruption of drumbeats and clang of weapons. He saw a ripple go through their mass, they locked ranks and raised their lances in defiance of every god this land might loose on them.

  “Theor, I see an extra-large flag at the point of their wedge formation. Is that where their chief would be?”

  “Indeed so. Chalkhiz fights in his own van. I feel ashamed that I did not likewise.”

  “You and me both. Well—I’ll go after Chalkhiz.”

  The ship tilted around until her stern jets pointed at the prideful banner. Fraser gunned the rockets.

  It was a low thrust, barely sufficing to push reaction mass out against the atmosphere. But the energy required for that much was so great that only the riven atom could yield it. And the gas emerged at thousands of degrees.

  To Jovian senses, the world lit up as if all the lightnings that ever raged had struck in this one place. The sky turned molten, the earth glowed, rocks melted and ran over ground that exploded in live ammonia steam. Air flamed with momentary incandescence, wrapped itself around each living thing and consumed the flesh. Then the shock wave came.

  The ground heaved up, a wave that ran out and out until it struck the rise and brought the hillside down in avalanche. Dust and smoke whirled in a cloud, through which dreadful fragments went flying. The roar which followed seemed to burst heads open. Back and forth the echoes beat, shock upon shock, and as they faded a great brief wind whistled across desolation.

  Fraser did not know how many Ulunt-Khazul perished in that circle of Ragnarok. He dared not reckon them up. Still less dared he look on that which crawled about at the edges, blind and charred, and screamed. He could oily remind himself, over and over aid over, that thousands didn’t appear to be seriously hurt, that they galloped in every direction, their weapons cast away, their will utterly broken, crazy with panic, no longer a conquering army, no longer anything.

  “Mark, mind-brother, deliverer,” Theor chanted. The drums of Nyarr crashed triumph behind him.

  “Are your people unharmed?” Fraser asked mechanically.

  “Ush, yes, we were well protected. Already Walfilo issues commands for detachments to go capture the enemy ships and as many warriors as possible. Not that they are ever likely to rally, but they could turn bandit if we let them escape. Herded off to Rollarik, they will be less troublesome . . . Can you land? The first man on this world!”

  “Sure, I can land,” said Fraser, and wept.

  Lorraine unstrapped herself, dragged her weighted body to his side, and cradled his head in its helmet against her armored breast. “Oh, Mark, darling, don’t let it hurt you. Think how many more lives would have been lost if you hadn’t come and, and saved a whole civilization. Think what we’ve got left to do at home. You have to free us, too, Mark.”

  He tore loose from her, she saw the upsurge in him and he shouted: “We can, by glory!”

  XIX

  He was less certain—he had no certainty whatsoever—by the time they were ready to go.

  The long confinement in his spacesuit was driving his body toward revolt; it sent him petitions of itch, manfestos of stench and impeachments of nausea. Matters might paradoxically have been less endurable were he not so worn down by hunger and gravity. At least that enabled him to spend most of the hours asleep while Theor’s people loaded his ship.

  Now he sat erect in the pilot chair, Lorraine beside him, and wondered how he had ever imagined so fantastic a scheme as his might work.

  Though there was no alternative, was there? They could refine water for him in the firepots of Ath, but Theor doubted that the smith community, disrupted by the war, would be able to resume operations soon enough to do the humans any good. Maybe, given a rested and nourished brain, Fraser could have thought of some less precarious plan. But the heavy blood was unwilling to rise in him, his ankles swelled and his head felt scooped-out empty. Jupiter was no place for any man to linger long; and if the man had spent the last dozen years on Ganymede, and was getting old—

  He stared out at a wild and marvelous sunset. The disc itself was not visible through the many cloud strata overhead, but a part of the sky was always brighter than the rest. That luminosity had slipped behind the western mists and turned them to fire. The light reached the northern scarp and flared back off it, as if the Wilderwall had become molten and yet somehow remained standing. Trees shook their branches aloft in a slow wind, which blew with a sound like the ocean. Fog had begun to rise on the open country, but the river still gleamed sword bright.

  “I wish—”

  “What, Mark?”

  “Foolishness. That I could come back here some day.”

  “Why not? With booster drugs and proper equipment, you could spend several Earth-days at a time. Don’t you think I want to return? But I’m a woman, and untrained for the work, and . . . I never will. You, though, with your knowledge, and with everyone so grateful to you—why, the next expedition will insist on taking you.”

  “ ’Fraid not. Any service I could do could just as well be done from an orbital post I’ve no business coming down here. Pharmacopoeia or not I can’t stand the gaff as well or as long as a younger man. I’d hinder the work. So, well, we’ll have an unfulfilled wish in common, Lory. Along with everything else.”

  She bit her lip and made no reply.

  “I do wish, however, I weren’t so tired and light-headed,” Fraser said. “I can’t appreciate what’s out there. It doesn’t quite register. You’re in better shape. Look close for me, will you, Lory? And listen to the wind and feel the weight, even. So you can tell me afterward what it was like.”

  “If there is an afterward,” she said.

  “We have to assume we’ll carry off the plan, or what is there for us?”

  “I wasn’t thinking about the operation against Swayne, Mark. I meant after that”

  Theor called out an order. The Jovians who had been at work by the cargo hatch dispersed.

  It hadn’t been fair to make them load the high-pressure compartment with rock, almost immediately after their battle. Fraser could see how the round heads were bowed, crests drooping, arms hanging loose, sturdy striped bodies barely able to shuffle away toward the river. But they could rest now before starting home. The humans’ work was hardly begun.

  Theor himself came around to the bow. The unset light gleamed off the disc on his breast and the big eyes. “We are done, mind-brother,” he said. “Would that we could do more. But we have nothing left to offer you except our hopes.”

  “You’ve done plenty,” Fraser said.

  “Must you go at once?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have not even seen you, behind that hull. And our hands will never clasp. Ush-heu, this is a strange universe.”

  “I’ll call you when I’m able.”

  “I shall have no ease until you do. May the Powers r
ide with you always.”

  “Good-by, Theor.”

  “Farewell, Mark.”

  The Jovian moved off to a safe distance. Fraser worked the controls to close the hatch and start the engine. Heat expanded the gas bag. The ship rose. Theor stood waving. Fraser and Lorraine watched him until he vanished in distance and night.

  The passage up was slow. Fraser had to bleed the bag, lest pressure rip it open. At appropriate heights he closed off the air sample cells. The ship moved sluggishly, weighted by her cargo. He dreaded a storm. But none was encountered. It was as if the whole planet wanted to aid him.

  In the end he glimpsed the sun, started the jets and felt his heart labor under acceleration.

  When finally he judged they were in orbit, the simple act of turning off the thrust was almost as much as he could do. Sleep smote him where he sat.

  He awoke hours afterward, weak, sore and ravenous, but more refreshed than he had expected. IBs mind was almost unnaturally clear. Yet the time on Jupiter did not seem quite real; it was like something he had dreamed long ago. Nothing existed but the cabin, the woman and the task.

  “I think we’d better eat our last food bars, don’t you?” Lorraine said. “We’ll need our strength.”

  “Uh-huh. Break ’em out, will you?”

  The stuff was tasteless in his mouth. He drank deep; there was no longer any reason to hoard water. “Well,” he said, “now we have to figure out our switching arrangement.”

  “I’ve already done that,” Lorraine answered. “I came to well before you did.” She pointed at a

  tangle of tools, wire and replacement-parts metal, netted in place on one of the bunks. “In fact, I’ve almost got it finished.”

  “Good girl.” Fraser regarded her for a space that grew. The amber light from the planet was gentle to her features, toning down their strength, lending a glamor of which he was much too aware. “You know,” he said, almost involuntarily, “you’re a beautiful girl.”