Read Ebook: The Mysterious Shin Shira by Farrow G E George Edward Easton W G Illustrator

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Ebook has 795 lines and 32114 words, and 16 pages

"Granted," said Vaine. "I'm an old fool and I know it."

He smiled somberly.

"Queer. We psychologists know exactly what makes us tick mentally, but we can't do anything more about our twisted emotions and impulses than we can do for those poor people who come to us for assistance we can't give them. Stanton collects old books. Never psychology, religion, or anything serious. What our ancestors called blood and thunder. Bang-bang adventure stuff. He calls it a hobby. It isn't. It's wish fulfilment."

He went on: "Look at that laughable little idiot on the televisor screen. He's the least imposing person I know of--and the happiest man on earth. He may be the greatest man who ever lived, for all I know. Listen to him."

"--man was useless. I knew that man must again find a motive for progress if he was to exist. The number of births had diminished almost to nothing. Both sexes felt that it was useless to bring children into such a world. So they did not, and the population has dropped frighteningly.

"After some time and thought I came to the conclusion that what was needed was another civilization with which our own could fuse its intellectual achievements and progress. For, it would be a new inspiration to find a race with a culture radically different from our own, and to adapt ourselves to that culture, to build shelters and new cities without the machines, and to bring back the old striving, ever-searching spirit of bygone days. And--I found it."

He stood there flushed with triumph. And the light in his face lit a similar light in the eyes and hearts of two billion people. Thus this modern Prometheus brought to earth a far more precious flame than did his predecessor of old.

"For the last fifty years," he said, "there have been no human trips made in a rocket--other than were absolutely necessary. As for exploring trips, there have been none beyond Pluto, and those by robots telecasting their impressions to earth; for we have lost the spirit of exploration, the spirit of discovery above all personal discomfort.

"At my request, the Central Consul built a spaceship suitable for a voyage to Alpha Centauri, which the electronic telescope revealed as the only star within its range having a civilization stationed on one of its planets. We used a device in the ship invented nearly forty years previous and completely ignored, which enabled us to make very nearly the speed of light."

Stanton interrupted the voice of the little man there. "Wonder how he managed to get permission to build the ship from that gang of ghouls. There was nothing they could get out of it, and it took a lot of credits."

Vaine said: "We're underestimating that little genius, I think. He grew up with an inferiority complex not brought on by the machines, but merely accentuated by it. He was one of those people virtually born that way; without any special ability except for bungling things in general.

"He's a type that every psychologist knows, the born failure. Only he had something in him that none of the others had. Something almost forgotten nowadays, and exceedingly rare in a person of his personality makeup: guts. There's a rumor that he spent years accumulating enough blackmail on the members of the Consul, after they refused him the first time, to force them to build that ship. I believe it.

"If he's right he'll go down in history, if he isn't right--then there won't be any history."

"Throttle down and listen," suggested Parker.

"Alpha Centauri has four planets," said the little man, "and the second innermost was our destination. We found that it had every conceivable advantage. The people were advanced scientifically, and evolved from a protoplasm basis that was, not unnaturally considering the similar conditions, along our own lines. They were rather ludicrously like certain twentieth century writers' conception of Martians and other extra-terrestrial creatures, particularly considering that no intelligent life has been found on Mars or the other planets in our system.

"They were small, with strangely faceted eyes, and two long slim cords for arms, these terminating in three thin fingers." He paused and repeated that, to emphasize such a familiar human characteristic. "Three fingers."

He continued: "They had no facial features outside of their eyes. They apparently perceived sounds by vibrations through their glossy black 'skin', if I may use such an inappropriate phrase, and their body was a cylinder and nothing more. They transported themselves in swift little cars, and how they got around before they progressed so far, I don't know. Probably they had some other method of physical motivation that has disappeared in long centuries of disuse. It does not matter. What does is the fact that they are an intelligent, sensitive people, and they have a great civilization, being able to communicate by means of telepathy, as many of our own people are able to do quite well.

"We hastened back before we had an opportunity to learn much about them, but were assured that we were welcome to their planet by their governing group.

"And the best news of all, is that it will not be necessary to build expensive ships to make the long trip! They have long had teleportation devices that enable them to transport the disassembled atoms of an individual or material to any distant place on which it is focused, no matter how far, there to be reassembled. The process is an extremely complicated and cumbersome one, requiring much mathematical calculation, but it can be done with absolutely no danger to the person using it. We have the plans for those machines."

The sound of cheering from the televisor became so ear-splitting that Vaine cut the volume, and then stood there, numbly cracking the fingers on his beautiful hands.

The picture on the screen whirled dizzily as the frantic operator panned too swiftly to pick up the image of the crowd, which was going mad with an enthusiasm that hurt them inside until they had to get it out, release it, let off their emotional energy. Women fainted, men wept, and the platform swayed dangerously as the amok crowd climbed over it to shake the hands of a new Messiah.

"I'll be damned," whispered Vaine, trying to comprehend hope, "I'll be completely damned." He cracked his long fingers slowly.

Stanton looked at his sandals as if he had never seen them before, and scowled. Parker ran his hand through his hair absently, forgetting that he no longer had any.

There was a buzzing in the next room.

Parker cursed all visaphones and vanished into the other room. They heard a bellowed, "Pleasure to you, too, and what the hell do you want?" Pause. "Oh." Another pause. Then: "Glad to hear it, Martin. Yes, it's a great thing all right. Huh? ... sure; thanks. Same to you. Glad you changed your mind. Pleasure, Martin."

Parker came back into the room. He tugged absently at his ear lobe. There was a strange look on his face. He noticed the stares of his fellow psychologists, and answered the question in their eyes.

"Remember that old duck, Martin Winter, the one with the registry full of credits he don't know what to do with--who came in here last week?"

He went on without waiting for an acknowledgement of acquaintance from the other two. "The old fool positively refused when he was here last time to have a transference to a robot body because he said he didn't have anything worth living for. But now he's determined to have the transference made, and to get transported to this other system. Wished me a happy trip over."

"Oh," said Vaine softly.

The voice of the little man came again into the room.

"Adventure," he said. "Adventure for all of us, and hope, and happiness." His voice trembled a little with the immensity of his own vision. "A new heaven and a new Earth, and a new dream for all mankind--everlasting, eternal, enduring for all time!"

His voice was drowned by a crowd roar that filled the room, then died away.

Electrical impulses touched the desert outside and rebounded to register on a dial the information that his distance from the ground was two thousand feet. He consulted another dial and found that the rocket was traveling a little more than eighteen hundred feet a second. Too fast. He cut it down to a thousand feet. Instruments were checked.

The energy waves he had received in space had come from the most desolate part of Mars. Lawrence was unable to understand why anyone chose this part of the planet to live on.

It was barren of the Martian planets collected by the settlers for their medicinal and museum value on earth, and it was far from the closely-clustered settler's towns. Which was strange. The settlers, he thought with a smile, made a lot of their being pioneers and all that sort of thing, but they loved their mechanical comforts and the warm, close companionship of their fellows.

He reached over and flicked the switch of the visor set in the nose of the ship for observation purposes. The scene revealed was as disappointingly prosaic to him now, as it had been when he had first seen it. It looked just as the mid-western deserts used to look before the Consul had turned them into fertile agricultural grounds, with one exception: the ground was as red as blood, even in the feeble light of the Martian moons.

There was a wind blowing, carrying the sand and the half-vegetable, half-animal "tumblies" along with it. But the wind always blew on Mars at this time of year, despite the thin air, when one was this near to the pole.

The shack he had been watching for, loomed dark and dismal in the black of the Martian night. Lawrence cut his rear jets and throttled down, aiding the ineffectual gliding surfaces of the rocket with occasional blasts from the hull. He landed with a very slight jar and cut the engines.

The racket of the engines in a rocket is so violent that it is always something of a shock to a rocket man when he cuts them off. The effect is as though something very vital had died.

Lawrence stood there trying to accustom his ears to the silence that claimed the ship, saving only the weep of the wind outside. And the wind became, in that moment, as all-pervading, as much a part of things as the rockets had been. The difference was that the rocket noise existed for only a brief while, and the wind had moaned out on those somber plains for--how many millions of years had it been?

He shook off the mood, drew on a light, electrically-heated suit with an oxygen container on the back. It completely covered every part of his body, and was especially designed for Mars, having two metaglass openings for his eyes and a voice amplifier just below it.

The shack was of metal, neat and compact. One side of it bulged like a tin can in which a firecracker has exploded. He stumbled over something in the sand--but he did not look down. The ground was covered in spots with strange relics of a Martian civilization here in this desert.

In the early twenty-first century, during the rush of excitement over interplanetary travel, there had been many expeditions to this part of the planet. In fact, the shack in front of him was probably one of the Smithsonian's archaeological stations. It had been supposedly long-deserted, though he had evidence that it wasn't now.

The expeditions had accumulated enough evidence from the desert to prove conclusively that the Martians had been a highly civilized and advanced people; more advanced, probably, than Earth. There were ruins of great cities in the south of the planet that must have been there for over two million years. The Martians had built well. As to what had happened to them--that was a mystery that remained unsolved. There had been no evidence of warfare of any sort, and a few rare translations of even rarer books, indicated that the Martians had eliminated diseases and had, in their time, colonized the entire solar system with their people. But now there was only the weeping wind and the barren sand--nothing more.

He reached the door, twisted the handle on it. Having suspected that someone was inside, Lawrence was not surprised when it came open easily with a sharp creaking sound. It had been recently used, of course, since otherwise the years would have rusted it to the extent that the first man to open it again would have had to exert a great deal of strength. It was monometal, but everything except lead and a few beryllium alloys rusted in the Martian air.

He took a torch from his utility bag, and the soft but brilliant green of the portable Howard-Brazier fluorescent stabbed into the darkness and tore away the shadows. There was nothing in the path of the beam that he could see. Only the red dust on the wings of the restless wind.

He went in.

The door creaked shut behind him. A tiny air purifier made sighings somewhere like a big dog with asthma. There was a bare metal table. And that was all. A door led into another room. He walked into it. Silence, save for the moan of the deathless wind, crying outside.

It was dark in the room, with only the light of Deimos and Phobos shining into the glassite windows. He could just make out the darkness-shrouded bulks of shattered machinery in the corner. He pressed the button on his torch and the darkness fled in panic from the brightness of the light.

His flashlight clattered to the metal floor, and his hand was on his blaster. Then he cursed himself for a fool and retrieved his torch. He did not, however, turn it on again.

To be startled like that by mental telepathy was childish. It was something that every member of the Space Patrol had to master, and was an ability fairly common among intelligent people--many of whom practiced the art as something of a hobby. The only element of surprise was the fact that it was a strain on any ordinary man to project his thoughts that way, and speech was preferable when practicable. Still, there was no reason why anyone should not use telepathy if he wished. cousin as old as you are. See, Gammage?"

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