Read Ebook: The ghost planet by Leinster Murray

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Ebook has 305 lines and 15550 words, and 7 pages

McGuire stared at him. Then he said shortly, "Let Kit brief you, then, and see if you can come up with some contributions to equal your friend's. This isn't a ceremony. It's an emergency, with a pack of politicians too busy thinking of politics to see what they're up against!"

Kit said eagerly, "You see, Lan, Father feels--"

"I know how I feel!" said McGuire angrily. "You're loyal, Kit, but I'm not thinking of the Ghost Planet as a matter with political implications! When there were different nations on earth there was a loyalty called patriotism. Now that there's a world government, there's still room for a similar feeling!

"I think the Ghost Planet represents a possible danger. What happened in Cleveland just now is evidence for that view. But I'm sure that the Ghost Planet has the secret of the answer to the most desperate need of humanity.

"So as a private citizen I think it's up to me to try to find that out! I think it's up to Lan and Tom and everybody else! And if Lan will pay less attention to the possibilities of being flatteringly respectful to me and try to suggest something useful I'll like it better!"

He strode angrily from the room. Lan flushed hotly and looked at Kit. "I'm not very popular with your father," he said resentfully.

"Don't be silly!" said Kit. "Because you're engaged to me you feel awkward with him. He won't bite you, Lan! Talk things over with Tom and work out something! That'll please him!"

"But it's ridiculous!" protested Lan. "There's bound to be organized research done! What can one or two or three people, working alone, do with problems that call for full scale planned investigation?"

Tom said nothing. He was at once very weary and very much absorbed in the new idea that had occurred to him.

"And he talks in riddles!" said Lan indignantly. "If it's a ghost planet with ghost space-ships why--he seems to agree with Tom that they can't do anything! And as for having a secret solving the most desperate need of humanity--"

Tom said abstractedly, "Interstellar travel, Lan. We've been to all our own planets and not one will support a colony. Earth's getting overcrowded. And our interplanetary drive wouldn't begin to reach even Proxima Centauri, even if we could live long enough to get there.

"The Ghost Planet came from beyond our system. They've a drive that will take a planet from one star to another. If we had it we could hunt out planets to colonize. There are plenty if we could reach them. And Earth would be a better place."

Kit said urgently, "There! That's it, Lan! Work out a drive that would serve for interstellar travel--after this affair is done with!"

Tom got up. "I've got to get back to work on a new angle. With a space-ship, even a little one, I think we could handle things."

The vision receiver was barking a news announcement as he left the room. The announcement was that a sphere was headed back toward the shimmering Ghost Planet--but "comet" was the word still used--and that it was much denser than any other that had been observed.

It was assumed to be the globe which had snatched a citizen from Lincoln Square in Cleveland and increased markedly in density while doing so. Moreover, several other extra-dense globes had risen from earth and were assumed to be heading back in the same direction.

At the very end of the news broadcast, an official announcement from the government public information service was read. It stated that Government scientists were actively investigating the comet and that the public should not be alarmed. There was absolutely no evidence--said the release--to support any idea that either the comet or the mist-globes were hitherto unknown forms of life or that the globes were likely to prey on humanity.

The release was very comfortingly phrased, but it was a mistake. Few people, if any, had heard any rumor suggesting that the ghost-globes were creatures which might eat men. The information release spread the suggestion on world-wide newscasts. It sent a wave of hysteria around an overcrowded, overemotional earth.

A hundred years of peace and preventive medicine had sent Earth's population soaring. From two billion people in the early twentieth century it was now eight and a quarter billion. In a world-wide culture of high development there could be neither plagues nor wars to ease the pressure. But the pressure was enormous.

The Guilds arose to meet it--grim associations of individuals, at once unions and fraternal organizations, which watched jealously over the rights of their members and helped them by cooperative housing and merchandising activities to meet the increasingly desperate pressure of overcrowding.

But no organization could meet the actual situation, which was that of ancient China, static for two thousand years from the same insensate pressure of population. All Earth faced the prospect of a frantically struggling stasis with no hope because there could be no escape.

Men like McGuire saw the situation as desperate, and were howled down because they wanted to throw all the resources of the world behind an all-out attack on the means of emigration to the stars. It would be infinitely costly and taxes were already too high--demands for ever-greater government services were unending.

Even now the government regulated details of life that before had been strictly personal decisions. A vast straining electorate demanded the impossible and denied the only means for ultimate relief because they required immediate sacrifices.

An enormous emotionalism had developed, which was channeled by skilful political propaganda. But the tensions of merely securing a livelihood made Earth a place in which almost anything in the way of mass hysteria could happen at almost any instant, simply because ninety-nine percent of all human beings had been forced not to think beyond the stress of today and now.

So Tom Drake went back into McGuire's laboratory and worked and worked and worked. He had begun to think about the ghost spheres because he'd encountered one and it had caused him personal disaster.

When the Ghost Planet appeared, and Kit had called for the two of them--Lan and himself--to come out to the Coast for work on the problem it presented, he'd first thought of it as a matter of scientific interest.

But now that Lan's peevish indignation had made him realize what McGuire saw in the coming of the Ghost Planet, he worked with an enthusiasm which ignored the possibility of fatigue.

If the Ghost Planet had the secret of interstellar travel--and it must--then the problem was not that of meeting a danger, but of the whole future of humanity. As such, it was worth much more than all he could do. It was worth all that everybody in the world could do.

McGuire listened to his new plans. He nodded and vanished from the house. Tom racked his brains for remembered data and dug into McGuire's technical library for further information and then sweated over the construction of a pilot model of a small device. He could go no further until McGuire turned up with something for which a larger device could be designed.

It was dusk and he was numb with mental and physical fatigue when the air throbbed heavily about the building. Then there was a deep moaning noise and the ground trembled--and then the whole disturbance stopped with a startling suddenness.

"The ghosts were thousand-foot spheres?" asked Tom, tiredly.

McGuire nodded.

He showed McGuire the device. It was a trigger-energy field generator, a development from the electrets of ancient days which stored a bound charge of electricity in a mixture of waxes so that it could not be short circuited and could only be released by the melting of the electret wax.

The trigger-energy field stored latent energy in the molecules of any substance at all. Stored, it remained only latent until released by special conditions, when it usually appeared as heat. There was a time when there were great hopes of using it for metal-casting.

Sufficient latent energy for the melting of a billet of metal could be stored in the metal, and the metal remained cold and could be handled in any way as long as the latent--trigger--energy remained bound.

But when it was released the metal melted from its own stored trigger-energy. Inability to control the temperature the melted metal would reach had made it impractical for casting and it had never had an actual industrial application.

"The point is," Tom told McGuire, "that borderline matter or stuff on the thin edge of being real can penetrate our matter without being disturbed. A plane flew through that globe over the polo field and nothing happened.

"But if the plane had been charged up with trigger-energy as its charged molecules encountered the uncharged molecules of ghost-matter they'd have to discharge. The latent energy would go to the ghost matter molecules.

"But since energy can't leave this cosmos the ghost-matter molecules would come into our space and become real--and since matter can only enter our cosmos if other matter leaves it the discharged molecules would go into the other cosmos.

"In other words I think a plane charged with trigger-energy flying into a globe would turn to ghost-matter and an exactly equal amount of ghost-matter would turn real, atom for atom and molecule for molecule. Here's the math."

McGuire checked carefully, and then began to pace up and down the laboratory. "It looks right," he said. He said uneasily, "If the Government got hold of this, there'd be atomic bombs charged with trigger-energy. Dropped on the Ghost Planet they'd become that other kind of matter and explode there."

"Undoubtedly," said Tom, "They could do the same to us. We're ghosts to them as they're ghosts to us."

"I've got to think," said McGuire abruptly.

"I," admitted Tom, "could do with some sleep."

He went out, stumbling a little, and had to ask a servant where he was supposed to sleep. On the way he saw Lan and Kit. They were walking together in the garden and Lan was in the middle of some enthusiastic explanation.

He was immaculate and the sunlight glinted on his hair. He made a graceful gesture and put his hand on Kit's shoulder. She looked up at him and smiled and then saw Tom.

"How's it going, Tom?" She called eagerly.

"Got some stuff designed," said Tom and yawned. "Your father's working on it now."

He went on wearily to the quarters assigned to him and to Lan together. He saw himself in a mirror. His clothes were wilted and rumpled, his hair hopelessly uncombed. His eyes were red from strain and altogether he was not a pretty sight. Compared to Lan--He surveyed himself for a moment.

"Oh, the heck with it!" he growled. He lay down and was instantly asleep.

There were announcements by the heads of the official Government astronomical research project, who managed to put into their discussions of the "comet"--they carefully said nothing significant--plugs for more money for their staffs and equipment. Essentially, these officials said that the "comet" was simply gas in so attenuated a form that if it were condensed to the thickness of air at sea level on Earth it would all go into a two-quart bottle.

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