World Beneath Ice. John Russell Fearn

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СКАЧАТЬ also drifting slowly towards it.

      With grim eyes she stared through the shields, satisfied at least that her plan, in essence, had worked. In a chain, unable to save themselves, the entire armada of alien spacecraft had followed her across the line and was streaming down towards that inconceivable furnace of boiling energies, utterly lost, unable to tear free, bearing with them the remains of an alien race. Her plan, to trick the invading fleet into hurling itself into the sun, had proven a success. Even as she watched, the vessels became remote against the screen-darkened cauldron, and finally they vanished.

      Quickly she switched in the auxiliary engines, which had the effect of doubling the power impetus. The Ultra jerked and strained, but it still did not check its sunward drift. Jumping out of the control-chair, the girl went over to the power plant and stared at the readings. The block of copper from which the energy was derived was shrinking at an alarming speed. Once it had entirely dissipated, there was nothing to stop the Ultra following the doomed alien craft to destruction.

      Turning, she raced out of the control room to one of the storage chambers, and brought forth two more copper blocks. Of necessity she had to switch off the current whilst she fixed the blocks into place using remote control apparatus, and in that time she lost half a million miles of distance.

      The heat in the control room increased to intolerable proportions, even though the heavily insulated shell. Motionless, she sat at the control board, peering through slit eyes at the terrifying vision outside. Playing tag with solar gravity was one trick she had never attempted before, and she was wondering if, in destroying the aliens, she had tempted fate too far.

      The power plant hummed and whined incessantly as she gave it the maximum load. The needles remained motionless on the dials. The vessel was still travelling diagonally to the sun, but neither pulling away from nor going towards it. There was also the danger that beneath the furious heat blasting through space the rocket-tubes themselves would fuse, and so stop the power plant operating.

      Half-blinded, the woman still manoeuvred the switches, giving a little power here, removing it there, edging the vessel mile by mile—twisting, wriggling, diving. The windows were no longer blazing shields. They seemed to be dancing with darkness, and the girl knew with growing horror that, masked though the solar glare was, the radiations were seeping through and damaging her sight.

      Weakly she got up and found a pair of dense goggles, which she slipped over her face. They blinded her completely, but she prayed that they would at least stop the radiations driving at her eyes.

      By touch alone she continued operating the switches, her body sensitive to every surge and movement of the machine she herself had designed; then at last to her intense relief she heard the sudden intake of power by the plant, which announced it was ceasing its laborious struggle against a superior gravity.

      It was a note that grew. Breathing hard, drenched in perspiration, the girl played her fingers up and down the control switches until at last the note in the power plant became steady. She wrenched the goggles from her eyes and looked at the gauges. They were clouded with darkness, and her eyes throbbed unmercifully.

      The needles were swinging free. The Ultra was slowly pulling away from that titanic maw in space, gaining speed with every second. With her eyes shut she sped onwards, until finally the Ultra had crossed the demarcation line and was back in free space.

      Slowly relaxing, the girl snapped the automatic pilot in position and staggered away from the control chair to lie down on the wall bed. For nearly an hour she lay flat, a hand over her eyes; then she reached out and snapped the switch which raised the screens from the ports.

      At first, even the brilliant sunshine seemed faded and weak and the shadows impenetrably dark; then with the passage of time the darkness began to lift and the intolerable pressure behind her eyes faded. The radiations, which had been more than sufficient to forever destroy the sight of a normal person, had with her super-normal physique only numbed the optic nerves. Now the numbness was dissipating, and with it came a clear return of sight and gathering bodily strength.

      Slowly she got up and gave a glance outside. She was far enough away from the sun now to be sure of safety. Infinitely distant, shining with the brilliance of a diamond, was Venus; and in the nearer foreground, erratic little Mercury.

      Turning to the shortwave radio, she switched it on, contacting Earth by direct transmission. It was several minutes, partly because of distance, and partly because of an increasingly severe static warp from the sun, before any clear answer came through from Earth; then there was another delay whilst Chris Wilson, Controller of the Dodd Space Line, was connected. His voice, speaking over nearly ninety million miles of space, sounded reedy and abysmal.

      “Then you’re still safe, Vi? That’s fine hearing....”

      “Yes, I’m safe,” she agreed, her voice heavy. “I very nearly wasn’t, though. I’m only three millions miles from the sun, and into it have gone all the alien invaders we needed to worry about. They actually flung themselves—but I admit I led them into it. That chapter is finished, Chris. The Earth is safe....”

      On faraway Earth it took nearly eight minutes for the radio message to be received, and Chris Wilson frowned as he listened to the girl’s words as they became increasingly distorted by sizzling static interference from the sun:

      “...The Earth is safe. However. I’m concerned that the....”

      Whatever the girl was going to say next was swamped by the solar static. All radio contact had been lost.

      * * * *

      Eighteen Months Later

      Morris Arnside, autocratic chief of the World Food Combine, could not quite believe the figures he was studying. In earlier times he could easily have thought that statisticians had erred in their calculations, or perhaps that there was some double-dealing going on somewhere—but in this latter part of the twenty-first century there was no room for doubt. Men racked their brains no more with calculations. Flawless machines computed everything to the last fraction, and they never made a mistake—for which reason the report was all the more mystifying.

      “Beyond me,” Arnside confessed to himself.

      For a moment or two he sat gazing out of the window.

      Light snow was falling, driven by flurries of bitter wind. It might have been mid-January instead of late May—but then it had been intensely cold for six months and more.

      Finally Arnside pressed a button on his desk and his chief assistant and deputy food controller entered.

      “Good morning Mr. Arnside,” he greeted—and Arnside glared at him with prominent grey eyes.

      “I’ll be hanged if it is! Sit down, Mathers. There’s something I want to talk over with you.”

      The assistant settled in the chair at the opposite side of the desk and waited. For Morris Arnside to be short-tempered was nothing new. He lived well, ate heartily, took little exercise, and was always volcanic in consequence. But for him to be anxious was definitely unusual.

      “I’ve just had the reports for the first three months of this year,” Arnside said at length. “They’re staggering! Crops and staple foods are nearly eighty percent below the normal yield. If things go on at this rate, there won’t be enough to feed the world’s population by the end of the year, and that means we’ll have to fall back on synthetic products, something which the majority of people hate.”

      “Yes, СКАЧАТЬ