Ray Cummings: Golden Age Space Opera Tales

GODS OF SPACE-4

FOR A MOMENT, AS HE sat there clutching the girl in the tangled vines of the swaying forest-top, Atwood was at a loss for words. Beyond doubt, English was this girl’s native language. Had some Earth-explorers landed here, bringing her when she was an infant? Earth-people who had died or been killed when the girl was too young to have learned anything? But her mature, fluent English belied that. In all those years, from infancy to maturity, alone here with what apparently were primitive natives of the planetoid, she would have forgotten her Earth-language.

She was staring at him blankly, her wonderment matching his own. “When did you come here?” he demanded. “Can’t you remember?”

“Oh, yes,” she smiled. “I was born—I appeared here in the forest—it was, how you would say, about two thousand of our days ago.”

With the day here about half that of Earth, she was naming something less than three Earth-years.

“You appeared here in the forest?” he prompted.

“Yes. From the sky I came. The Marlans saw me coming down. In my God-chariot.” She gestured. “Like yours there, it must have been. Only mine, they tell me, burst into flame and destroyed itself when it touched the ground.”

A miracle surely. But to Atwood, the miracle was that from a wrecked, flaming little spaceship, somehow she must have escaped alive. Had she come alone, or with others who, doubtless, in the wreck of the ship, had been cremated so that remains of them had never been found?

“And you can’t remember that coming?” Atwood demanded.

“Oh, yes. When human life came to me I was among the Marlans. I could not talk their language, then, but only the language of the Gods. This language of yours,” she added. “God-language of you and of me.”

Weird. She was so obviously sincerely truthful; she believed it. Naïve, child-like. Yet there was upon her, implanted by her belief, an aspect of power. A consciousness that she was a Goddess here. A radiance of her power, and a humility—a feeling of responsibility to One on High, who had sent her here as His servant.

And now she was staring at Atwood, another of God’s servants, like herself. A Man-God. She stared with a little color coming into her cheeks and her breath quickened.

“I see,” he murmured. Then abruptly on her forehead he noticed a scar—white scar-tissue over an area of an inch or so. He reached gently and shifted a lock of her hair. It was the scar of a ragged cut. Quite evidently a nasty wound. Three years ago?

“What is that?” he asked.

“Oh—that? There was my human blood running from it when they found me. My human birth—”

A crash when she landed. A brain concussion. And it had stricken her with amnesia—all her memory gone so that at that instant when she regained consciousness her life in effect was beginning again. Atwood understood it now.

“I see,” he nodded. “Well, Ah-li, my name is Roy.”

“Rohee,” she repeated.

“I came, landed just now, from Earth.”

“The Heaven of the Gods?” she murmured. “Oh, yes. Tell me. Surely I came from there, too. And you can remember it.”

“I sure can. Ah-li, listen. What you’ve got to understand now—” Abruptly he checked himself. It wouldn’t be easy to tell her. And then he had a queer thought. Was it right for him to destroy her faith in her own power to do good among the people of this world? Certainly he’d better find out what was here, first. And she probably would not believe him anyway.

“Tell me,” he amended. “The Marlans—your people here.”

Under his questions she told him with simple directness. The planetoid here was known as Marla. The Marlans were its only race. Not many of them now of recent generations—a few thousands, he gathered, most of whom lived in a settlement here in the forest only a short distance away.

“There were many, once,” she was saying. “But always the rising of the terrible Genes killed them off. We have learned now to subdue the genes with the glow of the Drall-stone light.”

The radiance of the Xarite. Her gesture indicated it. From here, on the forest top, the patch of its light-radiance showed plainly an Earth-mile or so away. Weird thing. So far as he could understand now, these genes seemed to be microscopic things of horror. At intervals, caused by the weather, or in rhythmic cycles of some mysterious process of nature, the genes abruptly grew from microscopic spores into ghastly monsters. But the radiance of the Xarite held them in check. So that of recent years the human Marlans had learned to use the Xarite against these monsters of the half-world. A barrage of the Xarite radiance was set up here to protect the Marlan settlement.

“I think I understand,” Atwood said at last. “Queerly enough, I came here to get some of that Xarite, as we call it on Earth. It is needed there.”

“In the God-realm they need—”

“Yes,” he hastily agreed. “Anyway—Oh, well, never mind that.”

His thoughts went back to the letter he had received from his father who had died suddenly. Young Atwood had been taking a post-graduate science-medical course in the great Anglo-American University in London. His father’s death had brought him hastily back. And the bank had given him the letter which his father had left for him.

“My dear Son:” the letter began. “I am preparing this data for you so that if anything should happen to me before my work is done, you will be able to carry on for me. I haven’t been able to tell you—it has had to remain a secret. I have been working with a Dr. Georg Johns, astronomer and physicist of Boston. As you know, all my life, Roy, has been devoted to the discovery of the cause of poliomelitus—”

The dread infantile paralysis. Dr. Atwood, ten years ago, had propounded the theory that it was a sub-microscopic spore so small that even the giant electro-microscopes could not detect it. So small that it was non-filterable—no filter had ever been devised that could trap it, despite the claims of having done that which other medical men had made.

Surely that was a negative result indeed. But, then, Dr. Atwood had discovered, in the ore of Xarium, which existed in very small quantities on Earth, a product which he had named Xarite. He had spent a considerable fortune doing it—the resolution of many tons of Xarium, refined down into an almost microscopic quantity of an electroidally active substance. And with it, for a year he worked miracles. As though by magic the emanations from his tiny Xarite tube, magnified and projected in the fashion of radiotherapy treatments, had cured victims of the dread disease.

But the triumph was short-lived. The Xarite tube exhausted itself. And on Earth, the scarcity of the ore of Xarium was such that to secure another grain of Xarite seemed practically an impossibility. And then the death of Dr. Atwood had come, and Roy had gotten the letter. His father had secretly been working with Dr. Johns. Together, with Dr. Johns’ huge electro-spectroscope, they had discovered the existence of Xarite on Planetoid 150. And had kept it secret. With the era of Interplanetary adventure now at hand, both the physicians feared that the Xarite treasure might fall into unscrupulous hands, be exploited for profit. They wanted to get it themselves and invent the radiotherapy projectors suitable for its use; and give it all to the suffering children of the world as their benefaction.

Dr. Atwood’s letter to his son told how, finally, Dr. Johns had secured a small spaceship and had gone, trying to get to Planetoid-150. Dr. Atwood, in delicate health, had not dared make the trip. He had been waiting; and had left this letter to Roy, with voluminous data, as a precaution. Roy had read the letter a hundred times. It was in the small spaceship which he had built with the money inherited from his father, and which had brought him here. He remembered its final, pleading words:

“You must carry on for me, Roy. Believe me, son, the lives of thousands of thousands of children will be in your hands. And the health of thousands upon thousands of others, who do not die, but live with twisted little bodies, tragic, pathetic, piteous monuments to the futility of man’s medical skill. You have seen them. They will be counting upon you.”

How could he fail them? And how could he fail his dead father? The thought of that was what had spurred him; what had brought him here with a grim determination to secure the Xarite and get back as soon as possible.

“You are very quiet,” the girl said timidly out of the silence.

“I was thinking,” he said. “Out there in our—our God-Heaven if that’s what you want to call it—well, it’s certainly very queer—”

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