Have you ever thought about what fiction is? Probably, such a question may seem surprising: and so everything is clear. Every person throughout his life has to repeatedly create the works he needs for specific purposes - statements, autobiographies, dictations - using not gypsum or clay, not musical notes, not paints, but just a word. At the same time, almost every person will be very surprised if he is told that he thereby created a work of fiction, which is very different from visual art, music and sculpture making. However, everyone understands that a student's essay or dictation is fundamentally different from novels, short stories, news that are created by professional writers. In the works of professionals there is the most important difference - excogitation. But, oddly enough, in a school literature course, you don’t realize the full power of fiction. So using our website in your free time discover fiction for yourself. Sand Doom by Murray Leinster (read full novel .txt) 📖
- Author: Murray Leinster
Book online «Sand Doom by Murray Leinster (read full novel .txt) 📖». Author Murray Leinster
The smoothness of the rock was [22] deceptive. The caterwheel car lurched and bumped and swayed and rocked. It rolled and dipped and wallowed. Nobody could have remained in a normal seat on such terrain, but Bordman felt hopelessly undignified riding what amounted to a hobbyhorse. Under the sunshade it was infuriatingly like a horse on a carousel. That there were three of them together made it look even more foolish. He stared about him, trying to take his mind from his own absurdity. His goggles made the light endurable, but he felt ashamed.
“Those side-fins,” said Chuka’s deep voice pleasantly, “the bottom ones, make things better for you. The shade overhead cuts off direct sunlight, and they cut off the reflected glare. It would blister your[23] skin even if the sun never touched you directly.”
Bordman did not answer. The caterwheel car went on. It came to a patch of sand—tawny sand, heavily mineralized. There was a dune here. Not a big one for Xosa II. It was no more than a hundred feet high. But they went up its leeward, steeply slanting side. All the planet seemed to tilt insanely as the caterwheels spun. They reached the dune’s crest, where it tended to curl over and break like a water-comber, and here the wheels struggled with sand precariously ready to fall, and Bordman had a sudden perception of the sands of Xosa II as the oceans that they really were. The dunes were waves which moved with infinite slowness, but the irresistible force of storm-seas. Nothing could resist them. Nothing!
They traveled over similar dunes for two miles. Then they began to climb the approaches to the mountains. And Bordman saw for the second time—the first had been through the ports of the landing-boat—where there was a notch in the mountain wall and sand had flowed out of it like a waterfall, making a beautifully symmetrical cone-shaped heap against the lower cliffs. There were many such falls. There was one place where there was a sand-cascade. Sand had poured over a series of rocky steps, piling up on each in turn to its very edge, and then spilling again to the next.
They went up a crazily slanting spur of stone, whose sides were too steep for sand to lodge on, and whose narrow crest had a bare thin coating of powder.
The landscape looked like a nightmare. As the car went on, wabbling and lurching and dipping on its way, the heights on either side made Bordman tend to dizziness. The coloring was impossible. The aridness, the desiccation, the lifelessness of everything about was somehow shocking. Bordman found himself straining his eyes for the merest, scrubbiest of bushes and for however stunted and isolated a wisp of grass.
The journey went on for an hour. Then there came a straining climb up a now-windswept ridge of eroded rock, and the attainment of its highest point. The ground car went onward for a hundred yards and stopped.
They had reached the top of the mountain range, and there was doubtlessly another range beyond. But they could not see it. Here, at the place to which they had climbed so effortfully, there were no more rocks. There was no valley. There was no descending slope. There was sand. This was one of the sand plateaus which were a unique feature of Xosa II. And Bordman knew, now, that the disputed explanation was the true one.
Winds, blowing over the mountains, carried sand as on other worlds they carried moisture and pollen and seeds and rain. Where two mountain ranges ran across the course of long-blowing winds, the winds [24] eddied above the valley between. They dropped sand into it. The equivalent of trade winds, Bordman considered, in time would fill a valley to the mountain tops, just as trade winds provide moisture in equal quantity on other worlds, and civilizations have been built upon it. But——
“Well?” said Bordman challengingly.
“This is the site of the landing grid,” said Redfeather.
“Where?”
“Here,” said the Indian dryly. “A few months ago there was a valley here. The landing grid had eighteen hundred feet of height built. There was to be four hundred feet more—the lighter top construction justifies my figure of eighty per cent completion. Then there was a storm.”
It was hot. Horribly, terribly hot, even here on a plateau at mountaintop height. Dr. Chuka looked at Bordman’s face and bent down in the vehicle. He turned a stopcock on one of the air tanks brought for Bordman’s necessity. Immediately Bordman felt cooler. His skin was dry, of course. The circulated air dried sweat as fast as it appeared. But he had the dazed, feverish feeling of a man in an artificial-fever box. He’d been fighting it for some time. Now the coolness of the expanded air was almost deliriously refreshing.
Dr. Chuka produced a canteen. Bordman drank thirstily. The water was slightly salted to replace salt lost in sweat.
“A storm, eh?” asked Bordman, after a time of contemplation of his inner sensations as well as the scene of disaster before him. There’d be some hundreds of millions of tons of sand in even a section of this plateau. It was unthinkable that it could be removed except by a long-time sweep of changed trade winds along the length of the valley. “But what has a storm to do——”
“It was a sandstorm,” said Redfeather coldly. “Probably there was a sunspot flare-up. We don’t know. But the pre-colonization survey spoke of sandstorms. The survey team even made estimates of sandfall in various places as so many inches per year. Here all storms drop sand instead of rain. But there must have been a sunspot flare because this storm blew for”—his voice went flat and deliberate because it was stating the unbelievable—“for two months. We did not see the sun in all that time. And we couldn’t work, naturally. The sand would flay a man’s skin off his body in minutes. So we waited it out.
“When it ended, there was this sand plateau where the survey had ordered the landing grid to be built. The grid was under it. It is under it. The top of eighteen hundred feet of steel is still buried two hundred feet down in the sand you see. Our unfabricated building-steel is piled ready for erection—under two thousand feet of sand. Without anything but stored power it is hardly practical”—Redfeather’s[25] tone was sardonic—“for us to try to dig it out. There are hundreds of millions of tons of stuff to be moved. If we could get the sand away, we could finish the grid. If we could finish the grid, we’d have power enough to get the sand away—in a few years, and if we could replace the machinery that wore out handling it. And if there wasn’t another sandstorm.”
He paused. Bordman took deep breaths of the cooler air. He could think more clearly.
“If you will accept photographs,” said Redfeather politely, “you can check that we actually did the work.”
Bordman saw the implications. The colony had been formed of Amerinds for the steel work and Africans for the labor the Amerinds were congenitally averse to—the handling of complex mining-machinery underground and the control of modern high-speed smelting operations. Both races could endure this climate and work in it—provided that they had cooled sleeping quarters. But they had to have power. Power not only to work with, but to live by. The air-cooling machinery that made sleep possible also condensed from the cooled air the minute trace of water vapor it contained and that they needed for drink. But without power they would thirst. Without the landing grid and the power it took from the ionosphere, they could not receive supplies from the rest of the universe. So they would starve.
And the Warlock, now in orbit somewhere overhead, was well within the planet’s gravitational field and could not use its Lawlor drive to escape with news of their predicament. In the normal course of events it would be years before a colony ship capable of landing or blasting out of a planetary gravitational field by rocket-power was dispatched to find out why there was no news from Xosa II. There was no such thing as interstellar signaling, of course. Ships themselves travel faster than any signal that could be sent, and distances were so great that mere communication took enormous lengths of time. A letter sent to Earth from the Rim even now took ten years to make the journey, and another ten for a reply. Even the much shorter distances involved in Xosa II’s predicament still ruled out all hope. The colony was strictly on its own.
Bordman said heavily:
“I’ll accept the photographs. I even accept the statement that the colony will die. I will prepare my report for the cache Aletha tells me you’re preparing. And I apologize for any affront I may have offered you.”
Dr. Chuka nodded approvingly. He regarded Bordman with benign warmth. Ralph Redfeather said cordially enough:
“That’s perfectly all right. No harm done.”
“And now,” said Bordman shortly, “[26] since I have authority to give any orders needed for my work, I want to survey the steps you’ve taken to carry out those parts of your instructions dealing with emergencies. I want to see right away what you’ve done to beat this state of things. I know they can’t be beaten, but I intend to leave a report on what you’ve tried!”
The Warlock swung in emptiness around the planet Xosa II. It was barely five thousand miles above the surface, so the mottled terrain of the dry world flowed swiftly and perpetually beneath it. It did not seem beneath, of course. It simply seemed out—away—removed from the ship. And in the ship’s hull there was artificial gravity, and light, and there were the humming sounds of fans which kept the air in motion and flowing through the air apparatus. Also there was food, and adequate water, and the temperature was admirably controlled. But nothing happened. Moreover, nothing could be expected to happen. There were eight men in the crew, and they were accustomed to space-voyages which lasted from one month to three. But they had traveled a good two months from their last port. They had exhausted the visireels, playing them over and over until they were intolerable. They had read and reread all the bookreels they could bear. On previous voyages they had played chess and similar games until it was completely predictable who would beat whom in every possible contest.
Now they viewed the future with bitterness. The ship could not land, because there was no landing grid in operation on the planet below them. They could not depart, because the Lawlor drive simply does not work within five diameters of an Earth-gravity planet. Space is warped only infinitesimally by so thin a field, but a Lawlor drive needs almost perfectly unstressed emptiness if it is to take hold. They did not have fuel enough to blast out the necessary thirty-odd thousand miles against gravity. The same consideration made their lifeboats useless. They could not escape by rocket-power and their Lawlor drives, also, were ineffective.
The crew of the Warlock was bored. The worst of the boredom was that it promised to last without limit. They had food and water and physical comfort, but they were exactly in the situation of men sentenced to prison for an unknown but enormous length of time. There was no escape. There could be no alleviation. The prospect invited frenzy by anticipation.
A fist fight broke out in the crew’s quarters within two hours after the Warlock had established its orbit—as a first reaction to their catastrophe. The skipper went through the ship and painstakingly confiscated every weapon. He locked them up. He, himself, already felt the nagging effect of jangling nerves. There was nothing to do. He didn’t know when[27] there would ever be anything to do. It was a condition to produce hysteria.
There was night. Outside and above the colony there were uncountable myriads of stars. They were not the stars of Earth, of course, but Bordman had never been on Earth. He was used to unfamiliar constellations. He stared out a port at the sky, and noted that there were no moons. He remembered, when he thought, that Xosa II had no moons. There was a rustling of paper behind him. Aletha Redfeather turned a page in a loose-leaf volume and painstakingly made a note. The wall behind her held many more such books. From them could be extracted the detailed history of every bit of work that had been done by the colony-preparation crews. Separate, tersely-phrased items could be assembled to make a record of individual men.
There had been incredible hardships, at first. There were heroic feats. There
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