No Dawn and No Horizon

by John Glasby, A.J. Merak

Genres: Occult & Supernatural; Horror; Gothic; Science Fiction

Synopsis

Cloth. Very Good. First American Edition. 12mo - over 6¾" - 7¾" tall. First U.S. edition. A fine copy in a nice dj with some tiny tears at the edges.

Release date: January 1, 1968

Publisher: Arcadia House

Print pages: 320

Sample

Directive from the office of the Secretary for Interstellar Exploration:

Urgent and Top Secret. Destroy after reading.

All work on the interstellar drive must be given top priority. It is essential that the Alpha I should be constructed as soon as possible and on Pluto, where everything may be under the immediate supervision of the commander-in-chief of the military base.

All members of the crew are to be thoroughly trained for the flight. It is impossible to predict completely what the effect will be on the human frame, nor how the mind will stand up to the stresses of the journey. Nothing like this has been attempted before and it does not even compare with the first landing on the moon.

It is therefore essential that this training shall be carried out strictly according to the program laid down by the Department of Advanced Space Medicine.

Every person chosen as a potential member of the crew of the Alpha I must be sworn to absolute secrecy until they arrive on Pluto. Information received indicates that the Eastern Federation of States are already working feverishly on the problem of an interstellar drive, although we do not know how far they have progressed. It is possible that they are slightly ahead of us, which only makes the urgency all the greater.

Most of the crew are preparing to make their way to the moon, where they will undergo a series of adaptation tests under conditions of high vacuum and low gravity.

Martin C. Wilder                Head of Operations.7-15-2008

Stubbornly, Leigh Merril fought against the sensation of panic which threatened to boil up inside him.

For close to a week it had been building up; longer even than that, if he counted the time he had spent on the firing range at Woomera. He looked up through the glass panel set in the ceiling of the small observatory, staring out through the atmosphere of earth and the nothingness of deep space, up to the shining face of the moon.

The moon seemed so near and so easy. A step comparatively, now that it had been conquered. Up there, close to the edge of the Mare Imbrium, would be the cluster of rounded, iridescent bubbles which marked the position of the spaceport with its launching ramps, living quarters, atomic power units, waste disposal plants and everything which went up to make a man comfortable on a world which was totally alien to him, where he had to exist inside a pressurized dome or a space suit, because outside, on the surface itself, there was the hard cosmic radiation and the high vacuum of space itself.

“It still beats me how they picked on you to be one of the crew of the Alpha,” said Bailey, the station astronomer. He sat easily in the small chair which swung beneath the satiny, shining metal of the telescope and puffed contentedly on his pipe. “You’d reckon they would have chosen somebody who’d been up in space before. There must have been plenty of linguists and semantics experts without having to pick on you.”

“That’s what I’ve been telling myself all along, ever since I left London. Why me? It still doesn’t make any kind of sense as far as I can see.”

He turned to face the other and told himself: Didn’t the other feel it, too? Didn’t this make some impression on him?

Bailey’s face was thin and seemed to have grown a trifle thinner in the short time that Merril had known him. His figure was slight, but the look in his brown eyes was intense and as bright as it had ever been, and right now there was a trapped look in the way his fingers curled stubbornly around the stem of his pipe.

With an effort, Merril forced his gaze away from the other and looked up at the enigmatic shape of the moon again. He would certainly have resented the intrusion of anyone else on his own private feeling of uneasiness. He wanted no other man’s eyes on the whiteness of his knuckles where he gripped the sides of his chair.

This place is just a tiny city, he told himself angrily, a place enclosed by a vast dome, similar to those of the buildings on the moon. But in spite of himself, he wasn’t fooled. There were a couple of inches of plate steel near his right elbow and beyond that—air, going out for close on a thousand miles before it stopped altogether. But on the moon, there wouldn’t even be that. Outside the domes on the moon, there was nothing but the empty darkness which lasted for close to fourteen days with a sun-glaring day of the same length.

From where he sat, looking up, the face of the moon was unchanged from the days when Neanderthal man had roamed the earth. But now, a fairly-good-sized telescope such as that in front of him would reveal the presence of those little shining dots that sparkled whenever the sunlight picked its way over the Mare Imbrium and touched the peaks in the craters that ran alongside it. You had to know where to look, of course, but it wasn’t too difficult to locate them and it wasn’t too hard to see the individual domes which represented the huge buildings built partly above, and partly below, the surface of the moon, erected by man in his headlong plunge outwards to the stars.

Only we haven’t gotten there yet, he thought solemnly, and it’s possible that we never will. Why they were going to all this trouble to get together a trained crew to man a rocket which hadn’t even been built yet and whose propulsion unit was still a mathematical concept in the minds of a few of the best scientists of the Western Federation was beyond him. It seemed far too much like putting the cart before the horse.

He returned to the astronomer. “Even now, after all these years, it seems strange to a man like myself that there should be men and women up there on the moon. Not only there, but on most of the other planets and satellites also. It makes me wonder why they do it.”

The other knocked out his pipe on his heel and grinned. “There’s a reason, I suppose,” he said quietly. “Maybe it’s the same reason why I sit behind this telescope almost all of my life, looking at things I’ll never see from close quarters, making all sorts of wild theories, testing them and seeing which explain the facts and which don’t.”

“And what’s that?”

“Curiosity,” said the other slowly. “There must be millions of worlds out there in the remote depths of space which could sustain life as we know it. Maybe some are inhabited, maybe not. But I think we ought to find out for two important reasons.”

Merril caught the other’s eye and watched him quizzically for a long moment.

Bailey nodded slowly, busied himself momentarily at the controls of the giant telescope, then said, “Firstly, there’s the inherent need for new planets which are compatible with our way of life and the environment we have here on earth; and secondly, if any of these other worlds are inhabited, the sooner we know about it, the better.”

“That sounds strange, coming from an astronomer like yourself.”

“Maybe so. But a lot of things have changed, even in my lifetime. The past few years have seen a tremendous upsurge in planetary exploration. Already, men are living up there on the moon, on Mars, Venus, Mercury’s Twilight Zone and even on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Now they’ve even started a military base on Pluto. But I reckon that so far, that’s their limit.

“A nuisance, isn’t it? But there’s an awful gulf of light-years lying between us and the nearest star. I guess that’s where you and the others come in. I’d sure like to be going with you, just to see what it’s like out there. The furthest I’ve been is Titan. God, but that was something.”

Merril started to shrug, then restrained himself. The gesture seemed too nonchalant at a time like this.

“Our first concern is to get a drive which will take us there,” he said, picking his words carefully. “As far as I know, they haven’t even done that yet. Maybe they’ve begun the building of the ship, but that won’t take us off the planet because, with conventional drives, it would take us the best part of thirty years to reach Centauri. And then what? No man alive would be able to set out and reach any of the other stars.”

Bailey busied himself for a while climbing onto the swaying bucket seat suspended beneath the instrument so that he could examine the telescope. His main interest appeared to be in the instruments, but he said nothing, and presently he jumped down onto the floor and crossed over to Merril.

“You’ll be blasting off soon,” he said. “I understand you’ll meet up with Doctor Anderson and the other two members of the crew on the moon-rocket. The captain of the Alpha I, Randall Clifton, is already on Pluto. You’ll be meeting up with him there.”

There was silence for a tense moment, and Merril could feel his heart beginning to bump inside his chest. He threw another swift-glance into the sky through the transparent portion of the dome, and shivered. Such a long and weary way to go, he thought, through all that emptiness—and who knew what lay at the end of it all?

In the huge control block at the Woomera launching site there is a green blip hovering almost motionless on the circular radar screen. The control officer sits in front of it, his eyes blinking tiredly after several hours of watching.

“Nearly an hour since they went on board,” he says.

The officer in front of the second tube turns his head and rubs the back of his neck slowly, grimacing.

“Think they’ve had any trouble on board?”

“I’ve checked on the radio channel. Seems they’re taking their time with these new guys. Some of them haven’t been spaceways before.”

There is a long pause. In front of the two men, the twin radar screens glow with a pale, translucent light that lights the objects in the room with a ghastly glow.

Ten minutes pass and the hands of the electric clock on the bare wall move slowly around the circular face. Then there is a faint sound in the distance, barely heard through the six-inch-thick concrete and steel walls of the block.

The ground trembles a little. Something shakes with a faint sound, scarcely heard, rattling in the uneasy silence. There is a slight movement on the nearer of the two screens. The two men peer at it intently.

The green blip which represents the rocket itself gets free of the bottom of the screen and begins to climb slowly over the palely glowing surface….

It was happening too quickly for Merril. None of this could possibly be so. He simply couldn’t be leaving earth like this and climbing up into the void on the end of a slim pencil of electronic fire. His mind groped footlessly for something concrete on which he could fix it, something he could anchor onto, while somewhere beneath him, atomic motors strained and shuddered, splashing a backlash of ionic fire into the concrete pit.

Merril was alone in the small cabin, separated from any of the others, and they, in turn, were all isolated. Why this had been done he wasn’t sure. So far, he had been unable to take everything in. Events were nebulous blurs which faded into one another in a manner which was both annoying and confusing. It was as though all sensation had been blurred and numbed, as though nothing that was going on about him was real any more. He told himself that within a few brief seconds he would be several hundred miles from the surface of the earth and speeding away at an ever-increasing rate, but it didn’t register.

He thought freezingly: Why did they insist on us having our space suits handy and the spare oxygen cylinders lying there in the center of the small cabin? Were they anticipating that something would go wrong on this particular flight—or was this purely a routine measure which was taken on every trip to the moon?

Lights flashed and the thunder inside his head grew to enormous proportion until it seemed as though his head must surely burst at the seams. There was the sudden push backwards against the plastic webbing of his seat as they began to climb.

Lying in his padded seat, Merril felt the long seconds ticking away into a dark, unforeseeable future. Little disconnected thoughts began to link up inside his brain, drifting lazily along channels of his mind which seemed rusty and long unused.

There was the dread knowledge that somewhere far beneath him, in the sleek body of the ship, almost directly below his tensed body, would be the tremendous atomic engines, hidden behind their leaden protective shields. He could not even guess what force they used when they transformed water into a stream of high-velocity ions.

Carefully, very carefully, he rested the back of his head on the specially shaped rest. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw more lights flashing on the tiny panel a little way in front of him, inclined so that it seemed to be on a level with his head.

Something huge and invisible slammed him back in the seat, pressing his body against the yielding plastic, until it seemed he could no longer breathe and his chest was collapsing swiftly inside him. No longer was the tremendous vessel a leashed, inanimate thing standing on the desert sands, a vast fabrication of metal strips and complicated atoms and electronic machinery which he couldn’t begin to understand.

Instead, it was a shuddering, straining, roaring creature with a thunderous voice and a mind and an individuality all its own. For a single instant, it hung suspended above the fused patch of sand and concrete which had been the launching apron on the end of a thin pencil of pure ionic flame, blue-white and eye-searing.

Sudden vertigo wrenched Merril’s body. An agony of pain sat briefly on his chest, but in spite of it and the terrible sensation of suffocation, that thrust down at the back of his throat, he felt clear and light-headed. His stomach and chest seemed to be bruised all over, and the red haze of incipient blackout floated in front of his eyes as he lay there gulping down air into his aching lungs in great, racking gasps.

A bodiless voice said loudly and metallically, “We are almost at the point of null acceleration. Prepare for free fall conditions.”

Free fall! Involuntarily, Merril braced himself and wondered how the other members of the Astra’s crew were taking it. It seemed impossible that they could all be as green as he was when it came to space travel.

There was a sudden silence. He hung onto the sides of the inclined seat as the acceleration ceased, the motors shut off and everything stopped suddenly. Silence lived in t. . .