The Incredible Planet

Book 0: AARN MUNRO

by John W. Campbell

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

The Incredible Planet is John W. Campbell's sequel to The Mightiest Machine and contains the following: "The Incredible Planet""The Interstellar Search""The Infinite Atom"

Release date: November 27, 2014

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 341

Sample

HOW AARN MUNRO, RUSS SPENCER and Don Carlisle came to visit Magya, a planet of another solar system in another galaxy existing in another space, has been recorded elsewhere* in complete detail. However, for a clearer understanding of their further adventures, this introductory summary of their experiences seems desirable.

It was Aarn Munro’s idea—the Spencer Research Laboratory No. 6. Aarn Munro was the director of the research department of the Spencer Rocket Co., and, incidentally, Russ Spencer’s best friend. Russ Spencer, rocketship designer, and grandson of the famous Russel Spencer who founded the Rocket company a century before, in 1979, was to see realized the dream of his father and his grandfather before him—a ship that could make the interplanetary journey without fear of meteors or thought of power shortage.

Aarn Munro’s father had helped Russel Spencer II, the present Russ Spencer’s father; had taken part in a colonizing experiment, and, with twenty others, the Munros had been marooned on Jupiter—marooned because Jupiter’s great gravity prevented the early rockets from leaving the planet after landing.

Aarn Munro was born there; he was twenty before he saw a ship land that could again leave the giant planet. Then the Jovian-born human, super-human in strength and speed from Jupiter’s harsh training ground, had studied at terrestrial universities.

His extraordinary brilliance of intellect had soon made itself manifest; and after completing his training the tremendously massive scientist had gone to work for Spencer Rocket Co. It was due in large part to his genius that Spencer Rocket had forged ahead so rapidly to their position of leadership in their field.

After a long period of research in an effort to improve existing methods of interplanetary travel, Munro, Spencer, and their close friend, Don Carlisle, head of the chemical-research department of Spencer Rocket, embarked on Aarn’s latest ship-laboratory, the No. 6. Aarn’s three greatest inventions were to receive their first tests—the anti-gravitor, the transpon beam, and the momentum-wave drive. The anti-gravitor made possible their “aggie” coils, storing the tremendous power their projected, conducting transpon beams stole from the mightiest machine that ever existed—the Sun, and the momentum wave made possible their drive.

Following the wave theory of the atom, Aarn had learned how to produce in actuality the waves the theory had predicted as being momentum waves—waves created artificially in space which actually were momentum. Out in space they tested their new ship—with their coils fully charged—and for the first time in the history of space travel they exceeded twenty miles a second, multiplying this old record by two thousand. At forty thousand miles a second—

At forty thousand miles a second their ship, officially the No. 6, familiarly the Sunbeam, was protected against damage by three layers of force—the magnetic atmosphere, a layer of magnetic field that would stop any conductor moving toward the ship; the anti-gravity field, which tended to repel any body not already weightless; and the momentum-wave apparatus, which likewise would hurl away anything that would tend to change the momentum of the ship.

At forty thousand miles a second the Sunbeam had the momentum of a major planet—concentrated. And at forty thousand miles a second she struck a planetoid. The magnetic atmosphere blasted the hundred-thousand-ton mass of metal to gas—but it still had a hundred-thousand-ton mass. The antigravitor repelled it, and called on the great aggie-coil storage bank for support; the momentum waves lashed at it, and called on the stored power of a sun for aid—

The fabric of space tore open under that terrible stress, and they were hurled out of four-dimensional space into the fifth dimensional interspace.

They awoke to find themselves in another four-dimensional space, a space of supergiant stars, near a sun of tremendous size. One hundred million times as brilliant as their own Sun, Anrel shone fiercely hot on them, at a distance of 1,000,000,000,000 miles.

They met the Tefflans and the Magyans, the warring races of the solar system they had entered, and they joined the latter.

The Magyans, they discovered, were human in every way, so completely human as to seem impossible, until they learned that theirs was not the first spaceship to be thrown through the spaces. On the continent of Mu, the Magyans had developed on Earth, warring with a strange race of horned beings—seemingly half human, half goat—the ancient Teff-hellani, who lived in the vast caverns under Mu. In a final effort to destroy them, the Emperor Tsoo-Ahs of Mu first established strong colonies all over Earth, built space ships equipped with powers capable of opening the caverns to the sea—and unleashed his forces. Water rushed in, and Mu sank forever.

But a single space ship of the Teff-hellani escaped, and destroyed all but one of the Magyan ships. The two enemy survivors, in a vicious running space battle, collided simultaneously with a planetoid and were thrown through into this strange space. Each ship, its passengers thinking themselves the sole survivors, landed on one of the eighty-seven planets circling about Anrel, the nucleus of what was to become a world population. On Magya, after a brief struggle the people reverted to barbarism. Ages passed—and a new civilization developed. Space was reconquered; and the Teff-hellani were again encountered, with knowledge and a science approximating their own. And for both races, legends which had never died became reality, and the war of instinctive hatred continued.

There followed a prolonged and devastating series of space battles which ended with the near destruction of Magya and the complete obliteration of Teff-El and all its inhabitants. In this interplanetary warfare, the Sunbeam played a decisive part.

At last, with order returning to Magya, Aarn Munro, Russ Spencer and Don Carlisle prepared to return to their own space. They bade farewell to Anto Rayl in the airlock of the Sunbeam.

“The apparatus is installed, Anto Rayl,” Aarn said, “the problem has been solved, and we have left apparatus with you. We must go now. Our home is on the other side of the wall, but we can both climb that wall now—so we of Earth will expect to see you of Magya soon. You will come?”

“Certainly we will come, Aarn Munro. We will want to see the Ancient World, where men such as those we have met are bred, and where the race was born. We will attempt to follow you through at the end of one thousand days.

“So—till then.” Anto Rayl waved, turned, and dived across space to the entrance port of a great gleaming metal wall, the wall of a mighty battleship. And the airlock closed behind him.

“WE READY?” ASKED AARN MUNRO looking at Carlisle and then at Spencer. The engineer nodded, half eagerly, half regretfully. The three turned toward the great metal bulk of the Magyan Battleship Tharoon Yal. A tiny figure in a microscopic port in the mighty wall waved a farewell.

“Here’s hoping,” exclaimed Aarn.

“Here’s hopping—from one space to another!” Spencer grinned a trifle shakily.

The giant spaceship was suddenly expanding, growing tremendously—they must be rushing toward it. Instinctively their hands tightened on their grips, then relaxed, for the ship was suddenly impossibly huge. It seemed tenuous, ghostly—ghostly motionless figures became visible inside, then vanished in cloudy smoke and a darkening pall. Space was black; the wonderful gleaming suns that shone blazing in the strange space of Magya and her sun Anrel, the stars that had made that space a never-darkened curtain, were gone. Slowly, slowly, pinpoints of misty light began to materialize, stars, gigantic, cloudy things, growing then shrinking—and the change was complete.

“We’re here!” Carlisle whispered. Munro turned the Sunbeam slowly around, revealing every angle of space. Only occasional stars were visible now. They had changed spaces.

“Where?” asked Aarn quizzically. “I don’t see old Sol anywhere.”

“Is this the right space?” Spencer demanded.

“Having eyes, you can see as much as I,” suggested Aarn.

“Not having your knowledge, I can’t,” replied Spencer. “Engineering’s mine. I built the apparatus you asked for, with the help of those Magyan engineers. It’s your job to know where we are.”

Aarn grinned goodnaturedly. The grin looked at home on his extremely broad face over his short thick body. “I’m worried too, so let’s not get snappy. But I think this is the right space. Remember: Magya is in a four-dimensional space separated from our own space by a fifth-dimensional inter-space where we can’t exist. We were first sent out of ours by the accident when we hit that asteroid, and our various forces started fighting the collision. That opened a path and kicked us out. Magya’s space was the easiest to enter, and due to Magya’s perfectly enormous sun and its gravitational attraction, we broke into their space at that point, as the Magyans had done before us.

“Now in getting back we’ve got to lift ourselves out of Magya’s space, and bore ourselves into another space. That’s harder to do—takes a lot of power. Also—there’s no way to choose one space or another to fall into, except by our mathematics based on those ancient Magyan Data Plates and the analysis of our own space as we knew it from data gained while on Earth. But unless there is another space with exactly the same characteristics as those of our own space, we had to go to our own. The chances that there are two identical spaces is pretty remote. I think we hit the right space—but not at the right point. Remember, those calculations we were working from were nearly 30,000 years old to the Magyans. How many Earth-years?” Aarn shrugged. “Who knows? But I believe we’re home—in the right space. And an indeterminable distance from Earth. We were lost in spaces. Now we’re lost in space. The inter-space is so vast it contains thousands of spaces—but just the same even one rather unimportant minor space like ours is several hundreds of millions of light years in diameter. I think we are still in the same galaxy.”

“Good Lord!” gasped Spencer. “We’re as bad off as ever.”

“How do we determine where we are?” asked Carlisle simultaneously.

“I’ve been thinking. Let’s assume for the time that we’re in the right galaxy. We’re in some galaxy, because we can see so many stars. You’ll notice there’s a Milky Way effect only on one side. That means we’re out toward the edge of the galaxy, since if we were deep in it the Milky Way would be a circle around us. We’re probably somewhere near where the proper motion of Anrel during the last 30,000 years would take you from where the sun was thirty thousand years ago. I think we’re still in the same galaxy. The problem is to find out where. That won’t be hard if we’re in the right galaxy, because there are still space-marks that will bring us near enough home so we can see old Sol and steer for him by direct astragation. Thanks to that interspace speed escape, we can travel faster than light, so that isn’t impossible to us.”

“What are your space-marks?” asked Carlisle.

“Something far enough away so that moving about in the galaxy doesn’t change them unrecognizably. Something far enough away so that lines drawn from them won’t change so greatly as to make us mistake one for another, and yet near enough so that they do vary with the galaxy.”

“The exterior galaxies,” said Carlisle, comprehending.

“Exactly. But we can’t do it ourselves.”

“Huh? We can’t? Then what good does it do us?”

“We’ll have to ask somebody in the neighborhood,” grinned Spencer. “We’ll drop in and ask them: ‘Do you know the way to the great nebula in Orion? Or Andromeda?’ And the local boys will of course be polite and tell us.”

“Something like that,” replied Aarn more seriously. “We will have to find a race near here, or somewhere in this galaxy for that matter, and tell them what we need. If they have telescopes, and photography, they’ll have pictures that we can compare with our plates here in the star catalogues and locate certain very outstanding nebulae. The Greater and Lesser Magellanic Clouds may help—though they are really part of this super-galaxy of ours, and very close. But they are distinctive.”

“What’re chances of finding a habitable planet?” asked Spencer.

“Oh, fine. There are nearly three hundred million stars in this part of the super-galaxy alone, and one in every hundred thousand or so has a system of planets, so they say. That means nearly three million planetary systems, and we want only one,” grinned Aarn.

“Or,” Spencer observed, “probabilities suggest approximately one star in one hundred thousand possesses a planetary system. Therefore, provided we investigate approximately one hundred thousand stellar systems, we’ll find a planet.”

“You might add,” said Aarn cheerfully, “that maybe one in ten thousand of those planets might be habitable, and one in ten thousand of those will be inhabited.”

“So things don’t look very promising,” Carlisle observed.

“Not as discouraging as they might seem. We might begin by ruling out stars that couldn’t have planets that would be habitable. About one star in four is a multiple, binary, trinary or something. We’ll rule those out. Then I’m ruling out giant reds, because I believe they’re too young. I think it might be a good idea to just look at more or less ordinary main-sequence stars. Class G, for instance.”

Bob Canning, the electronics engineer from Spencer’s laboratories on Earth, who had accompanied them on their trip, appeared cautiously in the doorway.

“Did we get home all right, Dr. Munro? I didn’t recognize the stars.”

“I hoped you had, Bob. I didn’t. I think we’re about ten thousand light years from home,” replied Aarn. “But we’re getting ready to move. Just keep an eye on the power board, and we’ll head for a near-by star and see what is to be seen.”

“WHAT’S THAT?” ASKED CARLISIE dubiously. Aarn, Spencer and Bob Canning were working hard at something they had set up in the already-crowded power room.

“I hope it’s a sort of twenty-mile diameter lens,” replied Aarn. “Not exactly a telescope—”

“I didn’t think so,” Carlisle commented. It resembled one of the power boards. Four small anti-gravity field storage coils, miniature replicas of the giant “aggie” coils used in storing the power of the ship, squatted at the base of the board. A regular “transpon” beam set-up with appropriate meters completed the lay-out.

“It was designed as a modification of the regular transpon beam,” explained Spencer. “Aarn worked it out on the math machines while you were sleeping. The regular transpon beam picks up power from any electric field. We’ve been using it mainly to tap power from the electric field of a sun, of course, but it will tap any electric field. Aarn modified it to tap the electro-magnetic field of light radiation. This is a sort of radio-funnel. It will reach out as a very rapidly spreading cone, and trap any electro-magnetic radiation, rectify it, and bring in half the field energy. Aarn says he’s going to learn a lot with it.”

“Hmmm—pick up light like a radio wave. Why?”

Aarn answered him. “I can pretty well focus it, and thereby pick up light from one star and its attendant star field. That way I can examine a star’s radiation when it’s a light year or more distant, and do it accurately. There are certain—modifications in the light that may be telling.”

“I suppose,” grumbled Carlisle, “it would be ‘telling’ if you explained what those modifications will be?”

“It would,” agreed Aarn, and fell to work again. “However, having visited fifteen stars fruitlessly in the past five days, I’m getting sick of chasing my tail all over space. This may help.”

Six hours later they had finished the set-up, and Aarn started it. They were hanging in space, the artificial gravity of the ship alone supplying weight. The power room was crowded by the great humped backs of the anti-gravity coils which would iron out the space-curvature that was gravity when they maneuvered near a planet—the momentum-wave apparatus that set up the incredible oscillations in sub-space that generated momentum in them, and reacted on all space—the overflow of aggie coils clamped wherever the Magyans had found space while they helped outfit the Sunbeam for power in battle—all hiding the mathematics machines that somehow found lodgement here. The new power board was set in the last remaining free space.

Swiftly Aarn adjusted his circuits, then threw a single relay. A network of glowing transpon beams exploded into being, and a deep reverberation thundered in the power room as the great main transpon apparatus, modified by the new device, took up its work. Out into space a great invisible flaring cone spread like a widening ripple. The meters on the new board began to register readings, some instantly, others at a gradually increasing pace. At length the limiting range of the cone was reached, and the collecting field maintained a steady value.

Aarn read off the figures rapidly, Spencer taking them down. Five minutes later the Sunbeam was in the strange ghostly gloom of its high-speed motion. Half way between the inter-space fifth dimension where fourth-dimensional distance meant nothing, half way in normal space that they might keep in touch with their surroundings, the Sunbeam raced toward the star they were studying. They stopped after a few minutes, and again Aarn took readings.

In this way, in an hour, he had all the data he wanted concerning this particular star. In half an hour he had calculated the results, and definitely knew that there were no planets circling that sun.

The next star was thrown out by the first reading. It was a binary. Another and another followed.

Two days—and Aarn shouted with sudden triumph. The star they were investigating had planets—or at least one planet! The incredible had happened. They had found a planet in mere days of search and trial!

“It looks,” said Spencer as they raced across space toward the distant sun, “as though your pessimism was unwarranted.”

“True,” admitted Aarn, “but I wasn’t raising any false hopes.”

“What kind of a star is it?” asked Carlisle.

“Frankly, I don’t know. It seemed disturbed, rather than variable, somewhat irregular, but that may simply mean that it has a very close planetary satellite that glows red-hot in the radiation of the primary, and acts as a secondary radiator. It seems to be a type F O, and not on the main sequence. Probably comparable to Capella.”

Crossing in each second a gulf that took light months to cover, the Sunbeam sped on toward the strange sun. Despite their incalculable speed, the flight took more than two days. On the second day they watched the ghostly image of the sun waxing from a distorted pinpoint to a blurred disc, and they slowed to a safer pace at the outer edge of its gravitational field of influence, dropping more and more into normal space.

They stopped, and from a distance observed the planetary system more carefully. They saw the strange little planet that was the secondary radiator of this new sun, a body scarcely 2000 miles in diameter, circling in an orbit less than ten million miles from the blazing blue-white sun they were to know as Tarns. Heated by the terrific flood of energy, it acted as a varying secondary radiator that had produced the effects that Aarn had observed.

There were eleven planets in all. Nine of them revolved in fairly normal orbits. The sixth, a giant nearly a quarter of a million miles in diameter, caught their attention immediately.

“It’s a monster,” said Aarn thoughtfully, checking the gravitational field analysers. “And what an orbit! Gravitational field at surface: 2.1. But it has a gravitational control that extends nearly a billion miles. Eight satellites—and that one is larger than Uranus! I’ll bet that was a real planet, captured by this big fellow. And look at that outermost satellite there! Five thousand miles in diameter—bigger than Mars—and it isn’t in an orbit about that big planet at all! It’s on a free orbit! Something has happened here—and I’ll bet I know what! A thing impossibly rare—”

Aarn’s comments trailed into silence as he set new controls on his strange probes of gravitational fields, and momentum-wave analysers, investigating that mis-oriented planet, now revolving about the giant world. Rapidly he read the instruments.

“It’s 134° out of the plane of the other planets! A wanderer that’s been captured. Within the last century, too, I’ll be bound. Look—it’s 57,000 miles in diameter; its orbit is an extreme elipse, retreating to nearly 10,000,000,000 miles at its greatest distance out, and coming within 50,000,000 on the inward trip! That planet was free, and wandered into this system by accident. That giant there dragged at it so hard with his heavy gravitational field that it was caught! It yanked the whole system of moons way out of position, even pulling that giant planet out of its orbit, and knocking loose its outermost satellite—but the planet stopped its wandering! It probably came in with a parabolic orbit, and the attraction was great enough to slow it to an eliptical orbit. That’s unique in the galaxy, I’m willing to bet.

“We’re heading for that planet!”

The Sunbeam darted forward, the ghostly image of the strange planet growing rapidly. At a distance of twenty million miles Aarn halted, and investigated it by telescope. The image was thrown on the screen by the televisor device, clear and sharp.

“No hope of life there,” Aarn commented. “It hasn’t thawed out yet—or—no it hasn’t. I thought it might be coming in on another trip from space on that huge orbit. See the ice-caps—and those seas! They’re ice too, I’d swear. The whole polar region halfway to the equator is frozen. A weird slant to the axis, too. Nearly seventy degrees. Let’s land—shall we?”

“Naturally,” replied Spencer. “But you’ll have to do all the investigating.” He pointed to the gravitometer. The surface gravity of the planet was 2.6.

Aarn grinned. “So I will. Weaklings—weaklings, these Terrestrians. And to think my own father and mother must have been such people!” Jovian-born Aarn Munro held out an arm, an arm thicker and bulkier than Spencer’s muscular thigh. The arm was attached to a shoulder that was so humped and layered with great muscles that the short powerful neck was almost buried in it, his head seeming to peep out of a shell, like some strange human tortoise. He clenched his fist and flexed his arm, watching the smooth flow of great lumps and cords of muscle. “I’m getting soft—living on a light planet, like Earth or Magya.”

The Sunbeam darted forward again, under her momentum drive. Waves even Aarn Munro scarcely understood, waves in the sub-space, generated by the machines he had invented, imparted momentum to the ship by reaction on the structure of the universe, and drove the Sunbeam forward at terrific speed. New transpon beams appeared automatically as the gravitational field of the planet began to affect the ship. They slowed at a hundred miles, and hung motionless. Automatically the gravitational field of the planet was neutralized, and the interior artificial gravity of the ship maintained at Earth-normal.

And then—Aarn caught a glimpse of the great mystery of Myrya. He clutched Spencer’s arm in a grip that made the Terrestrian yell with pain. “Spence—Spence—ruins!”

They glistened under the blue-white sun, magnificent, majestic. Gleaming metal overlaid with a thin layer of ash. Great broad avenues, choked with the debris of slowly disintegrating ruins. Tremendous buildings, awesome, beautiful—with their towering crowns crushed and crumbling. A giant city that spread for a mile up the side of a great mountain, and for three miles across the valley below.

“People!” gasped Carlisle.

“How—how old is that city?” asked Spencer slowly.

“Millions on millions of years old!” Aarn moved suddenly, and the ship shot precipitately down toward that ancient city.

Slowly they sank the last mile, and landed gently in the half-choked great square of the ancient city. About them loomed huge metal towers, their walls rising sheerly skyward, decorated with powerful, clear-chiseled frescos. The streets were wide, paved with a thick layer of crumbling black stuff that moved away uneasily as the field of the Sunbeam’s forces touched it. The ship came to rest nearly a foot deep in the impalpably fine dust.

Aarn stood up and looked out of the port before him. “How long, oh Lord, how long? It must have been here all the time this planet wandered cold and lifeless. Millions of years? Billions! What race lived here, fought and built this city, then died as the planet began its age-long wanderings?” He paused, frowning thoughtfully. “One thing I can’t understand is the layer of dust. It’s black and dirty looking. The pavement seems to be part of it. Now, what did that? There was evidently no weathering, so where did all the dust come from?”

Carlisle had been busy in a practical way. “The oxygen content is about 4%, the air pressure about 100 pounds per square inch.”

“That’s fine—just about right,” nodded Aarn. “Any poisons?”

“No simple ones, and I doubt that there would be complex ones. I’ve got one of our few remaining mice in it, and he’s still going strong. Nearly passed out at first, though.”

“Umm-hmm. Pressure. That won’t bother me—it’s just about the same as Jupiter’s atmosphere. I’m going out right now.”

Rapidly Aarn prepared himself. He put on a dust mask, and carried a tiny thing he had developed only recently, a hand elevator, he called it. It was a miniature momentum drive apparatus with aggie coil storage of power. Gripped in one hand, operated by thumb pressure, it would lift him about readily. He could not really fly on it, but he could move straight up.

“I’m going too,” announced Spencer suddenly. “I can stand it for a while, I guess.”

Aarn looked at him thoughtfully. “Pretty heavy labor.”

“I can make it for half an hour, anyway.”

In five minutes they were ready. Carlisle had decided to remain in the Sunbeam. He had tried Jupiter once, and once was enough. Cautiously they let the new atmosphere enter the lock, getting used to the pressure.

“Feels good,” grinned Aarn as the pressure reached the half-way point. His normally deep voice sounded heavy and booming. There was a chill in the entering air, and the fresh, clean odor of new-growing plants. “Those green things we saw must have been new plants coming up,” commented Aarn, inhaling deeply. “Smells good after a few days in the old tub.”

But they were tense, and tensely Aarn stepped out. It was a two-foot jump to the apparent surface, and dubious as to the solidity of it, Aarn lowered himself on the hand-elevator. There was a queer wrenching sensation as they passed through the neutral zone, where the gravity of the planet was neutralized by the artificial gravity of the Sunbeam. Then they were down, sinking ankle-deep into the thick, drifted dust. Aarn stretched luxuriously, staring sympathetically at Spencer, who was struggling erect with gruelling labor. Minutes passed while the smaller man strove to adjust his Earth-trained muscles to a gravity that gave him a weight of approximately four hundred and fifty pounds.

At last they started toward the nearest building, Aarn moving lightly, and with complete ease. His feet seemed to adopt the swift, jerky motion of a trotting dog. Spencer found that with a little more effort his feet could be lifted free of the dust, and that a fast walk was easier than a sliding shuffle.

Rapidly they approached the nearest of the great buildings and peered within the great arch. It was cold in there, bitterly cold, and a stream of freezing air drifted slowly out. It condensed in the sunlight into a fleecy white mist. Aarn glanced upward. The air was clear and cloudless, the great sun glaring bright orange far above, the sky a deep, deep blue with a tinge of green. There was no hint of dust or mist in the air, the only cloudiness visible pouring from the surrounding buildings.

“They haven’t thawed out yet!” said Aarn in a low voice. “This world can’t have been here for more than a few years!”

“Years—would it take years to thaw these out?”

“More. Years would have been needed to warm up the tremendous masses of air that must have lain frozen solid. Then the ultra-frozen rocks—and in all probability these buildings had some sort of insulation. Those giant buildings—well, sky-scraper type buildings of metal represent a high civilization—and metal buildings just have to have heat insulation.”

“I agree with everything but your interpretation of these sky-scrapers. They aren’t more than fifty stories tall, and while that’s a goodly building, New York has lots bigger.”

“Remember, this place has lots greater gravity. Half the height here means more than twice the height on Earth. The buildings weigh more.”

Aarn passed through the tremendous arch. A great hall, lofty and dim, greeted him. Huge columns, fluted and rounded gracefully, stretche