The Metal Moon, Everett C. Smith and Roman Frederick Starzl [best way to read e books .TXT] 📗

through a slit, suddenly misted over on the outside, became opaque with a milky glaze of frost. This told the prisoners that their captors were "bleeding" air into the hold, which did double duty as an airlock. They heard vague clanging of metal on metal, transmitted to them through the hull of their ship. Then a sharp blade scraped away the ice from one of the ports, and a face peered in.

They looked at one another for a few moments, these cousins of the human race, separated by 200,000 years of time and impassable meteor-strewn wastes of space. The man at the port turned and beckoned to others, who also surveyed the prisoners.

Then the first one, evidently the chief of this massive space vessel, motioned to the prisoners, to open their manports.

"Keep together now!" Sine admonished his companions. "If they act unfriendly we'll let them have the ray. Then you two slip back into your own ship while I grab this vacuum suit out of the lock. With that on I can carve a way out, and disable them, too."

"It would be a shame!" Kass said as he whirled the handwheel of the inner manport, "but——"

The valve opened, and a few minutes later the three Earthmen stepped out to confront the Jovians.

There were half a dozen of them, standing firmly, by virtue of the artificial gravity, somehow produced. They were not far different from Earthmen, except that they were shorter, being barely five feet tall. Their tremendous muscles told of the race's adaptation to the superior gravity of Jupiter. Their feet, encased in slippers of some burnished material, were unusually large.

They were dressed in an armor of overlapping scales that covered every part of their bodies, even their fingers. But their heads, instead of being armored, were protected by a thin, transparent membrane that followed the shape of their features closely. The Earthmen recognized the protective covering used before the comet swarm as a defense against the then used heat ray. So the Jovians had developed no new weapon! Sine thought comfortably of his little disintegrator tube. He could make those armored men vanish like puffs of smoke.

But they made no hostile move, and Sine had leisure to notice their faces. If their bodies were too heavily muscled for grace, their heads atoned for that defect. These were truly Jovian, god-like, combining intense virility, dominance, courage. But there was also about them an expression of intolerance, of ruthlessness, of selfishness. Here were men, it could be seen, who would not be too scrupulous in attaining their ends. But men, too, who could be charming companions.

Their leader, the man who had first looked into the port, now detached himself from the group and came forward, his hand outstretched in the old Earth gesture of friendliness. His appearance had all the characteristics of his companions, but in a more striking degree. He was taller than they, more than five feet, and his broad shoulders had the confident bearing of accustomed command. He spoke, in a pleasant, vibrant baritone:

"Welcome, men of Earth. Sorry for our little misunderstanding."

Sine gripped his hand, returned the muscular grip.

"It took us a little while to know what you were. And I may add that I'm pleasantly surprised that we can still understand each other."

The Jovian shrugged his shoulder:

"Canned speech. No chance for a language to evolve when it's mechanically recorded. But come up to my cabin. It's chilly here, and your manner of dress——"

"That has changed!" Sine smiled. "Lents and Kass, will you go ahead?"

CHAPTER II The Pleasure Bubble

After the first suspicions had worn off, the Earthmen felt that they had been singularly fortunate. To be captured by these intelligent beings had been about the most convenient thing that could happen to them. They might have found the human race entirely wiped out on the gloomy planet. Or they might have been struck by one of the still inconveniently numerous meteorites which would mean, at the very least, being marooned. Had they possessed the ability to look into the future they would not have rested quite so complacently in the hammocks assigned to them in the great patrol ship.

The big Jovian, they learned, was chief of the ship. He told them his name was Musters, and introduced his officers. They were an intelligent, efficient lot. From them the Earthmen learned something of the social organization of the human race as it survived on Jupiter.

"The race followed its natural evolution," intelligent and handsome young Lieutenant Reko explained to Sine as they leaned against a railing and gazed out of an unshuttered port at the somber splendors of Jupiter as it gradually swelled and covered the firmament.

"Like mated to like, and so the superior individuals became more superior, and the inferior ones more inferior. This resulted eventually in two races. Naturally we took steps to properly segregate the inferior race. Our efficiency experts have found ways to put them to work—to make them quite useful in fact. Of course we could not trust them with our weapons, our ships, our really important central power plants——"

What were these inferior—these so-called Mugs—what were they like? Reko arched aristocratic eyebrows. Why, they were often quite human in their appearance—though occupational diseases, and so forth——. Sine gained the impression that they were kept out of the way in order not to disturb the esthetic comfort of the superior race.

"There was a time when we had trouble with them," Lieutenant Reko said. "There were trouble makers among them. They attacked the homes of the First race, seized power control stations. Not fifty years ago there was an insurrection. But the Mugs lost. Thousands upon thousands of them were driven into the swamps and caves on the edge of the Tenebrian Sea. They were never seen again, although we searched for them with our heat rays. Perished, no doubt."

None were left now, Reko said, except those actually and fully occupied at certain labors for which they were found efficient. They were allowed to reproduce in sufficient numbers to fill the requirements—no more.

"What a rotten fate!" Sine exclaimed.

"They are quite a terrible people," Reko pointed out, closing a distasteful subject.

A few sleep periods later Musters called his terrestrial guests to his cabin.

"I have a pleasant surprise for you," he told them in his musical baritone. "Our planetary conference would wish for me to give you a most pleasant impression of Jupiter, so that interplanetary relations may be resumed under the best possible conditions. For that reason I am going to land you on a satellite that I'll wager will be a revelation to you. It is the goal and object of every one of our people. But it is costly and only a small portion of our population can be accommodated at a time. You may judge the kind of place it is by the name the public has given it: 'The Pleasure Bubble.' Come to the astrogator's cabin now; I'll show it to you."

They followed Musters to a compartment in the rounded bow of the great ship, stared out of a quartz port between opened shutters.

They saw Jupiter, immense, formidable, a mass of turbulent vapors, a depressingly drab scene. Suddenly Lents exclaimed, incredulous;

"Look! A satellite! There is no satellite this close to Jupiter! It's mathematically impossible!"

Musters laughed jovially. "It's there, isn't it? That's Jupiter's tenth satellite—The Bubble. It is less than 100,000 miles from the vapor envelope and has to travel so fast that its period is less than 8 hours. It was built by the First Race and set on its orbit so that our people would have a place where they could enjoy the sun, which is never seen from Jupiter's surface."

"It is a bubble!" Kass remarked, after an absorbed study of the satellite. It was racing just beneath them, at a dizzy speed, like a bubble blown before the wind. The ship followed the satellite, drawing closer, so that it grew in size and beauty.

Lents was mentally calculating the rupturing pressure exerted by the atmospheric pressure inside the crystalline ball. He stopped aghast at the thought of the tremendous strain.

"That crystalline material stands the strain easily," Musters assured them. "It will resist anything but a direct hit by a very large meteorite. As you can see now, the sphere, which is about a mile in diameter, is bi-sected by a plane surface, on which the city is built. In that little area you will see reproduced the choicest conditions of Earth." He turned earnest, hungry eyes on them:

"You don't know how lucky you people of Earth are!"

The ship was now coming quite close to the vast curve of the crystal, and they could see glimpses of beautiful structures in fairylike colorings, of small lakes like exquisite gems, of brilliant bursts of light that they conjectured served as substitutes for the sun while it was occulted by the enormous bulk of the planet.

Steadily the ship swept downward, to the level of the city, and the Earthmen became aware that the entire sphere was not transparent crystal. The part below the city level was a dull, ugly black.

"That's where the machinery is," Musters answered their questions, somewhat shortly, it seemed. "Hydrogen integrators there—to generate the power. Leakage of injurious rays down there—couldn't expect the First race to work there."

"Who does run the machinery?" Sine asked curiously.

"The labor Mugs, of course!" And Musters changed the subject.

The chief left them to their own devices as he superintended the lining up of the big ship's airlocks with the lock gasket of The Bubble. This effected, he bid his guests courteous farewell, assuring them that their ship would be conveyed to the Jovian capital city of Rubio, where they would be given every facility for repairing their damaged motor.

Sine was awakened by the talking of Kass and Lents as they sat at their breakfast in their unimaginably luxurious apartment. They were near the top of one of the fairylike towers they had glimpsed, and through the crystalline roof they could see the blackness of star-studded space. Far above was the glint of slanting sunlight on the outer covering of the sphere. This was the fourth morning on The Bubble, and the Earthmen were beginning to become vaguely restless. Their hosts had entertained them royally, but—

"I didn't see anything funny about the way they shoved that labor Mug out of the airlock," Lents was saying. "The poor devil! Stole a little of the juice they call ambrosia. The way that elegant over-civilized crowd laughed!"

"They lined up and watched the body floating alongside," Kass added somberly. "And that Mug was as human as you or I."

Their words recalled the scene vividly to Sine's mind. The broad, green field between two crescent lakes. The beetling-browed wretch, with eyes full of fear that darted from side to side, led to the center of the field by two splendidly armed warriors, there to be left alone in an agony of uncertainty.

He saw again the half-hundred clean-limbed athletes, sons of rich Jovian families. They were lined upon each side of the field. At the signal they dashed in. The frightened labor Mug tried to escape. As one team closed in he doubled, ran directly toward the others, saw his mistake too late. There was a brief savage scrimmage, and the unfortunate victim was stretched unconscious on the sward, while the victors and the vanquished in this curious game joined arms and made for the baths where exquisite nymphs peered coquettishly from behind delicately proportioned columns. Sine reaped uncomprehending and resentful stares when he declined to join them.

"Too rich for my blood," Sine told his companions at breakfast as they discussed their experiences. "Hope they take us to Rubio soon. We've done our job, and as for me, I'm not cut out for high Society."

After they had completed their breakfast a girl came hesitatingly into their chamber. Sine stared at her curiously. She had none of the enameled beauty of the women he had seen until then, but in her young face was a subdued comeliness that was attractive after the assertive pulchritude that was universal among the young women of the First Race. Unlike the shrewd display of their chiseled perfection, this girl's slender, rounded body was wrapped in a thin, gray garment that concealed as it draped. It was caught by a cord around her waist. Her feet, smaller and more fragile than the sturdy Jovian standard, were encased in neutral buskins. She stood submissively, waiting for them to speak.

"What does that girl want?" Kass murmured aside. "My stars, she can't be a labor Mug!"

"Come here, girl!" Lents rumbled kindly. "What can we do for you?"

The girl came forward hesitatingly. Her voice was soft, lacking the brassy assurance of other Jovian women;

"I was sent here, masters, to guide you through hell."

Immediately after this startling statement her face turned a brilliant red, then a deathly white. She half turned as if to