from their thundering rockets Traft set a course for the tiny disc of Titan near the sweeping curve of Saturn’s rings. He found it easier to stare out at the star-peppered firmament than back at the seven still figures strapped in their bunks. And the thought of Benning, lying broken at the bottom of some measureless pit—
The big pilot had not led a particularly tranquil life, in his adventurous calling, but this disastrous episode numbed him to the core. Especially the mystery of it. What strange gas had suddenly appeared in Iapetus’ atmosphere? Did it spell some strange menace, natural or—otherwise?
Traft shuddered a little. Somehow, it struck him as full of sinister promise, this amazing event.
CHAPTER II
The Institute of Bio-Magic
From the highest tower of ETBI, situated on Long Island, the view was magnificent. Far to the west could be seen the spires of Manhattan, Earth’s largest and busiest city, the beating heart of man’s empire in the skies. Closer, on Long Island itself, lay Tellus Space Port, with its gigantic drome and hangars and its wide-spread landing field.
Great liners and freighters rocketed up and thundered down constantly. The bull roars of their powerful engines could be heard as a steady low undertone, like the beating of an endless surf.
“The crossroads of space meet there!” murmured Dr. Rodney Shelton to his laboratory assistant, Myra Benning. She nodded.
It was a scene to inspire that thought, as the docks and quays of old London, two centuries before, had been the crossroads of the high seas. All the rich and varied commerce of other worlds centered at this hub of the Solar Empire. Not a day passed but what new treasure came out of the void—precious and useful metals, priceless jewels, exotic food stuffs rare or unknown to Earth, besides the steady dealing in Venusian grains and meats, and the Martian manufactures.
At times, the breath of adventure wafted from the spaceways—tales of hidden lands on alien worlds, fabulous creatures and heroic deeds. In that sense it was like the Venice of the Middle Ages, with its early reachings into Cathay and India and the mysterious South Seas. Only here it was the traversing of etheric trails to Mars and Ganymede and Rhea.
And there was a frontier—Saturn—beyond which organized enterprise had not yet advanced. It was a mixture of the prosaic and romantic, as with all such pioneering periods, and no one could say what the morrow might bring.
The two watchers from the tower drank in the scene, finding a moment of relaxation from their intense laboratory routine below.
Dr. Rodney Shelton was under thirty and over six feet, as lithely built as an athlete. One noticed his strong chin, firm lips and straight nose, but mostly his eyes. They were the steady, calm gray eyes of the dreamer and thinker, but in their depths lurked a certain quality, keenly alive, that marked him a man of action when the occasion demanded.
He did not look, outwardly, the scientist he was. But the wrinkles of concentration could appear in an instant on his forehead, when the brain behind it delved into a knotty problem.
Beside him, Myra Benning was wholly feminine, despite her shapeless laboratory smock and the lack of cosmetic artifices. She had the natural beauty equipment of pert nose, gold-sheen hair and soft blue eyes. But more than that, she had a mind, and a corresponding ambition to utilize it. She had chosen science as a career.
Suddenly both looked up, startled, as the shrill blast of sirens sounded from the direction of Tellus Space Port. The sirens were seldom used. It meant an emergency of some kind. Sometimes crippled ships, for instance, needed the port cleared for a dangerous landing.
Dr. Shelton and Myra could see ships hastily wheeling away, postponing take-off. One small freighter, about to settle for a landing, nosed up again with a revved blast of its under tubes, to circle and await its time.
A few minutes later the cause of the disturbance appeared—a long, torpedo-shaped craft that dropped almost precipitately from the clouds. Steam hissed from a hull that had been heated by rapid descent through Earth’s air envelope. The under tubes flamed a cherry red, smoothing the fall, but the ship landed bouncingly on its undercarriage and rolled forward a hundred yards before retarding blasts halted it. Then the volcanic throb of its engines ceased, abruptly.
The air-lock of the landed craft jerked open. Hurrying officials from the drome met the flyers coming out. Excitement pulsed in the air. To Rodney Shelton and his companion, it was like a play being enacted on a faraway stage. The figures were tiny toys.
“Wonder what that’s all about?” mused the man. “They’ve come from somewhere in a big hurry.” He leaned forward, straining his eyes. “Looks like an exploration ship, by the size of its fuel hold. Can’t make out the name.”
“Exploration ship!” Myra Benning caught her breath. “My brother Hugh is with the Tycho—” She shook her head. “But that isn’t due back for three weeks yet. It wouldn’t be Hugh’s ship.”
She glanced at her wristwatch. “We’ve been up here a half hour,” she stated crisply. “I think we’d better go down now, Dr. Shelton.”
“You’re like the voice of my conscience,” the man grinned. “But you’re right—back to work.”
They left the tower to descend to their laboratory.
The builders of the New York World’s Fairs of 1939 and 1966 had called it the “World of Tomorrow.” They would have been utterly amazed, however, to see what reared on those same grounds a century later.
To the eye, it was simply a group of giant, windowless buildings; the conditioning chambers of ETBI—Extra-Terra Bio-Institute. But within them, in sealed cubicles, were a hundred varieties of temperature, pressure, lighting, and the other strange conditions of extraterrestrial environments. It was a large-scale biological project that had meant much in Earth’s colonization of the planets.
One building was devoted solely to Martian conditioning. Men and women emerged from there with bodies whose metabolism was suited perfectly to Martian environment, with its utterly dry, wispy air, freezing climate, and light gravity. They were taken to Mars in specially conditioned space ships, a steady stream of them.
Mars had been the first to be colonized. Already the resident population of Earth people on the Red Planet was over five million. A dozen industries thrived there. Beautiful ceramics from Martian clay were much in demand on Earth. And the exquisitely fine cloths from Martian spider webs.
Another building conditioned colonists to withstand the torrid dampness of Venus, ten times as trying to humans as the hottest jungles of Africa or South America. These people reaped tremendous harvests of the Cloudy Planet’s boundless fertility. Crops ripened in a short month in the hot, steamy plains that stretched endlessly under veiled skies. Imported grains from Earth grew in riotous abundance. More than half of Earth’s staple food supplies came from the rich farms of Venus.
All this would have been impossible to normal, unconditioned Earth people. They would have had to labor in sealed suits against adverse environment, with all the insurmountable handicaps of such methods. But as people whose metabolism had been altered to fit the new conditions, they lived and breathed as freely as though born on those planets.
And how had human metabolism, the stabilized result of millions of years of evolution on Earth, been changed? In the final analysis, it all centered about the use of one remarkable product of biological science, developed twenty-five years before.
It
