CHAPTER XII
For the most part, the vessel had proceeded without producing any sense of motion. A violent shift would have dislodged everything loose in the shell—the scaffolding, ladders, the temporarily secured electric lights—and yet there had been nothing of the sort. Once in a while, they felt a trembling jar. This probably was caused by the impact of a meteorite. But thus far, no such bodies had pierced the heavy insulation of resistant clay.
There was now, however, quite definite indication that they were moving in space. Observations taken at intervals showed that the "moon" was coming closer. Presently, the irregularities on the edge of the disc were apparent to the eye, and shadowy configurations on its rocky surface could be discerned.
After some days, Marlin developed a new suspicion.
He checked his observations carefully. There was no doubt about it. They were no longer approaching the mass but were drifting in an orbit around it—either that, or it was rotating around the sphere. And about this time he made a further discovery. A second body had appeared in the heavens—and presently there was a third.
"There's only one explanation," he reported tersely at a mealtime gathering. "We're in the asteroid belt."
DuChane alone seemed to know what this meant.
"Dave seems to be jumping at conclusions, but assuming that he's right, we've swung out beyond the orbit of Mars—somewhere between it and Jupiter. There's a region of small planets, masses of rock, ranging up to four or five hundred miles in diameter. Supposed to be fragments of a planet that broke up somehow."
"Or didn't quite jell in the making," corrected Marlin. "I believe that's the modern scientific view. More than nine hundred of them have been charted though I've no doubt there must be innumerable smaller fragments."
"What's the chance of our gettin' through without bein' hit?" demanded McGruder.
"How should I know? As a matter of fact, I don't think we're on our way through. Looks as if we've established an orbit—at least around that big one."
"Anything we can do about it?"
Marlin regarded him impersonally.
"Nothing," he said. "Exactly nothing. We've no more control over our fate at present than we've had since we started."
Sally gave a mirthless laugh. "That makes it swell! All we've got to do is wait—and wait—and see what this old ball intends to do with us."
Pearl volunteered a remark which, in its unexpectedness, caused them all to look at her.
"So many stones," she breathed. "Lonely stones."
DuChane leaped to his feet.
"The girl knew!" he shouted. "She knew! We thought she was talking gibberish, but she was telling us where we'd wind up. Stones! Lonely stones! Asteroids!"
"Of course Pearl knows!" crowed Maw Barstow. "Didn't I tell you?"
Norma rarely took part in their discussions. She spoke now with bitter conviction. A flush of intensity lighted her wan features.
"It was all intended! I could feel it when I lay there in my stupor—just as if I was a part of it and knew where we were going and why. It's a soulless thing! We don't mean anything to it—not any more than grubs. This is only the beginning—it's going to be more and more terrible. We'll be ground to fragments—"
She closed her lips and stared, shudderingly, as if into space.
McGruder eyed her with resentment. "It's a lot of hogwash," he asserted with hollow confidence.
The nine days' wonder of it gradually became common-place to the rest, but Marlin spent a greater share of his waking time at the observation post. The three moons were joined by more. There were presently a number of gleaming bodies revolving around the sphere, the count increasing almost at every revolution. At one time, Marlin counted eighteen of fairly good size and no doubt several were out of range of the periscope.
The strangeness of it was slowly borne upon him.
"Why should these planetoids be revolving around us?" he questioned. "They're reputed to have eccentric orbits, but we seem to have barged in on a small system revolving around one common center. And the most cockeyed thing of all is that we're apparently that center."
There might be some other explanation, but the reasonable one seemed to be that the vessel was swinging through the vast planetoid belt, "picking up" stellar bodies as it approached them. Each rock concretion drawn into the ever-growing system increased its mass attraction for other bodies, and thus the accumulation grew, like an immense snowball.
Theoretically, there was support for the assumption. The plates within the sphere exercised an attraction which approximated Earth gravity. Normally, the attraction of so small an object in space would have been slight, but thus augmented, it might act as a magnet, drawing much larger bodies out of their natural orbits.
"Still, if that's the case," he reasoned, "they'd keep drawing closer. They'd eventually crush our sphere by the very force of its own gravity."
His mind pictured a churning mass of mountainous and smaller rocks, rolling round and round each other in ever-narrowing orbits, crashing and grinding together, probably generating heat in the process, eventually fusing into a solid mass.
"Nice prospect," he reflected with a shudder. "Where'll we be when that takes place? Somewhere near the center, from all indications."
The prospect revealed through the periscope was awe-inspiring, but increasingly fearsome. For one exciting hour, Marlin watched while two planetoids collided and slowly ground each other to fragments. On another occasion, a huge mass lazily crossed his field of vision so close that he could discern great areas of what looked like ice, mingled with towering spires of rock. He could easily imagine himself looking down on a mountain glacier.
"Why not?" he reflected. "There's no reason why there shouldn't be frozen water in this debris. Presumably the general mass is constituted of the same rock, minerals, and gases as the other planets, including Earth. Some of it could be frozen air—or its constituent gases—considering the absolute zero out there."
He recalled reading the contention of Halbfass that some earth hailstorms originate in outer space. The scientist had produced considerable data in support of his theory that such bombardments may be of stellar origin. There was the case of an iceberg twenty feet in diameter, reported from Dharwar, India, in 1838, and a still earlier case of a block of ice "as big as an elephant" which reputedly fell in the same region during the days of Tippoo Sahib.
Unless Marlin was mistaken there were celestial icebergs among the growing mass of planetary debris circling the sphere.
The picture he had envisioned of the planetoid bodies closing in on the sphere, with its augmented gravitation, had seemed at first fantastic. It was taking on more and more the aspect of grim, threatening reality.
Collisions between bodies in the surrounding space became more frequent as their orbits definitely spiraled inward. Once a fragment drifted so close that it almost seemed to graze the sphere. As Marlin tensed for the seemingly inevitable impact, it passed by. But on its return would it not be materially closer?
That particular fragment did not return. Perhaps it collided with another and was pulverized or deflected from its course. But the sphere might not escape so easily the next time.
Occasionally, his vision would be obscured by what seemed to be a cloud of dust. It was undoubtedly just that—a field of particles from the grinding and colliding of rock masses, settling toward the gravitational pull of the sphere. On another occasion, the obscuring cloud appeared to be sleet—a mass of iceberg fragments, or perhaps more tenuous gas in solidified form.
Since that one shuddering outburst, Norma had seemingly regained her self-control. She appeared only occasionally at meal times, tight-lipped, reserved. Often Marlin saw her standing on a secluded part of the superstructure, wrapped in her moody thoughts. She climbed one day to the observation platform beside him.
"What can you see through that thing?" she asked.
"Take a look," he invited. "It's terrifying, but inspiring too—when you reflect that mortal eyes never looked upon it before."
She studied the awesome prospect for a minute, then drew away, shivering as if with cold.
"Give it to me straight," she demanded. "What's the payoff? Here we are in a thin-shelled bubble floating through a tumble of jagged rocks and icebergs. They're drawing closer all the time, aren't they?"
He temporized. "My biggest worry right now is that the dust fragments, settling down on us, will bury the periscope head. That will be the last of our observations."
"I said give it to me straight," she retorted.
"All right. Your guess is as good as mine. Frankly, it looks like the end. But it looked like the end when we shot off into space. Somehow we've existed up to now." He spoke impersonally, trying to keep the sympathy he felt out of his voice: "Come to think, Norma, I'm puzzled—"
He stopped, but she finished for him.
"You can't understand why a person who's been through what I have should get the willies now. I'm not afraid of something I can fight. I'm not afraid of dying. It's eerie things you can't fight that get me. Hearing that girl Pearl talk gives me the creeps. She calls this a 'little world.' What does she mean?"
Marlin started. He had used the term himself; probably that was how it came to fall from Pearl's lips.
"I know what she means," Norma answered her own question vehemently. "It is a little world. I was a part of it, I tell you, while I lay there between life and death. I sensed things through its consciousness—if you can imagine such a thing. I knew what all of you were doing, just as if you were maggots crawling around inside of me. I had a feeling of what it was bound for—this grinding and crushing and churning in space. And we're no more to it than the mice and bugs that happened to get mired in the sticky clay while it was forming."
Marlin looked at her blankly. Despite her vehemence, she had herself under control—though at the cost of what effort he could only guess. The strange thing was that he himself had been subject to like fancies.
"Natural forces are—rather impersonal," he conceded.
"I hate natural forces! I hate this little world and everybody in it! Why did you help pull me back to life? I never wanted to live. I could have kicked off in a gunfight and had no beef. But here we're helpless like rats in a trap. Why don't we all kill ourselves and get it over with?"
Marlin shrugged. It was pleasanter talking to Pearl. Her unruffled poise almost amounted to an assurance that nothing could happen which particularly mattered.
On her next visit, with Norma's outburst fresh in mind, he reverted to the subject Pearl had once inspired.
"That idea about the world having a consciousness of its own may not be altogether screwy," he told her. "It would explain a lot of things that we take for granted. As an entity, it might very logically take a hand in the involvement of beings in its sphere of influence. Our surface life—the flora and fauna, including man—no doubt play an essential part in its evolution. The Earth entity, with its natural forces—the winds, tides, changes of temperature, volcanic eruptions, and such like—could easily direct the spread of these forms.
"Come to think—that's just what it has been doing, from the dawn of life. The only question is whether it happened by intention. Of course, I'm too much of a reasoning creature to believe such rot."
He stopped, half-awaiting the echoed response, "Such rot," but it was not forthcoming. From a pocket in the girl's soiled dress where she kept her strangely revived pet, a pair of beady eyes looked out at him brightly.
"All right, maybe I shouldn't have said a reasoning creature, but a skeptical creature. After all, it's as unreasonable to disbelieve as to believe—when you have no proof either way. Well, let's assume that you're right."
"Pearlie is right," she assured him.
"H'mm. Maybe so. Well, assuming all this, I suppose the same entity could carry the process further and cause all the activities of so-called civilization. It could stir up the restlessness that sends explorers and colonists to distant parts of the globe. It could inspire persecutions, such as those that drove the Pilgrim fathers across the ocean. It could drive men through greed, lust of conquest—any number of urges. War—perhaps that's Nature's way of purging elements she wants to get rid of, or preparing for some new stage of development. Which brings the topic down to us."
He glanced at her, half expecting a response, but she merely smiled in her vaguely knowing way.
"We all seemed to be free agents," he went on, "but somehow we drifted toward old Eli's shelter—a bunch of misfits that weren't of any particular use in Earth's economy. What financiers not under some strange influence would have invested in Eli's wild theories? And that pit of encrusted mire where the old coot was led to build his sphere. Who knows what substances were brought together by what we call natural forces, and mixed into the right composition to protect us for this dash across space?"
The sphere gave a trembling lurch. Something had brushed its surface, but in his intensity he scarcely noticed.
"There are only two ways of looking at it," he declared, breathing heavily. "Either the whole thing was a freakish combination of accidents, or—it was consciously directed. I'm just sufficiently space-struck to entertain the possibility that it might be conscious purpose. What do you say, Pearl? Accident—or purpose?"
"Or purpose," she assured him dutifully.
He gave a short laugh. "That was hardly fair. I should have phrased it the other way around, knowing your fondness for repeating last words."