VACANT WORLD This story was a Three-way collaboratIon—Cyril myself, and Dirk Wylie—and was originally published under Dirk's name. Dirk was a founding Futurian, and a long-time friend of mine (We met as freshmen at Brooklyn Technical High School, when we were both twelve.) Like most fans and nearly all Futurians, Dirk wanted to be a professional writer. He had talent. He was good at a kind of science fiction nobody seems to write any more: quixotic adventure, I suppose you would call it; the kind of thing That Percival Christopher Wren invented with Beau Geste. In science fiction it exists, among others, in the stories of C. L. Moore, notably the Jirel of Joiry and Northwest Smith series. I think the chances are good that we might now be saying "in the stories of Dirk Wylie" if a war hadn't come along just as he was hitting his stride. Dirk enlisted early. Like Cyril, he served In The Battle of the Bulge and, like Cyril, he ultimately paid for it with his life. Neither was wounded by enemy fire. What Dirk did was injure his back in a truck. It began to mend, then worsened and tuned into tuberculosis of the spine, and he died of it at the age of twenty-nine. I. Return from Venus "Happy New Year," Marvin said bitterly. "Shuddup!" growled Camp, trying to chuck a weightless book at him. "Him" was the talking lizard, tentatively christened petrosaurus parlante veneris, and generally sworn at as Marvin. Camp sorely regretted the day he had ever taught the little creature to talk; now its jeering, strangely booming voice was never still. He would have stuffed it if he had had the courage to kill it first, but in many ways August Camp was a sensitive man. Marvin silenced, except for his eternal, sarcastic chuckle, Camp turned again to his log book. "Final entry," he wrote. "September 17, 1997. Approximately one hundred thousand kilometers from Earth at the present time, 10:17:08 A.M. I shall set the robot pilot for Newark Landing Field, wavelength IP twelve, and the Third Venus Expedition will be over." He locked the manuals and swung a cover over their multiple pins and contacts, and threw the switch that would put the ship under the guidance of the Newark beam. A space-sphere couldn't be landed easily—not, at least, without outside assistance. There were nearly one million factors too many, all of them interacting, which had vital bearing on the dynamics of the particular vessel trying to ease itself to the seared pave of the field. At the Newark port there were monstrous machines that would shudder into action as soon as his flares were detected—computators which would grind out the formulae of his descent, using a strange, powerful mathematics all their own. No human mind could do that unaided, nor could Camp's ship accommodate even the immense charts that were the summarized and tabulated knowledge of the computators and the men who operated them. Camp dragged himself along a line over to the small, unshuttered port and swiped a patch of frost from its center, using a patch of waste for the job; even at that his hand was chilled and numbed by the frightful cold of the thick glass. He stared through the port at the meager slice of Earth that he could see, old, half-forgotten memories crowding his brain, and his muscles tensed at the thought of seeing people once more. The first thing he would do, he decided, would be to head for Manhattan and walk up and down Broadway as long as he could. No more loneliness. No more talking to oneself or to a brainless lizard.... Camp had started, not alone, but with two companions, One had died on the trip out to Venus three years ago, lost in space—that had been Manden—and the other, Gellert, had disappeared from their stockaded camp on the cloudy planet; for two years Camp had been alone, doing the jobs of three men and doing them remarkably well. It had been difficult, of course, but ... ... it was not supposed to be a joy ride. And things were just as tough, in a relative way, on Terra. The cycle of murderous wars just completed had left great, leprous areas of poisoned land scabbing the Earth's surface. Oil pools were empty and coal beds depleted; clean, fertile ground was at a minimum. A new source of supply had to be found. Camp was not the first of the interplanetary travellers; in the late Sixties Soviet Russia had been seized by a passion for exploration of the other worlds. Most of their huge ships had failed in one way or another, with appalling loss of life, but one had managed to reach the moon. The period that followed the next successful flights was one of feverish lunar exploration and even madder scrambling for concessions when it was found that the moon was rich in the materials needed on Earth. As might have been foreseen, this soon produced another war. The conflict was of short duration, and men once more looked to the stars. A new, more powerful propellant had been developed during the war, and using this fuel, an expedition managed to reach the cloud-wrapped surface of Venus. A second expedition soon followed, and a third, of which Camp was a member. The results of Camp's investigations had exceeded his wildest hopes. Venus, while too young a world to have much (if any) coal or oil, was still rich in minerals and cellulose organisms; the industrial processes of Terra could easily be adapted to employ cellulose fuels. The ground was swampy, for the most part, and contained a high percentage of a sort of peat. That constituted the principal source of danger to potential colonists; a fire in a Venusian peat-bog would kindle a blaze that might sweep hundreds of square miles. Then too, there wasn't a drop of drinkable water to be had on the planet. But with distilling apparatus, and fuel to be had for the mere digging of it, what problem was that? Camp muttered in annoyance as he blotted the page he was working on, and he crumpled the sheet and tossed it into a corner. The slight motion lifted him from his seat and sent him drifting across the cluttered cabin. He cursed absently at the inconveniences of weightlessness, and hauled himself back to his former position. He looked up suddenly. There was something wrong! "Oh, my God!" he gasped. His continued lack of weight meant that the sphere was still falling free, that for some reason Newark had not taken over control. He yanked the shell from the robot and peered intently at its intricacies; it was not in operation. Hastily he checked the device for faulty connections in any of its delicate grids, and turned away unsatisfied. As far as he could tell the receiver was in perfect condition. Fifty thousand kilometers to fall ... Then the observatories had not seen his signals, rockets that exploded with a ground-shaking detonation.... But why not? Had another war begun in his absence, to make mysterious explosions a matter of slight notice? If he only had a radio.... Newark! Newark! Why don't you take over, Newark? One thousand ... Should he unlock the manuals? Was he adept enough to jockey the huge space-sphere to a safe landing? Perhpas he would gun the motors too much, to find himself a scant hundred meters from the surface with his tanks drained to the dregs. Or he might keep his jets open too long, and send a destructive backwash into his motors. Newark! Where are you, Newark? Nine hundred kilometers ... a thin whistle keened through the ship as it plunged through the first fringes of atmosphere. He unlocked the manuals and touched a switch. The grating beneath his feet quivered in sympathy with the awakened motors, and weight suddenly returned to him as the sphere's shrieking descent was checked by the powerful jets. He could see, from his place at the C-panel, almost all of North America, rapidly increasing in size as he watched. He shot a swift glance through another port. The sky was still black, but already more than half of the stars whose shifting configurations he had come to know were gone, their feeble emissions filtered out by the thin blanket of air which had been interposed. He cut the jets, and again the ship fell free; this was by far the cheapest means of descent, in terms of fuel. He fired a short burst from a secondary jet to clear a slowly drifting lake of cirrus clouds far below, and the Great Lakes suddenly appeared beneath him. He closed a firing switch in sudden panic at the thought of making a submarine landing. The space-sphere had been designed to float, if necessary, but he had packed the buoyancy tanks with specimens and samples, depending on the Newark beam to land him safely. The explosions of the steering-jet veered the sphere northward, well over the Canadian border, and the ship dropped again. One hundred kilometers ... Like a dancer he tiptoed the vessel up and down, balancing it nicely and precisely on a blast, with a minimum of fuel expenditure, but dropping, always dropping, to the surface. He snatched a hasty look at his altimeter. Only a couple of kilometers now, he thought, and prayed that the exactly-measured fuel would last out this moment of terrible need. He cut the jets again, knocked the legs from under the sphere, and fell in a last wild plunge. He strained his eyes, staring intently at the altimeter—at the little spot of light creeping steadily toward a red line on the dial. They met! And Camp, his fingers quivering on a half score of firing-keys, kicked over a foot lever that opened the jets to their fullest capacity, and pressed the keys. The rockets flamed with their utmost, ravening power, and the smooth rush of the sphere jolted to a shuddering halt as it danced uncertainly at the tip of the column of hellfire. He had stopped flat about one hundred meters from the ground, he ob...
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