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Read Ebook: Black Silence by McDowell Robert Emmett Napoli Vincent Illustrator
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Ebook has 937 lines and 23977 words, and 19 pages
BLACK SILENCE
"What's first on your program when we land, Lynn?"
They had been out two and a half years, and it was a subject of which they never wearied.
Lynn said, "A bath--a real one. Not out of a tea cup." She was the expedition's photographer and reporter, a small blonde with a soft triangular face.
The music stopped in the middle of a bar. An announcer's voice broke in.
Everyone stopped talking in the messroom of the spaceship.
"Whew!" said Matt to the company at large. "What a disagreeable way to die! Wonder what causes it?"
There was an interruption. Everyone in the messroom was tense, conscious of blurred background noises in the far away studio toward which they were flashing.
The speaker went dead.
Matt Magoffin found himself holding his breath, waiting for the news to come back on. But it never did.
After a minute's silence, he leaped to his feet. "Damn that operator! I'm going to see what's wrong."
He started for the starboard passage, a babble of voices breaking out behind him. Matt was a stocky, powerfully built man in his thirties, the expedition's palaeobotanist. He reached the starboard ladder, ran up to the control deck and shouldered into the radio shack without knocking.
"What's up?" he demanded of the operator, a thin freckled youth who was staring at the banks of equipment in perplexity.
Sparks knit his brows.
"Nothing--that I can find."
"What!"
"There isn't a damn thing wrong at this end. The broadcast was interrupted. Power failure, maybe."
Matt Magoffin ran his hand through his short crisp black hair, alarm in his blue eyes.
"Have you tried to contact Earth?"
"No. Not yet."
The operator sat down at his instruments, threw in a switch and spoke into a microphone.
Silence!
Matt's jaw shut with a click. The operator tried again and again, but without success. He was still trying when the director of the expedition burst into the radio shack, followed closely by the captain.
"What interrupted the broadcast, Sparks?" the director burst out.
The operator shrugged. "There's nothing wrong with our instruments. But I can't raise a peep from Earth."
The captain said, "Um. Keep trying."
"Yes, sir."
"And report at once as soon as you establish contact."
"Yes, sir."
The captain turned on his heel and left. Isaac Trigg, the director, prepared to follow when Matt said: "Just a minute, Isaac. I'm coming with you."
The director paused, allowing Matt Magoffin to come abreast of him. "What do you make of it, Matt?" he asked.
"I don't know." Matt shook his head.
For two long years, between favorable oppositions with Earth, the expedition had been searching the airless, waterless wastes of Mars for any evidence of life. And had arrived at the disappointing conclusion that not only was Mars devoid of life, but that the ruddy planet never had supported life in any form.
But during the two years they had been in daily two-way communication with Earth. Not once had they lost contact. Now that they were almost returned....
The director suggested hopefully, "Perhaps they had a power breakdown."
"I don't think so." Matt shook his head. "But anyway we're only seven months out. We should be able to contact other radio stations. I don't understand it at all."
Their return to the messroom was greeted by an excited volley of questions from the others. The director held up his hands in dismay.
"The trouble is on Earth," he explained when quiet was restored. "Our instruments are functioning quite all right. There probably has been a power stoppage of some sort. We should re-establish contact any minute."
But by the beginning of the rest period seven hours later, Earth was still silent.
No one slept that night. Matt Magoffin tried, but at length he gave up and switched on the lights in his cabin. He drew on comfortable gray coveralls, which made him look even stockier than he was, and departed for the messroom.
Counting the crew, there were thirty-one members of the expedition--nine women and twenty-two men. Everyone of them, Matt realized, must be present. The tension was so apparent that he could feel a thrill of nervousness.
"No word, I suppose?" he asked, dropping into a vacant seat beside Lynn.
"No," the girl shook her head, setting her shoulder-length, yellow hair to swinging. There was generally a half-wicked, half-mischievous twinkle in her blue eyes, but it was lacking tonight. Little frown lines creased her low broad forehead. "You don't suppose the plague has anything to do with it, do you Matt?"
"Plague? How could the plague affect broadcasting?"
"I don't know." She shrugged helplessly. "Let's go up to the observation deck. This waiting is driving me off my beam."
"Sure."
Matt followed her into the passage. She was wearing coveralls like his own, but of a trimmer cut. She was unquestionably the prettiest of the nine women, he reflected. And hard as nails.
Two years on the treacherous Martian deserts had enabled Matt to arrive at a pretty accurate estimate of everyone by the way they reacted to danger, to the disappointment at failing to discover evidence of life, to their cramped quarters.
Their disappointment had been greater because Mars had been the last hope of discovering life in the Solar System besides that of Earth.
No fossil life had been reported on the moon. The Reeves' expedition to Venus two years ago had found that the Venusian clouds were composed of dust swirling about a desiccated and lifeless world. Mercury had not yet been reached, nor any of the outer planets, but there was little expectation that life could have lodged in such inhospitable environments.
No, in all the Solar System, Earth apparently was the only planet where septic conditions prevailed--and life could germinate....
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