giving a little power here, removing it there, edging the vessel mile by mile—twisting, wriggling, diving. The windows were no longer blazing shields. They seemed to be dancing with darkness, and the girl knew with growing horror that, masked though the solar glare was, the radiations were seeping through and damaging her sight.
Weakly she got up and found a pair of dense goggles, which she slipped over her face. They blinded her completely, but she prayed that they would at least stop the radiations driving at her eyes.
By touch alone she continued operating the switches, her body sensitive to every surge and movement of the machine she herself had designed; then at last to her intense relief she heard the sudden intake of power by the plant, which announced it was ceasing its laborious struggle against a superior gravity.
It was a note that grew. Breathing hard, drenched in perspiration, the girl played her fingers up and down the control switches until at last the note in the power plant became steady. She wrenched the goggles from her eyes and looked at the gauges. They were clouded with darkness, and her eyes throbbed unmercifully.
The needles were swinging free. The Ultra was slowly pulling away from that titanic maw in space, gaining speed with every second. With her eyes shut she sped onwards, until finally the Ultra had crossed the demarcation line and was back in free space.
Slowly relaxing, the girl snapped the automatic pilot in position and staggered away from the control chair to lie down on the wall bed. For nearly an hour she lay flat, a hand over her eyes; then she reached out and snapped the switch which raised the screens from the ports.
At first, even the brilliant sunshine seemed faded and weak and the shadows impenetrably dark; then with the passage of time the darkness began to lift and the intolerable pressure behind her eyes faded. The radiations, which had been more than sufficient to forever destroy the sight of a normal person, had with her super-normal physique only numbed the optic nerves. Now the numbness was dissipating, and with it came a clear return of sight and gathering bodily strength.
Slowly she got up and gave a glance outside. She was far enough away from the sun now to be sure of safety. Infinitely distant, shining with the brilliance of a diamond, was Venus; and in the nearer foreground, erratic little Mercury.
Turning to the shortwave radio, she switched it on, contacting Earth by direct transmission. It was several minutes, partly because of distance, and partly because of an increasingly severe static warp from the sun, before any clear answer came through from Earth; then there was another delay whilst Chris Wilson, Controller of the Dodd Space Line, was connected. His voice, speaking over nearly ninety million miles of space, sounded reedy and abysmal.
“Then you’re still safe, Vi? That’s fine hearing....”
“Yes, I’m safe,” she agreed, her voice heavy. “I very nearly wasn’t, though. I’m only three millions miles from the sun, and into it have gone all the alien invaders we needed to worry about. They actually flung themselves—but I admit I led them into it. That chapter is finished, Chris. The Earth is safe....”
On faraway Earth it took nearly eight minutes for the radio message to be received, and Chris Wilson frowned as he listened to the girl’s words as they became increasingly distorted by sizzling static interference from the sun:
“...The Earth is safe. However. I’m concerned that the....”
Whatever the girl was going to say next was swamped by the solar static. All radio contact had been lost.
* * * *
Eighteen Months Later
Morris Arnside, autocratic chief of the World Food Combine, could not quite believe the figures he was studying. In earlier times he could easily have thought that statisticians had erred in their calculations, or perhaps that there was some double-dealing going on somewhere—but in this latter part of the twenty-first century there was no room for doubt. Men racked their brains no more with calculations. Flawless machines computed everything to the last fraction, and they never made a mistake—for which reason the report was all the more mystifying.
“Beyond me,” Arnside confessed to himself.
For a moment or two he sat gazing out of the window.
Light snow was falling, driven by flurries of bitter wind. It might have been mid-January instead of late May—but then it had been intensely cold for six months and more.
Finally Arnside pressed a button on his desk and his chief assistant and deputy food controller entered.
“Good morning Mr. Arnside,” he greeted—and Arnside glared at him with prominent grey eyes.
“I’ll be hanged if it is! Sit down, Mathers. There’s something I want to talk over with you.”
The assistant settled in the chair at the opposite side of the desk and waited. For Morris Arnside to be short-tempered was nothing new. He lived well, ate heartily, took little exercise, and was always volcanic in consequence. But for him to be anxious was definitely unusual.
“I’ve just had the reports for the first three months of this year,” Arnside said at length. “They’re staggering! Crops and staple foods are nearly eighty percent below the normal yield. If things go on at this rate, there won’t be enough to feed the world’s population by the end of the year, and that means we’ll have to fall back on synthetic products, something which the majority of people hate.”
“Yes, sir.” Mathers agreed imperturbably.
“I’ve been trying to think of some reason for this tremendous falling off,” Arnside added, his fleshy jowls wagging with the emphasis of his words. “I’ll be hanged if I can, though. What has happened to our own British agriculture, the Canadian wheat fields, the United States grain-growing areas? All of them are just dying, man! Dying!”
“It has puzzled me,” Mathers responded. “The reports are similar from all sources. The seasons are said to be changing. Take today, for instance, and we’re right in the middle of spring. Snowing fast, and looks likely to continue. And the temperature hasn’t rose much over freezing point since December of last year. I have been gathering weather reports from all over the world recently, and in every case there is a marked decline in mean temperatures—even in the tropics. Crops in consequence are far behind normal.”
“The members of the combine must be made to produce eighty percent more than they usually do,” Arnside decided. “If they don’t, there’ll be a penalty, and I’ll issue a directive to that effect. It’s the only way. Laziness, that’s what it is! Living in a world of plenty, they think they can relax. They can’t—and most certainly they’re not going to make an unusually cold spring the excuse. I’ll settle it!”
“Yes, sir,” Mathers murmured.
“It would help,” Arnside added, “if you showed a little more enthusiasm.”
“I’m afraid I can’t, sir. I think I know what we are fighting, and it rather terrifies me.”
The food controller stared. “A slowing up in crop production terrifies you? Don’t be an idiot, man!”
Mathers knew his chief far too well to take offence at his brusqueness. “I have been studying this business pretty thoroughly—not entirely for professional reasons, but because I’m naturally curious. I may be wrong, but I don’t think we’ll ever get the crops to rights again. And I don’t think we’ll ever get warm weather again, either.”
“Do you mind telling me what on earth you’re talking about?” Arnside demanded.
Mathers rose and went to the immense window. He stood gazing out over the fantastically lofty roofs of New London; then he turned and motioned his superior. Arnside joined him and they stood gazing through the whirling snow into the grey sky.
“Well?” Arnside asked bluntly.
“Through the cloud breaks, sir, you can see the sun,” Mathers said, pointing. “There—practically overhead at this hour.”
Arnside