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When you're hiring, we at Zippercruder know you can feel frustrated.
For Lauren, even, like your efforts are futile.
And you can spend a fortune trying to find fabulous people, only to get flooded with candidates who are just fine.
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The Long Voyage by Carl Richard Jacobi.
When we published Carl Jacobi's last story, we had no assurance he would be with us so soon again.
For when a uniquely gifted science fantasy writer becomes radioactive on the entertainment meter and goes voyaging into the unknown,
he may be gone from the world we know for as long as yesterday is tomorrow.
But Carl Jacobi has not only returned almost with the speed of light.
He has brought with him shining new nuggets of wonder and surmise.
The Long Voyage by Carl Jacobi.
The secret lay hidden at the end of nine landings, and Medusa Dark was one man's search for it,
in the strangest journey ever made.
The soft, gentle rain began to fall as we emerged from the dark woods and came out onto the shore.
There it was, the sea, stretching as far as the eye could reach, grey and sullen and flecked with green white froth.
The blue, hint-sort trees, crowding close to the water's edge, were bent backward as if frightened by the bleakness before them.
The sand, visible under the clear patches of water, was a bleached white like the exposed surface of a huge bone.
We stood there a moment in silence, then Mason cleared his throat, huskily.
Well, here goes, he said.
We'll soon see if we have any friends about.
Ben slung the pack sack from his shoulders, removed its protective outer shield, and began to assemble the organic surveyor,
an egg-shaped ball of white carponium, secured to a segmented 40-foot rod.
While Brent and I raised the rod with the aid of an electric fulcrum, Mason carefully placed his control cabinet on a piece of outcropping rock, and made a last adjustment.
The moment had come, even above the sound of the sea, you could hear the strained breathing of the men.
Only navigator Norris appeared unconcerned.
He stood there calmly smoking his pipe, his keen blue eyes, squinting against the biting wind.
Mason switched on the speaker.
Its high-frequency scream rose definitely above us, and was torn away and unsteady gusts.
He began to turn its center-dial, at first a quarter-circle, and then all the way to the final backstop of the calibration.
All that resulted was a continuation of that mournful ollulation, like a whale out of eternity.
Mason tried again, with stiff wrists, he tuned while perspiration stood out on his forehead, and the rest of us crowded close.
There is no use, he said.
This pick-up failure proves there isn't a vestige of animal life on Straguella, on this hemisphere of the planet, at least.
Navigator Norris took his pipe from his mouth and nodded.
His face was expressionless.
There was no indication in the man's voice that he had suffered another great disappointment, his sixth and less than a year.
He'll go back now, he said, and we'll try again.
There must be some planet in this system that's inhabited, but it's going to be hard to tell the women.
Mason let the surveyor rod down with a crash.
I could see the anger and resentment that was gathering in his eyes.
Mason was the youngest of our party, and the leader of the antagonistic group that was slowly but steadily undermining the authority of the Navigator.
This was our seventh exploratory trip after our sixth landing, since entering the field of the sun, Pontus.
Pontus, with its 16 equal size planets, each with a single satellite.
First there had been Colora, then in Swift succession, Jama, Tenethon, Mokro, and R9, and now Straguella.
The engine names of strange worlds revolving about a strange star.
It was Navigator Norris, who told us the names of these planets, and traced the positions on a chart for us.
He alone of our group was familiar with astrogation and cosmography.
He alone had sailed the spaceways and the days before the automatic pilots were installed and locked and sealed on every ship.
Hanson, man, in his 40th year, he stood six feet three with broad shoulders and a powerful frame.
His eyes were the eyes of a scholar, dreamy, yet alive with depth and penetration.
I had never seen him lose his temper, and he governed our company with an iron hand.
He was not perfect, of course.
Like all Earthmen, he had his faults.
Once before he had joined, with that famed Martian scientist, Ganath Clay, to invent that all-use material into it.
The formula for which had been stolen, and which therefore had never appeared on the commercial market.
Norris would talk about that for hours.
If you inadvertently started him on the subject, a queer glant would enter his eyes, and he would dig around in his pocket for a chunk of the black substance.
Did I ever show you a piece of this?
He would say, look at it carefully, notice the smooth, grainless texture, hard, and yet not brittle.
You wouldn't think that it was formed in a gaseous state, then changed to a liquid, and finally, to a clay-like material that could be worked with ease.
A thousand years after your body has returned to dust, that piece of indorate will still exist, unchanged, unworn.
The erosion will have little effect upon it.
Decided, granite, still, are nothing.
If only I had the formula.
But he had only half the formula, the half he himself had developed.
The other part was locked in the brain of Ganath Clay, and Ganath Clay had disappeared.
What had become of him was a mystery.
Norris, perhaps, had felt the loss more than anyone, and he had offered the major part of his savings as a reward.
For information, leading to the scientists, whereabouts.
Our party, eighteen couples and navigator Norris, had gathered together and subsequently left earth,
in answer to a curious advertisement that had appeared in the Sunday edition of the London Times.
Wanted, a group of married men and women, young, courageous, educated, tired of political and social restrictions,
interested in extraterrestrial colonization, financial resources, no qualification.
After we had been weeded out, interviewed, and rigorously questioned, Norris had taken us into the hangar,
waved a hand toward the Marie Galant, and explained the details.
The Marie Galant was a cruiser-type ship, stripped down to essentials to maintain speed,
but equipped with the latest of everything.
For a short run to Venus, for which it was originally built, it would accommodate a passenger list of ninety.
But Norris wasn't interested in that kind of run.
He had knocked out bulkheads, reconverted music room and ballroom into living quarters.
He had closed and sealed all observation ports, so that only in the bridge-cutty could one see into space.
He shall travel beyond the orbit of the sun, he said, there will be no turning back.
For the search for a new world, a new life, is not a task for cowards.
Aside to me, he said, you're to be the physician of this party baggly.
So I'm going to tell you what to expect when we take off.
We're going to have some mighty sick passengers aboard then.
What do you mean, sir, I said?
He pointed with his pipe toward the stern of the vessel.
See that?
Well, call it a booster.
Gannath Clay designed it just before he disappeared, using the last lot of ender it and existence.
It will increase our takeoff speed by five times, and it will probably have a bad effect on the passengers.
So we had left Earth, a night from a field out in Essex, without orders, without clearance papers,
without an automatic pilot chuck, eighteen couples and one navigator, destination unknown.
If the interstellar council had known what Norris was up to, it would have been a case for the space-time commission.
Of that long initial lap of our voyage, perhaps the less said the better.
As always is the case when Monotony begins to wear away the veneer of civilization, character quirks came to the surface.
Cliques formed among the passengers, and gossip and personalities became matters of pre-eminent importance.
Rising to the foreground, out of our thirty-six, came fielding Mason, tall, taciturn, and handsome,
with a keen intellect and a sense of values remarkable and so young a man.
Mason was a graduate of Montape, the French outgrowth of Saint-Sir, but he had majored in military tactics,
psychology and sociology, and knew nothing at all about astrogation or even elemental astronomy.
He too was a man of good breeding and refinement.
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Nevertheless, conflict began to develop between him and Navigator Norris.
That conflict began the day we landed on Calora.
Norris stepped out of the airlock into the cold, then air, glanced briefly about him,
and faced the 18 men assembled.
We'll divide into three groups, he said.
Each group to carry in, organic surveyor, and take a different direction.
Each group will so regulate its marching as to be back here, without fail, an hour before darkness sets in.
If you find no sign of animal life, then we will take off again immediately on your return.
Mason paused halfway in the act of strapping on his pack-sack.
What's that got to do with it, he demanded?
There's vegetation here, that's all that seems to be necessary.
Norris lit his pipe.
If you find no signs of animal life, we will take off immediately on your return, he said, as if he hadn't heard.
But the strangeness of Calora tempered bad feelings then.
The blue hints or trees were actually not trees at all, but a huge cat-tail-like growth,
the stocks of which were quite transparent.
In between the stocks grew curious cabbage-like plants that changed from red to yellow as an intruder
approached and back to red again after he had passed.
Rock outcroppings were everywhere, but all were eroded and in places polished smooth as glass.
There was a strange kind of dust that acted as though endowed with life,
it quivered when trot upon, and the outline of our footsteps slowly rose into the air,
so that looking back I could see our trail floating behind us in irregular layers.
Above us the star that was the planet's sun shone bright, but faintly red as if it were in the first stages of dying.
The air, though thin, was fit to breathe, and we found it unnecessary to wear spacesuits.
We marched down the corridors of hints or trees until we came to an open spot, a kind of glade,
and that was the first time Mason tuned his organic surveyor and received absolutely nothing.
There was no animal life on cholera.
Within an hour we had blasted off again.
The forward impact delivered by the Ganath clay booster was terrific, and nausea and vertigo struck us all simultaneously.
But again, with all ports and observation shields sealed shut, Norris held the secret of our destination.
On July 22nd the ship gave that sickening lurch and came once again to a standstill.
Same procedure as before, Norris said, stepping out of the airlock,
those of you who desire to have their wives accompany you may do so.
Mason, you'll make a final correlation on the organic surveyors.
If there is no trace of animal life, return here before dark.
Once our group was out of sight of the ship, Mason threw down his pack sack, sat down on a boulder, and lighted a cigarette.
Bagley, he said to me, as the old man gone loco?
I think not, I said, frowning, he's one of the most evenly balanced persons I know.
Then he's hiding something.
Mason said, while should he be so concerned with finding animal life?
You know the answer to that, I said, we're here to colonize, to start a new life.
We can't very well do that, on a desert.
That's poppycock, Mason replied, flinging away his cigarette.
When the Albertson expedition first landed on Mars, there was no animal life on the red planet.
Now look at it.
Same thing was true when Breslauer first settled Pluto.
The colonies there got along.
I tell you, Norris has got something up his sleeve, and I don't like it.
Later, after Mason had taken his negative surveyor reading, the flame of trouble reached the end of its fuse.
Norris had given orders to return to the Marie Galant, and the rest of us were suddenly making ready to start the back trail.
Mason, however, deliberately seized his pick and began chopping a hole in the rock surface,
and the preparatory, apparently, to erecting his plastic tent.
"'We'll make temporary camp here,' he said calmly.
"'Brown, you can go back to the ship, and bring back the rest of the women.'
He turned and smiled sardonically at Navigator Norris.
Norris quietly knocked the ashes from his pipe, and placed it in his pocket.
He strode forward, took the pick from Mason's hands, and flung it away.
Then he seized Mason by the coat, whipped him around, and drove his fist hard against the Younger Man's jaw.
"'When you signed on for this voyage, you agreed to obey my orders,' he said, not raising his voice.
"'You'll do just that.'
Mason picked himself up, and there was an ugly glint in his eyes.
He could have smashed Norris to a pulp, and none knew it better than the Navigator.
For a brief instant the Younger Man swayed there on the balls of his feet, fists clenched.
Then he let his hands drop, at walked over, and began to put on his pack-sack.
But I had seen Mason's face, and I knew he had not given in as easily as it appeared.
Meanwhile he began to circulate among the passengers, making no offers, yet subtly enlisting
backers for a policy, the significance of which grew on me slowly.
It was mutiny, he was plotting.
And with his personal charm and magnetism he had little trouble in winning over converts.
I came upon him arguing before a group of the women one day, among them his own wife,
Estelle.
He was standing close to her.
We have clothing and equipment and food concentrate," Mason said, enough to last two generations.
We have brains and intelligence, and we certainly should be able to establish ourselves without
the aid of other vertebrate forms of life.
Calora, Jama, Tenathon, Makro, R9, and Stragawa.
We could have settled on any one of those planets, and apparently we should have.
For conditions have grown steadily worse at each landing.
But always the answer is no, because Norris says we must go on until we find animal life.
He cleared his throat and gazed at the feminine faces before him.
Go where?
What makes Norris so sure he'll find life on any planet in this system.
And incidentally, where in the cosmos is this system?
One of the women, a tall blonde, stirred uneasily.
"'What do you mean?'' she said.
"'I mean, we don't know if our last landing was on Stragela or Calora.
I mean, we don't know where we are or where we're going, and I don't think Norris does
either.
We're lost."
That was in August.
By the last of September, we had landed on two more planets, to which Norris gave the
simple names of R12 and R14.
Each had crude forms of vegetable life, represented principally by the blue hindsertries.
But in neither case did the organic surveyor reveal the slightest traces of animal life.
There was, however, a considerable difference in physical appearance between R12 and R14.
And for a time, that fact excited Norris tremendously.
Up to then, each successive planet, although similar in size, had exhibited signs of greater
age than its predecessor.
But on R12, there were definite manifestations of younger geologic development.
Some pieces of shell lay up exposed.
Under a fold of igneous rock, two of those pieces contained fossils of highly developed
ganoids, similar to those found on Venus.
They were perfectly preserved.
It meant that animal life had existed on R12, even if it didn't now.
It meant that R12, though a much older planet than Earth, was still younger than Stragela
or the rest.
For a while, Norris was almost beside himself.
He cut out rock samples and carried them back to the ship.
He personally supervised the tuning of the surveyors.
And when he finally gave orders to take off, he was almost friendly to Mason, whereas before
his attitude toward him had been one of cold aloofness.
But when we reached R14, our eighth landing, all that passed.
Our R14 was old again, older than any of the others.
And then, on October 16th, Mason opened the door of the locked cabin.
It happened quite by accident.
One of the Aurelium Thoxide conduits broke in the Marieke Alliance Central Passage Way,
and the resulting explosion grounded the central feed lines of the instrument equipment.
In a trice, the passageway was a sheet of flame, rapidly filling with smoke from
burning insulation.
Norris, of course, was in the bridge cutty, with locked doors between us and him.
And now, with the wiring burned through, there was no way of signaling him.
He was wanted for an emergency.
In his absence, Mason took command.
That passageway ran the full length of the ship.
Midway down, it was the door leading to the women's lounge.
The explosion had jammed that door's shut, and smoke was pouring forth from under the
cell.
All at once one of the women rushed forward to announce hysterically that Mason's wife,
Estelle, was in the lounge.
Adjoining the lounge was a small cabin, which since the beginning of our voyage had remained
locked.
Norris had given strict orders that that cabin was not to be disturbed.
We all had taken it as a matter of course that it contained various kinds of precision
instruments.
Now however, Mason realized that the only way into the lounge was by way of that locked
cabin.
If he used a heat blaster on the lounge door, there was no telling what would happen to
the woman inside.
He ripped the emergency blaster from its wall mounting, pressed to say the magnetic latch
of the sealed cabin door, and pressed the stud.
And instant later he was leading his frightened wife Estelle out through the smoke.
The fire was quickly extinguished after that, and the wiring spliced.
Then when the others had drifted off, Mason called Brant and me aside.
We've been wondering for a long time what happened to Genneth Clay, the Martian inventor
who worked with Norris to invent Inderit, he said very quietly.
Well we don't need to wander any more.
He's in there.
Brant and I stepped forward over the cell and drew up short.
Genneth Clay was there all right, but he would never trouble himself about making a voyage
and a locked cabin.
His rigid body was encased in a transparent block of amber-colored solid effects, the after-death
preservative used by all Martians.
Both of us recognized his still features at once, and in addition his name Tatoo, required
by Martian law, was clearly visible on his left forearm.
For a brief instant the discovery stunned us.
Clay, dead, Clay, whose IQ had become a measuring guide for the entire system, whose Martian
head held more ordinary horse-sense in addition to radical postulations on theoretical physics
than anyone on the planets, it was impossible.
And what was the significance of his body on Norris's ship?
Why had Norris kept its presence a secret, and why had he given out the story of Clay's
disappearance?
Mason's face was as cold as ice.
Come with me, you too, he said, we're going to get the answer to this right now.
We went along the passage to the circular staircase.
We climbed the steps, passing through the scuttle, and came to the door of the bridge-cutty.
Mason drew the bar, and we passed in.
Norris was bent over the chart table.
He looked up sharply at the sound of our steps.
What is the meaning of this intrusion, he said?
It didn't take Mason long to explain.
When he had finished, he stood there, jaw-set, eyes, smoldering.
Norris paled, then quickly he got control of himself, and his old bland smile returned.
I expected you to blunder and to Clay's body one of these days, he said.
The explanation is quite simple.
Clay had been ill for many months, and he knew his time was up.
His one desire in life was to go on this expedition with me, and he made me promise to bury him
at the side of our new colony.
The pact was between him and me, and I followed it to the letter, telling no one.
Mason's lips curled and a sneer, and just what makes you think?
We're going to believe that story, he demanded.
Norris lit a cigar.
It's entirely immaterial to me whether you believe it or not.
But the story was believed, especially by the women, to whom the romantic angle upheeled,
and Mason's embryonic mutiny died without being born, and the Marie Galant sailed on through
uncharted space toward her ninth and last landing.
As the days dragged by, and no word came from the bridge-cutty, restlessness began to grow
amongst us.
Rumor succeeded rumour, each story wilder and more incredible than the rest.
Even just as the tension had mounted to fever pitch, there came the sickening lurch and
grinding vibration of another landing.
Norris dispensed with his usual talk before marching out from the ship.
After testing the atmosphere with the Ozonometer, he passed out the heat pestles and distributed
the various instruments for computing radioactivity and cosmic radiation.
This is the planet in Nizar, he said shortly, largest in the field of the Sun Pontus.
You will make your survey as one group this time, I will remain here.
He stood watching us as we marched off down the cliffside, then the blue hint-sortant
trees rose up to swallow him from view.
Mason swung along at the head of our column, Eyes Bright, a figure of aggressive action.
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The following Zipper Cruder radio spot, you are about to hear, is going to be filled
with F words.
When you're hiring, we at Zipper Cruder know you can feel frustrated.
For Lauren even, like your efforts are futile, and you can spend a fortune trying to find
fabulous people, only to get flooded with candidates who are just fine.
Fortunately, Zipper Cruder figured out how to fix all that.
And right now, you can try Zipper Cruder for free.
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With Zipper Cruder, you can forget your frustrations.
Because we find the right people for your roles fast.
Which is our absolute favorite F word.
In fact, four out of five employers who post on Zipper Cruder get a quality candidate
within the first day.
Fantastic.
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Finding great candidates to hire can be like, well, trying to find a needle in a haystack.
Sure, you can post your job to some job board.
But then, all you can do is hope the right person comes along.
Which is why you should try Zipper Cruder for free.
At Zipper Cruder.com slash zip.
Zipper Cruder doesn't depend on candidates finding you.
It finds them for you.
This powerful technology identifies people with the right experience and actively invites
them to apply to your job.
You get qualified candidates fast.
So while other companies might deliver a lot of hay, Zipper Cruder finds you what you're
looking for.
The needle in the haystack.
See why four out of five employers who post a job on Zipper Cruder get a quality candidate
within the first day.
Zipper Cruder.
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And right now, you can try Zipper Cruder for free.
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We had gone but a hundred yards when it became apparent that as a planet, Nizar was
entirely different from its predecessors.
There was considerable topsoil and here grew a tall, reed shaped plant that gave off varying
cords of sound when the wind blew.
It was as if we were progressing through the nave of a mighty church with a muted organ
in the distance.
There was animal life too, a strange lizard-like bird that rose up in flocks ahead of us and
flew screaming overhead.
I don't exactly like it, baggly, he said.
There's something unwholesome about this planet.
The evolution is obviously in an early state of development, but I get the impression that
it has gone backward that the planet is really old and has reverted to its earlier life.
Above us, the sky was heavily overcast, and a tenuous white mist rising up from the
henceware trees formed curious shapes and designs.
In the distance I could hear the swashing of waves on a beach.
Suddenly Mason stopped.
Look, he said.
Below us stretched the shore of a great sea, but it was the structure rising up from that
shore that drew a sharp exclamation for me, shaped in a rough ellipse, yet mounted high
toward a common point, was a large building of multiple hues and colors.
The upper portion was eroded to crumbling ruins, the lower part studded with many
bobberleafs and triangular doorways.
Let's go, Mason said, breaking out into a fast-looping run.
The building was farther away than we had thought, but when we finally came up to it we saw
that it was even more of a ruin than it had at first appeared.
It was only a show with but two walls standing, alone and for long.
Whatever race had lived here, they had come and gone.
We prowled about the ruins for more than an hour.
The carvings and the walls were in the form of geometric designs and cabalistic symbols,
giving no clue to the city's former occupants' identity.
And then Mason found the stairs leading to the lower crypts.
He switched on his auto-flash and led the way down cautiously.
Level one, level two, three.
We descended lower and lower.
Here water from the nearby sea oozed in little rivulets that glittered in the light of
the flash.
We emerged at length on a wide underground plaisance, a kind of amphitheater, with tear
on tear of seats surrounding it and extending back into the shadows.
Judging from what I've seen, Mason said, I would say that the race that built this place
had reached approximately a grade C5 of civilization, according to the Mokart scale.
This apparently was their council chamber.
What are those rectangular stone blocks, depending from the ceiling, I said?
Mason turned the light beam upward.
I don't know, he said, but my guess is that they are burial vaults.
Perhaps the creatures were ornithoid.
Away from the flash, the floor of the plaisance appeared to be a great mirror that caught our
reflections and distorted them fantastically and horribly.
We saw them that it was a form of living mold, composed of millions of tiny plants, each
with an eye-like iris at its center.
Those eyes seemed to be watching us, and as we strode forward, a great sigh rose up,
as if in resentment at our intrusion.
There was a small triangular desk in the center of the chamber, and in the middle of it stood
an irregular black object.
As we drew nearer, I saw that it had been carved roughly in the shape of this central building,
and that it was in a perfect state of preservation.
Mason walked around this carving several times, examining it curiously.
Odd, he said, it looks to be an object of religious veneration, but I never heard before
of a race worshipping a replica of their own living quarters.
Suddenly, his voice died off.
He bent closer to the black stone, studying it in the light of the powerful out of flash.
He got a small magnifying glass out of his pocket and focused it on one of the miniature
bought reliefs midway to the top of the stone.
Unfascending his geologic hammer from his belt, he managed with a sharp swinging blow to
break off a small protruding piece.
He drew in his breath sharply, and I saw his face go pale.
I stared at him in alarm.
What's wrong, I asked?
He motioned that I follow and led the way silently, passed the others toward the stair-shout.
Climbing to the top level was a heart-pounding task, but Mason almost ran up those steps.
At the surface, he leaned against a pillar.
His lips quivering spasmodically.
Tell me I'm sane, baggy, he said huskily, or rather, don't say anything until we see
Norris.
Come on, we've got to see Norris.
All the way back to the Marie Galant, I sought to sue them, but he was a man possessed.
He rushed up the ship's gangway, burst into central quarters, and drew up before navigator
Norris, like a runner, stopping at the tape.
You damn lying hypocrite, he yelled.
Norris looked at him in his quiet way.
Take it easy, Mason.
He said, sit down and explain yourself.
But Mason didn't sit down.
He thrust his hand in his pocket, pulled out the piece of black stone he had chipped off
the image in the cavern, and handed it to Norris.
Take a look at that, he demanded.
Norris took the stone, clandsted it, and laid it down on his dusk.
His face was emotionless.
I expected this sooner or later, he said.
Yes, it's indirect, all right.
Is that what you want me to say?
There was a dangerous, fanatical, glint, and Mason's eyes now.
With a sudden quick motion, he pulled out his heat pistol.
So you tricked us, he snarled.
Why?
I want to know why.
I stepped forward and seized Mason's gunhand.
Be a fool, I said.
It can't be that important.
Mason threw back his head, and burst into an hysterical peel of laughter.
Important, he cried.
Tell him how important it is, Norris.
Tell him!
Quietly, the navigator filled and lighted his pipe.
I'm afraid Mason is right, he said.
I did trick you.
Not purposely, however.
And in the beginning I had no intention of telling anything but the truth.
Actually, we're here because of a dead man's vengeance.
Norris took his pipe from his lips and stirred it absolutely.
You'll remember that Gannath Clay, the Martian, and I worked together to invent indirect.
But whereas I was interested in the commercial aspects of that product, Clay was absorbed
only in the experimental angle of it.
He had some crazy idea that it should not be given to the general public at once, but
rather should be allocated for the first few years to a select group of scientific organizations.
You see, enter it.
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With such a departure from all known materials that Genneth Clay feared, it would be utilized
for military purposes.
I took him for a dreamer and a fool.
Actually, he was neither.
How was I to know that his keen penetrating brain had seen through my motive to get control
of all commercial marketing of Inderit?
I had laid my plans carefully and I had expected to reap a nice harvest.
Clay must have been aware of my innermost thoughts, but Martian like he said nothing.
Nor is paused to wet his lips and lean against the desk.
I didn't kill Genneth Clay, he continued, though I suppose in a court of law I would
be judged responsible for his death.
The manufacture of Inderit required some ticklish work.
As you know, we produced our halves of the formula separately.
Physical contact with my half over a long period of time would prove fatal, I know, and
I simply neglected to so inform Genneth Clay.
But his ultimate death was a boomerang.
With Clay gone, I could find no trace of his half of the formula.
I was almost beside myself for a time.
Then I thought of something.
Clay had once said that the secret of his half of the formula lay in himself.
A vague statement to say the least.
But I took the words at their face value and gambled that he met them literally.
That is, that his body itself contained the formula.
I tried everything, x-ray, chemical analysis of the skin, I even removed the cranial cap
and examined the brain microscopically, all without result.
Meanwhile the police were beginning to direct their suspicions toward me in the matter of
Clay's disappearance.
You know the rest.
It was necessary that I leave Earth at once and go beyond our system, beyond the jurisdiction
of the planetary police.
So I arranged this voyage with a sufficient complement of passengers to lessen the danger
and hardship of a new life on a new world.
I was still positive, however, that Clay's secret lay in his dead body.
I took that body along, encased in the Martian preservative solidifix.
It was my idea that I could continue my examination once we were safe on a strange planet, but
I had reckoned without Genneth Clay.
What do you mean?"
I said slowly.
I said Clay was no fool, but I didn't know that with Martian stoicism he suspected the
worst and took his own ironic means of combating it.
He is the last lot of indirect to make that booster, a device which he said would increase
our takeoff speed.
He mounted it on the Marie Galant.
Mason, that device was no booster.
It was a time machine, so device as to catapult the ship, not into outer space, but into the
space time continuum.
It was a mechanism designed to throw the Marie Galant forward into the future.
A cloud of fear began to well over me.
"'What do you mean,' I said again.
Navigator Norris paced around his dusk.
I mean that the Marie Galant has not once left earth, has not in fact left the spot of
its morings, but has merely gone forward in time.
I mean that the nine landings, we made, were not stops on some other planets, but halting
stages of a journey into the future.
Had a bombshell burst over my head, the effect could have been no greater.
No perspiration began to ooze out on my forehead.
In a flash I saw the significance of the entire situation.
That was why Norris had been so insistent that we always return to the ship before dark.
He didn't want us to see the night sky and the constellations there, for fear we would
guess the truth.
That was why he had never permitted any of us in the bridge-cutty and why he had kept
all ports and observation shields closed.
With the names of the planets, Calora, Sturgella, and the others, and the positions on the chart,
I objected.
Norris smiled grimly.
All words created out of my imagination.
Like the rest of you, I knew nothing of the true action of the booster.
It was only gradually the truth dawned on me.
But by the time we had made our first landing, I had guessed.
That was why I demanded we always take organic surveyor readings.
I knew we had traveled far into future time, far beyond the life period of man on earth.
But I wasn't sure how far we had gone, and I lived with a hope that Clay's booster
might reverse itself and start carrying us backwards down the centuries.
For a long time I stood there in silence, a thousand mad speculations racing through
my mind.
How about that piece of Enderrit, I said at length?
It was chipped off an image in the ruins of a great building, a mile or so from here.
An image, repeated Norris, a faint glow of interest slowly rose in his eyes.
Then it died.
I don't know, he said.
It would seem to presuppose that the formula, both parts of it, was known by Clay, and
that he left it for posterity to discover.
All this time Mason had been standing there, eyes smoldering, lips and ugly line.
Now abruptly he took a step forward.
I've wanted to return this for a long time, he said.
He doubled back his arm and brought his fists smashing into Norris's jaw.
The navigator's head snapped backward.
He gave a low ground and slumped to the floor.
And that is where, by all logic, this tale should end.
But as you may have guessed, there is an anticlimax, what storytellers call a happy conclusion.
Mason, Brent and I worked, and worked alone, on the theory that the secret of the Enderrit
formula would be the answer to our return down the time trail.
We removed the body of Ganath Clay from its solid effects, envelop, and treated it with
every chemical process we knew.
By sheer luck, the fortieth trial worked.
A paste of Carbo-Genathon, mixed with the crushed seeds of the Martian iron flower, was
spread over Clay's chest and abdomen.
And there, in easily desiferable code, was not only the formula, but the working principles
of the ship's booster, or rather, time catapult.
After that, it was a simple matter to reverse the principle and throw us backward in the
time stream.
We are heading back as I write these lines.
If they reach Brent and you read them, it will mean our escape was successful, and that
we return to our proper slot in the epilogue of human events.
There remains, however, one matter to trouble me.
Navigator Norris.
I like the man.
I like him tremendously, in spite of his cold-blooded confession and past record.
He must be punished, of course.
But I, for one, would hate to see him given the death penalty.
It is a serious problem.
End of The Long Voyage by Carl Richard Jacobi.
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