Distress Signal

Suddenly the ship had gone haywire. Neither Carl nor Rex was technician enough to understand that the etheric warp engines had been overdriven. The engines, down to the last accumulator cell, exploded with a mighty, tearing roar that blew gaping holes in bulkheads, deck-plates, and overheads. Carl was knocked out, but Rex held on.

He crash-landed the ship--on Worta, the lone planet of the unlisted, dying red star. The ship landed in a snow-bank, and the heat of the landing turned tons of snow into steaming, boiling water. By the time they had inventoried the situation, there was a smooth lake of ice around them and the ship was frozen in up to the edge of the airlocks.

Rex said shakily, "We'll have to use the auxiliary engines."

Which was a bit optimistic. The auxiliaries weren't etheric warpers. They were rocket engines. The fuel a ship like this carried would take it a few billion miles, but what was that in the vastness of interstellar space, with the nearest solar system two light-years away?

Carl's long slim fingers bit mercilessly into the palms of his hands. His voice was a thin cry of protest, drifting out over the sterile vistas of Worta, the ice planet.

"Rex, we're done for. We can't get back. We're marooned."

They were marooned, but not done for. The Wortans found them one day and took them to their city a thousand feet under the planet. These Wortans, the few of them that remained, were quiet, kindly people. Ages ago, they had fought their last retreat from the bitter surface cold. They had dug beneath the crust. They were savages now, their former mighty civilization forgotten, and were unlearned, save in agriculture and the skillful breeding of such fur-and-meat-producing animals as the col, the friga, the hask-nor. And, since they were human in form, themselves, they accepted these strangers that came among them.

They never came to the surface of Worta, but that unexplainable sense of theirs which enabled them to perceive disharmony, much as one flinches at a sour discord, brought them up to investigate.

Carl was grateful to them for their simple wisdom, their understanding. From the first, however, Rex was a "sour chord" among them. An inner conceit, perhaps growing out of a race consciousness, painted him with an unmasked hostility.

But it was all of a year after their arrival before M'hort, chief of the Wortans, revealed his feelings to Carl. He drew Carl into his _meegan_--his rock-dwelling--one day. M'hort was tall as Carl, but his eyes were faceted and insect-like, great horny reptilian lumps stood out on his bony-joints, and his smoothly-scaled skin reflected the eternal fluorescence of this underground land like a polished mirror.

Carl's smile was rueful when M'hort explained about Rex. "Rex never was one to get along with people. He told me you people don't like him."

"How sad!" said M'hort.

"He's never stopped dreaming that we might get back to Earth."

"If only," said M'hort, "he would join us at our festivals as you do! If only he would laugh when we gather for meals! But, ah, he will do none of these things. Many times he sits in his meegan and broods. You say he insists there is a way to return to your planet?"

Carl was embarrassed for his friend. "When we first landed," he explained, "Rex thought that somehow we could use the auxiliaries."

"Ah, yes," said M'hort, trying hard to understand these things which were strange to him. "The auxiliaries."

"You see, we can manufacture unlimited quantities of rocket fuel with the fuel-generator that most ships carry. It's a catalytic process, the raw material being any fairly dense rock.

"The auxiliaries were a sort of obsession with Rex. I couldn't control him. In the few days before you found us, he manufactured seven or eight tons of merbohydrate. He filled the ship full. I let him have his way. We lifted the ship and left Worta. Rex was certain we could find another planet and get back to Earth by a stepping-stone method."

"Ah, but there are no other planets near enough," said M'hort, recalling this fact which Carl had previously taught him.

"Within light-years. As I say, I let Rex have his way until half the fuel was used up. Then I had to fight him."

Carl looked ashamedly at his fists. "I knocked him out as we came back to Worta. But somehow he never gave up the idea that we could use the auxiliaries somehow."

"How very sad! And you say there is little chance of the Earth people coming for you?"

"Very little. Worta and its sun aren't even entered in the Star Catalogue. It's an unlisted system, although the Stellar Survey Institution has been working like crazy the past hundred years to survey the whole works."

M'hort touched the boy's hand sympathetically. "Someday they will come for you! But, in the meantime, it would be wonderful if your friend saw the futility of his ways."

During the first year of their stay on Worta, Rex stayed close to Carl, confiding in him, making those trips to the surface of the snowed-under world. Then he took to wandering the great winding corridors and chambers and dead underground cities of Worta alone. Carl would have liked to explore with him, for there was an unending fascination in this dying civilization. Once upon a time the Wortans had been great. The quaint webbed architecture of the spired and domed buildings, the delicate traceries, on the walls and the sculptured figures standing in the squares--these were a timeless wonder. But Rex didn't want Carl along, for Rex had closed up clam-like, his broad, square face held a sullen fanaticism, and Carl knew he had his mind set on escape.