Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs (33 page)

Having perfected the power amplifier technology of the Kapars, I was given the honor of leading the first expedition to our nearest heavenly neighbor, the planet Tonos. Handon Gar had begged to go with me, and I agreed, little knowing what trouble that would bring.

The night before we left, I kissed Harkas Yamoda and discovered that perhaps our relationship could grow to be more. I resolved to find out when I returned.

Our journey would be over five hundred and seventy thousand miles, and, even at our great speed, it would take us the better part of a week to reach the nearest planet.

We rose early that morning, Handon Gar and myself. We were seen off by the Commissioner for War and no less than the Elianhai—the High Commissioner—himself. Needless to say, both Handon Gar and myself were much pleased by the attention we received.

“Be sure to come back, Tangor,” the Commissioner for War ordered. “We will want to know how well the power amplifier works.” He gave me a conspiratorial wink as he added in a lower voice, “We have plans for that which will give the Kapars a nasty turn, don’t you worry!”

The Elianhai turned to him, his brows furrowed. “Is it really wise to send the only working copy and the only one who knows how it works on the same mission together?”

“It’s true that he’s the only one who knows,” the Commissioner agreed, “but we have the plans, and he’s explained them to our engineers.”

“Besides, he’s the only one capable of making repairs if anything goes wrong,” Handon Gar added in agreement.

The High Commissioner pursed his lips thoughtfully, then nodded. “I suppose that is so.” He smiled at me. “In that case, Tangor, go swiftly and return hastily!”

“As you wish, Elianhai,” I said, gesturing for Handon Gar to precede me into our craft.

It was packed with supplies, including oxygen, cold weather gear, and food for three weeks. We also had a small supply of weapons: we couldn’t be sure what sort of reception we would receive from the natives—or the native life-forms. I recalled my encounter with the zebra-lion with a shiver.

One innovation I had brought to Poloda was the flight checklist and we used it now, causing a certain amount of consternation for Handon Gar.

“I do not understand,” he said as I started through the list, “Did we not check all this last night?”

“We did,” I told him. “But it is better to be certain now when we can still fix things, than at one hundred thousand miles, don’t you think?”

He frowned. “I suppose.”

The checklist completed, I radioed the tower for permission to take the runway.

“You are cleared. Good luck!” the tower replied.

We reached the end of the runway, and I set the brakes before adding full power to the engines.

“Why aren’t we using the power amplifier?” Handon Gar asked as the roar of the engines rose.

“We have to be high in the sky before we can receive the power,” I told him. Why I had not shown him the installation that I’d set up which directed the power heavenward, I did not know. In the end, I was lucky that I hadn’t.

I released the brakes and pushed the engines to full power, and we roared down the runway. It took us a long time to reach flying speed, we were so heavily laden. We climbed slowly and steadily into the sky.

At ten thousand feet, I engaged the power amplifiers and our speed suddenly soared. I pitched the nose of our fast craft upwards, and, beside me, Handon Gar roared with approval as we pushed out to the edge of our world and beyond.

Our adventure had begun.

We’d brought cameras with us, and film, too, but early on I had to caution Handon Gar from taking too many pictures for fear of running out of film too early. Not that I could blame him in any way, and he would sometimes chide me for the same reason.

Our first round of picture-taking occurred when we left Poloda’s atmosphere and entered the thinner air between the worlds. We quickly realized that while the air might be breathable, it was so cold that it would freeze our lungs. However, with some fiddling, we rigged up a compressor system so that we could refill our air tanks along the way. This was a great relief to me, because it meant that we didn’t have to worry about running out of air on our trip even if it took longer than the three weeks we’d planned.

No one on Poloda could say for certain if the other planets were habitable. It was possible the air of the other worlds was toxic.

Landing on another world would be a problem too, as we had no way of knowing whether there would be runways on the distant worlds—any more than we knew whether there would be inhabitants. I had, however, accepted the advice of one of the older engineers and had our craft fitted with inflatable pontoons so that we could land on water. Handon Gar looked askance when I told him, so I didn’t need to ask whether he’d had any experience with floatplanes. Fortunately, I had had some in my former existence and was certain that the skills had followed me to Poloda along with my piloting.

On the third day we noticed that both Tonos and Poloda were the same size, and, gradually Tonos increased in front of us while Poloda diminished in the rear.

We grew increasingly anxious to see what we would find on Tonos, and I had to physically restrain Gar from zipping through all our film, not that I could fault him—the new planet was alluring.

I wished that we had thought to pack the chemicals and gear required to develop our film so that we could compare the images of Poloda with the steadily unfolding images of Tonos. Instead, we had to rely on maps and our own memories—Gar’s was better than mine.

What struck us both was how little blue sea we saw and how much white reflected from the planet looming in front of us.

“Maybe there’s a lot of cloud,” Handon Gar suggested as we puzzled over it.

“Or some gas,” I said, thinking of the hideous chlorine gas that had been used in the trenches of the First World War. When I mentioned it to him, Gar made a face and then grew thoughtful.

“We have not heard of such poisons at home,” he told me. “Are they really that powerful?”

“Some were even worse,” I said, launching into my father’s account of mustard gas at the Battle of the Marne.

“
Thousands
died in one assault?” he exclaimed. “When we get back, you must mention this to the Commissioner for War. We could wipe out whole cities in one raid!”

“It was a horror weapon, soonest forgotten,” I said, surprised and saddened at his viciousness. “And never did we willingly use it on unarmed civilians.”

“All the Kapars are armed,” Gar said as though that solved the problem. I recalled that he’d spent several years in their prison camp and wondered how much that had affected his sanity.

“That doesn’t matter, as we are looking for a new world of our own,” I reminded him. “The only question is whether we can breathe the air of this one.”

“This gas will not penetrate our breath masks?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head firmly. “In fact—” I cut myself short, deciding that he didn’t need to learn that on Earth we’d quickly learned to develop gas masks as protection. “I think our biggest question is whether we can find a place to land.”

We spent the next several days carefully watching the approaching planet, searching for likely landing places.

“I see no sign of cities,” Gar said one morning as I relieved him. We mostly shared the day but split watch across the nights, dimming our cabin from white to red lights. Ahead of us, half of Tonos was in shadow, half reflecting the light from the sun, Omos, as we were approaching the planet from the side. Of course, the planet rotated, just like Poloda, so we saw different continents wheel into and out of view in the slow, twenty-four-hour rotation. “There should be lights on the dark side.”

“Only if they are so advanced that they use bright lights for their streets,” I reminded him. “Would you see any lights from the sky over Orvis?”

“No,” Gar grunted, conceding my point. “But then, are you suggesting that this planet is also fighting a war?”

“No, only that lack of lights doesn’t mean lack of civilization.”

“Well, we’ll know soon enough,” He said, ending the conversation and heading back to the rest area.

We only had to wait another day. Tonos now filled our entire view and Poloda, from the rear gunner’s seat, looked like a distant speck.

“Now what?” Gar asked as we surveyed the view beneath us.

“Now we start our engines,” I told him.

“What? Why?”

“Because our engines breathe oxygen,” I told him. “If they start, we know they have enough oxygen to function.”

“And then?”

“Then we land.”

The engines did start and I shut down our power amplifier with some misgivings, not certain how we would arrange our return journey—for the power amplifiers only pushed—neither Horthal Wend nor I had considered how to make one that would
pull.

“So we land,” Handon Gar said, gesturing broadly toward the clouds below us. “Where?”

“We’ll see,” I told him with a confidence I did not truly feel. Truth be told, Handon Gar’s attitude was beginning to irritate me. He seemed to wax both hot and cold on so many things. His attitude seemed more Kapar than Unis: like the way he reveled at the thought of gassing innocent civilians and the eagerness with which he hoped to find civilizations at war.

It never occurred to him that the inhabitants of Tonos might not only be peaceful but might also be far more advanced than those of Poloda.

I, who had experienced death and rebirth, preferred to find a path to peace and, perhaps, someday, a family. Perhaps, even, a family with Yamoda.

The flight controls bucked as winds picked up, and I found myself concentrating solely on the task at hand.

We descended steadily through fiercer and fiercer winds. I worried that perhaps we were entering a gale or even a hurricane, but then the winds died as we entered the lower atmosphere and steadied down.

“There’s nothing in front of us!” Handon Gar said, waving his hand at the banks and banks of fog that enveloped us.

The Unis had developed a form of radio guidance similar to the ones the Allies were working on back on Earth, but they were subject to jamming and, worse, they could be used as an attack beacon by the Kapars, so they hadn’t progressed far.

“Try the radio!” I told him. Handon Gar looked at me in disbelief but turned the set on anyway. “Just see if you can find any signal.”

Enlightenment shone on his face, and he began to slowly turn the dial, saying, “We should have thought of that on the way here!”

Indeed, we should have, but we hadn’t. As I fought the controls and tried to imagine what our altitude was, Handon Gar worked with the radio, which picked up only static.

Suddenly we burst through the lowest layer of clouds and I found us over water. Ahead was a fuller whiteness—snow? We’d come through some flakes on our way down. Fortunately, our craft was equipped with de-icing gear, so we did not have to worry about our wings or propellers becoming bogged down with ice.

I glanced at our thermometer and saw that the outside temperature had risen to slightly above freezing. I guided our craft closer to what I was calling the shore and began to follow it northward, looking for a likely landing place.

“I see something!” Handon Gar shouted, pointing to his right. I craned my neck and turned our craft to the right. “Wait . . . no, I see a light!”

I didn’t see the light he mentioned but took him at his word. The weather was foul, and I was not at all certain that we’d be able to climb back out. Instead, I looked at the ground and then at the shoreline. There was a possibility. I turned us around, ignoring Gar’s cry of dismay.

“I’m going to land on the sea, and we’ll taxi to the shore,” I told him, pressing the button which deployed our inflatable pontoons and simultaneously reducing our power and lowering our flaps. Our craft settled like a falling rock until I added power to compensate for the change in pitch.

The green lights for the pontoons flashed on my panel, showing that they’d deployed. Of course, I couldn’t be certain, because, when we’d installed them, we’d never considered icy conditions. It was possible that they’d ruptured and that our precious compressed air was hissing out a hole rather than keeping the pontoons inflated.

The only way to know for certain was to land. On the rough sea below.

I turned back to the shore and reduced power further, increasing the flaps to the fullest.

“Get ready,” I called. Gar shot me a nervous look and braced himself in his seat, his hands clenched under his legs, leaving me in sole control of our craft.

I had forgotten how difficult it is to land a floatplane. Watching one land, the whole operation looks easier than landing on a runway or even a grass strip. But there is no horizon to compare against, and our altimeter was useless, as we had no way of knowing what pressure to set.

Even though it was freezing outside, I found myself sweating.

I looked out the side window to better gauge our height. Any moment. I angled our nose up slightly so that we wouldn’t dig in and cartwheel when we touched down.

A sudden lurch to the right caused my heart to skip, but I was experienced enough to compensate even before I knew it. Level again, we lurched another time and then another and then—we were down.

“That’s it?” Handon Gar exclaimed, looking around in amazement. “We’re down?”

“Shh, let me work,” I snapped, still concentrating on the waves and the view in front. Beside me, I could feel Handon Gar fume angrily. I had no time to be polite; the sea was choppy, and I kept our power up so that we didn’t bog down or tip—it was difficult work, made more so by our circumstances and my rustiness in floatplane work.

Steadily we made our way to the shore. I was careful to jig and jag to get different views while never getting our floats stuck in the trough of a wave—where we would be easily capsized.

I identified the least jagged section of shore—it almost looked like it had been made or sculpted—and blipped our throttles to make the floats climb up the grade and pull us out of the sea. When I was certain we were far enough from the shore to avoid any rogue waves, I cut our engines.