World Without Chance: Classic Pulp Science Fiction Stories in the Vein of Stanley G. Weinbaum. John Russell Fearn
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We don’t want to progress. We understand most scientific things but are not interested enough to develop them. Our theory is that the more refined you become the less happiness you have.”
Fearn clearly had great fun with this amazing character, and he provides much light relief, as well as figuring in some key plot developments. He was to feature to even greater advantage in later novels, electing to join forces with the Amazon out of his own, queer sense of loyalty.
“Penal World” by “Thornton Ayre” was submitted to Astounding Stories and accepted by its editor Orlin Tremaine on 23 July 1937. Thus encouraged, Fearn went on to produce more stories in the same vein.
PENAL WORLD
Mad, idiotic world! Air of absolute poison—trees basically ammonium carbonate—creatures living in a temperature of a hundred and twenty degrees below zero centigrade—
James Cardew, former American citizen, was on Jupiter through no fault of his own. He was in no way to blame for the fact that he now stood inside his enormously reinforced spacesuit gazing out on a landscape incredibly vast and rugged, stretching to a colossal distance, bounded at remoteness by the boiling horror of the seven-thousand-mile-wide Great Red Spot.
Jupiter was the penal world of the system, last working place of the criminals of Earth, Mars, and Venus. And for a very good reason! Once a space machine landed on Jupiter it was common knowledge that, in the case of the huge convict machines at least, it could never leave. The titanic gravity of the planet claimed large-sized ships absolutely.
James Cardew had been framed by certain jealous officials of the space ways—shipped to Jupiter because he knew too much of graft and corruption in high places. For two years he had worked among the bitter-hearted men at the settlement—a vast underground abode of itanium metal, Periodic No. 187, vastly heavy, and the only known metal capable of withstanding, for six continuous months, the unbelievable pressure of Jupiter’s atmosphere and down-drag. By the time the six months were up, this highly radioactive metal began to collapse—
The convicts’ entire life, therefore, consisted of building up the very walls that hemmed them in, And twenty miles away, where the walls were likewise always being repaired by good behavior men, was the underground residence of Governor Mason and his family, voluntarily marooned on this colossal world.
Despite the fact that within the governor’s abode and the settlement there were machines which nullified the crushing gravitation, men did go berserk at times—warders and prisoners alike. Some went to the exterior—a freely permitted act—quite unprotected, to die instantly in an atmosphere of pure ammoniated hydrogen at a frigid temperature of a hundred and twenty degrees below zero centigrade.
Others were smarter. They frisked itanium spacesuits and furtively escaped in them—but they were never heard of again. Either way it was suicide.
James Cardew had done pretty much the same thing. Suicide had been in his mind for months; he’d been on the verge of walking unprotected to the exterior. Then, from the external reflectors in the main machine room, he had seen a spaceship of the private variety—small and easy to handle—fall like a brilliant comet in the dense atmosphere, dropping finally about two hundred miles due east. If he could reach that ship he might, by very reason of its smallness, break the effect of Jupiter’s drag and get back to Earth, square his wrongful conviction.
It was pretty obvious that the vessel had been accidentally caught in the giant world’s enormous attractive field; maybe the pilot had been an amateur, unauthorized by the space flying committees. Whatever it was, James Cardew realized that he had to reach that ship within three weeks before the violent atmosphere and pressure made an end of it.
Three weeks—two hundred miles across Jupiter’s terrible terrain. To escape the prison had not been difficult. It was now that the difficulties began.
Cardew’s gray eyes were grim behind the six-inch, unbreakable glass of his helmet; his lean, powerful face was set in grimly determined lines, the lines of a man accustomed, by now, to bearing inexorable strain. For every step he took he was forced to raise a weight about three times in excess of normal, including his densely heavy spacesuit, so designed as to exclude external and maintain internal pressures.
Even so, being a one hundred and sixty eight-pound man, he weighed four hundred and forty-eight pounds on Jupiter, with his space suit and heavy equipment added to it. It made of his body a vastly heavy, aching machine.
He took stock of his position from behind the protection of two upjutting rocks of tremendously dense material. They afforded him a little shelter from the tycane—technical name for the vast two hundred and fifty mile-per-hour wind forever raging from pole to pole of the giant world. Yet by reason of the enormous gravity the effect of the wind on a human being was about equal to a gale of one hundred miles per hour. Around the Great Red Spot, the one remaining portion of Jupiter still un-solidified, despite the frigid cold of the rest of the surface, the tycane had been known to reach the incredible velocity of over four hundred miles per hour—but then the Spot was recognized by all experts as the fester spot of Jove, seven thousand miles of bubbling, densely heavy materials—
Cardew, moving his arms with enormous effort, studied his compass inside its protective itanium case, and took stock of his direction. His route would lead him to the Fishnet Jungle, through a cleft of the Seven Peak Mountains, and after that along the shores of the Turquoise Ocean. The points were fairly familiar in his mind, but the jungle was the main thing that worried him—how he was going to pick his way through its weird mass.
Finally he pushed his compass back in place on his back and swiftly checked over his heavily shielded equipment—first-aid pack, down to a common container of smelling salts, tabloid provisions, and an oxygen-jet pistol, the only practicable weapon of destruction in an atmosphere containing vast preponderances of hydrogen and ammonia. Not much equipment, but enough in a world where every scrap of weight added to an already crushing burden.
Cardew braced himself and emerged from his protection into the full blast of the eternal wind. Since dawn had arrived about an hour ago, he had about eight clear hours in which to make further progress; with a bit of luck he might reach the Fishnet Jungle in that time. That it was already quite visible to him in the weak daylight filtering through the writhing clouds signified nothing. There were always the tycane and the constant down-drag to be reckoned with. He moved with labored effort, the strain bathing him in perspiration inside his hot, heavy suit.
To the rear, now far distant, gleamed the sunken dome of the penal settlement, and farther away still the governor’s habitation. To left and right there was naught but hard red ground. Once it had all been like the Red Spot; now it had cooled to produce an effect as dreary as anything that could be imagined.
Only the Fishnet Jungle, with its blunted trees and weird tracery branches—from which the fanciful name was derived—provided any relief in the otherwise crushed monotony. Even the highest summit of the distant Seven Peak Mountains only reached a thousand feet in height, held down by the mighty gravitation.
Cardew struggled on, forcing his weight-anguished body into the teeth of the tycane. He found it hard to believe that the wind outside his helmet was absolute poison, that the trees of the distant jungle were basically ammonium carbonate, living in a temperature of a hundred and twenty degrees below centigrade zero.…
Mad, idiotic world! It was populated, too, by creatures as mad as their environment. Cardew had heard of them—mighty strong things with a fairly high scientific intelligence—known as the joherc, derived from Jovian Hercules. Where they abided, however, was something of a mystery; since they were rarely seen on the surface.
Grunting with effort. Cardew went on slowly, slipping and sliding on ground of enormous hardness, one wary eye fixed on the distant, quivering upspoutings of molten matter from the Great Red Spot. No telling when it might decide to erupt. It had a nasty habit now and again of covering thousands of square miles of Jupiter with molten chemicals. That, in a landscape normally bitterly cold, produced effects almost too cataclysmic for imagination—certainly death for a lone traveler.
Occasionally the fitful gleams of sunlight through the