a jovian compromise:
penal world
by
thornton ayre [= john russell fearn]
TEXT AND DISCUSSION

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 space suit 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 space suits 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 space ship 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 space suit, so designed as to exclude external and maintain internal pressures.

Even so, being a one-bundred-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 unsolidified, 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 dense scurrying clouds made the scene even more desolate, painted it with weak, washy colors, like some redstone plain of Earth at twilight. Gloom, depression and barrenness — mighty Jove had all these attributes.

Cardew stopped only once, to nourish himself, on his journey toward the jungle. He moved a switch on his helmet and a spring, releasing itself, dropped into his open mouth a vitamin pellet, following it with a rejuvenating drink-essence tablet. Neither of them were more than quarter of a centimeter in size, but so potent in effect that he felt renewed strength surge into his aching limbs.

He rose up again from the rock against which he had been lounging and staggered on — onward all through the drab afternoon, battling the eternal wind, muttering threats, in good American, upon Jupiter and all it contained.

As he had calculated, he reached the outskirts of the Fishnet at dusk. The twilight was brief, dimmed from murky drabness into night, relieved only slightly by the clouded glow of the attendant moons.

With lackluster eyes he peered into the shadows beneath the Fishnet trees. In every direction about their boles sprouted the weird below-zero forms of Jovian plants, bearing not the vaguest relation to Earthly vegetation, but patterned in some incomprehensible surrealist style, full of bars, cubes, oblongs and angles, more crystal then vegetational in form. Flowers there were none. Jovian vegetation, in the main, reproduced itself by fission and lived in the slow, creeping style of the unicell. There was something almost disgusting about the way the growths occasionally popped noisily and became two, growing with extreme slowness thereafter toward maturity and further reproduction. Cardew heard them bisect quite distinctly through his sensitive external helmet detector as he plodded onward —

Until he gained a Fishnet tree with branches lower than the rest —   To scramble into them, though they were only six feet from the ground, demanded enormous effort — took thirty minutes of muscle-wrenching strain. But once he was in their firmly spread, bedlike mass he relaxed with a sigh, satisfied that he was safe from the weird ammoniacal crawlers.

Beyond a wish that he could get out of his space suit and have a real breath of honest fresh air, he had no regrets. So far, so good. His eyes closed with leaden weariness; the tree branch moved up and down in the grip of the tycane slowly, ceaselessly —

As he half dozed, the detector phones brought in a medley of vaguely familiar noises above the wind’s whine, chief amongst which were the weird, half-human twitterings of the ostriloath — strange birdlike creature crossed vaguely between ostrich and sloth — and the deep bass grunting of the feather-sphere, the porcupine of Jove, rolling everywhere at terrific speed like a heavily flaked cannon ball. Familiar sounds all —

THEN, suddenly, Cardew jolted violently upright, wide awake, his heart slamming painfully with the sudden intensity of his effort, his ears still ringing with what had definitely been a human shout of fear!

“Damned delusions !” he breathed quickly, staring round and below at the crazy jungle. “Couldn’t have been — ”

He frowned in bewilderment. A scream from inside a helmet would be carried to the amplifier on the helmet exterior; even the slightest cry from anybody would be instantly enormously amplified by the dense atmosphere. But nobody else could be in such a cockeyed spot, surely —

Cardew broke off in his quick reflections and stared with amazed eyes through the clear patch between the nearest Fishnet trees. The light of Europa shone down through cloud breaks upon a space-suited figure lying flat on the ground, struggling against the gravity to tug out an oxygen pistol. A little distance away a hideous little-headed sican, violently strong, sheathed in an armor plating of frozen scales, fixed his intended prey with enormous glassy eyes. It was the largest of all Jovian animals, measuring five feet in length and nearly the same in width. Then it began to advance slowly on its six immensely powerful legs.

Almost as quickly as the danger registered in Cardew’s mind, he had dropped violently to the ground and tugged out his own oxygen pistol. With ponderously dragging feet, the ghastly pull of a nightmare’s dragging chains, he tried to run forward — fired his gun as he went.

Immediately a vicious stream of devastating flame spouted through the moonlight, momentarily lighted the mad glade with bluish-yellow fire. The force of the jet struck the sican clean in the center of its body, sent it rearing upward in a sudden paroxysm of searing pain.

Maddened, it twirled round and jumped dangerously near the sprawling, motionless figure. Then, at another vicious cut across its hideous face, it twisted round and traveled at high speed on its enormously strong legs into the jungle fastness.

Cardew felt the sweat of relief suddenly start to pour down his face. He replaced his gun and clumped slowly forward against the raging wind, turned over the prostrate figure with considerable effort. Jerking out his torch, he flashed the beam through the dense face glass, then started back in astonishment at beholding the perspiration-dewed face of a girl, eyes closed, hair raven-dark, lips pale with unconsciousness.

“Where in Heaven’s name did you drop from?” he said in bewilderment. Then he turned industriously to his first-aid kit and set to work with her helmet trappings. Swiftly he uncapped the triple valve socket connected to her respirator, screwed the heavy metal tube to the top of his smelling-salt container.

IMMEDIATELY the powerful aromatic ammonia fumes surged into her helmet, set her lips moving with sudden revulsion, forced her clear, dark eyes to open in sudden alarm.

“Better?” Cardew whispered into her external receiver, as he recapped her respirator and laid the salts container beside him.

                                                     Just a "reinforced" suit; not power-armour, it seems.  So how does he have the muscle to get around in jovian gravity?  Quick, reader, switch your disbelief-suspension to a higher notch, and carry on... you'll be all right.

   Here's some proper respect for Jovian gravity.  This is more like it!                                                       

Not a brilliant name for an invented element; just the word "titanium" without the "t".

Fearn knows about heavy elements' radioactive decay.  Not bad for 1937, I'd say.

Governor Mason sounds like an idealist.  A possible by-way of interest here.

Stid:  Machines using itanium, presumably - but why couldn't the reinforced suits for outside work be made to benefit from this technology?  It would make the tale vastly more plausible.   
Zendexor:  Agreed - but so long as the implausibility is shouted down by counter-incantations such as the stuff here about the temperature and atmosphere, I'd say the mood remains authentic enough...

A recent event.  A sign that we're nearing the end of the introductory background explanations.

A nicely-judged plot-element.  A goal to pursue, with a deadline.

"To escape the prison had not been difficult" - plausible enough.  Many a fictional prison has effectively used a hostile environment as the means to confine its inmates. 

Stid:  All very well, but how does Cardew reasonably hope to survive?

Zendexor:  He's desperate, isn't he?  It says he'd been contemplating suicide.

Stid:  But - to walk in armour under Jovian gravity for hundreds of miles?  Nope!  A few yards, maybe!  Facts are facts. 

Zendexor:  I know it's hard to swallow, but it seems that we OSS fans are able to access the impossible by a mental technique metaphorically akin to quantum tunnelling.  Admittedly, facts are facts, but also, mood is mood, and if it can reign supreme... if the author pulls off the stunt... you may experience something remarkable.  So be patient, Stid.

Stid: A gale... just in case things weren't already difficult enough for our hero.  But maybe it could help if it's at his back?

Zendexor:  Such "help" would be outweighed by the risk of falling over, in a situation where even Conan would find it hard to get up again.

The author both eats his cake and has it.  "Moving his arms with enormous effort", the hero nevertheless envisages a vast trek, promising the reader some real Jovian exploration of places with interesting names.  Treating the impossible as merely difficult - that's the game.  And for me, it works.

Practicalities, listed thus, amount to an authorial incantation, to summon up reader credulity.  The good reader will play along.  The special pistol is a nice touch, showing respect for the Jovian atmosphere.

A mere eight hours of trudging through two-and-a-half gravities.

I don't understand the point of this sentence.  Why should the dawn signify anything anyway?

Again we have the emphasis on how hard it is to move along, an emphasis intended as a substitute for dismissal of the whole idea as quite impossible.  Obviously the key issue is, do we, can we play along?  All I can report is, I do play along.  My credulity labours in co-operation with Cardew's labouring muscles.  A team effort.

A paragraph bearing two choice gifts: the description of the jungle and the nice realistic touch of the held-low mountains.  This sort of thing in my view makes the disbelief-suspension worth the effort.

Given the authorial decision to substitute "difficult" for "impossible", the writing is effective.  To say what Cardew finds "hard to believe" is a good touch, emphasizing a certain superficial parallelism of environments which grabs our attention in two opposite ways: via similarity of appearance combined with material difference.

Here's a promise to the reader: intelligent jovians!  Let's hope they do come up to the surface as much as possible...

Stid: Strange that the Terran prison was built so close to the especially dangerous Spot, seeing as they had all of Jupiter to choose from.

Zendexor:  Well, we must simply trust that they had some valid reason, and weren't completely daft.  A loyal reader could invent some excuse for the siting.  In fact you won't get far with appreciating OSS literature if you lack talent for excuse-production.

I've corrected the magazine's "plane" to "plain".

Gloomy description just part of the mood music; actually the landscape is fascinating, and this is evinced in other passages.

Practicalities like this helmet-switch stuff help the credibility...

Stid:  It sure needs help!

Zendexor: The author treads a tightrope - but with help from a well-disposed reader he treads it successfully.

Now before you say it, Stid, I know how implausible it is that on such a version of the Jovian surface one might still see the "attendant moons".  But be it noted that Poul Anderson boobs in this way too, in "Call Me Joe", if I remember correctly.  And if a hard science chap like Anderson can do it...

Great stuff.

Such description lifts the tale out of the category of perfunctory scene-setting.  The ideal in OSS tales is for a planetary setting to be sufficiently stereotypical to adhere to the literary archetype for that planet, but at the same time, within that category, to range inventively; and this story fits that bill. 

Stid: This guy makes Tarzan and Conan look like weaklings.

Zendexor:  Well, this is the future, after all.  Who knows what standards of physical fitness may have been achieved by then?

Just the place for more inventive description.  The author seizes his opportunities well.

...a sort of zoological tumble-weed, well suited to the environment

Aha - extra human interest on the way...

Credit for remembering that sound is amplified by a dense medium.  Given the hard-to-swallow aspects of the tale, it's helpful to pay compensation of this kind to realism.

Stid: Oh boy - just when you were complimenting Fearn on bestowing the occasional crumb of realism, we get the light of a Jovian moon again, miraculously shining "through cloud-breaks".

Zendexor:  But to make up for it, the sican, "largest of all Jovian animals", is just five feet long, and to my mind this is creditable and important, as it strikes the reader's mind's ear with a link to all the more realistic tunes in the tale's mood-music. 

Accept "moonlight" and be glad of the effectiveness of the flame-light description.  It's "contextual realism", one might say.  Fidelity to the parameters as set out by the author.  Consistency in exploiting its dramatic possibilities.

"clumped" - you've got to hand it to Fearn - excellent choice of verb

This works nicely: brief shocked exclamation and then to work with the emergency kit...  Dramatic credibility can exist without full marks being awarded for other sorts!