At times, the breath of adventure wafted from the spaceways—tales of hidden lands on alien worlds, fabulous creatures and heroic deeds. In that sense it was like the Venice of the Middle Ages, with its early reachings into Cathay and India and the mysterious South Seas. Only here it was the traversing of etheric trails to Mars and Ganymede and Rhea.
And there was a frontier—Saturn—beyond which organized enterprise had not yet advanced. It was a mixture of the prosaic and romantic, as with all such pioneering periods, and no one could say what the morrow might bring.
The two watchers from the tower drank in the scene, finding a moment of relaxation from their intense laboratory routine below.
Dr. Rodney Shelton was under thirty and over six feet, as lithely built as an athlete. One noticed his strong chin, firm lips and straight nose, but mostly his eyes. They were the steady, calm gray eyes of the dreamer and thinker, but in their depths lurked a certain quality, keenly alive, that marked him a man of action when the occasion demanded.
He did not look, outwardly, the scientist he was. But the wrinkles of concentration could appear in an instant on his forehead, when the brain behind it delved into a knotty problem.
Beside him, Myra Benning was wholly feminine, despite her shapeless laboratory smock and the lack of cosmetic artifices. She had the natural beauty equipment of pert nose, gold-sheen hair and soft blue eyes. But more than that, she had a mind, and a corresponding ambition to utilize it. She had chosen science as a career.
Suddenly both looked up, startled, as the shrill blast of sirens sounded from the direction of Tellus Space Port. The sirens were seldom used. It meant an emergency of some kind. Sometimes crippled ships, for instance, needed the port cleared for a dangerous landing.
Dr. Shelton and Myra could see ships hastily wheeling away, postponing take-off. One small freighter, about to settle for a landing, nosed up again with a revved blast of its under tubes, to circle and await its time.
A few minutes later the cause of the disturbance appeared—a long, torpedo-shaped craft that dropped almost precipitately from the clouds. Steam hissed from a hull that had been heated by rapid descent through Earth’s air envelope. The under tubes flamed a cherry red, smoothing the fall, but the ship landed bouncingly on its undercarriage and rolled forward a hundred yards before retarding blasts halted it. Then the volcanic throb of its engines ceased, abruptly.
The air-lock of the landed craft jerked open. Hurrying officials from the drome met the flyers coming out. Excitement pulsed in the air. To Rodney Shelton and his companion, it was like a play being enacted on a faraway stage. The figures were tiny toys.
“Wonder what that’s all about?” mused the man. “They’ve come from somewhere in a big hurry.” He leaned forward, straining his eyes. “Looks like an exploration ship, by the size of its fuel hold. Can’t make out the name.”
“Exploration ship!” Myra Benning caught her breath. “My brother Hugh is with the Tycho—” She shook her head. “But that isn’t due back for three weeks yet. It wouldn’t be Hugh’s ship.”
She glanced at her wristwatch. “We’ve been up here a half hour,” she stated crisply. “I think we’d better go down now, Dr. Shelton.”
“You’re like the voice of my conscience,” the man grinned. “But you’re right—back to work.”
They left the tower to descend to their laboratory.
The builders of the New York World’s Fairs of 1939 and 1966 had called it the “World of Tomorrow.” They would have been utterly amazed, however, to see what reared on those same grounds a century later.
To the eye, it was simply a group of giant, windowless buildings; the conditioning chambers of ETBI—Extra-Terra Bio-Institute. But within them, in sealed cubicles, were a hundred varieties of temperature, pressure, lighting, and the other strange conditions of extraterrestrial environments. It was a large-scale biological project that had meant much in Earth’s colonization of the planets.
One building was devoted solely to Martian conditioning. Men and women emerged from there with bodies whose metabolism was suited perfectly to Martian environment, with its utterly dry, wispy air, freezing climate, and light gravity. They were taken to Mars in specially conditioned space ships, a steady stream of them.
Mars had been the first to be colonized. Already the resident population of Earth people on the Red Planet was over five million. A dozen industries thrived there. Beautiful ceramics from Martian clay were much in demand on Earth. And the exquisitely fine cloths from Martian spider webs.
Another building conditioned colonists to withstand the torrid dampness of Venus, ten times as trying to humans as the hottest jungles of Africa or South America. These people reaped tremendous harvests of the Cloudy Planet’s boundless fertility. Crops ripened in a short month in the hot, steamy plains that stretched endlessly under veiled skies. Imported grains from Earth grew in riotous abundance. More than half of Earth’s staple food supplies came from the rich farms of Venus.
All this would have been impossible to normal, unconditioned Earth people. They would have had to labor in sealed suits against adverse environment, with all the insurmountable handicaps of such methods. But as people whose metabolism had been altered to fit the new conditions, they lived and breathed as freely as though born on those planets.
And how had human metabolism, the stabilized result of millions of years of evolution on Earth, been changed? In the final analysis, it all centered about the use of one remarkable product of biological science, developed twenty-five years before.
It was called, for the press and public, just “adaptene,” but only the most trusted officials of the Institute knew what it was by formula. By its very nature, it had to be shrouded in secrecy and kept from the hands of unscrupulous individuals. The Earth Union Government controlled exclusively the manufacture and use of adaptene.
Adaptene was the parent substance of all hormones in the living body. It controlled all metabolism, and therefore all the body processes to the last one.
Most remarkable of the applications of this near-miraculous substance had been the conquest of Jupiter’s inimical environment. It had seemed impossible at first. Jupiter’s surface had a crushing gravity, almost three times that of Earth, making human bones and muscles crack in a few hours.
A moisture-choked heat, from the titanic layers of pressing gases, promised constantly parched throats and slowly boiling skin. Worst of all, the atmosphere itself was laden with gases, besides oxygen, never meant for earthly lungs—methane, ammonia, and even traces of searing bromine that exuded from volcanic sources and gave the whole atmosphere its brownish tinge.
The natural life-forms of Jupiter’s wild environment were adapted by millions of years of evolution. How could Earthmen, nurtured in a gentler climate, meet that terrible challenge?
It was tried. A series of conditioning rooms had been prepared, with successively greater air pressure, heat and foreign gases. In a way, it was like the Twentieth Century compression chambers, which had been used to prepare divers for the great pressures under the sea. Three Earthmen, given strong doses of adaptene, had gone from chamber to chamber. Leaden suits were prepared for them and weight was added day by day. Their metabolism had faithfully undergone the necessary changes!
At the end of three months, they had reached the final conditioning room, which practically duplicated Jupiter’s conditions. Their skins had become tough and heat-resisting. Their lungs filtered out methane, ammonia and bromine automatically, retaining only the necessary oxygen. Their muscles, motivated by superactive adrenalin, easily supported five hundred pounds of weight without tiring. All this through the magic touch of adaptene, working in its mysterious way throughout every cell and vein.
The men had been sent to Jupiter. One of them succumbed to the continued harshness of life there, but the other two survived. With this proof of success, other men were bio-conditioned, and soon a settlement was founded and work begun to extract the chemical riches of Jupiter’s soil.
Now,