Son of the Stars Read online

  Son of the Stars

  A Science Fiction Novel

  by Raymond F. Jones

  * * *

  Jacket illustration by Alex Schomburg

  Cécile Matschat, Editor

  Cary Carmer, Consulting Editor

  * * *

  Copyright, 1952 By Raymond F. Jones

  Copyright in Great Britain and in the British Dominions and Possessions Copyright in the Republic of the Philippines

  FIRST PRINTING, JANUARY, 1952

  SECOND PRINTING, MAY, 1954

  M-554

  Back-Yard Scientists

  I have meant this book to be a tribute to the “backyard scientists” of America. These are the thousands of boys and girls like Ron Barron—whose story this is—who work in basements or attics or backyard laboratories to recreate the drama of science in their own way. These are the scientists of tomorrow.

  A ten-year-old boy in Texas begins the search by producing rotten-egg gas with his Christmas chemistry set. At sixteen he has a well-equipped basement laboratory. A girl in Oregon is astonished at the wonder of her first glimpse through a microscope in Junior High. When she enters college she takes her laboratory with her—a box containing her own microscope and a few hundred slides.

  In the years to come we have a responsible chemist in an industrial laboratory, and a technician searching for new wonder drugs found in molds from every part of the world. There are the future scientists of America. And this is how they start.

  This is the beginning, and all the steel and brick buildings of a college campus or a thousand learned professors cannot duplicate such a moment. The capacity for wonder cannot be taught. It is there from the beginning, or not at all.

  Fortunately, that great wonder is in most of us, in the beginning, at least. Unfortunately, it survives in only a few of us. In the fury of living, a sunset becomes just a sunset, and seeds and leaves a nuisance to be raked and burned.

  But the backyard scientists, and those in the industrial and university laboratories are the ones in whom wonder has not died or been smothered. Some, like Ron Barron, have well-equipped laboratories in which the techniques of several sciences are practiced. And their work is not mere “play” science. Solid studies and very real contributions have been made by some of these young people in basement, attic, or backyard labs.

  Their work is not well known publicly, except when brought to light deliberately as in the annual Science Talent Search conducted by one of the leading electrical manufacturers. Here, in a contest for university scholarships, an astonishing amount of talent is exhibited by teenage boys and girls when they place their research projects before the judges.

  Every field of science is represented. Mathematics, electronics, biology, astronomy—everything a child might wonder about, the shapes of the world, the lightning in the sky, the bugs under a stone, the stars overhead.

  It is a thing of great importance for our nation and for the whole world that wonder be not crushed in those in whom it still survives. For these are the researchers who will man the laboratories of industry and universities in the next decades.

  So I am writing this book also as a plea that those might be helped to find out more of the useful things of the universe. I have known what it means to set aside a project because essential wire or parts could not be bought.

  To parents fortunate enough to have a backyard scientist in the family, I would say that nothing will be remembered with such gratitude in later years as the assistance, financially and morally, that will make possible the research the young scientist wishes to pursue, whether it be a homemade telescope, or a bug collection, amateur radio, or a chemistry lab.

  But something still more is needed now. Scientists of the past could be content with their apparatus and their learned papers. Today a scientist aware of only the physical universe is no more than half a scientist. There is the world of fellow men—who are of equal or even greater importance than the world of atoms and stars. We have come upon this fact almost too late, and the older generation of scientists are sometimes bewildered by the anger of their fellow men because they have made possible the destruction of a world.

  The new scientists need to be as much aware of the value of their fellow men as of the value of the atom. They need a spiritual and moral value that has never been a prerequisite before.

  A child wonders about these things, too, but sometimes it seems that they are even more difficult to explain than the green of a leaf, or the colors of a sunset. But they must be explained lest wonder about them cease also.

  The story of Ron Barron and his contact with an inhabitant of another world is fiction, a story laid of necessity in the future, when science might make it possible. But Ron Barron is not fiction. He is a synthesis of the best in the many backyard scientists I have known. If it happened to one of them, this is the way it would happen.

  R. F. J.

  Chapter 1 The Wreck

  The dog liked the wind in his face. With his paws on the door of the car he pressed his sharp nose beyond the cowling and crouched there, ears flattened and eyes half closed against the rush of air, Ron Barron reached over and ruffled the collie’s thick hair behind his ears.

  “Better pull your head in, Pete. I don’t want to lose you on a turn.”

  The dog moved back reluctantly and sat up on the seat as if impatient that they should be taking so long to get wherever they were going. But Ron glanced at the speedometer and lifted his foot sharply from the pedal.

  They were on the flats east of Longview, moving toward the mountains. Ron was used to speeding here. This was the section of highway that was roped off by the police on Saturday afternoons for the speed runs of the Mercury Club members. These were the Long-view hotrod car builders and owners.

  But no matter how important this trip, Ron knew he couldn’t afford to be speeding now. As president of the club he would really earn them a black eye that way. It was tough enough convincing the public that hot-rodders could be respectable.

  Ron’s car was the pride of the club. A long flattened torpedo, brilliant in its lacquered natural aluminum finish, it was the result of hundreds of hours of shaping metal and machining engine parts.

  Ron had watched the sun rising a few minutes before, as he left the house with Pete and his gun. Now, approaching the eastern hills, he was in shadow again, and the chill morning air tightened his skin with pleasurable coolness. This was a hunting trip, he had told the folks. But he hadn’t told them the thing he intended to hunt.

  Atop the backyard building he used for a shop and laboratory there was a homemade meteor recorder that scanned the skies of Longview night after night, leaving a record of shooting stars that passed over the valley. A dozen times during the past two years he had obtained records indicating that meteorites had fallen in the surrounding mountains. Four times he had succeeded in locating fragments of these and they now rested on the specimen shelves in the lab. Last night his device had left the most intense record he had ever seen.

  It indicated an enormous mass falling across the valley and landing in the mountains beyond town. He wondered that half the town was not out looking for it this morning. Luckily, it fell during the early morning hours when few were awake to see it, and so he appeared to be alone in the search for it this morning.

  Finding it was largely a matter of luck. His instrument had given him the direction of fall, but the meteorite could be anywhere along a five-mile stretch of that direction line, and the terrain was rough.

  Pete, the collie, sniffed the air exuberantly as the car left the flats and began its climb into the foothills and wound slowly through the mountains beyond. On the skyline ridge overlooking the valley Ron stopped the car in a small clearing off the road.
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  He sat for a moment examining the chart he had made from the recording of his instrument the night before. This was the closest he could drive to the near end of the directional line along which the meteorite might lie.

  “Come on, boy, let’s go,” he said.

  He opened the door and Pete slid carefully to the ground, racing ahead between the familiar trees. Ron followed, but a few feet from the car he hesitated and returned for his gun. Pete raced back.

  “We might as well take it along. Maybe we can get ourselves a squirrel this morning.”

  He checked the box of shells in his shirt pocket and slipped one into the breech of the gun. Then they resumed their pathway through the trees.

  It was an old story to Pete, for they had taken many morning tramps such as this in search of squirrels and other game during season. The hills were familiar ground to him and Ron.

  There was no hour quite so peaceful or unhurried as this, Ron thought. He stopped occasionally and turned his field glasses on a distant bird in the high pines that lined the hills. Within minutes he spotted a dozen Blue Jays and almost as many Orioles. Then he checked his chart once more and brought out his pocket compass. He was on the line along which he intended to search.

  “This way, Pete,” he called to the dog trotting far ahead.

  The going became rougher. They left the trail and began working through the trees and underbrush. After a quarter mile of stiff climbing Ron came to a high point and raised the field glasses once more.

  Any meteorite as large as the one indicated by his instrument should have carved a sizable path in the growth on the hills. He searched carefully ahead and behind, and on either side of the imaginary line he had laid out. No marking of the kind he sought appeared. Ahead of him was a shallow ravine. And beyond that another hill. And farther in the distance the repetitious backs of other hills humped like sleeping elephants in the morning sunlight.

  He whistled to Pete and heard the dog barking and running through the underbrush. He started racing into the ravine they had to cross.

  By noon Ron had wound his way over almost a dozen such hills and ravines without results. At last he sat down in the shade of a tall pine. Pete lay at his feet panting with the exertion of chasing squirrels.

  “It looks like this one is a bust,” said Ron. “I thought sure we’d be able to find something with a track like that.”

  From his pack he drew a thermos and a bag of sandwiches his mother had fixed. He ate slowly while he contemplated the thrill of finding a meteorite as large as he believed this one to be.

  When he had finished lunch he got up and glanced ahead. Pete pressed against his leg and Ron scratched the collie’s ears affectionately.

  “One more hill,” he said. “If nothing shows there, we’ll call it a day.”

  Pete responded with an agreeable bark, and they began moving again.

  The afternoon sun was bearing down hard when Ron came to the top of the next ridge. He wiped the sweat from his face and scanned the surrounding hillsides with the glasses.

  “That does it,” he said finally. “Let’s be getting back to the car. Nothing short of a plane search will find anything that’s here. Maybe we can get Charlie Moran to take us up on Sunday afternoon and look around a bit.”

  He put the glasses away and started retracing his path, intent on searching as closely as possible on the return trip against the possibility of having missed the meteorite on the way out. But Pete seemed to have different ideas. He hung back and darted a short distance in the same direction they had been going.

  “Come on, Pete—let’s go!”

  The dog answered with a sharp bark and remained where he was. Then, certain that he had Ron’s eye, he loped away.

  “What in the world—? Pete! We’ve got to get back home.”

  The dog paid no attention. He ran swiftly through the underbrush and disappeared at last in the green cover of the opposite hillside.

  Irritated by this unreasonable action, Ron debated whether to go ahead and let Pete follow, or to see where Pete wanted to go. As he watched, he saw a faint brown figure topping the next ridge. He turned his field glasses upon it and saw Pete looking into the ravine beyond. Barking furiously and repeatedly, he looked toward Ron, then toward the ravine.

  Ron lowered the glasses, his breath quickening. Was it possible that the dog had found what they were searching for? It couldn’t be, he thought. There was no way by which the dog could have any knowledge of the meteorite or locate it. Nevertheless, Ron began running down the hillside and up toward the ridge where the dog waited.

  As he approached, Pete came down to meet him, barking wildly. His eyes were sharp and bright with the glory of some discovery of his own. Ron topped the rise and stood at the vantage point from which Pete had called him.

  And then he saw it.

  A narrow, pine-studded ravine only three or four hundred feet wide at the top was below him. The pines were young and short, and a swath had been cut through them as if by some colossal lawn mower.

  In a mile-long path the tops had been sheared off. Ron’s eyes followed from the faint beginning of that line where only the tips had been touched. At the other end the cutting object had torn its way into the heart of the grove at the bottom of the ravine.

  He held his breath in a moment of wonder. Then he was racing headlong down the steep slope. The lines of the fallen object began to appear as he made his way down. He saw the metallic sheen of polished sheet metal.

  He understood why it had been difficult to see from above. Besides being hidden by the trees, the object was a light green in color, just a shade lighter than the pine needles that surrounded it.

  Ron almost gasped aloud as the size of the thing became apparent at last. A hundred yards up the hillside, he stopped to survey it. The thing was circular—or had been before the crash that smashed the forward third of it, he supposed. At least two hundred feet in diameter, he guessed. There were darker spots on the disc which appeared like portholes.

  Pete was quiet, nuzzling Ron’s hand as if trying to convey his own understanding of the awe and mystery of this magnificent find.

  Ron stood there for long seconds trying to convince himself that it wasn’t what it appeared. But he knew it was. It had to be.

  It was a ship—a flying saucer.

  He felt a trembling in Pete’s body as if the dog were aware of something Ron could not see or feel.

  They moved forward, Pete staying close now. As they came down to the level floor of the ravine Ron got a better view of the giant machine. It was tilted only slightly and the edges of it rested on the sides of the ravine.

  When he got an edgewise view, Ron estimated the ship was thirty-five or forty feet thick at the center. And it was truly disc-shaped as the saucers had been described in so many previously unverified reports.

  There was space to walk under the ship, except at the forward end where the collapsed wreckage touched the bottom of the ravine. As he walked under it Ron saw how great the damage was. The forward half was wrinkled and torn. Jagged girders of the skeleton structure hung down, crumpled and broken like the bones of some great animal. Through the breaks Ron glimpsed rooms of furniture and machines and stored goods carried by the alien ship.

  So the stories were true—the stories of flashing discs that soared through the skies at unheard-of speeds. And here was one of them. But where had it come from, he wondered?

  Was it a military ship of this nation or of some other?

  Or had it come from the stars?

  There was no sign of life. The terrific force of the crash could hardly have left any survivors among the crew. As he stood there staring up into the dark, mysterious chambers of the ship there was only silence in the air, except for his own swift breathing and the panting of the dog.

  He would have to report the wreckage to the authorities, and he ought to do it quickly, he thought. But for just a few minutes longer he wanted the privilege of being alone with the ship.


  He wondered if he could climb up and get inside it. The broken skeleton offered a precarious ladder-way. He adjusted the field glasses and turned them upward.

  There was an alien strangeness about all that he saw. There was color everywhere. Each chamber seemed to be finished in its own shading. Nowhere was there the drab hue of military camouflage. There were brilliant greens, yellows, and orange, and colors for which he knew no name.

  As he moved to view it from a different angle he saw a fluttering in the grass beyond him. It looked like sheets of paper dropped from the ship. He gathered up a dozen of them.

  They were faintly yellow-tinted sheets, but the material was not paper. For a moment he thought they were metallic, then guessed plastic. They had the curious feel of both, but seemed to be neither.

  Then he turned them over. They were covered on one side with heavy black symbols. But they were symbols of a kind he had never seen. He well knew that there existed a thousand languages and dialects whose symbols he did not know. But somehow there was an instinctive sensing that these were symbols of a language spoken nowhere upon the face of the Earth.

  He rolled the sheets and put them in his pocket. He glanced upward again.

  A ship from the stars, he thought. This had to be a ship from the stars.

  The breeze blowing through the ravine and under the ship seemed suddenly more chill.

  Creatures of other worlds had spanned the hostile wastes of interstellar space before man and had come to make contact. Were they hostile or were they friendly? Actually, they had not made contact—deliberately, at least. All the stories of flying saucers so far had given no indication that the crews desired contact with human beings. They had remained aloof from any communication with man.

  Yet, regardless of the possible hostility of the creatures who had built and flown this ship, he could not help the feeling of awe and the thrill of being in the presence of the unknown.