The Gods Hate Kansas Read online

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  THE GODS HATE KANSAS

  Originally published in Startling Stories, Nov. 1941. Copyright © 1941 by Popular Library, Inc.; copyright renewed 1968 (renewal # R466788).

  Edited version copyright © 2014 by Wildside Press LLC.

  All rights reserved.

  CHAPTER 1

  Rock Fall

  The rocks had been hurtling toward Earth for more than a week, silent and invisible in the black, airless void of space. There were eleven of the dark chunks, each roughly the size of a basketball. In appearance they were no different from other random meteoric fragments that occasionally whipped past them at vastly greater speeds.

  The eleven, however, could not be mistaken for cosmic debris. There was too clearly an intelligent purpose in the pattern of their flight, maintaining an unvarying arrowhead formation as the tens of thousands of trackless miles fled by. There was added evidence in their fixed speed of precisely nineteen miles per second.

  The rocks were nearing the Earth now, still invisible but reacting to the first faint pull of gravity. Directly beneath lay the parched and dusty reaches of the Kansas Plains.

  * * * *

  August Solle was pitching bedding straw into the last of a row of cow stalls when he heard his wife’s voice calling from the house: “Supper’s ready. Come and get it.” He leaned the pitchfork against the wall, snapped off the barn light and stepped outside, slapping loose straw from his sun-faded overalls.

  The night was clear and moonless. The air still held a remnant of the day’s heat and the faint smell of dust. August Solle tipped his head back and studied the blazing canopy of stars overhead, a helpless anger settling over his gaunt, tired face with its bleached eyebrows and stubble of graying whiskers.

  Young Gus, his gangling twenty-year-old son, came out of the machine shed, dusting his hands, and stood waiting for Arnie Cole, the hired man, to join him. Together they walked toward the elder Solle. In the kitchen door Martha Solle waited, her spare figure outlined against the light.

  “What you looking for, Pa?” Gus asked.

  “A miracle, I guess. I keep lookin’ to find just one measly little patch of cloud so’s we can hope for a drop of rain. I’ve never see a spring as dry as this one.”

  “If we don’t get rain by the end of the week,” Arnie Cole said glumly, “there won’t be no use in planting wheat this year. I swear, the more I see of Kansas, the more I wish I’d never left Ioway.”

  Solle dragged a long sigh from the depths of his work-worn body. “It’s got so I’ve even took to getting up in the night to look for clouds. But all I ever see are them goldanged stars. I never thought I’d get to hate the sight of stars.”

  He glared resentfully at the blazing splendor overhead and the others, in unconscious imitation, threw their heads back to follow his gaze. In the kitchen door, Martha Solle looked skyward to see what the men were gazing at.

  Thus it happened that four pairs of eyes were watching at the precise moment when, some eighty-seven miles above the Earth, the rocks first glowed to incandescence under the lash of tenuous atmosphere.

  “Look!” Martha cried. “Shooting stars—a flock of ’em.”

  “Meteors, Ma,” Gus corrected, his voice cracking with excitement. “A meteor swarm. We studied about ’em in school.”

  Then there was no longer time for speech. The leisurely glide of outer space had become, in relation to Earth, a whipping flight. In two seconds the flaming V was close enough for the naked eye to separate its eleven component masses. In three seconds, the individual rocks appeared larger than baseballs and their color had changed from dull red to blinding white.

  With a crashing thunder that shook the Earth and tortured eardrums, the rocks burst through the sonic barrier as mounting friction dragged down their speed. From somewhere in the house came the tinkle and clatter of falling glass.

  Then there were two lesser but deafening explosions as two of the rocks succumbed to the titanic forces of kinetic energy and burst apart in midair. The remaining nine flashed downward, their arrowhead formation unchanged despite two gaps.

  The Solles and Arnie Cole stood frozen, locked in a paralysis of mingled awe and fright. Now it seemed to their bulging eyes that the nine flaming rocks were arrowing straight at the house. A strangled, incoherent yell burst from August Solle’s lips.

  Then miraculously the arrowing rocks were flashing just above the roof, down over the rooted four and beyond. The awesome roar of their passage deafened them and a breath of superheated air seared the upturned faces.

  The next instant the rocks struck and buried themselves in the edge of the unplanted wheat field barely ten rods beyond. Dust and fire and fearful sound burst up and the ground underfoot shook from the impact. The spreading shock wave hit and knocked the four to the ground. For a moment they were buffeted by a secondary wave of scorching air, a furnace blast that swept them and was gone, racing out into the night.

  Then there was only stillness, broken by the patter of falling fragments from the exploded rocks. Blinded, deafened, choking and terrified, the four witnesses clung to the parched ground.

  August Solle was the first to regain speech. “Martha, are you all right? Gus? Amie?”

  “I—I think so,” Martha croaked.

  The others mumbled agreement as they broke the spell and scrambled erect on shaky legs. Young Gus found his voice and wits. “Jumping Judas! Come on! They landed right over there at the edge of the plowed part, Pa. Hurry!”

  “Wait,” Martha cried shakily. “The others might blow up, too. You’d best not go near, at least for a while.”

  “They won’t,” Gus yelled wildly. “Don’t you know what we got, Ma? They’re worth money and they’re all ours. Remember when Pete Halvorson found just a little chunk of an old meteorite a couple years ago and a man from Washington paid him fifty bucks for it? We must have hundreds of dollars worth—maybe even thousands—right here in our own field.”

  He whirled and ran toward the great cloud of dust that was settling slowly back over the line of raw scars where the alien rocks had slammed into the Earth. The others ran with him, the prospect of buried treasure overriding their fears.

  In the nine shallow pits along the edge of the field the things lay quietly, waiting…

  CHAPTER 2

  Meteor Menace

  At three o’clock in the morning the telephone set up its unholy jangling in the bachelor apartment of Curtis Temple, Professor of Astrophysics and Meteoritics at Culwain University. He fumbled out into the darkness and found the light switch, muttering unacademic comments. Yawning, he levered his rangy six-feet-one to a vertical position and lifted the phone.

  The voice of the university night operator sounded sleepy and aggrieved. “Oh, Dr. Temple, I didn’t want to disturb you at such an awful hour, but the operator says it’s some kind of emergency. It’s a long distance call from Washington, a Mr. Van Arden at National Aeronautics and Space Administration.”

  Temple lowered the phone, examined it with sleepy suspicion and put it back to his ear. “He’s got the wrong number.”

  A brusque, commanding voice cut through the line noises. “Temple? Van Arden at NASA. What’s your personal
opinion of last night’s show?”

  “Show?” Temple echoed, his face slack. “Are you drunk?”

  “Damn it!” Van Arden shouted. “Don’t you astronomers out there ever look at the sky? You had the most spectacular meteor show of the century last night. Eleven fireballs popped into sight over New Mexico, and sailed northeast. Two exploded in the air but the other nine struck on the farm of a man named Solle, twenty miles west of Bomer, Kansas.”

  Temple was suddenly wide-awake, his blue eyes very bright. He snatched pad and pen from the night stand. “We’re over three hundred miles away so we couldn’t see it, and early reports probably went to Flagstaff Observatory first. How did you get it in Washington so fast?”

  “Hah!” Van Arden said. “Our Missile-Warning radar net got the blips from outer space and threw the whole Defense Command into a flap. SAC scrambled all bombers, the White House went on alert and opened the Moscow phone line and STRIKE had its finger on the dirty-bird button. We’ve still got the nuclear shakes.”

  “I can understand that,” Temple said, scribbling furiously, “What I don’t get is where I fit into your picture?”

  “Smithsonian says you’re a top authority on Meteoritics, with some kind of flying squad of picked scientists set up to rush to a meteorite fall and find out what they’re made of and where they came from.”

  “We have a Meteoritics Field Team with a portable laboratory for on-the spot analysis. We’ll certainly want to get in on this fall if the university will stand the expense—”

  “Damn the expense!” Van Arden snapped. “NASA will foot all the bills. You just get ’em there as fast as you can. The local sheriff’s guarding the site now and I’m leaving by jet in half an hour. How fast can you make it?”

  “Sometime this afternoon,” Temple said, calculating the problems. “But what’s your angle on all this? I thought NASA’s big interest was shooting things into space. When did you get hotted up over something from space?”

  “When that something travels in perfect V-formation, like a fleet of vehicles…or guided missiles,” Van Arden said grimly and hung up.

  Temple stared at the black rectangle of his window, his mind working furiously. He was not greatly impressed by the implications of Van Arden’s last remark. So little was actually known about meteorites even yet that the arrival of a swarm waving flags and playing an extra-galactic anthem would not be too staggering a surprise.

  The existence of nine whole, fresh meteorites waiting to be studied was infinitely more exciting. Of an estimated 24 million that strike Earth’s atmosphere every day, no more than four or five fragments of any size were recovered in an average year. Most of these were not found until vital clues to their nature and origin had been lost or weathered away. The infant science of Meteoritics was built almost entirely from ancient falls and a study of the meteoric dust in the atmosphere. Now suddenly a thousand burning questions might be answered on a Kansas farm.

  From the night he had first gaped in childish awe at a fireball streaking across the sky, Curtis Temple had been obsessed by a fierce need to plumb the mysteries of these aliens from space. By the time he was in high school he had absorbed everything printed on the subject. In college he swallowed Astronomy and Astrophysics in great gulps, achieving his Ph.D. at the mature age of 26. Now, at 30, he was an acknowledged authority and one of the pioneers in establishing Meteoritics as a separate science.

  Five months before, his passion had almost cost him his life when the plane in which he was collecting meteoric dust crashed on a cloud-swathed mountain. When pulled from the wreckage, doctors had given him a slender one-in-ten chance of survival. Now, thanks to his toughness and their skill in rebuilding a shattered skull with a silver plate, he was almost whole again.

  He blinked and pulled himself down from the cloudland of anticipation to the demands of the immediate moment. Grinning faintly, he dialed Lee Mason’s number.

  In spite of himself, his mind pictured her reluctant awakening. He hoped her honey-blond hair would be in a becoming tangle, not trapped in hideous curlers. Her face, he knew, would be warm and lovely even without make-up and she would probably be wearing something thin and frilly that did nothing to hide the softly rounded curves.

  Temple hastily pulled his imagination off that delicate vision. When the last classes ended in mid-June, he and Lee would stand in the university chapel and say the words that would make such intimate details no longer wistful conjecture.

  Meanwhile, Lee Mason was his department assistant and a respected scientist in her own right. She knew almost as much about his specialty as he did and was, in addition, a recognized authority on astronautics problems. One of the professors had described Lee Mason with classic clarity. “Nature outdid herself when she packed brains like that in such an attractive package. You’re a lucky, lucky guy, Curt.”

  The ringing stopped and Lee’s sleep-drugged voice mumbled something. Temple chuckled. “Rise and shine, baby doll. The Meteoritics Team is on the march.”

  “Curt!” Her voice was abruptly alert. “There’s been a meteorite fall within our range?”

  “A perfect gee-whiz of a composite fall, hon.” He reported Van Arden’s call. “Meet me at the lab as fast as you can. We’ve got to arouse the team and wake McCabe to get clearance.”

  Lee giggled. “Let me call McCabe. I’ve always wondered what kind of language a pompous university president would use when he’s rousted out of bed at four a.m.”

  “Granted,” Temple said. He grinned. “Tell me one thing, Lee. What are you wearing right this moment?”

  He heard a gasp, then a giggle. “The answer to that could set meteorics back ten years. Keep your mind on your work.”

  * * * *

  It was only a few minutes past eight in the morning when the last of the four Culwain University trucks rumbled southward, carrying the prefab huts, portable generator, heavy tools and supplies, and the delicate instruments and equipment for the Meteoritics Field Laboratory. A jeep and a station wagon waited to take the team members with their personal belongings and a few excessively fragile pieces.

  The five team members were as excited as schoolboys on a camp-out at the prospect. Each was an authority in his own field—chemistry, physics, petrography, geology, biology—each prepared and equipped to follow any relationship to his own specialty through to an informative conclusion. Temple and Lee, as a team, had the task of collating the diverse bits of information into a coherent picture of the mysterious strangers from space.

  Temple was rechecking the last lists when his telephone rang. Lee answered, listened in silence for several minutes, then handed the instrument across the worktable. Temple was too preoccupied to notice the expression on her face.

  The voice of University President McCabe sounded strained. “Curtis, after approving the expedition you called about this morning, I took the precaution of contacting the head surgeon at University Hospital. He—if I may be permitted a slang expression—blew his cork at your intention to participate in such a rigorous activity at this time. He says such a move could cost you your health, if not your life. In short, he expressly forbade your leaving his watch and care.”

  “Wha-a-t?” Temple yelled. “I’m perfectly well and I feel great. All that skull carpenter wants is more pictures of my head for his private collection. Tell him to keep his cotton-picking fingers to hell out of my business. When he let me out of the hospital, he ended his right to run my life.”

  “Precisely,” McCabe said stiffly. “That is why he left the decision to me. By virtue of your contract, I still retain a certain right and I’m afraid, on his advice, I must exercise it against my will. Your leave of absence is hereby canceled. You will be expected to remain on campus and conduct your lectures as usual until further notice.” He added, very softly, “I wish I could tell you how sorry I am, Curtis.”

  The last kit and case were packed, the team ready to leave a few minutes before nine. In the laboratory doorway Lee stood for a moment
, looking at Temple’s harsh face and dull eyes as he shook the last hand, mouthed the last good wishes.

  Suddenly she whirled and threw herself against him, hugging his taut body fiercely, feeling its slow, unwilling yielding to her warmth.

  “Curt, oh, Curt,” she whispered, “please don’t take it so hard. It isn’t the end of the world. It’s still your research, all of it. I’ll air-mail a full, detailed report of everything that’s done there, every single day, by every one of the team. We’ll take photographs and draw charts and graphs so you won’t miss a single clue. And every single evening, between six and seven, I’ll telephone you. I promise, Curt. You’ll be much too busy, and I’ll be close enough, so you won’t have time to get lonely or blue.”

  She whispered, “Until tonight, darling,” kissed him hard and ran to the waiting car.

  It was not her fault, nor his, that the promise on which they parted was so quickly and viciously broken.

  CHAPTER 3

  Sinister Rocks

  For five days, Temple found little time to brood over his bitter disappointment. Each mail brought a great bundle of detailed information from Lee, as well as photos, sketches and eye-witness reports from Flagstaff Observatory and its network of meteor watch teams. Shortly after six each evening there was a long, heart-warming telephone visit, not only with Lee but with any of the others who had problems or theories to discuss.

  On the fifth night there was no phone call; on the next day, no mail or contact of any kind. Temple was only kept from doing something rash by the calm wisdom of Dr. Tom Mullane, the wizened, gnome-like little Dean of Astronomy who shared office and laboratory space in the same Observatory wing.

  “Be reasonable, Curt. I’ve seen you so preoccupied with an interesting problem that you forgot to eat or sleep. If I know that bunch of fanatics, they’re so engrossed in cracking their space eggs and peering inside that they’ve forgotten that such things as telephones and reports exist. If there’d been an accident or any kind of trouble, you’d have been the first to hear of it.”