Island In The Sky by Manly Wade Wellman

Book Details

Island In The Sky – Blackie Peyton Returns to the Earth’s Surface After Twenty Years in the Pit—and First Begins His Fight for Freedom! A Future Convict Battles to Release a Cowardly New World in Chains!

Chapter I – Out of the Pit
Chapter II – Strange and New
Chapter III – Amusement for Airmen
Chapter IV – Thora
Chapter V – Circus Day
Chapter VI – Slumming
Chapter VII – Astride the Fence
Chapter VIII – Circus Day Again
Chapter IX – The Shouting and the Tumult
Chapter X – Argyle Asks Questions
Chapter XI – Crushout
Chapter XII – Mansion in the Sky
Chapter XIII – Fall and Downfall
Chapter XIV – Loose Ends

Manly Wade Wellman (1903–1986) was born in the village of Kamundongo in Portuguese West Africa (now Angola), where his father was stationed as a medical officer. He spoke the native dialect before he learned English, and became an adopted son of a powerful chief whose vision Dr. Wellman restored.

Island In The Sky was published in Thrilling Wonder Stories in October, 1941.  It contains 9 illustrations.

Files:

1. IslandInTheSky.epub

Excerpt: Island In The Sky

Chapter I

Out of the Pit

IT was evening. The toiling gray-clad convicts in the Pit knew, because the guard yelled:

“Down tools! Get to quarters. Chow coming!”

They lined up at attention like old soldiers. All of them were lifers, pallid but beefy from wrestling machines in this atom-smashing plant. Behind them, under stuffy, yellow lights, hummed and droned the great procession of engines. Before them marched in the men of the night shift. The air was heavy. It was bound to be, fifteen miles underground, on the lowest level of New York City Prison.

The day shift marched into a dark corridor, which immediately was lighted by the glow from their hands and faces. A few years in the atom-smashery gave a ghastly but harmless radiance.

Beyond was the mess hall, where stew and coffee waited, rank with the vitamin concentrates necessary to men who lived and worked fifteen miles from sunlight. Beyond the mess hall stood the rows of cells, each five by seven, with canvas hammocks, barred doors, the odor of insecticide. But at the door to the hall stood a big guard with sergeant’s stripes.

“I want Convict Peyton!” he announced. “Number 688-549J!”

The column halted. The lesser guard singled out a man.

“Fall out, Peyton. Rest of you, forward march!”

They filed into the mess hall, leaving the sergeant and one convict alone in the corridor.”

Pierce Peyton, alias Blackie, Convict No. 688-549J, was medium-sized and hard-bodied. He wore a dark, bushy beard, covering much of his prison-bleached face. His eyes were bitter and three-cornered, the eyes of a fighter. In his pessimistic soul he looked only for blame and penalization.

“Warden wants to see you up yonder,” the sergeant announced.

He led the way along the corridor to a steel panel marked “Decompression Chamber.” They went into a metal cubicle. The Sergeant turned a dial that made the air hiss out slowly.

“We’ll slack pressure for thirty minutes,” he said. “Want to take a shower over there in the corner?”

Peyton looked at the shower stall and his eyes glowed. Whatever would happen to him, he would have the luxury of cleanliness. Wisely he refrained from questioning his guide. Throwing off his slouchy gray uniform, he lathered, rinsed and toweled. Stripped, he looked as white as a fish’s belly, but tending the levers of the atom-smasher had made him brawny, especially his deltoids and triceps.

THEY left the chamber, went up for some moments in an elevator, then to a higher decompression chamber, a third and a fourth. Here was a chair and a trusty in a white coat.

“Shave, Peyton,” the sergeant ordered.

The trusty obeyed, also trimming the shaggy black hair with its salting of gray. Still suspicious, Peyton tried not to show how he enjoyed being shaved. His face proved to have a heavy jaw and a tight, scornful mouth. A chin-dimple did a little, not much, to relieve the set savagery of his expression. He hadn’t gotten young at atom-smashing since he began— how long ago—twenty years? It seemed a million.

Up through more decompression chambers, to the fifth, sixth and seventh levels. It took time for a man, used to the Pit’s compressed atmosphere, to get ready for pressure at sea-level.

At the ninth chamber, another trusty waited with stacks of shirts and socks and several cheap suits. Peyton, neither small nor large, proved easy to fit. He put his feet into rough tan brogans. The sergeant handed him a necktie, which Peyton recognized.

“I wore that the day they slung me in,” he said. “Where’s the rest of my property?”

“Styles have changed,” the sergeant reminded. “This is Nineteen hundred and Eighty. You’ve been in stir for twenty years.”

SO it really had been only twenty years. Peyton faced a mirror to knot the necktie. He studied the square, white face, unrecognizable as the boy he had been.

“Don’t stand there worshiping yourself,” snapped the sergeant. “The Old Man’s waiting at dawn. We’ve killed most of the night in these decomps.”

They entered more elevators and decompression chambers, finally reached the warden’s office. It was a business-like room, in which sat a plump blond man behind a heavy desk. He looked up from a big printed paper with a red seal.

“Pierce Peyton,” he greeted the convict, “alias Blackie Peyton, about our third or fourth most incorrigible inmate.”

Peyton kept silent. Most of the guards called him the worst convict, bar none.

“You came here as a boy of sixteen, sentenced for murder,” continued the warden.

Still Peyton made no reply. What good would it do to point out that he had neither touched the gun, nor pulled the trigger? As a foolish orphan kid, falling in with two criminals he thought dashing and indomitable, he had been present at an attempt to rob the payroll of a big factory at home in Rochester. A messenger resisted and was shot. His companions had escaped. He, glued to the spot with terror, was seized by police.

Furious because he bore the blame and punishment for his accomplices, he had rebelled against prison routine, forfeited all privileges.

“You were sent to the lowest level of this prison to help run the atom-smashing machinery that supplies power necessary to civilization. Only at that great depth can the machinery have the proper atmospheric pressure to operate. Law provides that rebellious and dangerous convicts shall serve at the machines. You have smashed atoms almost continuously from Nineteen hundred and Sixty to Nineteen hundred and Eighty.”

“I know all about it. Warden. You didn’t dredge me up out to the Pit just to hear my record.”

A harsh smile appeared on the warden’s face.

Excerpt From: Manly Wade Wellman. “Island In The Sky.”