More of the Essential John Wyndham, page 32
He awoke with a start. His hand already gripping the knife by his side. From somewhere came the whispering swish of a faint, ghostly movement. He looked towards the entrance and half started up. The sentry was no longer standing silhouetted on the ledge. A faint shuffling on the other side brought him round, trying vainly to pierce the wall of darkness. Stealthily he drew his feet up and settled the long knife more firmly in his hand. A scrape and the clatter of a loose stone jerked his head back to the entrance, and he drew a sudden breath. Black figures were stirring, indistinct outlines against the dark sky. Moving shadows: not the short Martians he had half expected, but grotesque, shrouded figures, six feet and more in height.
A Sudden Discovery
It was no time for inquiry – the vanished sentry told enough. Already a pair of the creatures were within the entrance. He could see them bending ominously above his sleeping friends. With whirling knife he leapt silently upon them. He felt the keen edge bite home and, simultaneously, there came a cry. A scream, but a scream no human throat could give. It was a mournful ululation with a harsh stridency which shredded the silence.
Confusion broke loose. The men sprang up, startled, yet bemused with sleep, and groping for their knives. The black prowlers retreated before Angus’ circling blade, making headlong for the open. Twice more he felt the steel cleave deep before he gained the cave mouth. The air sang in his ears with the shrill screams of alarmed and injured creatures.
He saw a half-dozen launch themselves into space as he came out upon the rocky ledge. Black forms which fell for a moment and then spread monstrous wings to check the fall. He watched them move in slow, powerful beats as the creatures rose and banked. Not for an instant did they check their desolate cries. Harshly the sound echoed in the shadow-hidden valley beneath and from further and yet further crags sprang answering cries like the wailing of funereal despair. A crescendo of screeching lament tortured the still night to pandemonium.
Mixed with the shrilling came the hoarser cries of striving men. Behind Angus a crowd of milling figures struggled and slashed in the dark, combating invisible opponents. With a stentorian command he dispersed the panic of their rough awakening and shook them into reality. They lowered their weapons and stood alert, breathing hard. From the dark, mysterious tunnel behind came the sounds of hurried feet mingled with those of occasional cries eerily echoing against the walls; sounds which grew fainter as their makers fled into the rocky heart of the mountain.
“What — what were they?” Torrance’s dignity had fallen away and his voice was shaky.
Angus made no reply. Instead, he struck a light and counted the white, startled faces about him. “Twenty-seven.”
Nobody commented, but a number of heads turned to let their owners gaze fearfully into the blackness where two officers and six men had passed to an unknown fate. “And Davie, and the rest are at the mercy of these blasted things — whatever they are,” growled Angus.
With the dawn they were able to examine the bodies of two of the assailants Angus had felled. They were bipeds, and that, together with the disposition of organs common to most mammals, gave the impression that they were at least semi-human. Other characteristics did their best to counteract the impression. The creatures were a dull, metallic grey in color, tall, thin and fragilely made. Attenuated arms, so long as to reach almost to the feet, were linked to the legs by enormous spans of membranous wings. Their only weapons appeared as cruelly curved claws at both the fore and hind tips of the wings. The size and shape of their half-human heads seemed to suggest an intelligence of some order. High enough, at least, to embarrass seriously a small party armed only with knives.
Nevertheless, Angus wished to lead a rescue party. He was dissuaded only with difficulty. The others managed, at last, to convince him that it would be more than foolhardy under the circumstances to attempt the exploration of the unlit caverns containing unknown numbers of the winged creatures. David Robbins, Doctor Cleary and the six men with them must be abandoned for the present, at least. When — and if — they should discover the Red Glory, they would have a stronghold, and — they hoped — weapons.
“The best thing we can do now,” said Joe, in conclusion, “is to get right along, before those Martians get busy. They’re sure to be on our tracks after that hullabaloo last night. We’ve got to settle with them before we can get a line on these flying screechers — the betting is that our men are safe for a while, if they’re not dead already.”
For an hour Angus led on, leaping prodigiously, climbing and scrambling through valleys choked with foliage and up precipices whose faces were hidden behind thick tresses of creeper. If he had any doubt of the direction, any uncertainty; no suspicion of it was allowed to appear. They paused only once. Beside a stream in one of the lesser valleys, a man caught his foot in something which rattled drily. He jumped back with a cry which caused the rest to stop short.
“What is it?” Joe called.
“A skeleton, sir,” the man reported.
Joe came back. He saw at a glance that the bleached bones were human. Tangled among the ribs, he caught a glint of metal and drew out a slender chain on which swung an identity disc. “Will Fording, Chicago, Radio Operator, Red Glory, (C.O. 1009),” he read.
He picked up the rifle which lay beside the remains. It was utterly useless and caked in the rust of many years accumulation. “Poor devil — wonder what got him?” he murmured. He dropped the gun and slipped the identity disc in his pocket. The party went on its way slightly chastened. So far they had encountered no sign of native animal life beyond the grey creatures and a few insects. The radio operator might have died of sickness or accident — it was impossible to guess with the little they knew of this strange planetoid.
An hour later, they crested the final rocky ridge to gaze down on a sight which brought excited exclamations from them all. Close to the far side of a valley somewhat larger than any they had yet encountered lay a spaceship of antiquated design. Her untarnished plates still glittered in the sunlight, but half surrounding her were deep growths of a sturdiness which told that it was many years since she had sunk to this, her final, berth.
Angus’ sharp eyes picked out the name Red Glory inscribed in faded letters upon her prow. Beneath, half obscured by branches, he could make out a part of her Chicago registration number. But it was not the sight of the ship which had caused the party’s surprise. They had expected no less. Their exclamations were due to the fact that the undergrowth before the entrance port had been cleared away. A broad path led from the ship to several acres of cultivated plots beside the stream which wandered down the centre of the valley.
Joe, for one, felt a rush of relief. Since the previous night’s encounter he had been aware of growing doubts that any of the Red Glory’s complement could have survived.
“Red Glory, ahoy,” yelled Angus.
No voice replied though he thought he saw a flicker of movement at one of the cabin windows. There was no wave of a welcoming arm such as he had expected. They hastened down the steep wall and across the valley floor. Midway up the cleared track to the open port, a voice called them to halt. Before and behind them figures oddly clad in rough materials stepped from the concealing bushes. All were men, and all held rifles trained upon them. A young man — Angus estimated his age at twenty-three or four — stepped forward and approached with wary suspicion. “Who are you, and where do you come from?” he asked.
Torrance replied, and the young man watched him intently as he spoke. He seemed slightly at a loss. As he began to reply a figure made its appearance in the entrance of the Red Glory. An old man who stooped, and whose white hair hung down upon the shoulders of his coarse woven coat, but who still gazed with keen eyes from a weather-beaten face.
“Jamie!” cried Angus. “Jamie, don’t you know me?”
The old man’s face cracked into a smile. “Aye, Angus, lad, it’s you all right. Come along in and bring your friends with you.”
With one hand he waved away the riflemen who appeared bewildered but retreated obediently. “Well I’ll be damned,” muttered Joe, “does he think we’ve just dropped in for supper?”
Angus grinned. “You could never surprise old Jamie — no one ever has.”
Accompanied by the riflemen who had not entirely lost their suspicion, the party filed aboard the ship. They entered the main living room to see a group of girls arranging baskets of strange Asperian fruits on the tables. “Ye’ll be wantin’ some food, I doubt,” said Jamie. “And ye' can talk while ye eat. We heard your rockets yesterday,” he continued. “The first rockets I’ve heard in twenty-five years — man, it was grand – like music.”
As the tale of the Argenta was told, more and more men and women and a number of children came crowding into the room. With some surprise Joe noticed the predominance of youth. There might have been perhaps thirty persons of middle age, and a few besides Jamie of advanced years, but the rest fell, almost without exception, below the twenty-four level. A number of them were introduced including the suspicious young man who had waylaid them. He, it transpired, was Andrew Stuart, son of old Jamie. Greta, one of the most attractive of the girls, was his wife.
Jamie heard their story through with little comment, but at the end he called Andrew to him and directed that a scouting party should be sent out. He looked a little worried as he turned back. “We’ve got to keep these Martians away,” he said. “’Tis a pretty situation — they’ve got a good ship and no fuel, while we’ve got a useless ship, but there’s plenty of fuel in her tanks yet.”
“Have you got rifles for us?” asked Angus.
“Aye, and pistols — more than we can use.”
Angus looked surprised, but a look in the old man’s eye checked his question. He decided that Jamie had been doing a little gun-running as a sideline and would not relish inquiries. Instead, he asked: “What about your story? And what about these flying things? We’re all sort of mazed.”
Jamie began his history from the disablement of the Red Glory. They had run into a meteor shower and had been lucky in not being carved to bits. Happily most of their score of leaks had been small, but the radio had been demolished and the relief operator who was in the room at the time, killed. One mixing chamber for gases had been wrecked, putting a number of tubes out of action.
They had set about limping for the nearest approaching body which they had believed to be Asperus. And, thanks to the low pull of the planetoid, managed a successful, if ungraceful landing. Thereafter a number of message rockets had been dispatched without result. The exact number of survivors, including passengers and crew, had been three hundred and seven.
In those first days Asperus had seemed a not unkindly place. It produced the necessities of life in abundance, and there was a feeling that fate might have been far more severe. Then, a week after the landing, fifty of them, many of them women, disappeared. A search party was sent out and never seen again. Up to this time they had seen nothing of the grey, winged creatures which they later came to call by the name of “Batrachs.” A second search party met a similar fate and still more of the survivors disappeared until, at last, Jamie had taken a firm stand.
Every sunset the door of the Red Glory was closed and locked and remained thus until dawn; nobody, under any circumstances, being permitted to go out by night. The numbers had now been reduced to sixty-five, omitting children. The Batrachs made bolder by their captures had besieged the ship for several nights, hut, finding it impregnable, at last abandoned the practice. For several years now no member of the Red Glory colony had set eyes on a Batrach. The creatures were strictly nocturnal in their surface operations, and the men became no less strictly diurnal. From that time the little colony had begun to prosper. Jamie from his position as captain had slid to the status of patriarchal ruler.
“But these Batrachs?” inquired Angus. “You had guns to fight them with?”
“Yes, we had guns,” Jamie nodded, “but so had the expeditions and they never came back. After all, laddie, a gun, even if it fires rocket shells, is at a disadvantage in the dark, and the Batrachs don’t come in ones or twos, but in thousands. You were lucky last night. The only reason you are here now is that they didn’t expect you. If they had been prepared — ” He spread expressive hands and shook his head.
To the Rescue
Sometimes, Jamie admitted, he had thought of leading out yet another search party, but it was his duty to stay with his ship and protect the survivors to the best of his ability. There had been marriages. Jamie, as captain, had performed them, even his own. He had now become, he said proudly, not only the father of two boys and two girls, but a grandfather as well. The Batrachs, in his opinion were the only unhealthy things about Asperus. All the children of the colony had flourished though he considered them slightly underdeveloped muscularly by reason of the lesser gravitation.
Angus, seeing that the story was tending to become a family history, pulled him back to the subject of Batrachs. Couldn’t Jamie give more details about them? What did they do with their prisoners? What was their level of intelligence? Did they ever use weapons? He extracted little. Jamie considered them almost equal to men in intelligence — except they never used weapons. Of their treatment of prisoners he could say nothing, since no one had ever returned to tell. His tone showed plainly that he thought no one would, but Angus had different ideas on that subject.
Talk was cut short by the return of a scout who reported that the Martians were encamping in the next valley. Thoughts of rescue were temporarily put aside. Sen-Su and his little lot must be settled first. First officer Torrance again emerged from that oblivion to which events seemed to condemn him. He proposed a sniping party. The suggestion met with a cold reception which genuinely astonished him. Angus was particularly incensed.
“This is not a murder gang. Our orders did not extend beyond marooning a bunch of political prisoners. They didn’t ill treat us when we were at their mercy — ”
“They’re nothing more than a lot of damned pirates, and the penalty for piracy is death.”
Angus kept his temper with difficulty. “That’s as may be. If they had been real pirates, we’d now be so many corpses floating out there in space. I, for one, refuse to shoot them down in cold blood. They treated us well.”
“They murdered Captain Briscoe.”
“That’s a lie!”
“This is mutiny.” Torrance’s eyes were gleaming. He turned as though to appeal to old Jamie, but Angus cut him short.
“I don’t care if it’s sacrilege — I’m not going to do it. Get that?”
Joe joined Angus. He, too, preferred mutiny to murder. Torrance glared helplessly. The odds were against him and he was wise enough to know that the men would back Angus in any dispute. He could do no more than give in with bad grace. The party would stay in the Red Glory and let the enemy fire the first shot, if shots there must be.
“It’s checkmate,” said Angus. “Sen-Su will realize that mighty soon. Jamie tells me there are plenty of supplies aboard and they couldn’t get us out for months. My only worry it that if they keep us cooped up here we won’t be able to find out what’s happened to Davie and the others.”
All the men of the colony were called in for safety’s sake. There was little over an hour of the short Asperian day remaining, and there was the risk of their being cut off by a party of Martians. Once or twice glimpses were caught of the little brown men on the escarpment of the further side, apparently bent on reconnaissance.
“Cooping up” seemed to be the program, because when Torrance went to the entrance port with a rifle in his hands, the warning smack of a bullet on the steel side above him caused his hasty retreat. Angus grinned when he heard of it. “Teaching the sniper a few tricks, are they?” he said.
Night closed in without any further signs of activity. The port of the Red Glory was swung to and locked by old Jamie in the manner of one performing a ceremony. All sound of the outer world was shut away. The Martians could do what they liked – no portable weapon would be capable of making so much as a dent in the spaceship’s armor.
Angus awoke with a hand shaking his shoulder. He looked up to find Joe bending over him. “Blast you, what’s the matter?” he mumbled sleepily.
“Looks like a deputation. Get your clothes on and come along.”
Dawn had just broken and from the windows of the living room they could observe three Martians who stood looking towards the ship. They had reached the beginning of the cleared pathway and were plainly ill at ease. The central figure upheld a stick to which was attached a piece of dirty, white rag. It was obviously intended for a sign of surrender. But why, Angus asked himself, should the Martians wish to surrender? All three men had evidently suffered rough handling since their clothing was little more than a covering of tatters stained with blood. After a short consultation the two flanking men lifted their empty hands above their heads and all three advanced. Old Jamie hesitated a moment and then unlocked the port, beckoning to them to enter. The questioning he left to Angus who began with the monosyllable, “Well?”
The middle man, looking askance at several pistols trained upon him, lowered his flag of truce and answered with the characteristic lilt: “We have come to surrender.”
Angus frowned. This was not his idea of Sen-Su’s methods. “And the rest of you?” he asked.
“There are no more.” The Martian spoke slowly and with a depth of dejection.
“Talk sense. There were ninety-seven of you. Where are the rest?”
