Collected Short Fiction, page 117
The actual bum on my shoulder was not so serious as the shock of the ray. I was able to keep on my feet for several hours, but Joan insisted upon my going at once to the vacant hospital bay, where she helped me dress the bum.
Outside again, we found Dr. Eldred, back from the monuments, organizing a party to pursue the three fugitives. Eleven men, armed with rocket-rifles and ultrawave tubes, set out, half an hour later, toward the red hills.
When they were gone, he had two men take sledges and smash the delicate photoscope equipment beyond possibility of repair.
“Sorry, Sidney,” he said, with a sympathetic smile at my damaged shoulder. “But I think it’s safer to wreck your toy.”
Only four men came back, of the eleven that set out after Castelar and Heink and Satsuma. Two were wounded. And they came hastily and in fear of death.
“We found them, right enough,” reported the lank Canadian, John Nisbit, who had been the leader. “And five of my men deserted, turned on the rest of us. Two were out before I knew what was happening. And it was a narrow squeak for us four.”
We set a heavy guard that night. And Dr. Eldred arrested two men and a woman, Sonia Milikov, whom he suspected of being in sympathy with the refugees, and locked them in their rooms.
“An ugly situation,” he said to me. “But it would be just the same if nationals of the other side had made the discovery. It’s just the madness of war, that lets such things happen.”
Just after midnight there was fighting on the ship. A half hour of confusion, punctuated with rocket shots, that started with an explosion in a corridor. Screams. Clangs of opened hatches. Shouted commands. Clatter of men running. The sickening hiss of projectors.
I found my own ray-tube, and went first to Joan’s room. She was safe, and about to venture out. I made her go back, and started along the corridor to Dr. Eldred’s cabin. He flashed a light on my face suddenly, recognized me, and shouted at me to go guard the aft port companionway.
I ran off to obey the order, and lay there, useless, watching the steps, until quiet had returned. Joan found me there, when it was all over, almost sobbing with her ridiculous fear that I had been injured. She helped me back to my room, and dressed my throbbing burn again.
One of the men on watch had been killed, we found. And two more badly injured. The three prisoners were gone from the ship. And eight others. They had carried arms, had taken supplies sufficient to last them and their comrades in the hills for several days.
At intervals, through the rest of the night and the following days, rocket projectiles fired by the men in the hills fell near the ship, exploding with sharp, angry snak’s.
Next morning the remaining members of the party set up a demand that we take off for the earth at once, leaving the deserters to the fate that would very soon overtake them upon the lifeless wastes of red slag.
Dr. Eldred, however, refused to listen to them. He posted lookouts on the high bridge of the Princess of Peace, set a heavy guard about her—and then went, alone, back to the monuments.
“I’m almost at the end of the inscriptions, now,” he said. “I’m finding something very important—and rather astounding. What the Martians did after the monuments were finished.
“No good to talk of starting back. We couldn’t run the ship without the men who have deserted.”
He donned his oxygen mask, picked up a little pack he had ready—containing a lunch, I knew, and a flask of water—and trudged off across the red lava toward the pillars of white metal.
We saw nothing, that day, of the deserters. The rocket projectiles continued to fall, through the morning. Their barking explosions ceased, however, in the afternoon. The low red hills seemed to stare at us, ominous and threatening, in implacable silence. Dr. Eldred did not return at sunset. Nisbit, who had been second in command, and two others, ventured out into the chill dusk to search for him. The vicinity of the monuments was deserted.
Dr. Eldred had vanished!
At the time, we could only suppose that he had been captured by the deserters. Far indeed was that from the truth.
CHAPTER V
Monsters out of Mars
THE mutineers came out of the dark hills on the second night. My shock from the ultra-wave burn having been worse than I realized, I had been forced to return to the hospital bay, despite myself, and so had no part in the battle.
On the white, narrow cots I had four companions. Ferrero, whose leg had been torn off by a rocket projectile; Casey, who had been stabbed in the lung with a knife; Pallin, whose left arm had been amputated because of ultra-wave burns; and Kennedy, whose eyes had been burned out with a ray.
It sickened me to listen to their groans in the night. To listen . . . and think they had been fine young men, brave, splendid, taking great risks for the science they loved—now helpless, disabled, suffering, because of this madness of war.
The attackers had slipped up near the ship before they were discovered. The burst of rocket shots came suddenly. And a thin, fearful scream. For a moment the whole ship was heavy with stillness; then came swift confusion of sound, as the defense was organized.
I was not able to go below. But I had Joan—who was acting as a nurse—bring my ray-tube. I got myself to a chair at the door of the hospital bay, and waited there, in case they stormed the ship.
But our men had been ready. Flares lit up the red lava about the ship, so that the men on the observation deck could see the attackers, shoot them down with the large rockets mounted there.
In five minutes it was over. The deserters were driven back, leaving three dead or dying, Satsuma and two others. We lost but one—the man who had screamed. An ultra-wave beam had burned his head off.
They brought Petroff and Tunis into the sick bay to die. I was sorry for them, even if they had been enemies. I knew they had fine minds. Tunis had been a poet and a gifted musician, before this madness of war had seized him.
By that time we had given up hope that Dr. Eldred would return; we were all considering starting back to earth.
Angular, lean John Nisbit, now in command, came into the hospital on the morning after the attack.
“How’re you doing, Tancred?” he greeted me, with a cheering smile.
“I’ll be up in a day or so,” I assured him. “The shock of that accursed ray, you know. The burn itself isn’t serious.”
“You think,” he asked soberly, “that you could run the ionodyne generators? You must be pretty well up in electronics.”
“I don’t know.” I considered. “Might, after a fashion. Of course that is outside my field. You mean—”
“We must try to get back to earth—if we can. Dr. Eldred was the navigator, of course. I don’t know who can calculate for us, in his place.”
“Heink—if he were with us—”
“Exactly—if he were here. There are a good many highly specialized jobs about running this ship. And the men that were trained to fill about half of them are against us.”
“I might run the ionodynes—though Castelar could do it better. But who would take the converters, since Petroff is dead? Sonia—”
“It’s one hell of a mess!” He bit his nails in desperation.
He sat staring at me for half a minute, and said, “Too big a risk! We’d smash up, sure. Better wait and try to patch up a truce—Had a message from them, this morning.
“Ueland came, waving a white rag. The guard stopped him, and called me out to see him. He took me off to one side, and told me that Heink and Castelar have built a machine to generate the ray that burned out Mars.”
“What’s that?” I gasped, swept with alarm.
“An electromagnetic vibration,” he explained, “that disintegrates oxygen.”
“Dr. Eldred told me about it. But that will wipe us out!”
“It might. Ueland said they had built the thing, in a laboratory they have hidden in the hills. Said they have it trained on us.”
“Just what did he want?”
“Ship surrendered. Us to agree to help work her back to earth.”
“And you told him—”
“Well, in the first place, I didn’t think they had the machine. It must be rather complicated, and I know they haven’t a great deal of apparatus. Then they wouldn’t dare use it, if they had it. It would wreck the ship, burn up all the supplies.
“I told Ueland to go back and think up another one. He went off in a rage, swearing we’d be burned to red slag in an hour.”
“He did?” I was really alarmed. I knew that our opponents were very able scientists.
“He did. And the hour was up fifteen minutes ago. A nervous wait, I admit. Didn’t tell anybody else—I was sure of my ground, and afraid there might be a panic.”
It was late the next day when we saw the Martian flier.
I had left my bed; I was able to totter up to the observation deck to watch.
It was sailing over the low red hills, from the north. The men out in those hills were already firing on it—simply because their nerves were ragged, I suppose, and it had alarmed them. We could hear the crackle of their exploding projectiles, through the open ports.
It was only natural, of course, that the Martians should fight back. And natural, too, that they should class us with the men in the hills.
THE flier was a long green arrow. It must have been two hundred feet in length, with a diameter of hardly ten. Little clouds of yellow gas were jetting from its stern, forming a vague track behind it.
Already it must have been crippled, when I first saw it. Its bow was slanting downward; soon I saw a black hole gaping in its glistening green side.
But it was fighting back. Little spurts of icy blue light were darting from small black ports along its sides. Tiny purple sparks were floating down from it, dancing and glittering in the air. Sparks that exploded when they struck, with silent, terrific, devouring bursts of white flame.
Chill blue light jetted for an instant toward the Princess of Peace—and fused a clean, six-inch hole through her hull, into the power rooms, wrecking one of the great ionodyne generators.
That brought us into the battle. We fired a burst from the big rocket-rifles on the observation deck, and die green arrow of the Martian vessel fell on the red slag, just at the foot of those low, glassy scarlet hills.
That ended the fight for the Martians. Their vessel was completely wrecked. They crawled from the debris—those that lived—and got back into the hills. We glimpsed some of them through binoculars as they made off. Long, greenish, snake-like things, writhing furtively from the wreckage, toward the hills.
Ueland was back, waving his white shirt, in half an hour. Nisbit received him at the ship’s main valve.
“We give you one more chance to surrender—” he began.
“Enough of that,” Nisbit cut in. “You haven’t that weapon, or you’d have used it on the green flier. And let me warn you not to quarrel with the natives. You might want to ask some favor of them, after we are gone.”
“Gone?” the man echoed, and went white. “But you can’t fly the ship.”
“Not so well, perhaps. But we can get away from here before more of the green fliers come back to finish the fight—this one was probably not a fighting ship at all; the next won’t be so easy.”
“We will come back,” Ueland offered hastily. “Forget all that—”
“If you want to surrender,” Nisbit said, “give up your arms, and help work the ship to earth, you may come aboard.”
Ueland seemed angered. “No!” he shouted. “We keep our arms!”
“You will need them,” Nisbit said, “when the green ships come.”
“Very well,” said Ueland, “we accept.”
He ran back a little way, and waved the white shirt.
The ex-mutineers came down from the hills, bringing with them a dead Martian from the wreck.
A weird thing. It was hard to think that it had been intelligent. Its body was slender, almost snake-like, nearly twenty feet long, tapering at each end into a thin, whiplike, muscular appendage.
The middle part of the body was thickened; it contained the vital organs, the great brain; four black eyes were set in it. It had no limbs save those formed by the tapering ends of its body. (Those we had seen leave the green flier had crawled like snakes.)
The living thing must have possessed a certain strange beauty. The green skin was brilliant, velvet-soft, marked with queer, geometric designs in gold and black.
It had been crushed when the flier fell; its mangled internal parts were obtruding through the bright skin; yellowish, strange-smelling blood oozed from it.
Dr. Eldred was not with our recent enemies, nor had they seen him. We were sure, then, that the Martians had captured him.
We were surprised, of course, to know that any of the beings still lived. But we knew they must be descendants of those who had built the monuments on the plain. The green ship had appeared, Heink said, from the mouth of a cavern in the lava hills.
It was twenty hours before we were able to take off. The hole that the Martian weapon had fused in the hull had to be repaired, the generator that it had wrecked, regenerators to be retimed, the elements of the course calculated.
In the face of greater peril, the men forgot their recent enmity. Heink fell at once to the vital calculations; the rest returned to their old stations, or took new ones, as Nisbit ordered.
Three hours before we could take off, two more green arrows appeared flying swiftly over the red hills westward. And chill, pallid blue lights spurted from the low mountains that hemmed us in, at a dozen points. We were surrounded!
“We’ve simply got to trust the other men,” Nisbit muttered to me.
He ordered the weapons returned to our former enemies. The foes of a few hours before stood shoulder to shoulder, waiting for the Martian attack, their late quarrel healed by this new danger.
The repairs were completed before the Martians closed in.
The Princess of Peace drove upward from the hill-rimmed plain of red lava, sweeping back with us to the war-ridden planet of our birth.
TWO days later, when we were a million miles out in space, and Mars was a little ocher-red moon in the star-bright inkiness of the void behind, we saw five green arrows, following. Five long, slender ships, that had swept out after us, from Mars.
We crowded on all possible power, and still they gained rapidly.
Nisbit served out all the arms on board, and we stood together at our posts—we who had been at each other’s throats until this more terrible menace beset us—waiting the seemingly inevitable conflict.
Then the men at the telescopes reported that the ships were not following exactly upon our course. In the next hour they passed us—eighty miles away—and drew rapidly ahead.
Inexplicably, we supposed, they had failed to see us. Twenty-nine days later our flight was ended upon the tranquil surface of San Francisco Bay. Tension had risen among us, as we approached the earth. But there had been no fighting, for every man was needed at his post; discord would have meant death for all.
San Francisco we found half ruined. And only a vast crater of shattered debris remained where Oakland had been, between the Berkeley hills and the bay. Ionodyne fliers, a month before, hanging above the atmosphere, had dropped hundred-ton bombs upon the cities.
Small craft soon approached the Princess of Peace. An officer, who said his name was Smithley, came aboard from a military helioplane, and requested that Nisbit come at once to confer with General Houston, who had command of the American Armies along the Pacific. Nisbit asked me to accompany them, since I had been the confidant of Dr. Eldred.
We saw a family, as we went over the shore, that typified for me the fruits of war. A tiny shack, upon the torn ruin of the water-front, built of shattered concrete blocks, roofed with odd scraps of twisted sheet metal. The blind wreck of a man was sunk in hopeless dejection before it, only the hideous scar of an ultra-wave burn where his face had been. A hungry blue-faced child was crying at his knee. A little distance away, a worn, broken woman, in tattered rags, was digging wearily in the mounds of wreckage, with a crooked stick for a spade.—This, where, a month before, the heart of the world’s busiest harbor and ionodyne terminal had throbbed mightily with commerce.
As the helioplane carried us down the peninsula, Smithley told us of the attack, from Mars.
“You certainly roused a hornet’s nest up there,” he began. “They’ve been raising hell here for two weeks.”
“Martians on earth!” Nisbit and I cried together.
“They’re supposed to be Martians. Long green ships that flash through the air—or up out of it—faster than any ionodyne flier ever built. Devilish weapons, they have, too. Little purple sparks that float down—and wipe out anything they strike!”
I stared through the ports of the cabin, at the war-torn country below, struck dumb with astonishment that Mars had attacked our world.
“Five of the ships,” Smithley went on. “They destroyed an American fleet, last week. An ionodyne fleet, that was bombing Mexico City. Eleven of the big fliers, but they couldn’t do a thing against the Martians. Just one got back.
“But I suppose we’re even, at that. On the next night they wiped out an enemy fleet that was crossing the Pacific from Tokio. In fact they have just about put a stop to the war, smashing at the forces of both sides.”
General Houston we found, harassed and puzzled, at his headquarters in a dilapidated farmhouse. He asked Nisbit and me a thousand questions about Mars, and the Martians. We supplied all the information we could. He had his secretary take it down, but it seemed to afford him little satisfaction.
“Why the hell did the things come down here?” he asked, almost querulously. “God knows we had war enough on our hands, without them interfering, smashing our air forces, and those of the enemy, too, until we’re both helpless.”
We failed to answer his question. At that time, we had no idea of Dr. Eldred’s part in the attack from Mars.
We returned to the Princess of Peace when the inquisition was ended; in this war-tom land there was nowhere else to go.
