Collected Short Fiction, page 16
I listened in an agony of suspense. It was several minutes before I was reassured to feel three twitches of the cord. I pulled it up. On the end was tied a piece of paper, with these words penciled upon it:
“Dear Winfield, I hate to leave us thus, without telling you, as I intend to do. But I could not tell you. Go back, get Melvar, and travel as far as you can from this accursed place. May you and she survive and lead a happy life together, in here if you cannot reach the world beyond.
“I will give you twenty hours. In that time you can go far north of the silver fall. I am sure, with the equipment I have with me, I can explode one of the engines and send all this part of the valley skyward—if I live to carry out my plan. Good-by, Austen.”
Then I saw that he had been planning all along to give up his life. The note had been written some time before he left. I cursed the stupidity that had kept me from perceiving his intention. If I had but thought, I would have known it was impossible for the aged scientist to climb the rope from the bottom of the pit. Dear old Austen! The truest friend I ever had! His wrinkled, smiling face, his kind blue eyes, his low familiar voice, are gone forever!
CHAPTER XII
The Forest Aflame
I HAVE a very confused recollection of what happened immediately afterward. My own actions seem a vague, disordered dream. My bitter grief at Austen’s self-sacrifice was the only thing real to me. I believe I began carrying rocks from the boulder-strewn slope at the foot of the cliff, with the idea of securing the rope to them so I could go down in search for him. But my memory of that is very faint.
The first thing I remember clearly is that I was staggering back to the shaft with a heavy rock in my arms, when I caught a whiff of acrid smoke and awoke to the realization that the purple sky was darkened with drifting clouds, and the air was already heavy with the suffocating pungent odor of the burning red vegetation. My instinctive alarm at the thought of fire served to bring me to myself, and I was suddenly fearful for the safety of Melvar.
I knew that, had the red-hot rocket-ship in which we had crossed the Silver Sea chanced to fall in the jungle instead of on the barren hilltop, a conflagration would have spread from it at once. Abruptly I remembered that the glowing fragments of the one we had wrecked had fallen in the northern forest. Austen’s cabin lay in that direction! I knew that the red vegetation was peculiarly inflammable, and that the fire fed on the oxygen of the heavy atmosphere, would advance with terrible speed.
For a moment, in a panic of indecision, I listened. From the north I heard the crackling roar of a mighty conflagration. Then my mind was made up. Any attempt to find Austen and induce him to give up his plan of self-sacrifice would be terribly uncertain. Melvar was in immediate danger, and I knew that Austen valued her life above his own. But even then, I knew in my heart that it was too late, though I would not let myself believe it. Fire is a pitiless and remorseless enemy.
At a dead run I started up the trail by which we had entered the clearing. Ever the smoke became thicker and more acrid, while the crackling roar of the fire rang ever louder in my ears. I ran on through the ghastly gloom of the scarlet jungle, in made desperation, even after hope was gone, until the hot suffocating breath of the flames was choking me, until the bright lurid curtain of the fire was spread before my eyes, and the intense heat radiation blistered my skin. The vast wall of flame swept forward like a voracious demoniac thing of crimson, implacable, irresistible, overwhelming. It plunged forward like a rushing tidal wave of red. Already the fire had passed the site of the cabin!
I was suddenly hopeless, and despairing, and very tired. The flames rushed forward faster, by far, than a human being could force a way through the jungle. With the knowledge that I had just lost the only two beings that in all the world of men ever mattered to me, it hardly seemed worth while to try to save my own life. For a moment I stood there, about to cast myself into the flames. But it is not the nature of an animal to die willingly, no matter how slight the promise of life may be.
When I could endure the heat no longer, when the pain of my blistered skin, and the outcries of my tortured lungs had grown unsupportable, I turned and ran toward the clearing again. Behind me, the flames roared like a lightning express. The fern-like fronds burned explosively, like gun-cotton. My nostrils and lungs were seared and smarting. The hot wind dried my skin and left it scorched and cracked. I was blinded by the smoke. I longed to throw myself down and seek the temporary ecstasy of a breath of clear air from near the ground, of a cooling plunge into a muddy pool. The red jungle reeled about me, but I fought my way on, like a man in a dream.
At last I staggered into the open space. The last of the giant trees exploded into flames not a score of yards behind me. Sparks rained upon me. My clothing caught fire. I ran on, fighting at it with my hands. The jungle back of me roared deafeningly, an angry, surging sea of lurid red flames, awful, overwhelming, fantastically terrible. Heat radiation poured across the clearing in a pitiless beam. I struggled on across the white sand, away from flames that tossed themselves up like volcano-ridden ranges of scarlet alps, until I reached the shelter of a great boulder on the slope below the cliff.
I flung myself down behind the rock, gulping down the cool air and rubbing out the fire in my clothing with my blackened hands. For many hours I lay there, tortured by thirst and pain. At last I fell into a light sleep of troubled dreams, in which huge, winged, green ants flew after me through burning crimson forests and in which I saw the dear form of Melvar devoured again and again by the flames.
I was awakened, after a time, I know not how long, by a cool wind that had sprung up from the north. For a moment my mind was lost in blank wonder, and then came the desolate memory that Melvar and Austen were lost. In hopeless misery I got weakly to my feet and walked unsteadily around the boulder until I could look across the clearing.
As I leaned against the rock, gazing eastward, it was a strangely altered and desolate scene that lay before my eyes. The red forest was gone. Below me was a region of low rolling hills, black and grim beneath the lowering, smoky purple sky. The white sand about me stood out in sharp contrast to the charred and gloomy waste beyond, from which a few slender wisps of dark smoke were still rising. All life was gone. It was a dead world. But still the dense purple clouds poured out of the shafts of the underworld, adding their weight to the dismal sky.
A great homesickness for the world, and my fellow men came over me. Then I heard a strange humming behind me, and a slight metallic clatter. I turned around in apathetic curiosity.
A Strange Duel
AND I came face to face with a monster so utterly strange and weirdly terrible that the very shock of it almost unseated my wandering reason. But so completely had my interests and hopes in life been severed, so near was I to the great divide of death, that I was past emotion of any kind. At first I looked on the thing with a curious lack of interest, as the soul of one newly dead might look with numbed faculties on his new habitation. But as I looked upon it, an icy current of fear stole over me like the creeping cold of the north, and clasped me to its frozen breast. I had met so many horrors that I had begun to think myself immune to terror. But I had met no such thing as that.
I knew that it was an intelligent, a sentient being. But it was not human, not a thing of flesh and blood at all. It was a machine! Or, rather, it was in a machine, for I felt far more of it than I saw—a will, a cold and alien intellect, a being, malefic, inhuman, inscrutable. It was a thing that belonged, not in the present earth, but in the tomb of the unthinkable past, or beyond the wastes of interstellar space, amid the inconceivably horrors of unknown spheres.
There was a bright, gleaming globe, three feet in diameter, lit with vivid flowing fires of violet and green. A strange swirling mist of brilliant points of many colored lights danced madly about it—a coruscating fog of iridescent fire—moving, flickering, in an incredible rhythm.
That unearthly thing rested upon a frame of metal. It was the head of a metallic monster. It was set on an oblong box of white metal, to which were attached six long-jointed metal limbs. The being stood nine feet high, at least. It was standing on three of the limbs and holding my rifle, which I had left where I had been lying, turning it and feeling of it with a cluster of slender, fingerlike tentacles on the end of the metal arm. It was working the mechanism of the gun, and apparently looking at it, though it had no eyes that I could see.
Suddenly the gun went off, throwing up the sand between me and the monster. With a grotesquely half-human attitude of alarmed surprise, the being dropped the gun and sprang back like a gigantic spider. The motion freed me from my paralysis of horror, and I started backing cautiously around the boulder, afraid to run. As I moved it sprang forward and a slender tube of white metal, in one of the tentacled hands, was suddenly pointed toward me. As the monster moved, there was a humming sound from it, and little jets of purple gas hissed from holes in. the sides of the box-like body.
I drew my automatic and fired at the metal tube.
I must have made an unusually fortunate shot, for the object was carried out of the metal grasp, and fell spinning on the sand. On the instant, I turned and ran toward another great boulder, as large as a railroad locomotive, that lay fifty yards to the north. As I ran I heard the clatter and whirring of the mechanical being. I paused at the edge of the rock and took a last glimpse back.
The monster was holding the little tube in one of its limbs, and apparently adjusting it with another. Then it suddenly extended the thing toward me. I dived behind the rock. And a bright ray of orange light shot past the boulder—a beam like that which had come from the being in the door of the rocket ship. Then I knew that here was an entity of the same kind as the one I had destroyed that night—one of the ruling intelligences of the crater, the Krimlu.
For several minutes I crouched behind the boulder, expecting the terrible being to come striding around after me at any instant; but it did not come, so presently I began to think. Perhaps the things were not so powerful, or so extremely intelligent after all. I had killed one, even if it was just by a chance shot in the dark. This one had seemed surprised and alarmed when the rifle went off, and I supposed that a being so intelligent as I had at first thought it to be might have inferred the nature and use of the weapon from its appearance. And I thought that it must be afraid of me, after my pistol bullet had knocked its own weapon out of its grip, or it would have followed me around the boulder. Then I began to wonder what it was going to do.
It evidently intended to strike me with the ray weapon. And not only did it respect me, but it knew that I stood in deathly fear of it. It knew that I was trying to escape, so it might reasonably expect me to leave the unscalable cliff and attempt a break against the open country. And if I were to do that, I would naturally keep in the shelter of my own boulder as long as possible. If the monster thought in that way, the logical thing for it to do would be to creep out of the upper side of its rock, where I would inevitably come into its sight by whatever direction I left my breastwork.
Of course there was a frightful risk in taking any action on such a hypothesis—a greater risk than I realized at the time. If the monster were less intelligent than I supposed, I might blunder on it; if it were more intelligent, it might have anticipated my plan—might be waiting to trap me.
But I crawled out along the upper side of my boulder and peered over a smaller rock which would serve me as a breastwork, my automatic ready. I expected to see the creature in my range, and itself intent upon my other lines of retreat. But it was not there. For a moment I thought I was doomed, but the orange ray did not strike, and I was forced to the conclusion that the monster was not in a position for action at all.
For a moment I was tempted to precipitate flight across the clearing, but I knew that such a move would put me at the mercy of the ray, and I thought that it might not yet be too late to carry out my original plan. I lay flat, with the gun trained on the spot where I expected it to appear. For perhaps fifteen minutes nothing happened; then it proved that my hypothesis was justified. The weird being suddenly sprang into view, with the strange weapon grasped in its glittering arm. It seemed to be looking beyond my boulder. I was lying ready, with the automatic leveled. It was a matter of the merest instant to aim at the green sphere and pull the trigger.
The globe was shattered as if it had been made of glass. The glittering fragments showered off the metal box, while the whole mechanical body suddenly became very rigid, and fell heavily to the side. A puff of coruscating green mist floated out of the globe as it broke, and swiftly dissipated, and the sparkling lights were about the thing no more. The monster was evidently dead.
For a few moments I hesitated, but I was sure the thing had been killed, and my curiosity got the better of my fear. I cautiously approached it. For a moment I marveled at the wonderful workmanship of the machine and at the cleverness of its design; then I saw something that made me forget all else. Something beside the crystal shell had fallen.
The tissue of it was very delicate, and it had been broken by the fall, so that the body juices were running from it. The brain cavity of it was very large—perhaps larger than that of a man—covered only with a thin chitinous shell. The limbs were but thin tentacles, almost altogether atrophied. In fact, the brain seemed three-fourths of the total bulk. The body was so badly smashed that I could tell little about it, but the tiny limbs were covered with chitin, and there were the rudimentary stumps of fine, tissue-like wings. There were no visible traces of digestive organs, or of mandibles.
The thing was plainly an insect. From just what species it had sprung in the long process of evolution in the crater it would be difficult to say. For several reasons, I believe it was an ant. At any rate, it had reached about the ultimate stage of evolution. Machines had altogether replaced bodies of flesh and blood. I believe the thing had been nourished by the sparkling green vapor, which must have circulated like blood through the protecting crystal sphere.
It seems incredible to find great intelligence in any form of life other than human; but science thinks that life and intelligence must rise and fall in recurring cycles, and that the earth has probably been ruled by many different forms of life, each of which has been blotted out by some cataclysm. The Krimlu were a surviving remnant of archaic ages.
CHAPTER XII
When Austen Struck
I LOST little time in the examination of the dead creature. The shafts from which it had come were but a few hundred yards below, and the purple gas was still rolling out of the funnels. I did not know when a second monster might follow the first. My mind was too much upset by grief and terror to be capable of intelligent planning, but I knew I wanted to get away from here, and I think I had some notion of reaching the northern pass, and of getting back to an unburned growth of the red vegetation, for I was weak with thirst and hunger. But all that was very vague.
I walked around the wells, keeping at a distance; and struck out for the east as fast as my wearied limbs could carry me. Soon the cliff was out of sight. All about was the desolate, rolling black landscape, with the gloomy purple sky overhead. My thoughts were as dark and sere as the world. Memories of dear old Austen and of lovely Melvar were always with me, even when I tried to banish the and to think rationally of my position.
When I had gone perhaps three hours from the cliff, and had almost lost my fear of pursuit, I saw a great cigar-shaped object of gleaming white on a low hill before me. So dulled were my perceptions that it was many minutes before I realized that it was the rocket-ship in which we had come over the Silver Sea. Then, bringing a faint thrill of hope, the thought came to me that it was still probably in a condition to fly, and that, if I could succeed in controlling it, it offered a possible avenue of escape from the crater.
I walked up to the thick metal walls. They seemed undamaged by the fire. Of course, they were used to withstanding the far higher temperatures developed during flight. I walked around the ship, and was surprised to see that the heavy metal door, which we had left open, had been swung shut. Lying against it was the charred skeleton of a man. About the bones were woven metal garments and crystal armor that I recognized with a shock as Naro’s. So, I thought, the fellow had deserted his beautiful sister to seek the shelter of the rocketship, and had fallen a victim to the flames at the last moment.
For a moment, I stared grimly at the remains; then, animated by a sudden ray of hope, I sprang to the door, pulled it open, and leaped into the ship. There, lying on the floor, was the lovely form of Melvar. Her clothing was tattered and smeared with stains of red and black from the burning forest, but she was unharmed. It was almost incredible to me to find her restored. I was half afraid that my mind had failed at last, and that she was but an illusion. I dropped on my knees beside her, and kissed her warm red lips. She stirred a little and, still but half awake, put a trustful arm about my shoulder.
“Winfield, I knew you would come,” she whispered at last. “But where are Naro and Austen?”
“They will never come,” I said.
She drew me fiercely toward her, as if to use me for a shield against the awful truth. It was some time before she was able to talk; but presently she told me how Naro had seen the smoke, and how she had thought of seeking shelter from the fire in the rocket ship. They had run down the trail we had made as they left the ship. The fire had overtaken them just as they reached it. The boy had carried her the last few yards, had put her through the door, and then had been unable to enter himself. But, a hero to the last, a worthy warrior of old Astran, he had swung the door shut with his dying motion.
