Collected Short Fiction, page 160
He jerked his thumb.
Lee swayed, and bit his lip.
“You—you ain’t jokin’, Mister. I rode on the side of an oil car, so long! You don’t really mean this ain’t Denver?”
The man started to grin, and then looked quickly away.
“Honest, kid. But you can make it today, easy. Better sit down and have a fill of slum with us.”
“Much oblige, sir,” Lee said wearily. “We’ll be gittin’ on.”
He turned stiffly away. Tige went whining up to the man by the fire.
“Hungry, pup?”
“Here, Tige! Come here!” the boy called sternly. “We ain’t—”
His voice broke; he walked away hastily, the dog reluctantly at heel.
“How you making it, kid?” came a hail.
It was the man of the vest—the garment by day was a dingy green.
“I’m lookin’ for the place to git on the cars again.”
“Had anything to eat?”
“No. I’m goin’ to Denver, to my Uncle Jethro.”
The man came toward Lee.
“Hell, kid, you look all washed up. Come on with me. Let’s mooch something, and eat.”
“I ain’t goin’ to beg,” said Lee. “Not when I got folks to go to.”
“Listen, kid, you’re starving. You gotta eat.”
The boy looked stubbornly away.
“Well, anyhow, let’s move on. The train leaves out up this way.”
They passed in front of a cafe. Lee saw men sitting at a counter inside, heard the rattle of thick dishes. He turned his face away, and hurried on. The man in the green vest lingered. Crisp fragrance of new bread smote Lee with intolerable yearning; he stopped and looked back.
A bakery truck had stopped in front of the cafe; the driver was getting out. The lingering man spoke to him.
“Sure, buddy,” said the driver. “I’ve got plenty of stale bread. Rolls too.”
He reached into the truck, produced a loaf of bread and a package of brown cinnamon rolls. The unshaven man stood eyeing his prizes with visible satisfaction.
“Hit him when he comes out, kid,” he advised. “He’s got plenty more. Hell, kid, you’re starving. You’ll never get to Denver unless you eat. You’ll fall off the train.”
The delicious odor of fresh bread floated around the boy. He swallowed, and took an unsteady step toward the door of the cafe. Then he clenched his thin black hands, and thrust them hard into the pockets of his overalls.
“I ain’t a beggar,” he muttered. “Not so long as I got folks.”
He went back to the tracks and stumbled along them until he came to the caboose of the motionless train. Walking along beside it, toward the engine blowing off steam far away at the head, he looked for an empty car in which he could lie down. He didn’t feel like holding on to the outside again. But all the cars were sealed.
A rough man strode down upon him.
“Get the hell out of the yards, you! You damn sure ain’t going to ride the train out!”
Lee hurried on, the bull followed him. They came to more men waiting; the bull herded them all down the track, left them at last to sit down wearily.
The engine whistled two blasts, began laborious puffing.
The man in the green vest was suddenly beside Lee, holding out a tempting, fragrant cinnamon roll.
“Here, kid. Take this. Hell, you ain’t able to hop it, without something in your gut.”
His hand moved toward it involuntarily; he felt the quick saliva flowing in his mouth.
Then he changed the movement to a weak slap, and buried his face between his knees.
“I won’t—” he sobbed. “I won’t be a beggar!”
The haggard, untidy men got to their feet, slung their packs and bundles to their bodies, dully cursing the bull.
The train came roaring down. They trooped forward, running one by one with the cars, swinging upon the ladders.
Lee felt dizzy when he first stood up; he waited until his head had cleared a little. The others were all gone when he lifted Tige in his arms and staggered toward the rushing cars.
A tank car came rumbling by, and he set the dog on the running board. The end of the car jerked past. He tried to run with it, seized the ladder. It was moving too fast. They had told him not to catch the rear end of a moving car, but he didn’t want to leave Tige.
The world went abruptly gray, and spun; and a strangely delightful lassitude descended upon him. He was unconscious that his foot had missed the step; he hardly felt the iron rung jerk itself savagely from his hands. For an instant, very near, he saw cruel bright steel, and the great wheels thundering . . .
Tige leapt yelping off the car. He fell rolling in the weeds and ran back, to stand whining by the track until the roaring train had gone.
The Plutonian Terror
The story of a gruesome horror on the planet Pluto, and a dread power that swept our Earth clear of human beings—a tale of interplanetary adventures and horrible death
THE strange, dead silence of the ether was the first grim hint of unconceived catastrophe.
Back to Earth the first explorers of space were slanting, returning from a perilous year on the barren moon, eager to feel again the poignant joys of human intercourse. Through the transparent ports of the Cosmobile’s steel-domed bridge, the two first adventurers of the void scanned with proud joy their native planet. They were nearing home!
Earth swam before them, a swelling green-blue sphere, swathed indistinctly in the misty radiance of its atmosphere. Soft and warm and bright it shone, against the startling, frozen, eternal blackness of the star-set universal void.
The foreboding sense of ruthlessly alien cosmic immensities was strong in them; and they yearned for the welcoming arms of Earth, with keenest nostalgia for the world that held all they owned and had known and loved.
“Oh, Ellis,” little Keening whispered through the white bandages that masked his face, “aren’t we in radio range?”
“Why, that’s right, we are!” cried the tall young engineer. “Try it. We had fair reception this far, on the outward trip.”
So the smaller man withdrew his eyes from the supernal panorama of cosmic space, and donned the head-phones of the compact little set built in the top of the chart-table. Impatiently he manipulated the dials, and at last cast aside the headset in exasperation.
“Not a thing,” he whispered. “Quiet as the grave.”
“Queer,” Ellis muttered. “There should be something. This far out we got a dozen stations——”
Keening’s dry, muffled whisper cut him short.
“That! What is it?”
The little man pointed out into the void, and Ellis saw the cube. A silvery cube, bright, sharp-edged, hung in the ebon depth of space. It looked small, and far off, so that it was not prominent among the still stars. Yet its sunward faces shimmered, and it crept across the firmament. Unmistakably cuboid it was, and relatively near.
Ellis hastened to consult his star-charts, and Keening went to the little telescope. A little time they were busy, the technician whispering his readings through the bandages over his face, Ellis plotting the position and orbit of the strange body upon his charts.
“Is there—danger?” Keening whispered, at last.
“It’s a hundred miles away, and crossing in front of us. It will be no nearer. But what is the thing?”
“It looks like a perfect cube, made of silvery metal. Could it be a ship, you suppose? Like our Cosmobile?”
“I don’t think so. Couldn’t be. Why, at a hundred miles’ distance, it must be nearly a mile on a side! I suppose it’s an asteroid.”
“But a cube?” protested Keening. “An artificial shape.”
“An asteroid that size would be as likely to be a cube as any other shape—the gravitation of such small bodies isn’t sufficient to make them spherical. As for the color—it must be white rock.”
“Could we get nearer,” whispered Keening, “see?”
“No. It’s moving too fast. We couldn’t overtake it.”
And the cube crept across the ebon sky, and dwindled to a silvery fleck among the white pin-points that were stars, and so was lost at last in the trackless and utter obscurity of the gulf.
MUTELY wondering, troubled perhaps with some faint icy premonition of the unnamed horror that had ridden into their lives upon the cube, the two of them stood in the control room, beneath the curve of the Cosmobile’s steel hull, gazing after the mysterious object through the small, steel-shuttered ports of laminated glass.
Ellis Drew. Robust, red-headed giant, with the big hands and the heavy jaw of a fighting-man. The dynamic, irresistible energy of his large-boned, steel-sinewed body was reflected in his piercingly blue, wide-set eyes. A man made for conquest, for defiance of the impossible. No other sort could have accomplished what he had done.
In six years out of engineering school.
his only resource at the beginning an idea, Ellis Drew had challenged accepted science, convinced skeptical financiers, met and conquered a hundred technological impossibilities. He had created the Cos mobile, and in it, with one companion, he had dared—victoriously—the uncharted perils of interplanetary space.
Keening was the one companion. A martyr to science, offering, on this mad voyage, his life to the same jealous mistress who had already robbed him of face and voice. A slight, frail-looking figure, face always bandaged to conceal the horror that X-rays had written there.
Toward western America the Cosmobile was dropping.
“Where shall we land?” Keening whispered—the same incautious experiments, Ellis understood, had cost him his face and his vocal organs; he never spoke above that dry and muffled whisper. “Back in the Mare Island yard, I suppose, where we started?”
“No, Keening,” Ellis said, slowly. “No, I want to land at a house in the foothills east of San Jose.”
The white-bandaged face looked at him curiously.
Ellis was a little while reflectively silent, and then he said:
“You see, Keening, a friend of mine lives there. The first scientific man to recognize that my ether-screw was more than a dream. Doctor Fredric Durand.” Keening whispered, “I see.”
But Ellis was not thinking of Doctor Durand. His thoughts were all of a girl, the daughter of his friend. Something of a scientist herself, thanks to her father’s training, she had been actually the first critic Ellis had convinced; and she had convinced her father.
More, she had decided to go with Ellis to the moon.
A picture of her came back to him, as she had looked when she asked to go. Slim and cleanly made, with the lithe elasticity of the disciplined athlete. Oval face flushed and eager, gray eyes burning.
“Sorry,” Ellis had told her, disturbed and embarrassed. “I can’t consider it. Why, you don’t understand what you’re proposing. The two of us together alone, for a year!”
“I think I could stand you, Ellis,” said Tempest Durand.
“It isn’t that!” he floundered desperately. “You must understand, Tempest, I have no animus against you. Instead, I am deeply grateful, both to you and your father, for what you have done. In fact,” he stammered, “I like you.”
“Then,” Tempest mocked him, “if it’s the conventions that worry you, why not marry me?”
Going red, Ellis restrained himself from ignominious flight.
“You must understand, Tempest,” he blundered on, “there’s no place in my life for women. And even if—if I—I loved you, do you think I’d be willing to take you out to the moon? To be smashed with a meteor, or asphyxiated, or frozen to death!”
“You’ll find me stowed away on your old Cosmobile!” she had challenged him.
And then she began stormily to cry. With a disquieting feeling that she was weeping just to see the effect upon him, Ellis had risen and snatched his hat and fled.
It had not been easy to find a companion for the trip. Cranks in abundance had offered themselves, but none possessing the scientific training he required. He had come almost to regret his refusal of the girl’s companionship. Had she spoken of the matter again, he might have thrust his scruples aside. But she avoided him.
Fortunately, just on the eve of the Cosmobile’s scheduled departure, Keening had come to offer himself. A trained technician, he possessed the skill that Ellis required. He was willing, he said, to take any risk in the service of science. Incurable burns, resulting from injudicious experimenting with “hard” or high-frequency X-rays, had eaten his face away, destroyed his voice. Life meant nothing to him.
THE Cosmobile settled softly into the tangled shrubbery of the wide, Spanish-style patio of Doctor Fredric Durand’s stuccoed dwelling, secluded in the foothills of the lovely Santa Clara valley. Ellis’s heart was leaping. Many times, in the long year of exploration upon the lifeless moon, he had lived over this moment when he should see Tempest again. For in the loneliness of space he had seen life more clearly; he realized that women—or one woman—had gained a place in his being that could not be denied her.
The Cosmobile was a hollow ball of three-inch steel, twenty-four feet in diameter, divided horizontally by two floors or decks. Beneath the lower deck were the banks of storage batteries, the cylinders of liquid oxygen to keep the air breathable, and the compact apparatus of the ether-screw, or, as Ellis termed it in his technical monograph, the “electrodynamic geodesic compensator.” Above the upper floor was the crowded control room. The space between decks was divided into sleeping-compartments, storerooms, and galley.
Keening was still working impatiently with the radio.
“Can’t get a thing,” he whispered, “or find anything wrong with the set. Static as usual. But not a human voice.” They descended from the bridge, and opened the circular valve in the side of the sphere. It was eight feet to the ground. Ellis dropped the folding metal ladder, and they climbed down into the patio.
“Hamilton Penn has apparently taken a holiday,” Ellis observed when they stood beneath the bulging steel hull of the ether-car. He pointed at the dahlia-beds, neglected, weed-grown, wilted. “Penn,” he explained, “was my friend’s negro gardener.”
He remembered Tempest Durand, as he had seen her standing among the fresh blooms, and looked hopefully toward the door. But she did not appear. Nor did any one else. The house was deserted, burdened with a heavy and ominous silence.
Wondering, both chilled with fatal apprehension, thinking of all that can happen in a year, Ellis and Keening entered the house.
The doors were open. Dust of months had settled upon the floors. The clock had stopped. In the dining-room a meal was on the table—but the food, half eaten, was dry, covered with white dust. The house had not been lived in for many days.
Keening went to the radio set in the living-room, tried to tune it. Crackle and sputter of static came from the speaker, but never a note of music nor a whisper of human speech.
Ominously, the ether was dead.
Then Ellis thought of the telephone and hastened to call Central. Though he tried for minutes, there was no response. The wires were also dead!
Together they ran out through the front door, and down the drive to the road. The valley below was empty of movement. Wind-smoothed, the road-dust revealed no mark of wheel. No traffic, obviously, had it known for many; weeks.
“Something,” Ellis muttered, “is wrong.”
And Keening’s whisper echoed, “Dreadfully wrong.”
BACK in the steel ball of the Cosmobile, they floated slowly above the farms and orchards of the lovely Santa Clara valley. Fruit was unpicked, crops untended. Strangely lonely was the countryside, and they saw no human being.
In minutes they were above the roofs of San Jose. Below, the streets were empty. The sphere settled into a deserted thoroughfare. Once more they lowered the metal ladder, and descended.
The midday sun beat down upon dusty asphalt. As far as they could see, in either direction, pavement and sidewalks were bare. Neither vehicle nor pedestrian moved upon them.
They walked together across the street, to a dry goods store. The door was open, and a table of dusty garments stood in front of it, with a fading sign that announced the fact of a cut-price sale. Ellis shouted hopefully back into the room—and dead echoes mocked him.
Next door was a grocery and meat market. Impulsively, Ellis pushed open the unlocked door, thrust his head within. Stench of putrefying food greeted his nostrils.
Keening led the way ahead to a news stand at the corner. Its wares, exposed to wind and weather, were yellow, faded, tattered. He found a legible newspaper, read aloud the date: “May 19.”
“May?” echoed Ellis. “Why, that’s six months ago.”
Anxiously they scanned the sheet in search of any item that might cast light upon this baffling, terrifying mystery of the city’s desertion. But the dingy columns contained nothing extraordinary; the front page was largely devoted to the brutal details of a club murder.
“We have learned two things,” Ellis said at last. “We know that it happened on May 19. And we know there was no warning—none, at least, that attracted newspaper attention.”
“Do you suppose,” Keening whispered—“do you suppose that something has happened to all humanity?”
“Of course not,” Ellis said. “Just something frightened the people away from here. Earthquake? Epidemic? What could——”
He remembered the silent ether, and stopped.
Strange it was to feel that they might be alone—inexplicably alone—upon the Earth.
Two alone . . .
None to aid them or to criticize. None to applaud or jeer. None to welcome their return, or to listen to their story of adventure on the moon. None henceforward with whom to hold converse. It was terror and desolation.
Flying again, northward, they came over San Francisco Bay. It was gray with rafts of crowded shipping. The fleets of all the world were gathered there. Long gray dreadnaughts, low slim destroyers, furtive submarines. Proudly splendid liners and red-rusted, salt-caked ocean tramps. Trim, white-sailed yachts, and ancient wind-jammers with yellow, rotting canvas. Rafts and rowboats, canoes and catamarans, junks and proas.
