Collected Short Fiction, page 168
“Lucky for us the water’s here, Red,” Don protested airily—my name is Ared Stokes; he persists in contracting it to “Red.”
“If it hadn’t been for the water, somebody else would have had the thing out years ago. A couple of multistage centrifugal pumps——”
“Would,” I finished for him, “cost a lot of money.”
“It’s your job,” he reminded me lightly, “to make money. And mine to spend what you make. I’m not complaining. But it does keep me hopping to stay even with you!”
I gave up. It’s true I manage the firm, and old William Belgrand left it in such sound condition that it can’t help paying dividends, even in times of depression. Don has never taken very much interest in his millions. Not much even in spending them, except in some such quasi-scientific project as this.
I spent the rest of our visit staring up at the twisted, battered, naked precipices that frowned down at us from every side of the pit, wondering blankly about the cataclysm that flung them up. The alien mystery of the crater, its cruel, stark desolation, was getting on my nerves.
Before we were out of the pit, Don made up his mind to exercise the option on the mining lease. I didn’t approve, and told him so. He merely grinned, and informed me that he wanted another hundred thousand, for a preliminary survey.
I WENT BACK to New York. For two months I didn’t see Don, and heard from him only when he needed more money—which was often, for the meteor-mining adventure seemed ill-starred from the first.
Millions of gallons of water poured into his shafts; he designed and installed special pumps, in an effort to drain what seemed to be a subterranean sea—and pumps cost money.
The strange, powdery quartz sand caused endless difficulties, caving into the tunnels, until Don invented a new—and expensive—machine to line them with reenforced concrete.
The “meteor” proved amazingly elusive. Learned geologists discussed the dynamics of impact, and gave opinions—expensive opinions—about where it lay. Don drove tunnels—very expensive tunnels—and proved that the opinions were about as good as mine, which was that the sooner we quit the better for Belgrand, Inc.
Don, however, has never been able to tell when he’s beaten. Nor will he listen when anybody else tells him he is. He kept on. He sent the geologists away, and followed his own ideas, with the aid of a sourfaced little Scot named MacQueen. They drove the concrete burrows on through the debris of crushed rock under the floor of the crater.
At last I had a wire from Don:
METEOR FOUND. NOT A METEOR. COME AT ONCE.
I found an amazing change in the crater. There was a new, splendid road from the highway, that wound over the rim and down to the head of the principal shaft. New, silvery sheet-iron buildings had replaced gray desolation. Great Diesels drummed incessantly. The pit after dark was a cup of electric light.
Both tense with nervous elation, hollow-eyed for want of sleep, Don and grim-visaged MacQueen took me a thousand feet down the shaft and out through a net of gray tunnels to the discovery.
It was a wall of grim black iron, pitted with forty thousand years of corrosion. Men were busy with oxyhydrogen torches, but they found the dense, tough nickel-iron alloy almost impossible to cut.
“Three inches in three days,” Don remarked. “I want another hundred thousand, Red, to find some way to cut through this wall.”
I was beginning my usual, useless protest, when he went on:
“But it wasn’t that I wanted to tell you, Red. I can wire for money. I wanted to tell you why the thing was so hard to find.”
“Yes?”
“The main mass isn’t in the bottom of the pit. And it never was. It had a fender! Some huge structure, that tore the crater in front of it, and collapsed under the main mass, to break the force of its fall. It wasn’t, Red, a meteor at all!”
“What, then——”
“A projectile!” Feverish, strained excitement burned in his gray eyes, trembled in his voice. “It was a shot, Red, fired to the earth across space from another planet! With an immense fender to break its fall, preserve whatever is inside!”
“Another planet!” I protested. “Are you crazy, Don?”
“Nearly,” he said, and grinned. “But I mean it, Red! The thing was shot from Mars, I’m sure. The Lowell Observatory fellows, up at Flagstaff, have convinced me that Mars has life older and more intelligent than the earth. Their irrigation system——”
He broke off, and grinned at me again.
“I guess you think I’m pretty wild, Red. And I am. Wild to get through that wall!”
I stayed for a day, even caught some of their feverish agitation. Don had driven a net of tunnels about the thing, following the curve of it, exploring its rugged black iron surface. The Shell—they called it that—was almost a perfect’ sphere. It was hugely massive, nearly two hundred feet thick. It felt their eagerness, yet I was some-; how skeptical that the nickel-iron crust contained anything but more nickel-iron.
Then I had to go—what with the depression, Don’s enormous expenditures had got the firm into a condition that kept me busy. It was nearly four months later that I received his imperative telegram:
DROP EVERYTHING. COME. I NEED YOU.
I came. One early morning a hired car brought me out from the town of Winslow, across gray, bleakly featureless desert, toward the strange, ring-shaped wall of age-old debris that hides the meteor-mine. At the new buildings in the bottom of the pit, under the sinister oppression of the tumbled, cragged walls, I found Don, for a miracle, asleep—it was the first time in three days, said dour old MacQueen, that he had been in bed.
IN A FEW minutes he appeared. I was distressed to see that his broad shoulders sagged a little under some intense nervous strain. His grin was stiffened by a strange, anxious tension. Brooding in his gray eyes was an agony—a longing and a dread.
We breakfasted together in the little shack beside the shaft. The meal was good—Don’s Chinese cook had come with him from the Western Belle. But Don displayed no appetite; he was weighed down with a silent, apprehensive indecision.
“How’s it coming, Don?” I had to ask him. “You wired, months ago, that you were inside. What did you find? Is the thing actually—hollow?”
His gray, steady eyes looked at me, haunted with strange dread.
“Yes, Red, it’s hollow,” he said slowly, almost wearily. “Or it has a chamber in it; it’s mostly solid metal. It’s really a shot. It was fired from Mars.”
His manner was as astounding as his words. His old eagerness was gone. He was tired—frightened—in an agony of doubt. Outright, I demanded:
“Tell me, Don, what’s the matter? You look almost sorry you found the thing.”
His tortured eyes stared at me; he made a feeble attempt to grin.
“Fact is, Red, I am. I wish the ace that won me that infernal option had been a deuce!”
“Well, if you feel that way about it, the sooner we quit the better. We can salvage the machinery and try to sell the lease. A few millions gone, of course. But what’s a cool million or so?”
He ignored my intended irony. “We have to abandon the thing,” he told me soberly. “It isn’t that that bothers me. A new flow of water broke into the shaft yesterday. It’s carrying sand. Just a matter of hours until it clogs the pumps. Then—we’re done!”
“In that case, I don’t see any choice except to salvage as much machinery as you can, and get out.” His queerly tragic eyes looked at me; he tried to grin.
“But there is a choice,” he said. “In fact, a hell of a choice! That’s why I sent for you, Red. I hoped your hard-headedness would make me snap out of it!”
“If you want my advice,” I told him, “I wish you’d explain the situation a little more fully.”
“I can’t explain!” cried Don. “Lord! You wouldn’t believe me if I did. I tell you, Red, it’s a fan-fustic mess! But I can show you!” I left my breakfast—Don had eaten nothing—and we hurried to the top of the shaft. We met shriveled-faced little MacQueen, furiously bustling about, chewing the ends of his mustache.
“Ye ain’t going down again, Mr. Belgrand?” Apprehension was in the question. “The sand’s getting to the pumps, I tell ye! They may stop any minute. Ye’ll be trapped before ye know it!”
“Mr. Stokes and I are going down,” Don told him. “We have to.”
He muttered protestingly, and I felt a chill of dread at the outlook. But Don dragged me into the cage; it dropped sickeningly under us, stopped as suddenly. Don led me off at a trot down the narrow, gray-walled drift, through eerie silence and cold, tomblike damp.
We came to the black, curving, rough-surfaced iron wall of the Shell. A guard stood in front of it, a thin little dwarf of a man, in an enormous leather coat. He held an automatic shotgun.
“Better get out to the cage, Tenbow,” Don told him briefly. “The water will be here soon.”
“Thank you, sir.” Relief was in his voice.
“Don’t let anybody pass except Mack.”
“All right, sir.”
The leather coat moved aside; I saw the entrance to the Shell.
A round, thirty-inch hole, drilled into the nickel iron. It was smooth and bright as the bore of a mammoth gun. Insulated wire was strung into it. It had cost Belgrand, Inc., three hundred thousand dollars.
In front of it, in a kind of cradle that ran on a track, was a huge steel plug, eight feet long, milled to the diameter of the bore.
“We’ll seal it up with that,” Don told me hastily, “when we’re—through. A flick of that lever, and the motors drive it in.” And he added, with unexpected vehemence: “I wish I’d pulled the lever the moment we got it finished!”
He squirmed into the hole. I wasn’t eager to follow. I was cold with the chill of alien, mysterious evil that dwells in the crater; sick with fear that the rising water would trap us.
But I did follow. Anxious curiosity was aflame in me. And, anyhow, I couldn’t have deserted Don, so desperately troubled.
For seventy feet, I suppose, we crept through that very expensive bore. Then Don vanished. I looked into the chamber in the iron. It was flooded with the glare of Don’s harsh electrics.
Six-sided, it was, the roof slightly domed. Perhaps forty feet across, twenty in height. Lined with something smooth and glistening, like green enamel. The bore pierced one wall some ten feet above the tilted floor; a ladder had been set under it.
FOR MINUTES I gazed, astounded at the tremendous reality of contact with an alien world. The full wonder of it burst upon me only when I saw that green, six-walled room in the globe of iron.
Machines, in the corners, shimmered fantastically under the brilliance of Don’s lights. To me they looked as weirdly incomprehensible as objects of the fourth dimension. They were mostly of some white metal that had a strange, faintly blue cast.
Piled high against one green wall was—treasure inconceivable. A colossal black coffer heaped with strange gems—jewels of a foreign world. They flamed with weird witch fires. Wondrously, they scintillated with red and yellow and blue, with purple and green, with colors never seen on Earth before.
Above were stacks of metal ingots. Queer thick bars of silver, of xanthic gold, of argent platinum, of some pale-green metal new to Earth.
I was staggered at the stupendous value of the hoard. It would have repaid our expenses a hundred times. But Don evidently had not disturbed it, and now it would be too late to remove it.
But the most amazing thing in that green, hexagonal, iron-walled cell was neither shimmering mechanisms nor weird, incalculable treasure. It was the woman.
The Flame Woman!
In the middle of the green chamber was a broad black platform. It was covered with a dome-shaped shell, transparent as glass. Under the crystal dome, bathed in a kind of rosy mist, lay—Allurova!
She was reclining on a black, simple couch. Her limbs were drawn up in the position of natural sleep. She was covered only by the sheerest, scantiest garment of something that looked like spun silver.
Beautiful, she was, beyond all imagining. Her fine skin was the color of pale coral. Her sleeping body was like an exquisite jewel cut out of coral. Her thick hair and her narrow brows were dark.
I stared at the motionless girl. Her still, lonely loveliness brought a quick ache to my throat. The green, amazing chamber swam in front of my eyes. For one bitter moment I longed for youth again.
At the bottom of the ladder, Don was staring, too.
Adoration was in his gaze. A love so intense it was painful to see. With it, dragging down his very soul to bitter depths, was black despair. And a cold, naked dread that chilled me.
“Wake up, Don,” I called down, to arouse him from the agony of that fascination. “You’re the prize catch left in the sea—you can’t die mooning over a mummy forty thousand years old!”
“Mummy? Mummy!” Tortured gray eyes looked up at me. “She’s more alive than I am! She—she’s immortal, Red!”
He held the ladder for me to climb down to the floor of the green chamber.
“Immortal?” I demanded. “How do you know? How did she come to be here, anyhow?”
“Her name is Allurova. She was a princess, on Mars. Allurova. And they gave her another name, that means Flame Woman.”
“But how in the name of common sense did she come to be here, buried inside a million tons of iron?”
“She was shot away from Mars,” Don told me slowly, “because she is—terrible! I told you it was a weird mess, Red. The rulers of Mars shot her out into space, because she was about to wreck their civilization!”
I demanded, then, as incredulity conquered my amazement:—“How do you know all this?”
He turned to one of those weird machines, that was crowned with a black cube, yard-square, shimmering like polished jet. As if quite familiar with it, he touched some control that started a low, whirring hum.
Then, before I knew what he was about, he snapped out the electrics. Darkness fell on us like a terrible, smothering flood. I cried out. I remembered we were a thousand feet underground, under seventy feet of iron, with subterranean waters rising inexorably upon us.
“This thing,” Don began, “is a little like a movie——”
But I wasn’t listening. I was staring at the Flame Woman—now I understood the name. She hadn’t vanished into darkness with the rest of the weird room. Under the crystal dome that was like a great bowl inverted, Allurova was still visible.
Her pale, matchless body shone with ineffable radiance, uncanny, unearthly. She was a jewel of coral flame. Her whole perfect body was permeated with supernal fire. The soft glow of her faintly lit the rosy gas about her, under the dome.
She was drenched, saturated, with a visible, vibrant energy.
A moment I was speechless, half with the sheer wonder of it, half with a new, blood-quickening admiration of her unutterable beauty, flaming against subterranean gloom. Then I cried out to Don:
“Look! She’s—shining!”
“That’s why they call her the Flame Woman,” he told me. He was still busy with the mechanism. He said abruptly:—“Watch the cube.”
I tore my eyes from the weird, burning wonder of Allurova, to look at the black cube.
It was flushed with gray. A faint mist of silver-gray was born in it, and filled it, and became brighter, until it was a cube of silver flame.
A bell note pealed from the instrument, clear, deeply golden. Its liquid reverberations trembled and shattered into silence. And the silver light ran out of the cube like molten metal.
It left the figure of a man. The cube was invisible; the figure seemed to stand before us, on a little argent table. It was only two feet high; only, I knew, an image. But no reality could have been more vividly real.
It was an old man, robed strangely and in white, with the grave stamp of an austere power upon his solemn face.
He gestured for attention, with a manner of serene authority. His lips moved. He spoke. His voice rang clear in the darkened chamber—though I knew it came across forty million miles of space and forty thousand years of time.
Don touched another lever. The voice stopped. The molten silver rose again, filled the cube, faded to blackness. The humming ceased. Don—to my relief—snapped on the lights.
“You see, now, Red, how I know.”
“You could—understand?”
“It’s something like our talking pictures,” he swiftly explained. “There are dozens of records. The first were picture lessons in the Martian language. The speaker pointed out objects, and named them, and illustrated the meaning of verbs. Then there were lectures on the history and the art and the science of Mars. The thing’s tremendous, Red! Three months, I’ve been working on it, twenty hours a day. And I haven’t even begun.
But this water, drowning us out——
“But I was going to tell you about Allurova.”
HE LOOKED at the fantastic, beauteous sleeper, and his haggard face was terrible again with longing and despair and dread. He made a visible effort to regain control of himself, turned back to me with a muttered, explosive “Damn!”
“That was the last record,” he said swiftly, as if thinking of the rising cold flood. “The man speaking was the ruler of Mars, telling the story of the Flame Woman, for the benefit of any one who might enter the Shell. And giving a warning against waking her.
“Anyhow, Allurova, I told you, was a princess of the planet Mars. Their civilization is—or rather was, forty thousand years ago—on a level with ours. They were far ahead of us in engineering. Had to be, to handle those irrigation projects. But we haven’t time for a lecture.
“Allurova’s mother, Red, was a distinguished scientist, as well as a personage of rank. Her father was much less admirable. He dishonored his wife, squandered her fortune, finally attempted to poison her. The plot failed, and the man departed with one of the slave girls and the valuables he could lay hands on, shortly before Allurova was born.
“The mother’s body was always tortured and disfigured from the effects of the terrible poison he had used—only her science had saved her life. She never got over her broken heart and her bitterness against men.
“If it hadn’t been for the water, somebody else would have had the thing out years ago. A couple of multistage centrifugal pumps——”
“Would,” I finished for him, “cost a lot of money.”
“It’s your job,” he reminded me lightly, “to make money. And mine to spend what you make. I’m not complaining. But it does keep me hopping to stay even with you!”
I gave up. It’s true I manage the firm, and old William Belgrand left it in such sound condition that it can’t help paying dividends, even in times of depression. Don has never taken very much interest in his millions. Not much even in spending them, except in some such quasi-scientific project as this.
I spent the rest of our visit staring up at the twisted, battered, naked precipices that frowned down at us from every side of the pit, wondering blankly about the cataclysm that flung them up. The alien mystery of the crater, its cruel, stark desolation, was getting on my nerves.
Before we were out of the pit, Don made up his mind to exercise the option on the mining lease. I didn’t approve, and told him so. He merely grinned, and informed me that he wanted another hundred thousand, for a preliminary survey.
I WENT BACK to New York. For two months I didn’t see Don, and heard from him only when he needed more money—which was often, for the meteor-mining adventure seemed ill-starred from the first.
Millions of gallons of water poured into his shafts; he designed and installed special pumps, in an effort to drain what seemed to be a subterranean sea—and pumps cost money.
The strange, powdery quartz sand caused endless difficulties, caving into the tunnels, until Don invented a new—and expensive—machine to line them with reenforced concrete.
The “meteor” proved amazingly elusive. Learned geologists discussed the dynamics of impact, and gave opinions—expensive opinions—about where it lay. Don drove tunnels—very expensive tunnels—and proved that the opinions were about as good as mine, which was that the sooner we quit the better for Belgrand, Inc.
Don, however, has never been able to tell when he’s beaten. Nor will he listen when anybody else tells him he is. He kept on. He sent the geologists away, and followed his own ideas, with the aid of a sourfaced little Scot named MacQueen. They drove the concrete burrows on through the debris of crushed rock under the floor of the crater.
At last I had a wire from Don:
METEOR FOUND. NOT A METEOR. COME AT ONCE.
I found an amazing change in the crater. There was a new, splendid road from the highway, that wound over the rim and down to the head of the principal shaft. New, silvery sheet-iron buildings had replaced gray desolation. Great Diesels drummed incessantly. The pit after dark was a cup of electric light.
Both tense with nervous elation, hollow-eyed for want of sleep, Don and grim-visaged MacQueen took me a thousand feet down the shaft and out through a net of gray tunnels to the discovery.
It was a wall of grim black iron, pitted with forty thousand years of corrosion. Men were busy with oxyhydrogen torches, but they found the dense, tough nickel-iron alloy almost impossible to cut.
“Three inches in three days,” Don remarked. “I want another hundred thousand, Red, to find some way to cut through this wall.”
I was beginning my usual, useless protest, when he went on:
“But it wasn’t that I wanted to tell you, Red. I can wire for money. I wanted to tell you why the thing was so hard to find.”
“Yes?”
“The main mass isn’t in the bottom of the pit. And it never was. It had a fender! Some huge structure, that tore the crater in front of it, and collapsed under the main mass, to break the force of its fall. It wasn’t, Red, a meteor at all!”
“What, then——”
“A projectile!” Feverish, strained excitement burned in his gray eyes, trembled in his voice. “It was a shot, Red, fired to the earth across space from another planet! With an immense fender to break its fall, preserve whatever is inside!”
“Another planet!” I protested. “Are you crazy, Don?”
“Nearly,” he said, and grinned. “But I mean it, Red! The thing was shot from Mars, I’m sure. The Lowell Observatory fellows, up at Flagstaff, have convinced me that Mars has life older and more intelligent than the earth. Their irrigation system——”
He broke off, and grinned at me again.
“I guess you think I’m pretty wild, Red. And I am. Wild to get through that wall!”
I stayed for a day, even caught some of their feverish agitation. Don had driven a net of tunnels about the thing, following the curve of it, exploring its rugged black iron surface. The Shell—they called it that—was almost a perfect’ sphere. It was hugely massive, nearly two hundred feet thick. It felt their eagerness, yet I was some-; how skeptical that the nickel-iron crust contained anything but more nickel-iron.
Then I had to go—what with the depression, Don’s enormous expenditures had got the firm into a condition that kept me busy. It was nearly four months later that I received his imperative telegram:
DROP EVERYTHING. COME. I NEED YOU.
I came. One early morning a hired car brought me out from the town of Winslow, across gray, bleakly featureless desert, toward the strange, ring-shaped wall of age-old debris that hides the meteor-mine. At the new buildings in the bottom of the pit, under the sinister oppression of the tumbled, cragged walls, I found Don, for a miracle, asleep—it was the first time in three days, said dour old MacQueen, that he had been in bed.
IN A FEW minutes he appeared. I was distressed to see that his broad shoulders sagged a little under some intense nervous strain. His grin was stiffened by a strange, anxious tension. Brooding in his gray eyes was an agony—a longing and a dread.
We breakfasted together in the little shack beside the shaft. The meal was good—Don’s Chinese cook had come with him from the Western Belle. But Don displayed no appetite; he was weighed down with a silent, apprehensive indecision.
“How’s it coming, Don?” I had to ask him. “You wired, months ago, that you were inside. What did you find? Is the thing actually—hollow?”
His gray, steady eyes looked at me, haunted with strange dread.
“Yes, Red, it’s hollow,” he said slowly, almost wearily. “Or it has a chamber in it; it’s mostly solid metal. It’s really a shot. It was fired from Mars.”
His manner was as astounding as his words. His old eagerness was gone. He was tired—frightened—in an agony of doubt. Outright, I demanded:
“Tell me, Don, what’s the matter? You look almost sorry you found the thing.”
His tortured eyes stared at me; he made a feeble attempt to grin.
“Fact is, Red, I am. I wish the ace that won me that infernal option had been a deuce!”
“Well, if you feel that way about it, the sooner we quit the better. We can salvage the machinery and try to sell the lease. A few millions gone, of course. But what’s a cool million or so?”
He ignored my intended irony. “We have to abandon the thing,” he told me soberly. “It isn’t that that bothers me. A new flow of water broke into the shaft yesterday. It’s carrying sand. Just a matter of hours until it clogs the pumps. Then—we’re done!”
“In that case, I don’t see any choice except to salvage as much machinery as you can, and get out.” His queerly tragic eyes looked at me; he tried to grin.
“But there is a choice,” he said. “In fact, a hell of a choice! That’s why I sent for you, Red. I hoped your hard-headedness would make me snap out of it!”
“If you want my advice,” I told him, “I wish you’d explain the situation a little more fully.”
“I can’t explain!” cried Don. “Lord! You wouldn’t believe me if I did. I tell you, Red, it’s a fan-fustic mess! But I can show you!” I left my breakfast—Don had eaten nothing—and we hurried to the top of the shaft. We met shriveled-faced little MacQueen, furiously bustling about, chewing the ends of his mustache.
“Ye ain’t going down again, Mr. Belgrand?” Apprehension was in the question. “The sand’s getting to the pumps, I tell ye! They may stop any minute. Ye’ll be trapped before ye know it!”
“Mr. Stokes and I are going down,” Don told him. “We have to.”
He muttered protestingly, and I felt a chill of dread at the outlook. But Don dragged me into the cage; it dropped sickeningly under us, stopped as suddenly. Don led me off at a trot down the narrow, gray-walled drift, through eerie silence and cold, tomblike damp.
We came to the black, curving, rough-surfaced iron wall of the Shell. A guard stood in front of it, a thin little dwarf of a man, in an enormous leather coat. He held an automatic shotgun.
“Better get out to the cage, Tenbow,” Don told him briefly. “The water will be here soon.”
“Thank you, sir.” Relief was in his voice.
“Don’t let anybody pass except Mack.”
“All right, sir.”
The leather coat moved aside; I saw the entrance to the Shell.
A round, thirty-inch hole, drilled into the nickel iron. It was smooth and bright as the bore of a mammoth gun. Insulated wire was strung into it. It had cost Belgrand, Inc., three hundred thousand dollars.
In front of it, in a kind of cradle that ran on a track, was a huge steel plug, eight feet long, milled to the diameter of the bore.
“We’ll seal it up with that,” Don told me hastily, “when we’re—through. A flick of that lever, and the motors drive it in.” And he added, with unexpected vehemence: “I wish I’d pulled the lever the moment we got it finished!”
He squirmed into the hole. I wasn’t eager to follow. I was cold with the chill of alien, mysterious evil that dwells in the crater; sick with fear that the rising water would trap us.
But I did follow. Anxious curiosity was aflame in me. And, anyhow, I couldn’t have deserted Don, so desperately troubled.
For seventy feet, I suppose, we crept through that very expensive bore. Then Don vanished. I looked into the chamber in the iron. It was flooded with the glare of Don’s harsh electrics.
Six-sided, it was, the roof slightly domed. Perhaps forty feet across, twenty in height. Lined with something smooth and glistening, like green enamel. The bore pierced one wall some ten feet above the tilted floor; a ladder had been set under it.
FOR MINUTES I gazed, astounded at the tremendous reality of contact with an alien world. The full wonder of it burst upon me only when I saw that green, six-walled room in the globe of iron.
Machines, in the corners, shimmered fantastically under the brilliance of Don’s lights. To me they looked as weirdly incomprehensible as objects of the fourth dimension. They were mostly of some white metal that had a strange, faintly blue cast.
Piled high against one green wall was—treasure inconceivable. A colossal black coffer heaped with strange gems—jewels of a foreign world. They flamed with weird witch fires. Wondrously, they scintillated with red and yellow and blue, with purple and green, with colors never seen on Earth before.
Above were stacks of metal ingots. Queer thick bars of silver, of xanthic gold, of argent platinum, of some pale-green metal new to Earth.
I was staggered at the stupendous value of the hoard. It would have repaid our expenses a hundred times. But Don evidently had not disturbed it, and now it would be too late to remove it.
But the most amazing thing in that green, hexagonal, iron-walled cell was neither shimmering mechanisms nor weird, incalculable treasure. It was the woman.
The Flame Woman!
In the middle of the green chamber was a broad black platform. It was covered with a dome-shaped shell, transparent as glass. Under the crystal dome, bathed in a kind of rosy mist, lay—Allurova!
She was reclining on a black, simple couch. Her limbs were drawn up in the position of natural sleep. She was covered only by the sheerest, scantiest garment of something that looked like spun silver.
Beautiful, she was, beyond all imagining. Her fine skin was the color of pale coral. Her sleeping body was like an exquisite jewel cut out of coral. Her thick hair and her narrow brows were dark.
I stared at the motionless girl. Her still, lonely loveliness brought a quick ache to my throat. The green, amazing chamber swam in front of my eyes. For one bitter moment I longed for youth again.
At the bottom of the ladder, Don was staring, too.
Adoration was in his gaze. A love so intense it was painful to see. With it, dragging down his very soul to bitter depths, was black despair. And a cold, naked dread that chilled me.
“Wake up, Don,” I called down, to arouse him from the agony of that fascination. “You’re the prize catch left in the sea—you can’t die mooning over a mummy forty thousand years old!”
“Mummy? Mummy!” Tortured gray eyes looked up at me. “She’s more alive than I am! She—she’s immortal, Red!”
He held the ladder for me to climb down to the floor of the green chamber.
“Immortal?” I demanded. “How do you know? How did she come to be here, anyhow?”
“Her name is Allurova. She was a princess, on Mars. Allurova. And they gave her another name, that means Flame Woman.”
“But how in the name of common sense did she come to be here, buried inside a million tons of iron?”
“She was shot away from Mars,” Don told me slowly, “because she is—terrible! I told you it was a weird mess, Red. The rulers of Mars shot her out into space, because she was about to wreck their civilization!”
I demanded, then, as incredulity conquered my amazement:—“How do you know all this?”
He turned to one of those weird machines, that was crowned with a black cube, yard-square, shimmering like polished jet. As if quite familiar with it, he touched some control that started a low, whirring hum.
Then, before I knew what he was about, he snapped out the electrics. Darkness fell on us like a terrible, smothering flood. I cried out. I remembered we were a thousand feet underground, under seventy feet of iron, with subterranean waters rising inexorably upon us.
“This thing,” Don began, “is a little like a movie——”
But I wasn’t listening. I was staring at the Flame Woman—now I understood the name. She hadn’t vanished into darkness with the rest of the weird room. Under the crystal dome that was like a great bowl inverted, Allurova was still visible.
Her pale, matchless body shone with ineffable radiance, uncanny, unearthly. She was a jewel of coral flame. Her whole perfect body was permeated with supernal fire. The soft glow of her faintly lit the rosy gas about her, under the dome.
She was drenched, saturated, with a visible, vibrant energy.
A moment I was speechless, half with the sheer wonder of it, half with a new, blood-quickening admiration of her unutterable beauty, flaming against subterranean gloom. Then I cried out to Don:
“Look! She’s—shining!”
“That’s why they call her the Flame Woman,” he told me. He was still busy with the mechanism. He said abruptly:—“Watch the cube.”
I tore my eyes from the weird, burning wonder of Allurova, to look at the black cube.
It was flushed with gray. A faint mist of silver-gray was born in it, and filled it, and became brighter, until it was a cube of silver flame.
A bell note pealed from the instrument, clear, deeply golden. Its liquid reverberations trembled and shattered into silence. And the silver light ran out of the cube like molten metal.
It left the figure of a man. The cube was invisible; the figure seemed to stand before us, on a little argent table. It was only two feet high; only, I knew, an image. But no reality could have been more vividly real.
It was an old man, robed strangely and in white, with the grave stamp of an austere power upon his solemn face.
He gestured for attention, with a manner of serene authority. His lips moved. He spoke. His voice rang clear in the darkened chamber—though I knew it came across forty million miles of space and forty thousand years of time.
Don touched another lever. The voice stopped. The molten silver rose again, filled the cube, faded to blackness. The humming ceased. Don—to my relief—snapped on the lights.
“You see, now, Red, how I know.”
“You could—understand?”
“It’s something like our talking pictures,” he swiftly explained. “There are dozens of records. The first were picture lessons in the Martian language. The speaker pointed out objects, and named them, and illustrated the meaning of verbs. Then there were lectures on the history and the art and the science of Mars. The thing’s tremendous, Red! Three months, I’ve been working on it, twenty hours a day. And I haven’t even begun.
But this water, drowning us out——
“But I was going to tell you about Allurova.”
HE LOOKED at the fantastic, beauteous sleeper, and his haggard face was terrible again with longing and despair and dread. He made a visible effort to regain control of himself, turned back to me with a muttered, explosive “Damn!”
“That was the last record,” he said swiftly, as if thinking of the rising cold flood. “The man speaking was the ruler of Mars, telling the story of the Flame Woman, for the benefit of any one who might enter the Shell. And giving a warning against waking her.
“Anyhow, Allurova, I told you, was a princess of the planet Mars. Their civilization is—or rather was, forty thousand years ago—on a level with ours. They were far ahead of us in engineering. Had to be, to handle those irrigation projects. But we haven’t time for a lecture.
“Allurova’s mother, Red, was a distinguished scientist, as well as a personage of rank. Her father was much less admirable. He dishonored his wife, squandered her fortune, finally attempted to poison her. The plot failed, and the man departed with one of the slave girls and the valuables he could lay hands on, shortly before Allurova was born.
“The mother’s body was always tortured and disfigured from the effects of the terrible poison he had used—only her science had saved her life. She never got over her broken heart and her bitterness against men.
