Collected Short Fiction, page 175
The color of all the sky changed appallingly from silver-gray to green, with the fearful radiation of the thing. The shadows it cast, inky-black, green-fringed, were uncanny—dreadful.
It hung for a time in the sky where the Moon had been, nearly motionless. Monstrous appendages like serpents of blue flame reached out of its head, beneath the purple ovoids. They writhed over its slender, terrible body and its diaphanous wings.
It preened itself.
Amazingly, then, it wheeled across the sky. Its fantastic shadows crept like living things. With luminous waves, like some strange force, pulsing outward through the wondrous sheets of flame that were like wings, it flew away. The dread green illumination faded from the sky, and the terrible shadows died, and the thing became a minute fleck of emerald light, dwindling beside white Vega.
“The Moon is gone!” breathed Foster, dazed with wonder.
“As the Earth will go,” came the voiceless whisper of Barron Kane, “in a few days, now.”
“Beautiful!” gasped June Trevor, in a queer, shaken little voice. “It was lovely—and horrible——”
She shuddered, and Foster was surprised to find her firm, warm, straight body in his arms. Unconsciously she nestled against him, instinctively seeking comfort; and his arm tightened, before he released her.
“Our world must go—that way, dear——” he breathed; and her shivery, tiny whisper finished: “But we have—each other——”
BARRON KANE was still looking out through the crystal dome. Since the going of the Moon, the sky was a dome of splendid stars. The low, rolling Pennsylvania hills loomed dark under it, picked out with tiny, winking lights of house and motor. The lights of the mill town, under the towering bulk of the Planet, were little bright rectangles in the blackness.
“There are too many lights on the roads,” said Barron Kane, and his whisper was edged with alarm. “Cars and torches and swinging lanterns. They are all coming toward the Planet!”
Foster and June looked down from the lofty windows. Over the dark hills they saw the rivers of dancing, flickering light, flowing toward them.
Foster rasped a single bitter word: “Mobs!”
“Mobs?” echoed June wonderingly. “Why?”
“People aren’t human beings any longer,” Foster told her grimly. “They are animals—frightened animals. They are mad with fear, since they’ve seen the break-up of the Moon. They’re driven to fight, like any fear-crazed thing. We can’t blame them—but we must defend the Planet.”
Tenderly, he put the girl from him.
“I must go down to warn the guard,” he said, “and to help the men in the power rooms. They’re installing the motor-tube.”
“When,” rustled the anxious whisper of Barron Kane, “when will you be able to move the Planet?”
“The castings came this morning from the foundry,” Foster informed him. “It will take a day to put them in. Then—if the mob hasn’t wiped us out!—we can see whether the Planet will move. Whether the human race is to live—or to die with the Earth.”
“A day?” breathed Barron Kane despairingly. “Our fence won’t hold them back so long.”
“It will take that long,” Foster told him, tight-lipped. “Twenty hours, at the very least. We’ll save every second, of course. And the entrance valve is ready to close. We’ll make an inner fort of the Planet, itself. But I must go!” He squeezed June’s hand and ran out of the little room.
The girl and Barron Kane waited there, amid the gleaming instruments that were to navigate the space machine—if it ever moved. The sick man was whispering orders into a telephone mouthpiece, to help organize the defense.
Impatiently, June waited; at last she demanded fearfully:
“Is there much—danger? The people are mad with fear; I understand that. But why should they attack us?”
“The priests of a fanatic religion have stirred them up against us,” grimly whispered Barron Kane. “In Asia, the priests of a secret sect foresaw the doom. They based their faith on it, and on the duty of man to die. In their eyes, we are heretics. They seek to destroy us.
“To destroy us,” the dread-chilled whisper went on, “and perhaps to sacrifice some of us, for atonement, at the ceremonial altar of the Great Egg, in the temple in the Gobi.” June shuddered, as if with a premonition of horror.
“I’m going after Foster,” she cried, fighting to keep a thin edge of hysteria out of her voice. “I want to be with him.”
“You had better wait here,” Barron Kane advised her. “Or rest in your room, just below. Foster is very busy.” And he added grimly: “You will be safer here—you are in the greatest danger.”
“I’m not afraid!” she burst out, wild-voiced. Then calmness came back; she went on quietly: “Not for myself, I mean. It’s the terror of it, the thought that so many must die. And the awful, awful thing we saw, that came out of the Moon! I want to be with Foster. But I’ll stay, if you think best.”
And she sank on a seat, face buried in her hands, and fought to control her sobs.
ALL THE terrible night, June remained in the little room. The mob still increased; ten thousand small fires flickered upon the hillsides; swinging lights crept here and there. The voice of the mob was a ceaseless, menacing murmur; again and again she heard a rattle of shots.
Barron Kane slept, in his invalid chair, at dawn. June covered him and watched a while. Then the loneliness, the strain, became so terrible that she went down to her own room and tried to sleep. But she could not, and before noon she came back into the bridge. The sick man was awake again.
He gazed at her.
“How is—everything?” her anxious question greeted him.
“They attacked three times in the night,” the little man whispered. “The wall held them back; many were killed, by the charge on the wall, and by the guns. But a thousand more poor wretches have come, for every one that died.”
His quiet gray eyes looked out through the thick quartz panels, down upon hillsides that were brown and swarming with the horde.
“There must be a million,” his voiceless whisper went on. “They came every way you could imagine.
On foot, on bicycles and trucks and freight cars, in cars and airplanes.
“You can’t help pitying them, so frightened, so soon to die. A great many of them seem to be ragged and cold; they can’t have brought food enough. Most of them didn’t bring any weapons.
“But the disciples of L’ao Ku have taken them over. You can see rings of them gathered around the priests, who are fanning their hate against us. You can see them marching, drilling. And some of them are unloading explosive and weapons that came this morning on the railroad. L’ao Ku is making an army out of the mob.”
Wearily nervous, June was peering with sleepless eyes through the heavy panels.
“I see a plane!” she cried suddenly. “Flying low over the hills. It’s going to land!” She watched it, adding: “It’s a huge ship, black, and it has scarlet circles on the wings and the fuselage.”
Grimly Barron Kane whispered: “That is L’ao Ku’s own ship. He has come to direct the attack in person. And, perhaps, to take one of us back——”
Silently, biting her lips until they bled, clenching her small hands, June Trevor watched—until the mob rolled toward the Planet, a resistless wave of fanatic, terror-mad hate.
Flashing like golden blades, the narrow, blinding jets of the poison ray silenced the machine guns in the armored turrets. Bombs of high explosive, hurled from cunningly improvised catapults, demolished the electrified wall. A million men, commanded by a pitiless fanaticism and armed by a secret science, stormed the great steel valve of the Planet.
Racked with an agony of suspense, June waited in the bridge room, until her straining ears caught the dull crash of a heavy explosion, and then the sharp rattle of gunfire—inside the Planet!
“They’ve taken the valve!” she whispered, then, forcing the words through a black haze of despair: “They’re coming on board. I must go to find Foster.”
Barron Kane began some protest; she stopped him with a fierce gesture.
“I’m not—not afraid,” she gasped. “But the—finish has come. I want to be with Foster.”
She ran out of the room and hastened down toward the sound of desperate battle.
IN THE exact center of the great steel globe of the Planet was a sixty-foot, spherical chamber. In that chamber, mounted in hugely massive gimbals, was an immense tube of fused quartz and steel, fifty feet long.
Foster Ross, with a score of other grimy, haggard, red-eyed men, was laboring to complete the assembly of that tube. A manhole was open in the top of the tube. With hoisting tackle, they were lifting a four-ton casting of a new alloy, to lower it through the manhole.
The confused, terrible roar of fighting burst suddenly into the chamber. “They’ve stormed the valve!” came a terror-laden shout; and consternation shook the men.
“Wait, men!” implored Foster desperately. “We can’t quit the job. A few more minutes, and we’ll have it done. We can take off into space. Come on——”
But some one, in his fright, had left his post. The tackle slipped. The great casting swung; it toppled out of the creaking sling and crashed to the floor. A man’s legs were pinned under it. He made a low cry, thin, dreadful, and then began to whimper like a child.
Some of the men started a rush to leave the chamber.
Faint, himself, with the shock of unexpected disaster, Foster struggled grimly to keep his self-command.
“Here, boys!” he shouted, forcing a show of unfelt confidence. “Let’s try again! Yet, we may have time to get——”
The panic-stricken men hesitated. Foster seized a bar, and struggled to lift the casting off the legs of the trapped man. The others came back to help. The man was freed, and the tackle quickly adjusted to the casting again.
The four-ton mass of metal was lifted, and lowered, this time, safely through the manhole. It was being bolted into place, when the mob, howling with maniacal fanaticism and led by yellow-visaged demons armed with the weapons of a secret science, stormed the room.
Foster’s recollection, after that, was a red haze of horror.
He led the resistance of the doomed defenders. He made a fortress of every angle of the corridors, of every door and bulkhead, of every stair and elevator shaft. To the last, he guarded the way to the bridge, because he thought June Trevor was still there with Barron Kane.
His six hundred men fought with the courage that became the flower of the race. Their six hundred women stood beside them. Even the children gave the aid they could. And the Planet had been well-armed; each new position was a fresh arsenal. Yet the conclusion was inevitable.
Foster made the last stand on the little stair beneath the bridge. He staggered back to it, with four others—three men and a woman, all of them wounded. They had a machine gun. With that, until the last ammunition drum was empty, they kept the howling, triumphant mob at bay.
Then they contested the way with bayonets, with clubbed rifles, with pistols, even with bare hands. One of the men, dying, leaped forward and cleared the stair as he went down. The woman fell. Another man was dragged down by the mob, eviscerated, dismembered. Foster’s last comrade shrieked and collapsed before the stabbing orange blade of a poison ray.
Foster dragged himself, then, to the top of the stair, to make the last defense. He looked about the tiny room for June and saw that she was gone. Sickness of utter despair rolled in a black flood over him at the discovery. Strength left him; he felt, for the first time, his many wounds and fell senseless.
Only Barron Kane was left, lying helpless in his invalid chair. Clumsily, his half-useless hands raised his big automatic and shot down the first grim-faced Asiatic who leaped into the room over Foster’s still body.
That was the end of the defense.
L’ao Ku’s black plane with the scarlet circles rose, an hour later, and fled into the flaming sunset, toward the temple of the Great Egg, in the Gobi.
V.
FOSTER ROSS came to himself, lying on the bloodstained floor of the wrecked bridge room. His body was a stiff mass of cuts and bruises; dull agony throbbed from a swollen wound in his temple; a lock of his hair was stiffly cemented to his forehead with dried blood.
He stood up, reeling with a sudden sickness, biting his salty, blood-crusted lip to keep back a cry of pain. The smashed room, littered with broken instruments, swam before his darkened sight. For a moment he had no memory.
“Foster!” Barron Kane’s faint, heartsick whisper brought him a shock of dim surprise. “L’ao Ku told me he was leaving you alive. I thought he lied, to torture me.”
“L’ao Ku!” It was a dry, harsh gasp, from Foster’s burning throat. “He was here?”
“He came,” whispered Barron Kane, “when we all were helpless. He left us alive, he told me, because our sin is too great to be punished by the hand of man. He wanted us to live, he said, to know that we had failed, and then to die from the opening of the Great Egg.”
“June?” rasped Foster’s dusty voice. “Where is she?”
“I don’t know,” the weary, hopeless whisper answered. “She went to look for you, when they stormed the valve. I don’t know——”
“Did L’ao Ku take her?” Agony leaped in Foster’s heart.
“It may be,” admitted Barron Kane. “L’ao Ku went back, in the black plane. He may have taken her. That, or else she will be—among the bodies——”
Foster reeled dizzily toward the stairway. “I’m going to look,” he rasped. “If I don’t find her, I’ll finish the motor-tube and fly the Planet to the Gobi and take her back from L’ao Ku!” A glare of terrible madness flickered in his blue eyes.
“You couldn’t do that,” whispered Barron Kane. “It’s just two days, L’ao Ku told me, until the Earth will break up. And we may not live even that long.”
“Eh?” said Foster, with a staring blankness on his blood-caked face.
“A tidal wave is coming from the Atlantic,” Barron Kane informed him. “It has overwhelmed the coastal cities. New York is gone and Boston and Washington. It will reach us to-night—a terrible rushing wall of sea water, a hundred feet high.”
Foster did not seem to be listening. He reeled, and stumbled against the standard of a broken telescope; he gripped it with both his bruised hands, as if making a terrible effort to keep upright; his dry lips murmured: “I’ll finish the motor-tube and look for June.”
“Lie down again, Foster,” advised Barron Kane. “You’ll faint.”
Foster paid him no heed, and the dull whisper ran on:
“Even if you finished the motor-tube, the Planet couldn’t fly. L’ao Ku told me that. They blew the entrance valve open with explosive. It was wrecked, so it can’t be sealed any more. If we got off into space, the air would leak out, and we should die.”
“I’m going to find June,” Foster muttered faintly.
His gripping hands slipped off the standard. Beneath its stain of grime and blood, his lean face whitened. He fell heavily, at full length, on the floor.
IT WAS twenty hours later, when Foster went down to close the valve.
Some strength had come back, as he lay unconscious on the floor; the throbbing agony in his temple had become more endurable. He had washed his wounds, when he woke and bandaged the worst of them; he had found a little food for himself and Barron Kane.
His first trip had been to search for June.
“I’ve looked at all the dead.” he informed Barron Kane grimly, when he came back to the bridge. “I didn’t find—her.”
“Then,” the sick man whispered, “the black plane must have taken her to L’ao Ku’s altar.”
“I’m going after her,” Foster told him, with the quietness of a terrible fatigue and of a determination that was invincible. And he said in a tired voice that held no triumph: “The motor-tube is finished. We had the elements in place before the mob came. I stopped to make the connections, and seal the manhole, and start the pumps to evacuate it. In ten hours, it will be ready.”
“Still,” protested the hopeless whisper of Barron Kane,” we cannot seal the valve. We can’t live, in outer space——”
“I’m going down, now,” Foster told him, “to close the valve. Then, we’ll look for June.”
“It was two days,” the sick man reminded him, “until the end. And one has gone. It is killing me, Foster, to give up. But we can only die.”
“The water is rising,” Foster told him. “I must hurry.”
And he went down to close the valve.
The tidal wave had come, as he lay unconscious—the same racing wall of the advancing ocean, gray, dreadful, that had drowned the coastal cities. It had routed the triumphant mob, at the very moment of victory, before they had plundered the ship; it had overcome them as they fled.
A tremendous blow, it had struck the gray, steel side of the Planet; a stormy sea still crashed against the concrete pier beneath the space machine. The green surrounding fills of yesterday now were barren, rocky islets, drenched with spray.
The huge steel-entrance valve had been torn open with a charge of high explosive. The hinges were twisted, the lock demolished.
Grimly, Foster surveyed the damage. The massive steel disk of the door itself, he decided, was not much injured. If he could straighten the hinges, to allow it to fit, and then find some way to fasten it——
He dragged himself to the machine shops and staggered back with hammers and wrenches and lifting tackle; he went again for a portable welding torch. Grimly deliberate, he set about heating the massive hinges and straightening them, so that the valve could close.
The massive concrete pier trembled constantly beneath him, as the whole Earth trembled. At thirty-minute intervals, it rocked and swayed dizzily beneath him—as the whole planet yielded to the ever-stronger pulse of the awakening thing within.
