Collected Short Fiction, page 177
“Oh, Foster!” she cried. “I’m so—so glad—that you’re here. I thought I was the only person alive. And I was so miserably soaked with oil.”
“How did you get here?” Foster asked as he helped her into the bridge room and made her sit down beside him. “When you were gone, we thought that L’ao Ku must have taken you—to his temple.”
“L’ao Ku?” she breathed, in weary surprise. “No; I didn’t see him. You see, I went to look for you, Foster, when the mob was coming. I asked the men where to find you. They sent me from one place to another, until I was down in the generator rooms. I couldn’t find you anywhere.”
She had relaxed, happily, against his great shoulder; unconsciously her hand had caught his arm, as if she feared that something might take him from her.
“What then?” Foster asked. “How’d you get away from the mob?”
“I was down in the generator room,” her tired voice went on. “I couldn’t find you. All of a sudden, there were shots and screams. The mob was killing the enginemen.
“One of the enginemen ran to me. ‘The damn’ chinks have come, miss,’ he said. ‘But I’ll put you where they won’t find you.’ And he made me come to a tank, and opened a lid, and made me climb down a ladder in it. It was full of oil—it came up to my chin. And he let the lid back down on me.
“I waited. It was dark in the tank. And. the fumes of the oil made me sick. I nearly fell off the ladder. For a while I could hear shots and roaring voices. Then—silence.
“Nobody came to lift the lid, and I tried to get out. I was faint. And the lid was so heavy I couldn’t lift it. I worked until I couldn’t move. Then I rested, and tried again. At last I found a way, standing on the top of the ladder, and using my back.”
“You poor, game kid!” whispered Foster, and patted her shoulder.
She shuddered; her brown eyes seemed not to see him—they were dull with remembered horror.
“I came out,” she went on grimly. “And every one was—was dead. The floors were all covered with blood and—bodies. And the quiet—it was terrible. You know how still it was, Foster. I couldn’t hear a voice. Not a sound! I thought I was the only one alive.”
“Why didn’t you come back here?” asked Foster. “Barron was here.”
“I did,” she whispered. “I looked in and saw him lying there—so still. I spoke, and he didn’t move. I thought he was dead, like all the rest. I thought I was the only one still living——”
“You must forget all that,” Foster urged her. “But where have you been?”
“I was—looking”—she paused, shuddering—“looking—among—the bodies for—for you, Foster.”
He held her trembling body close; for a moment she did not speak.
“I thought I was the—the last,” she went on jerkily, with an effort. “I thought I was—alone—alone with all the dead. I was looking for you, Foster, so that we could be together. And then——”
The sick horror ebbed slowly from her brown eyes; she smiled a little, wearily.
“Then I felt the machine moving, Foster. I had been asleep—I was so weary from searching and so grimy with oil. I woke and felt that we were moving. I knew, then, there was some one——”
Her brown eyes shone bravely into Foster’s blue ones, alight with hope and joy and new confidence. Then they closed; her body relaxed in his arms; she had gone to sleep. Her lips parted, and she smiled a weary little smile, in her sleep.
“She’s worn out, the nervy little kid,” Foster told Barron Kane. “I’m going to take her down to her room, where she can rest. I’ll come back in a minute, to help you down——”
“No, Foster,” the little man whispered. “I want to look out—at the stars.”
Foster lifted him a little, propped up his head with the pillow. “Men can carry on, now, Barron,” he said. “We can make a new beginning.”
Foster took up the girl’s quietly breathing body and started toward the door.
“Yes, Foster,” the sick man whispered after him, “we’ve really won.”
THE SCIENTIST’S gray calm eyes watched Foster until he had vanished down the little stairs. Then he looked back at the motionless, splendid stars. They were tiny and unmoving and many-colored, swung eternal in black space.
“We’ve won,” he whispered again to himself. “I had hoped to live—for this. Men will now be small parasites no longer, to be crushed like vermin by any chance tremor of the beast that bears them. In the Planet, men are free, on their own.”
He seemed to like the phrase, for he whispered it again: “On their own.”
He lay still for a time, musing.
“We’re off in the Planet, to a new beginning. And it’s just a beginning.”
His serene quiet eyes stared at the mocking points of the stars, and he whispered to them:
“You’re alive, all of you. We owe our lives to you—we’ve been parasites on your kind. But we aren’t any longer. We’re beginning all over again, on our own.”
His dying breath whispered a last prophecy:
“There will be many Planets, and greater ones. The new’, free race will be greater than the old. The children of Foster and June will conquer space, to the farthermost one of you!”
A joy seemed to linger in his tranquil eyes, that still looked out at the stars.
Xandulu
BOOK ONE
The Girl from Xondulu
l At dusk, we had slipped past Gibraltar, looming grimly massive upon the left. Just before midnight the moon had risen; across a Mediterranean that was a milky plain beneath it, the Gay Moth III plowed sedately toward Malaga, the rushing spray from her bows coruscating like pale jewels.
Unable to sleep, as I often am, I had called Carlos, my Filipino boy, to help me to the deck at moonrise. For two hours I had been sitting, swathed in rugs, beside the foredeck rail, watching the white rushing magic of the cleft sea, and a few slim porpoises that leapt and raced ahead.
Under the moon, the big yacht was silent save for the slow beat of her engines and the incessant rush of water. The ghostly desert of the sea was blankly void; the only human being in view was McLendon, my skipper, a white, trim figure in the wheelhouse high behind me, standing a solitary watch as he likes to do sometimes in fair weather.
For a time, lost in the quiet, supernal wonder of the moonlit sea, I had been almost happy, forgetful of the frailties of a sick body, that have made the yacht for many years my prison. The essence of peace rested upon sea and ship; and in the thing that presently happened was an element of incongruity, of wild, insane rebellion against the spirit of that tranquil world, that was to me almost a physical shock.
Above the dull vibration of the engines and the ceaseless hiss of white water, my ears detected some vague alien note. Moments. passed before I could identify it as the whine of a hard-driven airplane.
l This story is written in the style characteristic of only Jack Williamson. For over five years, he has been one of the readers’ favorites because of the originality of his plots, ideas, and theories, combined with beautiful and colorful composition.
You will find this novel well up to his standard. Herein we meet inexplicable forces of an alien intelligence incomparably ahead of ours. We are taken to a strange part of the world where ancient creatures plan terrible things with powerful sciences.
motor. Faintly curious, I scanned the moon-washed heavens, and presently discovered the plane, a high fleck of silver, rising up out of the south from the direction of Africa.
Idly I watched the plane, wondering dimly what mission might be bringing it across the sea from Africa at such an hour. Still I had no slightest premonition of the incredible adventure that was riding with it into my life, of the alien peril, awakened from a land lost and forgotten, that was at last to spread the dark wings of its unthinkable menace over unsuspecting nations.
My interest quickened when I saw that the racing plane was making very curious maneuvers. For a time it would fly straight northward, then abruptly it would dive, fling upward, zigzag, or roll. Unmistakably the pilot was attempting to shake off some pursuer, though I could see nothing in the sky behind it.
“Dr. Brander!” Captain McLendon called suddenly from the bridge. He was pointing excitedly in the direction of the plane. “A funny thing. See it? Try your glasses.”
He turned to call some order into his speaking tube, then raised his own binoculars again. I reached for the powerful glasses beside my chair, focussed them. Quickly my wondering, half-terrified attention was fixed upon the plane—and the things that followed it.
Unexpectedly distinct in the lenses, I saw the machine to be a two-place military biplane. As it banked and slipped down across my field of vision, I saw the machine gun mounted over the forward cockpit spurt yellow flame. The plane was fighting!
Then I saw the things it fought.
Bubbles, they looked to me. Glistening, iridescent violet spheres; seven of them I counted, driving after the plane, moving with a velocity that was astounding.
Weird things, and amazing, were those bright globes. Not more than a yard in diameter, they moved in a manner that gave proof of their intelligent direction. Nothing about them was familiar; they were utterly strange and in some way infinitely terrible.
I had expected to see a second, hostile airplane. Sight of those seven pursuing globes smote me with that instinctive fear that always rises from encounter with the completely inexplicable. To my wondering, bewildered mind, they brought first hint of the brooding and sinister power, of tire incredible, immemorial science of the hidden world of Xandulu.
The fugitive plane had turned back upon them. As I watched, it drove directly at the seven bright spheres, yellow flame spitting from the gun. The advance of the violet globes ceased before its attack; they parted in two groups to let it pass.
But they were not unscathed. One of them exploded incontinently into a flare of purple light. Another, and yet a third, flashed into blinding destruction.
At that I felt quick relief, for in the bright strangeness of the globes I had read menace, unknown, inconceivable, to the unsuspecting world of man. But that relief vanished, and cold fear sank its talons in my throat, when I saw the spheres strike back at the plane.
Thin green lightnings stabbed from violet globes, bright darts hurled at fabric of the fleeting plane. The machine flung suddenly upward, fled from them, driving swiftly toward us again. The four remaining bubbles of radiance swept swiftly after it.
“What ye make of it, Doctor?” McLendon asked at my elbow.
I saw that he had called the whole watch to the deck, relinquished the wheel to another member of the crew. His long, rugged face was tense; his voice was edged with the same unreasoning fear that I had felt.
“I don’t understand it at all,” I told him. “Little balloons of light, following the plane, striking at it with green fire. It’s—uncanny!”
“Aye, I never seen the like.”
“The things, Captain, are somehow—hellish! They have an inhutnan—power! I don’t know what—”
“Aye,” muttered McLendon. “I don’t like ’em.”
l Once more the plane swerved back, and again I raised the binoculars.
For five minutes I watched a weirdly amazing battle. Ceasing his attempts at flight, the unknown pilot fought the spheres with a half-cautious, half-reckless daring and a high skill that assured me he was no tyro aviator.
The fourth globe, caught squarely before the vicious gun, vanished in a blaze of purple light. For a time, then, the contest went on without casualty, the plane flinging madly about, its gun spurting occasional bursts of flame, the bright bubbles darting after it, flashing at it their bolts of green flame.
I knew that I was witnessing a superb exhibition of sheer airmanship. Such flying is an art, and like any art, it expresses the personality of the performer. From admiration of the high courage and the instinctive skill of the pilot, I came to have a vague feeling that I knew him, that I had met before a man who flew like this.
But the vague wisp of recollection was snatched from my mind when the fifth sphere and the sixth hit simultaneously, bursting into a single, enormous flood of purple light, casting momentary grotesque illumination upon the quiet sea and the yacht.
The single remaining violet bubble was not to be disposed of so readily. Clinging close above the fuselage, it was raining its virescent bolts upon the plane. The pilot appeared unable to dislodge it from this position, where he could not bring his gun upon it.
At last the plane slipped into a hurtling power dive for the sea. I felt abrupt apprehension that the green lightnings had slain the pilot, that the mad fall was to end in the sea. But finally, with a suddenness that must have put a terrific strain upon its fabric, the ship flung up and back, landing gear skyward, gun erupting flame.
The last of the incredible pursuers expanded into a vast, blinding sheet of purple light. An instant the plane was a blade shadow against it. And then it was gone. The astounding battle was ended, with the aviator victorious.
In that instant, the puzzling fragments of memory slipped into place. That last maneuver had recalled it all; this superb flying was the flying of Miles Kendon. It was as characteristic of him as his handwriting or his walk.
Miles Kendon!
Almost my oldest friend and my closest one, although I had hardly seen him since my illness forced me to give up the life of careless adventure the two of us once had led together.
Miles Kendon! A picture of him came to my mind. A straight young giant, broad of shoulder and narrow of hip, a reckless smile upon his hard face, his greenish eyes agleam with a dare-devil light, his stiff hair pushed back in a bronze tangle, revealing the livid, ragged scar across his forehead and right temple—the mark of a frenzied Malay’s kris. Just thirty years old, Miles now would be.
“I know that pilot,” I whispered to McLendon, who was still beside my chair. “Only one man would have managed that ship exactly as he did.”
“Eh?” he muttered, his mind still upon the distant plane.
“Miles Kendon. Known him since we were boys. Went to Leland Stanford with him, and he and I were over most of the world together in the Moth II, before my illness. Our families were intimate.
“Miles inherited a couple of millions two or three years ago when his father died. But I don’t think he has been back to California since, or taken any interest in the estate, except to cable for funds when he needs a new airplane.
“He has always had a genius for three things: cracking up planes, getting into trouble, and fighting his way out against all the odds in the world. But he must have stirred up something unusual this time. Those shining bubbles—”
I could not forget the terror that had laid cold fingers upon my heart as I watched that fantastic battle. But yet I was far, far indeed, from any true conception of the meaning of what I had seen. The hoary antiquity of Xandulu; the mysterious, incredible power of her alien science; her colossal, unnamable threat to our familiar world—they were all unguessed.
l I heard, then, the little harsh sound of pain in McLendon’s throat, and realized he had not been listening. And I saw what he had seen. The victory over the bright globes had not been won without cost. An angry red banner was rippling back from the fuselage of the plane.
Trailed by a dark plume of smoke, the machine dived suddenly for the sea.
“Those green flashes,” McLendon muttered. “He’s on fire!” Then, abruptly, “Ye say ye know him?”
“Yes!” I cried. “We must help him! It’s Miles Kendon, an old friend of mine. I’m sure of it!”
“Aye, we’ll stand by to do what we can.”
He left me, and climbed back to the wheelhouse.
The big yacht was coming around, and the crew already preparing to lower away the gas launch, when the flaming plane struck the sea. A smother of spray rose about it and subsided, and then the flame rose straight into the night, a crimson, motionless blade.
“Hurry!” I implored McLendon. “For God’s sake, hurry!”
The captain was already doing his utmost. Four men had taken their places in the launch with Harris, my second officer. The falls creaked as it was lowered away.
“One chance, Doctor,” McLendon told me, passing by my deck chair after his part was done. “If he was able to dive and swim away. A chance. . . . aye, if the burning gasoline doesn’t spread too fast?”
As the powerful launch leapt away, engine roaring, I wished that I were aboard. But my body is a feeble, useless thing. I never had Miles’s splendid physique; the hardships of our adventurings ever told more seriously upon me than upon his iron body. My life, upon several occasions. I owed to his robust strength and loyal patience. We were together when I contracted this obscure tropical malady which, the specialists tell me, my weakened constitution will never be able to throw off completely. I do not leave the Gay Moth once a year.
I could only sit helpless by the rail and watch, and hope.
Miles Kendon! With what conflict of emotion did I watch!—hoping to see the grim dare-deviltry of his smile again—fearing that he had died or been seriously hurt in the flaming wreck—wondering if my certainty that the magnificent airmanship I had witnessed was Miles Rendon’s was indeed well founded.
My dearest friend. A dare-devil with a streak of cold, fearless caution. Sober in manner with a flashing blade of rare humor always in reserve. An enthusiast, Miles Kendon, a dreamer—with a dash of sane common sense.
With the binoculars, I watched the launch slacken speed, circle the still flame that was a pillar of red upon the sea. A swift black shape, the vessel cut dark waters that glinted yellow and scarlet.
Then I breathed deep with relief. The launch had stopped. Her crew were dragging two dark figures over her gunwale. At the distance, it was impossible to see if either of them were actually Miles. But my certainty that he had been the pilot was unshaken; I recall a faint surprised jealousy that Miles, the lone wolf, had found another to take my place.
In a few minutes more, they were back alongside. Upon a sea that was a sheet of metal, the swinging falls were easily made fast again, the launch hoisted with her passengers aboard. I uttered an involuntary cry of joy and struggled up out of my chair, for the tall man who clambered out of the boat, sodden garments clinging tight to his broad-shouldered form, was indeed Miles Kendon!
