Collected Short Fiction, page 180
Thus began a desperate and uncanny—and a hopeless—battle. Useless in my chair, I watched it. Miles and Su-Ildra stood alone, side by side, on the deck. Obviously, the pallid girl was in extreme terror; but she showed no panic. Sometimes she spoke to Miles with high, determined courage in her voice.
Relentlessly inexorable, the shrilling globes were sinking over the deck, the yellow, hate-twisted face glaring from every one. Miles was firing at them with deliberate swiftness. Every shot was followed by a sharp splintering crash, and a lurid purple flare that rent the night to give me a glimpse of the appalling scene.
The spheres were striking back. Rippling cascades of green lightning rained down from them upon Miles—jagged bolts of virescent flame, searing livid scars across the darkness, destructive energy transmitted through the spheres by the alien science of Xandulu.
The inevitable end came soon.
The revolver was empty. Miles was fumbling hastily for more cartridges. A hissing green bolt stabbed down, struck him—so it looked to me—upon the ok) scar on his temple.
He cried out with a short, sharp sound of pain that was abruptly strangled. His long body sagged, and the empty gun clattered from his limp hands. His knees buckled slowly; he toppled forward.
With a breathless little moan of silent agony, Su-Ildra caught his lax body in her arms and lowered it tenderly to the deck. A moment she bent over it, caressing his still face with her hands. I heard a few sobbing words in her own melodious language.
Then, in proud and pitiful defiance, she stood up beside him and looked calmly at the descending spheres.
l The eldritch, violet radiance of the globes illuminate the deck; the air was vibrant with their shrill, incessant vibration. Miles lay there in a still heap and the girl stood beside him, fear upon her strained white face, yet brave, calmly defiant.
Down about her swirled the globes. Somehow they suggested a swarm of gigantic, unpleasant insects. Upon the yellow faces in them—all identical, bewildering reflections of the same hideous original—I read mocking, evil triumph; demoniac, satanic! The inquiring mildness of the golden eyes but emphasized the impression of malignant power victorious.
One of the globes hung directly over Su-Ildra.
Abruptly it changed. The image of the insidious face vanished from it. It expanded to twice its former diameter, became a gleaming bubble of violet, six feet thick. Its whining song grew louder, deeper-toned.
Then the girl was lifted.
As if by an invisible force of attraction, she was swept up from the deck beside the limp form of Miles, drawn into the violet sphere. Surrounded, imprisoned by its iridescent walls, she was carried upward into the night.
High above, they drove off southward toward the rim of the moon-washed sea, toward the distant mystery of Africa—and awakened Xandulu!
Yet Miles lay motionless. With a cold fear that he was dead, I pulled myself up from my chair and tottered across the deck to where he lay. His whole body was lax, horribly limp. His breathing had almost stopped. Putting my hand inside his shirt, I found that his heart was beating very feebly—but beating.
The ship’s discipline was very much disorganized. But at last, McLendon got some of the men to come back to the deck. They carried Miles below, and we undressed him, put him in hot water, and administered the stimulants we had available.
His heart strengthened steadily, and when we put him in his bunk, he was sleeping almost normally. I happened to be sitting near him when he at last awakened after many hours. His greenish eyes twinkled at me quizzically; for a moment he grinned the old, twisted grin. Then a shadow crossed his face, as if with sudden memory.
“Where’s Sue?” he asked faintly. “Did they—”
“The shining globes carried her away.”
Grim determination hardened his face.
“Then, Brandy, I’m going after her,” he whispered.
l We steamed on to Marseilles. There Miles, completely recovered, cabled home to San Francisco for funds and presently negotiated the purchase of a new airplane. He came back aboard for a while on the night before he left.
“I’m going back, Brandy,” he told me. “Back to that city of gigantic ruined pylons beyond the High Atlas. I’m going to fly down the Well to Xandulu and take Su-Ildra away from that demon whose face we saw mirrored in the spheres.”
In his greenish eyes was the old reckless confidence. He merely laughed at my startled protests.
“Luck, Brandy. I’ll let you know when I get back.”
So he left me, with the old, malicious grin on his face—my dearest friend, setting out to plunge into the sinister mystery of eternal Xandulu. I was sorry to see him go, yet I cursed the incurable malady that kept me from going with him.
At dawn, his new plane rose over the harbor and vanished southward beyond the rim of the brightening sea. Anxiously I waited for news of him. But wearily the months dragged on, and Miles Kendon did not come back.
(Continued next month)
The Legion of Space
In Six parts. Part One.
A full book-length serial of Super-science. Crashing into the unknown future of the Universe
“WELL, DOCTOR GRAY, how do you find me?” Hopefully, old John Delmar searched my face with his oddly keen blue eyes.
“Sound as a bell—except, of course, the knee. I’ve a good patient in you,” I predicted confidently, “for twenty years yet.”
John Delmar shook his gray head, very quiet, very earnest. “No, doctor,” he said, with the same calm certainty in his tone as if he had been stating that the sun was shining; “no, doctor, I shall be dead by eleven o’clock on the morning of the twenty-third.”
“Nonsense!” I protested.
“I know, doctor, that I shall die on the morning of the twenty-third,” he insisted, with the same quiet certainty. “For years, I’ve known. I came this morning simply to see if you could tell me what I’m to die of.”
“You can just forget the notion,” I heartily assured him. “If twenty thousand dollars’ worth of equipment can tell me anything about your condition——”
“Don’t think I question your skill, Doctor Gray. But I’m quite positive. You see, doctor,” he added hesitantly, “I’ve a very unusual gift. I’ve meant, sometime, to tell you about it. If you’d care to hear——”
And he paused, diffidently.
I had wondered, for years, about John Delmar. A faded, stiff little man, with thin gray hair and blue eyes that were curiously bright, strangely young. Still very erect, he walked with a slight, soldierly limp, from a troublesome old bullet wound in his knee.
He was oddly reticent. I had been, I suppose, his most intimate friend; yet he had given me only the barest outline of a life that must have been unusually interesting. I knew that he had begun his long career as a fighting man in the old West; that he had known “Billy the Kid,” had been town marshal, stock detective, express guard, a Texas Ranger. I knew that he had served in the Rough Riders, in the Boer War, under Porfirio Diaz, at last in the British army—to make up, he said, for fighting the British in South Africa. I was aware, too, that he was busy upon some literary project—in his rather shabby rooms I had often seen his desk piled with manuscript. But until he came to the office that morning for the examination, I had no inkling of what his life really was.
No patient was waiting, and his quiet certainty about the hour of his death piqued my curiosity.
“I’d be glad to hear,” I told him.
“IT’S A good thing most fighting men are killed before they get too old to fight,” John Delmar began, a little awkwardly, settling back in his chair and easing his stiff knee with thin old hands. “That’s what I was thinking, one morning in 1919.
“I’d just come home to New York, Doctor Gray. Or I called it coming home; it was a city of strangers, with no time for old fighting men. There was nothing for me to do; I was simply a useless human wreck. One cold, wet spring morning—April 13th, it was, I remember—I sat down on a bench in Central Park to think things over. And I decided—well, that I’d already lived too long.
“I was just getting up from the bench to go back to the room and get my automatic, when I—remembered.
“Memory! I suppose one must call it that. It’s strange, though, to speak of remembering things that haven’t happened yet; that won’t happen, some of them, for a thousand years. But there’s no other word.
“I’ve talked to scientists about it, doctor. A psychologist, first; a behaviorist; and he laughed. It didn’t fit in, he said, with the concepts of behaviorism. A man, he said, is just a machine; everything he does is just mechanical reaction to stimuli.
“But if that’s so, there are stimuli that the psychologists haven’t analyzed yet.
“I found another scientist, who didn’t laugh. A physicist from Oxford, a lecturer on Einstein—relativity. He didn’t laugh. He seemed to believe what I told him and asked questions about my—memories. But there wasn’t much I could tell him, then.
“Space and time, apart, aren’t real, he told me. And they aren’t really different. They fade one into the other all about us. He spoke of the continuum and two-way time. I didn’t understand it all. But there’s no reason, he said, why we shouldn’t remember the future, all of us. In theory, he said, our minds should be able to trace world-lines into the future as well as into the past.
“Hunches and premonitions and dreams, he believed, are sometimes real memories of things yet to come. I didn’t understand all he said; but I did understand enough to know that the thing wasn’t—well, insanity. I had been afraid.
“He wanted to know about what I—remembered. But that was years ago. It was just scattered impressions, then, most of them vague and confused. It’s a power, I think, that all people have, to some degree—it simply happens to be better developed in me. I’ve always had hunches, premonitions. But the first clear memory of the future came that day in the Park. And it was years before I could call them up at will.
“You don’t understand the thing, I suppose, doctor. I’ll try to describe that first experience in the Park. I slipped on the wet pavement and fell back on the bench—I wasn’t so long out of the hospital, then, you know. And then I wasn’t in the Park at all.
“I was still falling, all right, and in the same position. But I was on a weird plain. It was blazing with light, pitted with thousands of craters, ringed with mountains higher than any I had ever seen. The Sun was beating down out of a blue sky dark as midnight and full of stars. There was another queer luminary, huge and green.
“A fantastic black machine was flying over the mountains. Larger than one would believe possible and utterly strange. It had just struck me with some weapon; I was reeling back under the agony of the wound.
“It was some time before I realized that I had been on the Moon, in a great crater; that the green crescent had been the Earth itself. And the realization only increased my bewilderment. It was a year before I understood that I was developing an ability to recall the future; that I’d seen an incident in the conquest of the Moon by the Medusae, in the thirtieth century—they murdered the human colonists.
“The faculty improves with practice, like any other. It’s simply telepathy, I’m convinced, across time, not merely through space. Just remember they’re neither one real.
“At first I got contact only with minds under great stress. Still, there are difficulties. But I’ve followed human history pretty well through the next thousand years. That’s what I’ve been writing—the history of the future.
“The conquest of space thrills me most. Partly because it’s the most difficult thing men ever did, the most daring and the most dangerous. And partly, I suppose, because my own descendants played a pretty big part in it.”
He paused, keen eyes on my face, and I kept silent until he went on, sure that the least show of doubt would stop him.
“Yes, Doctor Gray, I’ve a son, in New Guinea, the last time I heard, looking for gold on the Bulolo River. We’re a roving breed, it seems. Anyhow, his grandson was killed in a rocket that exploded in the stratosphere—I say ‘was’; it happened in 1974.
“His grandson landed on the Moon, asphyxiated before he struck. James Delmar brought his body back in 2140 and discovered radium there. Peden Delmar established the first colony a hundred years later, over the radium mine—he had to build an air-tight city.
“Peden’s son Zane patented the geodyne—a vast improvement over the first clumsy rockets. He died horribly of a strange jungle fever contracted on Venus. But his three sons carried on his work and made a vast fortune from the geodyne.
“In the next century, all the solar system was pretty well explored, as far as the moon of Neptune. It was fifty years more before a John Ulnar reached Pluto—the name was changed about that time from Delmar to Ulnar to fit a new system of identification. His fuel was exhausted, so he couldn’t return. John lived four years alone on the Black Planet and left a diary that his nephew found after two decades of searching. A strange document, that!
“It was Mary Ulnar—a queer Amazonian woman she must have been—who began the conquest of the silica-armored desert life of Mars. And Arthur Ulnar, her son, led the first fleet in the long war with the weird, half-metallic beings who had extended their own rule over the four great moons of Jupiter—he was lost, with all his ships.
“More battles, though, were fought in the laboratory than in space. Explorers and colonists met terrific, endless difficulties with bacteria, atmospheres, gravitations, chemical dangers. As planetary engineers, the Ulnars contributed a full share to the science that, with gravity-generators, synthetic atmosphere, and artificial climate control, could transform a frozen, stony asteroid into a veritable paradise.
“And they reaped a generous reward. A dark chapter of the family history begins with the twenty-sixth century. The Ulnars had conquered space and seized the spoil. They almost controlled interplanetary commerce; finally their wealth dominated the system.
“One Eric Ulnar had himself crowned as Eric the First, Emperor of the Sun. For two hundred years the family ruled the system as absolute despots. Their reign, I’m sorry to say, was savagely oppressive. There were endless outbreaks for liberty, cruelly put down.
“Adam the Third, however, was finally forced to abdicate—he had made the mistake of antagonizing science. The Green Hall Council began the first real democratic rule of history. For another two centuries, a genuine civilization existed in the system, defended by a little body of picked, trained fighting men, the legion of space.
“It was a brief golden age, broken when another Eric Ulnar ventured away into space, the first man to reach another star. He got to the sun we know as Barnard’s Runaway Star, the two nearer having proved to possess no planets—and he brought terror and suffering and the shadow of doom upon the human race.
“His mad ambition brought war between our system and another. An invasion of unthinkable horror from an alien star! It was the very crisis of history—almost the end of human history. Then there was an epic achievement by a few men of the legion—one of them another Ulnar—that is perhaps the most heroic thing men ever did. John Ulnar—his name must have come down from me.”
ANOTHER patient was announced just then. And stiff, wrinkled, keen-eyed little John Delmar started to his feet; a vision seemed to fade from his eyes. He protested that he must not waste my time.
“I must be going, Doctor Gray,” he said. And he added quietly: “But you see how I know I’ll die on the morning of the twenty-third.
“I remember!”
“You’re fit as a fiddle,” I insisted again. “I wish I were as sound as you are. But it’s a strange thing you’ve told me. I’m very much interested; I’d like to see the manuscript you mentioned. Why don’t you publish it?”
“Perhaps, Doctor Gray,” he replied. “But so few would believe, and I don’t like to expose myself to charges of fraud.”
And he refused to stay, though I should have been glad to let the other patient wait, while I heard more of his strange “memories.”
He took to bed, a week later, with influenza. I expected at first to have him back on his feet in a few days. But pulmonary complications interfered, and he died at 10:55, on the morning of March 23rd.
Whatever others may decide, I was pretty well convinced, even before his death. He at first wished to have his manuscript destroyed, but I persuaded him to leave it in my hands. As mere fiction, it would be enormously interesting. As a real prevision of future history, it is more than fascinating.
The selection that follows deals with the adventures of John Star—born John Ulnar—a soldier in the legion of space, in the thirtieth century, when the unearthly Medusae brought alien horror and black threat of doom to humanity.
II.
“I’M REPORTING, Major Stell, for orders.”
John Star, lean and trim in his spotlessly new legion uniform, stood at attention before the desk where the erect, white-haired, grim-faced old officer sat toying with the silver model of a space cruiser.
“Are you ready, John Ulnar, to accept your first order in the legion as it should be accepted, to put duty above everything else?”
“I hope so, sir. I believe so.”
John Star was then called John Ulnar; the “Star” is a title of distinction given him later by the Green Hall Council. John Star we shall call him, according to the Green Hall’s edict.
This day, one of the first in the thirtieth century, had been the supreme, the most thrilling day of his twenty-one years. It marked the end of his five arduous years in the legion academy, on Catalina Island.
Where, he wondered eagerly, would his duty begin? On some cruiser of the legion patrol, in the cold wastes of space? At some isolated outpost in the exotic, terrible jungles of Venus? Or perhaps in the guard of the Green Hall itself? He strove to conceal his consuming impatience.
