Collected Short Fiction, page 181
“John Ulnar,” old Major Stell spoke at last, with maddening deliberation, “I hope you realize the meaning of duty.”
“I think I do, sir.”
“Because,” the officer continued as slowly, “you are being assigned to a duty that is peculiarly important.”
“What is it, sir?”
“John Ulnar, you are being given a duty that has previously been intrusted only to seasoned veterans of the legion. It surprised me, I may say, that you were selected for it. Your lack of experience will be a disadvantage to you.”
“Not too much of one, I hope, sir!”
“The orders for your assignment, John Ulnar, came directly from Commander Ulnar himself. Does it happen that you are related to the commander of the legion, and his nephew, Eric Ulnar, the explorer?”
“Yes, sir, distantly.”
“That must explain it, then. But if you fail in this duty, John Ulnar, don’t expect any favor of the commander to save you from the consequences.”
“No, sir. Of course not!”
“The service to which you are being assigned, John Ulnar, is not well known. It is, in fact, secret. But it is the most important that can be intrusted to a soldier of the legion. Your responsibility will be to the Green Hall itself. Any failure, I may warn you, even if due only to negligence, will mean disgrace and very severe punishment.”
“Yes, sir.”
“John Ulnar, did you ever hear of AKKA?”
“Akka? I think not, sir.”
“It isn’t ‘akka.’ AKKA—it’s a symbol.”
“Yes, sir. What does it mean?”
“Men have given their lives to learn that, John Ulnar. And men have died for knowing. Only one person in the system knows precisely what those four letters stand for. That person is a young woman. The most important single duty of the legion is to guard her.”
“Yes, sir.” A breathless whisper. “Because, John Ulnar, AKKA is the most precious thing that humanity possesses. I need not tell you what it is. But the loss of it, I may say—the loss of the young woman who knows it—would mean unprecedented disaster to humanity.”
“Yes, sir.” He waited, painfully. “I could assign you to no duty more important, John Ulnar, than to join the few trusted men who guard that young woman. And to no duty more perilous. For desperate men know that AKKA exists, know that possession of it would enable them to dictate to the Green Hall—or to destroy it.
“No risk, or no difficulty, will deter them from attempting to get possession of the young woman, to force the secret from her. You must be unceasingly alert against attempts by stealth or violence. The girl—and AKKA—must be protected at any cost.”
“Yes, sir. Where is the girl?”
“That information can’t be given you, John Ulnar, until you are out in space. The danger that you might pass it on, unwittingly or otherwise, is too great. The girl’s safety depends on her whereabouts being kept secret. If they became known—the whole legion fleet would be required to defend her.
“But you are assigned, John Ulnar, to join the guard of AKKA. You will report at once, at the Green Hall, to Captain Eric Ulnar and place yourself under his orders.
“Under Eric Ulnar!”
He was astonished and overjoyed to know that he was to serve under his famous kinsman, the great explorer of space, just returned from his daring voyage beyond the limits of the system, to the strange star Yarkand.
“Yes. John Ulnar, I hope you never forget the overwhelming importance of the duty before you. That is all.”
Queerly, John Star’s heart ached at leaving the old campus of the academy, parting from his classmates. Queerly, for he was a-thrill with eagerness. Mystery lay ahead, the promise of peril, the adventure of meeting his famous kinsman. With native optimism, he ignored Major Stell’s grim hints of the possibility of disastrous failure.
FROM THE ports of the descending strato-flyer, that afternoon, John Star first saw the Green Hall—seat of the supreme council of the united planets.
Like a great emerald, it shimmered darkly cool in a waste of brown, sun-baked New Mexico mesa—a colossal marvel of green, translucent glass. Three thousand feet the square central tower leaped up, crowned with the landing stage to which the strato-plane was dropping. The four great colonnaded wings spread over a full mile of luxuriantly verdant parkland—a solitary jewel in the desert, under the rugged, mile-high wall of the Sandias.
John Star was a-throb with eagerness to see Eric Ulnar, then in the full radiance of his fame for commanding the first successful expedition beyond the system—if an expedition can be called successful when but a fourth of its members returned, and most of those dying of a fearful malady involving insanity and hideous bodily disfigurement.
Dark chapters, and silent ones, were in the story of the voyage. But the public, like John Star, had ignored them. Honors had been showered on Eric Ulnar, while most of his companions lay forgotten in hospital cells, gibbering madly of the eldritch horrors of Yarkand’s solitary planet, while their bodies rotted away unspeakably, beyond the aid or the understanding of medical science.
John Star found Eric Ulnar waiting for him in a private room in the vast Green Hall. Long golden hair and slender figure made the young officer almost femininely handsome. Burning eyes, haughty manner, proclaimed unchecked passion and insolent pride. Retreating chin, irresolute mouth, betrayed the man’s fatal weakness.
“John Ulnar, I believe you are a relative of mine?”
“I believe I am, sir,” said John Star, concealing a stab of disappointment that pierced even through his admiration. He stood at attention, while the arrogant eyes of Eric Ulnar boldly scanned his trim, military figure, small-boned, but hard and capable from the five grinding years of academy training.
“You are under some obligation, I believe, to Adam Ulnar?”
“I am, sir. I am an orphan. It was the commander of the legion who got me the academy appointment. But for that, I might never have been able to enter the legion.”
“Adam Ulnar is my uncle. He had me select you for the duty ahead. I hope you will serve me loyally.”
“Of course, sir. Aside from the obligation, you are my superior in the legion.”
Eric Ulnar smiled; for a moment his face was almost attractive, in spite of its weakness and its pride.
“I’m sure we shall get on,” he said. “But I shall want services of you as a kinsman that I couldn’t ask of you as my subordinate in the legion.”
John Star wondered what such services might be. He could not hide the fact that Eric Ulnar was not all he had hoped of the heroic explorer of space. Something about him roused a vague distaste, though this man had been his idol.
“You’re ready to start for our post?”
“Of course.”
“We shall go aboard the cruiser, then, at once.”
“We’re leaving the Earth?”
“You’ll serve yourself best, John,” Eric Ulnar said, with an air of insolent superiority, “by obeying my orders and asking no questions.”
An elevator lifted them to the glittering confusion of the landing stage on the green glass tower. The Scorpion was waiting for them there, a swift new space cruiser, taperingly cylindrical, a bare hundred feet long, all silver-white save for black projecting rockets.
Two legionnaires met them at the air lock, came with them aboard—Vors, lean, stringy, rat-faced; Kimplen, tall, haggard-eyed, wolfish. Both years older than John Star; both, he soon found, veterans of the Yarkand expedition—among the few who had escaped the mysterious malady—they displayed for his inexperience a patronizing contempt that annoyed him. It was strange, he thought, that men of their type should have been chosen to guard the infinitely precious AKKA. He would not, he thought, care to trust either of them with the price of a meal, much less with the system’s most valuable possession.
The Scorpion was provisioned, fueled, her crew of ten aboard and at their posts. Air lock quickly sealed, multiple rockets vomiting blue flame, she flashed through the atmosphere into the freedom of the void.
A thousand miles off, safe in the frozen, star-domed vacuum of space, the navigator cut out the rockets. At an order from Eric Ulnar, he set the cruiser’s nose for the far red spark of Mars, started the geodyne generators.
Quietly humming, their powerful fields reacting against, altering, the curvature of space itself, the geodynes—more technically, electromagnetic geodesic deflectors—drove the Scorpion across the hundred million miles to Mars, with an acceleration and a final velocity that science had once declared impossible.
Forgetting his uneasy mistrust of Vors and Kimplen, John Star enjoyed the voyage. The eternal miracles of space fascinated him through long hours. Ebon sky; frozen pin points of stars, many-colored, motionless; silver clouds of nebula;; the supernal Sun, blue, winged with red flame.
Three meals were served in the narrow galley. After twenty hours, the geodynes—too powerful for safe maneuver in the close vicinity of a planet—were stopped. The Scorpion fell, checked by rocket blasts, toward the night side of the planet Mars.
Standing by the navigator, Eric Ulnar gave him directions from some private memorandum. About the whole proceeding was an air of mystery, of secret haste, of daring unknown dangers, that mightily interested John Star. Yet he had the sense of something irregular; he was troubled by a little haunting fear that all was not as it should be.
ON A STONY Martian desert they landed, far, apparently, from any city or inhabited fertile “canal.” Low, dark hills loomed near in the starlight. John Star, with Eric Ulnar and rat-faced Vors and wolfish Kimplen, disembarked; beside them was lowered their meager baggage and a little pile of freight.
Four legionnaires came up presently through the darkness, the part of the guard, John Star understood, that they had come to relieve. They went aboard, after their leader had exchanged some documents with Eric Ulnar; the valve clanged behind them. Blue flame jetted from the rockets; the Scorpion roared away, a dwindling blue comet, soon lost amid the blazing Martian stars.
John Star and the others waited in the desert for days. The Sun burst up suddenly, shrunken and blue, after the briefest dawn, flooding the red landscape abruptly with harsh radiance.
A scarlet plain, weirdly and grimly desolate. Lonely wastes of ocher drift sand, rippled with low, crescent dunes. Cruel, jutting ridges of red volcanic rock, projecting from yellow sand like broken fangs. Solitary boulders, carved by pitiless wind-driven sand into grotesque scarlet monsters.
Crouching above the plain were the hills. Low, ancient, worn down by erosion of ages immemorial, like all the mountains of dying Mars. Tumbled masses of red stone; broken palisades of red-black, columnar rock; ragged, wind-carved precipices.
Sprawling across the hilltop was an ancient, half-ruined fort. Massive walls rambled along the rims of the precipices, studded here and there with square, heavy towers. It was all of the red volcanic stone characteristic of the Martian desert, all crumbling to slow ruin.
The fortress must date, John Star knew, from the conquest of the weird, silica-armored Martians. It must have been useless, abandoned, a full three centuries.
But it was not now deserted.
A sentry met them when they climbed to the gate, a very fat, bluenosed man, in legion uniform, who had been dozing lazily on a bench in the warm sun. He examined Eric Ulnar’s documents with a fishy eye.
“Ah, so you’re the relief guard?” he wheezed. “ ’Tis mortal seldom we see a living being here. Pass on, inside. Captain Otan is in his quarters, beyond the court.”
Within the crumbling red walls they found a large, open court, surrounded with a gallery, many doors and windows opening upon it. In the center a fountain played in a tiny, vivid garden of flowers. Beyond was a tennis court, from which a man and a slender girl vanished hastily as they entered.
John Star’s heart leaped with excitement at sight of the girl. She was, he was immediately certain, the keeper of the mysterious AKKA. She was the girl he had been ordered to guard. Recalling Major Stell’s warning of desperate, unknown enemies anxious to seize her, John Star had a little pang of apprehension. The old fort was no real defense; it was no more than a dwelling. There were, he soon found, only eight men to guard her, all told. They were armed only with hand proton-blast needles. Truly, secrecy was their only defense. If the unknown enemies discovered she was here, sent a modern, armed ship.
During the day he learned no more. Eric Ulnar, Vors, and Kimplen continued insolently uncommunicative; the four remaining members of the old guard were oddly distant, cautious in their talk, unmistakably apprehensive. They were busy bringing up the supplies from where the Scorpion had landed—provisions, apparently, for many months.
An hour after dark, John Star was in the individual room he had been given, which opened on the court, when he heard a shouted alarm.
“Rockets! Rockets! A strange ship is landing!”
Running into the yard, he saw a greenish flare descending athwart the stars, heard a thin whistling that increased to a screaming bellow, deafeningly loud. The flame, grown enormous, dropped beyond the east wall; the bellow abruptly ceased. He felt a sharp tremor underfoot.
“A great ship!” cried the sentry. “It landed so near it shook the hill. Its rockets burned green, a thing I never saw before.”
Could it be, John Star wondered, with an odd little pause of his heart, that the girl’s mysterious enemies had learned where she was? That the great, mysterious ship had come to take her?
Captain Otan, the commander of the tiny garrison, evidently had some such apprehension. An elderly thin man, very much agitated, he called out all the men, stationed them about the old walls and towers with hand proton guns. For three hours John Star lay on his stomach, watching a crumbling redoubt. But nothing happened; at midnight he was dismissed.
The old officer, however, was still alarmed over the strange ship’s arrival. He ordered the three others of the old guard—Jay Kalam, Hal Samdu, and Giles Habibula—to remain on guard. From him John Star caught a sense of terror and impending doom.
III.
JOHN STAR found himself abruptly sitting bolt upright in his bunk, staring at his open window, which looked into the great courtyard. It was not any alarm that he could name which had roused him; rather, a sudden chill of instinctive fear, an intuition of terror.
An eye! It must be, he thought, an eye, staring in at him. But it was fully a foot long, ovoid, all pupil. Thin, ragged black membranes edged it. It was purple, shining in the darkness like a great well of subtly malignant luminescence. Mere sight of it shook him with elemental, nightmare horror.
The briefest instant it gazed on him, unutterably evil, and then it was gone. Trembling, he scrambled out of bed, to give an alarm. But the horror of it had left him doubtful of his senses. When he heard one sentry hail another in the court, as if nothing were amiss, he decided that the frightful eye had been only a fabrication of his strained nerves. After all, he had heard nothing, and it had vanished the very instant he glimpsed it. It was sheer impossibility; no creature in the system had eyes a foot long. He went back to bed and tried to sleep—unsuccessfully, for the picture of that fearful eye kept haunting him.
He was up before dawn, anxious to know more of the strange ship. Passing the weary sentries in the court, he climbed the spiral stair in the old north tower and looked out across the crimson landscape just at the abrupt sunrise.
Dunes of yellow sand—shattered, weirdly eroded rock—he saw nothing else. But crumbling walls, eastward, shut off his view; the vessel, he thought, might lie beyond them. His curiosity increased. If it were a friendly legion ship, why had the rockets been green? If it carried enemies, why had they not already struck?
THE GIRL was behind John Star when he turned, she whom he had glimpsed on the tennis court and guessed to be keeper of AKKA. One glance confirmed his impression that she was very beautiful. Slim and straight and cleanly formed; eyes cool gray, sober and honest; hair a lustrous brown that wrought magic of flame and color in the new sunlight. She wore a simple white tunic; her breast was heaving from the run behind him up the stairs.
It was amazing, he thought, that one carrying such a fearful responsibility as AKKA and living always in the shadow of deadly peril could be so freshly and innocently lovely.
“Why—why, good morning,” he said, a little confused, for legion cadets have little time to practice the social graces, yet very much delighted and eager to please her. “I came,” he said, “to look for the ship. But I don’t see it.”
“But it’s very near!” she cried, breathless. Her voice, he perceived, was adorable—and alarmed.
“Beyond the walls, perhaps.”
“It must be.” Her gray eyes studied him frankly, weighed him—warming, he thought, with approval.
She said abruptly, voice lower: “I want to talk to you.”
“I’m quite willing.” He smiled. “Please be serious,” she appealed urgently. “You are loyal? Loyal to the legion? To mankind?”
“Why, of course I am! What do——”
“I believe you are,” she whispered, gray eyes still very intent on his face. “I believe you really are.”
“Why should you think anything else?”
“I’ll tell you,” she said swiftly. “But you must keep what I say secret. Every word! Even from your officer, Captain Ulnar.”
Her face, when she spoke the name, tensed with a dislike that was almost hate.
“If you say so. Though I don’t——”
“I shall trust you. First, do you know why you’re here?”
“I’ve orders to guard a girl who knows some mysterious secret.”
“I’m the girl.” Her voice was more deliberate, more confident. “And the secret, AKKA, is the most valuable and the most dangerous thing in the system. I must tell you a little more about it than you seem to know. For it’s in terrible danger. You must help save it!” Quietly, then, she asked a question that seemed odd:
“You know the history, I suppose, of the old wars between the Purples and the Greens?”
