Collected Short Fiction, page 194
Five hours, that meant, in which to land at the hostile base, overcome its crew, force them to bring aboard some twenty tons of supplies, and get safely away into space again!
In those days of the flight, John Star found himself thinking often of Aladoree Anthar—and his thoughts were sweet music and agony. Strange, lovely girl; though he had known her but a day, memory of her brought a glow of joy to him, and a throb of pain at thought of her helplessness in the clutches of the weirdly dreadful Medusae!
THE PURPLE DREAM hurtled down on Pluto’s moon.
Pluto itself, the Black Planet, was a barren, lonely world, its frozen mountainous deserts inhabited only by a few miners, mostly hardy descendants of the political prisoners exiled there under the empire, strange denizens of eternal frigid gloom.
The moon of Pluto was a cragged, tiny sphere of lifeless rock, more desolate, crueler to man, than the dark planet itself. It was not inhabited, save by the crew of the lonely legion station.
John Star had feared that, after the ultra-wave radio warning that had gone ahead, a detachment of the fleet would be waiting at the base, but the station seemed deserted as they dropped.
A square field, leveled, between ragged black pinnacles. A long, low building, beside it, of cold white metal—barracks and storerooms. The thin, spidery tower of the ultrawave radio station on a peak above it. Beyond, rugged black desolation; wild mountains, crater-scarred, cracked, riven, blasted.
In officer’s uniform, John Star stepped out into the frigid, thin air, upon the little deck formed by the lowered outer valve. Assuming an air of brisk confidence that his feelings hardly justified, he waited while two men approached the cruiser from the long building.
“Pluto station, ahoy!” he hailed them, his manner as sternly official as possible.
“Purple Dream, ahoy!” one of them responded doubtfully—a short man, very bald, very stout, very red of face, his soiled uniform showing the careless neglect that sometimes comes of long isolation.
“I am Officer John Ulnar,” John Star said briskly. “The Purple Dream requires supplies. Captain Kalam is making out the requisitions. They must be aboard without delay.”
“John Ulnar?” the short man repeated, his voice sullen, suspicious. “And Kalam? The Purple Dream is officered by Madlok and Commander Adam Ulnar.”
“There has been a change of command,” John Star informed him curtly. “Here is Captain Kalam.”
Jay Kalam appeared beside him, in another borrowed uniform. They descended to meet the men from the station, who had stopped doubtfully below the air lock.
Jay Kalam offered a document, said sharply: “Here is what we require, captain.”
Above their heads, the long, shimmering needle of the ship’s great proton gun was thrust out of its little turret, swung above their heads to cover the barracks; Hal Samdu was at his post.
The short man looked at it uncertainly, with small, bloodshot eyes; looked back at Jay Kalam, unwillingly took the requisition.
“Sixteen tons of cathode plates!” he exclaimed. “Not for one ship, surely!”
“Sixteen tons. They must be aboard immediately.”
“It will be impossible,” muttered the short man doubtfully, “for me to load them without first reporting to legion headquarters for special orders.”
“This is an emergency——”
“I am Captain Hosea Nana, of Pluto station. I am not accustomed to accepting orders from—” he paused, his bloodshot eyes narrowed before he finished—“from pirates.”
“However, Captain Nana,” Jay Kalam told him evenly, in his usual grave, low voice, “in this case I should advise you to do so without any delay.”
The short man’s face went from red to purple; he choked:
“So you admit you’re trying to rob my base? I’ll hold you till the fleet comes and see the last one of you toasted to a crisp with a proton gun!”
“You aren’t,” Jay Kalam observed, “in a position to hold us.”
He looked back at Hal Samdu’s turret, pointed at the tower of the ultra-wave radio station on the peak. Hissing, roaring, an intense jet of incandescent electric flame leaped from the slender needle above their heads. A sword of blinding violet, it touched the spidery tower, hurled it down in twisted, half-fused ruins.
Captain Nana was suddenly trembling; his round face went from purple back to white—his anger, apparently, had been three parts terror.
“Very well, Captain Kalam,” he whispered hoarsely; “the supplies will be loaded at once.”
“Go with him, Mr. Ulnar,” said Jay Kalam. “See that there is no mistake or delay.”
CAPTAIN NANA complained that he did not have all the supplies required; that most of his men were too ill to help with the loading; that the cranes and conveyors were out of order. He was doing his utmost, John Star recognized, to delay them until the sixteen racing legion cruisers should have time to arrive.
Yet with John Star’s stern alertness and the menace of the great proton gun, all the cathode plates were aboard four hours later, the cylinders of fresh oxygen for the ventilation system, and the supplies of food and wine that Giles Habibula had added to the requisitions. Only the black drums of rocket fuel remained piled beneath the air lock, and it was still an hour before the pursuing ships should reach them. Yet John Star had caught a gleam of sinister triumph in Captain Nana’s piglike eyes that made him uneasy.
Jay Kalam appeared, then, from the bridge, hurried, tense. “We must take off, John, at once!” he said, his voice low.
“Why? We’ve an hour——”
“I see another ship coming. From Pluto. It must have been waiting there.”
“But we’ll need this rocket fuel. We can take a chance on outrunning it.”
“This isn’t a legion cruiser, John. And it’s coming faster than we can move. Faster than we could with perfect generators.”
“Not a legion ship?”
“Never saw one like it. Black, strange, gigantic. It has black wings, or vanes. The Medusae——”
“It is!” cried John Star, recalling the weird, colossal black flier that had carried away Aladoree in the power of his traitorous kinsman. “A ship from Yarkand! I don’t know what weapons——”
“Anyhow, we must go. Can’t risk fighting!”
“The rocket fuel?”
“Leave it. Come on aboard.” They hurried up the accommodation ladder.
“Leaving, already?” Captain Nana called after them, an unpleasant hint of gloating in his thick voice. And insolently he demanded a receipt for the supplies they had taken. John Star curtly refused, and he vanished with his men toward the long building with a haste that was ominous. The air lock sealed, levers flicked down under John Star’s fingers. Blue flame should have screamed from the rockets, sent them plunging away from the black field. But the Purple Dream did not move.
Puzzled, dismayed, he tried the firing keys again. Nothing happened.
“We’re somehow stuck. Rockets won’t fire!”
In alarmed incredulity he scanned the dials.
“Magnetism!” he whispered. “Look at the indicators! A terrific field. But how——The ship is nonmagnetic. I don’t see——”
“A magnetic trap,” said Jay Kalam. “Colossal magnets, under the field. Our hull is nonmagnetic; but the field holds the rocket-firing mechanism and the geodynes out of control. Nana is trying to hold us until the ships get here. And that black ship, plunging down from Pluto——”
“Then,” broke in John Star, “we must stop their dynamos!”
“Hal,” Jay Kalam spoke into his telephone, “destroy the building.”
The tongue of roaring violet flame reached again from the shining needle, swept the long, low metal building from end to end, left a flattened, twisted mass of smoking metal, flung off its foundations by the sheer thrust of the blast.
“Now!”
Again John Star tried the rockets; again only silence answered.
“The magnets still hold us. The dynamos must be underground, where our blast didn’t reach them.”
“I can, then!” cried John Star. “Open the lock.”
He snatched two hand proton guns, besides the two in his belt already, darted out of the bridge room.
“Wait!” called Jay Kalam. “What are you doing?”
But he was already gone; Jay Kalam touched the controls to open the valve for him.
He dropped to the field, ran across to the smoking wreckage of the long building, searched the bare foundations until he found the stair, a shaft hewn in dark rock. Down the steps he plunged, proton guns in his hands, leaping stray fragments of hot metal.
A hundred feet below, in silent, menacing gloom, a heavy metal door loomed in front of him. He turned a proton blast on it at full force. It flashed incandescent, sagged, was driven in. He leaped over it, ran into a long, dimly lighted hall, discarding the gun with its cell exhausted by the one terrific blast.
Another heavy door—machinery drummed behind it. He ran toward it, and a violet lance stabbed at him from a tiny wicket.
Alert for it, he flung his body under it, flat on his stomach. Even though he escaped the searing ray, the conducted shock of it numbed him. Yet his own proton gun flashed at the same instant, and the glowing wreck of the door was flung back upon the man behind it.
On his feet at once, though his shoulder was blistered, throbbing, he sprang for the door, tossing away his discharged gun and snatching the two from his belt.
A square room was before him, rock-hewn, great dynamos humming in the center of it. Five men stood about it in attitudes of petrified dismay, only Captain Nana’s hand groping mechanically for his weapon.
Both John Star’s guns flamed—at the generators!
Unarmed now, but sure the dynamos were wrecked, he flung his discharged guns in Captain Nana’s face, ran back down the hall and up the stair, hoping surprise would give him time to get back aboard.
It did. Air lock closed again, rockets washing black pinnacles with blue flame, the Purple Dream flashed upward from Pluto’s cragged moon—off at last, John Star exulted savagely, off at last for far Yarkand, to the aid of Aladoree!
“The delay——” whispered Jay Kalam. “Fatal, I’m afraid. The black flier is close—we can hardly escape it, now!”
XIII.
THE MOON of Pluto fell behind, a cold gray speck, and vanished.
The Black Planet itself was swallowed in the infinite black abyss, near the bright, tiny pin point of the dwindling Sun.
Out, beyond the system, beyond the little worlds of man, beyond the small domain of the Sun, the Purple Dream was flashing, toward remote Yarkand and its solitary world of shadowy horror.
Giles Habibula lived, now, in the generator room. Under the continual care of his fat, oddly steady hands, the geodynes ran almost perfectly, the ominous vibration sometimes unheard for hours at a time.
Racing day after day at the utmost speed of straining generators, the cruiser kept ahead of the strange, colossal black flier—just ahead.
“It keeps always just the same distance behind,” said John Star once, watching the faint red fleck on the telltale screen that marked the other ship’s location. “No matter how fast we go, we never gain an inch!”
“They’re just following us,” said Jay Kalam, worry apparent even in his calm tones. “They can catch us when they like. They’re just waiting.”
“Playing with us!” muttered John Star.
“Merely waiting, perhaps, to see what we intend to do. Or, perhaps, for a chance to take back the commander alive.”
“If we could give them the slip!”
Jay Kalam shook his head. “There’s no way.”
On they drove, into the frozen, star-gemmed chasm of darkness.
All four of them were haggard from sleeplessness, from the tension of endless, futile effort; only Jay Kalam appeared almost unchanged, still grave, calm, deliberate. John Star’s face was white, his eyes burning with anxiety. Hal Samdu, nervous, irritable, muttered to himself, knotted his great hands, glared at imaginary enemies. Giles Habibula, incredibly, lost weight until the skin hung in pouches under his hollow eyes.
Day by day the Sun grew smaller, fainter, until it was a dim star, lost at last among the myriads of the firmament.
Yarkand appeared and grew.
YARKAND! Red, feeble, dying sun, located in the constellation Ophiuchus, near the Serpent, near red Antares in the Scorpion. The third most distant star from the Sun, the nearest found to have a habitable planet. Once called “Barnard’s Runaway Star,” from its discoverer, its remarkable proper motion of one hundred and sixty-two miles per second.
Yarkand, its strange planet a weird domain of horror, ruled by monstrosities of insensate evil, babbled and shrieked of by the insane, dying members of the first expedition, dying of an ill that medicine could not understand or heal.
John Star was watching it one day; a dull, mad, red eye of evil, glaring at him from the tele-periscope. Staring, while he wondered, blankly, vainly, what might have been the fate of the lovely girl imprisoned on it. What a wrong it was that Aladoree should have been brought here! What an unthinkable wrong that her clear, honest gray eyes should be distended with horror and filmed with soul-searing fear!
He started when Jay Kalam spoke:
“Look! Ahead of us, in space. A green shadow!”
Even then his low, restrained voice was tense with the fear of something utterly unknown.
A vast greenish cloud, it appeared through the tele-periscopes. It shone with the green of nebulium—that strange gas known only in nebulae. It was angry, swirling; it writhed almost like a monstrous, shapeless thing; through it surged titanic currents.
“A cosmic cloud,” said Jay Kalam. “A nebula.”
“Must be,” agreed John Star, fighting his awe at its ominous splendor and its terrific, overwhelming magnitude. “I’ll change our course at once. It looks like an excellent thing to avoid.”
“No,” Jay Kalam protested quietly. “Drive on toward it. I want to skirt it.”
“Yes?” He obeyed, wondering.
ENORMOUSLY it expanded as they flashed on, spread out its vast, dimly shining masses to fill the black abyss ahead. A strange, ominous, stupendous thing; titanic clouds of gas, of cosmic dust, of meteoric fragments, faintly lighted with the green flame of nebulium.
Presently they were flashing along beside it, the black flier still following at the same fixed distance; past vast streamers that flowed like the pseudopods of some monstrous amoeba, avid to engulf them; past titanic wings of green flame.
“If it caught us——” muttered John Star, awe-struck, staring at it. “Those meteor streams—hurtling boulders! Those whirlpools of flaming gas! If it caught us——”
He wiped sweat off his tense face. “We wouldn’t live five minutes!”
“We may not, anyhow,” observed Jay Kalam, grimly quiet.
“How’s that?”
He pointed to the instruments. “The black ship is overtaking us. Afraid to follow too close to the nebulae, I suppose. And don’t intend to let us get away.”
“So that’s why!” cried John Star. “I see why you wanted to skirt it!”
“It gives us a chance. Giles is nursing the geodynes. Hal is standing by the proton gun. I don’t know what weapons they have, or how far they will dare follow.”
He turned a tele-periscope on the black flier so swiftly overtaking them. It was a colossal thing. The rods and vanes about the central spherical body were like wings and grotesque limbs. The vanes were moving a little as it came, as if they reacted against some unseen medium to control its flight.
“We’ll reach the nebula ahead——” he was muttering, when his heart sickened.
The clean, clear whine of the geodynes was singing through all the ship, sharp and strong; he could almost feel the terrific power that sent them hurtling ahead. But now the harsh, nerve-racking vibration came back; their speed slackened; the black ship visibly gained.
“Their weapon——” Jay Kalam whispered, deadly calm. “We’ll soon know——”
Something came hurtling toward them from the immense machine, a little misty glow of white. It grew larger as it came, and it froze them with the wonder and the terror of the utterly inexplicable.
A ball of opalescence, a swirling globe of milky flame, it shone with a strange light, white, sparkling with prismatic glints. It swelled as it came. It filled space behind them, blotting out the star-swept void.
A glowing sun flung at them! A titanic sphere of opalescent flame!
It drew them!
The Purple Dream lurched, rolled toward it.
Dizziness, nausea, intolerable vertigo overwhelmed John Star. He staggered, grasped at a handrail, clung to it, sick and trembling, while the ship spun, helpless, in the strange attraction of the opalescent sun.
Almost they had been drawn into its milky, prismatic flame, when it vanished in a blinding explosion of white. Black space was about them again, John Star’s amazing sickness ended, the cruiser again responded to her controls.
“Never felt—such a thing!” he gasped. “Space itself—dropped from underneath!”
“A sort of vortex of disintegration, apparently,” whispered Jay Kalam. “Titanic fields of force, drawing us into it! Twisting space itself, I imagine, from the way the geodynes failed. Our proton blast can’t meet that!”
“Not when they begin throwing suns at us!”
“One thing to do—dive straight into the nebula.”
“Into it?” He started at the lowvoiced, grave command. “Into that awful cloud? The odds are a thousand to one——”
“Out here,” Jay Kalam said calmly, “they are a thousand to none! The Medusae are trying another shot.”
“Another——”
“But I don’t think they will follow. Put her straight into the cloud.”
ONE INSTANT John Star was rigid at the controls, his mind filled with a picture of the cosmic cloud, a titanic, turbid, angry mass, lighted by weird lights of green, torn by savage etheric currents. One instant, and he had accepted the danger, sent the Purple Dream plunging toward the madly swirling clouds of green.
