Collected Short Fiction, page 195
Again a glow of white grew into a sun of opalescent fire hurled after them; again the cruiser pitched and spun, helpless in the grip of its stupendous fields of force; again John Star was strangely, amazingly sick, with such vertigo as he had never previously felt.
But the abrupt turn had saved them; the fearful globe of destroying flame exploded before it reached them; the space cruiser plunged ahead again, was buffeted by the nearest green arm of the nebula.
The repulsion screens of the meteor deflector served to protect the hull from meteoric particles—if they were not too large, too numerous, or approaching too swiftly. For the rest, the life of the ship depended on John Star’s skill.
The Purple Dream, with his fingers on the keys, spun, twisted, paused, darted forward, threading a swift and perilous way through the mazes of the nebula.
Sheets of green flame flashed ahead, gigantic vortexes of incandescent gas; powerful currents of etheric force sucked and strained against the fighting ship; gigantic masses of stone came plunging at her.
Right or left, up or down, John Star drove her with sure, merciless fingers. Alarms rang continually, vainly. The telltale screens were a useless blaze of red. Jay Kalam, clinging to the handrail, unable to stand alone in the spinning bridge room, gasped:
“No—no—I think they won’t follow!”
The smooth, keening song of the geodynes, a moment later, gave way to the old, heartbreaking vibration.
The speed of the cruiser slackened; a hurtling rock that she was too slow to avoid drove through the screen, struck the hull with a terrific clang that reverberated through the ship like the very knell of doom.
Ahead appeared a titanic sudden vortex of incandescent gas; a fearful force caught the Purple Dream, sent her, twisting, helpless, toward the fiery heart of the cosmic whirlpool.
“Giles,” appealed Jay Kalam, “we must have power.”
“Sick!” returned the abstracted, plaintive voice from the receiver.
“Old Giles is mortal ill. This blessed spinning——”
Nearer, nearer, was the flaming core of the vortex. Inferno of green incandescence! Gigantic ragged boulders were swept into it, ahead of them, crushed to fragments against one another, glowed abruptly white, vanished in virescent flame.
Under John Star’s hands the little cruiser fought doggedly, vainly, against the mighty current sucking her into the whirl. Still the harsh vibration filled the ship, a harrowing growl of doom.
“Ah, my mortal, dizzy head!” came the faint voice of Giles Habibula. “Sick, sick, sick! And dying like a dog in a flaming whirlpool in the heart of a blessed nebula! Ah, there!”
The geodynes, abruptly, were humming clear and strong again.
The Purple Dream leaped forward, battled the savage current that dragged her toward crashing, fiery destruction in the supernal fury of the vortex. Battled—and won!
She plunged through a last pale streamer of greenly lighted cosmic dust; and ahead was the clear darkness of space.
“Safe!” exulted John Star, looking back at the green streamers of the nebula, spread like the tentacles of some monstrous creature reaching to draw them back.
“Safe!” repeated Jay Kalam gravely, with a slow, ironic smile. “Safe! And there ahead is Yarkand.”
John Star looked at the feeble, dying sun, a scarlet, solitary eye, watching them with unblinking menace.
“Yarkand,” Jay Kalam went on quietly, with a grim little smile. “With its one planet, where Eric Ulnar and his Medusae are guarding Aladoree from us. Yes, we’re safe—and ahead of us is the zone of danger the monsters set up to guard their world, the barrier the insane men scream of. Of course, we’re safe!”
XIV.
“WELCOME, John,” Adam Ulnar called from the cruiser’s brig, where he had been locked since they left Phobos. He stood up, smiling, in the little cell, tall, erect, handsomely distinguished as ever. Suavely ironic, he added: “Come in. Stay as long as you like.”
“We’ve a question to ask you, Adam Ulnar,” said John Star.
Jay Kalam had come with him from the bridge room.
“I appear to be at your disposal, gentlemen.” He smiled. “Rough times, we’ve been having, by the feel of the ship.”
“But rougher ones ahead,” said John Star. “Or I imagine so. But what do you know of the Belt of Peril?”
The question had rather a remarkable effect on Adam Ulnar. His face became unsmiling, rigidly masklike; and John Star detected something like consternation behind the mask. His hands clenched unconsciously on the bars of the cell.
“The Belt of Peril?” He spoke with visible effort. “Already—we’re near Yarkand?”
His voice had grown tense, uncertain; there was dismay in it.
“Yes. The survivors of the first expedition spoke of a Belt of Peril. What is it? How can we get through?”
“I don’t know what it is,” Adam Ulnar said slowly, his fine eyes shadowed with fear. “I don’t know. Even after Eric had made his alliance with the Medusae, they didn’t tell him, though they let him safely through on the way back to the system.
“But it’s something—dreadful! Two of the ships were lost in it, as the expedition approached the planet. And Eric’s got through, I believe, because the Medusae thought it might prove less useful destroyed than not.”
“You don’t know what it is?”
“No. Something they set up to guard the planet, like a ring of forts in space. The force of it is radiant. It causes electronic changes—very strange ones! Disintegration, I think. But the precise nature of it, or how to avoid it, I don’t know.”
“Thank you, Adam Ulnar.”
They turned away, and the tense voice called after them, frightened: “Wait! You can’t plunge into it! Not into the Belt of Peril.”
“We’re running through it,” John Star assured him.
“We shall try,” added Jay Kalam, “to get through at a very high speed, by surprise, or before the radiant force you mention has time to act.”
“Then, John,” came the shaky voice, “I’ve a request to make of you.”
“What’s that?”
“We’re kinsmen, John. And, though we happen not to agree, I’ve done something for you. The academy, you recall.”
“Yes. What is it?” The pleading, uncertain manner had softened his tone.
“John, we are certain to die in the Belt of Peril, if you insist on diving into it. And I understand that it is a peculiarly unpleasant death. I wish, John—I wish you’d give me the euthanasia.”
“You want to die?”
“I’d rather, John, than enter the Belt of Peril alive.”
“You can communicate with the Medusae?” asked Jay Kalam gravely.
“Yes, I can. Why——”
“Then we must refuse the request. We may need you, Adam Ulnar, to help undo the thing you have done.”
Yarkand burned on the right, a swelling, perfect sphere, sharp-edged against the ebon chasm of space. Blood-red, intense, its rays smote to the very brain with a disconcerting sense of horror and doom.
Straight ahead was the solitary planet that circled it, a smaller, darker globe. It also was red, a dull, smoky orange-red.
The Purple Dream plunged toward it, geodynes still humming keen and high. At the tele-periscopes John Star and Jay Kalam watched for the first glimpse of the dreaded zone of danger.
The dull, yellow-red ball swelled against the star-flung black abyss as they dropped; it was a gigantic world, John Star realized, many times the bulk of Earth.
“I see it,” whispered Jay Kalam. “Blue. Like a double ring of sapphires.”
John Star saw the barrier, then; the Belt of Peril.
Tiny points of blue, forming twin rings about the cloudy, crimson world; one about each hemisphere, above and below the equator, thirteen in each ring, twenty-six in all.
Orange-red ball and hard blue points expanded as the cruiser drove down at reckless speed. The points became flashing stars of sapphire. Colossal, star-shaped structures of blue crystal, John Star saw, examining one with the highest power of his instrument; gigantic crystal shapes of cold blue flame.
Frozen light burned within them, flashed out in cold, thin rays, narrow pencils of hard, diamond radiance that wove an unbroken net about the scarlet planet from pole to pole.
The Medusae’s world assumed a sinister and awful splendor as they fell nearer.
THE GIGANTIC globe of dim, cloudy yellow-red hung against the utter black of space, twin rings of colossal sapphires encircling it, flinging from their cold facets a web of diamond rays that veiled the sullen-hued planet in supernal splendor.
“The thing,” whispered John Star, “is—beautiful!”
“Beautiful,” agreed Jay Kalam, “like a deadly snake, or the crystals of some horrible poison. It both fascinates and repels.”
“Think of Aladoree, down there,” breathed John Star. “Beyond—that! Hidden, guarded, and tortured, I suppose, for her secret. We must get through!”
“We must!”
And Jay Kalam spoke quiet orders into his telephone.
“Mortal me!” appealed a voice, plaintively thin. “Can’t we have a blessed moment of time, before we go plunging into the awful thing? Just time to snatch a bite to eat?”
“No, Giles. In minutes now——”
“Can’t poor old Giles have time even for a mortal sip of wine before he dies? A poor old soldier of the legion, dead on his feet from toiling day and night, starving to death for want of time to eat! Unjustly accused, hunted out of his native system for a blessed pirate, driven to his death in the mortal horrors of an unknown planet! Poor old——”
John Star was listening no longer. He had seen a strange thing. Something was happening to the ship—and to his own body.
The metal walls, the instruments about him, were suddenly luminous, shining with prismatic radiance. His own skin was shining.
Infinitely small luminescent atoms, it seemed, were dancing away from the walls of the room—tiny, vibrant motes, red, orange, yellow, green and blue, indigo and violet. They swirled away from the curiously shining walls, filled the room swiftly with a throbbing, sparkling, rainbow-colored mist.
The strange, glittering particles, he saw, were streaming away from his own body.
Then he felt it. A sheet of blinding pain.
It wrapped him; from it stabbed a million merciless needles.
A moment he gave way to it, sick and reeling, eyes closed. Then he fought to control himself, turned unsteadily to Jay Kalam, a shimmering specter clothed in a mist of molten rainbows.
“Feels—” through clenched teeth, he gasped—“like every nerve—eaten away!”
“That’s it,” he heard the specter’s voice, hoarse and faint with pain. “Particles dancing away—radiation—beating through us—disintegrating—our bodies—nerves being destroyed—stimulated.”
“How long——”
His voice went out. Agony beat against his brain in great surges. Every limb, every tissue of his body, shrieked with pain. Even the cells of his brain itself screamed protest at the radiation consuming them.
Every second it seemed that his suffering must be the ultimate—every second it increased.
He was blind with pain. Pain roared in his ears. Red-hot needles of pain probed every fiber of his body. Still he fought to keep mastery of himself, to keep the cruiser plunging ahead.
Above the agony thundering in his ears, he heard the whine of the hard-pushed geodynes change again to the harsh, vibrating note. The vibration increased, the whole ship trembled with it. It became terrific; he clutched at a handrail, thinking the ship must fly to fragments under the torture.
It ceased abruptly. The cruiser was silent. The geodynes at last had failed completely. Now only momentum remained to carry them through the radiation wall. Would it—in time? He feared not.
In the new silence he heard Adam Ulnar’s voice from the brig, a thin scream of utter agony.
“Disintegration——” came the faint, hoarse rasp from Jay Kalam. “Invisible——”
He saw, then, that the solid metal of the mechanisms about him was becoming weirdly and incredibly semitransparent, as if about to dissolve completely in the glittering mist that swirled away from them, ever denser.
He looked at Jay Kalam, through the haze of shattered jewels, and saw a strange, a fearful thing.
A specter in earnest, now, semitransparent, bones visible like shadows within misty outlines of flesh. Fiery smoke swirling away from it. It looked no longer a man, but a grim shadow, melting into prismatic mist.
Yet it still had consciousness, reason, will. A sound whispered from it, dry and faint: “Rockets!”
John Star knew that he was another dissolving ghost. Every atom of his body flamed with unendurable pain. Red agony blinded him, thundered in his ears, froze his body in rigid walls. Yet he moved, before it overcame him utterly.
He reached the rocket firing keys.
He was sprawled over the control board, the next he knew, limp, trembling, his sick body oddly weak, dripping with sweat. He dragged himself up, aware that his weird, agonizing transparency was gone; saw Jay Kalam, faint and white; saw beyond him a few glistening diamond particles still floating in the air.
“The rockets,” breathed Jay Kalam, his voice weak, uncertain, but gravely deliberate as ever, “the rockets brought us through.”
“Through!” It was a dry, hoarse croak. “Inside the Belt?”
“Inside! And plunging toward the planet’s surface.”
He fought to recover a grip on himself.
“We must check our motion before we smash!”
“Giles!” Jay Kalam called into the telephone. “The geodynes——”
“It’s no mortal use,” wheezed the plaintive protest. “Old Giles is dying, dying! The blessed agony of it! And the generators are wrecked, burned up! That awful vibration. They can never be repaired!
“One old soldier, against all the legion, and the blessed dangers of space, and the precious monsters of a world of bloody horror——”
“The geodynes——”
“Ah, the mortal things are finished, I tell you. Done!”
“He means it,” said Jay Kalam. “The geodynes are gone. We’ve only the rockets to keep us from smashing to smoke on Yarkand.” John Star dragged himself grimly to the firing keys, muttered: “Now is when we need the fuel we left on Pluto’s moon!”
XV.
DOWN UPON the huge, expanding, yellow-red planet the Purple Dream was hurtling, rocket blasts thundering forward at full power to check her flight—if it could be checked short of catastrophe.
Jay Kalam watched, gravely anxious, as John Star swiftly took the readings from a score of instruments, set them up on the calculators, snapped down a button.
“What do you find?”
“A close thing,” John Star said slowly, at last. “Uncomfortably close. At very nearly the same time, three things will happen. Our forward momentum will be checked. We shall approach the surface of the planet. The rockets will go dead for want of fuel.
“But that thick red atmosphere hides the planet’s surface—I can’t tell exactly where it is. If it’s too near, we smash against it like a meteor, before our fall is checked. If too far, the fuel will be exhausted, we plunge down again, helpless.”
“Then,” Jay Kalam observed calmly, “we must await the event. How long have we?”
“It’s about two hours, until those three things happen.”
“And nothing we can do?”
“Nothing. Except keep the rockets at full power.”
“A black flier!” announced Jay Kalam, a moment later. “Out to watch the pyrotechnics when we hit. We gave the alarm, I suppose, when we entered the Belt of Peril.”
John Star picked it up in a tele-periscope—a complex, gigantic mechanism of glistening, ebon metal; wide black vanes moving, oddly slow, above the immense sphere of its body. Not far above, it was merely keeping pace with their fall, making no hostile move.
“Just waiting to watch us smash!” he muttered grimly. “Or to pick us off if we don’t!”
“I’m going to get Adam Ulnar,” Jay Kalam said abruptly. “He said he could communicate with them.
I’m going to let him try. Might get some scrap of information. Or negotiate some advantage, for his release.”
John Star nodded. He left the bridge, returned with Adam Ulnar before him, still white and shaken from the experience in the Belt of Peril.
“You’re willing to try to communicate?”
“Yes, John. We’re falling, you say, near the planet, with generators useless and a black flier near?”
“That’s the situation.”
“Then I’ll offer you a proposition.”
“What’s that?”
“Our lives, if the ship continues to fall, aren’t worth much?”
“Agreed! What then?”
“I’ll save yours, for a chance to save mine. The black ship can pick up the Purple Dream, set it down safe anywhere I say. I’ll have them put you down safe, anywhere you like on the surface of the planet, in exchange for my life and freedom. I’ll go aboard the black flier, have it take me to their city. I’ll promise you twelve hours truce—I can’t answer for what will happen afterward.”
“We’ve only your word.”
Adam Ulnar smiled a little, assured them: “That is all. But you can afford to take it.”
John Star studied the handsome, gravely distinguished face, found there something of sincerity and honor and strength. Something he could trust.
“Very well! You can communicate from on board?”
“Yes, John. With the ultra-wave transmitter. The Medusae, you see, don’t converse by sound—in spite of the name, they really aren’t comparable to any life form on the system. They use an ether vibration.
The first expedition devised radio apparatus, with their aid, for intercourse with them. I know the code of signals—I’ve been in contact with the agents they sent to the system.”
“It’s a bargain, then,” said Jay Kalam. “Have us set down safe, with twelve hours’ freedom. And we’ll let you go aboard.”
