Collected Short Fiction, page 20
The volume of the gases in the atmosphere depends upon temperature and pressure. As one leaves the surface of the earth, the air grows thinner, because the pressure is less. But interplanetary space is nearly at absolute zero, where molecular motion ceases. It follows that the molecular motion of the outside of the atmosphere is not sufficient to keep it in the gaseous state at all.
The top of the air is literally frozen into a solid layer!
Scientists suspected as much when they suggested that the Heaviside Layer effect was caused by the reflection of Hertzian waves by solid particles of frozen nitrogen in the air. But it seems that the many frozen gases (for the air contains hydrogen, helium, krypton, neon, xenon, and carbon dioxide, as well as nitrogen, oxygen, and carrying quantities of water vapor) possess chemical characteristics lacking at ordinary temperatures. They seem to have formed a relatively substantial crust, and to have formed an entirely new series of chemical compounds, to make life possible upon that crust. (The rare gases of the air are monatomic, and consequently inert, at ordinary temperatures.)
It would appear that intelligence had been growing up upon that transparent and unsuspected world above, through all the ages that man had been fighting for survival below. Vars had been the first to suspect it.
He had got into radio communication with the denizens of that second crust, had enlisted their aid in a war upon his fellow men!
We flew on toward the crimson city.
“The armies from there will conquer the world. Those purple things fight like demons,” the fat man boasted complacently, waving his half-empty flask toward the gleaming crimson battlements.
“Demons! Yes. Devils! Hell in the sky!” the shrunken man whispered through chattering teeth, never taking his red eyes from the door to the pilot’s cabin.
We were over that strange city of red metal. It was a mile across, circular, with a metal pavement and a wall of red metal about the edge. Scattered along the rim were a dozen great gleaming domes of purple.
“Gas in the domes supports the city,” my guard said briefly. “The ground is mist. Won’t hold up anything solid.”
I suppose that a dollar would have fallen through those purple rocks as a similar disc of neutronic substance, weighing eight thousand tons to the cubic inch, would fall through the crust of our own earth. Strength and weight are relative terms. The strange crust must have seemed solid enough to the weird beings that trod upon it, until they acquired the use of metals and of the negative gravity gas. (Their “mines” may have been the meteorites of space.)
In the center of the city was a huge transparent dome, with a slender tube projecting through it. I was struck at once with the semblance of it to Dr. Vernon’s ray tube. Had a duplicate already been installed here?
The fat man answered my question. “Old Vernon is some prize fool. We have his weapon as well as those already possessed by the Things. A ray tube in that city, and one in every plane. The Master has promised me a little model, to carry in my pocket. He is going to give me Italy and—”
Poison in Their Blood
I LISTENED no more, for we were dropping swiftly to a broad platform of the red metal. Upon it were long lines of the thick-bodied red airplanes. And at one side was the larger ship into which I had seen three prisoners taken.
“—the army, ready to start,” I heard the red-faced man again. “I’ll be over New York tomorrow.” He raised his bottle unsteadily.
Our machine was dropped lightly to the top of the great ship. Two red-clad mechanics moved through our compartment, toward the rear. In the next little room we found them waiting, when my guard had made me follow. They held a round metal door, above a dark opening in the floor. It seems that the machines were placed with openings opposite, and were clamped together to prevent loss of air.
“Crawl through. Pronto!” said the guard, giving me another prod with his bayonet and pointing to the hole.
I put my hands on the edge of the opening, dropped through, and found myself in a dark chamber—for a second, alone. It was the opportunity I had been awaiting. I slipped out the little tube of the Doctor’s. On the night before, I had set the little dial. Now I pushed over the little lever that lit the tube, and played the invisible beam through the opening.
My guard climbed through, suspicious and in haste, evidently unconscious of the beam. I slipped the tube under my coat, to hide its crimson glow, playing the ray over him again, and over the mechanics and my two fellow-passengers, as they came through. I heard footsteps, and a light flashed on. I saw that we were in a long, low room, with a door at the farther end. Four men, in red uniform, with rifles, were approaching. Hopelessly, I gave them the benefit of the ray, but still nothing happened.
“Move on, Pard,” my guard muttered. “The Master waits.” He gave me another vigorous prod with the blade. (He seemed to enjoy his prerogative immensely.)
I still had the tube in my hand, concealed against my coat. Though it seemed to have no effect, I was missing no chances. We passed through a door at the end of the room, into another fitted up like a luxurious office. At a paper-littered desk, the lunatic, Vars, was sitting with three other men, who, for all their looks, might have been ex-pugilists or bootlegger kings (or both).
Suddenly Vars ducked, and a pistol flashed at his side. My hand went numb, and I heard the crash of glass. He had shot the tube as I turned it upon him. As he cursed and fired again, I threw myself at the feet of the fat man. Pistols cracked, and I felt the wind of bullets. Strangely, the big fellow collapsed as I dived, striking the floor at my side.
And then a fearful thing threw itself at me!
It was a many-tentacled creature of luminous purple fire, with an eye-like nucleus of bright scarlet in its shapeless, semitransparent body! It was a thing or horror like that which had looked upon me as I lay in the cell—a nightmare being! I struck at it feebly, reeling in terror.
It had followed us into the room; it must have been the pilot of our ship.
Slender tentacles of purple fire coiled around me. They touched me. Their touch was cold—cold flame! But it burned! I felt a tingling sensation of pain—unutterably horrible. The contact with that monster shocked like electricity—but it was as cold as space!
I shrieked as I fell!
With my last energy, I sent out my fist at that flaming scarlet core. My arm went through it, cut it!
Then I have a confused impression of cries of agony and terror, of men cursing, screaming, falling. There were pistol shots, shouts, and dreadful sobbing gasps. I sat up, and saw that the room was full of writhing, dying men! Corpses weirdly splashed with red!
And the purple thing lay before me on the floor, inert and limp, with the fire in it fading. Still it was unspeakably horrible.
Then I heard Ellen cry out, calling my name! I ran on in the room. Ellen stood at the bars of a flimsy little door back of the desk at which the men had been seated.
“Bob,” she cried, “I heard you! I knew it was you!”
I smashed the door with one of the rifles. The girl ran out to me, with Bill and the Doctor at her heels. The Doctor took in what had happened.
“The r-r-r-ray made slow p-p-p-p-poisons in their blood. Not adjusted right. It can upset the chemical equilibrium of the body in a thousand ways. But let’s get b-b-b-back in the other ship before something happens.”
We got through the manhole. I closed it again and unfastened the clamps that held us to the other ship, while the Doctor and Bill ran forward into the pilot’s compartment. I felt the vessel rise.
Ellen and I stood by one of the round ports. We saw the weird red city drop away below us. Soon the flat, desolate purple desert was slipping along beneath us, with the green-gray earth visible through it, so far below.
And still there was no movement from the city.
We were several miles away before I saw the red ships rise in long lines from their places on the landing deck. Our flight had been discovered! And then I saw the great dome moving, the slender tube pointing at us.
They were going to use the ray!
The Doctor’s voice came from the forward compartment. “I was afraid something would happen to the; p-p-p-p-plans. You know I told you that I almost had an atomic explosion of the molten Vernonite electrode. The specifications on the blue print were almost! right—almost—”
A great flare of white light burst from the transparent dome. A blaze of blinding incandescence blotted out the scarlet metal city. After a long moment it was gone, and we could see again. The city in the sky was no more!
There was only a vast ragged hole in the purple plain!
That was perhaps the most terrific explosion of history, but we neither felt nor heard it, for we were above the air.
* * * * *
That is a year ago, now. Ellen and I are married. Soon we shall go back to El Tigre, to see the Doctor and Bill. Dr. Vernon is working on a new model of his tube, and is making a painstaking examination of the strange ship we brought back to earth.
Did the destruction of a single city destroy the menace? In all that world above the air, larger than our own, may there not be other cities, or nations and races, perhaps, of intelligent beings? What might we not gain from them in the arts of peace, or not lose to them in war?
This summer the four of us are going to adventure above the air again, in that captured ship—to explore the Second Shell.
THE END.
1930
The Green Girl
(A Serial in Two Parts) Part I
IN a very recent issue of SCIENCE AND INVENTION Dr. Hartman tells of the amazing discoveries he has made in the Mediterranean, off the coast of Sicily, when he went below the sea in his newly constructed steel diving bell, which was designed to withstand a pressure of 2,500 pounds per square inch or a sub-sea depth of about 5,000 feet. During his latest venture below the sea level, Dr. Hartman discovered a prehistoric city—perhaps the Lost Atlantis. Why, then, should it be impossible to assume that there might be cities—even vast cities—submerged miles below the Pacific, for instance, and made habitable? But whatever else might be said, “The Green Girl” is a scientifiction classic that will rank with the best that have ever been published. Though it is a wild, exciting, fantastic tale, it is exceedingly plausible withal. Be sure to read the first instalment in this issue.
CHAPTER I
MAY 4, 1999
AT high noon on May 4, 1999, the sun went out! It had risen bright and clear. The summer sky had had an unwonted liquid brilliance. The climbing day-star had shone all the morning with unusual intensity. But just at ten o’clock, an intangible mist obscured the sky! A pale and deepening film stole over the crystal infinity of the heavens! The sky assumed a dull, almost copper tinge, that developed into a ghastly scarlet pall! In five minutes the sky changed from a soft and limpid blue to an intense, darkling scarlet! In the appalling suggestion of blood in the dusky crimson depths, there was a grim omen of the fate of earth!
I had got up at dawn for a plunge in the surf, and all the morning I had been wandering about the bit of beach and the strip of virgin woodland behind it, content in the restful, soothing peace of that untouched bit of Nature, rejoicing lazily in the vivid greenness of it, in the fresh odors of earth and plant, in the whisper of the wind in the palms. I lounged on the crisp grass in the cooling shade, living in my sympathy with the life about me, watching the long soft rollers of the green-blue Atlantic surging deliberately toward the crystal whiteness of the sunlit sandy beach. The soft cerulian skies were clear, save for the white wings of occasional airships that glanced in the bright sunshine. The morning had a singularly quiet and soothing beauty. My sleepy soul was in harmony with the distant mellow chime of a church bell. I lay back in the peaceful rest of a man ready to sink lazily into the evening of life.
Though I am still an able man of somewhat less than thirty years, I felt that morning none of the energetic exuberance of youth. I felt something of the age and the agelessness of Nature herself. I felt no fires of ambition; I was oddly devoid of feeling or emotion; I felt content to steep my soul for eternities in Nature’s simple wonders. But I have always been a dreamer.
I was a worshipper come unknowingly for the last time to the shrine of life. For even then the doom was gathering! But I was spared all knowledge of the alien menace that was blotting out the sun! I had no premonition that within a few short hours the balmy Florida coast would be a frozen wilderness, whipped with bitter winds and lashed with freezing seas!
I had risen at last, and was sauntering down the hard white sand in the direction of our cottage, listening idly to the birds—singing on the eve of their doom. I came in sight of the house, a low building, covered with climbing vines and half hidden in the trees. I strolled toward it upon the narrow, curving gravel walk, lost in the peace of the rustic setting.
The Doctor was sitting on the small veranda, gazing sleepily out over the sea, with his pipe in his mouth and his hands on the arms of his chair. Dr. Samuel Walden was the sole person in the world, outside the vivid creations of my dreams, for whom I had affection. He was an unusual character. Born in 1929, he was now seventy years of age. His earlier life had been devoted to science, and he had won fame and fortune for himself by the invention of the hydrodyne sub-atomic engine. But in the last twenty years he had done no scientific work—or so I thought, for I had never been behind the little door that he kept always locked.
A close friend of my parents, he had been more than a father to me since they were lost in the turmoil of the last outbreak against the Council of Nations, when I was three years old. We had always lived in the old cottage on the hill, in this natural park on the Florida coast. He loved Nature deeply. For many years his chief interests in life had been plants and animals, for which he cared more than for society. A flower, a dog, the sound of the surf—such things were the joys of his life.
Though his hair had been white for many years, his lean, tanned face was unwrinkled, and he was among the strongest men of my acquaintance. In fact, two years before, he had won second place at the Olympic wrestling contests. He loved the simple things of life. He had a passion for cooking, and he made it a science as well as an art. He was an inveterate smoker, and clung to the habit, even when he had to have the tobacco smuggled in from Asia at vast expense. He had an old music box, of a type that went out of date half a century ago, to which he used to listen for hours on end.
There was little enough about Sam Walden’s daily life to show that he was the greatest scientist of the earth, and the sole hope for the world in the amazing battle that was brewing. His simple philosophy had changed hint far from the energetic young inventor of the hydrodyne. No one would have suspected the qualities of supreme heroism that he revealed.
During the days of my youth we had restlessly wandered over the globe. We had lived rather aimlessly—for the simple joy of living. The mountains, the desert, and the sea have always had a fascinating call for both of us, and we wandered in answer to that call—and during some of those years, I traveled on a strange quest of my own.
But it was a whole decade since we had left our rustic home. And as our latter years had been quiet and tranquil, so the world had lost the fierce energy and struggle for advancement, that had driven it during Sam’s younger days. It had settled down to the enjoyment of peaceful content. Science had turned from the invention of new machines to the improvement of those in existence, and had died with their perfection, until, when the crisis came, Sam was the only man on earth able to understand and to cope with it!
The industrial organization had been perfected. Work was done by machines. Men attended them for short hours and played through long ones. There were no rich, and no poor. The products of industry were fairly divided. All men received their shares in content and enjoyed them to the full, without troubling themselves about the question of science or religion or of life that had received the attention of the past generation.
And upon the peaceful tranquillity of that happy, prosperous age, there fell with no warning the lurid doom that no man could explain, throwing it into frenzied confusion. In the past era, there would have been a thousand men to attack the problem, with all the power of clear, dynamic minds. Now, there was just one man who could understand!
It was not so much that scientific knowledge was lacking. Men still studied and talked the language of science. The machines demanded it. But there were none of trained and penetrating minds, used to departing boldly from the world of the known to bring forth the new. Science was no longer living. It was mechanical.
CHAPTER II
The Radio Girl
I HAVE said that I am a dreamer, living more truly in my fancy than in the world. Perhaps my imagination is abnormally developed. Always I have had new worlds awaiting me in my dreams, to which I could retire when life was dull or unattractive. My visions have always had a singular reality, such a definite concreteness, that it sometimes seemed to be the truth.
The old wonder stories of Wells and Verne, and of the pseudo-scientific writers of the first part of this century have always appealed to me. I had a vast collection of ancient volumes and tattered magazines, full of those old stories, which I read and reread with passionate interest. The rest of the world had forgotten them with the passing of the age of science, but I found in them the priceless food of fancy.
Psychologists say that many children have dream companions of some kind. They are very real entities of the child’s imagination, playmates of fancy. They usually fade and are forgotten as the adolescent child becomes absorbed in the activities of life, and the imagination atrophies.
Since the days of my earliest recollections, I have visited in the world of my dreams a wonderful playmate. It is a girl, with dark brown hair, deep, warm violet eyes, and clear skin, so I thought, slightly tinged with green, though the lips were very red. I have always thought that she was very beautiful, and she has always been very real to me.
