Collected Short Fiction, page 204
Standing there on the perilous edge, John Star’s first impression was of nightmare strangeness, bewildering confusion. Gleaming black buildings, towers, stacks, tanks, fantastic machines, loomed up about him, against the lurid sky, appallingly colossal—some of them reaching, he soberly estimated, two miles high.
If the weird metropolis had order or plan, he did not grasp it. The black wall had seemed to inclose a regular polygon. But within all was strange, astounding, incomprehensible, to the point of dismay.
THERE WERE no streets, merely yawning cavernous abysms between mountainous black structures. The Medusae had no need of streets. They did not walk, they floated! Doors opened startlingly upon sheer space, at any level from the surface to ten thousand feet.
The stupendous ebon buildings had no regular height or plan, some were square, some cylindrical or domed, some terraced, some—like the reservoir upon which they stood—sheerly vertical. All among them were bewildering machines, of unguessable function—save that a few were apparently aerial or interstellar fliers, moored on landing stages, but all black, ugly, colossal.
The four stood there for a little time in dismayed confusion, caution forgotten.
“Bless my eye!” moaned Giles Habibula. “No streets. No ground. No level space. All a tangle of blessed black metal. Can’t get anywhere without a mortal pair of wings!”
“That must be the central tower,” observed Jay Kalam. “Still miles away.”
He pointed to a square, forbidding, Cyclopean pile, towering up amazingly against the red sky in the distance, truly a mountain of metal, landing stages carrying colossal fliers and other grotesque black machines along its sides.
Weary, hopeless, he shook his head.
“We must get back, hide until dusk.”
“The mortal Medusae,” apprehensively promised Giles Habibula, “will see——”
“One, I think,” broke in John Star, “already has!”
Hundreds, perhaps, of the city’s people had been in view from the moment they came on the roof, greenish hemispherical domes drifting above the confusion of black metal, dark tentacles dangling. All had been far away, insignificant by comparison with their vast works. But now one had drifted abruptly over the point of the conical roof.
Giles Habibula dived for the hole through which they had emerged. He stuck; before the others could help him the Medusa was overhead.
The sheer size of it was astounding. Those in the distance had been tiny by comparison only. Its green dorae was twenty feet through, the hanging, ophidian tentacles twice that in length.
It was infinitely horrible. Vast, bulging mass, gelatinous, slimy, unpleasantly and translucently green. Scores of tentacles, hideously writhing and twisting. The eyes, staring down from the bulging sides—long, ovoid wells of purple flame. All pupil, rimmed with tattered black membrane. Strange, great mirrors of infinite age and infinite wisdom and infinite evil! Luminous, burning with frozen cruel fire.
The sheer, elemental horror of it set off some primeval fear response. Paralyzed their limbs with tingling cold, slowed their hearts, stopped their breath, drenched them with sweat of terror.
Fear-numbed, they stood motionless, until the tentacles had whipped about them, snatched thorn daggers from their nerveless hands, pulled Giles Habibula like a cork from the hole. The Medusa carried them away, vainly fighting the hard thin tentacles.
“My mortal wine——” panted Giles Habibula.
It dropped from his pocket. Like a plummet it fell into the chasm below, fell two thousand feet.
“My blessed bottle of wine!” And he sobbed in the coiling ropes.
Moving by what force they did not know, by what amazing conquest of gravitation, the creature swept through the air with them, above the titanic black disorder of the city, toward—John Star noted it with a certain grim satisfaction—toward the gigantic central fortress.
They were overcoming the horror that had numbed them.
“Something about it,” gasped Jay Kalam, even as it bore them, “perhaps some obscure vibration—sets off our mechanism—of instinctive fear. Must be that. Huge brain—powerful—dreadful!”
It carried them into the stupendous building, through a door opening on sheer space, five thousand feet high. Through a green-lighted hall, colossal, black-walled. Stuffed them through a rectangular opening in the floor, dropped them.
SPRAWLING in a black-walled room, twenty feet square, they found beside them a man—or the shattered wreck of a man.
Pale, emaciated, ragged, he was sleeping on his face, breathing with long, rasping snores. John Star shook him, after the Medusa had vanished from above the locked grating overhead, woke him. He sat up. Stark, feverish terror stared from red eyes in his pallid, haggard face.
He uttered a shrill, hoarse scream of agonized terror, clawed in wild, blind insanity of fear at John Star’s hand on his shoulder.
John Star himself cried out, for the man was Eric Ulnar.
The handsome, insolent officer, who would have been emperor of the system, become this feeble, twisted wreck!
“Leave me be! Leave me be!” he shrieked. “I’ll do what you want! I’ll do anything! I’ll make her tell the secret! I’ll kill her if you want! But I can’t stand any more! Leave me be! Leave me be!”
“We won’t hurt you!” John Star tried to soothe him, horrified as he was by the import of his cries. “We’re men. We won’t harm you. I’m John Ulnar. You know me. We won’t hurt you.”
“John Ulnar?” Red, fevered eyes stared. “Why, yes, you’re John.” The trembling wreck, abruptly sob-shaken, clung to his shoulder.
“The Medusae!” he wailed. “They tricked us! They’re murdering mankind! They’re bombing the system with red gas, to eat men’s bodies away and make them insane. They’re murdering mankind!”
“Aladoree?” demanded John Star. “Where’s she?”
“They make me torture her!” sobbed the weak, wild voice. “They want her secret. Want AKKA! But she won’t tell. And they won’t let me die till she tells. They won’t let me die!” he shrilled. “They won’t let me die!
“But when she tells, they’ll kill us all!”
To be continued next month
The Legion of Space
Part Five of the great novel
UP TO NOW:
In the thirtieth century, John Star—then John Ulnar—receives his commission in the legion of space, with orders to join the guard of Aladoree Author, a lovely, mysterious girl, keeper of
AKKA—the secret weapon of humanity, so terrific that its plans are intrusted to only one person in the system.
For two hundred years AKKA has protected the democratic Green Hall Council from the “Purples,” who plot to restore the old empire, with the despotic family of Ulnar on the throne.
Adam Ulnar, wealthy leader of the Purples and now commander of the legion, has sent his nephew, Eric Ulnar, claimant of the throne, to the star Yarkand, where he made an alliance with the weird, monstrous, hut highly scientific Medusae, to help him crush the Green Hall, promising them iron, precious to them.
Aided by the Medusae, Eric Ulnar abducts Aladoree, to deprive the Green Hall of AKKA. John Star, with three legionnaires, Jay Kalam, Hal Samdu, and Giles Habibula, captures the “Purple Dream,” space cruiser of the traitorous commander, and follows to the gigantic planet of Yarkand, where the crippled ship plunges in an ocean.
The Medusae, they learn, have tricked the Purples, planning to migrate to the system, from their dying sun, wiping out humanity.
Leaving Adam Ulnar aboard the wrecked ship, the four get ashore, reach the colossal, unearthly black city of the Medusae. Entering through an aqueduct, they are captured, imprisoned with Eric Ulnar.
“They’re murdering mankind!” screams Eric. “Bombing the planets with a deadly red gas. And making me torture Aladoree! They want AKKA. They won’t let me die till she tells. But when she tells, they will kill us all!”
They must rescue the girl to save the human race.
XXI.
“MY BLESSED bottle of wine!” sobbed Giles Habibula plaintively. “I carried it out of the sunken cruiser. I carried it through the jungle of thorns. I carried it up the mortal black mountains. For precious months I carried it on the raft. I risked my mortal life to save it, fighting a blessed flying monster. I dived for it into the horrors of the yellow river. I was near drowning with it in the fall beneath that precious aqueduct!
“The only bottle of wine on the whole black continent!”
His fishy eyes clouded, and the clouds gave forth to a rain of tears. He sank down on the bare metal floor of the cell in a stricken heap.
“Poor old Giles Habibula, lonely, desolate, forlorn old soldier of the legion. Accused for a pirate, hunted like a rat out of his own native system, caught like a rat in a mortal trap to be tortured and murdered by the monsters of an alien star!
“And, ah, me, even that is not enough! I’d carried that bottle through a mortal lot of hardship and peril. I’d held it up to the light, many a time, life knows, my old mouth watering. Always I’d saved it for the hour of greater need. Ah, yes, for such a time of mortal bleak necessity as faces us now!
“And it must fall! Fall two thousand feet. Every mortal drop of it. Gone! Ah, Giles Habibula——”
His voice was overcome by cataclysmic grief, earthquakes of sighs and storms of tears.
John Star questioned Eric Ulnar again. He had slept, his haggard, emaciated body exhausted by the outburst of hysteria. He was calm where he woke, sunk in a sort of apathy, speaking in a dull, weary tone.
“The Medusae are anxious to desert this planet,” he said. “It’s old, its natural resources exhausted. The long, bitter nights are always more severe. And it is spiraling back toward its dying sun; sometime it will crash into it.”
“They already have an outpost in the system, you say?”
“Yes,” continued the lifeless monotone. “They’ve already conquered the Moon of Earth. They’ve filled its atmosphere with the deadly red gas, wiped out the human colonists, built a great fortress of this black, synthetic metal.”
“But the legion! Surely——”
“The legion of space is destroyed. The last, disorganized remnant of it was annihilated in a vain attack on the Moon. The Green Hall, too, is gone. The system has no organization, no defense.
“And the Medusae, from the fort on the Moon, are proceeding with the destruction of the human race. They’re firing great shells, filled with the red gas, at Earth and the other planets and satellites. Slowly, in every atmosphere, the concentration of the gas is increasing. Soon men everywhere will be dying of insanity and the green, leprous wasting away of their bodies.
“Only a few of the Medusae, comparatively, have already gone to the system. But their great fleet is now being organized and equipped, to carry the migrating hordes that will occupy our planets as the human race is destroyed.” There had been a vast change in Eric Ulnar’s manner. On the first occasion, his voice had been a thin, hysterical scream. Now his dull tones were barely audible. His face—it still had a sort of pallid beauty from his long yellow hair, worn, haggard, pain-drawn as it was—his face was vacantly calm. He spoke of the plans of the Medusae with an unconcern that was almost mechanical, as if the fate of the system no longer interested him.
“And Aladoree?” John Star demanded. “Where is she?”
“She is locked in the next cell, beside us, under the floor of the hall above.”
“You say she’s been”—he could not keep a little sob of pain and anger from his voice, “been—tortured?”
“The Medusae want to know her secret,” came the lifeless, expressionless reply. “They want the plans for AKKA. Since they can’t communicate with her themselves—she doesn’t know the code—they made me try to get the secret for them. But she won’t tell. “We’ve used different means,” he droned on. “Fatigue, hypnotism, pain. But she won’t tell.”
“You——” choked Hal Samdu. “You—beast—coward——”
He charged across the cell, great hands clenching savagely. Eric Ulnar shrank from him, shuddering, cried out: “Don’t! Don’t let him touch me! They tortured me! I couldn’t stand it! They tortured me! And they wouldn’t let me die!”
“Hal!” protested Jay Kalam gravely. “That won’t help things a bit. We need to know what he can tell us.”
“But he—” gasped the giant, “he—tortured Aladoree!”
“I know,” soothed John Star, holding his arm, though he shared the savage impulse to destroy this abject human object. “What he tells us will help to rescue her.”
He turned back to Eric Ulnar.
“In the next cell, you say. Is there a guard?”
“Don’t let him touch me,” came the whining response. “Yes, one of the Medusae always watches in the hall.”
“If we could get past the guard, is there any way out?”
“Out of the city, you mean?”
“Yes,” Jay Kalam spoke up. “We’re going to rescue Aladoree. We’re going to take her outside the city and let her set up her weapon. Then the Medusae will come to us for orders—unless we decide to destroy the whole city out of hand.”
“No, you could never get out of the city,” returned the dull voice. “You can’t even leave the hall. It opens over a pit a mile deep. Just a sheer, blank wall below the door. Even if you got down, you’d have no way to cross the city. The Medusae have no streets; they fly.
“But there’s no use, even to talk of that. You can’t even get out of this cell, or get Aladoree out of hers. The sliding doors are locked. You are unarmed prisoners. Talking of stealing something the Medusae are guarding in their securest fortress!”
His voice died in dull contempt.
WITH SOMETHING of the impatience of a trapped animal, John Star gazed about the cell—a bare metal chamber, square, twenty feet wide. Ten feet overhead was the rectangular opening through which they had been dropped, closed with a sliding grille of square metal bars. Green light filtered through the bars from the hall above. His eyes, searching for some weapon or tool to aid their escape, found no movable thing in the cell. It was simply a square box of black metal.
Hal Samdu was pacing back and forth along the walls, his eyes roving like those of a caged beast, sometimes casting a glance of savage rage at Eric Ulnar.
“You can’t get out of this cell, even,” insisted the same dead voice. “The Medusae will kill yon. They will soon be coming back to make me try again to get the plans from Aladoree. She will tell, this time. They are preparing a ray that burns like fire, and yet will not kill her too soon. But they will kill us all when she tells.”
“Then,” John Star muttered fiercely, “we must get out!”
Hal Samdu beat with his fists on the metal walls. They gave out a dull, heavy reverberation, a melancholy roll of doom; he left blood from his knuckles.
“You can’t get out,” droned Eric. “The lock——”
“One of us has a certain dexterity,” said Jay Kalam. “Giles, you must open the door.”
Giles Habibula got to his feet in the corner of the cell, wiping the tears from his fishy eyes.
“Ah, yes,” he wheezed in a brighter tone. “One of us has a certain slight dexterity. It came of the accident that his father was an inventor of locks.
Even so, it cost him a mortal lot of toil, to develop an aptitude into a skill.
“A mortal dexterity! Life knows, it has never been given the credit it has earned. Ah, me! Lesser men have won riches and honor and fame with half the genius and a tenth the toil. And to old Giles Habibula his talent and his unremitting effort have brought only poverty and obscurity and disgrace!
“Mortal me! But for that dexterity, I should never have been here, rotting in the hands of a lot of bloody monsters, waiting for torture and death! Ah, no! But for that affair on Venus, twenty years ago, I should never have been in the legion. And ’twas that dexterity that tempted me then—that, and the fame of a certain cellar of wine!
“Poor old Giles, brought by his own genius to ruin and starvation and death and——”
“But now’s the chance to make your skill undo all that,” urged John Star. “Can you open the lock?”
“Ah, me, lad! The penalty of unjust obscurity! If I had been a painter, a poet, a blessed musician, you would never dare cast doubt upon the mortal power of my art. With my genius, it would be known from end to end of the system. Ah, me, it was an ill tide of destiny into which I was cast!
“That even you, lad, should doubt my genius!”
Great tears trickled down his nose.
“Come, Giles!” cried Jay Kalam. “Show him.”
The three of them lifted Giles Habibula—an easier task than it would once have been—so he could reach the barred grating, ten feet above the floor.
He looked at the black case of the lock, fingered it with his oddly sure, oddly delicate hands. He set his ear against the case, tapped it with his fingers, reached up through the bars and moved something, listening.
“My mortal eyes!” he at last sighed plaintively. “I never saw such a blessed lock as this. Combination. The case is precious tight. No place to insert an instrument, to feel it out. And the thing has levers, instead of cylinders. Never was a lock like this in the system!”
Again he listened intently to little clickings from the lock, resting the tips of sensitive fingers against the case, now here, now there, as if vibration revealed the inner mechanism.
“Bless my poor old bones!” he muttered once. “A mortal new idea, here! If we were back in the system, the patents on it would earn me the fame and wealth I’ve been cheated of. A lock that challenges even the genius of Giles Habibula!”
Abruptly he gasped, stooping.
“Let me down! A fearful creature, coming!”
They lowered him to the floor. And a huge greenish hemisphere floated over the grating. A gross mass of glistening, slimy, translucent flesh, palpitating with strange, slow life. An immense, ovoid eye stared at them, so unearthly, so horribly fascinating, that John Star felt it must be reading their very minds.
