Collected Short Fiction, page 205
A dark tentacle dropped four little brown bricks through the grating. Eric Ulnar, breaking from his apathy, snatched one of them, gnawed it eagerly.
“Food,” he said. “This is all they give us.”
A cube of dark, moist jelly, John Star found one of them to be, picking it up to taste it, with an odd, unpleasant odor, an insipid lack of flavor.
“Food!” wept Giles Habibula, biting into another. “Mortal me, if they call this food, I’ll eat my blessed boots first, as I did in the prison on Mars!”
“But we must eat it,” said Jay Kalam. “Even if it isn’t palatable. We shall need strength.”
The Medusa presently floated away from above the grating; they lifted Giles Habibula, to resume his battle with the lock.
He muttered under his voice from time to time; his breath, in the absorption of his effort, became slow and panting. Sweat stood out on his face, glistening in the green light that shone through the bars.
There was, at last, a louder click. He sighed and raised his face against the bars. Then shook his head, whispered:
“Let me down.”
“You can’t open it?” asked John Star anxiously.
“Ah, lad, so still you doubt?” he breathed sadly. “The blessed price a man must pay for a mortal spark of genius! There was never a lock designed that Giles Habibula couldn’t open. Though many a locksmith has tried, life knows!”
“Then it is open?”
“Ah, yes! The bolts just went back. The blessed door is unlocked. But I didn’t open it.”
“Why?”
“Because the mortal monster is waiting up there in the hall. Hanging still over a blessed queer contraption on a tripod of black metal. Its purple eyes would see any move.”
“Tripod?” shrilled Eric Ulnar, voice edged with the panic of hysteria. “Tripod? That’s the machine they use for communication with me. They’ve brought it again, to make me get the secret from Aladoree. They’ll kill us all when she tells!”
XXII.
“LIFT ME,” said John Star, and Hal Samdu’s great hands swung him up.
Through the square metal bars of the grating, he could see the walls and ceiling of the vast hall, twenty feet wide, twice that in height, made all of the dead-black metal and illuminated by little green, shining spheres strung along the middle of the ceiling.
The Medusa was in view, hanging over the cell and a little to one side A bulging, fifteen-foot hemisphere of greenish flesh, slimy, half transparent, throbbing. Ovoid, foot-long purple eyes, protruding a little, rimmed with ragged black membranes—hypnotic eyes of evil enigma. Scores of black tentacles hanging from the edge of the hemisphere, motionless, lifeless.
Beside it was the tripod mechanism. Three heavy, spike-pointed legs of black metal, supporting a little cabinet, from which hung cables fastened to little objects that must have been electrodes and transmitter, for picking up Eric’s voice and the strange etheric emanations of the Medusae.
At a sign, the giant lowered him.
“There’s a chance,” he whispered. “If there are no others in sight—and if we can be quick enough.”
He told what he had seen, outlined his plan. Jay Kalam nodded, grave approval. In quick, breathless whispers, they discussed the details, down to the smallest movement.
Then Jay Kalam gave the word, and Hal Samdu swung John Star up again. This time he seized the grating, slid it swiftly and noiselessly back, in a moment was on his feet in the hall above. Without the loss of an instant he leaped toward the tripod.
Jay Kalam meanwhile came through the opening after him, catapulted by the arms of the giant, and helped Hal Samdu to follow.
But an instant after the grating had opened, the three stood beside the opening, working with savage haste to dismember the tripod. Even so the guarding Medusa had already moved. The green dome of it swept swiftly toward them, thin black appendages whipping out like angry snakes.
Hal Samdu wrenched apart the mechanism. One heavy, sharp-pointed leg he thrust to John Star, another to Jay Kalam. The third, with the heavy black case still fastened to it, he brandished like a great mace.
Holding the pointed leg like a pike, John Star lunged at a purple eye.
Instinctive terror smote him, the same strangely numbing fear that had struck him twice before from the luminous eyes of the Medusae, the touching off of an age-old response to elemental horror. He felt tingling chills where hair sought to rise, ice of sudden sweat, abrupt pause of heart and breath, disconcerting stiffening of his muscles.
Immobility of instinctive terror—inheritance from some primeval progenitor, that had found safety in keeping quiet. Useful, perhaps, to a creature too small to do battle and too slow to run away. But now—deadly!
He had known that it was coming. He had braced himself to meet it, as he had met other perils. He would be ruled by his brain, not by age-old instinct patterns!
A moment it checked him—just a moment. Then his numbed body responded to desperately urging nerves. He went on, metal point swinging up before him.
Yet the Medusa had taken full advantage of the small delay. The black whip of a tentacle, small as his finger, but cruelly hard, pitilessly strong, snapped around his neck, constricted with merciless, suffocating force.
In spite of it, he carried out the lunge. Fighting down the blinding agony from his throat, he completed, with every atom of weight and strength behind it, a forward rush, an upward swing.
The point reached the eye, ripped through its transparent outer coat, plunged deep into the sinister purple well of it, between the fringes of black membrane. A pendulous blob of clear jelly burst out, a quick rush of purple-black blood; and the great socket was sunken, sightless, hideous.
Abruptly increasing its fearful pressure on his larynx, the choking tentacle hurled him forward with a jerk that almost snapped vertebrae, flung him dazed and blind against the metal floor.
With a dogged will that ignored danger and physical pain, he clung to consciousness, clung to his weapon. Before he could see he was scrambling back to his feet, dimly aware of the blows of Hal Samdu’s club—great soft thuds against boneless, palpitating flesh.
He got his sight back, saw the giant, head and shoulders towering from a very mass of tightening black appendages, gasping with agony and effort, muscles knotting terrifically as he swung the metal mace.
He saw Jay Kalam lunge, as he had lunged, drive his point deep into a purple eye. Saw him instantly wrapped in ferocious black whips, that squeezed his body and twisted it and flung it savagely against the black metal wall.
He was staggering forward again. Black ropes caught his knees, before he came in thrusting distance, tripped him. They snatched him aloft, with resistless strength, whirled him up to dash his head against the black floor.
A huge, malevolent purple eye came before him, as he was flung up—one of the two that remained to the creature. It was too far to reach with a lunge. But he threw his weapon, hurled it at the immense eye with a twisting swing of his whole body, a long sweep of his free arm.
It went deep, deep into the purple well. And the tentacles dropped him, to grasp it, tug at it.
On hands and knees he sprawled, beside Jay Kalam, who was still motionless, groaning, weapon at his side. John Star snatched it as he got to his feet, straightening fairly underneath the creature, surrounded by whipping, agonized appendages.
On the under surface of the huge hemisphere, a circle of soft green flesh, was a curious organ. A circular area, three feet wide, slightly bulging, that glowed with soft, golden iridescence. The light wavered, pulsed rhythmically, with the regular palpitations of the monstrous body.
With the quick intuition that it must be some vital part, he thrust at it.
SENSING his attack, the creature fought to avoid it. Hal Samdu, dazed, was flung down at his feet. Black tentacles cut at him. One whipped about his waist, tightened fiercely. The weapon that he had flung into the great eye, now grasped in thin tentacles, flailed at him, struck his head with a blinding burst of agony.
He drove on; his point pierced the golden, shimmering circle.
The yellow light went out of it at once. And the Medusa fell, a helpless mountain of quaking green flesh. Only by a desperate, sidewise fling did he get his body from beneath it in time; even so it caught his legs.
The glowing organ, he was later sure, must have been the agency of its remarkable power of locomotion, perhaps emitting some radiant force that lifted and propelled it; perhaps giving it a grasp, in some manner yet inexplicable, upon the curvature of space itself.
Half under it he lay for a while unable to extricate himself. Still the creature was not completely dead; black appendages were whipping and writhing about him in aimless, spasmodic agony.
It was Hal Samdu who reeled back to his feet, ended the struggles of the palpitating horror with a few mighty blows of his club, and dragged John Star from beneath it.
A moment they stood gazing at it in dread; a quivering mountain of greenish protoplasm, helpless, twitching, tall as Hal Samdu’s head, the yet-twitching tentacles sprawling away from the edge of it, three sightless eyes staring horribly.
Utterly hideous as it was, both of them were moved by a contrary impulse of pity for it, in its manifest agony of death.
“It had tortured her!” gasped Hal Samdu. “It deserved to die!”
They turned from it, then, lifted Jay Kalam, already returning to consciousness, struggling to sit up.
“Stunned!” he muttered. “So it’s finished? Good! We must get on to Aladoree. Before others come. If it called for aid——Hal, please help Giles and Ulnar out of the cell. Must—work fast!”
He dropped back again. He had, John Star saw, been cruelly hurt when the tentacles flung him down. Grave face white, eyes closed, gasping, he lay there a moment, then whispered:
“John? Find her. I’ll be all right. We must be quick!”
John Star left him, ran around the quaking mountain of horror, found another grating in the floor. He dropped to his knees, peered into darkness faintly relieved by the green rays that streamed through the bars from the hall, made out a slight form, lying on the bare floor, sleeping.
“Aladoree!” he called. “Aladoree Anthar!”
The slender dim shape of her did not stir, he heard her quiet breathing.—it seemed strange to him that she should be sleeping so innocently, so like a child, when the fate of the system depended on a thing she knew.
“Aladoree!” He spoke louder. “Wake up!”
She rose, then, quickly. Her quiet voice showed complete possession of her faculties, though it was dull, weary, hopeless.
“Yes. Who are you, here?”
“John Ulnar, and your——”
“John Ulnar!” Her low, tired voice cut him off, cold with scorn. “You’ve come, I suppose, to help your cowardly kinsman make me betray the specifications for AKKA? I’ll warn you now that you’re going to be disappointed. The human race is not all your own cowardly breed. Do what you like. I can keep the secret till I die—that, I think, won’t be very long!”
“No, Aladoree!” he appealed, shocked and inexpressibly hurt by her bitter scorn. “No, Aladoree, you mustn’t think that. We’ve come——”
“John Ulnar——” her voice cut him, hard with contempt.
Then Giles Habibula and Hal Samdu dropped by the grating.
“Bless my eye, lass! It’s a mortal time since old Giles has heard your voice. A mortal time! How are you, lass?”
“Giles! Giles Habibula?”
In her voiceless cry that came up from darkness through the bars was incredulous relief, ineffable joy, that brought a quick, throbbing ache to John Star’s heart. All the contemptuous scorn was gone; only pure delight was left, tremulous, complete.
“Ah, yes, lass, it’s Giles. Old Giles Habibula, come on a mortal perilous journey to set you free, lass. Just wait a few blessed moments, while he works another precious lock.”
Already he was on his knees by the sliding grille, his thick fingers, curiously deft and steady, moving over the little strange levers that projected from the case of the mechanism.
“Aladoree!” cried Hal Samdu, an odd, yearning eagerness in his voice. “Aladoree—have they—hurt you?”
“Hal?” came her glad, trembling cry. “Hal, too?”
“Of course! You think I wouldn’t come?”
“Hal!” she sobbed again joyously. “And where’s Jay?”
“He’s——” began John Star, when Jay Kalam’s grave tones, weak and uneven, came beside him:
“Here, Aladoree—at your command.” He reeled to the edge of the grating, sank beside it, still weak and white with pain, though smiling.
“I’m so—glad!” her voice came from darkness, broken with sobs of pure joy. “I knew—you’d try. But it was—so far! And the plot—so clever—so diabolical——”
“Ah, lass, don’t weep so!” urged Giles Habibula. “It’s all right, now. Old Giles will have this mortal door open in a moment, and you out in the precious light of day again, lass!”
John Star abruptly sensed something amiss. Quickly he looked up and down the long, high-walled black hall. The vast bulk of the dead Medusa lay motionless, tentacles sprawling. The flood of green light revealed nothing moving, no enemy. Yet something, he knew it intuitively, was wrong.
Suddenly it struck him.
“Eric Ulnar!” he gasped. “Did you help him out of the cell?”
“Ah, yes, lad,” wheezed Giles Habibula. “We couldn’t leave the mortal wreck of him for the monsters to torture.”
“Of course,” rumbled Hal Samdu. “Where is——”
“He’s gone!” whispered John Star. “Gone! Still a coward and a traitor. He’s gone to give the alarm!”
XXIII.
“AH, NOW!” wheezed Giles Habibula. “Ready, lass, to come?”
The lock had snapped; he slid back the barred door.
“Please go down, John,” said Jay Kalam. “Help her.”
John Star swung through the opening, hung by his arms, dropped lightly on the floor of the cell beside Aladoree. Her gray eyes watched him doubtfully in the gloom.
“John Ulnar,” she asked, her scornful dislike less open, yet still cutting him to the quick, “you came with them?”
“Aladoree!” he pleaded. “You must trust me!”
“I told you once,” she said, “that I could never trust a man named Ulnar. That very day you locked up my loyal men, betrayed me to your traitorous kinsman!”
“I know!” he whispered bitterly. “I was a dupe, a fool! But come! I’ll lift you.”
“I was the fool,” she said, “to trust an Ulnar.”
“Come! We’ve no time.”
“You must be more clever than Eric, if you have the confidence of my men. You Purples! You’re trying, John Ulnar, to get the better of them and the Medusae, too!”
“Don’t!” It was a pained cry.
“Please be quick!” urged Jay Kalam from above.
She came to him, then, still doubtful. John Star slipped an arm about her slight body, lifted her foot, swung her upward, to Hal Samdu’s reaching arms; then leaped, himself, to catch them.
They stood in the immense, silent hall.
Aladoree was thin, John Star saw, under the green light, pale, her white face drawn with anxiety and suffering, gray eyes burning, with a fire too bright, ringed with blue shadows. Her startled outcry at sight of the hideous mountain of the dead Medusa showed nerves strained to the point of breakdown; yet her erect bearing revealed courage, decision, determination.
Torture had not conquered her.
“We’re here, Aladoree,” said Jay Kalam. “But we’ve no ship to leave in. No means, even, to get out of the city. And no proper weapons. We’re depending on you. On AKKA.”
Disappointment shadowed her worn face.
“I’m afraid, then,” she said, “that you have sacrificed your lives in vain.”
“Why?” Jay Kalam asked apprehensively. “Can’t you build the weapon?”
Wearily, she shook her head.
“I think not. Not in time. Simple as it is, I must have certain material. And several hours to set it up and adjust it.”
“We’ve the thing they used for communication with Eric Ulnar.” He pointed to Hal Samdu’s mace. “Rather battered, now. It was electrical. Wires, and so on.”
Again she shook her head.
“I don’t think it would do. Not for everything. I could try. But it would take hours. And the creatures will soon find us.”
“We must take it along,” said Jay Kalam.
Hal Samdu unfastened it from the head of the tripod, slung it to his body by the connecting wires.
“We must do—something!” cried John Star. “Right away. Eric must have gone to give the alarm.”
“We must somehow get outside the city,” agreed Jay Kalam. “Aladoree, you know any way——”
“No. That way,” she pointed, “the hall leads into a great shop, laboratory. Many of them are always there, working. Eric went that way, I suppose, to tell them. The other end is outside. A mile high—no way to get down, without wings.”
“There might be,” mused Jay Kalam. “I remember—a drain, it looked to be. We must see.”
They ran three hundred feet to a great door at the end of the hall, an immense, sliding grate of heavy black bars, crossed, close-set, fastened with a massive lock. Through the bars they saw the black city again—a storm raging over it.
Looming mountains of ebon metal, fantastic, colossal machines, all piled in titanic confusion, with no visible order, no regularity of shape or size or position. No streets; chasms merely, doors opening startlingly into them.
It was lashed with the hurricane. The four had weathered other storms, on their epic trek across the black continent, always toward the end of the week-long day, when swiftly chilling air caused precipitation. But they had seen no such cataclysm as this.
It was almost dark. A lurid pall of scarlet gloom shrouded the city’s ebon, nightmare masses. Wind shrieked with maniacal fury. Rain fell in sluicing sheets; it drenched them, stung them with its icy whip, even in the shelter of the bars. Blinding lightning flamed continually overhead, stabbed red swords down incessantly at the tops of black buildings that loomed like tortured giants.
