Collected Short Fiction, page 206
Below the door was a mile-deep chasm, walled in completely by black, irregular buildings, no way visible to leave its mysty, flood-drenched floor.
Aladoree shrank back instinctively from the chill rain that lashed through the bars, from the luridly ominous glow of the sky and the fearful bellow of the wind and thunder. Giles Habibula hastily retreated, muttering:
“Mortal me! I never saw such———”
“The lock, Giles!” Jay Kalam requested urgently.
“Bless my bones, Jay!” he howled above the roaring elements. “We can’t just stroll out into that—the storm and a blessed pit a mile deep!”
“Please!”
“Ah, if you will, Jay. It is easier, now.”
His deft, steady fingers manipulated the levers of the lock, more surely, this time, more confidently. Almost at once it clicked; the four men set their shoulders to the bars, slid the huge grille aside.
STAGGERING against wind and rain that now drove in with multiplied force, they peered over the square metal ledge. The blank, black wall dropped sheer under them for a long mile, sluiced with rain. Jay Kalam braced himself against the howling, gusty wind, pointed, shouted into the roar of thunder:
“The drain!”
They saw it, beside them, ten feet away. A huge, square tube, supported at close intervals by a metal flange that surrounded it. fastened it against the wall. Straight into the pit it fell, dwindling to a thin line.
“The flanges!” Rather by watching his lips than by sound they caught the words. “A ladder. Too far apart. Inconvenient shape. But we can climb them. Down.”
“Bless my bones!” howled Giles Habibula, into the tempest. “We can’t do that—not in the storm. We can’t even reach the mortal flanges! Poor old Giles Habibula——”
“John——” Jay Kalam’s lips moved, his face a question.
“I’ll try!” he screamed.
He was the lightest, the quickest, of the four, he knew; he could do the thing if any of them could. He nodded to Hal Samdu, smiling grimly. The giant’s hands took him up, hurled him out over the chasm, into wild rain and bellowing, gusty wind.
His arms stretched out, his fingers caught the edge of a metal flange. But the savage wind had his body; it flung him out, over the abysm. Fingers strained. Shoulders throbbed. Muscles cracked. But he hung on.
The merciless gust released him, left him clinging to the flange, drenched, strangled, in roaring rain. He tried the flanges; found that they would serve, however awkwardly, as a ladder; nodded at the others.
He braced himself, then, standing on one leg, the other knee hooked over the flange above; waited, arms free. Jay Kalam was flung out and he caught him. helped him to a higher position. Then Giles Habibula, green-faced, gasping.
And Aladoree, who said in a queer, muffled tone, “Thank you, John Ulnar,” when he caught her in his arms.
Hal Samdu then passed out the gory legs of the tripod, which they slung to their belts; standing on the narrow ledge, he closed the sliding grate, so the lock snapped, in hope of confusing pursuit. Then he leaped, through blinding sheets of rain, and John Star leaned out to catch him.
His great weight was an intolerable burden, in John Star’s cramped position; a furious downward gust of wind increased it; he felt, as he clung to the giant’s wet hand, that his body must be torn in two. But he kept his hold. Hal Samdu caught a flange with his free hand, was safe. And they started down the drain.
The bracing flanges were uncomfortably spaced; it would have been no slight feat to climb down a mile of them in the most favorable circumstances. Now rain fell in blinding, suffocating sheets from the crimson, roaring sky; demoniac gusts of wind tore at them. All of them were already half exhausted. And apprehension of inevitable pursuit drove them to reckless haste.
In only one way was the storm an advantage, John Star thought; it had driven the Medusae to shelter from above the buildings and the monstrous machines; there seemed no danger of accidental discovery, before pursuit started from above. But that advantage they paid for dearly in the battle with the mad fury of wind and rain.
They were halfway down, perhaps, when Aladoree fainted from sheer exhaustion.
John Star, just below her, had been watching her, afraid that she would slip from the wet flanges. He caught her, held her until she revived, protested stubbornly that she was able to climb again. Then Hal Samdu lifted her to his shoulders, made her cling to him pickaback, and they climbed on down.
The great chasm’s floor, as they descended, became more distinctly visible through the gloom and the mist of falling water. A vast square pit, a full thousand feet on an edge. Black, blank sides of huge buildings walled in, without a break. The floor was flooded with yellow water from the rain. All the water on the planet appeared yellow in volume, carrying in solution the insidious red gas.
Anxiously scanning the flooded floor, as they approached it, their descent slowed with fatigue, John Star could see no possible avenue of escape from it—unless they should climb another of the drains that were discharging their floods into the pit. And they were all too near exhaustion, he knew, to make such a climb, even if it promised safety.
The torrential rain slacked suddenly, when they were near the bottom. The rumble of thunder diminished; the scarlet sky grew swiftly brighter; the cold wind beat at them with decreasing violence.
John Star’s feet had just touched the cold standing water on the floor, when Giles Habibula gasped the warning:
“My mortal eye! The bloody Medusae!”
Looking upward, he saw the greenish, black-fringed half moons, drifting one by one from the hall they had left, floating down swiftly.
XXIV.
STANDING in foot-deep water, as the others were finishing the descent behind him, John Star looked desperately about for some possible way of escape from the pit.
Before him lay the sheet of yellow flood water, a thousand feet square. Above it, on every side, stood glistening black walls of Cyclopean buildings, the lowest two thousand feet high. Here and there the abrupt high doors broke them, but none that he saw could be reached by any but a flying creature.
Against the little red rectangle of sky above the chasm, the pursuing Medusae were drifting down, little dark disks against the scarlet.
“There’s no way!” he muttered to Jay Kalam, splashing down beside him. “For once—none! I suppose they’ll kill us, now.”
“There is one way,” said Jay Kalam, his voice swift and strained. “If we’ve time to reach it. Not safe. Not pleasant. A grim and desperate chance. But better than waiting for them to slaughter us.
“Come!” he called, as Giles Habibula, the last, clambered down into the chill water. “No time to waste!”
“Where?” demanded Hal Samdu, splashing after him through the yellow water, Aladoree still clinging wearily to his back. “There’s no way.”
“The flood water,” Jay Kalam observed succinctly, “manages to find an exit from the city.”
At a splashing run, he led the way to an intake of the flood drains. A yellow whirlpool, ten feet across, roaring down through a heavy metal grating.
“My mortal eye!” wheezed Giles Habibula. “Must we dive into the blessed sewers?”
“We must,” Jay Kalam assured him, “unless we want to wait for the Medusae to kill us.”
“Bless my bones!” he wailed. “To be sucked down and drowned like a precious rat! And then vomited out, life knows, to be torn and swallowed by the monsters in the yellow river. Ah, Giles, it was a mortal evil day——”
“We must lift the lid,” urged Jay Kalam, “if we can!”
Hal Samdu had set down Aladoree, weary, uncertain. Almost swept off their feet by the swirling yellow water, the four gathered along one side of the circular black grating, grasped it, strained their muscles. It did not move.
“A mortal hasp!” cried Giles Habibula, feeling along the edge.
Staggering in the mad current that buffeted his feet, Hal Samdu hammered and pried at the fastening with one of the tripod legs. John Star, glancing up at the square of crimson sky, saw the dark circles of the Medusae, larger now, midway to them.
The giant still beat and pried at the hasp, in vain. John Star tried futilely to help him, and Jay Kalam. The furious swirl of yellow water rushed over it, hindering their efforts, making it almost impossible even to stand.
“It was Eric Ulnar who warned them,” said Aladoree, her voice icy with bitter scorn. “One of them is carrying him. I see him pointing at us.”
They renewed their efforts to break the hasp with their clumsy tools, panting, too busy to look up at approaching danger. At last the twisted metal broke.
“Now!” muttered Hal Samdu.
They gripped the bars again, lifted. The grate stirred a little to their united strength, settled back under the pressure of the roaring torrent.
They tried again, Giles Habibula panting, purple-faced, Hal Samdu’s great muscles bulging, quivering with strain, even Aladoree adding her efforts. Still it did not rise.
The Medusae were fast drifting down upon them. Stealing an apprehensive glance, John Star saw a full score of them, some carrying black implements that must have been weapons, one bearing Eric Ulnar, gesticulating, seated in a swing of woven tentacles.
“We must lift it!”
They tried again, in new positions, straining fiercely. The grating came up suddenly, relatively light when above the water. They flung it back.
The open pit yawned before them, eight feet across. Mad, swirling water leaped into it in an unbroken sheet, from every side; it was a yellow funnel, foam-lined. Ominous, furious, deafening, the yell of wild waters came up out of it.
John Star paused, staring into its spinning, savage yellow maw with a sickening wave of horror. It seemed very suicide to dive into that bellowing vortex, suicide in a singularly fearful guise. He shuddered at images of being sucked down that tawny, foaming throat, whirled helpless through the sewers below, drowning, battered against the walls, finally belched into the horrors of the great river.
And Aladoree! It was impossible.
“We can’t!” he shouted to Jay Kalam, above the snarling, sinister roar of it. “We can’t drag her into that!”
“Mortal me!” hoarsely breathed Giles Habibula, the color of his face fading to a pallid, unhealthy greenish hue. “It’s death! Blessed, howling death, suffocation!”
He reeled back, staggering in the water that tore at his feet.
Jay Kalam glanced at the Medusae drifting down, very close, now, with their black weapons and Eric Ulnar clinging to his cradle of tentacles; he looked gravely at Aladoree, a silent question on his face.
She glanced up at them, her pale face momentarily hardening with scorn. Her gray eyes, still cool and steady, though too bright and dark-rimmed with weariness, looked deliberately from one to another of the four, and then down into the thundering whirlpool.
A moment she hesitated. She smiled, then, oddly; made a little fleeting gesture of farewell. And dived into the roaring yellow funnel.
JOHN STAR was dazed by the suddenness of her action, by the cold, reckless courage of it, so astounding in a girl. It was a moment before he could recover his faculties, put down his own horror of that avid, howling maw. He tossed aside his improvised weapon, then; gasped a last full breath of air; followed.
Twenty feet down, he fell with the yellow, foaming vortex into a plunging river.
The red light of the sky had been gone in an instant. In complete darkness he was whirled along, beneath the black city. After a little time his struggles brought him to the surface. The drain was racing almost full. His fending arm was bruised against the top of the tube. But he was able to inhale a gasp of foul, reeking air.
He caught breath, once, to shout Aladoree’s name, then realized the utter futility of it. Whirling ahead of him through the darkness, in the mad torrent, she could never hear him above its angry roar. Nor would it serve any good if she did.
The passage turned presently; he was strangled in the smother of foam below the angle.
Again, after an indefinite time of Waiting, fighting to keep afloat, breathing when he could, he was flung into a deeper, yet swifter current. Here the drain was all but full. The mad water washed and splashed against the roof of it, was beaten into foam; it was seldom he could find an open space from which to fill his lungs.
On and on he was rushed, until he felt that he had been fighting the savage torrent for hours, until his bruised, weary body screamed for relaxation, until his lungs shrieked for pure air again, not the foul, foam-filled pockets above the thundering tide.
The nightmare journey could not possibly last another moment, he was thinking, before he reached the river, when he plunged into a still wider channel. The current sucked him under. For seeming hours, deadly, lung-tortured, he fought for the surface, only to rise under racing metal, no air beneath it.
His body went limp, refused to make another effort. But he set his teeth, battled with every atom of his consciousness to keep water from his lungs, as the wild flood bore him on and on. He had reached, he felt, the very limit of endurance. when air was above him again, he could breathe.
On and on he was whirled, making feeble efforts to keep on the surface, gasping a breath of dank air at every opportunity. It seemed that dull, weary ages came and went, seemed that he must be floating under the whole black continent.
Could Aladoree, he wondered, have endured all this? And the three behind him, if they had dived before the Medusae came, could they be still alive?
Abruptly he was in wild fury of conflicting currents, drawn resistlessly down until a cruel weight of water bore on his agonized lungs. Fighting a weary way upward once more, he realized, too nearly lifeless to feel any glow of triumph, that light was in the water.
Up he broke through yellow foam, gratefully sucked in the clear reviving air of the open—quite oblivious, for the moment, of its insidious taint of the red gas.
Above, on the one side, was the planet’s sky, sullenly crimson, washed to its full, sinister brilliance by the storm. On the other was the mile-high metal wall of the unearthly black metropolis, rising grimly black to the very zenith. He had been discharged into the surging flood of the yellow river.
Boiling, scarred with lighter lines of foam, pitted with vortexes of angry whirlpools, its turbid tide reached away from him, ten miles wide, so wide that the low, dark line of jungle on the farther bank was all but lost in red haze.
For miles below him, it rushed turbulently along the base of the mighty wall, until it reached the not-less-forbidding barrier of the black thorn jungle.
For months he had voyaged that yellow tide, had learned to face its thousand perils. But the others had been with him; they had been on board the raft, a crude ship, but navigable; they had been armed against the weird, ferocious life of river and air and jungle, rudely, but effectively. And he had not been half dead of exhaustion.
Anxiously, he looked about him for Aladoree—in vain.
When he had breath, he shouted her name. His voice was a thin, useless sound, weak and hoarse, drowned in the roar from the chaos where the flood from the drains met the river’s mighty tide.
But he saw her, presently, a hundred yards below him. Her head a tiny thing, bobbing upon the boiling yellow surface. Her body too small, he realized, too frail, too weary, to struggle long against the savage might of the river.
He swam toward her, slowly, wearily, his limbs all but dead.
The turbid current moved her toward him, carried her farther again, faster than he could swim, mocking him, taunting him, until, in the near-delirium of exhaustion, he gasped curses at it as if it had been a sentient, malicious thing.
She saw him, struggled feebly toward him, through rough yellow foam, as they raced along in the overwhelming shadow of the Medusae’s walls.
He glanced back, sometimes; hoping that one of the three others might have come through alive; saw none of them.
Aladoree vanished before his eyes, when he was not a dozen feet from her, sucked down by. a pitiless current, appeared again as he was about to dive hopelessly for her, fighting with her last energy.
He reached her, caught her arm, dragged it across his shoulder.
“Hang on!” he gasped. And, with a last grim spark of spirit: “If you can trust an Ulnar.”
With the brief, wan ghost of a smile of relief, she clung to him.
The yellow, swirling, foaming tide bore them on, under the mighty, marching walls, toward the river bank below, with its savage, horror-haunted jungle of thorns.
XXV.
JOHN STAR had never any clear recollection of the time upon the river. In the ultimate stages of exhaustion, driven far beyond the normal limits of endurance, he was more machine than man. With the mechanical efficiency of an automaton, he kept himself afloat, and Aladoree. But he was less than half conscious.
The feel of gravel beneath his feet brought purpose briefly back. He waded and crawled up out of the yellow water, on the edge of a wide, smooth bar of black sand, dragging limp, unconscious Aladoree.
Three hundred yards across the dark bare sand rose the jungle; a barrier of black thorns, closely interwoven, towering two hundred feet against the crimson sky. A gloomy, forbidding rampart, it was splashed with huge, vivid blooms of flaming violet that gave it a certain terrible beauty, and it hid death in many guises.
The open sand, John Star knew, was a no man’s land, menaced from the river and the jungle and the air. But he had scant heed left for danger. Pulling the exhausted girl safely out of the yellow shallows, into the dubious shelter of a mass of driftwood lodged against a sand-buried snag, he fell beside her on the sand bank, sank into the oblivion that his tortured, overdriven body had craved so long.
He knew, when he woke, that many hours had passed. The sinister, huge disk of the red sun was cut in half by the edge of the jungle; the air already chill with a grim threat of the fearful night approaching.
