Collected Short Fiction, page 234
The doorway was suddenly filled with men.
“Salutations, mother, darling,” the liquid voice of Aru floated into the room. It was soft, mockingly endearing.
Kane and Shiela sat motionless upon the divan, staring at the door. Kane’s arm was about the girl’s shoulders. She trembled against him. For a desperate, frightened moment, her eyes looked up at his face. They were wide and purple with fear.
Athonee stood near them, watching the doorway. Her tall, slender body was rigid. Despair had fixed her golden, pointed face. Her long black eyes were molten with pain.
Aru led the men crowding through the arch of green crystal. He had changed his sheer robes for fine, linked mail of gleaming purple. He was a ponderous, lurching mountain of puffy white flesh. His small, greenish eyes glittered with malevolent amusement from the white rolls of his face.
Fifty men followed him. They wore close-fitting gray. For weapons they carried swords, pikes, golden needles of flaming death. Behind Aru, they spread out across the floor, alert, menacing.
Among them, Kane saw Vethlo. The thin man’s knee, evidently, was still hurt from Kane’s kick; for he was sitting upon a crude litter improvised from pikes, carried between two men. In his lean fingers Kane glimpsed the golden needle of his electron gun.
So this somber-eyed, white-haired man, then, with his singular look of mingled youth and age, was the beloved of Athonee, and the father of Aru? Watching him, Kane saw his eyes fasten upon Athonee’s golden loveliness. A sudden warm eagerness flooded them. And that warmth was instantly chilled with cold despair.
The dark, sad eyes crossed Kane’s. There was a little flicker of greeting in them, but nothing of resentment. And Kane knew that the man harbored no ill feeling for that painful kick upon the knee.
Vethlo looked from Kane to the purple-mailed bulk of Aru, standing just before him. Kane was puzzled by the swift emotion that filled the dark eyes of this weirdly ancient man, as. he looked upon his son.
There was love, Kane thought; an agonizing tenderness. There was fear, a humble, shuddering dread. But there was something beyond these, and greater—a slumbering flame, intense, yet veiled, hidden. What could it be? Resentment, Kane guessed. A smothered hatred, ancient and bitter.
Breathless, speechless, stricken, Athonee stood eyeing Aru.
He swayed across the green room, toward her. He stopped, when there was only the small table between them, with the peerless grace of the crystal urn resting upon it. Heavily, he planted himself. He braced himself with a long staff, jeweled, scarlet-lacquered.
His small, hard eyes looked across the urn, at Athonee. The buttery masses of his white face were twisted into a leer of peculiarly brutal, malicious triumphs His inadequate scarlet mouth opened, and he began to laugh. The grossness of his flesh shuddered against the tight purple mail.
“My darling mother,” he gasped, as the spasm of laughter subsided, “have you no tongue to bid welcome to your only son, when he comes after so long to your dwelling?”
His words faded again into pitiless, mocking laughter.
THE quivering restraint of the golden woman broke abruptly into choking sobs. She swayed unsteadily around the small table, to Aru.
“My son,” she cried, in the low, dead voice of heart-break. “Aru, how can you be so, when you are my only son?”
She reached him, and tried to throw her slim, golden arms about him.
The ponderous thickness of Aru’s puffy arm came slowly up. With deliberate, brutal strength, his great white hand struck the woman’s face. She reeled backward from the blow, and stumbled, and fell headlong to the floor.
Aru laughed softly.
“So, my dear mother,” he said, “you love me still. The machine tells me that you love me too much to destroy me—even if indeed you have this boasted secret, which I believe is a lie.”
Glancing at the thin form of Vethlo, drawn half upright on his rude stretcher, Kane was amazed at the agony that twisted his long face. His mouth was twisted, trembling, with some inner conflict His dark eyes were pools of pain.
Pale and silent and quivering, Athonee gathered herself upon her knees. She made some little effort to rise, and then sank back to the floor. Her pointed, small face looked up at the purple-mailed bulk of Am, haggard with ultimate despair.
“My son,” she whispered brokenly, “destroy me if you will. I cannot use the secret.”
Aru wheeled ponderously upon his scarlet staff.
“The machine told me that, dear mother,” he said, in fluid tones of malicious caress. “And the machine is master of events, and I am master of the machine.
“I am going to destroy you, my mother, as I should have done, time and time again, but for my foolish fear of your lies. So, my darling, compose yourself to die. And prepare yourself to endure in dying a little pain, for I shall slay you with my own hands, in a manner whose sweetness I have long foretasted.”
The golden woman shuddered a little, on the floor. Her black eyes remained fixed upon the face of Aru. On her face was mute agony, and she made no sound.
Am turned slowly. He looked at the lean, black-clad form of Vethlo, heaped upon the stretcher, clutching the golden needle of his weapon. And the thin man, Kane saw, brushed the conflict and the agony from his face as Aru turned, so that only the shadow of old pain was left for Am to see.
“My father,” said the sweet, high voice, “may live on for a time, and serve me. He shall remain my slave and the master of my slaves. For he fears me, the machine tells me. He knows that my slayer will die with me. And the machine has not warned me of danger from him.”
He turned to Kane and Shiela. They were still upon the couch, trembling in the silent embrace of despair.
“When my mother is dead,” his venomously sweet voice assured them, “I shall take you both bade to my dwelling. And I shall seek in you file cream of my jest with mankind.”
Releasing Shiela, Kane surged up from the couch. Bare hands clenched, he lunged savagely toward Am. He realized the blind futility of the attack. But his restraint could endure Aru’s torture no longer. Outraged senses drove him forward, heedless, unreasoning.
Am moved his white hand. Indolently, he signaled. Vethlo lifted the golden needle of his weapon. Purple, crackling flame leapt from it. Kane was hurled to the floor by a resistless flood of pain.
Am chuckled softly.
“Kane Montel,” he said softly, “it is well that you struggle against me. It amuses me. You are playing your part in the jest, as I planned that you should play it, long before the day of your birth.
“You may have the pleasure of resisting me again, and many times, in the years to come, as we finish the jest.—you, and Shiela, and I.”
He chuckled again.
Kane sprawled on the floor. His mind was numb with despair. His twitching body was paralyzed with pain beyond endurance. Shiela dropped to her knees beside him, seeking in vain to ease his agony.
Am looked slowly away.
“Now,” he said, “I shall kill my mother——”
“No!” the word rasped from Kane’s tortured throat.
His muscles trembled and cramped as he struggled in vain to drag himself bade to his feet. The flame from Vethlo’s golden needle struck him again, and hurled him back into helpless agony.
“I know that my mother is beautiful,” said Aru, softly, “and ever it has pleased me to destroy beauty.” His hard, small eyes were gloating upon the tall grace of the crystal urn. “This trinket,” he said, “my mother has long treasured. And I have long wished to destroy it, because it is beautiful, and because it is precious to her.
“Now I shall shatter it, as I shall shatter her beauty.”
Deliberately, he picked up the flawless urn. His great, puffy hand held it high. Glittering with malevolent amusement, his small greenish eyes went to the crouching form of Athonee. He chuckled mockingly.
Desperately, Athonee was shaking her white head. Her lips moved frantically, but emotion held her speechless.
“Does it please you, darling,” Am inquired softly, “to see how you are to die?”
“Stay, my son!” the urgent appeal broke forth at last. “Don’t break the urn! Your doom——”
A GLEAMING miracle in crystal, opal-white and ebon and scarlet, the urn had already left the fingers of Aru. It spun down toward Athonee. It struck the floor, and dissolved with a musical, tinkling crash into a momentary spray of bright fragments.
“My son!” moaned Athonee.
Am was striding heavily toward her. his huge, white, thick-fingered hands were twitching with a hideous avidity.
Kane heard a gasping, muted cry of agony from Vethlo. He saw the thin man come rigidly erect upon his stretcher. Vethlo’s long face was contorted with the agony of a supreme conflict. In the instant that Kane looked, that conflict was resolved. Agony gave way to grim purpose.
The thin, knotted hand brought up the golden needle. Held steady and true, it pointed at the striding bulk of Aru. A blinding torrent of purple flame gushed from the needle’s point.
Am, within his tight mail, stopped, stricken. His big body was driven a little backward. It shuddered convulsively. Purple flame enveloped it. Smoke burst from the jeweled crown of fine, pale hair. The odor of burnt flesh swiftly filled the room. The big body slumped and fell heavily upon the floor.
Am lay motionless, a mountain of seared flesh, smoking.
“My son!” wailed Athonee. “He is dead.”
A strange, hoarse cry of terror drew Kane’s eyes to Vethlo. Agony twisted his long face. He tried vainly to hurl away the black globe of his weapon. It seemed to burst in his upraised hand. Kane heard a loud report. Vethlo was enveloped in a momentary flare of violet flame.
For an instant afterward, he sat erect, quivering with hysteria.
“I have killed Am!” he screamed, shrilly. “I killed my son, and I must die! The machine has decreed that the killer of Aru must die!”
Then pain and weakness overcame him. His thin body tensed for a moment, and then fell limply back upon the stretcher. The shattered globe of the electron gun fell from his inert fingers. In a low, broken voice he gasped:
“Athonee, my love! Come to me, before I die. I love you still, Athonee. And I am dying, because I killed our son, for you.”
Pale and silent, the golden woman got uncertainly to her feet, and walked unsteadily to the stretcher. Vethlo reached out his hand, as she came near, and she took it. His lips moved. A brief, hoarse sound came from his throat. Then his thin arm stiffened and relaxed, and Kane knew that he was dead.
Athonee stood holding the limp hand.
“How blind I was!” she wailed. “His hate was the hidden factor that the machine could never reveal.”
She stumbled bade to Aru, and dropped beside the inert mass of his body.
“My son!” she sobbed, her voice high and dreadful with grief. “My son is dead.”
11. “Mightier Than the Machine!”
KANE and Shiela were walking, many hours later, in the scarlet, unfamiliar garden below the green, domed mass of Athonee’s dwelling. They were bathed in a cool, violet dusk. Beyond the strange, graceful plants loomed the black and rugged cavern walls, broken, here and there by the mysterious darkness of farther spaces.
Katie’s big body was bandaged. He walked a little stiffly, and winced now and then from the pain of an unaccustomed movement. But his lean face was smiling, and his mind was less upon his injuries than upon the laughing girl beside him.
“It’s hard to realize it, Monty,” she whispered once. “But it’s all over, like a bad dream. With Aru dead, it must be.”
Her hand closed on his, with a quick, light pressure.
“Does seem queer, kid,” he said, “to think we can have each other, for keeps, without fate making a joke of us. Hard to believe.”
Then he saw Athonee, coming through the delicate scarlet fronds.
Her tall, golden slenderness was once more erect. She had put on a simple robe of the same snowy whiteness as her hair. Her small, pointed face was still marked with grief, but it was composed. Her long dark eyes smiled a little, as she greeted the two.
“My dead are put away,” she told them quietly. “The servants of my son I have sent bade to his dwelling. I shall follow them soon, to take my old place beside the machine of destiny.”
Still holding Shiela’s hand, Kane faced the golden woman earnestly.
“What’s going to happen, now?” he asked her. “All those dreadful things that Aru showed us—must they take place? The death of Martin Grenfell? The War? Must the world be destroyed with these atomic bombs?”
“About Monty and me?” asked Shiela, her voice low with anxiety. “Must our lives be what Aru showed us? Must we be separated when we get back to Earth? Must we spend all those terrible years searching for each other? Must we endure all that suffering?”
Athonee smiled a little, and shook her white head.
“The machine still rules the future,” she said. “I can change all that Aru showed you. I can save the life of Martin Grenfell. His efforts, and your triumphant return from the moon, will avert the threatened war.
“I will send lasting peace and new happiness with you, back to Earth.”
Her somber eyes went past them, into some far space of the lunar caverns.
“I will not let the machine into, another’s hands, again,” she said. “I will make it serve its first purpose, of lifting your race to true manhood.
“A terrible interlude this has been, since I surrendered the machine to my son. But I think the terror and the pain of it have burned all the weakness and passion and selfishness, all the animal, out of me. I can go ahead now, untroubled, toward my old aim.”
“But we two?” asked Shiela, apprehensively.
And Kane said, “What of us?” Athonee smiled again, quietly.
“I shall now carry you back to your flyer,” she promised them. “And I can assure the Spirit of Man a safe flight back to Earth, and a happier landing my son showed you.
“And I shall send you happiness on Earth that will be full reward for all your sufferings. You both deserve reward,” she said softly, with a tender radiance in her long black eyes, “for it was your choice that won the victory. It was your love that proved mightier than the machine of destiny, and changed the course of fate.”
[THE END]
The Cometeers
The Sequel to “The Legion of Space” tracing the destiny of the people of Earth in their battle with a galaxy
PART ONE
“AH LAD! Wait a bit, lad!” moaned the bald, blue-nosed fat man. “Old Giles can’t hold a pace so mortal swift. He’s not the man he was twenty years and more ago, when he went fighting out to bloody Yarkand, with the great adventure of the legion, to save the blessed human race!”
Puffing, the old man paused amid the bright verdure of the roof garden. His fishy eyes glanced back toward the slim, towering central pylon of the Purple Hall, behind them.
“No, lad,” he pleaded, “remember that Giles Habibula is only a poor old soldier, ill, crippled, tottering on the brink of his precious grave!”
His fat hand caught at the sleeve of Bob Star’s uniform. It was the green of the legion of space. It bore no insignia of rank, nor any decoration for service to the system.
“Tell me, lad,” he asked, “where are you dragging poor old Giles, so mortal early in the morning, before he has tasted his miserable scrap of breakfast?” Bob Star’s trim form had stopped beside a mass of snow-white bloom. Like his father, John Star, he was smallboned, quick, active. His lean, cleanly molded face was briefly lighted with a smile. His clear blue eyes looked back at the short, waddling figure of Giles Habibula, warm with a little glow of affection.
“All right, Giles,” he said pleasantly. “But hurry! I’m going to the little observatory, at the end of the roof.”
“But tell me, lad, what’s your mortal haste?” inquired the old man, plaintively. “Will the blessed stars fall out of space before we’ve had breakfast?”
The brief smile had gone. Bob Star’s thin face was left sober, grimly strained, almost prematurely old. Suddenly anxious, half fearful, his blue eyes left the vivid greenery of the fragrant roof, and climbed into the purple-black sky.
“What’s the matter, lad?” persisted Giles Habibula. “You’re too young to look so mortal grave.”
“I woke up before dawn this morning,” Bob Star told him, in a slow, worried tone. “I don’t know what woke me. But my head was worse than usual”—he touched a pale, singular scar on his forehead—“and I couldn’t go back to sleep.
“Looking out of my window, I saw something new in the sky—just a little greenish fleck. It was in Virgo, near the star Vindemiatrix. It wasn’t very big. But I couldn’t understand it; and, somehow, as I lay there, staring at it, with the old pain throbbing in my head, the most dreadful feeling came over me. The thing began to seem like a horrible eye staring out of space, and—well, anyhow, Giles, I’m afraid!”
A curious look—Bob Star thought it the shadow of consternation—passed across the yellow moon of the old man’s face. But his thin voice protested, unchanged: “So you drag poor old Giles up here on the roof, just to look at a mortal star?”
“But it isn’t a star,” objected Bob Star, in a puzzled tone. “It isn’t sharp enough to be a nova. Besides, no star ever had that strange, pale-green color. Perhaps it’s a comet—but any comet should have been detected and reported long ago, by the big gravity-free observatories out in space. I don’t know what it is!
“It has gone out of sight, since the Sun came up. But I’m going to try to pick it up with the telescope. I don’t know why the thing made me so afraid. Might have been the color of it; colors have queer emotional effects.
“Anyhow, it set my nerves on edge. I came up here as soon as I could get into my uniform.”
“Ah, lad, I know you did,” panted the old man, bitterly. “For I had to tumble my poor, aching old bones out of bed, and drag them along with you. Often I wish that Hal and I had been made the bodyguards of some lazier youth, lad. You know you are never still: you never rest.”
