Collected Short Fiction, page 247
Trembling, he blew his nose.
“Wine,” he whispered. “There’s wine in the house. Precious, potent, ancient wine, that can lure death himself to sleep!”
A curious, vague smile came over the yellow moon of his scarred face. He turned heavily and lumbered, with a weary, rolling gait, toward the great white mansion. And Bob Star, listening, caught the faintly whistled notes of a once-popular ditty of the legion: The Sparrow of the Moon.
HAL SAMDU was still standing rigid, with his blue eyes burning toward the dark circle of the indigo planet. The muscles of his rugged, weatherbeaten face were working; he was muttering inaudibly.
The commander’s tall body still sagged against the hull of the Halcyon Bird, as if the life had gone out of it.
Bob Star turned to Kay Nymidee, who was looking from him to the disk of the purple sun, with apprehensive bewilderment.
“Come on, Kay,” he said huskily, “let’s walk.”
She smiled. “Se,” she said softly. “Walk.” That was a word she had learned.
They crossed the level of the rocket field, and climbed up into a welter of rocks beyond. They were wild and fantastic as the spires of a fairy city, under the green sky. The encrusting lichens had changed color strangely, so that they were splashed with eldritch hues.
Bob Star made her sit beside him on a mossy ledge. His arms closed around her slender loveliness. Bitter in his heart was the thought that, inside the space of hours, all the beauty and the sweetness and the mystic wonder of her should have been consumed within the purple sun.
And the thing began to seem incredible, so that he desired to laugh, and forget it as a dreadful dream. For his poignant love for Kay Nymidee seemed too strong, too vital, to be destroyed; it was a flaming power that could not die.
But the girl was trembling, staring away into the green sky, her eyes great pools of somber dread.
And the fragility of their love, of all human values and even of human existence, came to him appallingly. Their situation, he saw, epitomized that of all humanity. They were lost, bewildered, helplessly riding a dead world to doom.
And the great human realities, the joy and pain of love, the sweetness of companionship, justice and compassion, the desire of life itself—they were feeble armor against the dread lords of the comet; against invisible fleets, and the power that had dissolved the system’s strongest fortress into vanishing red fire, and instrumentalities that tore very worlds from their orbits; against the horror of the Cometeers themselves, invincible, shining beings, superior to matter, feasting hideously upon humans.
Vainly, Bob Star tried to push that bewilderment, that horrified despair, out of his mind. He drew Kay Nymidee close to him, and tried to banish the haunting dread from her face. He tried to think only of her white beauty.
THEN Giles Habibula was beneath them among the rocks, panting, excited. “Come, lad! Come!” he puffed. “The dalliance of love is the food and drink of youth, I know. But it must await a time less torn with mortal urgency. Come!”
“What is it, Giles?” asked Bob Star, dully. For nothing mattered.
“Jay bids you come and aid us to load the Halcyon Bird with rocket fuel.”
“Rocket fuel!” exclaimed Bob Star, dazedly. “But there isn’t any.”
“But there is! Jay bids you hasten.”
Bob Star helped the girl down from the ledge, and followed Giles Habibula. A slow, incredulous joy was breaking in him. He demanded: “Where did he find it?”
The old man shook the bald dome of his head, which shone greenish in the light of the comet.
“Ah, lad,” he lamented, “ever the same is the fate of genius: it stumbles unknown into an unmarked grave. ’Twas not Jay that found the precious rocket fuel, lad. ’Twas I—poor old Giles Habibula. But you give him no credit.” He blew his nose, tearfully.
Bob Star asked, eagerly: “How did you find it?”
“Poor old Giles had started to seek wine with which to dull the fearful fangs of death. But, beneath this mortal green sky, his aged spirit, weak and feeble as it is, rebelled against extinction.
“Ah, so! Giles Habibula’s blessed genius awoke to the shocking touch of peril, and refused to be destroyed. It recalled Jay’s belief that rocket fuel must be upon the asteroid, hidden away against possible raiders of space. It recalled the nature of the dead master of the asteroid.
“Ah, and it set his old finger upon the hiding place.”
They were crossing the rocket field. The old man’s fat arm pointed toward the switch box, built in the wall of the white house, from which were controlled the floodlights beside the field.
“Old Giles simply walked to that box, lad, and opened it. There is a deftness that lingers in his old hands, lad. And he found the secret of the box that would have evaded any other.
“And there’s the fuel for the blessed rockets, lad!”
They came around the green-bathed hull of the Halcyon Bird. And there, a dozen yards from her air lock, a little cylindrical metal house had risen through the gravel. Hal Samdu was rolling black drums of rocket fuel from the door of it.
Bob Star ran to aid him.
It was more than two hours later when Bob Star, with the tall commander and anxious Kay Nymidee, hurried into the tiny bridge room of the Halcyon Bird.
Urgently, the girl pointed through an observation port, at the great indigo disk of the master planet.
“Aythrin!” her soft voice cried eagerly. “Staven Or-rco! We go?”
And Jay Kalam asked gravely, “Can we?”
“I don’t know,” Bob Star told them, briefly.
He called to Giles Habibula, through the power-room telephone. His fingers touched the firing keys. And once more the rockets awoke to thundering life. Their blue flame washed the gravel field, roared against the white columns of the deserted mansion.
THE Halcyon Bird leaped free again, and away into the green void of the comet. The asteroid plunged away behind them. It was a little dark fleck, against the now huge and ominous face of the purple sun. It dwindled, vanished.
Bob Star felt a pang of regret at its destruction. For it was in the cradle of its haunting, exotic beauty that he had come to know Kay Nymidee. His love for her had spread, somehow, to its laughing groves and the wild splendor of its lichen-painted rocks and the peace of the long white house above the smiling lake.
He thought with distress that the silent mystery that dwelt there now could never be solved. The anonymity of its dead master was now forever secure. The design of the secret world’s creation, the purpose of the hidden laboratory, the meaning of that strange emblem of looped cross and crossed bones, the connection—if connection there was—between the asteroid and Stephen Orco—these all were riddles now unanswerable.
Jay Kalam had long since announced abandonment of his efforts to read the secret diary.
“Impossible,” he had said, through lips strangely tight.
“Have we fuel enough,” the commander asked again, “to reach the master planet?”
“I’ll see,” Bob Star said. And he added: “We could have stayed to load no more. Or we should have been caught, too, in the gravitation of the purple sun. As it is, it’s taking half our fuel to check our fall and get clear.”
The rocket motors still were thundering as he read fuel gauges, took repeated telescopic observations of purple sun and indigo world and of a dozen other dark planets hung within the green.
“I believe,” he said at last, “that it can be done. But there’ll be no fuel left to maneuver, or to come away again. And——”
His voice stopped, as red telltales flamed and gongs clamored at him.
Puzzled, startled, he swung back to the instruments.
“It’s the triple beam!” he reported, apprehensively. “The flaming purple rays between the planet and the sun. There’s an etheric vortex about them. A suction——”
He paused to call again to Giles Habibula, to change the course of the Halcyon Bird. Worry creased his lean brow.
“We can keep free,” he said. “But it costs fuel.” He bit his lip and whispered, “We may land too hard for comfort.”
Stern-faced, abstracted, he turned again to instruments and calculators, fighting a silent battle to conserve every precious drop of fuel.
IN HOURS, perhaps, the flight was long. But it seemed to Bob Star that they had hardly left the asteroid before the Halcyon Bird was slanting down out of a pallidly green sky that swarmed with many-colored worlds, toward the dark, strangely even surface of the indigo planet.
The master planet seemed a perfect sphere of violet-blue, unbroken by mountain or sea. It appeared absolutely featureless, save for the overwhelmingly colossal machines, red and mysterious beneath their domes of shimmering green radiance, that scattered it at distances of hundreds or thousands of miles.
As that dark, strangely forbidding surface expanded before them, Kay Nymidee had pointed through an observation port at the looming bulk of one of those machines.
“Go,” she said eagerly, and groped for a word, “there!”
Bob Star nodded, and set the nose of the Halcyon Bird toward it. Then he looked doubtfully at a fuel gauge.
“I’ll try,” he whispered grimly.
But the needles crept inexorably toward zero. The even drumming of the rockets was interrupted by a warning cough.
He shook his head, and brought the Halcyon Bird to a jarring landing upon the strange flatness of the indigo world, with rockets dead before the ship was still.
“The tanks are empty,” he muttered. “The ship won’t move again.”
Kay Nymidee seized his shoulder, and pointed imploringly at the crimson, Cyclopean mass of the machine ahead, a bewildering and fantastic enigma of red metal, within its transparent shell of flashing green.
He shook his head again.
“Sorry, kid. I couldn’t do it.”
The mute reproach in her brown eyes changed slowly to frightened dismay.
“Perhaps we can walk, if we aren’t discovered,” Jay Kalam suggested gravely. “Kay seems determined to take us to the machine. And it doesn’t look so far——”
“The distance is deceptive,” Bob Star informed him, wearily, “because of the vast size of the planet, and the remarkable clearness of the atmosphere, and the lack of any other object for comparison.”
“How far is it?”
Bob Star looked at his instruments.
“According to my last observation,” he said, “that machine is more than a hundred and twenty miles away.”
XXII.
THE hostile impact of an alien world struck the five with shocking violence, when they left the air lock of the useless Halcyon Bird.
It was five hours later. They had spent the time in preparing to undertake a desperate march of more than a hundred miles. Bob Star and Hal Samdu were dragging two sledges improvised from metal doors torn from within the ship, packed with food, water, and weapons.
The runners sang musically across the flat infinity of the planet’s surface. It was darkly shimmering, a rich violet-blue. It was absolutely smooth, as if from a high polish. Nowhere, so far as they could see, was it broken by any irregularity.
At first they found it oddly difficult to walk upon it; Giles Habibula slipped twice, and sprawled ludicrously. As a compensatory advantage, however, the sledges, once started, glided along almost without effort.
“A whole world, armored?” marveled Bob Star. “Is it metal——”
Jay Kalam shook his dark head. “I made some examination of it,” he said. “It isn’t metal. It is harder than diamond; it was not affected by any test that I had time to make. Probably it is matter of no sort that we know—but another and more perdurable construct of vibratory energy, made possible by the high science of the Cometeers.”
He had been busy for an hour, in the little laboratory, before the air lock was opened.
“The atmosphere is adequate,” he had reported. “The low pressure—ten pounds—is made up for by a high oxygen content. There is a relative wealth of inert gases. The air is remarkably pure, completely dust-free.
“The gravitation is four per cent less than Earth standard, although the planet has nearly four times Earth’s diameter. That means that its density must be relatively very low.”
“Then,” Bob Star asked, “we can safely leave the ship, without space armor?”
The commander nodded.
“And we must go ahead, on foot, and try to reach that machine. That seems the only thing——”
Bob Star’s face set, bitterly.
“And that’s a forlorn hope,” he muttered. “We’re so helpless! So ignorant even of what we must try to do. Think of it, commander! We are only five, one of us an old man, one a girl. And we’ve come with little more than our bare hands, to fight against a science that drives a swarm of worlds through space like a ship!”
“But we must fight,” Jay Kalam said gravely. “It is our duty to man——”
AT a little distance from the Halcyon Bird, Jay Kalam paused, and they all looked back. The trim, argent hull of it lay small and lonely upon the jewel-smooth plain of dark indigo. It was the only object upon the infinite world behind, a solitary gleam under the pale-green vault of the sky.
Blue flame, as they looked, gushed suddenly from the turret which had housed the great proton gun. The bright hull glowed swiftly red, and sagged. A little streamer of smoke drifted away from it. Slowly it began to cool.
The five went on, regretful, for it had been a faithful ship.
“Perhaps,” Jay Kalam said, “when they find it, they will think that it fell, and we all died in it.”
They plodded on, over the level of violet-blue, wearily dragging the sledges. It was a blank infinity that reached out to the titanic riddle of the machine, a hundred miles away. The machine was the only thing that broke the straight line of the strange horizon where indigo met green.
Bob Star’s eyes rested upon that monstrous mechanism, with a dull, apathetic fascination. There was a square platform of some dead-black stuff. It might be, he estimated vaguely, two miles high and ten in length. The machine towered above it, so vast that he dared not attempt to guess its height.
The thing was of some blood-red substance, that shone like metal. There was a lofty frame of colossal beams and girders. There were moving parts, so intricate, so strange, that he could find no name or explanation for them. In particular, his eye was caught by a vast, shimmering white object, shaped like a flattened orange, that moved irregularly up and down between two colossal plates of crimson.
And the whole was inclosed in a conoid dome of pallid-green radiance, that seemed somehow akin to the sky.
Despair dropped its leaden mantle on him.
“Against that machine,” he muttered, “and the masters of it, we’re no more than five flies!”
They plodded on. In the pellucid atmosphere, the machine looked almost near enough to touch. Ever it retreated, mockingly.
At last, at the plaintive insistence of Giles Habibula, they halted. The Halcyon Bird was lost to view. They huddled in a lonely little circle by the sledges, on the vastness of the shimmering dark expanse of indigo. They drank. They ate sparingly. They tried to rest their bodies upon the adamant surface.
There was no wind. The cool air was oppressively still. The green sky did not change. There were no clouds.
“The planet doesn’t rotate,” commented Jay Kalam. “There is no inequality in the radiation. There are no seas. Consequently there is no weather, not even any time. It is a world without change.”
A terrible silence hung over them. Nothing lived or moved or gave voice upon all the plain of empty indigo. The world was utterly vacant, save for the overwhelming enigma of the red machine, utterly changeless.
The green sky was equally devoid of life or motion. The vast, cold disk of the purple sun hung steady, high above the straight horizon. They could see the faint, glowing lines of the triple beam, diminishing toward it.
The multitudinous planets of the comet swarm, of various sizes, variously marked and colored, were strung motionless through the void of eternal green. Then neither rotated nor changed position.
Giles Habibula wiped sweat from his yellow brow with the back of his hand.
“Mortal me!” he moaned. “ ’Tis a fearful world to die in! Ah, Giles! His old bones ache. His feeble limbs tremble with weariness. His poor feet are blistered until every step is mortal agony. His old eyes are dim with staring into the fearful face of death.”
He sighed heavily.
“Ah, me! Upon one journey of forlorn hope, old Giles carried a bottle of wine through the mortal hardship of a continent larger than the blessed Earth. But then he fought enemies he could understand.
“Ah, no. He never felt such need of the bright strength of wine.”
He fumbled in the packs on the sledges, and found a bottle of some rare vintage, from the asteroid. Watching with a jealous eye, he presented it to the others in turn, and at last drained it gratefully.
EVEN JAY KALAM was worn to admission of doubt.
“It’s true,” he said in a low voice, “that we are in a graver situation than even on the Yarkand expedition. For the Medusae, although able scientists and terrible foes, were conquered refugees from their own environment.
“The Cometeers have conquered theirs!
“The Medusae we could understand, we could kill. But the Cometeers, while doubtless in a sense material, are not common flesh. They are beyond our understanding. I doubt very much that any weapon men ever made could destroy one of them!”
The others, squatting in the lonely circle amid the empty desolation of the bleak indigo plain, had listened solemnly. This was the commander’s first expression of his mounting despair. They all were shaken by it, for his quiet reserve had been a bulwark.
“Ah, so,. Jay,” croaked Giles Habibula. “Our plight is mortal desperate. In seeking to balk the Cometeers and destroy Stephen Orco, we are like five ants making war on all the system——”
