Collected Short Fiction, page 251
“Hasten, Giles,” urged Jay Kalam.
“Ah, Jay,” begged the old man, frantically, “have mercy!”
“You must,” the commander told him soberly. “Or we shall die.”
And, calmly, as if he could not hear that hideous knell of descending doom, Jay Kalam was still busy with the enigmatic mechanism in the long red case. Now he was fastening five wires to a binding post.
Kay Nymidee, eagerly aiding him, twisted one of the wires around Giles Habibula’s fat arm. She made each of the others hold the end of a wire.
The gong still thundered its warning, deep as a vibration of the whole world about him. Bob Star watched the monstrous throng come down, until he could see the pattern of the tread on the black belts of the spheres, see the color-flushed, fantastic-stalked organs of the silent red giants.
From his tight lips rasped the hoarse demand: “What can we do?”
“I had hoped,” he heard Jay Kalam’s calm voice, gravely regretful, “that they would follow the ship, and give us time——”
Hal Samdu rumbled imploringly: “Hurry, Giles!”
“In life’s name,” protested Giles Habibula, “I’m too mortal ill——”
The foremost silver sphere was now close upon them. Its white tentacles whipped out toward Kay Nymidee. Bob Star set himself to leap at it in futile, bare-handed desperation.
“Wait!” breathed Jay Kalam.
He made some quick, final adjustment within the rectangular red case. A faint, momentary humming came from it, low at first, running up the scale of sound until it became ear-piercingly shrill, then inaudible.
It seemed to Bob Star that the light abruptly changed, that a curious shadow had flickered down upon them. The nightmare throng was indefinably distorted; it appeared somehow withdrawn, as if seen through an inexplicable veil.
Besides that, he sensed nothing. But the white sphere jerked back its grasping tentacles. The alien horde was abruptly silent, as if with consternation. Monstrous things rebounded from the walls, retreated.
Then, beside him, Giles Habibula sighed deeply.
“Ah, me,” he gasped, with a vast relief. “It’s done!”
Wearily, he wiped his pale-yellow face with the back of his hand.
Bob Star perceived that the entire bottom of the shaft had begun slipping away, like an inconceivably massive sliding door. There was a remote sound, like the rushing of a distant hurricane.
A dark slit appeared at one side of the shaft, and widened. And presently they were looking down a great, square well, walled with jewel-smooth indigo, into another world, where a small green sun was shining.
Jay Kalam was the first to speak; his voice was faint and deep with awe. “And this,” he said, “is the hidden fortress of the Cometeers!”
XXVII.
BOB STAR was amazed at the extent of the space beyond that mighty door. When they had pushed themselves through the shaft, and Giles Habibula had touched something that closed the vast barrier behind them, they all paused to stare with bewildered astonishment.
Bob Star’s sense of direction had changed again; it now seemed that this vast, dimly lighted void was above them. It must have been fifty miles in diameter, he thought—perhaps five hundred. It was roughly spherical. The walls of it appeared to be partly natural rock, dark and rugged. And they were partly tremendous flat surfaces of violet-blue.
There were machines looming mysteriously in that twilight vastness, huger than any upon the surface of the planet. They were the master machines, he supposed, that controlled the comet swarm. He sensed the power of terrific, unheard vibrations—too deep to be audible. He felt the wash of tremendous, well-leashed energies.
Those vague, shadowy mountains of mechanism were giants, he knew; they fed upon a captive sun, and drove clustered worlds through space like a ship.
A nightmarish sense of futility overcame him again. What could the puny five of them hope to accomplish against the masters of the comet? They were fools even to hope.
Then he was ill again. Suddenly he was clinging like a fly to the roof of this hollow world, and sick with the invincible fear that he was falling into the small green sun at the center of it. Then the green sun and the dim, Cyclopean machines began to spin over and under him, over and under, until he shut his eyes.
Faintly, he heard Kay Nymidee speaking, with awe and terror battling in her nervous voice against the elation of desperate daring.
“Kay says the secret of the aythrin’s mortality is locked in the green sphere,” he heard Jay Kalam interpreting. “Two of the Cometeers, she says, are always stationed outside of it, on guard.
“Even they cannot enter the sphere itself, for the metal of it is impregnated with forces that form a barrier to their nonmaterial bodies. Only the masters of the comet are able to enter it.
“Kay and her father studied it with their projector, she says. But they were never able to penetrate the green. Kay doesn’t know how to enter, or what is within.”
Nauseated, trembling, Bob Star forced his eyes open. He looked at the pale, tense slimness of Kay Nymidee, at the others; he dared not look again, into that giddy, spinning void. Jay Kalam was gravely alert. Hal Samdu looked grimly belligerent. Giles Habibula was still greenishly ill.
“We must lose no time,” Jay Kalam said decisively. “The slaves are bewildered for the moment. But they saw the door open. They will report what happened. And the aythrin won’t be so easy to confuse.
“We must reach the green globe.”
Bob Star stole an apprehensive glance at it—a small, dim-green sun, swung alone in that giddy void.
“How can we get there?” he whispered. “It’s miles away—and floating free——”
“Not floating,” Jay Kalam corrected him, gravely. “It must be suspended in etheric force fields. But still,” he admitted, “there’s nothing we can climb.”
“Then,” asked Bob Star, “how——”
The commander said quietly; “We must jump.”
Bob Star was startled.
“Jump?”
“Certainly. There is no gravitation to stop us. If we don’t miss the globe, and go sailing on beyond——”
Instinctively, Bob Star’s hands clutched at the railing beside the great door. Stark horror lurked in the idea of a plunging fall through that directionless void.
“Can you go on, now, Giles?” asked Jay Kalam.
“Ah, so,” he gasped. “If I must!”
JAY KALAM made them all crouch in a little circle upon the jewel-hard surface of the mighty door, holding hands. He had fastened the red, rectangular metal case to his belt; they all still clung to the wires fastened to it.
“When I give the word,” he said, “we shall all leap toward the green sphere.”
To Bob Star it began to spin again, over and under him. It took all his will to keep his eyes upon it. Dimly, he heard the commander counting. He heard the quiet, “Now!” He leaped, with all his strength, into that spinning void.
For a moment he was too ill to be aware of anything. Then he knew that they were all clinging together, a little huddle of flying figures. They were helpless, pitiful, somehow ludicrous.
They were plunging through the confused vastness of a hollow world. The green sun seemed a very tiny and distant goal. And they were quite helpless to stop or turn.
“I’m afraid,” said Jay Kalam, “that we’re going to one side.”
It was very strange, to Bob Star, to hear that voice, as cool and grave and perfectly modulated as always. A frightened whisper, a choking gasp, a scream, would have been in keeping with their nightmare flight. But those restrained, collected tones held grotesque incongruity.
The small green sun was whirling over and under them again. All meaning and direction had vanished from the vastness of that dim, silently thunderous cavern world. Bob Star’s sickness returned, made intolerable by the lack of anything substantial to cling to.
He compressed his lips in silent agony.
“The damned aythrin—those on guard?” he heard Hal Samdu’s booming question. “Won’t they see us?”
“Not so long as we hold these wires,” Jay Kalam informed him. “It is possible, however, that they may detect us with other senses than sight.”
Fighting his sickness, Bob Star looked along the glistening red wire that he grasped, to the instrument at Jay Kalam’s belt.
“We aren’t”—he gasped—“invisible?”
Sitting in empty space as if he rested in a chair, the commander nodded his dark head soberly.
“Kay and I tore the invisibility mechanism out of the ship we took,” he said.
“In my haste to remove it I got it out of adjustment. We had some difficulty in discovering the principle of it so that we could repair it—our success, I should say, is due to Kay.
“It seems,” he explained, “to create an etheric field about everything electrically connected with it, forming a kind of etheric pocket about which rays of light are bent uninterrupted. That effect, alone,” he added, “would leave us blind, for want of light. Some radiation, probably far within the ultra-violet, penetrates the field and its revibrated as visible light.”
His thin lips pursed.
“There,” he said slowly, “is one danger. If the Cometeers should be sensitive——”
Recurrent illness swept Bob Star’s attention away.
During that fall—for to Bob Star it was a fall, through the vertiginous depths of some ultimate hell—time lost its meaning. He settled into a passive, agonized endurance.
By turns, he opened and closed his eyes. He watched the dizzy spinning of that remote green sun, amid the monstrous mechanism that filled this hollow world with the terrific, unheard vibration of power beyond imagination. He closed his eyes, and was bathed in that silent, eternal thunder. And his illness did not cease.
With one hand he clung to Giles Habibula, who was still sick, greenfaced, groaning.
And he gripped the hand of Kay Nymidee. She was silent, pale, tense. But sometimes, when he could see her face, she smiled a little.
TIME had seemed suspended. But at last Bob Star realized that the pallid, weird-green sphere was near, and somewhat to one side.
He heard Jay Kalam say: “Yes, we’re about to miss it.”
“Ah, so,” sighed Giles Habibula.
“And it’s my fault, Jay! I was too mortal slow when we leaped. I dragged you all aside——”
Bob Star’s sickness was increased by the bitterness of defeat.
“There’s no way,” he muttered, “to turn!”
He was amazed to hear Jay Kalam say: “There is a way—at the cost of one of us.”
He whispered, “How?”
“One of us,” said the commander, “must turn loose and kick away, so that the reaction will push us toward the globe. We are like a ship in space—and one of us must be the rocket.”
“That would work!” Bob Star exclaimed eagerly. Then dismay choked his voice to a whisper. “But he would have to let go the wire. He would be visible again. And the aythrin would destroy him!
“Aye, Jay,” Hal Samdu was rumbling, “just tell me what to do.”
“No,” protested Bob Star, hoarsely. “I’ll be the one——”
“Bob,” said the commander, quietly, “you must stay with us.”
He gave Hal Samdu brief directions. The giant crouched against the huddle of their drifting bodies, then kicked powerfully away. His sprawling body spun off through emptiness. It seemed to flicker, oddly, as it passed the veil of invisibility.
It grew small, hurtling away into the silent, thundering twilight.
Giles Habibula was abruptly sobbing, noisily. And Bob Star felt the salt sting of tears in his eyes, a bitter ache in his throat. Big, simple Hal Samdu had been his guard since he was a child.
Then he saw the pale, uncanny green of the sphere again. It was close, rushing upon them. He whispered: “We’re almost——”
Kay Nymidee’s hand clapped over his mouth. She was white and rigid with dread.
Then he saw the shining thing floating watchfully near the globe. It was like a magnet metamorphosed into living fire, with red star and violet star within their moons of mist, for poles; with the swirling spindle of silver-green atoms like the field between them; with the massive emerald ring like a coil about the field.
It was more than alive. It was the dwelling of supernal power.
They passed dose to it, and it abruptly paused in its slow flight about the green sphere. Bob Star’s heart stopped. His skin prickled to the chill of sudden sweat. His muscles tensed involuntarily; his breath went out with a gasp.
For an instant the thing was without motion. The pulsation of the bright stars ceased. And the misty spindle seemed frozen into a pillar of greenish ice. Then burning life returned.
The thing darted away in the direction that Hal Samdu had gone.
Kay Nymidee’s hand uncovered Bob Star’s mouth.
“It was Hal that it saw,” he whispered.
Jay Kalam nodded and said: “But it will soon be looking for us!”
A moment later they thudded against the cold, hard metal of the pallidly glowing sphere. They crouched upon the green surface, held to it by a slight attraction.
It was like a little world, Bob Star thought; perhaps it was half a mile in diameter.
Kay Nymidee spoke eagerly to Jay Kalam.
“What we seek is within,” he interpreted deliberately. “This is a kind of safe.”
“Mortal me!” gasped Giles Habibula in despair. “And what a safe!”
XXVIII.
EVERY SAFE, Jay Kalam reasoned, must have a door.
They searched, shuffling very carefully across the green, glowing surface, walking by the aid of its slight gravitation. They came at last to a square, twenty-foot depression, surrounded by a low metal flange.
Giles Habibula scrambled down into the pit and examined a triple circle of projecting green metal rods.
“Ah, me!” he moaned with dismay, “if that last lock was difficult, this one is mortal impossible! The masters of the comet couldn’t open it themselves, with all their precious science, if ever they lost the combination.
“Ah, so, but they are fearful clever, the lords of the comet!” he wheezed. “What a lock! You could try possible combinations at random till the blessed universe runs down, and the odds are a million to one the door would still be closed.”
His thick fingers, so uncannily sensitive, so amazingly deft, were already swiftly busy, sliding the rods in and out, twirling them. He was listening intently, although Bob Star could hear no faintest sound.
The others clung to the flange above him. Bob Star, at intervals, was still acutely ill. And momentarily he expected to see the dread, shining pillar of one of the Cometeers materialize beside him, perhaps to speak with the triumphant voice of Stephen Orco.
Urgently, Jay Kalam inquired at last: “Giles, can you do it?”
The old man looked up, to wipe the sweat from his yellow face with the back of his hand.
“ ’Tis mortal difficult.” He shook his bald, round head. “ ’Tis a fearful test of my precious genius, Jay. Never was such a lock built in the system, or on Yarkand.”
Wearily, he bent again.
“Opening locks,” he muttered, “is largely a matter of point of view. To any of you, a lock is something to prevent the opening of a door—and it does prevent it. But my genius sees a lock as a means of opening the door—and it is.”
He groaned, and spat.
“Or at least,” he amended, “it should be. But old Giles never met such a lock as this!”
“And never,” Jay Kalam said, “was a more valuable treasure locked up. So long as their secret is safe, the Cometeers are immortal, invincible——”
Kay Nymidee had seized his arm, to speak urgently in swift, strained tones.
“Hasten, Giles,” he pleaded. “Kay says that they will surely find us soon. Our invisibility, you know, is a trick of their own. It can’t baffle them long.”
The old man looked up again, his small red eyes round with anger.
“For life’s sake,” he burst out, “have you no patience? Here is Giles Habibula, a feeble old soldier, faint with mortal illness, doomed to die in a hideous, alien world! Ah, so, a dying man, taxing his sacred genius to the last ounce to solve a mortal riddle that would baffle all the scientists, mathematicians and doddering philosophers in the blessed system for the next ten thousand years!
“In the name of precious life, can’t you let him work in peace without screaming in his blessed ear——”
“Forgive me, Giles,” said the commander, hastily. “I’m sorry. Go on.”
The old man shook his head, muttering, and bent again to the triple circle of green rods.
Bob Star, ill, was aware of the little hammer of red pain that had throbbed against his brain, unceasingly, for nine long years. It seemed sharper now, changed, since the organic orange ray had burned through his old scar. And the old fear was stalking down upon him like a hideous specter.
Through the mounting tension of ultimate catastrophe it shrieked the fearful warning: “You can’t kill Stephen Orco!”
“Well!” came explosively from the pit. “ ’Tis done!”
A faint vibration whispered through the green sphere. The floor of the pit slid deliberately aside. Giles Habibula clung to the flange at the edge.
“Ah, me!” he whispered. “ ’Twas a desperate trial.”
A dark slit appeared and widened, until they looked into a deep, square well, whose walls were shining green.
“Come,” said Jay Kalam, eagerly. “Gravity will aid us.”
THEY PUSHED themselves into the square pit. They fell hundreds of feet, and struck another metal door, which was studded with three circles of projecting rods.
“Another mortal lock,” muttered Giles Habibula. “Ah, well,” he sighed, “ ’twill be easier, now that I have discovered the principle.”
