Collected Short Fiction, page 263
In the brief summers, while they worked the rich placer deposit that was now buried under the glacier, Jean Adare had ever been a generous and gay companion. But the dark chord of fear in his primitive heart always responded to winter’s bitter threat.
Always, he had been annoyed by Blake’s experiments. And, at the last, when he had been terrified, he had found Blake’s absorbed serenity intolerable.
“Que diable!” he had burst out once, angrily. “Speak to me! I cannot endure ze damn silence. Say zat you are cold. Say you fear ze ice. I t’ink you drive me crazy!”
“You never understand, Jean, what I’m doing—”
“Non, but I do understan’. I understand zat you are beeg fool, yes. You try to destroy gold—”
“I can destroy gold,” Blake corrected him cheerfully. “You saw the activated particles under the microscope, like golden stars burning. What I’m working on is a way to control the process—and I think the tau-ray will do it.
“What you don’t understand is that energy is worth more than gold. One tiny grain would give us light and heat for all the winter. One little flake would drive a steamboat up the Yukon from the Aphoon pass to the Chandalar.”
But Adare refused to catch Blake’s enthusiasm. He went back to crouch miserably over the stove, his one dark eye staring solemnly at the dwindling pile of wood. The stringy, stained wisp of his beard moved monotonously as he chewed; ever and again the stove hissed as he spat upon it.
The whole winter had been a burden. But the two before had passed without tragedy. It was the bewildering, the inexplicable, the mindcrushing events of the last three weeks that had driven the ’breed upon his fatal flight.
Blake knew, he thought, more than any other man of this incredible nightmare that had seized all the world. Yet his scientific mind searched in vain for its origins.
The winter had been the coldest of history—here and throughout the northern hemisphere. The radio had brought reports of unprecedented blizzards sweeping all America. The unparalleled displays of the aurora had spread wings of terrifying flame visible almost to the equator—the result, Blake knew, of a period of extreme sunspot activity.
The cold, the aurora—all the world knew of them. But Blake and Adare had been the first to observe stranger things. They had seen a green and living light spread through the ice, an uncanny, pulsating glow that seemed independent of the auroral fires. They had seen the glaciers break and move, despite the cold, as if they flowed to the pressure of an inner purpose.
BEWILDERED, Blake had paused in his researches long enough to assemble a little short-wave transmitter, powered from the: small gasoline motor-generator under the bench. For a month he bad reported daily to the world all he could observe of the strange fire and motion of the ice.
His last message had carried his observations of a stranger thing; the motionless, unchanging cloud that loomed black and sharp-edged against the aurora, above the shining northward hills.
The interference of terrific electric storms had been making radio communication almost impossible, and that day Jean Adare had been abruptly seized with the obsession that this electrical interference was a deliberate attempt of the ice to cut off the reports.
“Stop it!” he screamed as Blake sat before his microphone, patiently repeating his message against the roaring flood of static. “You tell ze secrets of ze ice. It is angry! It will kill us, unless you stop! Que diable—”
“Kill us? How?”
“Ze damn glacier! It creeps up ze slope. Ze green fire is in it. Grand Dieu! It comes to crush us—”
Rubbing away the frost to peer through the window, Blake had seen that the green and shining wall of ice, that had come down out of the hills to fill the valley of the Mannabec, was indeed nearer than it should have been.
A crash brought his eyes back into the room. He saw that the desperate ’breed had smashed his microphone. Strangely, the interference had immediately lessened somewhat, so that he was able to pick up reports of the extreme cold, of loss of life—and to hear the frantic appeals of scientists for his observations.
But the greatest puzzle, the most terrific catastrophe, was what had happened to the sun. That had been two weeks later, now three weeks ago.
Jean Adare had been waiting with almost pathetic eagerness for the sun. He had marked the passing days upon a tattered calendar, prayed for the dawn of spring.
At last came a time when the aurora flamed in a clear sky, and the bitter air was still. Jean Adare slipped into his furs and went outside the hut. Blake, a moment later, heard his eager shout:
“Le bon Dieu! The sun—”
Dropping his tools, he ran outside just in time to meet Jean’s exclamation of frightened wonder.
Jean was standing on the point of rock above the cabin, peering south across the weirdly shining glacier and the barrens. For three hours it had been dull daylight. A glow of rose had come into the southern sky, the dawn of the summer-long arctic day. And now Blake saw the sun, a disc of red gold, raggedly bitten off by distant peaks.
Even as Adare’s cry of fear rang upon his ears the sun dulled, went out. The flush of dawn faded into strange gloom. The sky had become a changeless dome of dusky, frozen violet.
Upon the dark, rocky point the ’breed had turned to stare into the north. Barrens and mountain shone alike with terrible, ghostly green. Above the ice, like eldritch phantoms marching, were glittering shapes of green.
The black cloud that had hung beyond the hills was gone.
“See!” screamed the ’breed. “Ze ice—it grows fingers! Fingers of green fire. Zey put out ze sun. Now zey reach to strangle us! Ze fingers—fingers of ze ice—”
Babbling with terror, he sprang from the rock and started running south. Blake had caught him before he reached the glacier, brought him back to the cabin. But the next three weeks had been too much for him. The violet sky never changed. The cold grew steadily more intense. And the horror at last drove the ’breed to draw his knife, make Blake let him go.
“I’ll see you,” Blake called as they parted, “when the spring comes.”
Jean Adare said grimly, “Spring, she nevair come!”
He cracked his whip and shouted to the shivering huskies. Blake closed the door regretfully, and watched through the frost on the window. The ’breed drove the cringing, unwilling malamutes straight south, toward the ragged green water of the glacier whose slow, inexorable advance on the cabin had so terrified him.
Blake watched green fire flowing in the ice, pulsating like luminous blood. Numbed with horror, Blake saw insidious green fingers clutching at the man, the huskies.
He saw them dragged down. He shut his eyes and turned away when he knew that the ice had conquered.
Grimly, hands stiff with cold, brain paralyzed with the impact of alien menace, he drove himself back to his task.
CHAPTER II
Fire of the Golden Atom
MASON BLAKE once had felt himself the happiest man in the world.
It was now four years ago since, taking an advanced degree in technology, he had published his thesis, Theory of Atomic Activation. It had won him the recognition that turned a wild dream into glorious possibility. His father had made him vice-president of the struggling little Blake-Maddon Electric Company, promised him laboratory and funds for his atomic research. Jane Maddon, tall, grey-eyed daughter of his father’s deceased partner, promised to marry him.
But Ellet Frey read the thesis and sent for Blake. Blake didn’t go—his father’s little firm had been crippled, more than once, by the ruthless activities of Frey’s colossal Planet Power Corporation; Blake shared a proud resentment.
Frey came at last to Blake’s laboratory. A gaunt, gigantic man, with bright, cold eyes.
“You’ve got something I want, Blake. Atomic power. I’ll give you a contract at two hundred thousand a ear, for five years, to work it out for Planet.”
“It’s worth nothing, now,” Blake told him. “It isn’t even a toy—because to play with it is too dangerous. If I do get it worked out it will be worth a million times your offer.”
The power king smiled.
“I’m glad to see your confidence. My offer is doubled.”
“I’ve nothing to sell,” Blake said, flatly.
“Won’t sell, eh?” Frey’s eyes glittered frostily. “I get what I want, Blake. I’ll take it.”
Blake had smiled his defiance, until incredible disaster struck.
His father, trying to make the little firm safe from Frey’s operations, had contracted for large stocks of copper, had borrowed funds to fit up Blake’s expensive laboratories. Learning of the situation, Frey dumped huge amounts of copper on the market and used his vast influence to force the unwilling creditors to call their loans.
When Frey’s newspapers managed to color the ensuing bankruptcy with criminal charges, Blake’s father shot himself in despair.
Frey, taking possession of the firm’s assets, seized Blake’s laboratory. But no practical application of Blake’s theories had been completed; and Frey’s engineers, recalling a casual observation of Blake’s, that gold activated by his process would be roughly 829,440,000 times more active than pure radium, cannily refused to make any attempt to carry on the work.
Chagrined, Frey then charged that Blake had stolen records and apparatus from the laboratory. He demanded that Blake perfect and hand over a workable process of gold-disruption.
Despairing of establishing his innocence in the courts, Blake had fled to escape arrest. In happier summers, when he vacationed with his father in Alaska, Jean Adare had been their guide. Blake had grub-staked the half-breed, and a scrawled letter now brought him word of Adare’s rich strike on the Mannabec.
Thus it came about that Mason Blake had spent three years in the arctic, digging gold through the summer, toiling through the long winter to perfect a process for the controlled disintegration of its atoms. Success meant power to clear his dead father’s name, meant freedom to return to, the world—to Jane Maddon.
He had kept in touch with Jane. Left penniless by the disaster, she had found employment as assistant to Dr. Mark Lingard, a distinguished scientist and electrical engineer, for whom the old firm had manufactured experimental equipment. He knew that she was waiting.
Blake turned back to his bench, after he had watched Jean Adare die on the glacier.
He rested his numb fingers on a switch. His blue eyes rested on a golden fleck, almost invisible, lying on the insulated stage before the concave anode of his tau-ray tube. Had he failed again?
Radium, disintegrating, uses up half its bulk in some sixteen centuries. Gold, activated by Blake’s discovery, was half gone in fifty-nine seconds. What he sought was a way to control the terrific force he had liberated; for such power, unharnessed, was a monster set free.
If he had failed again, the quartz stage would be fused and shattered with resistless atomic flame.
HE covered his eyes with his big hand, closed the switch. No fire seared him, and he looked. The metal flake was burning on the disc of quartz like a golden star. With trembling fingers, he varied the intensity of the tau-rays. The star obediently waxed and waned.
Blake sighed with a deep, weary gratitude, and held his stiff fingers in the radiant warmth of the star.
“Done!” he whispered. “Gold has been master of man, through all history—and made him into things like Frey. Now man is the master of gold.” His tired eyes closed. “Done—if it had been three years ago—”
The golden light still flooded the room as he pried a board from the bunk, and split it up to make a fire. He made tea for himself, ate, slept. The fire was dead again when he woke. But the gold star still burned; its rays had warmed the room a little.
He sat up on the bunk, and stared at It, with a new light in his blue. eyes.
“The world is freezing,” he whispered. “Somehow—freezing. But if men had portable heat, portable light—”
He made another fire, and went back to the bench. Chairs and rough table went into the stove as he worked. The wood from the bunks. But the fire went out before he had finished, and silent freezing death came back into the cabin.
But the thing at last was done: a little cylinder two inches thick, a foot long. It held the tiny mechanism of the activator, the delicate little tau-ray tube with its minute coils and condensers. And half a pound of gold.
He twisted at a little stud, and a warm golden light shone out of the tube. It drove the darkness from the cabin, thawed the rime of frost that had crept through the walls. He fed the shivering, whimpering dogs again; then, cold and exhausted, he lay down in the golden beam.
Sleep presently pressed upon him, ridden with nightmares of the green fingers of the ice.
CHAPTER III
The Life of the Ice
THE throb of a motor broke that last nightmare. Numb with the cold that had crept into his body, despite the golden warmth of the ray, Blake ran eagerly out into the frigid violet dusk. Green fire flowed and danced in the wild glacier that filled the valley of the Mannabec. Above it, he saw the plane, a dark fleck drifting in the sky.
Trembling with the breathless hope of contact with man, he held the disrupter like a flashlight, swept its beam back and forth. A white flare answered from the plane. Soon it dropped toward him in a long glide.
There was landing space, he thought, on the snow-covered plateau behind the cabin. He clambered hastily upon a point of rock, poured the golden flood across it. The plane sank low over the glacier. Then: “Look out! For God’s sake!” The scream burst uselessly from his lips. “The fingers of the ice.”
The pilot seemed to sense his danger. The plane shot upward. Blake’s muscles tensed as he watched the battle. He trembled to the roar of the motors that fought to save the ship.
Green ropes of fire had flowed up from the ice. Serpents of green flame coiled about wings and fuselage, tensed straight, pulled the machine to relentless destruction. Blake’s breath went out in a long gasp of silent pain as he saw the ship strike, crumple as it flopped grotesquely over, saw the first lurid streamer of yellow flame lick upward from the wreck.
He saw the quick motion of a little figure near it, a survivor. Remembering the fate of Jean Adare, he thought he would be too late to help anyone. Bat with the disrupter, perhaps there was a chance.
He plunged down from the rocky point, hitched the dogs to the sled, and raced toward the flaming wreck.
Under a sky of chill violet, the glacier burned with unearthly living green. He was amazed again at its nearness to the cabin. Its motion was too slow to see. But in a few more days—
He mounted the ragged edge of the glacier. The green throbbed and flowed beneath him, like blood of cold fire.
The point of granite that marked the cabin became a small dot behind him. The plane, now, was close ahead. It lay across a ragged fissure, the broken landing gear pointing into the amazing sky. One wing was twisted and splintered.
Like a golden blade, the flame was thrusting ever higher. Was he too late?
Something gripped his fur-booted ankle. He sprawled on the ice, but his fingers clung to the sled, and the racing huskies, with a tug that wrenched his big body, jerked him free.
Running on, he looked back at the green writhing tentacles. Sick, incredulous fear mounted higher in him.
Fingers of the ice! Half insane, Jean Adare had screamed of them. Blake had seen them drag the ’breed down to death. He had watched them wreck the plane. Now they were clutching at his own body, at the dogs. The huskies leaped from them, yelping with pain.
Blake was so near he could hear the crackling flames, when he was caught again. The sled jerked onward, his numbed fingers slipped. He fell against the ice, and found an astounding, half-invisible net about him. Desperately he fought the chilling, strangling meshes.
The dogs were snarled in the harness, fighting the bands of terrible, living light—and one another. One had his fangs in the other’s throat, and both were being crushed in the green coils.
Above their yelps, Blake heard the increasing roar of the conflagration. In the motionless air the flame was rising swiftly, fanned with its own draught. The orange light of burning gasoline flickered over the ice.
Abruptly he was free. The green tentacles seemed to recoil from the flame. The ice beneath him was now black.
He stumbled on toward the plane. The fuselage was a roaring furnace. No human being could be alive within it. But he had seen a figure moving, outside—
“Help! Here—”
The faint voice drifted out of a crevice in the ice. He stumbled, came upon two human figures beside a tapered cylinder of shining steel. One was limp, unconscious; in spite of the bulky flying togs, he could see that it was a girl.
“Here!” the man called again, nervous, urgent. “Help me get her away. Bombs in the plane!”
HIS voice was a husky gasp of pain. His small head was bare; one side was a bloody smear. His right arm flapped limply against his body.
Beside him, Blake bent over the girl. The first glimpse of her white face set a confusion of surprised delight and agony to roaring in his head.
“Jane!” he whispered. “Jane, how did you—”
The little tanned man, with his good hand, was unscrewing something from the end of the steel cylinder.
“Carry her away,” he rapped, hoarsely. “Think I can make it by myself, with this detonator. But hurry! The bombs—”
Blake ran with the girl back to the sled. Although the green fire of the ice had retreated, the huskies were still rolling in deadly battle. With Jane here, the plane wrecked, they might mean life itself. He cuffed them, stopped their wolfish struggle.
He was untangling the harness when the little brown man came reeling up, his left hand grasping the little brass cylinder of the detonator from the bomb.
“Had to save it,” he gasped. “You’ll need the bomb.” He thrust it at Blake. “Go on!” he urged. “Leave me. Miss Maddon will tell you what to do. Hurry! Sigma-bombs in the plane.
