Collected Short Fiction, page 264
Equal a hundred tons of nitro—”
Blake seized him, tumbled him on the sled beside the girl. His whip cracked.
“Mush, fellows!”
The flaming wreck was a mile behind when sudden radiance shone blue upon the glacier, and the little man gasped through white lips, “Down!”
Blake steered the sled into a crevasse, dived after it. The ice jolted to a shattering concussion, followed by an air wave that flattened them like a crushing hand. Ice-pinnacles tumbled down about them.
When Blake lifted his ringing head, the glacier was black. The green fire was gone.
“Come on,” he said. “If we can make it to the cabin—”
Then he saw that the little man’s lips were moving, realized that he was deaf. The little man pulled himself and the inert body of the girl off the sled, held up the brass detonator, pointed back across the glacier. Blake bent in the roaring silence, faintly heard the screamed words:
“Get the bomb—while the Ice is dead.”
He drove the frightened huskies back toward the crater where the wreck had been. He found the shining cylinder of the sigma-bomb beyond it, half covered with shattered ice. He lifted it onto the sled, started back.
Endless serpents of green Are were creeping beneath him in the dark ice, when he got back to the little man and Jane. He put her back on the sled, beside the bomb.
Green snakes were darting at them, above the surface of the ice, before they came to the edge of the glacier. But Blake had learned a lesson. He twisted a stud on the side of his cylinder, and its golden beam grew more intense.
“An atomic ray,” he shouted at the other man. “Light seems to kill the ice. I’ve stopped it up to ten kilowatts.”
The yellow flood drove back the creeping tongues of green. They came safely off the glacier. Blake helped the man and the girl into the cabin, propped the cylinder in a corner, so that its warming golden ray fell across the room.
When Blake had examined Jane’s bruises, set the little man’s arm and bandaged his head, they talked.
“I’m Mark Lingard.”
“I see,” said Blake. “I knew that Jane had been with you.”
Lingard smiled through his bandages at the quietly breathing girl.
“A splendid assistant, Miss Maddon,” he said. “Fine scientific mind. It was her intuition that suggested my investigation—”
“Tell me,” interrupted Blake. “Do you know what has happened? The ice?”
Awkwardly, with his left hand, Lingard fumbled for his pipe. Blake ailed and lighted it for him.
“Life has been born in the ice.” His voice was deliberate, low. “I say life—that’s the only word I know to use. Certainly it is something very different from animal life, and even that is a little difficult to define.
“ANYHOW, it is pretty obvious that the ice has something that we must call mind; and mind seems to me the essence and the measure of life. Just what gave birth to it, I can’t say. But I believe that it is the establishment of a relationship between the ice crystals, analogous to that between the neurone cells in the brain.
“Probably a matter of electrodynamic potentials. The origin of it I conceive to be associated with the winter’s phenomenal displays of the aurora: the impact of electronic and electromagnetic influences from the sun.
“How its energy is derived again I cannot say with certainty. Probably, however, by the diversion of heat into other energy forms. That accounts for the increasing cold.
“The fact remains that it displays energy: by luminescence, by the extraordinary motion of the ice, by manipulation of objects and forces outside the ice. And the release of that energy, again, is patently directed by intelligent purpose. Such discrimination in energy-release is the very fundamental of life.”
He was fingering the sling that held his useless arm.
“Its purpose,” he said, “is evidently directed toward the annihilation of mankind. Its intelligence promises to be sufficient to accomplish it.”
“You mean—the sun?”
Lingard’s brown, bandaged head nodded soberly.
“Was that a blow at mankind?” Blake asked.
“I think so—an incidental one. The ice is intelligent enough to know fear, and it has showed that it fears man—even by wrecking our plane. But the sun itself, of course, was a greater menace than man.”
“Of course. It would have melted the ice.”
“The danger was more immediate than the melting of the ice,” said Lingard. “The sentience of the ice is a matter of delicately balanced electromagnetic potential differences. The sun gave it birth, with the strange effects associated with the aurora. But the powerful actinic radiation of ordinary sunlight would upset those delicate balances, kill it.”
“I see,” said Blake. “That’s why light drives it back.” His voice sank. “But how—how did it put out the sun?”
“My experiments have proved,” Lingard said deliberately, “that the upper atmosphere is flooded with a strange ultra-short radiation. It is of a type that excites fluorescence in helium molecules under certain conditions, and I am certain that it is the secondary radiation they emit that has shut off the sunlight, by the interference of exactly synchronized wave frequencies.”
“That radiation?” Blake asked breathlessly. “Where does it come from?”
“T approximated the position of its source,” said Lingard. “By directional methods, and triangulation. It is not far from here. North—probably beyond the mountains. We came north in the hope that with your aid we could locate and destroy the source—”
“And bring back the sun,” whispered Blake. “It must be done.” His shaggy head lifted. “You had just the one plane?”
“We were lucky to have that,” said Mark Lingard, bitterly. “I think you know Frey—Ellet Frey?”
Blake bit his lip; his bearded face twitched with pain.
“I do. Because I wouldn’t sell him the disrupter, he destroyed my father’s business and his life. For three years I’ve been hiding from his trumped-up charges.” His blue eyes were savage. “What has Frey done?”
“A strange thing, Blake. You see, something has happened to Frey.”
GINGERLY caressing his broken arm, he explained:
“The success of my investigations, Blake, is due largely to your radio reports. When I put our observations together, and with Miss Maddon’s aid, formulated a theory of the menace and a plan to avert it, I laid all my work before the president. He promised me every support. Funds, assistants from the Bureau of Standards, and the aid of the army in carrying out whatever campaign I could plan.
“But your messages had been rebroadcast all over the world. Five weeks ago, when they suddenly ceased, there was a storm of popular interest in you. At its climax, Ellet Frey announced that he was undertaking a privately financed rescue expedition.”
“Strange,” muttered Blake. “Unless he hoped to get the disrupter—But go on.”
“Two weeks ago, with four planes and twenty-eight men, he flew north across Canada from Spokane. Miss Maddon and I were then in Seattle, organizing our own expedition. We had ten new army bombing planes, with a splendid corps of picked officers and scientists. The military part of the expedition was in command of a friend of mine, Major Wade Cameron.
“The day before we were planning to take off, Frey came back across Canada, with one battered plane, alone. I don’t know what had taken place, Blake. But something had happened to him—to his mind.”
Lingard’s low voice sank.
“He gave the newspapers a most absurdly fantastic story, Blake. He told them that it was you who had extinguished the sun.”
“I?” Blake was breathless. “I?”
“His story was ridiculous; it would have been incredible to a sane world. He told how his expedition had been met by a fleet of strange black planes, shot down. He was captured, he said, by a group of fanatic cultists, and found you their leader.
“It was your discovery of atomic energy, he said, that had been used to put out the sun. Your purpose, he said, was to crush civilization, kill all humanity save your chosen handful, and then establish some grotesque anarchistic society. Your radio messages about the living ice, he said, had been merely a blind for the plot.
“He escaped from you, he said, fled in the plane to warn the world.”
“Ana people—” whispered Blake—“people believed him?”
“The world isn’t sane,” said Lingard. “Men are afraid—horribly afraid of the life in the ice. They were eager for a chance to call the appalling truth a lie, glad to cast the blame on a human being, on something they could understand.
“The president accepted his story without question. Major Cameron received orders immediately to halt the expedition. And we learned that Frey had come to Seattle with a group of Federal men, with warrants for the arrest of Miss Maddon and myself as accomplices in the alleged plot.
“We should have failed utterly but for the faith and courage of Major Cameron. Miss Maddon had come to me at the airport. Major Cameron pretended to arrest us, announced that he was taking us to Washington for trial, and flew north with us Instead.
“Frey was outwitted for the moment. But when Cameron ignored radio orders to turn back, we learned that Frey himself had taken off in another plane to follow us. He is only a few hours behind, end he has threatened to kill us on sight. A whole squadron of army planes took off as soon as it could be organized, to follow and aid him to destroy us.
“We have not only the ice to fight,” Mark Lingard said solemnly, “but man as well.”
He limped to the window.
“Back in the States,” he whispered, “it seemed incredible that the ice was alive—that’s why Frey’s story was so promptly accepted. We must kill the ice, Blake. If we fail, human life won’t last very long. Already people are dying by tens of thousands, as supplies of food and fuel run out. Frost has reached the equator, the living glaciers are pushing down.
“It is a new ice-age dawning. The ice will overwhelm forests and cities, until the continents are covered with living green. Even the oceans will freeze; green fire will spread through them, until the planet is one green globe of endless frozen night, ruled by the entity of frost.”
“We must not fail,” Blake was whispering grimly, when he heard Jane’s low voice, and went eagerly back to the waking girl.
CHAPTER IV
The Fiend of the Forest
IT was four hours later that the three set out. through the still violet dusk, across the living ice. Jane Maddon had declared herself able to follow the sled.
The five lean huskies were running before the sled. It carried the sigma-bomb, and Blake’s carefully selected equipment.
Following were the three: Blake with his long whip and the disrupter; Jane Maddon, still white-faced with pain; the brown little scientist with his slung arm, limping awkwardly on unfamiliar snow-shoes.
The disrupter, set to give an intense hot golden beam, burned a path across the snow, into the mysterious menace of the frozen barrens.
“Your batteries—” Jane had asked as they started, “won’t they burn out?”
“They are half a pound of gold,” Blake told her. “They would last a thousand years.”
“Your atomic discovery?” she cried eagerly. “Oh, I’m so glad, Mace!”
“If we win, Jane—if life goes on,” he whispered, “it can give us—everything. It will clear Dad’s name, and make us safe from Frey—”
Beneath the fur parka, her grey eyes shadowed.
“But Frey’s after us, Mace,” she whispered. “In the north, something’s happened to him. I saw him, after he came back—” Her voice trembled with dread. “He’s mad—he’s a fiend. He’s still after us, Mace—with the green of the ice in his eyes!”
In the changeless violet dusk, the motionless air seemed to congeal about them. Numbing, bitter, insidious, its cold penetrated their furs. A terrible silence closed in on them—the stillness of a world without life.
Jane refused to ride the sled, until, with a little gasping cry, she collapsed on the ice. Blake was putting her on the sled, when Wolf, the great lead dog, went mad. He whirled in the traces and crouched for an instant, with a. singular wailing howl. The green of the ice, Blake thought, was oddly reflected in his eyes.
Out of the crouch, he sprang savagely back upon the other dogs. Two were injured before Blake could snatch up the rifle to kill him.
At the foot of the long, steep ascent to the pass, the exhaustion of the dogs forced a halt. The suffering animals gulped their frozen fish, buried themselves in the snow. Blake pitched the tiny tent, melted water for tea over the primus stove, thawed bread and dried meat. Hot food revived Jane. She and the crippled scientists crept into their sleeping bags, in the warming beam from the disrupter.
Blake’s exhausted companions still slept when he heard a distant droning, saw a dark speck hanging in the south above the trail. The plane was drifting low across the green glaciers, but the fingers of the ice did not attack it—the ice, he thought, must know it for a friend.
Blake leaped instinctively to the disrupter, cut its output down to one kilowatt. But even the weakened beam, he realized, left them clearly visible. He dared not cut it down any farther, for already the green tentacles were writhing nearer. Piercing cold sank into him.
“It’s Frey,” said Lingard, roused. “That’s his plane.”
“I cut down the ray as much as I thought safe,” said Blake. “But it will still give us away.”
“Better turn it up again,” advised the little scientist. “We’ll freeze, without it. And those green things are coming pretty close—they might snatch it away.”
Blake increased the output again. Then he tried the mechanism of the rifle, found it immovable.
“Oil frozen,” he muttered. “Maybe I can thaw it in the ray.”
THE plane wheeled above them, dived. Above roaring motors Blake heard a rattling sound. He saw a line of white puffs march across the ice, toward the tent.
“Machine-gun!” Lingard gasped. Blake snatched the rifle out of the warming beam, tried it again. It leaped and roared in his hands. He flung it to his shoulder and began firing at the plane.
It passed, rose and wheeled and dived again. The ice leaped into white spray under the machine-gun. Standing upright in the golden beam, Blake slipped his extra clips into the rifle, fired until the last shot was gone.
“Gun’s empty,” he muttered. “Guess we’re finished—”
Then he saw the bright yellow ribbon rip backward from the fuselage. He saw the plane slip aside, dive, level, crash against a pinnacle of ice. For a little time the tangle of wreckage was dark. Grey smoke drifted out of it. Then a yellow flame was mounting.
“Got it!” he whispered, savagely exultant. “Gas tank—and maybe the pilot. We can go on, until the others come—”
He turned then, and his triumph gasped and died. Mark Lingard was lying on the ice behind him, a bullet hole through his bandaged temple. Dead.
Bullets had ripped the top of the tent. Quivering with abrupt new apprehension, Blake flung back the flap, peered at Jane. She was very silent. He lifted the fur that was frosted with her breath, saw her weary face peaceful with sleep.
Blake carried Lingard a little away, and left him lying on the snow in his furs. He heated food, and then wakened Jane. They ate, watching the burning plane, while Blake told her what had happened.
“Mark?” she whispered, whitefaced. “Dr. Mark dead! And I didn’t even wake.” She winced with pain.
“Don’t mind that,” said Blake. “But now it’s up to us.”
He dug the dogs out of the snow. Only three remained. Blake got into the traces himself, ahead of them, to break the way. Jane plodded behind.
He fell once, and his foot twisted under him. As Jane came to help him rise, his face was white with agony.
“We’ll never make it,” he gasped bitterly, staring at the ragged summits ahead, that glowed with unhallowed life. “We’re mad.”
But for hours, again, they toiled toward the pass. Then the gaunt-grey malamute, Amber jack, fell dead In the harness. Blake cut him out of the traces, dragged his lean body out of the way of the sled. His mittened hand caressed the shaggy, frost-crusted head, just once.
Jane, looking back, gasped and called out:
“Mace! I see something—something—following!”
“Couldn’t be,” Blake said. “Nothing alive—nothing but the ice. Even the wolves were all dead or gone, months ago.”
But his blue eyes, searching, found the follower. A tiny figure, lonely and dark, it was still far out on the green-glowing barrens. He bent over the sled, found the binoculars. The ruddy glow drained out of his face as he lifted them; he trembled to a new thill.
“Frey! It’s Ellet Frey,” he whispered. “He wasn’t killed, when his plane fell. He’s walking after us, over the ice. His face is white, like frozen flesh. His eyes are mad, and shining green.” He lowered the glasses. “His furs are light. I don’t know what keeps him from freezing.”
JANE was quivering, whitefaced.
“He’s not a man any more,” she whispered fearfully. “He’s a fiend—a fiend of the ice. The ice did something to him, when he was lost in the north.” She crept close to Blake. “The ice has a mind,” she said apprehensively. “Do you think—do you think it could hypnotize, or somehow dominate, another mind?”
Blake tugged at the ice in his red beard.
“That must be it,” he said somberly, “I’ve been sure of it ever since Wolf went mad, with the green of the ice in his eyes.”
Jane was pointing at the rifle. “Can you stop him?”
Blake shook his head. “No ammunition.”
“I’m afraid, Blake. Afraid!”
“We must go on,” said Blake. “He has no burden, but perhaps we can keep ahead.”
When he turned back to the dogs, one was crouching, with a terrible green flaming in her eyes. She launched herself savagely at his throat. He went down under her. Only the thickness of his furs kept her fangs from his jugular, until his hunting knife had found her heart.
