Collected Short Fiction, page 265
Watching the green die in her glaring eyes, he whispered:
“That was the ice.”
Now Flash alone was left. Jane came silently to take the dead husky’s place in the harness. They went on up the slope, often looking back. Sometimes they couldn’t see the tiny lone figure of their pursuer; but when they did, he was always nearer.
“Do you know what he will do, when he catches us?” Jane whispered once, when she had looked with the binoculars at their gaunt, green-eyed Nemesis. “He’ll stop us first, because he is a tool of the ice. He will destroy the bomb. But he will do more—”
Her voice hushed; she shuddered.
Climbing unendingly, at last they dragged the sled into the narrow rocky gorge of the pass, and through it to the point where they could see beyond the range.
Blake stopped, when he saw the machine. Reeling with fatigue, Jane dropped to her knees in the snow. Behind her, Flash, the last husky, gave a short, hoarse bark, and fell dead in the harness, of sheer exhaustion.
Presently Blake laughed—a bitter, short, ironic sound. He limped back past the dead dog to the sled, and sat down on it.
“And we came to smash that?” he whispered. “That! With one little bomb!”
Inert, trembling In the snow, Jane Maddon stared at it. A dull, wondering horror came slowly into her grey eyes.
Mile upon mile ahead of them, beyond a barren plain of ghostly snow, the thing loomed unbelievably gigantic upon the green, dully shining ice. Incredible, colossal, it towered into the eternal vacancy of violet twilight.
Creation of a mind utterly alien to human understanding, of a life that had in common with human life little save the will to live, it was incomprehensible.
Part of it was black. Part of it was metal. Part of it was a machine.
Blake could grasp that much. But the form of it eluded him at the same time that it numbed him with shadowy horror. It was spidery, grotesque, as if it might be constructed of fourth dimensional entities. The black, colossal parts of it—he could find no fitting words for them—were silently moving.
Other parts of it, higher, not black, not metal, were nothing that could be termed mere machine. Their color was merely analogous to blue. They seemed somehow intangible. In material, shape, and function, they were beyond the grasp of the human mind.
The fingers of the ice coiled about the thing. Green arms reached up from the crested ice-waves of the surrounding glaciers, as if to move and adjust its enigmatic parts.
Blake had promised himself that they would rest in the pass. But they waited merely to make tea again, and warm a little food.
“It’s too big,” Jane whispered dazedly. “Too big! We can’t do anything. But we must try.”
“Try—” agreed Blake. “Until we are dead—”
THEY rose beside the sled. He bent to cut Flash out of the traces, and they pulled the sled onward. The slope now was downward, and it ran easily. Limping ahead in the slack traces, Blake warmed to a sudden hope that was like a steaming drink.
“We’ll make it, at this rate!” he called. “If we could explode the bomb at some vital point, it might put the thing out of commission, big as it is.”
“If we could stop it long enough to let the sun shine just a moment,” Jane said, “I think that would kill the ice.” They had emerged from the narrow pass, upon the broad, snow-swept slope that fell toward the machine. In marching legions, the phantoms of green flame met them. Blake was breaking the way. Jane, behind him, carried the disrupter. She swung it back and forth, and the curling, questing tentacles fled from it—and ever returned. Green, swirling fingers circled the sled, moved with it, struck, recoiled, lurked, waited—
Sometimes Blake looked back, while they rested. Once he lowered the binoculars with a hand that trembled.
“I see him,” he said. “Just stalking out of the pass. A gaunt, terrible giant—with the green of the ice in his eyes.”
They were hastening on when far thunder rumbled through the frozen summits behind them. Bewildered, they paused to gaze back up the dark, rugged slope, that burned with the pale, ghostly light of the ice. Blake felt Jane’s hand close convulsively on his arm.
“Mace!” she screamed. “The ice—” Already he saw the motion above them. A vast green-white wave was gathering on the slopes. It was sweeping down upon them.
Then his wild eyes saw the little mess beside them, an age-flattened point of black granite.
“Run!” he screamed to Jane. “If we can get on the rocks, there—”
Jerking the sled about, they drove themselves into a lurching run toward the safety of the mesa. Distant cannon boomed across the glaciers; they shattered with crashes like collapsing cathedrals of glass. The ice quivered and rocked beneath them.
But they were on the slope beneath the little black plateau.
“Come on!” Blake shouted. “We’ll make it—”
The warm golden light of the disrupter went out behind him. He stopped and whirled and saw that Jane had turned out the beam, flung down the little cylinder in the snow. Her face was queerly white. She had paused, with her body straight and tense. Her eyes were glittering strangely.
With a frantic desperate haste, Blake plunged for the disrupter. It was in his hands when Jane sprang upon him, savage and silent. Her bloodless face was a terrible mask, and her grey eyes were shot with a green that was like the green of the ice.
“Jane!” It was a tortured scream. “Jane—”
She was fighting for the precious tube. He held it from her clawing hands, tried to drag her up the rugged slope, toward the little table-land. They were tangled in the harness of the sled. The roar of the avalanche was deafening. Blake felt a sudden, piercing breath of frigid wind.
And a monstrous, freezing black paw crushed him down into roaring dark.
CHAPTER V
Ice and Gold
BLAKE was floating in a green sea and time passed him by like a wind. His body was tired; it was good to float so restfully and forget the wind of time. Yet some nagging problem tugged at his rest, while ages roared above. And at last he knew the trouble: the green sea was cold. It was freezing; green ice was grasping his body.
He battled the hardening frozen fingers, and strove to fling himself up into the wind of time. For there was a task he must do. The world was sinking into the green sea—and a girl. He alone could lift them back into the life of time.
He fought until something tensed in him, something snapped, and suddenly he was wide awake.
He was lying on the flat point of granite that had split the avalanche. Numb wrists and aching ankles refused to move. Hands and feet were bound, he saw, with leather thongs cut from the dog harness.
A low groan, shivering, piteous, twisted his head. He saw Jane Maddon on the ledge beside him, similarly bound. A little of her face was exposed beneath the parka, blue with cold, drawn with pain.
Beyond her, a little cliff dropped from the ledge where they lay, and the greenly shimmering slopes fell away from it, toward the colossal enigma of the machine that had extinguished the sun.
The girl moved. She was sobbing. “Sorry, Mace!” she gasped, bleakly. “I couldn’t help it—I couldn’t! The ice made me do it—the ice—”
“I know,” he whispered. “Don’t you worry!”
Deep relief flooded him, to know that she was herself again.
“Frey?” he breathed. “Frey—”
“He came,” she sobbed, “after the ice struck us. He dug us out, and tied us. I think he’s going to kill us. But now he’s digging again.”
Blake twisted his shivering, stiffening body, to look in the other direction. Beyond the rocky level he saw the pit, where they had been buried in the green wave of snow and ice.
Ellet Frey was in the pit. A haggard, gaunt, tremendous man. His skin, beneath his thin furs, was white as if already frozen. Digging at the rubble of snow and broken ice with white bare hands he was uncovering the sled. He came at the bright steel cylinder of the sigma-bomb.
Blake watched with sinking heart as he unscrewed the little brass detonator from the bomb, and brought it and the empty rifle out of the pit. He laid the detonator on a flat rock, twenty yards away. Deliberately, with an appalling superhuman strength, he snapped the stock off the rifle. Gripping the barrel, he brought the breech mechanism down like a hammer on the detonator. It exploded sharply with a vivid blue flash.
Despair fell like a leaden hand on Blake. That bomb had meant the life of mankind. Grimly he had hoped, somehow, to escape and use it. But without the detonator it was as inert and useless as two hundredweight of stone.
Ellet Frey came stalking across the little mesa to his two prisoners. His bare, craggy face was utterly white. His eyes glowed green. He stopped on the black rock above them, and a dull, strange voice came out of his throat. It was like the voice of some monstrous thing, Blake thought, roaring far-off in a fog.
“Man—” it whispered thickly. “Your life—life of warmth and light —must die— Cold is conqueror—”
The gaunt, gigantic figure pointed one stiff white hand into the north. Blake looked again down the slope of glowing ice. Colossal and incredible beneath the eternal violet night, he saw again the thing that had put out the sun.
The uncanny voice, strange as the aurora whispering through a frozen fog. came again:
“Ice—reigns—”
Green light flamed in the mad eyes beyond the frozen mask. It was a mask —no longer a human face. And that dull, foggy voice was not the voice of Ellet Frey. It was the voice of the ice.
If the supernal, dreadful mind of the ice could speak to men, could it understand them? A sudden trembling seized Blake’s big body. If his mind could meet the mind of the ice, through this thing that had been Ellet Frey, then here was a way to attack.
THE voice was saying, “Man—must die—”
Blake jerked hip head toward Jane. “Maybe he must!” he said, in a low, swift whisper. “But Frey didn’t find the disrupter. It’s still buried beneath the ice. And when I saw that the avalanche would overtake us I set it like a time bomb. It will go off after half an hour. Eight ounces of activated gold—”
“What!” the girl gasped with astonished wonder. “I didn’t—”
“Hush!” whispered Blake. “He mustn’t hear—might smash it—”
But the green fire had already flamed up in the hollow eyes of Ellet Frey, like dreadful panic burning. The gaunt tremendous figure whirled, ran back into the pit. Furiously, bare white hands dug into ice and snow.
Blake’s hope trembled before sudden fear. Could the ice match his cunning with cunning enough to suspect? Or could its strange mind read man’s mind? He must carry on.
“I didn’t tell you,” he told Jane. “We must escape before it explodes. Any minute—”
He writhed toward her, tugged with his teeth at her binding thongs. The frozen leather seemed hard as iron. His teeth ached to the chill. The knots were drawn tight; he accomplished nothing—
“He has it!” Jane’s voice was sudden, fearful. “He’s bringing it out of the pit!”
Striving to conceal his elation, Blake glanced at the giant form stalking with the little tube to the rock where he had smashed the detonator.
“Can’t manage the knots,” he gasped. “Got to go over the ledge. Any second now—”
“I can’t—” Jane sobbed faintly. “Can’t move—”
Blake caught her frozen furs in his teeth; writhing, he inched his way toward the ledge, dragged her beside him. Behind him, with the lifeless precision with which a robot might move, the tall haggard thing laid the tube on a rock, and lifted the barrel of the broken rifle above it.
In the last, frantic instant, Blake flung himself off the ledge, dragging Jane after him with his teeth. They slipped twenty feet down the face of the little cliff, into deep soft snow that buried them.
“Shut your eyes!” Blake whispered urgently against the smothering snow. “Cover your face. Or the explosion might blind you—”
The universe turned into golden flame. Blake thrust his head deeper in the snow, pushed the fur parka down over his eyes. He tried to twist his body to shelter Jane’s head.
Even through snow and fur and eyelids, the light came in a merciless, penetrating flood. Sudden heat was in the air, for an instant grateful, then terrible. The air was too hot to breathe. The snow melted above them. Water drenched them, cold at first, then steaming.
An eternity of flaming agony that slowly grew tolerable.
And a time came when they could uncover their eyes and sit up at the foot of the little cliff that had sheltered them. For many yards the snow was gone, the rocks hot and dry.
Bewildered, Jane asked faintly, “What happened?”
“There was no other way,” Blake muttered. “I couldn’t move; it was my mind against the mind of the ice. And I think I had a right to do it, after what the ice did to you. It was just, anyhow, that the human slave of the ice should destroy it.”
“But what did you do?”
“I said that the disrupter was a bomb,” said Blake. “I made Frey smash it. And when he smashed the tau-ray tube it left eight ounces of gold free to disintegrate at the full rate—half the atoms breaking down every fifty-nine seconds.
“I think the radiation wasn’t good for the ice.”
Anxiously, his streaming, half-blind eyes were peering into the north. Glaciers and snowfields were grey and white: the green of alien sentience was gone. The green streamers of flame no longer tended the fantastic machine.
“See!” Blake breathed exultantly. “That break in the rhythm of its motion! The ice is dead, and the machine is running wild—”
The hot rocks shivered abruptly. Roar of terrific grinding crashes came rolling up the slope. And suddenly the incomprehensible upper parts of the thing, looming so monstrously against the violet sky, seemed to twist and crumple. They vanished in a blinding flicker of colorless energy.
THE violet sky brightened, then, into the hazy blue of an arctic day. A flood of rosy light washed the slope below.
“The sun!” Jane was sobbing with hysterical joy. “It’s the sun!”
Wet from the melting snow, their leather bonds stretched. Blake slipped his hands free, untied himself and Jane. Though the low sun still burned through the mists on the horizon, the air grew cold again as the atomic flame died. Stiff and weary, they climbed back to the little mesa.
Where Frey had laid the disrupter to smash it a ten-foot pool of molten rock still glowed dull red. Creeping up to its grateful heat, Blake saw that the black rock beyond was smeared with the white lime from an incinerated skeleton.
“Frey,” he said, “must have died Instantly.”
“I think that he died days ago, when he was lost on the ice.” Jane shuddered. “I think the ice had stolen his body—”
That gaunt, green-eyed, frozen mask came back to Blake like a haunting thing. He shut his eyes. His bearded face twitched. Seeing his pain, Jane said hastily:
“I’m sorry the disrupter is ruined. Can you build another, Mace?”
“Not here,” he said gloomily. “Guess we’re finished, Jane. We’re lost here, without much food, or any way to travel. We can keep alive till the rock gets cold—”
His voice ended abruptly. He stared into the south, away from the colossal ruin of the black machine. The dull saffron sun hung low in the mist above the ice-clad range.
“There!” Jane cried joyously. “Look!” The music of motors grew louder and louder. “It’s the army planes that followed Frey. They must have seen the light when your tube exploded.
“They see us, already I They’ll take us back—”
Then she was in Blake’s arms. Looking into her wide grey eyes, so near, Blake saw little gleams of green—like the green of the ice. Had they been there always? Or—
He shivered, and kissed her.
The Mark of the Monster
A vivid thrill-tale of the black altar on the hill-top, and the dark doom that hung over two lovers like a living horror—by the author of “Golden Blood”.
1. The Brooding Horror
BEYOND the miserable poverty of Creston, its squalid ignorance and its rotting antiquity, there is something more appalling—something that has always seemed to me like a colossal, invisible spider, gloating over the broken victims in its intangible, unbreakable web. I had escaped it once; now I dared it again to set free Valyne Kirk.
Brakes shrieking, the antiquated bus pitched down the rutted mountain road. Carrying away all the sanity of the modem world, it left me alone and oppressed amid the sinister shadows of the time-crushed village.
I shuddered, for I felt that Creston was the unhappy ghost of a town, sprawling dead in this desolate vale. Its narrow, high-peaked houses were bleached and gray as decaying skulls; their broken windows leered like vacant eyeholes at the gloomy, frowning hills.
The spirited young all have fled from Creston. No children laugh in the ancient, cobbled streets. And I found nothing new in the years since I had gone—unless it was this spirit of festering evil, come to haunt the old town’s tomb.
Valyne Kirk had promised to meet me; for I had come with seven years’ earnings, to take her away from Creston, for ever. Eagerly I looked for her, up and down the unkempt squalor of the narrow street. After seven years, the sweet memory of her burned still like a sacred flame within my soul. The picture of her quiet, violet-eyed face, framed in dark and shining hair, remained etched into my heart.
But she didn’t come. And somber premonitions rose to cloud my joy. For in my pocket was that strange letter from Doctor Kyle, my aged adopted father. Upon my very heart was graven its puzzling and sinister warning:
My son, you write that you are coming home t® marry Valyne Kirk. I shall not, I dare not, tell you why—but may God in his mercy forbid that so monstrous a crime should be!
