Collected Short Fiction, page 28
A short time after he showed me three helmets, as he called them. They were little more than bags of wire gauze to be put over our heads. He demonstrated that an electroscope draped with one of them remained entirely unaffected by charges brought near it; but it seemed a ridiculously inadequate protection against that terror.
We went hunting several times, for the benefit of the little plant. After the first few days, Sam let it go along, hanging on his coat. It was growing very fast, and developing remarkable characteristics. It showed surprising intelligence. Sam seemed to have a real affection for it, and it, in turn, seemed to love him.
I never ceased to feel the strangeness of those expeditions over the rolling green grasslands, among the sparsely scattered flowering trees, in the hot damp air and the intense red light. We shot two more animals like the first, and three others of a smaller variety, which somewhat resembled large rabbits.
Very shortly after Sam had perfected his electroscreen helmets, he planned another expedition to the hill where we had so nearly met incredible disaster. We carried a telescope, electrometers, spectroscope, and a few pieces of Sam’s recently developed and highly complicated apparatus, which he had neglected to name, for detecting and analyzing etheric waves.
Xenora insisted on going with us, and there seemed no reason for leaving her behind, since Sam had perfect confidence in the efficacy of his new helmets, and since the girl herself was an excellent woodsman, and could undertake to keep us from getting lost.
We had a long hot march of it across the green plateau among the purple trees, with the fierce beams of the crimson sky pouring down upon us. Burdened with the heavy instruments, we were worn out when we reached the summit. I had suggested that we come in the machine, but Sam wanted to keep it out of the sight of the weird enemy we fought.
Once more we gazed across the vast valley of purple and green, to the mists of ruby light over that abyss beyond the distant lake, in which the violet beams still danced and pulsed. And hardly did we have our apparatus set up when we saw that unearthly, serpentlike beam of green fire writhe up out of the vale of mystery into the rosy haze!
We had on the insulating shields, and I felt nothing of the inexplicable horror of the former occasion; though, of course, the whole adventure was certainly terrible enough. But now that strange thing of green seemed distant and devoid of menace. By way of experiment, I ventured to raise my helmet. The terror caught me like a cold and rushing torrent that swept me almost off my feet! I was glad enough to get the wire gauze fastened back about my head again.
“It is the Lord of Flame,” Xenora cried, “looking over toward the city of my people, to see who will be taken to become his slaves. This is a wonderful thing, Barsoni Sam, that lets us not feel its power!”—Barsoni being a word that means ‘great man,’ in the tongue of Lothar.
For many minutes the amazing shape of twisting green radiance hung in the air. Sam was busy with his apparatus, squinting at the thing through telescope and spectroscope, and reading his other devices. At last the awful, throbbing thing faded away, and died into nothingness. Only the violet lances were left in the mist.
“Many of my theories were substantiated,” Sam informed me, almost jubilant. “And I got a lot of new data! It is rather odd, but the light from that thing shows the helium lines as luminous bands, not as the dark lines that might be expected to rise from the absorption of the helium in this atmosphere! I can hardly understand it!”
He said nothing more, but was sunk deep in thought as we quickly gathered the instruments and hastened silently down the hill. I felt that he had won a notable victory in the invention of the thought-insulating helmets. We arrived at the machine again without accident.
CHAPTER XXII
The Silver Sphere
FOR several days longer, Sam continued his labors in the laboratory. During that time “Alexander,” the flying plant, developed remarkably. Before we moved, it had a wing-spread of two or three feet. I have spoken of its intelligence. It soon learned to flutter to the guns when we were preparing to hunt. Sam talked to it incessantly, and declared that it could understand him. He said it could even make its thoughts known by the varying pattern of colors on its fringe of brilliant membrane. Presently he had it trained to dry dishes and to do other similar tasks in the galley.
Of course the thing never learned to speak. In fact, it was devoid of vocal organs, and incapable of making a sound, though its hearing seemed to be good enough. It appeared to communicate its emotions and thoughts by means of changes of color in the tissue-like membrane that I have termed a flower. And, from a strictly scientific point of view, communication by light, or sight, is quite as logical as communication by sound.
Sam examined the black, rod-like organs projecting from the flower on the thing, and said that each of them bore thousands of tiny eyes, like the compound eyes of an insect.
After we had been in the vicinity for perhaps two weeks by upper world time, we started the Omnimobile’s great motors again, and moved northward. I had not told Xenora about my talk with Sam—our minds were too closely attuned to require much conversation. I knew that she understood that our maneuver would probably mean our sacrifice to the cause of the world. She said nothing of it, but I thought I detected a sadness in her manner.
During all the hours that Sam had been in his laboratory, alone or with Alexander, I had spent most of the time with Xenora. We wandered together about the meadows, or sat in the cabin to escape the almost intolerable heat. Always I loved her more, brimming as she was with humor and sympathy and love. And bitterly I cursed the fate that was dragging us both to our doom!
Even at the beginning, Sam’s scientific achievements had been so far above my understanding, that I would scarcely comprehend them, and his later speculations regarding the menace of the abyss were so abstruse that I quite failed to follow them. His little workshop forward was crammed with strange machinery’, some of it humming incessantly. Indeed, his apparatus was still keeping up the interference that prevented the freezing of the earth!
Sam had been signally unsuccessful in getting any scientific information from Xenora, for the simple reason that she had none to impart. But, from her geographical knowledge, he attempted to draw a map, showing the locations of Lothar, of Mutron, and of the pit of the Lord of Flame.
It seemed that there was a strip a score of miles in width between the farther blue walls of the abyss and the great lake we had seen. The pit of Xath seemed to be a great crater lying in that strip. On the brink of the crater Xenora located her “City of the Sleepers,” or Mutron. The domain of the last city of Lothar, where she had spent her childhood, lay along the cliffs far to the west of there.
Our boldest plan of action would have been to hurl the machine, by means of the rocket tubes, into the abyss in a direct attack on the Lord of Flame; but Sam, for reasons he did not divulge, doubted the success of such a maneuver. He wished to keep up his researches, and possibly to visit the city of Lothar. His apparatus told him that hidden forces were again stirring in the ether.
For ten hours we moved toward the north, making a long detour to westward to keep within a valley, and always trying to take advantage of such cover as was offered by the purple trees. The country was, for the most part, rolling and green, with the great flowering trees dotting the hills and plains but sparsely. The blazing radiation of the eternal crimson day was undiminished, but the temperature fell slightly with increased altitude.
Xenora and I were together at the cabin control-board, driving the machine; and Sam was in the conning-tower, with the little gun, ready for emergencies. When we had been moving for some ten hours, we mounted a low, bare hill, and saw in the little green valley before us a thicker forest of the bright purple trees, offering good cover for the machine.
We had crossed the summit, and I had increased the speed to ten miles per hour in haste to reach the trees, in spite of Sam’s fear that the operation of the motors at anything like full capacity would create a disturbance in the ether that our hidden enemies would pick up.
Suddenly I saw a strange thing skimming along over the bright forest before us—in our direction! It looked like a bright silver globe, many feet in diameter! It floated a few hundred feet above the trees, drifting smoothly along like a bright metal balloon in a very swift wind. There was no visible propulsive mechanism.
I shouted a warning to Sam through the speaking tube, to stand by his little gun.
Xenora laid a light hand on my shoulder and said, in a tense voice: “It is the Sleepers of Mutron, the slaves of the Lord of Flame! They will fight to death—they know not fear!”
As the silver sphere drifted swiftly and silently down upon us, as though borne by an invisible wind, twice I caught a glimpse of a slender ray of purple flame, that darted out of it and moved searchingly over the bare greensward below. And then a rich purple beam fell suddenly and intensely upon the Omnimobile!
When that misty finger of purple light discovered us, I saw a strange vortex of pale green fire spring up about the globe and reach out in our direction. Suddenly I realized that this ship was of the same appearance as the weird thing that had destroyed our cottage! Small hope, I thought, if that force of atomic disintegration were to be released again!
I heard the rapid crashing of the machine gun, as Sam began to fire, and presently bursts of smoke appeared about the gleaming sphere. But to hit a relatively small and rapidly moving target even a mile away is no mean feat of marksmanship. I drove rapidly for the purple wood, but with little hope of getting there before the terrible red disintegration had melted us away.
Suddenly I heard the drone of some of Sam’s new machinery going into action. He had mounted his switches and dials in the conning-tower, so he could control it from where he stood. Vivid blue electric flame quivered and flashed over the metal parts of the machine as his new weapons went into play!
The floating globe of silver drifted nearer, and the misty vortex of green fire about us grew more intense. A strange red glow stole over the vegetation around us, and a solitary purple tree ahead burst into crimson flame. Then the sparkling fingers of purple fire reached out at us again from the sphere. I wondered vaguely why the strange force was not acting upon us. I did not know, until it was all over, that Sam’s vacuum tubes had set up a repulsive screen in the ether, protecting us from the electronic vortex!
Abruptly an intensely bright, blinding tongue of white flame leapt toward the silver thing from the great platinum electrode on the nose of the Omnimobile! Sam had turned loose his electric arc! The flame struck the globe, impinging upon it like a jet of fire, converting it into a ball of supernal light!
Then it fell! It plunged toward the forest in a gleaming curve! The green vortex of the disintegrator ray was gone, and the purple fingers shone no longer! The incandescent shell crashed out of sight beyond the purple trees!
CHAPTER XXIII
The Green Slaves
SAM snapped off the arc as the silver ship fell, and the drumming of the generators stopped. For a little time the world was very still. Xenora stood tense and silent beside me. As I turned toward her, I caught the slight perfume of her dark hair.
Indeed, the Green Girl was a beautiful being! The white flannels she wore failed to conceal the delectable curves of her slight and boyish figure. Her rich, red lips were parted slightly, in the unconscious intensity of her outward gaze.
Abruptly she became conscious of my look, and turned to face me, with a quick smile on her face. There was a radiant, joyous light in her eyes. The soft green tint of her skin was obscured by the rich, warm flush of her excitement, and she smiled with gladness.
Impulsively she reached her slender hand out to take mine. “You have won, Melvin Dane!” her soft voice said. “The ship of Mutron is fallen! We shall not be slaves of the Lord of Flame! We shall not die the violet death in the pit of Xath!”
“I hope not, my Xenora,” I said. “I hope——” and I stopped in a little confusion. I was not really embarrassed, but I could not go on. Really, talking to a princess like Xenora is quite a different thing from making protestations of love to a being of one’s dreams.
“What is it that you hope?” she said quickly, with an impish smile.
Sam saved me by coming in from the turret, begrimed with the smoke of the little cannon. He was a wonderful man. He was still strong, erect, and confident, despite the load of toil and hardship our adventure was putting upon his seventy years. His white hair was tousled, and he was cheerfully loading up his ancient pipe, as calmly as if he were in his own kitchen in Florida.
“Looks like the arc did for ’em all right,” he said briskly. “Suppose we get over and take a look. We might pick up something new.”
“Very well,” I assented, and turned to start the motors. I could not resist a grin at Xenora, who was still regarding me with a speculative smile. She laughed back at me; then was suddenly serious.
“Be careful! The Sleepers of Mutron! They might be alive in the wreck! As long as they breathe, the Lord of Flame rules them!”
I started the generators, and the Omnimobile rolled heavily down across the green slope, and through the fringe of flaming purple trees. In a few minutes we came upon the wreck of the silver car, a great tangle of twisted wreckage, half fused by the electricity, and bent and torn by the fall. It lay in the little open space, with a great tree splintered and smoking under it, and the ground about empurpled with fallen petals. The twisted metal plates gleamed brightly in the light of the scarlet sky.
I stopped the Omnimobile, and we got out and approached the wrecked machine. There was a vast mass of the debris. The globe must have been forty feet in diameter. We spent several minutes in gazing at it from different angles, and then Sam and I climbed into the tangle of bent white plates and massive twisted girders.
The machinery had been too completely destroyed for us to be sure just how it worked. But Sam thought that the shell had carried tanks of water, the gravity of which had been negatived by the emanations from tanks of the same luminous gas which supported the roof of waters, lifting the ship. From the nature of the fragments of electrical machinery we observed, it seemed that the horizontal propulsion was attained by the ionization and repulsion of the helium atoms in the air. The apparatus that had produced the atomic disintegration was too badly wrecked to be identified.
Presently I came upon the body of a man, caught between two twisted bars, and cut half in two. The body was naked. It had a greenish cast that was darker by far than that of Xenora’s fair skin. The physique, and the size and shape of the head, showed a race of high intellectual development.
The dead man had a metal frame clamped upon his back. It was twisted and broken, and whatever had been fastened upon his body had been torn away in the crash. And the corpse had upon its back the strange violet stains that had been upon Xenora when we found her!
Presently Sam found another body. It had been half burned up by the arc. It, too, had the metal frame upon it, and the thing the frame was to hold was still clamped to it! The body bore, fastened to the back with those cruel metal clamps, a six-sided bar of blue metal! It was six inches in diameter and two feet long!
“This must be the thing Xenora calls a ‘fire crystal,’ ” Sam said, “though I don’t see any fire about it. It’s damned queer!”
“Do you suppose there is machinery in the bar, that generates forces or currents that move the man about like a puppet?”
“Might be. I don’t know. The metal thing may be a receiver for the occult force set up in the ether by the Lord of Flame—hypnotism by radio, perhaps, or something of the kind.”
“Anyhow, as you said, it’s damned queer, like everything else we’ve found here—excepting Xenora.”
“Suppose we take the thing along, and open it up when we have time?”
He produced a pair of pliers, and we twisted the odd blue bar out of its frame, and carried it to the machine. It was oddly light to be metal, though it must have been an irksome burden to the one on which it was fastened. We got aboard again, and moved for the cover of the purple wood, for we did not know how soon relief would come for the fallen ship. But Xenora assured us that the Lunaks, as she called the flying things, quite frequently destroyed the ships of Mutron, and that the fate of this one would be laid to them.
CHAPTER XXIV
The Blue Prism
FOR perhaps thirty miles we drove the great machine through the brilliant forest, southward down a broad valley. At last we stopped in a little grove of tall flowering trees, close by the cool crystal stream. Beyond the grove was a little patch of green clearing with the great purple trees closing in all about it. It was a peaceful spot, weirdly beautiful, and it seemed secure enough. The unceasing wind was not so hot beneath the great trees, and they shielded us from the burning, crimson glare of the sky.
The Omnimobile seemed safely hidden beneath the masses of purple bloom; and whenever we were tired, or thought ourselves in danger, we could retire to the quiet security of its cool interior, behind the thick metal walls. Frankly, I hoped that our stay there would be a long one. I tried to forget the menace that hung over the earth.
Our life there was simple, and, for my part, I was supremely happy. Or not quite supremely, for I could not quite still my conscience. I was pretty well resigned to fate, however. With such a girl as Xenora, a man might be supremely happy anywhere. We tramped together about the grove, gathered the tiny, bright-red flowers in the green meadows, and bathed in the cool dark pools, where the river flowed beneath the purple trees. Sometimes she sang to me the folk-songs of her people, monuments of the high estate that Lothar had once enjoyed.
