Collected Short Fiction, page 281
Dim in the green haze of the ice, I presently distinguished a Cyclopean machine. Resting on tremendous skids which lay far along the floor of the valley, it was all of darkly gleaming red-black metal. A colossal bulging hull, surrounded with a confusion of struts and braces, masts and booms and metal arms, mysterious rods and vanes, towered even above the ridge where we stood. It was like the bloated body of some monstrous spider, crouching with folded limbs, set to spring.
Here and there about those crimson planes and arms, frozen motionless in the green mist of ice, I saw black and hideous beings like the Watcher: scaled bodies headless and bulging, supported on triple ophidian limbs.
An alien horror touched me, as we stood on that black ridge beneath the ice. It was the stark menace of the Outside: the terror of worlds strange beyond conception, of powers and entities supernal, monstrous, utterly alien. That stark, wondering, elemental dread—some dim instinctive inkling of it, I think, is at the basis of many primitive religions—is the most terrible emotion a human being can feel.
DIMLY through the numbness of my dread, as if I dreamed within a dream, I heard the piping of Maru-Mora, and Karalee spoke:
“That is the ship that came from—Beyond. And They are the Tharshoon. They came to conquer Earth. That was in another age, before the ice came here. This was a fair world, then, and my people ruled it. Man was not born.”
I knew that this was Maru-Mora speaking, through the lips of the wide-eyed, terror-dazed girl.
“The Tharshoon brought fearsome weapons: giant needles that poured out terrible red flame. Even their eyes could stare us into—nothingness. And we had none. We had been a people of peace.
“The invaders attacked our white cities, overwhelmed them in horror and death. We were without defense, until I, the Seeker, who had long since given up my body on the altar of science, discovered a power that made them sleep.
“By that time, it was too late to save my people. They all had perished. But I lived—when rather I had died. I stopped the Tharshoon, in the hour of their victory. And I have stood guard upon them, whom I could not destroy.”
The half-chanting voice of Karalee—speaking, I knew, the thoughts of the strange elder being—had become oddly like the piping of Maru-Mora. It was plaintively sorrowful, weary with age-old loneliness, piercing with a yearning beyond words.
“The world has changed its axis. The ice has come to bind the sleepers more securely. Your race of man has risen from the northern jungle beasts. And still I wait and watch. . . . And the Tharshoon shall not wake!”
However amazing that scrap of Earth-history, it was, in my singular mental state, somehow credible. I knew Antarctica had once been tropical; it is rich with coal seams; our survey had revealed a rich Jurassic fossil flora of ferns, conifers and cycads, within fifty miles of the pole; I was familiar with the various theories of axial shift and continental drift. For the rest of it, the hideous forms of the invaders and the Seeker’s exotic beauty were here before my eyes.
Yes, I accepted it without question, then. And the ray of understanding merely increased my shocked and reeling dread. Maru-Mora was piping again, and the girl said anxiously:
“Come. We must return. Maru-Mora’s strength is low. Should it fail, we all must perish.”
For myself, I was eager to escape. The green mist of ice was suddenly crushing, suffocating. And I was sick from the overwhelming horror of that ship and its monstrous crew.
But the tiny golden fingers tightened on my hand, and the girl’s. We left the black ridge beside that vessel from “Beyond,” drove upward through the malachite haze of the ice. We swept over the glaciers again, toward the towering black range and the time-battered summit where the purple pylon stood.
I glimpsed the girl’s body waiting, rigid in its furs—not a muscle had moved since we left. Then we were beside it, and there was but one Karalee. Blue with cold, shuddering, she began beating her mittened hands stiffly against her sides.
The Seeker piped again, and she turned to me, gasping:
“You have seen them, now, Ron Dunbar. The eternal Sleepers—if they are waked, your world will die! Let them sleep—do not try to thaw the ice—and don’t come back again.”
“But I am coming back.” I tugged toward her, against the strange strength of Maru-Mora’s hand. “For I love you, Karalee.”
The shivering girl started toward me, eagerly. But the eery voice of Maru-Mora stopped her. The white oval of her face went starkly rigid. Her wide blue eyes turned dark with dread.
“No, Ron, don’t come back!” she sobbed. “For you will die, and I, and all the world——”
The Seeker piped again, imperatively. The girl turned slowly, as if in reluctant obedience. Her dry eyes looked back at me, black with tragedy, mutely imploring. She tried to speak, and could not. She went stiffly, at last, down the steps in the fissure, and through the black door.
“Karalee——” I called after her, vainly. The door closed ponderously. I was still staring at it when I felt the Seeker’s tiny fingers tugging at my hand.
She drew me toward the side of the pylon. The purple transparency of it towered sheer out of the black granite. Frost of ages had splintered and crumbled the stone, blizzards of ages carved it grotesquely. That Cyclopean crystal, however, remained diamond-hard, diamond-polished; it was deeply graven with the lost runes of a world dead before the coming of the ice.
One moment she paused against that amethystine wall. Wondrous being! A fluted spiral vase of opalescent pearl, holding flower-like an elfin queen, golden-robed and golden-crowned, crimson-plumed. Last and greatest of a people lost! Maru-Mora, the Seeker!
The deep purple wells of her immense eyes regarded me soberly, as if with unuttered warning. Her delicate seven-fingered hand gestured toward Karalee’s door. Her scarlet mouth pouted to a single admonishing note.
Then her furry fingers released me. As easily as we had entered the ice, she drifted through that adamantine wall, into the crystal pylon. She seemed to relax. For an instant I watched her still, sinking peacefully through its pellucid depths.
Then I turned. I tried to walk back toward the crevice in the rock that opened to Karalee’s abode. But the world splintered about me. I was crushed beneath a black, appalling avalanche of pain. . . .
And then I was in bed again, back in my room at the Aero Club.
5. Beyond the Pole
EVEN now, writing these words, I am overcome with a black tide of guilt. For the warning in that singular vision had been explicit, unmistakable. Had I but been wise enough to heed it, what untold horror and death might have been averted!
The silent hands of the electric clock, when I looked, stood at three-forty. My body, which had lain thiry-five minutes uncovered and motionless, was stiff with cold, yet strangely damp with sweat. A blinding headache splintered through the back of my brain. Clambering uncertainly out of the bed, I found myself trembling with nervous exhaustion, sound heart fluttering as if it had come through some terrific strain.
At first I could hardly stand, but I felt better as movement restored circulation. I wouldn’t, I decided, call a doctor; what I wanted was a chance to think over what had happened. After a few turns around the room, I took two aspirins, smoked out a pipe, and went back to bed—but not to sleep that night.
For my mind was still too full of Maru-Mora’s supernal wonder; of the immemorial ice-drowned horror of the Sleepers; of Karalee’s young intoxicating beauty. Desperately I wrestled with the terrible question: had it been real, or a dream?
It all had been absolutely convincing as it passed; doubt had only come afterward. It had seemed too perfect in detail, too strangely coherent, too fearfully alien, to be a dream—for the dreaming mind commonly reflects only the familiar patterns of the day, creating nothing new. But the stiff orthodoxy of my scientific training balked at accepting it as anything more than dream.
Could the human mind exist outside the body?—fly ten thousand miles and back in half an hour?—dive a mile beneath the ice cap?
That was childish superstition; any enlightened savage would know better.
The Seeker—was she possible? A prehuman being as high as mankind—or higher; ageless dweller in a crystal block; flitting intangibly over the planet at the speed of thought! Who would believe my tale of Maru-Mora?
The Tharshoon—could such monstrosities be? Could sentient invaders have crossed the gulf from some unimaginable Beyond? Assuming that they came when a tropical wilderness covered the present polar continent, could they have survived ten or a hundred million years beneath the ice? The scientist in me answered those questions with an outraged “No!”
Moreover, at the risk of greater blame, but for the sake of honesty, I must confess that even if I had been fairly convinced of the reality of that experience—still I might have gone. For a kind of foolhardiness—or it may be only egotism—has made me ever seek danger rather than avoid it. Not that I am fearless, at all; merely that great peril has a resistless fascination, even when it terrifies me.
And then, besides, I had seen Karalee.
That is all my apology. I merely hope the reader will try to understand why I chose to ignore that singular warning—why I strove to credit it, in my own mind, to a heavy supper and my worries about Doctor Harding and our flight to the south.
I SAID nothing at all to my associates about that astounding dream. Our preparations were completed with little delay. On the afternoon of February 21, the last bulky crates of Bell’s atomic apparatus were stowed aboard the Austral Queen, moored in San Francisco Bay. The next morning we took off for Antarctica, via Honolulu, Suva, and Dunedin.
We were five. Remembering the loyal faith of jerry Ware, I might have known that no husband of hers would go into peril without her by his side.
A strange haze that forewarned of an early blizzard met us, as we came down across the dark polar sea. In the pale light of the low sun reddening behind us in the north, it shimmered with a curious pellucid saffron radiance. The towering white-crowned icebergs loomed out of it with a suddenness always startling.
Flying low, no more than a frail mote lost in the ominous immensity of this ice-walled sea at the bottom of the world, the Austral Queen soon battled a freezing headwind.
A big, four-motored amphibian transport, she had served me loyally through two previous expeditions. But she was too heavily laden, now, with the five of us, our winter’s supplies and equipment, and the nine tons of Bell’s apparatus.
The blizzard, as if to give warning of the grim night to come, met us with savage fury. Sometimes it drove us perilously close to the fangs of the ice; sometimes its opposing violence held us motionless.
Tommy Veering had spelled me at the controls, while I got a little sleep back on the dunnage that filled half the cabin, but he called me forward as the wind grew worse, in the sixties. I was tired—for all the flight had been a desperate race against the polar night. Yet, back at the controls, I found an old elation. I shared the victory of the ship as she defied the teeth of the ice and the sea’s cold maw, and met the blows of the bitter wind.
Floes and bergs became more frequent, and at last the white pack was beneath us. The desolate Balleny Islands were behind. We veered a little eastward, around Cape Adare, and battled our way along the grim coast of South Victoria Land.
Dim-shrouded in the blizzard, the dark masses of Mount Erebus and Mount Terror crept down to our right, and at last the Ross Barrier came marching out of the ever-thickening saffron mists, a black and hostile wall towering hundreds of feet to the white desert of flying snow.
Jerry Harding had come up into the cockpit, after Veering went back, bringing hot coffee. Her brave gray eyes scanned the wall of ice ahead; then she looked at me, and her voice came quiet and grave:
“We are flying very low, Ron. Do you think——”
“I’ve been trying to keep under the wind,” I said. “The ship is heavy, but she’ll climb—she has to climb eighteen thousand feet to cross the passes into the Stapledon Basin. But she’ll pull through.”
“I hope so, Ron,” Jerry said. “Aston has staked everything. . . . So much depends on us—a whole new world!”
The blizzard screaming off the ice shelf, as I brought the ship up, struck like the hand of a demoniac giant. She shuddered like a stricken thing, and plunged down again into the mist of ice crystal whipped off the frozen barrier.
Harding’s wife stifled her instinctive cry of fear, but her white small hand went convulsively tight on my shoulder. Her gray eyes looked at me, big with that terrible question.
“It’s all right, Jerry.” I tried to get some calm into my voice. “The Queen has never failed me yet. She’s brave—as a woman!”
And she didn’t fail me then. She came up again, with motors thundering wide open, through that flying spume of frost. She hung, evenly battling the wind, for a heart-breaking moment above the frozen blade that edged the ice plateau. She sank—lifted—leapt ahead.
“And here we are—on the world we’ve come to conquer.”
Jerry Harding caught a breath of relief, and her hand relaxed on my shoulder.
She leaned across to peer down at the polar world, thickly misted with blizzard-whipped snow, savage-fanged with hummocks and pressure ridges, black-scarred with abysmal crevasses.
Then again something happened that it is difficult to account for in the cold rational light of established science. A small thing in itself, perhaps—merely the inexplicable sensation of an instant—but terrible in its significance.
I had looked aside at Jerry’s frail loveliness, her pale lips now parted with a little smile. And some warning tentacle of cold reached suddenly into the insulated cabin, to touch my spine. Something, I know, made me shudder, made my trembling hands knot hard on the wheel.
It was a thing I could not explain, any more than the dream of the Seeker. But in that instant, as surely as if I had seen her lying in her coffin, I knew that Jerry was doomed.
She knew it, too. She felt the same ghastly intuition—that was the terrible part. Otherwise I should have ignored it, set it down to fatigue and my own vague fears, for I have never been ruled by hunches.
Her face went abruptly paler. She caught her breath, and her white lips set. For a moment her whole thin body was rigid. Then her gray eyes looked at me, suddenly dark, dreadful, shadowed with the doom I knew they had seen.
“Quite a bump, we passed,” I said, as easily as I could. “Made me giddy for a moment, and nearly got the controls.”
For a long, terrible moment, her tortured eyes looked into my face, straining as if to read some awful secret. I tried not to let her know I had shared that fearful premonition. At last she swallowed uneasily.
“Ron,” she said uncertainly, “if—if anything should happen to me, please look after Aston. He needs someone. He isn’t—he’s not quite himself.”
And she left me, in a moment, and went back to her husband.
I TRIED to deny or forget that disturbing, uncanny sensation. But it clung and grew in my brain, like something evil and alive. And the difficulties ahead seemed suddenly a more terrible barrier than the wall of ice we had passed. Where lay any hope of success? What impress could four men and a woman make upon this eternal citadel of winter?
The tense hours passed. We drove on into the blizzard, above the featureless white surface of the Barrier. As our load of fuel was lightened, I fought for altitude to gain the passes and plateaus before us.
The barren summits of the Commonwealth Range behind, we flew up the long inlet of the Barrier, beside Queen Maud’s Range. The Austral Queen labored bravely upward, battled the shrieking wind that hurled her at the black crags that walled a glacier-carven pass, and we were at last above the polar plateau.
We passed seventy miles to the left of the Pole itself. For two hours we fought the tempest that raged down beside the Mountains of Despair, across beyond the Pole, before we reached the only pass. It was the highest on the flight, and there we met the most savage wind. I had to drop half our reserve tanks of gasoline, before the ship found courage to lift above the barrier.
Beyond we came down into the Stapledon Basin: the site that Bell had chosen for our attempt to thaw the ice. It was an ice-dad plateau nine thousand feet high, walled on all sides with dark tremendous ranges towering above the glaciers.
Far across it, a hundred and forty miles away and invisible in the hazy fury of the blizzard, rose, I knew, that mighty unexplored transpolar range that I had glimpsed and named the Mountains of Uranus—on whose summit, in the dream, I had seen the purple pylon of the Seeker.
I had resolved to discount the dream. But now I found myself straining my eyes through the bleak gray mist, wondering, dwelling even upon the bright memory of the girl Karalee—until a jutting rocky ridge broke the ice beneath us, and it was time to land.
Wind and altitude made that landing difficult. The heavy-burdened plane came hurtling down far too swiftly. A black granite boulder loomed suddenly out of the blinding drift-snow whipped along the surface. Our skids crashed against the ice crust. The ship bounced, lurched awkwardly around the boulder, buried her nose in the drift beyond.
The flight was ended.
6. The Haunted Camp
I OPENED a hatch and dug my way to the surface. Merry Bell followed me up into the blizzard. It had moderated to a mere fifty-mile gale, but still at nine thousand feet, at forty below, it could pierce our furs and sear our lungs.
A welter of dark outcroppings of shattered granite and fantastically carved white drifts surrounded us. The desolate rugged ice beyond was like a wild sea congealed in the midst of a furious storm. The dark ranges that walled the Basin, fifty to eighty miles away, were lost in lead-gray mist.
Bell was staring about, shivering.
“This ridge is the summit of a mountain, buried under the glacier,” I told him. “Our survey showed the ice over most of the Basin to be three to five thousand feet——”
His tortured thin face was suddenly warm with enthusiasm.
