Collected Short Fiction, page 286
“From her place on the mountain,” she told me, “Maru-Mora saw the waking of the Watcher. She perceived the doom which she had foreseen close upon her and all the world.
“She sent me down to deal with the man who has the body of another. And she came after me, while I rested by the way, and told me that you were about to die. She showed me where you lay fallen in the snow, and gave me permission to pause and save your life.”
“She did?” I broke in, wondering. “But this has happened because I ignored her warning. Has she—forgiven?”
“She has need of you,” said Karalee, rather enigmatically.
“You say you are going to deal with Kroll?” I demanded. “How?”
For answer she rose to loosen the tarpaulin that covered the sledge, and laid it back in a manner almost reverent, saying.
“This is Maru-Mora’s treasure.”
It was a huge, strange-looking chest that she had uncovered. Eight feet long by three in width, it was massively constructed of golden-yellow metal. It was enameled with strange figures in red, blue, and black, among which predominated a curious spiral emblem. These designs were half obliterated, however. The chest was worn, battered, and stained with a greenish patina—the scars, I knew, of ages beyond comprehension.
“It is older,” the girl whispered solemnly, “ten times older than the race of man.”
From inside her clothing she produced a massive time-stained key of the same golden metal, and turned it in the lock.
“These are the priceless things that Maru-Mora has kept from her own world,” Karalee said, “which was here before the ice.”
I helped her lift the great battered lid—and my breath went out in a gasp of awe. For this coffer held the wealth of a lost world. The golden rays that bathed us shimmered back redoubled from such splendor as I had never dreamed of.
There were pearls, bushels of pearls, many-colored, larger and more perfect than I had ever seen. There were shells of a delicate nacreous beauty, and wondrous jewels fashioned into the likeness of shells—Maru-Mora’s people, I thought, must have risen from the sea.
There were jeweled robes of spun silver, and a great splendid sword of hard yellow metal. There were strange heavy cylinders, which I knew from their blue-white color to be platinum, inlaid with the blue of lapis lazuli in intricate spiral patterns.
There were figurines of beings like Maru-Mora, the fluted conical shells of silver-white metal, queerly human-like busts of yellow gold, crests of blazing ruby. There were odd-shaped vessels cut from jewels—from monstrous diamonds, sapphires, and emeralds; utensils, and some, I thought, lamps.
There were other things, strange in shape or half hidden beneath the rest, that I had not identified when Karalee lowered the massive lid. My imagination was staggered, my eyes blinded by those precious scintillations.
The mere intrinsic value of jewels and metal, I knew, would be tremendous. And the historical, the archeological value of what I had seen was beyond all calculation.
“These things,” the girl was saying gravely, “Maru-Mora has preserved in memory of her world, that is lost. But now she has sent me to give them up for her, that the evil Tharshoon may not be wakened.”
“Eh?” I muttered, still staggered with the mental impact of that treasure. “What’s that?”
“I am taking it to the man Kroll,” she said. “It is all to be his—if he will let the Watcher sleep again, destroy his apparatus, and depart for ever from this land.”
I LOOKED for a long time, wonderingly, into the clear blue light of her eyes, and then beyond into the purple north, where in the dream I had seen the Seeker in her pylon. Such an effort to buy peace, I knew, meant surely that she had no weapon against the evil power Kroll had gathered.
“It’s a large reward,” I said. “But how does she know that Kroll will play fair?”
“No man,” she said, “having Maru-Mora’s treasure, could desire more.”
“He shouldn’t,” I said. “But I think Kroll will.”
The girl’s blue eyes looked at me squarely—they were warm kind human eyes, but deep in them was something remote and alone, some reflection of the Seeker’s purple orbs.
“That problem is yours,” she told me gravely. “For you are to go with me, to aid me in dealing with him. And you are to return with him, to your own land, and see that he does not come back.”
“That shows a touching-confidence in my abilities,” I said rather doubtfully. “But we can try.”
“Now we must go on,” she said. “Maru-Mora warned me to hasten, before Kroll has carried his plan too far to abandon it. But before we start, Ron,” her voice was suddenly soft and low, “I have a gift for you.”
She slipped off the gauntlet of white fur that covered her slim lower arm, and took from her wrist a little trinket, which she handed to me.
It was a little oblong block of argent metal, heavy as silver, but faintly self-luminous. Cut in the top of it, filled with red enamel, was the curious spiral design which appeared to be the Seeker’s emblem. Its pierced ends were attached to a flat metal chain.
Seeing from the way the girl handled it that it was precious to her, I hesitated to accept it.
“Karalee,” I protested, “you mustn’t——”
“Put it on.” Her voice was husky, gravely urgent; her blue eyes bright with tears. “If you love me—wear it, Ron. Promise me you will never take it off.”
“I promise, Karalee.”
Quivering, her fingers fixed it on my wrist. I kissed her again, tenderly. Her eyes were filled with joyous tears.
Karalee, my darling! If I had known the meaning and the cost of that gift——
13. Blue Star of Doom
WE STARTED on at once toward the camp.
When Karalee saw how I limped, she made me take off my boots and smear my frostbitten feet with a gray ointment she gave me, which eased their pain immediately.
Despair rode with us, from the first. It was clear that Kroll’s mad ambition, aided by Veering’s strangely devoted genius, had already seized overwhelming forces. Our mission was Maru-Mora’s last desperate play, and one foredoomed to fail.
Yet I clung to the desperate hope of some odd chance to strike. If Kroll let us open the great chest in his presence, the heavy golden sword lay just beneath the lid. If I could reach it, one second—
Karalee showed me how to control the sledge, with two small levers on the upright. We took turns, one steering it while the other rode seated on the tarpaulin that covered the chest.
It was a remarkable vehicle. Its method of propulsion I never learned, but it must have been some directional repulsion between the silvery runners and the surface beneath. The snow in its track was compacted, and left shining with a pale silvery phosphorescence that endured for several seconds—doubtless the residue of whatever radioactive or sub-atomic reaction it was that drove the sledge.
Its speed on smooth ice might have been twelve or fifteen miles an hour. Over this welter of hummocks and fissures, however, we made no more than three.
The warming golden mist, Karalee told me, came from a square black box under the tarpaulin. She showed me how its intensity was regulated by the turning of a knob.
“We must hasten,” she said again. “Kroll is embittered with mankind. He thinks to give the planet to those others. Once he has awakened them, we can never turn him back.”
We toiled on. The sledge pitched and labored over the hummocks. Sometimes we both had to push and steady it, to get it safely past a crevasse. Sometimes it glided smoothly on ringing runners, and we both could ride.
“Karalee,” I asked hesitantly, once when I was steering and she rode before me on the chest, “there is something I want to ask—if I may?”
She smiled and waited. Her smooth white face was bright and beautiful, her blue eyes almost gayly inquiring. But it was queerly difficult to frame my question.
“How long, Karalee—how long have you—known Maru-Mora?”
She looked at me wonderingly. White teeth flashed in the starlight, and suddenly she laughed.
“All my life, Ron.”
“Then are you——”
Dread closed my throat, but she laughed again.
“But I’m not so old as she, if that’s what you mean.”
Relieved, but still wondering, I demanded:
“How did you come here? Where did you learn English?”
The smile vanished, her face was wistfully sad.
“I learned it from my mother,” she said. “Maru-Mora guided my mother across the ice, to the dwelling of those who served her in the old days. I was born there. My mother lived and cared for me, until the going of the twelfth sun. Then—then there was only Maru-Mora. But she was kind. She taught me many things.”
The girl had been fumbling in the breast of her furs again. She drew out a worn little make-up compact, and snapped it open.
“Here is my mother.”
Carefully she handed me a tiny snapshot. Faded and yellowed, it showed a woman whose lean, laughing, reckless features seemed somehow faintly familiar. I turned it over. On the back of it, in fine script, was written:
“To her lonely daughter Carol, from Elida Lee.”
Elida Lee! Slowly, numbed again with the horror of that old tragedy of the ice, my mind filled out this fantastic ending to the story of the “Flying Lees.”
Karalee was Carol Lee!
That did not end the wonder of her—nothing ever would. But it removed some little barrier of strangeness, made her humanity complete.
“I saw the machine that brought your mother here,” I told her. “And I knew of your parents when I was a child. They were brave and famous flyers. The world will make you welcome, Carol, when we go back. If——”
An aching constriction stopped my throat.
“Carol,” I whispered, “if you——”
She must have read the question in my eyes. For her own were suddenly misted with tears, and said softly:
“Yes, I’ll go with you, Ron. Maru-Mora has promised. If we can deal with Kroll——”
And she had leaned to kiss me again, when the blue star flamed out ahead. It was miles away, on a summit of the long granite ridge that jutted here and there through the ice. It flickered once, and when it dimmed I could see the tall metal tower that supported it.
“What is it, Ron?”
The girl’s eyes were dark with apprehension.
“It is the atomic radiator that Merry Bell invented,” I told her. “Bell is dead. But they have finished the machine. Kroll has started it—to thaw the ice.”
“And to wake the Tharshoon!” Her low voice was hoarse with dread. “We must hasten, Ron—or we shall be too late.”
WE KEPT the sledge plunging on across the rugged ice, as fast as it would go, toiling and straining to guide it safely.
The tiny orb of blue ahead became no larger, but its radiance became searing, terrific. All around us the ice was brilliant with it, the frost splintering its rays into unimaginable sapphire splendor.
The light shone poleward to the Mountains of Despair. Northward it lit the black distant peaks of the Uranus Range, and the nameless rounded summit where Maru-Mora dwelt.
The air became warm, as we struggled desperately on. Carol turned off the golden radiance of her heater. Our furs became uncomfortable. The fairy sheen of the frost was lost, as it began to melt, leaving bare black ice.
And still that fearful, blinding radiance increased. It blistered our faces, inflamed our dazzled eyes. We had to replace our discarded furs—now as protection against the heat.
For Meriden Bell’s great invention was proving successful beyond his wildest dreams. It seemed fantastically incredible that such terrific heat could come from the hydrogen atoms in a few pounds of ice. But the glacier retreated almost visibly from the ragged black teeth of the granite ridge. Pools of slush soon flowed together, in deepening icy torrents.
Still we labored on.
One great boulder, when we struggled by it with the wallowing sledge, proved to be no boulder at all, but a tremendous monument of gray stone, which must have been set upon this buried mountain before the coming of the ice. The long eons had shattered it, but still we could distinguish the massively sculptured shell and crusted bust of a molluskan being like Maru-Mora.
When Carol saw it, her lovely face set with fearful desperation.
“The ice is going fast,” she sobbed. “We must hasten. The dead cities of Maru-Mora’s people will soon be uncovered, as the destroying Tharshoon left them. And then the victorious ship of the invaders, and the hideous mound city they were building. And they will wake, as the Watcher did. And we shall be too late!”
We went on. Even before the thawing started, our progress had been slow enough. Now it was exasperating. Whatever propelled the sledge, it would hardly function on the slushy surface of the exposed ice. When it slipped into a pool, or one of the increasing icy, torrents, we had to wade or swim and drag it.
The slush remained ice-cold, although the air was now heated to a searing wind. We were frozen below, blistered above, exhausted with desperate effort, taut with fear of the danger ahead.
There had been only a few miles to go, however. And at last, faint and reeling with fatigue, we came over a ridge near the camp. Bell’s spidery metal tower stood now on a stark, naked peak of granite, supporting that small blue orb of terrific flame. Our ice-hewn shelter, of course, was already gone. A white tent had been pitched below the little sheet-metal shelter which covered the atomic battery.
The Austral Queen, I saw with relief, had been drawn up out of the slush, on the bare black rock. If Kroll should accept Maru-Mora’s amazing offer, l thought—or if he gave me an opportunity to use the golden sword—we might soon be aboard her, flying back toward civilization, all this horror no more than an evil dream. Carol and I. . . .
Then I saw the Watcher.
IT ROSE up from behind the white tent, the monstrous black-scaled spheroid of it belted with pulsating purple. One huge malefic eye, a cold triangle of terrible green, stared from beneath its uplifted flap.
Carol, beside me, stiffened and gasped with unutterable terror. And I was cold with fear of the pale beam of dread destruction that I had seen strike from that baleful organ.
But the creature dropped back again, to the tent. Beside it, gesturing to it, I saw the lank powerful body that had been Aston Harding’s, clad now, against that searing radiation, in white linens, dark glasses, and pith helmet. The huge green eye winked evilly. A black tentacle whipped out of its socket, seemed to gesticulate, seized a pencil and marked upon an easel. Man and monster, incredibly, were allies, had already evidently worked out some code of communication!
Kroll peered at whatever his strange companion had drawn on the easel, and then stood watching us as we labored up the last slushy slope. I saw slim Tommy Veering, beyond, tending the humming mechanisms at the base of the tower.
We stopped the sledge twenty yards from Kroll and his appalling ally. He saluted us, with a sort of mocking courtesy, and said:
“Well, Dunbar. Hello, Miss. What can I do for you?”
I said, “We have a proposition to make, Doctor Kroll.”
He started when I called that name. Keen-edged, harsh, his voice demanded:
“Well, what is it?”
“We want you to stop Bell’s ray,” I said. “Put your strange friend back to sleep. Break up all your apparatus. And leave Antarctica, to stay. We’ll fly you, in the Queen.”
His harsh voice—so like Harding’s and yet so different—rasped:
“The human race was a biological mistake, Dunbar—and you’re part of it. I’m going to rectify the evolutionary error. I’m going to take over the planet and give our visitors from Saturn a chance.”
His terrible eyes flickered up to the swollen black monster, and came back to my face.
“What could induce me to accept your preposterous suggestion?”
I knew that we were beaten—I had known it from the first. But I tried to hold a steady voice, a poker face. One second, with that golden sword. . . .
“Something we have here, Doctor Kroll.” I gestured toward the sledge. “A greater treasure than you can earn with all your schemes. Accept our terms, and it’s yours. Look it over.”
Carol had flung back the tarpaulin. We opened the chest. Bright metal and jewels shimmered in the intense blue light. The yellow blade was just beneath my fingers.
But Kroll came no nearer. His long arm made a contemptuous gesture.
“I don’t bargain for what is already mine.”
“But it isn’t yours,” I said, “—yet.”
I groped for the ancient sword, measuring the distance between us. But he stepped alertly back, and waved his hand to Tommy Veering, who was watching from beside the tower.
“Veering!” he rapped the command. “The stasis ray!”
“Yes, Doctor Kroll.”
The thin pale youth held up something that looked like a small movie camera. The intense blue orb on the tower flickered, went dim, as its energy must have been diverted. And another ray flashed toward us, from the little object in Veering’s hands—a narrow beam of radiant energy, of a pale magenta color.
It struck through me, painful, stunning, blinding. I tried to move, to snatch and hurl the sword. But my numbed body was arrested, starkly rigid. In that last frozen instant, before shattering darkness fell, I realized the overwhelming horror of this catastrophe.
This was the stasis ray, that had frozen the crystal fossils and the Watcher. Maru-Mora’s old weapon of sleep, now turned against her!
Carol and I had been congealed, struck into the eternal hardness of adamantine stone.
The fearful doom that overwhelmed the world when the sleepers awoke from their dreadful sleep will be told in the thrilling chapters that bring this story to a close in next month’s WEIRD TALES. We suggest that you reserve your copy at your magazine dealer’s now.
The Infinite Enemy
The World’s Fate Hangs in the Balance When Scientific Genius Unlocks the Gateway to a Lost Universe and a Fantastic Giant of Cubes!
