Collected Short Fiction, page 292
I cast longing eyes upon a fine new American-built bombing-plane, at the Brazilian military aviation depot, where I landed at Sao Paulo. With its smart crew of six, its racks of bombs, it looked a splendid weapon. But I gave it up with a sigh, for all the power of the plaque was now required to shield my own body and the tiny sport plane from the universal stasis.
I did appropriate a ten-pound bomb, however; and relieved one of the officers of his automatic pistol, a fine pair of binoculars, and a powerful flashlight, wondering grimly what his reaction would be if ever he woke.
It was ten days later that the motor failed when I was circling over Havana. I managed a pancake landing on the Prado, and carried my weapons on a bicycle to the airport, where I was fortunate in discovering a trim little low-wing Cord.
The steady weakening of the plaque, I found, had caused the accident. Crossing to Florida and proceeding up the Atlantic coast, I was forced to travel by hops of only a few hours, stopping to let the precious little instrument recuperate at minimum power.
I had found no trace at all of Mawson Kroll, until one late afternoon when the towers of downtown Manhattan came into view, beyond Staten Island and the glassy upper bay; and I glimpsed dimly, far beyond, a red and monstrous shape towering upon the Jersey Palisades.
It was the ship from Saturn.
18. The City of Doom
I DROPPED the plane at once into the shelter of Staten Island, on the diamond floor of Raritan Bay. Now that I had found the enemy, consternation staggered me. What was next?
I had hoped to rescue Carol, overcome Kroll and his allies, unlock the stasis that held the earth. But how was such a program to be carried out? The obstacles, when now I came face to face with them, appeared overwhelming.
The weapons I had—the ten-pound bomb and a pistol—were nothing against the terrific scientific instrumentalities commanded by Kroll and the Saturnians. I lacked information, moreover, to plan any effective campaign.
Did Kroll live aboard the interplanetary ship, or had he perhaps taken possession of some luxurious penthouse apartment? Where would he keep Maru-Mora’s treasure chest, and Carol—if her petrified body were still in it? Where was the projector that maintained the earthwide stasis? How could I gain access to it, or get the skill to reverse its force? What possible weapon lay to be discovered, against all the power of the enemy?
Waiting apprehensively for the shelter of the night, I pondered those questions and many more, and found no certain answer. I could go nearer, try to see and not be seen. That was all.
Using the binoculars as I waited, I saw dark specks moving above the skyline ahead, dropping toward New York and soaring away again. The Saturnians, I knew. But what was their business in the sleeping city?
The long dusk came at last—I had come from one winter to meet another. In the brief dark hour before the waning moon should rise, I took off again, flew across Staten Island and the upper bay and as far up the Hudson as I dared. I landed hastily when I saw moving lights in the sky ahead, and taxied across the solid river to the Hoboken docks.
Carrying the bomb, I left the plane and hastened up into the shelter of the frozen streets. The Cyclopean ship still lay twenty miles away. But, across above Manhattan, I could see the Saturnians. Immense black-armored spheroids, belted with purple fire, they dropped among the sleeping towers, rose again, and soared back toward the Palisades.
Shuddering with the elemental dread those other-world entities never failed to rouse, I crouched back in an entry and fearfully lifted the binoculars to watch. Cold horror came with the impact of what I saw.
For the monsters came like black balloons, with limbs retracted. But each black tentacle was extended when they returned, each wrapped about a rigid human body!
The Tharshoon were carrying away the sleeping people. Why? But one answer came to me, and that was unthinkable.
Keeping fearfully to the shadows, I hurried back from the river. A Western Union messenger stood congealed at the curb, beside his bicycle. That seemed a silent and inconspicuous mode of transport. I commandeered the wheel and rode northward through the Jersey towns, trying to avoid the moonlight.
It must have been after midnight when I passed the low gray building of the Planet Research Foundation, where the modern chapter of this weirdly grim tragedy had begun. I followed the lonely road past its wooded grounds.
The moon shone with an eery opalescence on the fairy shapes of high frozen clouds. It glittered in crystalline splendor on the bright emerald leaves of trees turned to stone. I had turned into Alpine Park, beyond the Foundation, when a thing happened that stopped me, tense with involuntary dread.
A cricket had chirped.
It was the first sound, other than those of my own making, that I had heard for many months. It was queerly startling, unnerving.
LEAVING the cycle, I slipped forward through the park. The vegetation here was no longer diamond-hard and diamond-sharp, but soft and yielding, natural. I had come, I realized, into a zone shielded from the stasis.
I pushed through an oddly murmurous grove, and came once more in view of that colossal red-black ship—and the city of the Tharshoon.
Squat and repellent, dark in the moonlight, low mud walls rose before me. The invading ship, resting in the center of the park, had been surrounded with a city of low domed mounds—like the hideous city I had seen beyond the pole.
In its midst, looming incredibly vast against the moon-flushed sky, that dark long hull surrounded with its enigmatic rods and vanes suggested some hideous alien creature crouching.
Above the city and the ship I saw scores of the Saturnians, soaring away southward, returning laden with stiffened human forms, dropping with them into those flat mud domes.
What horror waited there?
I crept as near as I dared, and lay in a clump of brush, studying ship and city through the powerful night glasses. High in that tremendous hull, lights came on beyond a row of triangular ports. Shadows moved against them. I watched, and at last glimpsed briefly a gaunt unmistakable outline.
The shadow of Mawson Kroll!
So he was still aboard. The next matter was to reach him. But how? How cross those walling mounds, and evade the monsters wheeling above? How find undetected entrance to that great ship? Or find my way through its colossal mystery, to Kroll’s apartment?
I didn’t know how. But I was prepared to try.
Waiting until the moon had gone behind a black pillar of the motionless cloud, I got silently to my feet, dug into my pocket for the detonator for the bomb, and started to screw it into place, preparing for action.
Suddenly, behind me, a shoe scraped on the gravel. Turning swiftly, I saw a man standing in the shadow of a tree. A faint steely gleam betrayed his gun. A low voice rasped:
“Drop it, Captain Dunbar.”
The bomb, without the fuse in place, was quite useless. I dropped it obediently—and snapped a quick shot from the hip. It struck the gleam of that level gun, sent the weapon spinning into the shadows.
The gasping curse had a familiar flat nasal intonation.
“Stand still, Veering,” I said. “I’m going to ask some questions.”
But I saw the glint of metal at his mouth, and a whistle shrilled out.
“Quiet——”
Behind me, suddenly, another sound bellowed out: a deep and hideous baying. I had not heard the cry of the Tharshoon before. I spun, and consternation struck me powerless.
For a monstrous fire-banded shape had lifted above a mass of trees behind me. A great triangular eye opened its baleful window of lambent green flame. And a queer, numbing shudder ran through me.
I swung up the automatic, tried to pull the trigger. But the green fire of that eye was suddenly intense, painful. A freezing greenish cloud began to obscure my vision. Sudden screaming agony flashed through my limbs, and the gun dropped out of my fingers.
I must have been within an instant of annihilation by that consuming orb. But, faintly, I heard two short blasts on Veering’s whistle, and that deadly mist vanished from about me.
I staggered back, reeling, blinded. I felt faint and sick. The fearful cold of that annihilating ray was still in my bones, yet my body was drenched with hot perspiration.
Veering whistled again. A tentacle darted like an immense black snake from its armored receptacle, ran toward me, whipped about my middle. Its strong, indescribable earthy pungence made me suddenly and violently ill.
Yet I knew that another tentacle had lifted Veering, at his command, set him on top of that headless body. The whistle shrilled above, and the great creature lifted, carrying me dangling in that tentacle.
In the intervals of vertiginous sickness, I saw that we were soaring over that low wall of clustered dome-shaped mounds. Each dome, I saw, had a blade central orifice, through which the flying monsters came and went.
Then the crimson-black hull of the ship was beneath us, vast as an ocean liner’s, supported hundreds of feet above the ground on the limb-like struts of its landing-gear. We sank toward it. The black tentacles dropped me unceremoniously into a sort of hatchway. I fell through musty darkness, and sprawled on a bare metal floor.
19. The Emperor of Terror
IT WAS a cold dank space into which I had fallen. The biting pungence of the Tharshoon was sickeningly strong. As my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I saw a great ophidian tentacle setting Veering down beside me. He held my own pistol in a bleeding hand.
“Stand back from me, Dunbar.” His voice was high, quavering. “Make another play, and I’ll kill you.”
He moved into the beam of moonlight that fell through the hatch. I saw that he was very haggard. His skin had an unhealthy, yellowish pallor. His hollow eyes were deeply sunken. His thin hand shook with the gun.
He looked a man consumed, half crazed, with fear.
“Come along, Dunbar,” his nasal voice quavered. “Walk straight ahead. Doctor Kroll will want to see you.”
Fighting for time, for any possible advantage:
“Wait a minute, Tommy,” I said. “You are afraid. What are you afraid of? Tell me.”
His flat laugh had a dry brittle ring. “You are the one to be afraid, Dunbar, if Doctor Kroll lets them take you down to feed the grubs.” Menace edged his voice. “Get on! Straight ahead.”
His shaking gun made an imperative gesture, but I stood still in front of it—if I lost now, it would be for ever.
“I’ve known you a long time, Tommy,” I said, keeping my voice as low and steady as I could. “I first heard of you when you had a paper route. You were delivering papers to old Judge Ware. And Jerry found out how you wanted to be an engineer, how you were saving money for books and experiments.
“She told Doctor Harding about you—that was long before they were married. And Harding gave you a chance. He paid your way through tech, and made you a place in the Foundation.”
Staring at me with a bright anger in his eyes, Veering caught a gasping breath and started to speak. But I went on:
“This man Kroll killed Doctor Harding, Tommy. And stole his body, his position, his wife. Tommy, don’t you remember Jerry Ware? Can you serve the man who tricked and murdered her?” Veering licked his quivering lips. The gun gestured again. Dry and hard, his voice rasped:
“Don’t talk, Dunbar. Move ahead! Or else——”
Standing in front of the wavering gun: “You’re a human being, Tommy,” I told him. “Your parents lived in the Bronx. Your father was born Verensky. He had a little tailor shop. He’s in it now—frozen—waiting for these monsters to take him. The others——”
Shuddering, he bit through his lip.
“You had a sister, Tommy—Jerry told me about her. Nada was her name. You loved her. She went to live with a man you hated, a gunman named Ricci. That killed your mother. You haven’t seen your sister again, Tommy. You’ve tried to put her out of your mind. But you love her still. And she’s out there, petrified.”
Tears burst out of his bright, sunken eyes.
“Shut up!” his hard voice whipped at me. “By God, I’ll drill you! Get going!”
I stood still in front of him, in the reeking, mysterious darkness of that colossal hold. Inside, I was sick and cold with fear. But I tried to keep it out of my voice.
“Go ahead and kill me, Tommy,” I said. “Kill your father, and Nada. Kill your dead mother’s last hope. Kill the last chance that mankind has——”
The gun came up, unsteadily. The bore of it was like a terrible round eye. It stared at me. I was cold all over, waiting for the hard impact of death. But suddenly it fell, and Veering’s face drew into a white, quivering mask.
“You win, Dunbar,” his choked voice sobbed. “I can’t kill you. And don’t think that I wanted to be Kroll’s slave. But I—I’m afraid of him. He threatens me.”
His slight body shuddered to gasping sobs.
“You saw the mud city, outside. Well, the things lay eggs there under the ground. They carry people, and revive them, and seal them up in the burrows. And when the grubs hatch, there is food.
“When they are grown, the grubs undergo a metamorphosis, and come out as mature creatures. They will be sent out, to establish new colonies. All the people of the earth are to be used up for food, left petrified until they are needed.” Veering tried to control his sobbing, looked fearfully behind him.
“Doctor Kroll—he bullies me all the time. He threatens that he will let them take me. I have to obey—there is no choice. And in the end he will send me anyhow—he said he would!
“I don’t want to kill you, Captain. But there’s nothing we could do. All the creatures obey him—they know he would turn them back to stone if they didn’t. There’s no use——”
“But there is,” I broke in. “We can do—something.” And I demanded: “Where’s the stasis ray projector? If we could get to that, reverse it!”
“That’s no good,” Veering insisted. “It’s in his laboratory, aft—where he is, now. He won’t let me in it, any more. He has one of them to guard it. We can’t go there.”
My voice stuck on the next question: “Tommy, where—where is Carol? The girl who came with me, back at the pole? Is she still in the chest? Or is—has she——”
Thinking of those stiff victims carried down into the mounds, I couldn’t finish. I felt a vast relief, when:
“She is still in the chest,” Veering said. “He is keeping her under the stasis. But we can’t go there. Doctor Kroll told me that if he found me there——”
“Come on,” I said. “Perhaps she can help.”
“We can’t do anything,” Veering whispered. “Doctor Kroll is the Emperor of the World. He makes me kiss his feet.” But, although trembling with fear, he showed me the way through that vast gloomy compartment. It had been planned for no puny human beings. We climbed a ladder to a circular passage. Veering manipulated a combination lock to open the way to another vast dark room—the Saturnians, of course, made their own light wherever they went.
“THERE is a stasis here,” said Veering. “We must use the reactor.”
He fumbled with a little metal device he wore on his wrist—it was oddly similar to the plaque that Carol had given me.
“Hold my hand,” he said.
He snapped on a flashlight, and we walked into that huge, silent room. Great piles of casks, boxes, drums, and bags, cast fantastic shadows. Vast stacks of tinned food. Bales of clothing. Crates of books and scientific equipment. Heaped golden bars, currency, furs, furniture, pictures.
The loot of New York!
“Doctor Kroll and I used to walk through the city,” Veering said, “taking what we wanted.” He added: “He sent me to the Foundation today, to look up references for him in the scientific library there. I happened to see you riding past on your bicycle.”
His darting light had picked out the yellow gleam of Maru-Mora’s ancient chest. I ran to it eagerly. The key was in the lock. I turned it, and Veering helped me lift the massive lid.
He gasped with awe as his light shone on the treasure within: pearls; gems and precious metals wrought by the dead genius of Maru-Mora’s people into a thousand unfamiliar shapes, all of haunting beauty; the heavy jeweled sword of yellow metal; and, lying rigid amid that ancient splendor—Carol.
Or Karalee, as I first had known her, strange lovely castaway of the antarctic. Beautiful and white, she lay still in that rigid pose of horror in which I had seen her frozen, months before. On my knees beside the chest, I kissed the diamond hardness of her lips, the frightened oval of her face, the white, icy column of her throat.
“Carol! my darling. Wake!”
Remembering myself, I moved the slide to turn the silver plaque up to full power, held it against her breast.
“Quick!” Veering muttered fearfully beside me. “We can’t stay!”
The power of the plaque, I knew, had been ebbing. For a long time, Carol made no motion. Was it too weak to rouse her?
Then I thought she stirred.
“Carol!” I sobbed. “Can you hear? Wake—Carol!”
I heard Veering’s breathless gasp of horror beside me, and then, behind us, a hideous deep ululation, like the baying of a monstrous hound.
Paralyzed with dread, I turned, and saw in the circle of the doorway, the tall gaunt figure of Mawson Kroll, and, behind him, staring at us with a green triangular eye, one of the black Saturnians.
20. The Chamber of the Worm
“RON DUNBAR!”
It was Carol’s low, bewildered cry. For she was alive again. She sat up suddenly in that great yellow chest, amid the strange heirlooms of Maru-Mora. Her blue eyes stared about the great dark room, startled. Seeing Kroll and the monster she stiffened again, with one hand on my arm, almost as if she were back in the stasis.
Kroll came stalking into the room, with the invader floating like a black cloud beside him. White and sick with terror, Tommy Veering flung himself down on the floor in front of them.
