Collected Short Fiction, page 360
Staring in a paralysis of dread, he saw that it was moving apparently toward the Earth. Its mass, he knew, must be countless millions of tons. The violence of its impact, if it struck, might shatter a whole continent.
What if it did? Numb with horror, he made a little apathetic shrug. When the world was doomed, what mattered a few days more or less?
If there were any survivors, when he landed with the Pioneer—
His thoughts were frozen. Stiff with wonderment, he stared at that strangely altered planet, and then back at his instruments. He shook his bewildered head, made hurried observations and frantic calculations.
Then he shouted.
“Moving! If I’m not crazy—the Earth is moving—out of its orbit! And that meteor is going to miss it!” What could have happened, to move the planet? No answer was conceivable. Trembling with a sudden breathless hope and an equal dread, he changed the course of the Pioneer, to follow.
And the little geoflexor plunged into another dead pocket. It was the greatest that Cartwright had struck.
For an hour the tiny ship spun helpless, her drive fields refusing to mesh.
At last the geodes thrummed again. Cartwright searched eagerly for the moving Earth. But it was gone. The nebula had thickened about him. Even the vague crimson blur of the Sun had vanished. There were only green-black clouds, and the great meteor with its shining trail.
CHAPTER XXI
The Shining Door
THE meteor itself, however, and the direction of its luminescent trail, restored Cartwright’s orientation. He knew the course that the inexplicably moving Earth had taken, with reference to the meteor. He followed.
And suddenly the amazing planet burst out of a wall of ominous cloud. It was a huge globe of milky light, thrusting brushes of green fire from its poles. With the dust-clouds of the nebula whipping past, at scores of miles a second, he feared that he would lose it again.
He feared, too, that its incredible motion would draw it away from him. But its curving progress remained deliberate, and the Pioneer drew toward it.
At last, at an elevation of eighty miles, Cartwright came down into that opalescent envelope. A thin silver haze surrounded the ship, while he dropped forty miles. Then it cleared again, and made a silver dome above him.
He gasped at what he saw below.
He was descending over Antarctica. His grimly hopeless plan had been to land at the abandoned ark of space, to provision and refuel the Pioneer. Now this motion of the Earth—a thing beyond comprehension—might make his plan either needless or futile. In any case the stack of golden ingots for the power tubes was almost exhausted. Whatever was to come, they had to be replenished—
But even that purpose was swept from his mind by the wonder of the thing he now beheld.
The ic-bound convexity of the polar continent lay beneath him. Rugged mountain ranges thrust grim black summits above endless seas of hummocked, fissured ice. And all that frozen desert was illuminated by the strange pale luminescence of the silver sky, and by an incredible pillar of weird green flame!
Far south of the granite ridge where the ark of space had been abandoned, full upon the polar plateau itself, rose a vast, flat, disk-shaped structure. It was a thing, Cartwright’s benumbed brain reckoned, thousands of feet in diameter. And straight up from its center rose that supernal column of green fire! It was that same mighty jet of mysterious light that made the far-spreading brush of fire above the silver haze.
So Cartwright didn’t land at the ark. He drove the Pioneer straight toward the base of that shining column. He had to know about this colossal construction and the light above it if it was the last thing he ever knew.
For this—this mighty, incredible phenomenon—must be what had moved the Earth!
He was afraid, but it was a fear compounded of awe. All his body was cold and stiff with apprehension. But an eager hope was burning in him too. . . .
He dropped the Pioneer upon a glacier slope, beyond that Cyclopean disk. It was a curving wall of gray metal. It rose straight out of the ice. The top of it, he estimated, was five hundred feet above him.
His approach had not been challenged. He saw no men. Nothing was moving. There were no doors, on any openings, in that metal wall. He waited, anxiously watching through the ports. Nothing happened.
AT last, moved by the desire for a closer examination of the thing, he opened the Pioneer’s valves, and climbed down upon the ice. A drumming sound reached him, from that mighty disk. It was infinitely deep. It suggested infinite power. A rushing, like that of a far hurricane, came down from the pillar of flame.
It was far warmer, outside the ship, than he had expected. This was the dead of the Antarctic winter. Even without the greater cold caused by the interception of sunlight by the nebula, it might normally have been fifty or eighty below zero. Actually, however, it was not quite freezing. Little pools of water were standing on the ice.
That high silver haze, Cartwright realized, must be radiating heat as well as light! His brain jumped to the incredible but correct conclusion—this power could make the planet independent of the Sun’s radiation!
In awe and bewilderment he walked bewilderedly toward that mighty gray wall. Its great size made it deceptively near. But at last he came to it, over the slippery ice, touched it. It was steel. He could see the seams, where tremendous plates had been welded. It vibrated faintly, to that deep reverberation.
There was no opening in it. After a little time, Cartwright turned to go back to the Pioneer, across the weirdly green-lit ice. He was shaking his head, baffled.
“Hi, Jay!”
For a moment he kept plodding on, his brain not registering that amazing call. Then his heart heaved upon him—Pat Wayland’s voice! He wheeled. The breath went out of him.
Something had happened to a tall oval section of the steel wall behind him. It was shining with a faint bluish light. It was ghostly, transparent. And Pat Wayland was running out of it, as if it had been no more than a barrier of smoke!
“Jay! Jay!” Her cry was clarionlike with a sob of joy beneath it.
He caught his breath, stumbled toward her. His anxious eyes were devouring her. She wore strangely cut garments of some white, fur-like stuff. Her platinum head was bare, and her blue eyes smiled at him, joyously.
“Pat! Pat!” His incredulous eyes went back to the blue-shining doorway in the wall of steel. He saw little Mart Worth standing beyond its smoky transparency, and thought he glimpsed the bright uniform of Captain Drumm. And there was a tall, strangely attired figure who looked curiously like Lyman Galt! He looked bewilderedly back at the girl.
“Pat,” he faltered . . . “this is . . . a dream . . .”
Her hand seized his. He gripped it, clinging to the warm strong reality of it and looked anxiously into her white face. She shook her shining head, happily.
“It isn’t a dream, though it’s all wonderful enough to be one.”
Like a sleep walker, he looked back at the glowing, smoky oval. It was real. Pat was real. It was all real. And now he found tongue, masked his stormy emotions.
“How about that?” He searched her face again. “How did you get out here, Pat? I may be crazy—but I thought I saw you come walking through a solid steel wall.”
Her laugh was like the chime of a bell.
“So you did, Jay—and that isn’t the strangest thing you will see.”
He held on to her hand. This, at least, he would not deny himself.
“It’s just one surprising little scientific discovery of the Under-men,” she explained. “One of their scientists was looking for a way to make more space for them, underground. He developed a force-field which polarizes the electrons. Two pieces of matter, polarized in different planes, are interpenetrable. The discovery was not successful for the original purpose, because the polarization lasts only a few seconds after the power is turned off. But it does enable men to walk through walls—or floors.”
Cartwright started.
“So that’s how you were taken, Pat?”
Her shining head nodded.
“A band of Under-men came up from their tunnels, through a polarized section of the floor. They had been coming every night, to observe the nebula. They simply took the opportunity to avail themselves of the services of one of the famous Four.”
She laughed again. He had never heard her laugh like that before.
“These Under-men?” he demanded. “Who—”
“They are the children of the renegades,” she told him. “Their leader, Kran Grekko, says that he is the great-great-great-grandson of Silver Skull—do you see an amazing likeness to Lyman Galt?”
“Galt? Yes!”
CARTWRIGHT’S eyes flashed to the fading oval of the strange door, and the girl nodded. Her blue eyes turned serious.
“It seems there was something wrong with our great Plan, Jay. Our Utopia failed. It was the renegades, whom we tried to destroy, who made the real advance. Because, I suppose, they had to advance in order to survive at all. Now it is they who have saved the Earth.”
“They are really moving it?” Cartwright gestured, dazedly, at the great disk and the pillar of shining green above. “With—this?”
Pat Wayland nodded, smiling at him a little tremulously.
“They are. The Earth is now a ship. If this disk were smaller, you would recognize it as a geode-element. It differs only in size from the one of the geodes on the Pioneer. There is another like it, moored at the north pole. All the planet is meshed in their geoflexion field.”
“The Earth—a ship!”
Cartwright’s amazed eyes lifted to the silver vault above.
“It is a ship,” the girl said softly. “The Under-men have developed an iron-cathode power tube that is many times more efficient than anything we had, and their deeper tunnels have found fuel enough.”
Her white arm lifted.
“That silvery gas, floating above the atmosphere, prevents too rapid radiation of heat. It is excited to fluorescence by the cosmic rays. So, wherever we voyage in space, we’ll have heat and light.
“There will be no days or nights, of course. The climate over all the planet will be mild and comfortable. An eternal spring, Worth promises. You see that the ice is already thawing, down here in Antarctica.”
Her blue eyes were shining.
“Isn’t it wonderful, Jay!” Her voice had an eager ring. “The Earth is safe. It’s free. Now it can cruise through space, from star to star, wherever man shall guide it. A new era has come, of knowledge and freedom and power. Men are now the masters of their environment, and not the slaves.”
A sober little hush came into her voice. “Our job, that we planned so long ago—two hundred and thirty years ago—is done. Aren’t you happy, Jay? Isn’t it grand?”
Suddenly her blue eyes were peering at him curiously. “What’s the matter, Jay? Aren’t you glad?”
He shook his yellow head, with a dazed little grin.
“Oh, I guess I’m glad—of course I’m glad. What I mean is—well, I’m still sort of confused and tired. I don’t know quite what to think. But it looks like everything is going to be all right. There’s nothing more to worry about, I guess.”
He looked at her slim blond loveliness. “What about you, Pat? What are you going to do?”
It was a little time before she answered. He saw a little wet gleam in her huge blue eyes, and she blinked.
“I don’t know, Jay,” she said slowly. “I don’t know. I have been working to help save the Earth for so long—putting that first, and trying to forget everything else—so long, that nothing else seems quite real. I guess I’ll find something—sort of begin over again, somehow.”
Her soft voice caught.
“How—how about you, Jay?”
It wasn’t any use, Cartwright knew, to tell her what he felt. But it had been bottled up in him too long. And now, in this dazing moment of victory, no possible rebuff seemed to matter very much.
It came rushing out of him.
“You know I love you, Pat. I’ve told you before. It’s probably no use to say it again. And please forgive me if I hurt you. I don’t know what makes you like you are. Whether you loved Galt, or someone before. But—well, I just can’t help loving you.”
He stopped, then, staring at her. He had expected one of her old malicious wise-cracks. But suddenly she was laughing, and then he saw that she was crying, and then he didn’t know which she was doing.
Words filtered through her paroxysms.
“Once I thought I loved Lyman. That was why I first joined his Utopia Corporation. But that left no time, no room, for anything. The approach of the Holocaust, it seemed to me, made all love madness. I’m afraid I showed my bitterness and anger. But now—”
Cartwright had never understood Pat Wayland.
Now he was astonished when she flung her arms around him, and kissed him eagerly. But not too astonished to make the fitting response.
The Angel from Hell
Could this hell-spawned golden bird-girl dispel at last the shadow of ageless tragedy from Carter Boyd’s earth-man heart? And had his passionate love for her made civilization’s doom a horrible certainty, and delivered ten million mortals into the hands of the Alexander’s Gray Minions and their ghastly G-Ray?
CHAPTER I
THE FREEZING MUSIC
THE piping was a thin cold sound. Like a flight of crystal arrows, the high notes of it reached Carter Boyd’s racing plane. Its eerie chill sent a shudder down his hard, air-trained body.
He knew that it wasn’t really sound at all. He was a full mile above this bleak North-China desert, five from the strange dog-fight ahead. The six hundred horsepower of the Russian-built motor was bellowing before him. He couldn’t have heard a shout at his ear.
Yet that mysterious piping came clear and flawless to him, as if he had heard it in a still moonlit garden, with some nude spring-goddess dancing to its weird, disturbing melody. Somehow, it set an uncanny picture in his mind.
Carter Boyd wasn’t the type that is given to visions. He was a lean, hardheaded young American. His thin face carried a perpetual whimsical grin. His dark eyes, however, were apt to show a solemn reflection of the flying accident that had shattered his life.
The fault was a rookie pilot’s, not his own. But four lives were blanked out, three of which he counted the most precious in the world. Boyd’s hair, within six months, had turned completely white. It was a year before his hands were steady enough to fly again. Then he had come to China.
In a year and a half, he had earned a number of medals and several thousand dollars—which he had turned back into a relief fund for refugee children. Now one of the most trusted officers in the Chinese service, he had been sent to investigate reports of strange planes operating above the Gobi.
That desert lay beneath him now. The vastest and most hostile of the world’s unconquered wildernesses. Farther than his mind could reach, it spread waterless wastes of yellow drifting dunes, treeless cragged mountains, arid canyon-chopped bad lands.
Somewhere behind him, on the ancient caravan trail that now was rutted with the wheels of trucks, was a supply depot. A skipping beat in the motor had worried him. He had been wondering what would happen if he never got back. Between hunger and thirst and the Mongol nomads, it wouldn’t be anything very pleasant.
Carter Boyd forgot all danger, however, when he saw the dog-fight ahead. Three planes were attacking a fourth. There was something queer about the fourth plane. It seemed, for one thing, oddly small. Wheeling, rolling, sideslipping, it was evading the others with a matchless skill. But still the three were forcing it slowly down, toward the red wind-carved teeth of the wilderness.
Boyd was puzzled. He studied the gray attackers, through his binoculars. They were neither Japanese, he thought, nor Russian. Something was radically novel about their design. The taper of their wings suggested some great bird. Unfamiliar ailerons heightened the likeness. Here were aerodynamic principles, Boyd thought, that were unknown to western designers.
But the fourth plane was stranger still.
It was a monoplane, too. But if the attackers seemed birdlike, it looked like an actual bird! Boyd couldn’t quite understand what he saw. He thought those bright-colored wings really rose and fell—
Then he heard that thin cold piping.
He shuddered to the eldritch chill of it, as if every piercing crystal note had been an ice-cold blade. And it did something else to him, something beyond comprehension.
For a moment it blotted out the bleak red maze of sandstone canyons a mile beneath him. It hid the specks of the four planes ahead, dancing insect-like in that puzzling engagement. And he saw an eerie being.
A winged woman!
Or was she woman?
She was soaring toward him, on powerful slender pinions that were feathered like some mighty bird’s. Pure silver lined them. They were tipped and covered gorgeously, with flaming purple and delicate mauve and subtle hints of green.
HER face was a woman’s. Beneath a close-fitting scarlet helmet, it was pointed, elfin, golden. The small mouth was a burning red, tense with distress.
Her body was a woman’s, too. The sweet curves of it were shining with a yellow velvet down. The breasts were firm round golden bowls, quivering to the effort of her wings.
She was piping, as she soared. The pipe was a long silver tube, oddly keyed and knobbed. She held it with her feet—which, really, he saw, were delicate golden hands. Tiny yellow fingers formed the exotic rhythm of that maddening music.
Carter Boyd felt his heart pump faster. Those full lips moved, and he read their scarlet promise. He looked into the deep pools of her eyes, dark with pain and desire. And he wanted her.
But she couldn’t be! His reason made outraged protest. There were beautiful women. There were birds that soared with a matchless grace. But there could be no being who mingled the beauty of woman and bird—
