Collected Short Fiction, page 364
She walked swiftly in front of Hall toward a little group standing about the other plane. A hard-bitten, desperate lot of men, they looked to Hall. Half of them, probably, had the stamp of Renvic’s and Krošeć’s own Balkan race. The rest came from everywhere. They were all in gray uniforms. Most of the Balkan officers were young. They carried themselves with an arrogant, dashing swagger.
Just now, however, everybody was being respectful to the lean pale supercilious man who had been presented to Hall as Mr. Smithson Jones. He wore black, and the lights gleamed on his bare black head. He seemed to strut, before the attentive officers. His green eyes lifted sharply at the approach of Hall and the girl.
“Linda!” His metallic voice rang possessively. “Were you injured by zis man?”
Linda Gaylord showed none of the awed respect of the men in gray. She walked quickly up to Renvic, and put her slim arms around him in a familiar embrace. Boiling inwardly, Hall still noticed that she offered only her cheek to be kissed.
“No, Alec darling,” she was saying. “Mr. Hall was naturally angry, when he learned that we had deceived him. Captain Krošeć pulled his gun, before I had time to explain, and Mr. Hall took it away from him. But everything is all right, now—But where’s Dad?”
The narrowed green eyes looked very sharply from Linda to Hall.
“I am told Doctair Gaylord ees not back from his evening walk.” The sleek black head jerked impatiently into the darkness, westward. “Down in the gorge, they say he has found the remains of some greater monster. Fool, digging up old bones in the dark I But he weel be here.”
Renvic turned abruptly from the girl. Snapping out Hall’s name, he omited most of the h, so that it was nearly:
“All!”
“Yes, sir,” said Hall.
Renvic waited for something. His breath drew in sharply. His pale arrogant face began to turn a little pink. Linda Gaylord looked urgently at Hall, Whispering under her breath:
“Salute!”
Hall brought his arm up, in a brisk military salute. But the green-eyed man failed to return it. His arrogant appearance touched off a kind of fuse in Hall, who said loudly:
“Yes, Mr. Jones?”
Renvic stiffened. His narrow, rather feeble chin drew down. His thin face turned a darker red. His breath caught angrily, and Hall expected something violent. But the sharp metallic voice said merely:
“I am zee Alexander. Forget Mr. Jones. And remember to salute me.”
“Yes, sir,” Hall said flatly.
“Your rank here will be lieutenant. Your duties will be to train my aviation personnel. Tomorrow you will report for orders, to Captain Krošeć. Now you may go to your quarters.”
And Renvic wheeled toward the glowering Krošeć.
Hall’s head jerked toward the hairy man, and he whispered to Linda:
“Won’t that be a picnic?”
Her gray eyes mocked him. “You asked for it!”
THEN she turned suddenly away from him, toward a short bald fat man who came waddling and puffing into the light. The little man wore a monocle in a red moon face that was set with chronic irritation. A white topi hung from his neck. White duck shorts revealed that his fat sun-reddened legs were remarkably bowed.
“Dad!” Hall failed to see any family likeness, but the girl flung herself into his arms. “Dad, I’m so glad to be back! You are all right? You held my post?”
“No trouble, dear.”
Adjusting his monocle, which her enthusiastic kiss had got out of place, the little man turned to Renvic.
“Alexander,” he said in a rather shrill voice, “I am glad to see you back. Now I can take full time to excavate my discovery. I have found a complete skeleton of my new species, Cycloptosaurus Gaylordi. I am anxious to complete its recovery, before we must return to the rock. It is a find that will make my place—”
Renvic broke in with an abrupt question:
“Has the fugitive been found?”
Gaylord looked a little ruffled.
“No,” he said. “But my Cycloptosaurus—”
“We’ve got to find her,” rapped Renvic. “I’ll send out more planes, tomorrow. And offer bigger rewards to the Mongol spies.”
Gaylord’s bare, sun-burned head was nodding.
“Indeed,” he shrilled, “a living witness would be an invaluable addition to the inscriptions and the relics. But give your men orders to handle her with caution. Her reactions are largely incomprehensible to me, but previously I suspected a suicidal tendency.”
“You may go back to your work, Doctair,” rapped Renvic. “I want those formulas on the G-ray.—If we catch her, Krošeć will know how to make her talk, and I need that freezing weapon.”
Standing unnoticed at the edge of the group, Hall had been listening with a good deal of interest. Talk of the Rock and this fugitive was all enigma. But if Krošeć were going to handle her, then her situation was not to be envied.
Now Renvic discovered him, and the green eyes blazed.
“All,” his metallic voice twanged ominously, “I dismissed you to your quartairs!”
“So you did, sir,” Hall agreed. “But you neglected to inform me where my quarters are.”
Renvic glared for a moment, spun on his heel.
“Captain Krošeć, find an orderly and have Lieutenant Hall conducted to his tent.”
Hall found the next morning interesting. A gray uniform was provided him. He ate in a long mess-tent, with his new, oddly-assorted fellow officers. He stood in line with them, under Krošeć’s belligerent inspection.
Meantime, however, he saw more of his new surroundings. This secret aviation base occupied a long flat gravel plateau. Eastward, it sloped toward a waste of yellow crescent dunes. The western rim fell more abruptly, into a tumbled waste of bad lands—a welter of canyons and gorges, of bare cliffs and pyramids and pinnacles—a lifeless hostile wilderness that erosion had carved from red and yellow clays and sandstones and shales.
Several hundred officers and men were quartered in the city of gray tents beside the field—obviously, however, Renvic had far too few trained crews to man all the sixty planes. These were several large buildings of white sheetmetal and native sandstone. Arsenals, probably; hangars; supply depots.
A big castle-like building, of gray sandstone, stood apart on the plateau’s upper end. Precious water sprayed a scrap of green lawn about it. Above it flew a curious flag—on a gray field, there was a symbol that looked like a black-winged boulder, with a golden crown above it.
That, Hall guessed, must be Renvic’s dwelling.
Another thing puzzled him. On the rim of the plateau, between castle and camp, stood a spidery tower of white metal. Swung atop it, a hundred feet high, was something that looked like an elongated silver egg.
A black spot like an eye was visible in the smaller end of that streamlined case. The thing had somehow an ominous look, as if it might be a weapon. Hall failed to guess its nature. He realized that it would be very difficult to heed Linda’s warning about asking questions.
THIS whole establishment presented a baffling riddle. Who was Renvic? What was he going to do with a private flying army? Where had he got the money to equip it? For Hall knew that this sinister armada must represent an investment of at least fifteen or twenty million dollars.
It happened that he got one significant clue.
After the inspection, Krošeć ordered Hall to be ready to fly, at ten o’clock, and then went roaring away to Renvic’s castle on a gray motorcycle. Hall was waiting, at the edge of the field, when one of the big, graceful gray planes came in.
A gray-painted armored truck came lumbering down from the castle, and roared out to the side of the plane. Guards with sub-machine guns clambered out, and stood about alertly while some load was being transferred from plane to truck.
Curious, Hall walked out to see what they were unloading. It was none of his business. He realized that the act was probably dangerous. But nobody stopped him.
He saw several heavy, bulky burlap bundles. Then the men in gray staggered under a bright-colored, brassbound box that looked like an antique coffer. When that was in the truck, they began passing out short round rods of gleaming yellow metal. The rods looked small. From the apparent effort it took to move them, Hall knew that they were gold.
Gold! And a coffer of treasure!
Loot of some conquered empire—but what empire had Renvic conquered? Had he joined the Japanese invaders in the rapine of China? Hall doubted it—the bright decorations on the coffer were definitely not Chinese.
Nor had he ever seen gold molded into rods, anywhere.
Still watching, it chanced that he saw the deft fingers of a swarthy little man—some sort of Eurasian, apparently, for his panting curses were in French—slip something bright into a gray uniform. When the unloading was done, Hall approached and demanded his name.
Turning white, the little man stammered:
“Du—Duval. But have mercy on me, lieutenant!”
“Report to my tent,” Hall ordered him, “in five minutes.”
He returned to his tent. Five minutes later, the little Eurasian lifted the flap. In a trembling hand he held out a small bright object.
“Mon Dieu!” he gasped. “Take it, monsieur. Take it, and say nothing to the Alexander.” His voice was husky with dread. “He would give me to that cochon Krošeć, to be destroyed!”
Hall reached out his hand.
“Say nothing, Duval,” he said. “And I’ll see that this reaches the proper hands.”
“Eh bien!” The fellow dropped the trinket into his fingers. “Thank you, monsieur!”
Strange jewel, indeed!
Alone in the tent, Hall examined it. The long chain, of sparkling crimson links, looked as if it must have been cut, by some marvel of the jeweler’s art, from one monster pigeon’s-blood ruby.
Swung from the chain was a heavy little figure of enameled metal. A most curious figure. For it represented an incredible thing—a creature half bird and half woman!
The golden body, with its delicate limbs and full-rounded, up-tipped breasts, was almost human. But the legs ended with tiny hands, instead of feet. And the upper limbs were two spread wings, lined With white platinum, enameled on the outside with gorgeous colors. The woman-like, delicate head was covered with a close-fitting red cap, and the eyes, oddly slanted, were twin purple sapphires.
That little figurine was the most puzzling object that Hall had ever looked upon. For the minute, painstaking detail of it convinced him instantly that it was no mere fantasy of an imaginative artist, done in precious metal. He knew that it was an accurate copy of a living original.
But what an original!
None, certainly, known to biology. If some species of bird had followed a unique evolutionary trend, for millions of years, until they became bird-mammals, the result might have been such creatures as this. But where on earth could that have happened?
A precious thing, the jewel. No wonder it had tempted Duval! Hall decided that he had better see that it got back to Renvic at the first opportunity. His interest had been in what it could tell him, but it raised more questions than it asked. Doubtless it would be fatal to have it found on him. If little Duval should talk—
BACK on the field, he found two bombers being warmed up. Krošeć returned with Renvic, in a long gray armored limousine. A truck, following, carried the bright cylinders of two small bombs. One of the bombs was loaded into the recessed racks of each plane—racks equipped to hold at least eighty similar bombs.
“All!” Renvic waited for him to salute. “Before you take up your duties, lieutenant, of training my men,” the metallic voice rapped, “it ees wise that you should become familiar with our equipment.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Therefore, you will accompany Captain Krošeć on a test flight thees morning. You will each drop one of our new G-bombs. The forces radiated when these bombs explode increase temporarily the effect of gravity on objects within range. For safety, you weel drop them from an altitude of at least fifteen thousand feet, and then dive to observe the effect oh your objective. You weel receive further orders from Captain Krošeć aloft, by radio.”
Krošeć’s plane roared away ahead. Hall was at the wheel of his own, which was manned by the swarthy Balkan officers. One of them operated the radio.
Hall had supposed that the “objective” would be merely a patch of desert. But Krošeć led the way southward. After two hours, they came to the narrow river, followed down it at high altitude until they were over the brown dots and gray ribbons and green patchwork that marked a little mud village.
Above that, Krošeć dropped his G-bomb.
Tense with a horrified indignation, Hall followed the other bomber down, to see what had happened. They found the village obliterated. Mud huts were shattered as if a great invisible heel had trod upon them. In the flattened fields lay the crushed bodies of peasants and their oxen. Women and babies lay in the rutted streets, dark pools of blood squeezed out of them, as if they had been grapes in some hellish press.
The man at the radio relayed an order to Hall:
“Lieutenant, you will drop your G-bomb on the next village, down the stream. Captain Krošeć’s command.”
But Hall’s vision was obscured with a red mist of anger. His big tanned body was trembling.
“Tell Krošeć,” he shouted, “to guess again!”
And he wheeled the bomber back toward Renvic’s secret base.
“Lieutenant,” sharply warned the officer at the radio, “this will be mutiny. The Alexander will have you shot for this. Captain Krošeć requests me to tell you—”
“Cease communication,” Hall ordered savagely. “I’ll see Renvic and Krošeć when we land.”
But even in his wrath, he could see that things looked very dark ahead.
CHAPTER VII
SHADRONA OF SHAR
AFTER the ominous whisper of the passing plane had ceased, Carter Boyd’s companion lifted him on her brilliant wings again, and they glided down to begin the strange bittersweet of their existence in the darkwalled valley of the abandoned monastery.
Sweet, even through the fever and delirium that came from Boyd’s infected shoulder, because every day brought its new revelations of the surpassing wonder, the humanity of soul, and the understanding devotion of his winged savior.
Even before they could talk, he. was certain that she had come to return his own blazing passion with some feeling far deeper than mere gratitude.
Bitter, along with the sweet, because of the tragedy and the fears that haunted her. The abiding shadow of great sorrow never left her limpid purple eyes. If a living thing had been haunted, Boyd felt, it was she.
He could never solve the riddle of her dreads.
Always she watched the narrow rift of sky above the canyon walls. Often she silenced him, to listen, while a strange tensity of apprehension froze her golden face. He knew she was consumed with dread of the gray planes that hunted her.
Boyd made her let him examine the cold-weapon, whose telescoped silver tube she wore slung from her shoulders. Its control must have involved those eerie half-guessed telepathic powers beyond his first vision of her, but the mechanism itself appeared rather simple.
A tiny rotor, in the mouthpiece, was turned by the breath. That drove what looked like a miniature dynamo, which was connected to a long spidery helix. Boyd could make nothing of its principles, and he stared in new amazement at his companion’s demonstration of its weird power.
Her golden fingers flashed across the intricate keys, faster than he could follow them. Above the faint hum of the rotor, he sensed rather than heard the thin eldritch wailing of piercing melodic minors. And he shivered to sudden, bone-piercing cold.
Frost snapped and glittered in the air before the silver tube. A gnarled little tamarisk was quickly frozen, chilled to such a temperature that swift condensation covered it with bright silver.
Amazing weapon!
Only later, when Boyd saw it tested again in the darkness, did he attempt even a guesswork explanation. Then he saw intense weird gleams of fluorescence bursting from the freezing objects, and knew that they were emitting “hard” radiations.
Incredible discovery! It meant that in the path of that eerie soundless vibration the normal direction of entropychange was reversed. Heat, before the weapon, was transmuted into X-rays, perhaps even into electrons and atoms! And objects drained of heat were cold.
An instrument of ghastly potentialities. But the frightened gestures of the winged woman made clear that she regarded its power as nothing, against all the weapons of her mysterious enemies.
On thing that deeply troubled Boyd was her attitude toward clouds. Let the smallest wisp of white vapor float into the ribbon of blue desert sky above the cliffs, and she would stare at it with an incomprehensible intensity of interest. Sometimes she soared on her wings, to get a better view. She would return to him, shuddering with dread, anxious for the shelter of his arms.
Often, after a cloud had passed, Boyd found her slumped in some lonely corner of the ancient courts and gardens, the red carapace of her head covered with her wings’ bright arches, shaken with inconsolate sobs.
But for those shadows of fear and strange wonder, their life in the old monastery would have been completely idyllic.
For they found all the needs of life.
Over part of the abandoned buildings, the roofs were still intact. In the dust choked ruins, besides a great many stone Buddhas, prayer wheels, and moldering manuscripts, they found such useful articles as cooking vessels and garden tools.
At first there were a few hungry days. But as soon as Boyd was able to move about, they found an abundance of fruits, grain, vegetables, and wild poultry.
Boyd’s keenest desire was for some weapon with which he might help to defend his winged companion, if her mysterious enemies should ever discover them. But his automatic had been lost. The ancient monks must have been men of peace, for all his searching of the ruins yielded not even a spear. He was forced to content himself with a fire-pointed wooden lance.
