Collected Short Fiction, page 384
CHAPTER I
THE WOMAN AND THE WHIP
SHRIEKING with terror, and quite aware of her complete nudity, Ann Tancred appeared in a second-story window. The weird greenish glare of the laboratory conflagration spotlighted the full roundness of her young breasts.
In the laundry truck that he drove to pay for his engineering course, Weston Craig rounded the street corner and came upon the scene. Amazement drove his foot against the brakes.
Yawning in the side of the old brick house was a round, four-foot hole—as perfectly circular as if it had been cut out with a monster punch, Uncanny greenish flame was gushing out of it, and from the explosion-shattered doors and windows on the ground floor.
The fire department, as usual in the sleepy little university town, was late. Singed and smoking from the accident, Professor Tancred was running back and forth in the street. A lean little wisp of a man, he reminded Craig of an excited ant. He was babbling frantically:
“The disk—it’s out of control! My precious disk!” Keen enough to win the Nobel prize in physics, his mind seemed to have deserted him. “My notes! My daughter! My disk! Some body—do something!”
Craig guessed what had happened. He was student assistant in Tancred’s physics laboratory classes. He had helped wire the weird-looking atomic disruptor disk, and he had listened to hours of Tancred’s ravings about the possibilities of the invention.
The disk would liberate atomic power, to run all the world’s industry. It would manufacture neutronium out of the disrupted atoms—a wonder-substance, a million times stronger than steel. It would bore mines to incredible depths, cut tunnels under the oceans.
So the excited little scientist had promised.
Just now, however, something seemed to have gone very much wrong with the wonderful new invention. It was time indeed, Craig saw, for somebody to do something.
For an instant his eyes clung to the screaming nude girl in the window. Ann Tancred was just sixteen. He had regarded her only as a dark-eyed, darkhaired little mouse of a freshman. But the slim softness of her young body kindled something in him.
His foot went from brake to accelerator, The laundry truck veered across the lawn, beneath the deadly thrust of the disintegrating ray. Narrowly missing the frantic scientist, Craig backed it against the burning building.
He scrambled to the top of it, beneath the window where Ann was leaning out. The choking green chemical smoke was now pouring out above her head. Pain added terror to her screams. Still unconscious of her nakedness, she threw herself down into Craig’s arms.
Her slender body was still cool and dripping from the shower she’d been taking when the explosion had surprised her. They both fell off the truck, and sprawled together on the lawn.
“Oh—” she gasped at him. “Thank you—for saving my life!”
They got up. The girl turned away from Craig, trying to cover her breasts with small hands, Craig draped her with a bath towel that he grabbed from the truck, Slim and long-limbed in the green glare of the ray, she ran away from him, toward a neighbor’s house.
That was Commencement week, four years ago now. The disruption ray had sliced through trees and a neighbor’s roof. There were damage suits, and Professor Tancred left the university, to carry on his experiments in a more secluded place.
CRAIG graduated, and became a fellow in the engineering department. He received several letters from Tancred, postmarked somewhere in Arizona, requesting him to look up data or buy pieces of equipment.
Craig wrote a few times to Ann. He received no answer. The girl, he guessed, had not recovered from her embarrassment. But he could not forget her.
Then came the last, strange appeal from her father. The frantic phrases of the scientist’s letter haunted Craig:
My dear Weston:
Come to us—for God’s sake!
You will be interested to know that the disruptor disk, after all these years and disappointments, is at last perfected, I am installing the completed model on a new boring machine. I know that the Subterrane will accomplish all that I have dreamed of.
The new “mole,” as we call it, can carry us down through Earth’s crust, to the mother lode of all treasure. The years of poverty and effort can soon be ended. We can all be millionaires—billionaires—there is no limit!
But we need you, Weston. All my years of work may lead only to tragic disaster, unless you come to aid us, For I have reason to mistrust my present associate—Dr. Hugh Maddrey.
Ann is afraid of Maddrey. She believes the promise of unimaginable wealth is transforming him into a madman. He is certainly becoming more and more violent. I must have the Mexican cook take this letter out, without his knowledge.
For Ann’s sake, Weston—come at once!
Desperately.
TANCRED
Craig wondered about the Subterrane. He had always been a little skeptical of Tancred’s invention. And the letter sounded half crazy to him. Craig had no desire for millions. But he did need money for a new cyclotron.
And, across four years, memory of Ann Tancred’s long, full-breasted nude body, still tantalized him. He locked up his laboratory and caught the next plane west.
The bus that he had to take from Phoenix stopped at a dusty, sun-faded ghost town at the desert’s edge. Craig told the wrinkled, sun-blackened man at the gas pump:
“I’m looking for old Professor Tancred. Know him?”
The man stared, letting gasoline run on the ground. Craig saw the shadow of fear darken the deep-sunken eyes. Suspicious mistrust brought the thin, sun-parched lips together like the jaws of a trap.
“What’s the matter?” Craig demanded. “Don’t you know Tancred?”
The wrinkled desert rat stopped the wasting gas. He stepped back from Craig, his eyes narrowed watchfully.
“Know him well enough,” he muttered. “Him and that devil, Maddrey!” The words jerked out, violently. “That Maddrey—he’s a coyote! A hydrophobia-skunk!”
“I don’t know Maddrey,” Craig said, “Where does Tancred live?”
“In that devil’s den!” The man spat the words. “If you got to go there—get off the bus at the mail box, twenty miles up. You’ll see the road. And you’ll meet Maddrey!”
The sun was low when the bus left Craig at the mail box. There was no one waiting—he had decided not to send a telegram, lest it fall into the dreaded hands of Maddrey.
The box stood on its post alone in the middle of a vast sweep of barren mesa. There was no tree or house in view. Craig could see no living thing—until he saw an ominous black bird wheeling, far away south.
He looked at the box again. Black-lettered on the side of it was the name, Dr. Hugh Maddrey. Above was a thin smear of wet red paint. Dimly, through it, Craig could read Tancred’s name.
He shuddered, and his fingers groped unconsciously for the heavy little automatic that he had bought in Phoenix. Suddenly Craig wished that he had a more formidable weapon—and knew more about its use.
He found two narrow wheel tracks that led straight south across the sere brown vegetation of the mesa. They ran between the monument-like sandstone buttes that towered here and there, and on toward the black wheeling bird.
Only now there were three of the birds.
Uneasily, Craig started walking south, along the dusty tracks. He couldn’t help wanting to turn back toward the safety of his laboratory, where problems could be solved with a slide rule, and uncertainties checked in a test tube.
Always, Weston Craig had led a sheltered life. Always he had been afraid, even of fear itself. Sometimes he had spurred himself to reckless feats, But he had never conquered fear, and he thought he never would.
Now his whole body was tensed and goose-fleshed with an intuition of monstrous peril waiting for him. His throat was dry. A cool wind of evening sprang up across the desert, and suddenly he Was shivering to the chill sweat of fear.
But he plodded ahead, gripping the little gun with sticky fingers. He had trained himself to go ahead, in spite of fear. Once, he remembered, he had saved Ann Tancred’s life—with no thought of fear.
He knew that he would risk a great deal for her, again.
He counted the black specks again, that wheeled in the sunset sky ahead.
Now there were seven. He remembered reading how the desert’s carrion birds will gather above anything dead. Was their object just a rabbit or a coyote, he wondered. Or—something larger?
THE face of the desert changed, as the sun dropped lower. The naked buttes became pillars of ominous red—they were like blood-drenched gravestones, Craig thought, in a giants’ cemetery. Purple light flowed up, and drowned the red. And a dust-red moon rose beyond them.
Craig’s feet were getting sore. Still he could see, no sign of any habitation. He began to wonder how much farther it could be to whatever dwelling or laboratory Tancred and his alarming assistant had established here—and abruptly he stopped.
Listening.
It came from far ahead, an unfamiliar sound. It had the drumming quality of a powerful aero engine. But Craig could find no light in the moon-flooded sky. And he had a curiously disturbing impression that the roaring came from beneath.
The ground seemed to quiver, under his aching feet. He dropped his ear to a boulder, and the sound was louder. A quivering tension drew upon his nerves. His heart began to skip.
But it couldn’t be—not Tancred’s Subterrane!
Then he stared at the base of a purple butte, half a mile ahead. There was a flare of greenish flame—that carried him instantly back four years, to that laboratory accident and the memory of Ann Tancred’s naked childish loveliness.
The flame died, and something burst out of the rock. A bulky, clumsy-looking metal thing, shining dully in the moonlight. It rocked ponderously on massive caterpillar tracks, and came sliding down a talus slope.
It was cylindrical, except for the tracks. It looked a little bit like a submarine, with conning tower and other obstructions removed. Except the nose of it, that was a palely glowing greenish disk.
That was a disruptor disk, a huge copy of the one he had helped Tancred wire. This strange machine was Tancred’s “metal mole!” The Subterrane!
A small dark opening appeared in the side of it. Craig glimpsed two small figures moving swiftly. The machine, he realized, must be far larger than he had at first thought.
That mighty drumming had ceased. Now another sound ripped through the moonlight—a scream, torn by the fangs of agony from a woman’s throat!
Crack!
For an instant Craig was puzzled by that sharp, rifle-like report. But it came again. And he knew, from the shriek that followed, that it was the sound of a whip.
Chill apprehension prickled along Craig’s spine. He wished that he had taken time to practice with the little automatic. But he went forward, at a weary, stumbling run, and met the screaming girl.
Long-legged and slender, she came fleetly across the mesa. Cruel mesquite and poisoned Spanish Bayonet ripped at her clothing. The full moon caught the flash of a smooth white thigh, and gleamed on the full roundness of a naked breast–and it was black on the whip’s bleeding tracks.
Crack!
Gigantic in the moonlight, the man came close behind her. A bull-huge brute, black-haired, black-bearded. His breath was a hoarse bestial gasping. The whip ran through his hands and leapt out in the moonlight, a thin black serpent striking.
The girl shrieked again, and Craig knew the intonation of her voice. Four years had filled out her straight body with the lush curves of womanhood. But she was Ann Tancred.
Craig lifted the inadequate little automatic, shouted hoarsely:
“Hold on—you, there!”
THAT sounded silly. He knew that he should have shot first. But then, unused to weapons, he might have endangered the girl as much as the man.
The girl checked herself. Her dark eyes grew wide in the moonlight. Her hands lifted instinctively to cover her nudity. Craig knew, from the odd little toss of her disheveled head, that she remembered their last meeting.
“Craig!” She gasped the warning. “It’s Maddrey—watch him!”
The dark-featured, gigantic man came panting up beside her, trailing the whip. And Craig flinched before the eyes of Maddrey. They were blue against the moon, blazing—mad! “Well—Mr. Engineer!”
The voice of Maddrey was a deep hollow bellow, again bull-like. Craig shuddered from it. And the old fear flowed like an icy liquid in his veins.
“I read Tancred’s foolish letter, for the Mexican was my slave.” It was an appalling, effortless roar. “And we’ve been waiting for you, Mr. Engineer. We may need you to repair the disruptor-disk, somewhere on the way.
“Because you are going with us, down to the center of the Earth!”
The girl came stumbling forward. “No—no!”
Hoarse with fear, she flung quivering arms around Craig. Her firm breast brought him the rapid thud of her heart. He caught the perfume of her body. “Oh, Weston—he’ll kill you!” Maddrey moved to follow the girl. The thin gleaming whip leapt forward like a live thing. Craig tried to ignore the fear shrieking in him. He thrust himself forward, lifted the little wobbling gun.
“Stand back!” he whispered.
He hardly saw the swift movement of Maddrey’s big hand, in the moonlight. He had time to squeeze the trigger of the little gun, just once. But he knew the bullet was going wild.
And the tiny report was drowned in a thundrous crash. He saw the spurt of yellow fire from Maddrey’s hip. Then crimson lightning splintered against his head. He felt the girl’s frantic hands clinging to him, as he slipped down. He heard, far-off, her anguished scream:
“Don’t! Don’t! Not the whip!”
CHAPTER II
PASSAGE TO MADNESS
CRAIG came back to consciousness, lying in the dark. A dull wedge of agony was splitting his head. He fingered it, gingerly. Maddrey’s bullet must have plowed a long furrow through his scalp. The wound had been roughly dressed, but the hair on his neck and the collar of his shirt were still stiff with dried blood.
He sat up stiffly, fumbled about. He was in a cramped little cell. There was no article of furniture. The walls were riveted metal. A flimsy metal ladder ran up one of them.
He would climb it, when he felt stronger.
The metal walls quivered to a deep, drumming roar. Craig felt an uneasy sense of swaying motion. It made him feel a little sick. The noise was like a hammer, pounding the wedge of agony in his brain.
He knew that he was a prisoner aboard the Subterrane.
Bound—
Where?
A sudden blade of blue light fell from above, painful to his eyes. It widened to a shining pillar. A trap door was opening in the ceiling of riveted steel, above the ladder. Craig saw a woman’s foot, a trim bare ankle.
Her skirt caught on the ladder. Smooth thighs flashed. Then the light was obscured, as she lowered the door back into place. Craig waited, again in utter darkness.
She touched the floor beside him. His nostrils caught the fragrance of her hair.
“Ann?” he whispered.
“Shhhhh!” she warned. “Maddrey thinks I’m asleep. He told me not to come near you. If he finds me here, he’ll whip me again.” She shuddered. “Oh, Weston!”
“We must get away,” Craig whispered.
She was trembling.
“But how can we?” Her voice was hoarse with dread. “We’re on the Subterrane. Maddrey has been boring straight down with us, for hours.” She clung to him. “We must be dozens of miles down!”
“Dozens of miles?” Craig shook his head, in the dark. “That would be impossible. Volcanic heat would roast us. The pressure would crush the machine!”
“But you helped poor Dad build the first disruptor disk,” she protested. “You know the disrupted atoms form a neutronic film that lines the tunnel. It is less than a thousandth of an inch thick. But it doesn’t conduct heat. And it’s so dense that the weight of ordinary matter is nothing at all against it. It can stand thousands of tons, and thousands of degrees of heat!”
Craig was interested. The agony of his wound was forgotten for the moment, and their desperate plight. He was the engineer again.
“What about the power?” he asked.
“That comes from the disintegrated atoms,” the girl told him. “Escaping electrons are picked up by accumulators at the edges of the disk, to charge the batteries. There is power to spare, for the refrigerator and ventilator systems.”
A sob of fear came back into her voice.
“Oh, Weston—what can we do?”
“Your father?” asked Craig. “Can’t he help us?”
She shuddered in his arms.
“I’m afraid—about Dad,” she whispered. “One day he was gone. Maddrey told me that he had been called suddenly to Washington, about the patents. But he would have surely waited to speak to me. I’m so afraid—”
She sobbed again. Craig remembered the buzzards wheeling above the desert. He was certain that Dr. Tancred had not gone to Washington.
“Twice I tried to run away,” whispered the girl. “But Maddrey caught me, with the whip—” Her quivering hands felt cold. “He’s mad—a monster!”
“We must try to overpower him,” said Craig. “If we can get out of here, and find something to use for a weapon—”
SUDDENLY his voice seemed very loud, and he choked it off. The drumming of the machinery had stopped. Heavy steps rang on a metal deck above, approaching. The girl trembled against Craig, voiceless.
“Oh, Weston!” she sobbed. “He’s coming—”
The door was flung open above. Blue light flooded them. Leaning weakly against the metal wall, with his arm about the shuddering girl, Craig looked up. He saw Maddrey’s bull-like, black-bearded mass. One gigantic hairy hand gripped a big automatic. From the other trailed the whip.
“Well?” Maddrey’s voice was a careless, triumphant bellow. “Mr. Engineer, I see that I must warn you, too. You are not to associate with my ward, Miss Tancred. You two must keep apart.”
