Collected Short Fiction, page 402
Trent retched to a giddy sickness. He felt as if the floor were rocking beneath him. It was rocking. His head was flung against a hard curving wall. Faint with new pain, he opened his eyes.
Amazement steadied his reeling senses.
He was in a glass cell, whose walls curved strangely. High above was a round black trap door. Sliding about with him, across the slippery glass floor, were a steel cylinder marked “Oxygen,” a bottle of water, and a hard dry loaf of black bread.
He reached out, in an effort to help himself rise, and something jerked at his wrists. Steel jaws snapped cruelly tighter. Trent looked down at the bright links, and reached automatically for the belt that held his ingenious equipment.
But the belt was gone.
The cell tipped again. Sliding to the opposite wall, fending off the heavy steel cylinder with his fettered hands, Trent looked up—and blinked his eyes. Outside the curving walls, he saw the thumb and fingers of a hand.
Each finger was larger than all his body.
Staring up, he glimpsed a Titan head. Far-off as a skyscraper’s spire, the features were incredibly vast, and yet familiar. For a moment his pain-clouded brain was puzzled. Then he recognized von Schlegel.
Comprehension burst upon him. He had been shrunk to the dimensions of tiny Rori Rori. Like the unfortunate girl, he was imprisoned in a bottle.
The pale bald head of the spy bent down. The monocle glittered, vast as a telescope’s mirror. The glass walls shivered to a thunder of sound, and the thunder formed itself into words:
“So we part, Herr Trent—through no means so crude as a bullet. His Highness the Gendhu Ghan has accepted the task of disposing of you—in a manner that will completely baffle your blundering Secret Service corps.”
Von Schlegel’s chuckle was a vast hollow booming.
Peering through the heavy glass, Trent glimpsed another gigantic form. His eyes overcame the strangeness of size and perspective. He recognized the green tunic and waved yellow hair of the Gendhu Ghan.
The Ghan reached out a mighty hand, and took the bottle. Once more Trent was bumped painfully about, with the heavy steel cylinder. His throbbing head struck the wall, and agony blinded him.
WHEN he could see again, his prison had been set upon a table that seemed vast as a roof-top. It was covered with tremendous dials and levers. Far below the edges of it, he could see a vast round floor, and curved walls of crystal rising. Above him loomed the tremendous head and shoulders of the swastika’s new ally, the Gendhu Ghan.
He knew that he had been carried aboard the flying globe. Blue and opaque from without, its walls were perfectly transparent from inside. The bottle was resting upon a control post, that stood in the center of the circular deck.
The Ghan’s colossal hand moved a green lever that rose twice Trent’s height. The glass prison shuddered to a reverberation as powerful as an organ’s deepest note. And the globe lifted, in the dim cavernous vastness of von Schlegel’s secret citadel.
A square of blue daylight appeared above, and the globe mounted toward it. It rose between mighty snow-dusted firs, about the winter-clad flanks of the Schwarzwald. The sky was leaden, and presently the machine lifted into low-lying clouds.
Trent studied the gigantic figure over the controls. Gradually he became used to the change of size and perspective. The Gendhu Ghan ceased to be an incredible giant, and was a man again. The narrow, painted face beneath his yellow hair looked pale and worried. Once his hollow eyes flicked down at the bottle, uneasily.
Trent put his hands to his mouth, drew a full breath, and shouted:
“Your Highness—where are you taking me?”
His voice rang with an almost deafening loudness against the glass wall. If the Ghan heard, however, he made no sign. Trent battered his handcuffs against the glass until the worried eyes looked down, and tried again:
“What are you going to do with me?”
An unpleasant contemptuous twist of the full red lips told him that the giant had heard him. But the hollow eyes moved to the dials again. The Ghan made no reply. His head ringing, Trent gave up his shouting.
Presently, above the clouds, the globe came into sunlight.
A dazzling fleecy blanket covered the Earth so far as Trent could see. Slowly, as the globe rose, it became visibly convex. The white, mighty shoulders of the Alps lifted through it in the south.
Crystal blue at first, the sky turned slowly darker. At last, when the globe must have been a dozen miles high, it had faded to a dull, dusky gray. And still the gray faded, into a rich midnight purple.
This was a greater altitude, Trent knew, than any scientific expedition had ever reached. Some men would have gladly paid with their lives for the adventure—as it seemed that he must do.
He watched the giant leaning over him. He studied each movement of the controls. He was straining every sense, for every possible crumb of information. Perhaps he could yet defeat the Ghan’s sullen reticence.
The bulk of Earth’s atmosphere was now beneath. The sun burned with savage force out of a flaming halo in the west. But stars were breaking out of the darkly purple east. Trent had expected the globe to increase its speed, perhaps for some astounding interplanetary voyage.
But it slowed down, instead.
THE MIGHTY reverberation ebbed.
The Ghan’s giant hands made delicate adjustments of the controls—as if he were carefully piloting the globe into some port. But what port could there be, here perhaps thirty miles above the Earth?
The Ghan saw his anxious attention. The painted face twisted briefly, with a leering amusement. The bottle vibrated to a mighty voice, as the giant spoke at last:
“Well, little one. Our voyage will soon be ended. Soon I shall be at home on Oru.” The leer of the Ghan was palely sinister. “And you will be on your way back to Earth.”
Trent shuddered to an infinite apprehension. The voice and the look of the giant held a ruthless enigmatic threat. He caught his breath, shouted against the glass:
“You are letting me go back?”
The Ghan’s laughter was wild thunder.
“Yes, little one—as the Herr Doktor planned!”
His eyes returned to the dials. Great fingers moved the colossal controls. He peered out, hopefully, through the crystal walls. At last the tense effort on his pale face was replaced with a smile.
“Oru!” His murmur was a far-off roaring. “Soon, under the swastika, it will be mine.”
Against the dark east, Trent saw a new atom of purple light. The Ghan steered toward it. It became a sphere, no larger than the ball of the giant’s thumb. The machine drifted past it, and its phases changed, from disk to tiny crescent.
Oru!
A planet the size of a golf ball! Hard to believe that it once had been as huge as Earth. But so Rori Ron had told him.
The Ghan looked at the dials again, and pulled an immense red lever toward him. The mechanism sang another mighty song, and the crystal wall glowed faintly green.
Trent felt a curious lurching sensation. He looked out at tiny Oru, to tell if the globe was moving again. The tiny planet seemed larger. It had grown large as an orange. Still it grew.
Suddenly it was no longer small and near at all. It was vast and remote. It was a mighty world, spinning in blue and infinite space. It was hundreds of thousands of miles away.
The Ghan’s giant hand picked up the bottle. Unable to stand on the slippery glass, Trent fell painfully. Picking himself up, he heard the giant’s voice:
“Now, little one, I call to tell you the fate that the Herr Doktor planned for you. Now we have reached the size-scale of Oru. I am going to dispose of you, in your bottle, through the refuse-valve.
“You will fall back to Earth. But now you are smaller than the molecules of your planet’s crust. You will drop through it, battered by the heat-driven molecules, until some impact breaks the glass. And the Herr Doktor promises that you will make us no more trouble.”
The great pale face leered down at Trent.
“He is a clever man—almost as clever as I am. We are both too clever for you, little one.”
Holding the bottle in his hand, he knelt at the edge of the circular deck, and began to spin an immense gleaming wheel. A dark chute yawned.
CHAPTER IV
Coffin for a Planet
THE BOTTLE shook, as the Ghan’s monster hand thrust it toward the chute. Trent fell again on the slippery glass. His wounded head came with splitting force against the steel oxygen cylinder. Pain made him ill. But he caught his breath, shouted desperately:
“I have seen that you are a clever man, Your Highness. I think you are too clever to destroy me—yet.”
The Ghan poised the bottle above the chute.
“Of course I am clever,” the mighty voice rumbled. “And I am clever to destroy you, For the Herr Dokter told me that you are the one Earthman who could threaten our plan.”
Trent braced himself against the glass, shook his throbbing head.
“That is true, Your Highness,” he shouted. “I am the only Earthman who has ever beaten the Herr Doktor. When I am gone, you will be the only man in two words clever enough to stand against him.”
The great painted face abruptly smiled.
“So I am, little one,” boomed the Ghan. “And I am too clever to destroy you—yet! Because I don’t trust the Herr Doktor completely—I am too clever for that. If he attempts to betray me, you might be useful. If he doesn’t—there is still time to drop you to die in the heart of your planet.”
The great yellow head nodded.
“Yes, that is the clever stroke. I shall take you with me to the rock of Krandevar, and leave you there until Oru is safe in the Herr Doktor’s trap.”
The Ghan smiled with sinister elation.
“But you have won no victory, little one. I shall not remove you from the bottle. And, as soon as Oru is safely mine, you shall be destroyed. I am too clever to trust Earthmen.”
“Thank you,” gasped Trent. “You are clever, indeed.” He braced himself, as the Ghan closed the great chute and carried the bottle back to its place on the control pillar.
Trembling, Trent sat down on the oxygen cylinder. His bandaged head was throbbing, and he felt weak with exhaustion. In spite of the tiny stream of oxygen hissing from the cylinder, the air in the bottle was growing bad. Things still looked black. He had won a stay of execution. But his life was still at stake. And Rori Ron’s. And the future of two planets.
The Ghan moved the huge green lever again. The bottle quivered to a deep reverberation. And presently Trent saw that the Planet Oru was swelling larger again, as the globe dropped toward it.
Time dragged away. In spite of himself, Trent dozed wearily. He woke ravenous, and ate half the black loaf, chewing the hard bread until it turned sweet in his mouth.
“Eat slowly, little one,” warned the Ghan’s great voice. “You shall have no more when that is gone. I am too clever to open the bottle.”
Oru became a mighty sphere, suspended in a blue infinity. Still it swelled. The globe dropped into a sea of purple mist. Sank through, into air that was crystal clear. Trent stared at an astounding landscape.
THE SKY was a luminous purple dome. Vast brown continents were splashed with yellow and crimson vegetation. The oceans that ran between them were emerald green. The Ghan leered triumphantly at the shining dome.
“Little one,” he boomed, “I’ll give you a key to our trap. The layer of purple gas above the atmosphere absorbs a certain cosmic radiation, and emits the light and heat and power waves that mean life to all Oru. All the planet’s deposits of oil and coal and radium were long ago exhausted. If anything cut off that cosmic radiation—anything such as a wall of contracted copper—Oru must soon surrender.”
His hungry burning eyes looked down at the strange landscape sliding beneath. Trent saw orange squares of fields, masses of crimson forest, silver nets of roads, cities that were clusters of jewels.
“Surrender—” rumbled the Ghan. “Or die!”
Beyond the continent, he dropped the globe toward a wide green sea. Its waters turned dark and uneasy. Out of them towered an immense black rock, with restless waves breaking into emerald and lapis foam at its foot. On the rock stood a huge grim castle, its walls and towers dark and crumbling with time.
“That is Krandevar,” roared the Ghan. “It will be your prison, little one, as it was mine—until the time has come for you to die.”
He dropped the globe to a high terrace, picked up Trent’s bottle, and left the machine. A dozen men and women had gathered in a court below, and he paused to speak to them. Clad in gay fabrics, they all looked amazingly young and vigorous. Trent remembered something Rori Ron had said about the biological effects of the contraction process.
He slipped and fell, as the Ghan moved the bottle. Pain blinded him. When he could see again, the Ghan had set the bottle on a broad stone ledge. Trent peered anxiously across it.
The thick glass distorted vision. He had to put his face close against it to see anything very clearly, and eyestrain made a new ache in his throbbing head.
But the stone ledge seemed to be a mantle. A floor made a checkered plain below. Windows in the mountainous walls looked out upon infinity. He could see the vast blue curve of the ship on the terrace. Beyond, the green sea surged darkly away to the purple sky.
The Ghan leered at Trent in the bottle. He left the vast room, locking the door behind him. Presently Trent saw the blue globe rise from the terrace.
Trent was left in solitary imprisonment.
For a time he lay sick with despair. What chance had he now, against von Schlegel? An old man, injured, exhausted. Shrunken to something smaller than an atom. Imprisoned without sufficient food or water, or even air to breathe. Handcuffed.
He fought that despair. Dry-mouthed, no longer hungry, he ate another black crust. He opened the oxygen valve a little. Wearily, he began filing the handcuffs against the steel rim of the oxygen cylinder.
If he could escape, in time to give warning of the trap—
But the steel wore slowly. Beneath the purple sky, Oru had no nights or days; but leaden, eternities passed. Trent’s wrists swelled and turned black. Blood stained the links. The bread was gone, and the last drop of water. The air was foul, and the oxygen pressure low.
And the thing happened.
NIGHT came to Oru!
Dim remote walls, incredibly vast, rose beyond the purple sky. Abruptly, then, its radiance was blotted out, as if a lid had closed down upon it.
It was a lid, Trent realized—the lid of the copper box!
The planet was in von Schlegel’s trap.
Only a chill violet dusk remained, terrible and foreboding. Snow began to fall out of it. Cold seized the planet. The ancient castle shuddered to the screaming of a frightful blizzard.
Cold crept into the bottle. Trent was numb and shivering with it. Yet he worked on—grinding his bleeding wrists and the stubborn links against the worn edge of steel.
He wondered a little at his own endurance. He was old, tortured with thirst, drugged with foul air, starving. Yet he managed to keep going. Somehow the pain in his heart had stopped. The contraction must have stimulated him. A youthful hope kept surging up in him.
He wasn’t beaten—not yet!
But the savage cold grew more intense. White floes of ice formed on the wild green sea. Its dark anger was stilled. At last, to the dusky violet horizon, it became a desert of white. Blizzards screamed over it, building long white drifts and carving them away.
The last of the oxygen was gone from the cylinder. Tortured with slow asphyxiation, half-dead with cold, Trent worked on. The bloody links were half worn through, when the blue globe landed again on the terrace. The gigantic Ghan came back into the room.
“Cold, little one?” He paused to leer down at Trent, who lay in a shivering heap, hiding his wrists. “Well, so is all Oru!”
He tuned the television communicator. Von Schlegel’s pale, putty-like face appeared upon the screen, and his hard voice drummed:
“Well, Your Highness?”
“The thing is done, Herr Doktor,” the Ghan reported. “The contracted metal has cut off the vital radiations almost completely. The regents made a desperate effort to escape from the trap. But my agents had been able to destroy the emergency batteries at both main power plants. Escape is quite impossible.”
The Prussian’s monocle glittered icily. “Good,” boomed von Schlegel.
“Good,” echoed the Ghan. “My cleverness won an easy victory, Herr Doktor. The regents accepted the story that I had been your dupe—”
“Ja!” rapped the Prussian. “So you have been!”
The Ghan swallowed hard and looked uneasy.
“What—Herr Doktor—what do you mean?”
“Precisely that.” The monocle flashed triumphantly. “You have served your purpose. I have no more need of you—unless you wish to tell the regents that my terms are unconditional surrender, and full aid in the conquest of the Earth.” And von Schlegel cut the communicator off.
The Ghan staggered back, trembling.
He stared at Trent. “Little one, you were right.” His voice was stricken. “I see it now—too late. My mistake cannot be undone. I can only leave a warning for the regents. Death is better than the rule of Hitler.”
He shouted. The door burst open, and a dozen of his gigantic bright-clad retainers came thundering into the vast room. He roared something at them, in the language of Oru. Pale with a stunned consternation, they turned angry eyes on Trent, fingered odd-looking silvered guns.
The Ghan’s bleak eyes looked back at the bottle.
“Farewell, little one,” he gasped. “I have warned them never to trust an Earthman.”
He snatched a bright-looking gun from the man next him, whipped it to his temple. There was a saffron flare, a dull tremendous concussion. The Ghan crashed down like a toppling mountain, dead.
Half his stunned retainers bent over him. The rest surged angrily toward Trent. He was flung from his feet as a gigantic hand lifted the bottle, swept it back to crash it against the wall.
