Collected Short Fiction, page 453
I leveled my rifle, drew a bead on the neck of the foremost one, and fired. I had the luck to shatter the spine. The head dropped limply to the side as the thing stopped abruptly, groping blindly about with its talonlike fingers. Strangely enough, it did not fall. Instead, as one of the others ran close by it, the crippled monster sprang savagely at the other. In a moment they were writhing and struggling in the brush, tearing at one another with tigerish ferocity. The other three passed by them as I finished emptying the rifle, without visible results.
By now the crackle of the swiftly spreading fire had grown to a dull roar. It swept fast across the brush, red flames flaring high and dense smoke rolling up into the night. The purple beasts did not appear to see it. They made no effort to avoid the flames. Were they invulnerable to fire?
The three rushed straight on toward us, disregarding the rushing wall of flame not a dozen yards to the right of them. The leg of one went limp, but he came on with scarcely diminished speed, laughing terribly all the while. The flames engulfed the fallen two and hid them. In another instant the curtain of fire had rolled over the others, and even the ship was hidden from our view.
SUDDENLY I realized that we were in as much danger from the fire as from the monsters. Already we were shrinking from the hot blast, half-choked by the acrid fumes. For the second time we made a mad retreat to the top of the boulder, and lay flat while I reloaded the all but futile rifle. I heard a terrible laugh from the flames, and in a moment one of the things dashed out. Its white hair was gone and the purple flesh was burnt black. I shot as it showed itself, and it fell. In another instant the flames had raced over it again. None of the others appeared.
We lay on the rock for several minutes, gasping in the cooler air that lingered near its surface. For a time the heat was stifling, but the scanty vegetation burned off quickly, and soon a cool breeze came up from the south and lifted the smoke. The metallic flying cylinder still lay where it had landed, its port now closed. The green light still shone in the forward end. About it the earth lay black and smoking. Between us and the ship I saw in the darkness the black shadows that were the five dead purple beasts.
I was just beginning to wonder if all the crew of this ship were dead, and whether we might enter and examine it, when the great oval door in the side swung open again, and something sprang out of it into the night. I heard a strange hissing, and a clatter of metal. In the semi-darkness I could see nothing plainly, but there was a floating shape of greenish mist with a vague form beneath. I strained my eyes to try to distinguish its shape.
Abruptly a narrow, intensely bright beam of orange light shot out of it to impinge on the rock. There was a dull thud from the rock, and it quivered beneath us. Then the orange ray went dead, but the granite where it had struck was cut away—obliterated! The beam had shone straight through the boulder, disintegrating the matter which it had struck! The smooth edges of the cut were glowing with a soft violet radiance.
Anticipating no luck against this sort of enemy, nevertheless, I fired. I aimed just below the greenish patch. Something was exploded by the bullet. There was a vivid flash of white fire, and a loud, sharp report. The spot of green disappeared, and there was no further motion about the cylinder.
At the time I had no idea what it was that I had shot. I supposed it to have been another of the purple beasts armed with a strange ray-weapon, and I thought my bullet had struck the weapon, causing an explosion.
CHAPTER IX
The Battle in the Mist
For perhaps an hour we waited there on the half-rock. As soon as the smoke cleared, we could see overhead more crimson needles flying high upon their vague red tracks. I dreaded the moment when one of them would land to investigate the fate of its sister ship that lay silent and presumably empty before us. The ground was still too hot for us to walk upon. With a feeling of resigned and hopeless horror we saw one of the crimson pencils circle lower about the place, then disappear in the direction of its lair beyond the Silver Lake.
Even as the whistling roar of its passage was rolling down upon us, Melvar spoke.
“The Krimlu are coming,” she cried. “There is no use to try to fight them or outrun them. But that ship must be empty. The walls are metal and strong. Perhaps they could not open it.”
While there were several things about the proposition that were not very attractive, it seemed our best resource. Besides, I had a keen desire to see the interior of the thing. We gathered up our equipment, climbed off the boulder and hurried over to the cylinder.
I was possessed by a haunting fear that we would find something hideous awaiting us, but the bright pencil of light from my pocket lamp revealed no living being in the long interior, nor could I find even a trace of the green patch that had blown up in front of the door. We scrambled through the opening without difficulty. I found and turned a handle that swung the heavy door shut and evidently locked it.
Then I set about examining the mechanism, for I had an intense curiosity about the propulsive force that enabled the vessel to attain such terrific speeds. In one end were rows of long cylinders of a transparent substance, evidently filled with the metallic fluid from the Silver Lake. Pipes ran from them to a complex mechanism in the rear end of the ship, from which heavy conduits ran all over the inside of the metal hull. While my understanding of it all was far from complete, I was able to verify a previous idea—that the strange vessels were driven by use of the rocket principle.
It appeared that the silver fluid was decomposed in the machine, and that the purple gas it formed was forced out through the various tubes at a terrific velocity, propelling the ship by its reaction. The whistling roar of the things in motion was, of course, the sound of the escaping gas, and the red-purple tracks were merely the expelled gas hanging in the air.
The green globe in the forward end must have been the objective lens for a marvelous periscope. At any rate, the walls of the forward part of the shell seemed transparent. And the periscope must have utilized infra-red rays, for the scene about us seemed much brighter than it, in reality, was. We could see very plainly the burned plain and the granite rock, and once, through a rift in the clouds of smoke that were rising all about, I caught a glimpse of the gleaming city of Astran, high above us in the west.
I noticed a slender lever, with a corrugated disc at the top, rising out of the floor in the bow of the ship. Obviously the control lever. I took hold and gingerly pushed it back. Great jets of purple gas rushed past the transparent walls about us, and the ship slid backward along the ground.
The sensation of motion was most alarming. The illusion of the transparency of the bow of the ship was so perfect that it seemed almost as if we were hanging in space a few feet in front of the mouth of an open tube. It was impossible for me to realize that I was surrounded by solid walls of metal, until I touched them.
I think the wonderful telescope worked on much the same principle as television apparatus—that is, that the rays of light were picked up, converted into electrical impulses, amplified and then projected on the metal wail which served as a screen.
I CONTINUED my experiments with the lever. The control was relatively simple. The vessel was propelled forward when the lever was pushed forward, and reversed when the lever was pulled back. Slipping the little disc up or down raised or lowered the prow, and twisting the disc accomplished the steering.
By the time my cautious experiments had revealed all that, Melvar had pointed out three slender crimson craft wheeling low above us and evidently preparing to land. I pulled the knob up and pushed it forward all the way. A pale-red beam shot ahead. The black landscape dropped away from us, and we hurtled through the air of the night. I was amazed at the lack of any great sensation of motion. The jets of gas, for all their appalling roar without, were barely audible within the cylinder. Since the fore part of the ship was transparent from within, we had the oddest sensation of floating free in space.
I saw that the three ships had fallen in a line behind us, and were following at the same terrific pace. When we had reached an altitude of perhaps a mile, I twisted the knob to bring the helm about, and we shot over the Silver Lake, which lay like a white desert of moonlit sand beneath us, standing out sharply against the dark plain around it.
In a moment we had passed over it, and over the low hills beyond into the bank of purple mist. I had hoped to have time to land and hide the vessel on the ground below, but I looked back and saw that our pursuers were gaining swiftly. Slender, twisting rays of bright orange and green were darting toward us from the pursuing arrowlike ships of red.
In the darkness and the mist we could see nothing of the ground below. The only visible things were a few mist-veiled stars above, and the bright scarlet torpedoes that hurtled after us. Quickly I circled, raising the helm. I was almost intoxicated with the indescribable sensations of our swift and lofty flight. I felt a new and wonderful sensation of freedom and power. I had but to move the little piece of metal in my hand to go where I pleased with the speed, almost, of light. But still came the trio of ships behind us, at an incredible pace, stabbing at us with the green and orange rays.
Then, high above the others, I brought our ship around in a hairpin turn and plunged directly at them. They tried to turn aside, while their rays shot quickly toward us, but our speed was too great. The foremost suddenly turned broadside toward us, attempting to get out of our path. I held our bow directly at it, raising it a trifle at the last instant. The keel of our vessel struck the other amidships. The terrific crash of the collision hurled us to the floor.
When I regained my feet we were falling in a crazy twisting path, our ship out of control. I saw that the one we had struck was broken in two and plunging toward the earth far behind us, while the other two were circling about, far overhead. The mist about us grew thicker until the other ships, and the fragments of the wrecked one, finally vanished. We floated alone in a world of purple fog.
I seized the control lever as soon as our wild gyrations enabled me to reach it, but my unskilled efforts only resulted in making us roll and twist more wildly. So long as we had been on an even keel the piloting had been easy enough, but the blow against us had been slightly sidewise, setting the ship to spinning like a top. It seemed that we fell an interminable time. Whenever the stern pointed downward for a moment, I pushed the lever forward, to check our fall as much as possible.
Through the mist I caught a glimpse of the dark ground below. In another instant the vessel struck heavily, throwing us against the floor again.
DAY broke at last, and we could see that we had fallen on a bare, gravelly hilltop. The clear space was only an acre or so in extent. We were shut in on all sides by a dense, dark forest of gigantic trees that rose threateningly, seeming to close in on us. The purple mist hung in a somber curtain overhead, only faintly lighted by the coming day.
Naro and I strapped on our packs, picked up our weapons and opened the door. The three of us stepped out to face the perils of another world. What they might be, we did not know. But Austen had not let himself be conquered by the mere strangeness of the place. I still hoped to be able to find him, although a search in such a jungle as that about us seemed completely hopeless.
The walls of the rocket ship were still glowing dully red with the heat of its passage through the air, and we hurried away over the gravel for fifty yards to get beyond the fierce heat it radiated. The patch of sky above was a dull, dusky, luminescent purple. It seemed almost as if the mist shut out the daylight and lit the valley with a strange, weird radiance of its own.
All about us towered the forest. As the light grew better, we could see that the trees were red. They bore the same feathery fronds, star-like flowers of brilliant white and golden-brown fruits as the plants of the plain about Astran. But they were immensely greater; they towered up hundreds of feet. It was like a forest of the tree-ferns of the Carboniferous period, save for the deep bloody scarlet of the leaves.
The ground all about the gravelly knoll was low and marshy, and the air was heavy with the odors of rotting vegetation. There was no wind, and the air, under the great atmospheric pressure, was heavy, moist and hot. It hung like a weight upon our chests.
The crimson jungle seemed to possess a terrible life and spirit of its own. It did not belong to our world. The undergrowth was very thick. The higher branches were dimmed by the purple mist. It appeared useless to try to penetrate it. It was an evil jungle waiting to seize us the moment we crossed its bounds.
I got out my compass, and we decided to try to make our way toward the north, in the direction of the pass by which we supposed Austen to have rounded the Silver Lake.
When I had at last noted our position above the mist, with reference to the lake and the crater walls, we had been about fifteen miles south of the pass. I hoped by taking a course in that direction to come across some trace of Austen.
As we approached the north side of the clearing, I made a startling discovery. In the side of the hill was a deposit or iron pyrites. Not that there was anything remarkable about that. But the thing that struck me was that the vein had been recently worked!
I sprang down into the pit and found on the rock traces of copper that had evidently come from soft copper tools. Austen! I knew that Austen would have needed minerals if he had set up a wireless outfit in here. He must have been compelled to do an immense amount of work in collecting and refining the needed materials. I had a little doubt that he had been there, but it had been evidently weeks or months ago. Any trail that he might have made through the forest would have already grown over.
I THOUGHT the situation over. There seemed nothing better to do than to follow our original plan of exploring the jungle to the north. We plunged into the crimson gloom.
Without the compass we would have been quickly lost. Even with it, it was hard enough to travel in the same direction, walking over the marshy, sodden ground and breaking a path through the heavy undergrowth. We were soon covered with mud and dyed red with the stain of the weird vegetation.
For many hours we struggled through a wilderness of endless sameness—a dank morass, a crimson jungle, with the dusky purple sky hanging heavily in the tree-tops. At first the forest was quiet, with a silence that was dead and depressing, for there were no living things about us. No birds, no insects—not even a bright moth or butterfly. It was a wilderness of death.
But presently we heard, far ahead of us, a dull, constant roar, that grew ever louder as we went on. At last it grew so loud that we had to shout when we wished one another to hear our words. I was glad of the roar, for it drowned the sound of our progress through the jungle. But the forest was so dense that there seemed little danger of our capture unless we stumbled unaware on the habitation of the Krimlu.
Abruptly the jungle ended, and we stepped out on a bare ledge of stone. Before us was one of the most magnificent spectacles that I have beheld. To the west of us a great black cliff rose perhaps a thousand feet—until it was almost lost against the lowering, smoky purple of the sky. Over it plunged a vast sheet of the glowing white liquid of the Silver Lake, falling in a gigantic, unbroken arch to the immense pool beneath us, where it broke with a deafening roar into a gleaming bank of soft silver haze. Surrounding the black rock rim of the pool, the gloomy crimson of the forest closed in. The pool was a thousand feet across. The whole scene was colossal, awe-inspiring and impressive by the strangeness and intensity of its color.
There was no visible outlet for the silver liquid, so I knew that it must find its way off underground. I knew that we must be far below the level of the Silver Lake and the plain beyond. The fact may have accounted for the more luxuriant growth of the red vegetation.
Suddenly Naro reported the discovery of a comparatively fresh print of a hob-nailed boot in a little patch of mold on the rock. That set us to looking again for traces of Austen, and presently we found a fairly well-defined trail that led off to the east. We followed it eagerly.
When we had gone perhaps a mile we came to an outcropping seam of coal. There I found the plain marks of a copper pick. Evidently a good deal of coal had been dug up and carried off down the trail.
CHAPTER X
Austen’s Retreat
Perhaps two hundred yards farther on we came to the camp. It was on a little hilltop below a giant tree. By the trunk was a little mud-daubed hut, an open shed in front of it. Beside the shed was a rude clay furnace, with piles of coal, some strange ore, and large lumps of native copper lying by it. Beneath the shed was what appeared to be a small steam turbine, with a kettlelike boiler of hammered copper. Connected with it was a dynamo of crude but ingenious construction. Also there was a rude forge, hammers, anvils, saws and drills, all of copper or bronze, and a primitive device for drawing wire.
Simple as it was, that camp of Austen’s was the most remarkable thing I came across in the crater. Austen was a wonderful man. Having not only an exhaustive knowledge of half a dozen fields of science, he had also courage and determination, patience and manual skill, and a great deal of resourcefulness at the art of invention.
Where the average man would hardly have been able to keep alive in the jungle, Austen had been able to do such things as smelt and refine ore, and set up complicated and workable electrical machinery. Of course, he was fortunate in finding himself in a place where practically no effort was needed to satisfy his physical needs, and where he found various natural resources in available and easily accessible form. But I shall never cease to wonder at his accomplishments during the time of less than a year.
I was struck by a sudden fear that we had come too late, and that something had happened to him.
