Collected Short Fiction, page 59
A smile flickered over Smith’s stern face. “You have a revelation waiting for you. But it is better not to keep the Prince waiting.”
They stepped into the heliocar. The pilot sprang to his place, set the electric motors whirring. The machine rolled easily forward, took the air on spinning helicopters. The road, lined with green gardens and bright cottages, dropped away “below” them, and other houses drew nearer “above.” In the center of the cylinder the young man dextrously inverted the flier; and they continued on a straight line toward an imposing concrete building which now seemed “below.”
THE heliocar landed; they sprang out and approached the imposing building of several stories. Guards uniformed in scarlet, black and gold standing just outside the door held ray pistols in readiness. Smith hurried his “guests” past; they entered a long, high-ceilinged room. It gave a first impression of stately luxury. The walls were paneled with rich dark wood, hung with a few striking paintings; It was almost empty of furniture; a heavy desk stood alone toward the farther end. A tall young man rose from behind this desk, advanced rapidly to meet them.
“My guests, sir,” said Smith. “Captain Brand of the Fury, and a reporter.”
“The mysterious Mr. Cain!” Bill gasped.
Indeed, Mr. Cain stood before him, a tall man, slender and wiry, with a certain not unhandsome sternness in his dark face. A smile twinkled in his black, enigmatic eyes—which none the less looked as if they might easily flash with fierce authority.
“And Mr. Win or, I believe you asked me to call you Bill. You seem a very hard man to evade!”
Still smiling enigmatically, Mr. Cain took Bill’s hand, and then shook hands with Captain Brand.
“But—are you the Prince of Space?” Bill demanded. “I am. Cain was only a nom de guerre, so to speak. Gentlemen, I welcome you to the City of Space!”
“And you kidnaped yourself?”
“My men brought the Red Rover for me.”
“Dr. Trainor and his daughter——” Bill ejaculated.
“They are friends of mine. They are here.”
“And that blue globe!” said Captain Brand. “What was that?”
“You saw the course it was following?”
“It was headed to intersect the orbit of the earth—and its direction was on a line that cuts the orbit of Mars where that planet was forty days ago.”
The Prince turned to Bill. “And you have seen something like that blue globe before?”
“Why, yes. The little blue circle on Mars—that I saw through the great telescope on Trainor’s Tower.”
A sober smile flickered across the dark lean face of the Prince.
“Then, gentlemen, you should believe me. The earth is threatened with a dreadful danger from Mars. The blue globe that wrecked your fleet was a ship from Mars. It was another Martian flier that took the Helicon. I believe I have credit for that ghastly exploit of sucking out the passengers’ blood.” His smile became grimly humorous. “One of the consequences of my position.”
“Martian fliers?” echoed Captain Brand. “Then how did we come to be on your ship?”
“I haven’t any weapon that will meet those purple atomic bombs on equal terms—though we are now working out a new device. I had Smith cruising around the blue globe in our Red Rover to see what he could learn. He was investigating the wrecks, and found you alive.”
“You really mean that men from Mars have come this near the earth?” Captain Brand was frankly incredulous.
“Not men,” the Prince corrected, smiling. “But things from Mars have done it. They have already landed on earth, in fact.”
He turned to the desk, picked up a broad sheet of cardboard.
“I have a color photograph here.”
Bill studied it, saw that it looked like an aerial photograph of a vast stretch of mountain and desert, a monotonous expanse of gray, tinged with green and red.
“A photograph, taken from space, of part of the state of Chihuahua, Mexico. And see!”
He pointed to a little blue disk in the green-gray expanse of a plain, just below a narrow mountain ridge, with the fine green line that marked a river just beside it.
“That blue circle is the first ship that came. It was the things aboard it that sucked the blood out of the people on the Helicon.”
Captain Brand was staring at the tall, smiling man, with a curious expression on his red, square-chinned face. Suddenly he spoke.
“Your Highness, or whatever we must call you——”
“Just call me Prince. Cain is not my name. Once I had a name—but now I am nameless!”
The thin dark face suddenly lined with pain, the lips closed in a narrow line. The Prince swept a hand across his high forehead, as if to sweep something unpleasant away.
“Well, Prince, I’m with you. That is, if you want an officer from the Moon Patrol.” A sheepish smile overspread his bluff features. “I would have killed a man for suggesting that I would ever do such a thing. But I’ll fight for you as well as I ever did for the honor of the Patrol.”
“Thanks, Brand!” The Prince took his hand, smiling again.
“Count me in too, of course,” said Bill.
“Both of you will be valuable men,” said the Prince. He picked up a sheaf of papers, scanned them quickly, seemed to mark off one item from a sheet and add another.
“The Red Rover sets out for the earth in one hour, gentlemen. We’re going to try a surprise attack on that blue globe in the desert. You will both go aboard.”
“And I’m going too!” A woman’s voice, soft and a little husky, spoke beside them. Recognizing it, Bill turned to see Paula Trainor standing behind them, an eager smile on her elfinly beautiful face. Her amazing eyes were fixed upon the Prince, their brown depths filled, for the moment, with passionate wistful yearning.
“Why, no, Paula,” the Prince said. “It’s dangerous!” Tears swam mistily in the golden orbs. “I will go! I must! I must!” The girl cried out the words, a sobbing catch in her voice.
“Very well, then,” the Prince agreed, smiling absently. “You father will be along of course. But anything will be likely to happen.”
“But you will be there in danger, too!” cried the girl. “We start in an hour,” said the Prince. “Smith, you may take Brand and Windsor back aboard the Red Rover.”
“Curse his fatherly indifference!” Bill muttered under his breath as they walked out through the guarded door. “Can’t he see that she loves him?”
Smith must have heard him, for he turned to him, spoke confidentially. “The Prince is a determined misogynist. I think an unfortunate love affair was what ruined his life—back on the earth. He left his history, even his name, behind him. I think a woman was the trouble. He won’t look at a woman now.”
They were outside again, startled anew by the amazing scene of a street of houses and gardens, that curved evenly up on either side of them and met above, so that men were moving about, head downward directly above them.
The heliocar was waiting. The three got aboard, were lifted and swiftly carried to the slender silver cylinder of the Red Rover, where it hung among the ponderous machinery of the air-lock, on the end of the huge cylinder that housed the amazing City of Space.
“I will show you your rooms,” said Captain Smith. “And in an hour we are off to attack the Martians in Mexico.”
CHAPTER IV
Vampires in the Desert
FORTY hours later the Red Rover entered the atmosphere of the earth, above northern Mexico.
It was night, the desert was shrouded in blackness. The telescopes revealed only the lights at ranches scattered as thinly as they had been two centuries before.
Bill was in the bridge-room, with Captain Smith.
“The blue globe that destroyed your fleet has already landed here,” Smith said. “We saw both of them before they slipped into the shadow of night. They were right together, and it seems that a white metal building has been set up between them.”
“The Prince means to attack? In spite of those purple atomic bombs?” Bill seemed surprised.
“Yes. They are below a low mountain ridge. We land on the other side of the hill, a dozen miles off, and give ’em a surprise at dawn.”
“We’d better be careful,” Bill said doubtfully. “They’re more likely to surprise us. If you had been in front of one of those little purple bombs, flying on the white ray!”
“We have a sort of rocket torpedo that Doc Trainor invented. The Prince means to try that on ’em.”
The Red Rover dropped swiftly, with Smith’s skilled hands on the controls. It seemed but a few minutes until the dark shadow of the earth beneath abruptly resolved itself into a level plain scattered with looming shapes that were clumps of mesquite and sagebrush. The slim silver cylinder came silently to rest upon the desert, beneath stars that shone clearly, though to Bill they seemed dim in comparison with the splendid wonders of space.
Three hours before dawn, five men slipped out through the air-lock. The Prince himself was the leader, with Captains Brand and Smith, Bill, and a young officer named Walker. Each man carried a searchlight and a positive ray pistol. And strapped upon the back of each was a rocket torpedo—a smooth, white metal tube, four feet long and as many inches thick, weighing some eighty pounds.
Dr. Trainor, kindly, bald-headed old scientist, was left in charge of the ship. He and his daughter came out of the air-lock into the darkness, to bid the five adventurers farewell.
“We should be back by night,” said the Prince, his even white teeth flashing in the darkness. “Wait for us until then. If we don’t come, return at once to the City of Space. I want no one to follow us, and no attempt made to rescue us if we don’t come back. If we aren’t back by tomorrow night we shall be dead.”
“Very good, sir,” Trainor nodded.
“I’m coming with you, then,” Paula declared suddenly.
“Absolutely you are not!” cried the Prince. “Dr. Trainor, I command you not to let your daughter off the ship until we return.”
Paula turned quickly away, a slim pillar of misty white in the darkness. Bill heard a little choking sound; he knew that she had burst into tears.
“I can’t let you go off into such danger, without me!” she cried, almost hysterical. “I can’t!”
The Prince swung a heavy torpedo higher on his shoulders, and strode off over bare gravel toward the low rocky slope of the mountain that lay to northward, faintly revealed in the light of the stars. The other four followed silently. The slender sunship, with the old scientist and his sobbing daughter outside the air-lock, quickly vanished behind them.
With only an occasional cautious flicker of the flashlights the five men picked their way over bare hard ground, among scattered clumps of mesquite. Presently they crossed a barren lava bed, clambering over huge blocks of twisted black volcanic rock. Up the slope of the mountain they struggled, sweating under heavy burdens, blundering into spiky cactus, stumbling over boulders and sagebrush.
When the silver and rose of dawn came in the purple eastern sky, the five lay on bare rock at the top of the low ridge, overlooking the flat, mesquite-covered valley beyond. The valley floor was a brownish green in the light of morning, the hills that rose far across it a hazy blue-gray, faintly tinged with green on age-worn slopes.
Like a string of emeralds dropped down the valley lay an endless wandering line of cottonwoods, of a light and vivid green that stood out from the somber plain. These trees traced the winding course of a stream, the Rio Casas Grandes.
Lying against the cottonwoods, and rising above their tops, were two great spheres of blue, gleaming like twin globes of lapis lazuli in the morning light. They were not far apart, and between them rose a curious domed structure of white, silvery metal.
Each of the five men lifted his heavy metal tube, leveled it across a boulder before him. The Prince, alert and smiling despite the dust and stain of the march through the desert, spoke to the others.
“This little tube along the top of the torpedo is a telescope sight. You will peer through, get the cross hairs squarely upon your target, and hold them there. Then press this nickeled lever. That starts the projectile inside the case to spinning so that inertia will hold it true. Then, being certain that the aim is correct, press the red button. The torpedo is thrown from the case by compressed air, and a positive ray mechanism drives it true to the target. When it strikes, about fifty pounds of Dr. Trainor’s new explosive, trainite, will be set off.
“Walker, you and Windsor take the right globe. Smith and Brand, the left. I’ll have a shot at that peculiar edifice between them.”
Bill balanced his torpedo, peered through the telescope, and pressed the lever. The hum of a motor came from the heavy tube.
“All ready?” the Prince inquired.
“Ready,” each man returned.
“Fire!”
Bill pressed the red button. The tube drove heavily backward in his hands, and then was but a light, sheet-metal shell. He saw a little gleam of white light before him, against the right blue globe, a diminishing point. It was the motor ray that drove the torpedo speeding toward its mark.
GREAT flares of orange light hid the two azure spheres and the white dome between them. The spheres and the dome crumpled and vanished, and a thin haze of bluish smoke swirled about them.
“Good shooting!” the Prince commented. “This motor torpedo of Trainor’s ought to put a lot of the old fighting equipment in the museum—if we were disposed to bestow such a dangerous toy upon humanity.
“But let’s get over and see what happened.”
Grasping ray pistols, they sprang to their feet and plunged down the rocky slope. It was five miles to the river. Nearly two hours later it was, when the five men slipped out of the mesquites, to look two hundred yards across an open, grassy flat to the wall of green trees along the river.
Three great heaps of wreckage lay upon the flat. At the right and the left were crumpled masses of bright silver metal—evidently the remains of the globes. In the center was another pile of bent and twisted metal, which had been the domed building.
“Funny that those blue globes look like ordinary white metal now,” said Smith.
“I wonder if the blue is not some sort of etheric screen?” Brand commented. “When we were fighting, our rays seemed to take no effect. It occurred to me that some vibratory wall might have stopped them.”
“It’s possible,” the Prince agreed. “I’ll take up the possibilities with Trainor. If they have such a screen, it might even be opaque to gravity. Quite a convenience in maneuvering a ship.”
As they spoke, they were advancing cautiously, stopping to pick up bits of white metal that had been scattered about by the explosion.
Suddenly Bill’s eyes caught movement from the pile of crumpled metal that had been the white dome. It seemed that a green plant was growing quickly from among the ruins. Green tendrils shot up amazingly. Then he saw on the end of a twisted stalk a glowing purple thing that looked somehow like an eye.
At first sight of the thing he had stopped in amazement, leveling his deadly ray pistol and shouting, “Look out!”
Before the shout had died in his throat, before the others had time to turn their heads, they caught the flash of metal among the twining green tentacles. The thing was lifting a metal object.
Then Bill saw a tiny purple spark dart from a bright little mechanism that the green tendrils held. He saw a blinding flash of violet light. His consciousness was cut off abruptly.
The next he knew he was lying on his back on rocky soil. He felt considerably bruised and battered, and his right eye was swollen so that he could not open it. Struggling to a sitting position, he found his hands and feet bound by bloody manacles of unfamiliar design. Captain Brand was lying on his elbow beside him, half under the thin shade of a mesquite bush. Brand looked much torn and disheveled; blood was streaming across his face from a gash in his scalp. His hands and feet also were bound with fetters of white metal.
“What happened?” Bill called dazedly.
“Not so loud,” Brand whispered. “The thing—a Martian left alive, I guess it is. Must have been somewhere out in the brush when we shot. It blew us up with an atomic bomb. Smith and Walker dead—blown to pieces.”
“And the Prince?”
“I can speak for myself.”
Hearing the familiar low voice, Bill turned. He saw the Prince squatted down, in the blazing sunshine, hands and feet manacled, hat off and face covered with blood and grime.
“Was it that—that green thing?” Bill asked.
“Looks like a sort of animated plant,” said the Prince. “A bunch of green tentacles, that it uses for hands. Three purple eyes on green stalks. Just enough of a body to join it all together. Not like anything I ever saw. But the Martians, originating under different conditions, ought to be different.”
“What is going to happen now?” Bill inquired.
“Probably it will suck our blood—as it did to the passengers of the Helicon,” Brand suggested grimly.
Windsor fell silent. It was almost noon. The desert sun was very hot. The motionless air was oppressive with a dry, parching heat; and flies buzzed annoyingly about his bleeding cuts. Wrists and ankles ached under the cruel pressure of the manacles.
“Wish the thing would come back, and end the suspense,” Brand muttered.
Bill reflected with satisfaction that he had no relatives to be saddened by his demise. He had no great fear of death. Newspaper work in the twenty-second century is not all commonplace monotony; your veteran reporter is pretty well inured to danger.
“Glad I haven’t anyone to worry about me,” he observed.
“So am I,” the Prince said bitterly. “I left them all, years ago.”
“But you have someone!” Bill cried. “It isn’t my business to say it, but that makes no difference now. And you’re a fool not to know. Paula Trainor loves you! This will kill her!”
The Prince looked up, a bitter smile visible behind the bloody grime on his thin dark face.
“Paula—in love with me! We’re friends, of course. But love! I used to believe in love. I have not been always a nameless outcast of space. Once I had name, family—even wealth and position. I trusted my name and my honor to a beautiful woman. I loved her! She said she loved me—I thought she meant it. She used me for a tool. I was trustful; she was clever.”
