Collected Short Fiction, page 63
He reached the red sand of the plain—it was worn by winds of ages into an impalpable scarlet dust, that rose in a thin, murky cloud about him, and settled in a blood-colored stain upon his perspiring limbs. The dry dust yielded beneath his feet as he made his way toward the silent gray bodies, making his progress most difficult.
Almost exhausted, he reached the gray creatures, examined them. They were far different from human beings, despite obvious similarities. Each of their “hands” had but three clawed digits; a curious, disklike appendage took the place of the nose. In skeletel structure they were far different from homo sapiens.
Wearily Bill trudged back to the towering red cliff, red dust swirling up about him. He was oddly exhausted by his exertions, trifling as they had been. The murky red dust he inhaled was irritating to his nostrils; he choked and sneezed. Sweat ran in muddy red streams from his body, and he was suddenly very thirsty.
All the top of the red granite plateau—it was evidently the stone heart of an ancient mountain—was hidden from him. He could see nothing of the Red Rover or any of her crew. He could see no living thing.
The flat plain of red dust lay about him, curving below a near horizon. Those dust sucked at his feet, rose about him in a suffocating saffron cloud. The sun, a little crimson globe in a blue-black sky, shone blisteringly. The sky was soberly dark, cold and hostile. In alarmed haste, he struggled toward the grim line of high, red cliffs.
Then he saw a round white object in the red sand.
Pausing to gasp for breath and to rub the sweat and red mud from his forehead, he kicked at it curiously. A sun-bleached human skull rolled out of the scarlet dust. He knew at once that it was human, not a skull of a creature like the gray things behind him on the sand.
With the unpleasant feeling that he was opening the forbidden book of some forgotten tragedy, he fell to his knees in the dust, and scooped about with his fingers. His right had closed upon a man’s thigh bone. His left caught in a rotten leather belt, that pulled a human vertebra out of the dust. The belt had a tarnished silver buckle, and he looked at it with a gasp.
It bore an elaborate initial “E.”
“E!” he muttered. “Envers! He got to Mars. And died here. Trying to get to the mountain, I guess. Lord! what a death! A man all alone, in the dust and the sun. A strange world. Strange monsters.”
The loneliness of the red desert, the mystery of it, and its alien spirit, wrapped itself about him like a mantle of fear. He staggered to his feet, and set off at a stumbling run through the sand toward the cliff. But in a moment he paused.
“He might have left something!” he muttered.
He turned, and plodded back to where he had left the skull and the rotted belt, and dug again with his fingers. He found the rest of the skeleton, even bits of hair, clothing and human skin, preserved in the dry dust. He found an empty canteen, a rusty pocketknife, buttons, coins, and a ray pistol that was burned out.
Then his plowing fingers brought up a little black book from the dust.
It was Envers’ diary.
Most of it was still legible. It is available in printed form today, and gives a detailed account of the tragic venture. The hopeful starting from earth. The dangers and discouragements of the voyage. A mutiny; half the crew killed. The thrill of landing on a new planet. The attack of the blue globes. How they took the ship, carried their prisoners to the pens, where they tried to use them to breed a new variety of domestic animals. Envers’ escape, his desperate attempt to find the ship where they had landed in the desert.
Bill did not read it all then. He took time to read only that last tragic entry.
“Water all gone. See now I will never reach mountain where I landed. Probably they have moved sunship anyhow. Might have been better to have stayed in the pen. Food and water there. . . . But how could God create such things? So hideous, so malignant! I pray they will not use my ship to go to earth. I hoped to find and destroy it. But it is too late.”
Thick red dust swirled up in Bill’s face. He tried to breathe, choked and sneezed and strangled. Looking up from the yellowed pages of the dead explorer’s notebook, he saw great clouds of red dust hiding the darkly blue sky in the east. It seemed almost that a colossal red-yellowed cylinder was being rolled swiftly upon him from eastward:
A dust-storm was upon him! One of the terrific dust-storms of Mars, so fierce that they are visible to astronomers across forty million miles of space.
Clutching the faded note-book, he ran across the sand again, toward the red cliffs. The wind howled behind him, overtook him and came screaming about his ears. Red dust fogged chokingly about his head. The line of cliffs before him vanished in a murky red haze. The wind blew swiftly, yet it was thin, exerting little force. The dusty air became an acrid fluid, choking, unbreathable.
Blindly, he staggered on, toward the rocks. He reached them, fought his way up the bank of talus, scrambling over gigantic blocks of lava. The base of the cliff was before him, a massive, perpendicular wall, rising out of sight in red haze. He skirted it, saw a climbable chimney, scrambled up.
At last he drew himself over the top, and lay flat. Scarlet dust-clouds swirled about him: he could not see twenty yards. He made no attempt to find the Red Rover; he knew he could not locate it in the dust.
HOURS passed as he lay there, blinded, suffocating, feeling the hot misery of acrid dust and perspiration caked in a drying mud upon his skin. Thin winds screamed about the rocks, hot as a furnace-blast. He leveled his torpedo, tried to watch. But he could see only a murky wall of red, with the sun biting through it like a tiny, round blood-ruby.
The red sun had been near the zenith. Slowly it crept down, toward an unseen horizon. It alone gave him an idea of direction, and of the passage of time. Then it, too, vanished in the dust.
Suddenly the wind was still. The dust settled slowly. In half an hour the red sun came into view again, just above the red western horizon. Objects about the mile-long plateau began to take shape. The Red Rover still lay where she had been, in the center. Men were still busily at work at the mining machinery—they had struggled on through the storm.
“All lookouts signal reports,” the Prince flashed from the ship.
“Found Envers’ body and brought his diary,” Bill flashed when it came his turn.
“Now preparing to depart,” came from the Prince. “Getting apparatus aboard. Have the required cerium. Return signal will be fired soon.”
Bill watched the dusty sky, over whose formerly dark-blue face the storm had drawn a yellowish haze. In a few minutes he saw a blue globe. Then another, and a third. They were far toward the southeast, drifting high and fast through the saffron haze. It seemed that they were searching out the route over which the globe that he had brought down must have come.
“Three globe-ships in sight,” he signalled. “Approaching us.”
Some of the other lookouts had evidently seen them, for he saw the flicker of other ray pistols across the plateau.
Without preamble, the red signal rocket was fired. Bill heard the report of it—sharp and thin in the rare atmosphere. He saw the livid scarlet flare.
He got to his feet, shouldered the heavy rocket tube, and ran stumbling back to the Red Rover. He saw other men running; saw men struggling to get the mining machinery back on the ship.
Looking back, he saw the three blue globes swimming swiftly nearer. Then he saw others, a full score of them. They were far off, tiny circles of blue in the saffron sky. They seemed to be rapidly flying toward the Red Rover.
He looked expectantly northward, toward the end of the plateau to which Paula had gone. He saw nothing of her. She was not returning in answer to the signal rocket.
He was utterly exhausted when he reached the sunship, panting, gasping for the thin air. The others were all like himself, caked with dried red mud, gasping asthmatically from exertion and excitement. Men were struggling to get pieces of heavy machinery aboard the flier—vitalium power generators that had been used to heat the furnaces, and even a motor ray tube that had been borrowed from the ship’s power plant for emergency use in the improvised smelter.
The Prince and Dr. Trainor were laboring furiously over an odd piece of apparatus. On the red sand beside the silver sunship, they had set up a tripod on which was mounted a curious glistening device. There were lenses, prisms, condensers, mirrors. The core of it seemed to be a strange vacuum tube—which had an electrode of cerium, surrounded with a queer vitalium grid. A tiny filament was glowing in it; and the induction coil which powered the tube, fed by vitalium batteries, was buzzing incessantly.
“Better get aboard, and off!” Bill cried. “No use to lose our lives, our chance to save the world—just for a little mining machinery.”
The Prince looked up in a moment, leaving the queer little device to Dr. Trainor. “Look at the Martian ships!” he cried, sweeping out an arm. “Must be thirty in sight, swarming up like flies. We couldn’t get away. And against those purple atomic bombs, the torpedoes wouldn’t have a chance. Besides, we have some of the ship’s machinery out here. Some generators, and a ray tube.”
Bill looked up, saw the swarming blue globes, circling above them in the saffron sky, some of them not a mile above. He shrugged hopelessly, then looked anxiously off to the north again, scanning the red plateau.
“Paula! What’s become of her?” he demanded.
“Paula? Is she gone?” The Prince turned from the tripod, looked around suddenly. “Paula! What could have happened to her?”
“A broken heart has happened to her,” Bill told him.
“You think—you think——” stammered the Prince.
There was sudden alarm in his dark eyes, and a great tender longing. His bitterly cynical smile was gone.
“Bill, she can’t be gone!” he cried, almost in agony.
“You know she was on lookout duty at the north end of the plateau. She hasn’t come back.”
“I’ve got to find her!”
“What is it to you? I thought you didn’t care!” Bill was stern.
“I thought I didn’t, except as a friend. But I was wrong. If she’s gone, Bill—it will kill me!”
The Prince spun about with abrupt decision.
“Get everything aboard, and fit the ship to take off, as soon as possible,” he ordered. “Dr. Trainor is in command. Give him any help he needs. Brand, test everything when the tube is replaced; keep the ship ready to fly.” He turned swiftly to Trainor, who still worked deftly over the glittering little machine on the tripod. “Doc, you can operate that by yourself, as well as if I were here. Do your best—for mankind! I’m going to find your daughter.”
Trainor nodded in silent assent, his fingers busy.
The Prince, sticking a ray pistol in his belt, set off at a desperate run toward the north end of the plateau. After a moment’s hesitation, Bill staggered along behind him, still carrying the rocket torpedo strapped to his back.
It was only half a mile to the end of the plateau. In a few minutes the Prince was there. Bill staggered up just as he was reading a few scrawled words on a scrap of paper that he had found fastened to a boulder where Paula had been stationed.
“To the Prince of Space” it ran. “I can’t go on. You must know that I love you—desperately. It was maddening to be with you, to know that you don’t care. I know the story of your life, know that you can never care for me. The red dust is blowing now, and I am going down in the desert to die. Please don’t look for me—it will do no good. Pardon me for writing this, but I wanted you to know—why I am going. Because I love you. Paula.”
CHAPTER VIII
The Vitomaton
“I LOVE Paula!” cried the Prince. “It happened all at once—when you said she was gone. Like a burst of light. Yet it must have been growing for weeks. It was getting so I couldn’t work in the lab, unless she was there. God! It must have been hard for her. I was fighting it; I tried to hide what I was beginning to feel, tried to treat her as if she were a man. Now—she’s gone!”
Bill looked back to the Red Rover, half a mile behind them. She lay still, burnished silver cylinder on the red sand. He could see Trainor beside her, still working over the curious little device on the tripod. All the others had gone aboard. And a score of blue globe-ships, like little sapphire moons, were circling a few thousand feet above, drifting around and around, with a slow gliding motion, like buzzards circling over their carrion-prey.
The Prince had buried his face in his hands, standing in an attitude of utter dejection.
Bill turned, looked over the red flat sand of the Martian desert. Far below, leading toward the near horizon, he saw a winding line of foot-prints, half obliterated by the recent dust-storm. Far away they vanished below the blue-black sky.
“Her tracks,” he said, pointing.
“Tracks!” the Prince looked up, eager, hopeful determination flashing in his dark eyes. “Then we can follow! It may not be too late!
He ran toward the edge of the cliff.
Bill clutched his sleeve. “Wait! Think what you’re doing, man! We’re fighting to save the world. You can’t run off that way! Anyhow, the sun is low. It is getting cool already. In two minutes after the sun goes down it will be cold as the devil! You’ll die in the desert!”
The Prince tugged away. “Hang the world! If you knew the way I feel about Paula—Lord, what a fool I’ve been! To drive her to this!”
Agony was written on his dark face; he bit his thin lip until blood oozed out and mingled indistinguishably with the red grime on his face. “Anyhow, the vitomaton is finished. Trainor can use it as well as I. I’ve got to find Paula—or die trying.”
He started toward the brink of the precipice again. After the hesitation of a moment, Bill started after him. The Prince turned suddenly.
“What the devil are you doing here?”
“Well,” said Bill, “the Red Rover is not a very attractive haven of refuge, with all those Martian ships flying around it. And I have come to think a good deal of Miss Paula. I’d like to help you find her.”
“Don’t come,” said the Prince. “Probably it is death—”
“I’m not exactly an infant. I’ve been in tight places before. I’ve even an idea of what it would be like to die at night in this desert—I found the bones of a man in the dust today. But I want to go.”
The Prince grasped Bill’s hand. For a moment a tender smile of friendship came over the drawn mask of mingled despair and determination upon his lean face.
Presently the two of them found an inclining ledge that ran down the face of the red granite cliff, and scrambled along to the flat plain of acrid dust below. In desperate haste they plodded gasping along, following the scant traces of Paula’s footprints that the storm had left. A hazy red cloud of dust rose about them, stinging their nostrils. They strangled and gasped for breath in the thin, dusty air. Sweaty grime covered them with a red crust.
For a mile they followed the trail. Then Paula had left the sand for a bare ledge of age-worn volcanic rock. The wind had erased what traces she might have left here. They skirted the edge of the ledge, but no prints were visible in the sand. The small red eye of the sun was just above the ocherous western rim of the planet. Their perspiring bodies shivered under the first chill of the frozen Martian night.
“It’s no use,” Bill muttered, sitting down on a block of time-worn granite, and wiping the red mud from his face. “She’s probably been gone for hours. No chance.”
“I’ve got to find her!” the Prince cried, his lean, red-stained face tense with determination. “I’ll circle about a little, and see if I can’t pick up the trail.”
Bill sat on the rock. He looked back at the low dark rim of cliffs, a mile behind, grim and forbidding against the somber, indigo sky. The crimson, melancholy splendor of the Martian sunset was fading in the west.
The silver sunship was out of sight behind the cliffs. But he could see the little blue globes, like spinning moons of sapphire, circling watchfully above it. They were lower now, some of them not a thousand feet above the hidden sunship.
Abruptly, one of them was enveloped in a vivid flare of orange light. Its blue gleam flickering out, and it fell in fragments of twisted white metal. Bill knew that it had been struck with a rocket torpedo.
The reply was quick and terrible. Slender, dazzling shafts of incandescent whiteness stabbed down toward the ship, each of them driving before it a tiny bright spark of purple fire, coruscating, iridescent.
They were the atomic bombs, Bill knew. A dozen of them must have been fired, from as many ships. In a few seconds he heard the reports of their explosions—in the thin, still air, they were mere sharp cracks, like pistol reports. They exploded below the line of his vision. No more torpedoes were fired from the unseen sunship. Bill could see nothing of it; but he was sure that it had been destroyed.
He heard the Prince’s shout, thin and high in the rare atmosphere. It came from a hundred yards beyond him.
“I’ve found the trail.”
Bill got up, trudged across to follow him. The Prince waited, impatiently, but gasping for breath. Just half of the red disk of the sun was visible in the indigo sky above the straight horizon, and a chill breeze blew upon them.
“I guess that ends the chance for the world!” Bill gasped.
“I suppose so. Some fool must have shot that torpedo off, contrary to orders. The vitomaton might have saved us, if Trainor had had a chance to use it.”
They plodded on through the dust, straining their eyes to follow the half-obliterated trail in the fading light. It grew colder very swiftly, for Mars has no such thick blanket atmosphere to hold the heat of day as has the earth.
