Collected Short Fiction, page 70
“I’ve got it! In good shape, too. Hasn’t even been fired, though it looks like they have opened a box of cartridges, and cut open one or two. Maybe they didn’t understand the outfit—or it may be such a primitive weapon, that they aren’t interested in it.”
We hurried up to the building of blue cylinders and carefully hid the gun and ammunition, as well as a sun compass, a pair of prism binoculars, and a few other articles Ray had recovered.
In a few minutes Mildred, having seen Ray’s return, finished her song and ran up to join us. We arranged our packs, and waited the next call of the throbbing brazen gong to make the attempt for freedom.
We slept twice again before the clang of the great gong. Ray and Mildred were always together; I could not see that they were at all impatient.
The bell note came, the awful brazen vibration of it ringing on the black cavern roof. It came when we were eating, in the liquid turquoise radiance of the lofty cylinder. We sprang out. Ray gave his last directions to Mildred.
“Give us time to get to the top of the cliff by the shining fall. Then swim ashore and run. They may not notice. And if they do. we give ‘em a taste of lead!”
I was not very much surprised when he took the girl in his arms and put a burning kiss on her red lips. She gasped, but her struggles subsided very quickly; she clung to him as he freed her.
She paused a moment in the door, before she ran down across the beach. A radiant light of joy was burning in her great blue eyes, even though tears were glistening there.
RAY and I waited, to give time for the giant crabs that guarded the ladder to get away. In about ten more minutes the second brazen gong sounded, and presently the third. We gathered up the heavy packs of food, Ray took the rifle and I the binoculars, and we slipped out into the brilliant mushroom forest.
I stepped confidently out of the jungle into the clearing below the splendid opalescent fall of fire—and threw myself backward in trembling panic. A flaming crimson ray cut hissing into the towering mushrooms above my head.
Mildred’s confidence that the crabs would all gather at the ringing of the gong had been mistaken. The two guards had been waiting at the foot of the ladder, their flaming heat-rays ready for use.
As I dived back into the jungle, I heard two quick reports of the rifle. I scrambled awkwardly to my feet, beneath the heavy pack. Ray stood alert beside me, the smoking rifle in his hand. The giant crabs had collapsed by the foot of the ladder, in grotesque and hideous metal-bound heaps of red shell and twisted limb. Blood was oozing from a ragged hole in the head of each.
“Glad they were here,” Ray muttered. “I wanted to try the gun out on ’em. They’re soft enough beneath the shell; the bullet tears ’em up inside. Let’s get a move on!”
He sprang past the revolting carcasses. I followed, holding my nose against their nauseating, charnel-house odor. We scrambled up the metal ladder.
As we climbed, I could hear the haunting melody of Mildred’s wordless song coming faint across the distance. Once I glanced back for a moment, and glimpsed her tiny white figure above the black water, with the thousands of green antennae rising in a luminous forest about her.
We reached the top of the cliff, where the opalescent river plunged down in the flaming fall. Ray chose convenient boulders for shelter and quickly we flung ourselves flat. Bay replaced the fired cartridges in the rifle and leveled it across the rock before him. I unslung the binoculars and focussed them.
“Watch ’em close,” Ray muttered. “And tell me when to shoot.”
THE black lake lay below us, with the weird city of sapphire cylinders on its floor. I got the glasses upon Mildred’s white form. Soon she dived from the turquoise pedestal, swam swiftly ashore and vanished in the vivid fungous jungle. The wavering green antennae vanished below the water; I watched the crabs swimming away. Some of them climbed out of the water and lumbered off in various directions.
In fifteen minutes the slender white form of Mildred appeared at the foot of the ladder. She sprang over the dead crabs and scrambled nimbly up. Soon she was halfway up the face of the cliff, and there had been no sign of discovery My hopes ran high.
I was sweeping the whole plain with the binoculars, while Ray peered through the telescopic sights of the rifle. Suddenly I saw a giant crab pause as he lumbered along the edge of the black lake. He rose upright; his shining green antennae wavered. Then I saw him reaching with a knobbed, claw for a slender silver tube slung to his harness.
“Quick! The one by the lake I To the right of that canal!”
I pointed quickly. Ray swung his gun about, aimed. A broad red beam flashed from the tube the thing carried, and fell upon the cliff. The report of Ray’s rifle rang thunderously in my ears. The red ray was snapped off abruptly. and the giant crab rolled over into the black water of the lake. Half a dozen of the huge crabs were in sight They all took alarm, probably having seen the flash of the red ray. They raised grotesque heads, twisted stalked eyes and waved green antennae. Some of them began to raise the metal tubes of the heat-ray.
“Let’s get all there are in sight!” Ray muttered.
He began firing regularly, with deliberate precision. A few times he had to take two shots, but ordinarily one was enough to bring down a giant crab in a writhing red mass. Three times a red ray flashed out, once at the girl clambering up the ladder, twice at our position above the precipice. But the intense color of the ray announced its source, and Ray stopped each before it could be focussed to do damage.
I looked over at Mildred and saw that she was still climbing bravely, a little over a hundred feet below.
THEN the great red crabs began to climb out of the water, heat-ray tubes grasped in their claws. Ray fired as fast as he could load and aim. Still he shot with deliberate care, and almost every shot was effective.
Intense, ruby-red rays flashed up from the lake shore. Twice, one of them beat scorchingly upon us for a moment. Once a rock beside us was fused and cracked with the heat. But Ray fired rapidly, and the rays winked out as fast as they were born.
He was powder-stained, black and grimy. The heat-ray had singed his clothing. He was dripping perspiration. The gun was so hot that he could hardly handle it. But still the angry bark of the rifle rang out, almost with a deliberate rhythm. Ray was a fine shot in his youth on his father’s Arizona ranch, but his best shooting, I think, was done from above that cascade of liquid fire, at the hordes of monster scarlet crabs.
Mildred scrambled over the edge, unharmed. Her breast was heaving, but her face was bright with joy.
“You arc wonderful!” she gasped to Ray.
We seized the packs and beat a hurried retreat. A crimson forest of the heat-rays flashed up behind us, and flamed upon the black walls and roof of the cavern until glistening lava became incandescent, cracked and fused.
We were below the line of the rays. Quickly we made the bend in the cavern and followed at a halting run up the path beside the shimmering river of opalescent light. Before us the torrent of fire fell in a magnificent flaming arc from the roof.
We rounded the pool of lambent milk of flame, passed the roaring torrent of coruscating liquid radiance and reached the ladder in the square metal shaft. “If we can get to the top before they can get up here, we’re safe,” Ray said. “If we don’t, this shaft will be a chimney of fire.”
In the haste of desperation, we attacked the thousand-foot climb. I went first, Mildred below me, and Ray, with the rifle, in the rear. Our heavy packs were a terrible impediment, but we dared not attempt to go on without them. The metal rungs were four feet apart; it was no easy task to scramble from one to the next, again and again, for hundreds of times.
IT must have taken us an hour to make it. We should have been caught long before we reached the top, but the giant crabs were slow in their lumbering movements. Despite their evident intelligence, they seem to lack anything like our railways and automobiles.
The cold gray light of the polar sky came about us; a dull, purple-blue square grew larger above. I clambered over the last rung, flung myself across the top of the metal shaft. Looking down at the tiny fleck of white light so far below, I saw a bit of red move in it.
“A crab!” I shouted. “Hurry!” Mildred was just below me. I took her pack and helped her over the edge. Red flame flared up the shaft.
We reached over, seized Ray’s arms and fairly jerked him out of the ruby ray.
The bitterly cold wind struck our hot, perspiring bodies as we scrambled down the rungs outside the square metal shaft. Mildred shivered in her thin attire.
“Out of the frying pan into the ice box!” Ray jested grimly as we dropped to the frozen plain.
Quickly we tore open our packs. Ray and I snatched out clothing and wrapped up the trembling girl. In a few minutes we had her snugly dressed in the fur garments that had been Major Meriden’s. Then we got into the quilted garments we had made fee ourselves.
The intensely red heat-beam still flared up the shaft. Ray looked at it in satisfaction.
“They’ll have it so hot they can’t get up it for some time yet,” he remarked hopefully.
We shouldered our packs and set oat over the wilderness of snow, turning our backs upon the metal-bound lake of fire, with the tall cone of iridescent flame rising in its center.
The deep, purple-blue sky was clear, and, for a rarity, there was not much wind. I doubt that the temperature was twenty below. But it was a violent change from the warm cavern Mildred was blue and shivering.
IN two hours the metal rim below the great white cone had vanished behind the black ice-crags. We passed near the wreck of Major Meriden’s plane and reached our last camp, where we had left the tent sledge, primus stove, and most of our instruments The tent was still stretched, though banked with snow. We got Mildred inside, chaffed her hands, and soon had her comfortable.
Then Ray went out and soon returned with a sealed tin of oil from the wrecked plane, with which he lit the primus stove. Soon the tent was warm. We melted snow and cooked thick red soup. After the girl had made a meal of the scalding soup, with the little golden cakes, she professed to be feeling as well as ever.
“We can fix our plane!” Ray said. “There’s a perfectly good prop on Meriden’s plane!”
We went back to the wreck, found the tools, and removed an undamaged propeller. This we packed on the sledge, with a good supply of fuel foe the stove.
“I’m sure we’re safe now, so far as the crab-things go,” he said. “I don’t fancy they’d get around very well in the snow.”
In an hour we broke camp, and made ton miles of the distance back to the plane before we stopped. We were anxious about Mildred, but she seemed to stand the journey admirably: she is marvelous physical specimen. She teemed running over with gay vivacity of spirit; she asked imnumerable questions of the world which she had known only at second hand from her mother’s words.
THE weather smiled on us during the march back to the plane as much as it had frowned on the terrible journey to the cone. We had an abundance of food and fuel, and we made it in eight easy stages. Once there was a light fall of snow, but the air was unusually warm and calm for the season.
We found the plane safe. It was the work of but a short time to remove the broken propeller and replace it with the one we had brought from the wrecked ship. We warmed and started the engine, broke the skids loose from the ice, turned the plane around, and took off safely from the tiny scrap of smooth ice.
Mildred seemed amazed and immensely delighted at the sensations of her first trip aloft.
A few hours later we were landing beside the Albatross, in the leaden blue sea beyond the ice barrier. Bluff Captain Harper greeted us in amazed delight as we climbed to the deck.
“You’re just in time!” he said. “The relief expedition we landed came back a week ago. We had no idea you could still be alive, with only a week’s provisions. We “were sailing to-morrow. But tell us I What happened? Your passenger—”
“We just stopped to pick up my fiancee,” Ray grinned. “Captain, may I present Miss Mildred Meriden? We’ll be wanting you to marry us right away.”
Through the Purple Cloud
THE world of our senses, we are coming to learn, is not actually the world that exists in reality. What the real world may be, we have no means of knowing. Even our laws of nature are the product of our sensual observations, and may be fraught with as many errors as our other conceptions of the universe.
Einstein has introduced into our scientific thinking an almost limitless vista of new worlds. Since everything is relative and nothing absolutely real, conceptions of other dimensions existing side by side with our own take on more of a semblance of probability. Those other dimensions may not be expected to be like our own world, they may be strange beyond all imagination.
Mr. Williamson is admirably fitted to deal with such bizarre worlds. His fluent, picturesque style conjures up instant images of strange places, and in the present story he tells us of a world that the immortal Edgar Allan Poe might have created.
A RATHER pretty girl was seated across from George Cleland, on the other side of the aisle. They were in the rear compartment of the gigantic, four-motored Fokker passenger plane, just taking off from the Alhambra field at Los Angeles, for the three-hour flight to San Francisco—or rather, to meet as weird and astounding an adventure as ever befell human beings.
George was returning to his office in San Francisco, and to his engineering work after a summer’s vacation.
He watched the girl with interest as the steward handed her the little package of absorbent cotton with which to “stop her ears against the oppressive roar of the motors.
Clearly it was her first long flight. Her smooth cheeks were flushed with excitement; her shining gray eyes looked up quickly to see what the other passengers were doing with the cotton.
Her eyes met George’s. She smiled at him a little, accepting him as a companion in the adventure of the flight. He grinned instructing her to twist the soft cotton into cylinders, and fit them into her ears.
She smiled her thanks.
Already the great plank had rolled across the field with ever-increasing speed, powerful motors thundering, had left the ground to rise easily through the low, gray fog, into the brilliant sunlight of the August morning.
George liked the girl. She was pretty. Soft brown hair, glistening with ruddy lights, tastefully arranged. Bright face flushed with excitement. Gray eyes shining. She wore a dark green traveling suit, neat and trim. The body beneath it seemed to be neat and trim, too; athletic and well-developed. She looked like a co-ed. He remembered that the University at Berkeley would open in a few days, and supposed that she was flying up to attend it.
Two other men were sitting in that rear compartment with them—the great plane did not have a full load and four of the seats were empty. Facing George was a slender, meager, little, man, whose black suit was polished with wear. He wore enormously thick-lensed glasses, and his face was narrow, pinched, bird-like, so that he gave George’s imaginative mind the suggestion of a grotesque, goggle-eyed monster.
Presently he leaned forward, however, with the map of the route that the steward had handed him, introduced himself as Howard Cann, said that he owned a dry goods store in Oakland, and asked George to help him locate the observatory which, according to the map, should be in sight on Mt. Wilson. His voice sounded thin and bird-like, above the unceasing roar of the motors.
George pointed out the silver domes and towers shimmering on the crest of the mountain, in the bright August sunlight. Cann nodded his thanks, and bent over the map again.
The other man was sunk sullenly into a seat facing the girl. George did not like him. His clothes fitted his bull-like form loosely, grotesquely. His heavy-jowled face was black with a short stubble of a beard. From beneath a disreputable cape, pulled low over his forehead, he was staring at the girl, rather to her discomfort.
His ferret eyes were black, shifty. George noticed that he swept the compartment watchfully with them, at intervals, always resuming his annoying gaze at the girl. I wouldn’t like to meet him on a dark night, thought George.
THEY had been up a little less than an hour when the astounding catastrophe took place.
The little, spectacled man who said his name was Cann had persisted in his high-voiced questions.
George had pointed out to him the San Fernando and Santa Clara valleys, and Tejon Pass, and Lebec. They were just coming across the last gray mountain range, over the southern tip of the great San Joaquin Valley.
The air had been smooth, though the ship seemed to rise and fall with a slow, almost regular motion. The girl had seemed to be enjoying her flight immensely, peering out of the windows with a lively interest. Once or twice, to George’s pleasure, she had leaned over to watch when he was pointing out something of interest on Cann’s map.
Once she had asked some little question. Her voice, above the mighty, overwhelming roar of the four great motors, had seemed clear and pleasant. George began, to regret that the flight and their companionship must end in a few short hours when the great plane glided down to the Alameda airport, across the bay from San Francisco.
But the plane, and most of her passengers, never reached Alameda.
George happened to be peering out when it occurred, trying to locate for Cann the town of Maricopa, which lay a little to the left, and ahead of the plane.
The air before the ship was suddenly filled with a blinding purple light, although a great shell had burst, releasing a vast volume of incandescent violet vapor. A moment before, the sky had been clear. The purple cloud appeared suddenly, as from thin air.
Its diameter must have been many miles extending from the ground into the cloud less sky above them. The great plane was plunging almost at the center of it, an far too close for the pilot to turn aside.
George thinks, however, that the ship was suddenly tilted up, al the last instant, as if the pilot had attempted to zoom above the purple cloud. But it was only moment after the clouds appeared that they struck it; the tragedy was occasioned by chance, not by any want of skill—and no display of skill could have averted it.
