Collected Short Fiction, page 71
But as they pierced through it, George saw the purple cloud contract swiftly. It became a great, smooth-surfaced sphere of violet-red radiance. Then, somehow, it seemed to flatten, become thin, until it was only a disk of red-blue light.
It became a circle of purple flame, a hundred yards and more in diameter—we can judge its size only from George Cleland’s guess based on that quick glimpse of the amazing thing. A disk of amethystine fire, hanging in the air, with the great plane plunging away from its center.
A long, dreadful instant went by, after George knew that they had crashed through it. He had time to wonder what it was, to wonder if it could be only some trouble with his eyes, then he realized that others could see it for Cann shrank back from the window and clutched at his arm.
Without a sound or a vibration, they had passed through the purple disk, into a flood of crimson light!
George was dazed.
One instant, the blue sky was above and the green-blue fields beneath. The next, they were flying at some crazy angle beneath a sky that was red, plunging toward the foot of a precipitous cliff of jet-black rock.
The cloud of purple had been like a gate to another world. They had flashed through it, into another plane of existence that seemed to lie co-existent with ours, yet more distant than the Andromeda nebula. To the science of a few decades ago, such a thing would have been incredible. But Einstein’s relativity, with its four-dimensional continuum, with its destruction of the old conception of space as an absolute dimension brings it much nearer to understandable phenomena. And it is confidently trusted that the implications of the incident narrated here will result in a farther modification of the changing theories of relativity.
The plane was hurtling toward the base of a rugged, towering wall of grim black rock, which had suddenly appeared beyond the purple disk. A crash was inevitable. The pilot had time only to bank the ship, causing it to strike the ebon cliff obliquely instead of head on.
George was stunned by the crash.
His last recollection was-of their plunging flight toward the sheer, soaring wall of black rock, of the attempting turn that had failed to save them, of the splintering crashes and the merciless bruising shock of the collision with the mountain.
The Land of the Scarlet Sky
MEMORY did not return at once, as he recovered. He found himself lying in the bottom of a dark, cramped place, with a soft human body beside him. A hoarse voice, evidently that of the bearded man, was muttering curses, while heavy feet, apparently belonging to the same individual, were carelessly trampling George’s legs.
Then George caught the acrid odors of burning paint and gasoline.
His memory returned. He knew that the plane had crashed into the black mountain wall, that it was wrecked and in flames. The soft body against his was that of the girl. And it was the big man who was trampling on the others.
George tried to struggle up, pressing a hand to his head to try to stop the dizzy pain, to clear the faintness from his vision and the ringing noises from his ears, to sweep the misty clouds of pain from his mind.
A suffocating breath of flame came from the forward part of the ship, where the blaze had evidently started.
The fuselage was on its side, George saw. The door was above them. And the big, bull-like man, walking upon their bodies as carelessly as if they were sacks of grain, was struggling to open the door.
Suddenly there was a sharp snap, as if he had broken a lock with the strength of his great, heavy hands. A moment later the door was thrown back, revealing the sky above, crimson, dark and sullen, red as if deluged in blood.
For a moment the strange scarlet sky was in view. Then thick masses of black smoke, touched with flickering, lurid yellow flames, floated across it. George heard the increasing roar of the conflagration.
He tried to struggle to his feet, still rubbing his throbbing head.
“Thanks, Mister,” came the hoarse voice of the giant, mockingly.
The huge man placed one heavy foot on George’s shoulder, while he was still on his knees, sprang forward. He clambered through the door in the uppermost side of the side.
George was sent crashing to the bottom of the compartment again, under the force of the ruthless kick.
Choking black smoke, so hot that it seared his lungs, was filling the little space when it struggled up again. The roar and crackle of the flames was growing swiftly louder. A black and yellow canopy of smoke and flame was rolling above the door.
Still his head throbbed with dull pain; his thoughts were slow, confused; he reeled, his knees buckled uncertainly.
“Not much time, now,” he muttered. “Guess they are all gone, in the front part of the ship.”
He bent beside the girl, lifted her with an effort, fighting to control his shaking knees. She was conscious.
“What’s—matter?” she whispered in a slow, uncertain voice.
“Plane smashed,” he said. “Burning. We must get out! Able to help? Do your best, but we have time.”
“I’ll try,” she murmured through white, compressed lips.
He lifted her in his arms. She grasped the side of the door, he pushed her up. She scrambled through it. For a moment she darkened the opening. Then she was gone from sight. Smoke and fire were still rolling over the opening.
The forward part of the plane was already an inferno. White heat drove down the aisle. Blinding, blistering smoke swirled into the compartment. Gasping for breath, tears streaming from his eyes, perspiration running from his skin under the scorching heat, the engineer stood still a moment, to recover from the exhausting effort that had been required to lift the girl through the door.
A choking groan came from beside his feet.
He bent, wiping the tears from his smoke-blinded eyes, distinguished the limp little body of Cann, lying in a little heap in a corner of the compartment, sprawled over the back of a seat.
“Poor Cann can’t,” he muttered in grim horror, as he began the very serious task of lifting the inert body through the door above him.
IN ever denser volumes, the smoke was pouring into the compartment, blinding, suffocating. Tears were streaming from George’s eyes, so that he could hardly see the bright square of the door above. The hot smoke seemed to dry and scorch his throat and lungs. He coughed, strangled. Sweat was pouring from his body; the heat was almost intolerable.
And he was still dazed and groggy from the blow that had stunned him when the great plane crashed. His head throbbed with leaden pains; his ears rang queerly; his thoughts were slow, confused. But he did not hesitate in beginning the grim task of saving the little man who had questioned him so persistently in his thin, bird-like tones.
Fighting the heavy inertia that tugged at him, George lifted the limp body and thrust it up toward the door. It was a terrific task. Some malignant demon seemed to be pressing back against him. His aching muscles relaxed, despite the fiercest effort of his will, the unconscious man fell back into his arms.
George bent, sucked in a deep breath of the cooler air that hung in the bottom of compartment, and raised himself, thrusting the body of the little man up again. At last his arms straightened; the still body was outside, lying beside the door, atop the fuselage.
A blistering tongue of lurid yellow flame licked through the compartment, up through the open door. George gasped and strangled from the hot breath of it. He felt hair burned from his head, felt the bare skin of his face and hands scorched.
Reeling from exhaustion and the lingering effects of the blow he had received when they fell, he bent for another gasping inhalation of the still breathable air in the bottom of the compartment. Then he stood up, grasped the sides of the door, leaped, and struggled to draw himself through it.
Burning smoke swirled up about him. He strangled, tried to hold his breath. His muscles cracked. The effort seemed almost beyond him, in his weakened condition. And an infernal river of smoke and flame seemed pouring across above the door. He shrank back from it.
Then he saw Gann’s inert hand, still hanging in the door—glimpsed it through streaming, smarting eyes. He had to get out, to save the little man.
With a fast fierce effort, he swung himself up, got his feet upon the edges of the door, straightened up in a blast of smoke and flame. In a moment he had snatched up Cann again, and leaped, blindly, desperately, into space.
He came down on bare, hard rock. The smoke was still blinding, he could feel the beating radiation of heat from the inferno which he had just escaped, but he was out of its intolerable area.
Gasping in great breaths of the cooler air, he dragged Cann over the rock, to where the heat was bearable. He dropped his limp burden, still drawing fresh air into his tortured lungs, and wiped his smarting eyes.
An amazing world he saw, when he was able to open his painful eyes. Half of it was hidden by the dense clouds of smoke and the lurid curtains of yellow flame that leaped from the blazing wreck of the plane; but in the half that he saw was matter enough for wonder and amazement.
The sky was red, intensely crimson, dark and oppressive. Like a dome cut from a monster ruby, and lit with a dull, sinister light from beyond. It was unbroken by cloud or sun or star. A pall of scarlet gloom, sullen and terrible.
Beneath the lowering, crimson sky was a barren waste of black rock. It resembled obsidian, without the glassy luster of the volcanic glass. It was a dead, dull black, somber and unrelieved by any gleam. It did not even reflect the angry fire of the scarlet sky.
It seemed that they were at the bottom of a vast pit or abyss, for sheer black precipices, like that against the foot of which the plane had crashed, rose about them in i rugged wall, leaping up to inconceivable heights.
George estimates that the diameter of this crater or pit must have been ten or a dozen miles, and he thinks the cliffs that ringed lit must have been fully five miles high. No elevations of this abruptness are found on the earth, though several are to be observed upon the moon. The walls of several lunar ring-craters rise vertically for several miles. This abyss appeared to be of similar formation.
The floor of the pit was a rugged, tortured wilderness of black rock, cracked and scarred, pitted with innumerable chasms, thrown up in miniature peaks, twisted into grotesque fantasies of lifeless black stone.
George saw no tree, no bird or insect—no living thing at all.
He had no time to wonder at it, then. He merely swept the weird horizon of scarlet sky and stupendous dull black cliff with a single glance, and turned back to the burning plane.
An Explanation
WHERE was the girl? She had been conscious when he helped her through the door. Had she been able to reach a safe distance from the flaming ship? He heard a faint cry, and found her lying on the ground, several yards from the burning ship. She had been able to slip from the upper side of the fuselage to the ground, to stagger away a few steps before she collapsed.
George carried her out of the smoke, and placed her beside the still inert body of Cann.
She was still conscious, but weak and dizzy, suffering from concussion.
“Where are we?” she whispered. “The sky looks red. And these black mountains—they are so high!”
“I don’t know,” George said. “We’ll think of that after a while. I was almost wondering if I wasn’t seeing things. But we have a patient here to look after.”
He bent over Cann’s limp body.
“Oh!” the girl cried suddenly, with pain in her voice. “You are all burnt! Your face, and your hands! You stayed to carry us out!”
“What else could I do?” George asked. “There was another man that didn’t stay,” the girl said. “He trampled all over us, and then climbed out and left us to burn.”
“Wonder where the kindly fellow is?” George said. He looked about them, over the rugged, desolate wilderness of twisted black stone.
But George paused to wonder again at the eldrich landscape spread out before him. The barren, lifeless waste of burned and tortured black rock. The mighty cliffs that plunged up beyond it—higher than any earthly mountains, so high they seemed unreal. They were nightmare mountains; cruel, looming crags from some drugged dream. Their rugged faces swept up far toward the zenith, surrounding the horizon. George had an unpleasant sense of oppression, as if those lofty, ebon walls were crowding them, smothering them.
And above the black peaks the sky was crimson, red as clouds of blood-mist, red as a dome of ruby lit with dull, sinister lights. It was lowering, gloomy, oppressive as the bald, looming walls—it shone with a dark and sullen glare.
The red of blood. The red of horror. The red of death.
George Cleland was frightened by it—though he took care not to show the girl his fears. He dropped his gaze from the fearful wonder of the new world, and resumed his slow examination of Cann’s body.
The little man was still unconscious. His clothing had been scorched and torn. His thick glasses were lost, and he looked oddly different without them—small and weak, like a child, or perhaps a crippled bird. His right upper arm had been broken. George pushed up the sleeve to examine it. On the skin was the blue print of a man’s heel; the bull-like man who sat opposite the girl had stepped on it, breaking the bone.
George straightened the limb, and tried to set it. But he could find nothing satisfactory to use for splints. There seemed to be no tree or bush—or any living thing at all—in the wilderness of black rock, from which he could get a splint. But during his search he made a curious discovery.
The barren waste of dead black stone was scattered with huge green crystals. Clear and transparent, as if cut from monster emeralds.
In shape, they resembled snow-crystals, as seen through the microscope. Six-pointed stars, with a delicate, symmetrical fretwork, never the same in two crystals, between the points. But they were far huger than snow-crystals. Three feet from point to point. They were usually three or four inches thick. The first one that George discovered, lying in a deep crack in the black rock, not far from where the plane had crashed, weighed about twenty pounds. He is unable to make any suggestion as to the material of which it was composed, though it seems that it must have crystallized in the air, and fallen as a snowflake falls in our world.
While George was working over Cann, the girl told him something of herself.
“My name is Juanita Harvel,” she said “Dad has a fruit ranch near Los Angeles.
I was going up to Berkeley, to the University. I was to graduate this year—but my prospect, right now, aren’t very good.” She smiled a little. Then soberly, “Where can we be?”
“Your guess is as good as anybody’s,” George told her.
“DO you think—” she asked, and paused oddly, “do you think that—we could be—dead? The plane smashed. It may have killed us all.”
“Not a bit,” George cried. “For myself, I feel very much alive and real—especially where the skin was cooked so it’s coming off!” He grinned painfully.
“Oh, I’m so sorry for you!” Juanita cried.
“That’s all right,” George assured her. “It won’t make much difference, if I’m dead. And if I’m alive, I’ll get well. We can cook up some sort of theory to account for it all. I suppose you’ve heard about the so-called Fourth Dimension?”
“Yes,” I’ve heard about it,” she admitted. “But as for understanding it—”
“There’s been a lot of bunk written on the subject, but nobody seems to know much about it. Einstein’s theory of relativity, however, introduces a fourth dimension, which is not different in any way from the three other dimensions we know. He says that to an observer on a different planet, the fourth dimension, or part of it, might appear as a spatial dimension; and one of the dimensions that appears spatial to us, would be, for him, partly or wholly the fourth dimension.
“Of course, I may be putting an interpretation on his work that he would not approve. He devised the hypothesis of four-dimensional continuum, or ‘space-time’ as it is more generally called, to account for known facts. He was not interested in other worlds that might lie beside our own, billions of light years distant in our space, but touching the earth in the fourth dimension.
“The plane, you know, flew into a circle of purple light that appeared suddenly ahead of us. It may have been a sort of a gate to this other world, through the fourth dimension. This planet may be so far distant in space from our own world that it is in another universe, yet touching it in the fourth dimension.”
“How could that be?” Jaunita asked in a puzzled tone.
“I don’t know whether I can explain it very clearly. But a favorite method in such discussions is to form an analogy in dimensions of a lower order. Suppose we were two-dimensional beings, with length and width, but no thickness. Suppose our world were on the surface of a sheet of paper. And suppose this planet were on the other side of the sheet, just opposite.
“Being two-dimensional beings, we could not conceive of the third dimension, which is the thickness of the paper. We could not know of the other world so near, nor could we reach it except by going around the edge of the sheet.
“But suppose somebody stuck a pin hole in the paper, through the two worlds on opposite sides. Then we might blunder through, into a new world outside of our knowledge, just as the plane flew through that purple cloud into this strange place. So we must have fallen through a hole in the fourth dimension!”
“And what can we do about it?” Juanita asked.
“I don’t know. My theory may be the bunk, anyhow. But there was evidently some phenomenon, either of natural or artificial cause, which swept the plane through the ‘continuum’ from our world, to this. It may happen again. We must watch. If we see it happen, we may be able to find the cause, and manipulate if to act in reverse, to take us home, A slim chance, but our best bet!”
It was not very long before the flames of the wrecked plane died away. Only a mass of bare, blackened metal was left, scattered with charred bones. When the wreckage was cool enough, George found some traps of metal in it which he used as splints on Cann’s broken arm.
