Collected Short Fiction, page 96
She ran across to him, threw her arms about the heavy armor that covered him, stood on tiptoe, and kissed his face.
Don Galeen dropped his wrench, and came to shake Dick’s armored hand, tears of relief and joy in his keen brown eyes.
“How did it happen?” Dick demanded. “How did you come to be here, in a ship of the dead?”
“Ask Don!” Thon told him.
“First tell us how you came here,” cried Don, the greasy adventurer. “And where is Midos Ken?”
Thon was watching Dick’s face.
“Is he—dead?” she asked slowly.
“Yes,” Dick told her. “We got back to the Ahrora. When we were well, we flew to the Dark Star. We did not find you—or the stone. Midos Ken used the K-ray generators to drive the planet into collision with the Green Star.”
“He had done his work,” Thon said, controlling her evident sorrow and brushing tears from her eyes. “He was ready to die, and he died as he chose.”
“The stone of life is here,” Dick said. “The detector showed me the way.”
For answer, Don Galeen bent beside the great machine, lifted a shining case. He drew back the lid, to reveal the stone of life lying in soft wrappings within. The magnificent crystal of many prismatic colors was alive with wondrous fire.
“The greatest treasure of the universe!” he cried. “It will give deathless youth to all who desire it!”
“And now, my question!” Dick insisted.
“Well,” Don Galeen began modestly, “you know I was once a driver of beasts of burden on the inner planet of Sirius. That is where I learned to smoke the tian. There is a sort of fungus in those hot jungles that attacks the bodies of men, or of any living thing from other planets. Only the plants and animals that thrive in those jungles are immune to it.
“And the tian is hostile to those hideous, swift-growing moulds. Its use gives immunity. We had to use it there, to keep from turning into heaps of greenish corruption. That is why I use it—or why I began, at least.” He grinned.
“And I have always carried a few of those spores with me—spores of that deadly fungus—in a place where they are not likely to be found when I am searched. A useful trick we learned for protection against certain enemies that were likely to attack our pack trains.
“So when Nark had us aboard, and safely off into space, I crushed my little capsule of the spores. The seed of that swift-growing fungus was free in the air. The ventilating system carried it through the flier. Thon and I, having recently smoked tian, were immune, of course.
“In five minutes, almost before they realized what had happened, the men were falling dead.
“Nark discovered it too late to reach us—he had been saving us for the celebration of his return to the pirate planet with the stone of life. But he was able to press a button which wrecked this K-ray generator.
“We brought food and water in here, and sealed the air-lock—the men the fungus brought down are not pleasant company. And we have been working to repair the generator that Nark smashed for us.”
Dick said nothing. But he seized the hand of the resourceful adventurer of space, and crushed it in his armored grasp.
Then he stepped back, and looked from one to the other of the two before him—Thon Ahrora, slender, lovely being—Don Galeen, strong, tanned, calm, invincible.
“Tell me, Don,” Dick blurted out awkwardly, “do you love Thon?”
“Love Thon?” the giant echoed. “Of course!” He paused, staring soberly at Dick—then grinned. “Like she was my own little sister!”
And he burst into loud guffaws of laughter at Dick’s downcast expression at the first statement and his relief at the second.
In a moment he stopped his merriment to add, “I love you, too, my lad. And Thon loves you—she told me so herself. And it isn’t hard to guess that you love her. And I’d love nothing better than to see you happy together!”
Again he burst into roaring laughter.
Dick stepped up to Thon, laid his armored hands upon her slim white shoulders, and looked into her deep, warm blue eyes.
“Then it’s true?” he asked her breathlessly.
“It’s true. I love you, Dick,” she told him.
And disregarding the fact that Dick was encased to his chin in an air-tight fabric of stiff armor, they embraced.
* * *
LITTLE more is to be told of the story which I have gleaned from the voluminous notes sent me by Richard Smith. They will shortly be published in full, of course, under the title, “A Vision of Futurity.” Only a few more incidents may be mentioned here.
Dick returned to the Ahrora, brought space-suits which Thon and Don Galeen donned to go aboard the little flier. A few months later they were back on the earth.
The catalyst of life was placed safely in the hands of a group of scientists, who will supply the means of immortal youth to all the peoples of die far-flung planets of the Union of Man. The priceless gift of Midos Ken will be free to all.
Don Galeen tired of terrestrial life after a few months. He borrowed the Ahrora, secured a fresh supply of his inevitable tian, adventured off to explore the quadruple star—the group of four suns—toward which he had been cruising when he discovered the Green Star. Again he is adventuring in worlds where man has never been.
Dick and Thon Ahrora are married, living together in the city of silver towers, where Dick entered the world of futurity. At the time of Dick’s last writing they had a son and daughter, whom they have permission from the authorities to rear in their own home. It is, Dick says, a huge undertaking, but one which he is not going to shirk.
Thon Ahrora still indulges in a little scientific research, by way of recreation. She has developed her father’s time machine to a greater degree of perfection—the machine by which Dick was drawn into this world from our own age, through a fourth dimension.
She is able to cause the machine to hurl small objects back through space and time, to stop at any part of the world, and at any point and time, which may be determined beforehand. It is in this manner that the little case found its way to my library table—the little black case of the strange, flexible material, which contains Dick’s notes, and one of the little statuettes of him, which was made in the wondrous far futurity, by the lovely Thon Ahrora.
THE END
1932
Wolves of Darkness
Strange, strange that there runs with the wolf pack a girl with fierce green eyes.
CHAPTER I
The Tracks in the Snow
INVOLUNTARILY I paused, shuddering, on the snow-covered station platform. A strange sound, weird, and somehow appalling, filled the ghostly moonlight of the winter night. A quavering and distant ululation, which prickled my body with chills colder than the piercing bite of the motionless, frozen air.
That unearthly, nerve-shredding sound, I knew, must be the howling of the gray prairie or loo wolves, though I had not heard them since childhood. But it carried a note of elemental terror which even the trembling apprehensions of boyhood had never given the voice of the great wolves. There was something sharp, broken, about that eery clamor, far-off and deeply rhythmic as it was. Something—and the thought brought a numbing chill of fear—which suggested that the dreadful ululation came from straining human throats!
Striving to shake the phantasy from me, I hastened across the icy platform, and burst rather precipitately into the dingy waiting room. It was brilliantly lit with unshaded electric bulbs. A red-hot stove filled it with grateful heat. But I was less thankful for the warmth than for the shutting out of that far-away howling.
Beside the glowing stove a tall man sat tense over greasy cards spread on the end of a packing box which he held between his knees, playing solitaire with strained, feverish attention. He wore an ungainly leather coat, polished slick with wear. One tanned cheek bulged with tobacco, and his lips were amber-stained.
He seemed oddly startled by my abrupt entrance. With a sudden, frightened movement, he pushed aside the box, and sprang to his feet. For a moment his eyes were anxiously upon me; then he seemed to sigh with relief. He opened the stove door, and expectorated into the roaring flames, then sank back into his chair.
“Howdy, Mister,” he said, in a drawl that was a little strained and husky. “You sort of scairt me. You was so long comin’ in that I figgered nobody got off.”
“I stopped to listen to the wolves,” I told him. “They sound weird, don’t they?”
HE searched my face with strange, fearful eyes. For a long time he did not speak. Then he said briskly, “Well, Mister, what kin I do for ye?”
As I advanced toward the stove, he added, “I’m Mike Connell, the station agent.”
“My name is Clovis McLaurin,” I told him. “I want to find my father, Dr. Ford McLaurin. He lives on a ranch near here.”
“So you’re Doc McLaurin’s boy, eh?” Connell said, warming visibly. He rose, smiling and shifting his wad of tobacco to the other cheek, and took my hand.
“Yes,” I said. “Have you seen him lately? Three days ago I had a strange telegram from him. He asked me to come at once. It seems that he’s somehow in trouble. Do you know anything about it?”
Connell looked at me queerly. “No,” he said at last. “I ain’t seen him lately. None of ’em off the ranch ain’t been in to Hebron for two or three weeks. The snow is the deepest in years, you know, and it ain’t easy to git around. I dunno how they could have sent a telegram, though, without comin’ to town. And they ain’t none of us seen ’em!”
“Have you got to know Dad?” I inquired, alarmed more deeply.
“No, not to say real well,” the agent admitted. “But I seen him and Jetton and Jetton’s gal often enough when they come into Hebron, here. Quite a bit of stuff has come for ’em to the station, here. Crates and boxes, marked like they was scientific apparatus—I dunno what. But a right purty gal, that Stella Jetton. Purty as a picture.”
“It’s three years since I’ve seen Dad,” I said, confiding in the agent in hope of winning his approval and whatever aid he might be able to give me in reaching the ranch, over the unusual fall of snow that blanketed the West Texas plains. “I’ve been in medical college in the East. Haven’t seen Dad since he came out here to Texas three years ago.”
“You’re from the East, eh?”
“New York. But I spent a couple of years out here with my uncle when I was a kid. Dad inherited the ranch from him.”
“Yeah, old Tom McLaurin was a friend of mine,” the agent told me.
IT was three years since my father had left the chair of astrophysics at an eastern university, to come here to the lonely ranch to carry on his original experiments. The legacy from his brother Tom, besides the ranch itself, had included a small fortune in money, which had made it possible for him to give up his academic position and to devote his entire time to the abstruse problems upon which he had been working.
Being more interested in medical than in mathematical science, I had not followed Father’s work completely, though I used to help him with his experiments, when he had to perform them in a cramped flat, with pitifully limited equipment. I knew, however, that he had worked out an extension of Weyl’s non-Euclidian geometry in a direction quite different from those chosen by Eddington and Einstein—and whose implications, as regards the structure of our universe, were stupendous. His new theory of the wave-electron, which completed the wrecking of the Bohr planetary atom, had been as sensational.
The proof his theory required was the exact comparison of the velocity of beams of light at right angles. The experiment required a large, open field, with a clear atmosphere, free from dust or smoke; hence his choosing the ranch as a site upon which to complete the work.
Since I wished to remain in college, and could help him no longer, he had employed as an assistant and collaborator, Dr. Blake Jetton, who was himself well known for his remarkable papers upon the propagation of light, and the recent modifications of the quantum theory.
Dr. Jetton, like my father, was a widower. He had a single child, a daughter named Stella. She had been spending several months of each year with them on the ranch. While I had not seen her many times, I could agree with the station agent that she was pretty. As a matter of face I had thought her singularly attractive.
THREE days before, I had received the telegram from my father. A strangely worded and alarming message, imploring me to come to him with all possible haste. It stated that his life was in danger, though no hint had been given as to what the danger might be.
Unable to understand the message, I had hastened to my rooms for a few necessary articles—among them, a little automatic pistol—and had lost no time in boarding a fast train. I had found the Texas Panhandle covered with nearly a foot of snow—the winter was the most severe in several years. And that weird and terrible howling had greeted me ominously when I swung from the train at the lonely village of Hebron.
“The wire was urgent—most urgent,” I told Connell. “I must get out to the. ranch to-night, if it’s at all possible. You know of any way I could go?”
For some time he was silent, watching me, with dread in his eyes.
“No, I don’t,” he said presently. “Ten mile to the ranch. And they ain’t a soul lives on the road. The snow is nigh a foot deep. I doubt a car would make it. Ye might git Sam Judson to haul you over tomorrow in his wagon.”
“I wonder if he would take me out to-night?” I inquired.
The agent shook his head uneasily, peered nervously out at the glistening, moonlit desert of enow beyond the windows, and seemed to be listening anxiously. I remembered the weird, distant howling I had heard as I walked across the platform, and could hardly restrain a shiver of my own.
“Naw, I think not!” Connell said abruptly. “It ain’t healthy to git out at night around here, lately.”
HE paused a moment, and then asked suddenly, darting a quick, uneasy glance at my face, “I reckon you heard the howlin’ ?”
“Yes. Wolves?”
“Yeah—anyhow, I reckon so. Queer, Damn queer! They ain’t been any loafers around these parts for ten years, till we heard ’em jest after the last blizzard.” (“Loafer” appeared to be a local corruption of the Spanish word lobo applied to the gray prairie wolf, which is much larger than the coyote, and was a dreaded enemy of the rancher in the Southwest until its practical extermination.)
“Seems to be a reg’lar pack of the critters rovin’ the range,” Connell went on. “They’ve killed quite a few cattle in the last few weeks, and—” he paused, lowering his voice, “and five people!”
“The wolves have killed people!” I exclaimed.
“Yeah,” he said slowly. “Josh Wells and his hand were took two weeks ago, come Friday, while they was out ridin’ the range. And the Simms’ are gone. The old man and his woman and little Dolly. Took right out of the cow-pen, I reckon, while they was milkin’. It ain’t two mile out of town to their place. Rufe Smith was out that way to see ’em Sunday. Cattle dead in the pen, and the smashed milk buckets lying in a drift of snow under the shed. And not a sign of Simms and his family!”
“I never heard of wolves taking people that way!” I was incredulous.
Connell shifted his wad of tobacco again, and whispered, “I didn’t neither. But, Mister, these here ain’t ordinary wolves!”
“What do you mean?” I demanded.
“Wall, after the Simms’ was took, we got up a sort of posse, and went out to hunt the critters. We didn’t find no wolves. But we did find tracks in the snow. The wolves is plumb gone in the daytime!
“Tracks in the snow,” he repeated slowly, as if his mind were dwelling dazedly upon some remembered horror. “Mister, them wolf tracks was too tarnation far apart to be made by any ordinary beast. The critters must ’a’ been jumpin’ thirty feet!
“And they warn’t all wolf tracks, neither. Mister, part was wolf tracks. And part was tracks of bare human feet!”
WITH that, Connell fell silent, staring at me strangely, with a queer look of utter terror in his eyes.
I was staggered. There was, of course, some element of incredulity in my feelings. But the agent did not look at all like the man who has just perpetrated a successful wild story, for there was genuine horror in his eyes. And I recalled that I had fancied human tones in the strange, distant howling I had heard.
There was no good reason to believe that I had merely encountered a local superstition. Widespread as the legends of lycanthropy may be, I have yet to hear a whispered tale of werewolves related by a West Texan. And the agent’s story had been too definite and concrete for me to imagine it an idle fabrication or an ungrounded fear.
“The message from my father was very urgent,” I told Connell presently. “I must get out to the ranch to-night. If the man you mentioned won’t take me, I’ll hire a horse and ride.”
“Judson is a damn fool if he’ll git out to-night where them wolves is!” the agent said with conviction. “But there’s nothing to keep ye from askin’ him to go. I reckon he ain’t gone to bed yet. He lives in the white house, jest around the corner behind Brice’s store.”
He stepped out upon the platform behind me to point the way. And as soon as the door was opened, we heard again that rhythmic, deep, far-off ululation, that weirdly mournful howling, from far across the moonlit plain of snow. I could not repress a shudder. And Connell, after pointing out to me Sam Judson’s house, among the straggling few that constituted the village of Hebron, got very hastily back inside the depot, and shut the door behind him.
CHAPTER II
The Pack that Ran by Moonlight
SAM JUDSON owned and cultivated a farm nearly a mile from Hebron, but had moved his house into the village so that his wife could keep the post-office. I hurried toward his house, through the icy streets, very glad that Hebron was able to afford the luxury of electric lights. The distant howling of the wolf-pack filled me with a vague and inexplicable dread. But it did not diminish my determination to reach my father’s ranch as soon as possible, to solve the riddle of the strange and alarming telegram he had sent me.
