The complete fiction, p.38
The Complete Fiction, page 38
FAULKNER drew off his heavy gloves, took a small knife from his equipment pouch, and deliberately cut a small incision across the ball of his thumb. Blood seeped up, formed a rounded little drop.
“Turn off the lamps,” said Faulkner, “and look, Jim. This is why I stayed on, why I wasn’t afraid—”
In darkness relieved only by the glow of fluorescent sleeve stripes, the droplet of blood shone with a virescent light of its own, no longer scarlet, but a ghastly yellow-green. Against the blackness too Faulkner’s hands were marked by the dull glow of those same half-moons Blane had noticed before; it came to him suddenly why they had seemed offensively familiar, and where he had seen their like before—upon the scabrous paws of the diseased Quitchy. Tulag.
“The sign of radiation poisoning, Jim,” Faulkner said. “I’d caught it before I could crawl out—because you left me there—
“I knew there was no cure, but that it would take years to kill me. I swore that I would remain strong enough to work, and I never told you—I even went on wearing armor, although I would have been as well off without it. I wore armor because I didn’t want you to guess, Jim. I wanted to stay with you, hoping that some day you would know how I felt—that you would some day see your blood glow green in the dark—”
“No!” whispered Roarke. “No, you wouldn’t—”
Blane switched his lamp on. “That’s enough, Faulkner. It won’t help you if we all die. I’m going to find a way out.”
His lamp beam searched the far end of the cavern, the only part he had not yet explored. The wall here shelved away at a height of five feet forming a ledge of uncertain depth. He thrust the beam of light far back, waking ancient shadows, striking reflected fires from quartz and crystal. An exclamation burst from him as he saw what appeared to be a small opening, scarcely two feet in diameter, in the farther wall.
“There’s a hole here, blind or not I don’t know. Have to climb up to find out—”
“I can save you that trouble,” Faulkner put in. “It’s an open passage leading to an unused cut one level above the main bore, from which it is easy to reach the shaft. But you wouldn’t want to leave that way.”
“Why not?” snarled Roarke, evidently emboldened by the discovery.
“Because the hole is too small. You couldn’t get your shoulders into it—unless you take off your armor. But I wouldn’t, if I were you. Even Blane, who hasn’t been exposed much as yet, couldn’t survive more than thirty seconds of this radiation without becoming—what I am. As for you—five seconds would be fatal. No, there’s only one of us who can afford to escape that way. Mirzonite can’t effect me any further, you know. But you missed the main thing, Blane. Look six feet to the right.”
Blane shifted his beam as directed, to find what he had overlooked in the excitement of the first discovery—a square metal plate three feet across, apparently set into solid rock.
“Boost me up, Blane,” ordered Roarke in something of his old voice. “I’ll look it over.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Escape—Without Armor!
BLANE stooped, allowing the other to step on his back and mount to the ledge. In utter silence Roarke examined the plate. Despite the concealing bulk of armor Blane could almost see his great shoulders sag.
“Quite solid, isn’t it, Jim?” asked Faulkner. “Half inch stellite set into solid concrete sills. Behind it there’s a tunnel—all my work, Jim, planned six years ago and built to allow you to escape when it pleased me. I didn’t want you to die, but to live, knowing as I knew that the seed of death was sown in you—feeling the growth of it and your own helplessness. It wasn’t a punishment of hours that I planned, Jim, but one of years.
“But when the work was done, the plans perfect, I found my hatred had burned itself out. In plotting your punishment I had glutted my desire for it. Strange, wasn’t it? It might have saved you, Jim, if you hadn’t given me new reason to hate you. The Quitchies—”
Roarke spoke in little more than a raw whisper. “I’ll make it up. To you—to them. Get me out of here, Dave.”
Faulkner turned to Blane. “I suppose every man wants to justify his acts. I want you to understand, Blane. The native you saw was suffering from an acute form of mirzonite poisoning. I’ve seen dozens of Quitchies stagger from this mine with their skin dropping off, their eyes bleeding. Jim killed three who wouldn’t keep away after they caught the sickness, because it would have given his game away if a native welfare inspector had seen them. But while they look sound he’s willing to let them kill themselves making him rich—”
“But it’s a proven fact that the natives are immune to mirzonite,” Blane interrupted. “Tests have proved it—”
“Normal Quitchies are,” Faulkner put in, with acerbity. “There wouldn’t be any Tulags if Jim used normal ones, and paid them out in food, and let them live out their miserable lives as God meant them to. But he found they wouldn’t work steadily for food, because they have the forests to feed on. He pays them in salt.” Faulkner grinned bitterly.
“DID you ever see a Quitchy eat salt? They’re stark crazy for it. They’ll kill themselves with work to get it when nothing else will make them stir a finger. A Quitchy would sell his soul for salt—if he had one. There’s no free salt on Toroga or in a Quitchy’s body unless you put it there. And salt kills them—because it destroys the hormone that make them immune to mirzonite. That’s why the stuff won’t work in us, or in any metabolism that includes salt. And a salt-eating Quitchy absorbs radiation faster than a human—in six months they look like Tulag. In seven they’re dead. But they don’t know it’s the salt that kills them—and it wouldn’t matter if they did.
“Nor did I know at first. Then I noticed their finger nails and compared them with mine. I got myself a control—a Quitchy who worked with the others, but whom I paid off myself, in food instead of salt. He’s still healthy. But every other native who was working here when he came is either dead or dying.
“I told you what I’d learned, Jim. You laughed, and told me to put armor on my damned pets if I cared that much. Armor! When a Quitchy goes crazy if you hang so much as a rag on him! But I tried it. They ripped the armor off and went back to work without it. I thought of reporting the thing, then realized it was my word against yours. I had no evidence. We use tons of salt in the reduction plant; what you gave the Quitchies would never be missed or traced. Nor would any ever be found on them—they eat it immediately. You would have found somebody else to run the mine, and the Quitchies would have died off quicker than ever. Because I was doing what little I could to spare them.
This pocket, the mother lode, that I had first left untouched as part of my plan for your punishment, I later sealed up to save the Quitchies from exposure to its radiations. Also I hoped to keep any new surveyor from locating it. The rest of the mine petered out. For a while that looked like the answer to things—but Blane found the lode.”
The blurred roar of the Geiger filled the silence that followed Faulkner’s words. Three expressionless masks of metal stared at one another, then as though by consent at the fiercely glowing sleeve stripes that shrieked mute warning.
“What do you want?” whispered Roarke hoarsely. “Name it quick. We’ve got to get out of here—” His breath came whistling through the helmet-plates.
“You’re worried, Jim, aren’t you?” retorted Faulkner calmly. “You know that every minute drags you closer to the deadline, when your blood will begin to reradiate what it can no longer absorb. Then the sickness. I’ve had it six years, but I’ve had the sight of you as you are now, Jim, to help me stand the pain and the certainty of—death. You’ll have only yourself to think of, and the memory of millions that will never do you any good—”
“Stop it!” snapped Blane. “If you have an offer to make, make it.”
“Sorry, Blane. I keep forgetting you’re in this now. But it’s Jim who will have to pay my price. Life for the Quitchies, born and unborn, Jim—a guarantee on my own terms.”
“What are they?”
Faulkner drew from his pouch a closely printed sheet of paper, and a second, typewritten one. “First, you’ll sign a release of your concession here, Jim, turning it back to the government as the law provides you may. Second, you’ll sign this confession stating that you have paid the natives in salt instead of legal foodstuffs. I’ll hold it, as a guarantee that you won’t contest the other. When the new operators see this lode they won’t waste any time before putting in automatic loaders. No more Quitchies, Jim—”
“You’re robbing me,” whimpered Roarke. “But I’ll sign—only get me out first.”
“Sign now, Jim,” said Faulkner coldly. “Or stay here—and rot.”
THE helmeted head of Roarke turned uncertainly from the Superintendent to Blane. Then, frantically, the big man ripped off one glove, seized the pen Faulkner held up, and hastily scrawled his signature upon both sheets. Quick as he was, the angry flush of an ore-bum crept over his unprotected hand before he could again don the glove.
“How do we know you’ll get us out?” muttered Roarke, as Faulkner took the papers.
“You don’t,” returned the other. “But I will.” Without further words he twisted his helmet free, then rapidly doffed the other parts of his armor, until he stood clothed only in shirt and jumper. No sign of ore-burn appeared upon his naked forearms, for, ironically enough, mirzonite poisoning rendered its victim immune to further radiation.
He scrambled up on the ledge, and a moment later vanished into the narrow mouth of the open tunnel. Roarke’s breathing was a harsh, rasping sound. In Blane’s ears the thudding of his own heart sounded like that of a trapped animal. His nerves were wire-taut.
Two minutes passed, and three. The sinister roar of the Geiger filled the stillness, until Roarke with a sobbed curse asked Blane to shut it off. He did so, then set himself to counting stones in one wall. But not that childish expedient nor an effort to blank his mind utterly could quell the chaos of his thoughts. What if Faulkner were mad enough to desert them?
“He’s gone!” snarled Roarke suddenly. “Don’t you see? With my release filed, he can claim this deposit himself. He never meant us to leave here alive—”
The thought had struck Blane also. He replied with an assurance more intuitive than reasonable. “I think he’ll free us—if he can.”
“What do you mean?”
“Faulkner’s sick, sicker than he knows, maybe. Radiation sickness often attacks the heart. He may have collapsed—but it’s a bit early to think of the worst yet, isn’t it?”
“He lied, I tell you,” snarled Roarke. “We’ll rot here unless we blast our way out.”
“With what?” asked Blane wearily. “We’ve no charges, no drill to set them with—and if we had, a blast might wreck the tunnel and leave us worse off than before.”
“We’ve got this!” muttered Roarke, pulling the neutron blaster from the pocket of his suit. “I’m going to use it!”
Before Blane could stop him he leveled the weapon and fired, squarely at the metal barrier. A pencil-sized hole appeared as if by magic in one corner of the stellite plate. Roarke aimed again, but Blane, whose ears had caught an unmistakable metallic scraping, leaped up and struck the weapon aside even as its guard ring glowed with its discharge. Fragments of rock leaped and fell at the impact of its beam.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Seize Him—And Kill!”
“LISTEN!” snapped Blane. “Faulkner’s working back there—you might have killed him. You couldn’t cut away the plate anyway, with the ten shots your batteries are good for.”
Roarke snarled an inarticulate reply, but let the blaster fall to his side as the sounds increased in volume. Bolts thudded back. There was a grating of rusted metal, and slowly the plate swung inward, revealing Faulkner, breathless and trembling from his exertions.
At once Roarke leaped forward, hurling the smaller man aside in his mad dash for the tunnel. Blane, following, paused as he saw that Faulkner was near collapse.
“Here! We’ve got to get you to bed. Think you can make it to the cross cut?”
Faulkner smiled wearily. “Get out yourself, Blane. I guess—I can crawl that far. Been running—too much for me.”
His lips twisted into a grimace of pain. Blane hesitated, saw that the cramped dimensions of the tunnel made it impossible for him to help Faulkner through it, and entered it himself. His lamp showed it to be fifteen feet long or more. He emerged into the abandoned cut Faulkner had described. There was no sign of Roarke.
It was a full minute before Faulkner painfully crawled out and rose shakily to his feet. Blane put an arm under his shoulders. With Faulkner clinging to him, he flashed the lamp about in search of the shaftway leading to the main tunnel. The beam found it—and found also the armored figure of Roarke standing beside it, blaster leveled.
“Forgot I had this, didn’t you, Dave?” snarled the big man. “Thought you could rob me without a fight? Stop where you are. Blane, search him. I want those papers back.”
For all the fact that the robot-like face of his helmet concealed Roarke’s expression, Blane felt the ruthless, decisive energy behind the big man’s words. Roarke would fire as readily as not, if defied. Blane shrugged, went through Faulkner’s pockets, tossing their contents at Roarke’s feet—a few inches of firing cord, connection clips, a knife, the stub of a pencil.
“That’s all. No papers on him.”
“He’s hidden them! Give them up, Dave, or you’ll never get out of here alive.”
Faulkner’s pallor-ridden face lighted with a thin smile. “I was afraid you’d feel like that, Jim. That’s why I had to keep you waiting in there—while I rode the engine to the shaft and sent those papers off to Administration City by Quitchy runner. He’ll take them to a friend of mine, and if that friend doesn’t hear from me within forty-eight hours, he will turn them over to the Administration. You’re licked, Jim.”
Roarke cursed him furiously, then, abruptly: “Maybe I’m not licked at that, Dave. Not yet—” Blane could imagine the cold smile on the big man’s face as he went on, jerking the blaster up briefly. “This is my ace in the hole—this and the cat Blane drove over in. By driving like hell I can cut off your damned Quitchy, Dave—out in the sticks where a dead native won’t mean a thing. Your friend will never see those papers—”
FAULKNER strained against Blane’s arms, his deep-sunk eyes ablaze. “I’ve got a witness now, Jim. Blane heard you admit everything. He won’t perjure himself for your sake. Our story will convict you even without your confession.”
“I know it,” Roarke replied. “And I’m not taking any chances that way. Too bad, Blane—you could have gone far with me. I’ll have to report you both killed by a premature blast. That won’t surprise anybody, or raise awkward questions. These mines are dangerous if you’re even a bit careless—and you were careless.”
“That’s murder, Roarke!” said Blane, fighting to keep his voice steady.
Roarke shrugged. “Between ourselves, so it is. But who’ll guess it? Why should the owner of this bonanza kill his superintendent and geologist? No sense to that. No, it will be accidental death, and nobody more sorry than me.”
There was a long moment of silence. The blaster steadied in Roarke’s hand. His voice lashed out, whip-like. “Back into the tunnel, both of you. Back or I burn you down where you stand!” Blane’s whole body flamed with bitter resentment, with rebellion that death should come like this. Furiously he considered the chances of a sudden rush against Roarke’s weapon. Then he felt Faulkner’s slight body twist from his grip, heard Faulkner’s thin voice whip out in unfamiliar accents—
“Tulag! Eo-ghan tuhan. Tuhan!”[*] Faulkner was free, plunging toward Roarke. Behind the big man a blue shadow moved; a skinny, rope-like arm descended like a noose over his head, jerking him backward. The blaster’s guard ring flared. Faulkner stumbled in his tracks, collapsed almost at Roarke’s feet. In Blane’s lamp beam the blue shadow resolved itself into the gaunt figure of the diseased Quitchy his single eye fixed upon the slumped body of Faulkner, his grip on Roarke relaxing as though the sight of his fallen master had drained all strength from those scabrous arms.
Blane threw his lamp aside and flung himself upon Roarke, who drove one mailed fist into the Quitchy’s face and turned to meet his new attacker. The native screamed, stumbled backward, leaving Blane alone at grips with the big man. The struggle centered around the blaster, and Blane knew beyond doubt that it was a struggle for life itself. With all the relentless strength of his bull-like body Roarke strove to bring the weapon’s barrel against Blane.
Light from the discarded lamp threw their locked shadows upon rock walls. The second lamp, swinging from Roarke’s waist, now and again limned in Blane’s sight the grotesque helmet of his opponent, the thick, gloved fingers locked upon the blaster’s trigger-switch. Relentlessly the weapon was being brought to bear upon him. A grunt of triumph burst from Roarke.
Downward inched the muzzle despite Blane’s desperate resistance—and suddenly his fingers found the hollow back of the trigger casting. He thrust his thumb behind it, felt pressure against it as Roarke tried to fire the weapon. Pain flared mercilessly up Blane’s wrist as metal tightened cruelly upon flesh and bone, but the flash and agony of the shot he feared did not come. Savagely Roarke twisted the weapon free. A cry of pain burst from Blane as his thumb was all but dislocated. Roarke stepped back, the weapon leveled.
A DARK body catapulted out of the shadows. Skinny arms locked again around Roarke’s helmet. The big man squirmed, slipping the bayonet catch that held the headpiece on his shoulders. With a jerk the helmet tore loose, the rim of it striking Roarke’s forehead with terrific force. Abruptly the man’s body went limp, the blaster falling from his hand. Before Blane could make a move to interfere the Quitchy raised the heavy helmet high; there was a sickening crunch of bone as he bludgeoned it across Roarke’s unprotected skull.
