The legion of space the.., p.12
The Legion of Space: The Complete Saga, page 12
“Ashore!” exulted John Star, as they splashed through the shallows, waving a mocking farewell to the amoeba on the log.
“Yes, we’re ashore,” agreed Jay Kalam. “But, you observe, an eastern shore. The city of the Medusae is on the west coast. That means that we have this jungle to cross, and those mountains, and all the strange continent beyond.
“We have the unearthly, savage life to battle, that has driven even the Medusae within their metal-walled city. And the terrible nights to endure.”
“Ah, yes, a black continent ahead, full of mortal horrors,” wept Giles Habibula. “Ah, me, and we’ve no weapons, we’re naked as blessed babes. Not even a bite to eat! Poor old Giles, destined to starve on the alien shores!”
XVIII.
“WEAPONS,” began Jay Kalam, “are what we must first——”
John Star caught his breath with pain as something jabbed into his bare foot, broke in with a wry smile: “Here’s one to begin with. Edge like a razor—warranted!”
He picked up the thing he had stepped on, a wide, slightly hollowed black shell, with a curving edge. Jay Kalam examined it seriously.
“Good enough,” he said. “A useful blade.”
He looked for others, as they walked up the beach, found one for each of his companions. Giles Habibula accepted his disdainfully.
“Ah, you expect me, with this mortal thing, to hew a way through that lot of daggers and bayonets waiting for us ahead—waiting to cut us to blessed ribbons!”
He pointed at the menacing jungle barrier, bristling with gigantic black blades.
“And so we’re armed,” said Jay Kalam. “As soon as we can cut a spear apiece with our shell knives.” They approached the black, violet-flowering barrier of thorns and spines and spikes. Many of the blades were ten feet long, black, glistening; they were close-grained, hard and sharp, almost, as steel. Naked and sensitive as their bodies were, it was not easy for the four to get near the blades they selected; it proved still less easy to cut and shape the iron-hard wood with the shells.
Weary hours had passed before each of them was armed with a black, ten-foot spear, and a shorter, triangular, saw-toothed dagger. Hal Samdu shaped himself also a great club from a piece of driftwood.
“Ah, so we set out to cross a mortal continent on our bare, blessed feet——” Giles Habibula had begun, with a last regretful look back toward the yellow sea, when his fishy eyes spied something, and he ran heavily back toward the beach.
It was their bundle he found, drifted ashore while they worked.
“It was slow in reaching the surface,” said Jay Kalam. “The wind carried it after us.”
“Our clothes, again!” exulted John Star. “And real guns!”
“And my blessed bottle of wine!” wheezed Giles Habibula, laboring to open the bundle on the sand.
Their hopes for weapons were dashed. The package had leaked; their clothing was sodden, half the food ruined, the delicate mechanism of the proton guns quite useless from contact with the corrosive yellow water.
Only the bottle of wine was completely undamaged. Giles Habibula held it up toward the red sun, regarded it fondly with his fishy eye.
“Open it,” suggested Hal Samdu. “We need something——”
Giles Habibula’s mouth was watering; but he swallowed, slowly shook his head.
“Ah, no, Hal,” he said sadly. “When it’s gone there’ll be no more. Not a blessed drop of wine on the whole mortal continent. Ah, no, it must be preserved for an hour of greater need.”
He set it down firmly but carefully on the black sand.
Discarding the useless proton guns, they finished as much of the food as remained edible, and gratefully donned their half-dry clothing—even under the continual radiation of the huge red sun, the atmosphere was far from tropical. John Star rudely bandaged the lacerations on thigh and ankle that he had sustained on the way ashore. Giles Habibula stowed the bottle of wine in one of his ample pockets, carefully wrapped against breakage. And they plunged into the menacing mystery of the black jungle.
Thick, fleshy black stems rose close about them, twisted together overhead in an unbroken tangle, that bristled with knife-sharp, sawtoothed blades. The dense roof of thorns hid the crimson sky completely; merely a ghastly blood-hued twilight filtered to the jungle floor.
With infinite caution they picked a way under the tangle of blades, and even caution did not save them. Clothing suffered, each of them was soon bleeding from a dozen minor cuts that throbbed painfully from the poison of the blades. And soon they met a danger vastly more appalling.
“One advantage,” Jay Kalam was observing, “is that if the thorns hinder us, they also hinder any enemies that—ugh!”
A little choking cry cut off his grave voice. John Star turned to see him carried off the ground by a long, thick purple rope. Hanging from the crimson gloom above, it had wrapped itself twice about his body, clapped a flat, terminal sucking disk to his throat. Struggling savagely, he was helpless in the contracting, inch-thick tentacle. Swiftly, it was drawing him up into the tangle of black thorns.
JOHN STAR leaped after him, dagger lifted, but already he had been carried out of reach.
“Throw me, Hal!” he gasped.
The giant seized him by knee and thigh, flung him mightily upward toward the roof of thorns. With one grasping hand he seized a coil of the tough purple cable. Immediately it shortened, drawing him higher, forming another loop to throw about his body.
Hanging to it with one hand, he sawed at it with his dagger in the other, above Jay Kalam’s shoulder. The tough purple skin cut through, a thin, violet-colored fluid streamed out and down his arm—sap or blood, he did not know. Hard fibers, inside, formed a core that did not cut so easily.
A coil slipped about his shoulders, constricted terrifically.
“Thank you, John,” Jay Kalam was whispering, voiceless, but without panic. “But turn loose, while you can!”
He sawed and hacked away silently.
Suddenly there was red in the fluid that streamed out—it was, he knew, Jay Kalam’s blood.
The purple cable contracted spasmodically, with agonizing, bonecracking force.
“Too—too late! Sorry—John!”
Jay Kalam’s white face went limp.
He made a last, fierce effort, as the unendurable pressure forced the breath from his lungs in a long gasp of agony. The purple cable parted, they fell.
They were, the next John Star knew, outside the jungle.
He was lying on his back, in a little glade covered with some plant like grass, soft, fine-bladed, brilliantly and metallically blue. Below, over the top of the black thorn jungle, he could see the oily yellow ocean, a glistening golden desert that touched the rim of the red sky, beneath the low, sullen sun.
Above towered black mountain ranges; vast sloping fields strewn with titanic ebon boulders; bare, rugged, jet-black precipices; barrier of peaks beyond barrier of somber, Cyclopean peaks, until the jagged dark line of them scarred the bloody sky.
Jay Kalam lay beside him on the blue grass, still unconscious. Hal Samdu and Giles Habibula were busy over a little fire by the edge of a tiny, flashing stream that crossed the glade. Incredulous, he caught the scent of meat cooking.
“What happened?” he called, sitting up painfully, body stiff and aching from bruises and the inflamed wounds of the jungle thorns.
“Ah, so you’re awake at last!” said Giles Habibula. “Well, lad, Hal and old Giles got the two of you out of the mortal jungle, after you fell back with the end of that tentacle. It wasn’t so blessed far. Here in the valley, Hal threw his spear at a little thing grazing on the blue grass, and I struck sparks with stones to make a fire.
“That’s the story, lad. We’re through the jungle. But we’ve got these mortal mountains to climb, after you and Jay are able, and life knows what blessed dangers to face beyond. Ah, if that purple rope is a fair sample of the horrors waiting for us!
“This life’s too strenuous for such a precious feeble old man as Giles Habibula, that deserves to be sitting somewhere in a blessed easy-chair, with a sip of wine to lift his old heart from the woe that weighs it down.”
He cast a fishy eye at the bulge in his pocket.
“Ah, yes, I’ve one mortal bottle. But that must wait for the hour of greater need—it will come, soon enough, life knows, with a mortal continent of horror ahead of us!”
Up the mountain barrier they clambered, when all were sufficiently recovered. Over tumbled heaps of colossal black boulders. Up sheer, rugged ebon slopes. Mounting range after wild range, always to find a wilder, more rugged range beyond.
Slowly the enormous, scarlet sun, that served as their compass, wheeled across the gloomy crimson sky, through the long week of its progress. Often they were hungry, often thirsty, always deadly tired. The air grew thin and colder as they climbed, until they were never warm, until the least exertion meant exhaustion.
Sometimes they killed the little animals that grazed the blue grass, cooked them while they rested. They drank from icy mountain torrents. They slept a little, shivering in the sunshine, one of them always on guard.
“We must go on,” Jay Kalam urged them, again and again. “The night must not catch us here. It will be a week of darkness and frightful cold. We would freeze, or starve.”
But it was already sunset when they mounted the last divide, looked across a vast plateau, lifeless so far as they could see, black and grimly desolate. It was piled with masses of dark rock, riven and scarred with the stern marks of volcanic cataclysm, a wild waste of utter black. In the darkling sky of sullen scarlet hung the blood-red, dying sun, its sinister disk already touching the waste of ebon stone.
“We would die here surely,” said Jay Kalam. “We must hasten on.”
And they went on, breathless in the thin, bitter air, as the sun’s red. disk was slowly gnawed away by the teeth of the jagged western horizon, and a chill wind rose about them.
XIX.
FOR HOURS they hastened on, across the black, lifeless volcanic waste of the high plateau, the bitter promise of approaching night increasing in the air. The huge red dome of the sun sank before them, vanished at last, and in the lurid crimson twilight they came to the rim of the chasm.
Its floor a full thousand feet below, it was a mighty slash across the plateau, a huge, cliff-walled trench filled with dusky crimson gloom.
“A river,” Jay Kalam pointed out, “with forest along it. That means firewood and the chance of food. And we should find a cave for shelter in the cliffs. We must climb down.”
“Climb down!” snorted Giles Habibula. “Like a blessed lot of flies!”
But they found a slope that looked less menacing, started the descent, clambering over heaps of fallen, colossal black rocks, sliding across banks of talus, scrambling and dropping down sheer precipices. All of them were bruised and lacerated against jagged rock, all of them took reckless chances, for dread night came swiftly.
Only the faintest crimson glow marked the narrow slash of sky between the mighty walls when at last they stumbled into the strip of strangely black forest at the bottom. They were trembling with cold, violent as had been their exertions; ice crystals already fringed the river beyond.
Giles Habibula started a blaze, while the others gathered deadwood among the weird, cruel-bladed trees.
“We must find shelter,” said Jay Kalam. “We can never live here in the open.”
With torches they explored the canon wall. John Star came upon a round, eight-foot tunnel. He shouted for the others, and entered, flaring torch in one hand and spear in the other, alert for danger, for the air had an acrid, animal odor; he saw strange tracks on the sandy floor.
The cavern proved to be vacant, a twenty-foot room hollowed out at the rear.
“Just made to our order,” he cried, meeting the others in the entrance. “Some creature has lately used it, but it’s gone. We can carry in wood, wall up the entrance——”
“Mortal me!” shrieked Giles Habibula, who had been cautiously in the rear. “Here comes the owner!”
They heard a crashing in the fringe of dark trees, as the thing came up from the river. Then torch light gleamed yellow and green on a crown of seven huge eyes, glistened on close-scaled, scarlet armor, glinted on black, sharp-edged, terrific fangs.
It met them at the tunnel-mouth; they had no time to choose to fight or not. John Star, Jay Kalam, and Hal Samdu braced their long black spears against the floor, to face its charge. Giles Habibula shouted, scrambling back behind them and holding up his torch:
“I’ll give you light.”
A river creature, it must have been, that retired to the cave to escape the terrible night. Its body was crablike, thick as an elephant’s covered with hard red armor; it had innumerable limbs, the foremost armed with savage talons. It exhaled an overwhelming, nauseating stench.
John Star’s spear, set against the floor, was driven by the force of its charge into the side of its armored snout.
With a hissing, screaming roar, deafening in the cave, the creature threw up its head, splintering the shaft against the roof. A black tongue, hooked with cruel spines, darted out, impaled his shoulder through garments and flesh, jerked him spinning toward black-toothed, yawning, tremendous jaws.
He brandished his torch, struck with it the seven great eyes set in a crown of armor, thrust it ahead of him into the reeking maw.
The monster screamed again, the tongue lashed, flailing him from side to side of the passage, drew him back, numb, bleeding, half-conscious, toward the jetty fangs.
Hal Samdu’s spear came past him, sank deep in the roof of the yawning mouth. He was vaguely aware of the gigantic club, raining pile-driver blows on the crown of eyes and the armored skull.
His shoulder was bound, when he came to; he was lying by a fire in the cave. The others were busy, carrying in wood and great pieces of meat from the huge carcass at the entrance.
“Mortal cold, outside, lad!” Giles Habibula informed him. “Snowing, with a blessed blizzard roaring down the canon. The river’s already frozen. Poor old Giles is too feeble for such a life as this! Killing monsters in the wilderness of a precious alien planet!”
Even by the fire in the cave, the long night reached them with its numbing fingers. When they emerged again, after the long, weary delay and the grim battle with the cold, they found the river a racing torrent, fed by melting snows, rising almost to the mouth of the cave.
“We shall build a raft,” decided Jay Kalam. “Follow the rivers across the continent to the Medusae’s city.”
With improvised tools of stone, they laboriously fastened fallen logs together. The slow sun had already reached the zenith when they poled the clumsy vessel out into the rushing stream, began the voyage to the black city by the sea.
Four painfully built rafts they lost. Two that broke up on rocks, leaving them to struggle ashore as best they might, through angry, ice-cold water. One that was wrecked by a green, lizardlike water animal. One that they abandoned—at the last instant—upon the brink of a great fall.
Week-long days came and departed, between week-long nights of savage cold, when they fastened the raft by the shore, and landed to battle for food and warmth.
BELOW THE great fall, the colossal gash of the canon was deeper, a Cyclopean gorge, rugged black walls shutting in perpetual crimson twilight. Then the river joined a larger stream, that carried them away from the mountains, across an interminable plain, between low fringes of black vegetation—vegetation that died in the bitter nights, grew amazingly again by day.
Steadily the river became wider, deeper, its yellow torrent swifter. The somber, menacing jungles along its banks grew higher, the animal life in the water and the jungle and the air larger and more ferocious. With spear and dagger and club, with fire and rude bows, they fought many times for possession of the raft.
They had become four lean, haggard men—even Giles Habibula was almost thin—black from exposure, ragged, unkempt, shaggy, scarred from many wounds. But they had got an iron endurance from the endless struggle, a calmly desperate courage, an absolute confidence in one another.
Through all of it, Giles Habibula carried his bottle of wine. He defended it when the camp was attacked by a great flying thing, with splendid wings like sheets of sapphire, and a deadly, whipping sting. He dived for it when the green river creature destroyed the raft. Many times he held it up to the red heavens, gazed at it with longing in his fishy eyes.
“Ah, me, a sip of it would be mortal good!” his plaintive voice would wheeze. “But when it’s gone there’ll be none—not a blessed drop of wine on the whole continent! Ah, I must save it for a greater need!”
They were drifting one day near the middle of the river, vast now, a deep, mighty yellow flood, ten miles wide. Sheer walls of black jungle stood along its banks; barriers of violet-flowering thorns, interwoven with deadly purple vines; brakes of towering canes that whipped out at anything moving like living swords; gigantic trees laden with black moss that was bloodsucking death. Above the black walls hung the low, smoky dome of the crimson sky, the huge red sun burning sullen at the zenith.
Hal Samdu, at the steering sweep, roared suddenly:
“The city! The black city of the Medusae!”
Like a mountain it rose, ominously dim in the red haze, colossal beyond belief. Above the black barrier of the jungle, its sheer walls leaped up, infinitely, incredibly up, to strange ebon towers and huge fantastic mechanisms. It was a city planned by madmen and built by giants.
Strange sensations overcame the four ragged men on the raft, gazing at the city they had crossed the abysm of space and a savage continent to reach. They stood with heads back, gaping in mute wonder at the unguessable, titanic mechanisms that lined the sheer, looming mountains of its walls.
“Aladoree!” muttered Hal Samdu at last. “There!”
