Collected short fiction, p.137
Collected Short Fiction, page 137
“For the moment, the tiger was driven away by the explosive crash. Tol-ga flung herself upon her mate, tried vainly to drag him from under the stone. Her efforts resulted only in a cry of agony from him. She collapsed on his breast, weeping.
“IN a few minutes I heard the tiger screaming again, approaching. There seemed to be something querulous, hesitant, in his tones. In a moment I saw the reason. The lightning had fired the dry, resinous trunk of the old pine. Flickering red flames were dancing merrily up the splintered bole.
“I heard Harr Garr madly entreating Tol-ga to run back to the cavern to save herself. She did not stir. Then for a long time they were still—the girl there on the ground, holding up the bleeding head and shoulders of the mighty man whose feet were crushed beneath the stone. I suppose they were listening for the footfalls of the beast.
“At last Tol-ga looked up and saw the tiger. The fire was fifty yards away from them, the tiger was slinking uneasily up and down, from time to time raising a low, impatient growl. The lurid, uncertain light of the burning tree shone in his eyes.
“With her quick mind, Tol-ga must have understood at once that the fire was what kept him away. With a low, soft word to Harr Garr she rose, and stood staring at the flames. I would give a good deal to know just what she thought. It is possible, of course, that she had seen fire before; but that is not likely, for the cave-men seemed to know nothing of it.
“She stood looking at it thoughtfully, for perhaps an hour. If it was something new to her, she must have been reasoning pretty clearly, for what happened afterwards showed that she understood it pretty well, showed that she knew it was supported by dry wood, and that the wood was consumed in the process.
“At first the roaring blaze had swept up in a lurid volcano, lighting the whole shelf before the cavern. Slowly it died down. And as it died down the restless tiger came nearer and nearer, and began to repeat his dreadful screams—he was evidently getting into a bad humor. Above the crackle of the dying flames, I could hear his light, quick footfalls; his impatient course was traced by the red coals that seemed to gleam in his eyes.
“When the flickering, smoky blaze had fallen so that the tiger seemed about to come up past it, the girl ran to the fire and seized a blazing branch. She dragged it up close by the man under the rock.
“The first one went out, through too rough handling. She burned her hand painfully on the next, and cried out; but she was too plucky to give up. Soon she had a little heap of blazing sticks in front of Harr Garr. Then she made the great discovery that the phenomenon could be transmitted to a new piece of dry wood.
“At once she set about gathering up the scattered fragments of pine scattered about the shelf. By this time the tiger seemed extremely impatient about his delayed dinner—even the storm had frayed his nerves, before this weird business of fire. He persisted in coming nearer, leaping restlessly about the fire, champing his teeth and squalling.
“Twice, the girl very narrowly escaped him, while she was gathering wood. Then she hit on the idea of carrying a blazing brand with her. Soon the sticks near the cavern-mouth were exhausted, and she had to go farther a-field. While she was gone, the tiger crept upon Harr Garr, determined to get at him in spite of the flames.
“COURAGEOUSLY, the girl ran at the huge, tawny beast, flourishing her flaming pine-knot. The tiger snarled savagely, refused to retreat. The girl came on, drove the blazing stick into his face. He sprang back with a howl of pain.
“And Tol-ga went after him.
“She passed out of my sight. She was driving the tiger toward the narrow end of the shelf, toward the sheer precipice behind it. I heard savage growls, squalls of pain. And then the crashing rattle of stones, as a heavy body plunged down the mountain side.
“She had driven the tiger over the cliff.
“In a moment she was back to Harr Garr. She took his body up in her arms again. But she did not forget the fire, but presently rose to gather sticks for it again.
“And then she came into the cave with a flaming pine-knot in either hand. The cave-men cowered back from her, shivering and mouthing in terror. With dauntless courage, she flourished her torches and shot jabbering clicks and grunts at the men, until she got three or four of the younger savages to hurl themselves upon Kog.
“The young bucks fought with a good heart—they hated the old bully cordially enough—and she helped with her firebrands. In a few minutes he was driven out of the cavern, broken and terrified.
“Then Tol-ga, with the authority the blazing pine-knots gave her, superintended the efforts of a half-dozen cave-men who lifted the boulder from Harr Garr’s feet. No bones had been broken; and with the amazing vitality of his race, he seemed as well as ever in a day or two.
“Kog had been driven from the cavern, but he was back in a short time, with his females gathered around him, at his old bullying habits once more. He seemed to have learned a lesson, at first, and left Tol-ga and Harr Garr severely alone. But his brutish mind soon forgot.
“Tol-ga and Harr Garr kept the fire burning before the cave. The tribe soon realized the value of it as protection from wild animals, and for warmth on stormy nights. The art of cooking—or at least of broiling meat—was soon discovered. And an attempt to cook something in a woven basket water-proofed with a lining of clay resulted in a rude pottery vessel—the beginning of the ceramic art. When Tol-ga mastered fire on that night before the cave, she made the first step of her race on the long road to civilization.
“As keepers and masters of the fire, the young couple soon enjoyed a prominence quite unprecedented for those of their age. Kog grew Insanely jealous of Harr Garr. A few months later he made a desperate and treacherous assault upon Tol-ga, armed with a jagged stone.
“Harr Garr had just started on a hunting trip.
“With her mental quickness, the girl escaped old Kog, provoked him to throw his stone, and dodged it. She got past him to the fire, and with a blazing stick kept him at bay until her calls had brought Harr Garr back on the run—Kog had not had self-control to wait until the young hunter was beyond hearing distance.
“THERE, on the wide ledge before the cavern, the two of them fought the final battle for mastery of the tribe. Kog, having flung his stone, was armed only with fang and claw. Harr Garr carried a wooden spear, the end shaped and sharply pointed. As they closed, he caught Kog in the abdomen with that crude weapon. Though the old bully carried the young hunter to the ground, he died of the wound before his superior strength could be turned to account.
“Thus Harr Garr and Tol-ga became rulers of “The-People-of-the-Mountain,” and brought them the blessings of fire—in very much the same way that fire must have come to our world. When I last saw Tol-ga she was nursing a pink little infant.
“It must have been three or four years, as time goes in that other world, that I lived in the great cave. Twice, in those long years, I was wounded, once in an encounter with a pterodactyl, another time in a battle with a tiger. On both occasions Harr Garr saved me at the risk of his own life. I came to feel a real friendship for him, savage that he is.
It is only a few minutes ago that Harr Garr and I were hunting in the forest, stalking a shaggy little prehistoric horse that we were trying to capture. I was standing there in a little glade in the lush green jungle, silent and tense with the excitement of the hunt. Then a dizzy sensation of reeling, falling. And the next moment I was standing on the red crystal, looking at you. Do you wonder that I was amazed?”
And the bronzed giant straightened in his seat on the bed, fingering the tawny striped tiger skin about his waist. Blue eyes gleamed restlessly above an unkept beard as he said,
“And you know, Stewart, I’m going back to that world in the star!”
[*] An early period in human origin, characterized by weapons made of stone. It is assigned to the second place of the stone ages or is sometimes used to include four divisions or the whole of them.
Salvage in Space
To Thad Allen, meteor miner, comes the dangerous bonanza of a derelict rocket-flier manned by death invisible.
HIS “planet” was the smallest in the solar system, and the loneliest, Thad Allen was thinking, as he straightened wearily in the huge, bulging, inflated fabric of his Osprey space armor. Walking awkwardly in the magnetic boots that held him to the black mass of meteoric iron, he mounted a projection and stood motionless, staring moodily away through the vision panels of his bulky helmet into the dark mystery of the void.
His welding arc dangled at his belt, the electrode still glowing red. He had just finished securing to this slowly-accumulated mass of iron his most recent find, a meteorite the size of his head.
Five perilous weeks he had labored, to collect this rugged lump of metal—a jagged mass, some ten feet in diameter, composed of hundreds of fragments, that he had captured and welded together. His luck had not been good. His findings had been heart-breakingly small; the spectro-flash analysis had revealed that the content of the precious metals was disappointingly minute.[*]
On the other side of this tiny sphere of hard-won treasure, his Millen atomic rocket was sputtering, spurts of hot blue flame jetting from its exhaust. A simple mechanism, bolted to the first sizable fragment he had captured, it drove the iron ball through space like a ship.
Through the magnetic soles of his insulated boots, Thad could feel the vibration of the iron mass, beneath the rocket’s regular thrust. The magazine of uranite fuel capsules was nearly empty, now, he reflected. He would soon have to turn back toward Mars.
Turn back. But how could he, with so slender a reward for his efforts? Meteor mining is expensive. There was his bill at Millen and Helion, Mars, for uranite and supplies. And the unpaid last instalment on his Osprey suit. How could he outfit himself again, if he returned with no more metal than this? There were men who averaged a thousand tons of iron a month. Why couldn’t fortune smile on him?
He knew men who had made fabulous strikes, who had captured whole planetoids of rich metal, and he knew weary, white-haired men who had braved the perils of vacuum and absolute cold and bullet-swift meteors for hard years, who still hoped.
But sometime fortune had to smile, and then . . .
The picture came to him. A tower of white metal, among the low red hills near Helion. A slim, graceful tower of argent, rising in a fragrant garden of flowering Martian shrubs, purple and saffron. And a girl waiting, at the silver door—a trim, slender girl in white, with blue eyes and hair richly brown.
Thad had seen the white tower many times, on his holiday tramps through the hills about Helion. He had even dared to ask if it could be bought, to find that its price was an amount that he might not amass in many years at his perilous profession. But the girl in white was yet only a glorious dream . . .
THE strangeness of interplanetary space, and the somber mystery of it, pressed upon him like an illimitable and deserted ocean. The sun was a tiny white disk on his right, hanging between rosy coronal wings; his native Earth, a bright greenish point suspended in the dark gulf below it; Mars, nearer, smaller, a little ocher speck above the shrunken sun. Above him, below him, in all directions was vastness, blackness, emptiness. Ebon infinity, sprinkled with far, cold stars.
Thad was alone. Utterly alone. No man was visible, in all the supernal vastness of space. And no work of man—save the few tools of his daring trade, and the glittering little rocket bolted to the black iron behind him. It was terrible to think that the nearest human being must be tens of millions of miles away.
On his first trips, the loneliness had been terrible, unendurable. Now he was becoming accustomed to it. At least, he no longer feared that he was going mad. But sometimes . . .
Thad shook himself and spoke aloud, his voice ringing hollow in his huge metal helmet:
“Brace up, old top. In good company, when you’re by yourself, as Dad used to say. Be back in Helion in a week or so, anyhow. Look up Dan and ‘Chuck’ and the rest of the crowd again, at Comet’s place. What price a friendly boxing match with Mason, or an evening at the teleview theater?
“Fresh air instead of this stale synthetic stuff! Real food, in place of these tasteless concentrates! A hot bath, instead of greasing yourself!
“Too dull out here. Life—” He broke off, set his jaw.
No use thinking about such things. Only made it worse. Besides, how did he know that a whirring meteor wasn’t going to flash him out before he got back?
HE drew his right arm out of the bulging sleeve of the suit, into its ample interior, found a cigarette in an inside pocket, and lighted it. The smoke swirled about in the helmet, drawn swiftly into the air filters.
“Darn clever, these suits,” he murmured. “Food, smokes, water generator, all where you can reach them. And darned expensive, too. I’d better be looking for pay metal!”
He clambered to a better position; stood peering out into space, searching for the tiny gleam of sunlight on a meteoric fragment that might be worth capturing for its content of precious metals. For an hour he scanned the black, star-strewn gulf, as the sputtering rocket continued to drive him forward.
“There she glows!” he cried suddenly, and grinned.
Before him was a tiny, glowing fleck, that moved among the unchanging stars. He stared at it intensely, breathing faster in the helmet.
Always he thrilled to see such a moving gleam. What treasure it promised! At first sight, it was impossible to determine size or distance or rate of motion. It might be ten thousand tons of rich metal. A fortune! It would more probably prove to be a tiny, stony mass, not worth capturing. It might even be large and valuable, but moving so rapidly that he could not overtake it with the power of the diminutive Millen rocket.
He studied the tiny speck intently, with practised eye, as the minutes passed—an untrained eye would never have seen it at all, among the flaming hosts of stars. Skilfully he judged, from its apparent rate of motion and its slow increase in brilliance, its size and distance from him.
“Must be—must be fair size,” he spoke aloud, at length. “A hundred tons, I’ll bet my helmet! But scooting along pretty fast. Stretch the little old rocket to run it down.”
He clambered back to the rocket, changed the angle of the flaming exhaust, to drive him directly across the path of the object ahead, filled the magazine again with the little pellets of uranite, which were fed automatically into the combustion chamber, and increased the firing rate.
The trailing blue flame reached farther backward from the incandescent orifice of the exhaust. The vibration of the metal sphere increased. Thad left the sputtering rocket and went back where he could see the object before him.
IT was nearer now, rushing obliquely across his path. Would he be in time to capture it as it passed, or would it hurtle by ahead of him, and vanish in the limitless darkness of space before his feeble rocket could check the momentum of his ball of metal?
He peered at it, as it drew closer.
Its surface seemed oddly bright, silvery. Not the dull black of meteoric iron. And it was larger, more distant, than he had thought at first. In form, too, it seemed curiously regular, ellipsoid. It was no jagged mass of metal.
His hopes sank, rose again immediately. Even if it were not the mass of rich metal for which he had prayed, it might be something as valuable—and more interesting.
He returned to the rocket, adjusted the angle of the nozzle again, and advanced the firing time slightly, even at the risk of a ruinous explosion.
When he returned to where he could see the hurtling object before him, he saw that it was a ship. A tapering silver-green rocket-flier.
Once more his dreams were dashed. The officers of interplanetary liners lose no love upon the meteor miners, claiming that their collected masses of metal, almost helpless, always underpowered, are menaces to navigation. Thad could expect nothing from the ship save a heliographed warning to keep clear.
But how came a rocket-flier here, in the perilous swarms of the meteor belt? Many a vessel had been destroyed by collision with an asteroid, in the days before charted lanes were cleared of drifting metal.
The lanes more frequently used, between Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury, were of course far inside the orbits of the asteroids. And the few ships running to Jupiter’s moons avoided them by crossing millions of miles above their plane.
Could it be that legendary green ship, said once to have mysteriously appeared, sliced up and drawn within her hull several of the primitive ships of that day, and then disappeared forever after in the remote wastes of space? Absurd, of course: he dismissed the idle fancy and examined the ship still more closely.
Then he saw that it was turning, end over end, very slowly. That meant that its gyros were stopped; that it was helpless, drifting, disabled, powerless to avoid hurtling meteoric stones. Had it blundered unawares into the belt of swarms—been struck before the danger was realized? Was it a derelict, with all dead upon it?
EITHER the ship’s machinery was completely wrecked, Thad knew, or there was no one on watch. For the controls of a modern rocket-flier are so simple and so nearly automatic that a single man at the bridge can keep a vessel upon her course.
It might be, he thought, that a meteorite had ripped open the hull, allowing the air to escape so quickly that the entire crew had been asphyxiated before any repairs could be made. But that seemed unlikely, since the ship must have been divided into several compartments by air-tight bulkheads.
Could the vessel have been deserted for some reason? The crew might have mutinied, and left her in the life-tubes. She might have been robbed by pirates, and set adrift. But with the space lanes policed as they were, piracy and successful mutiny were rare.
Thad saw that the flier’s navigation lights were out.
He found the heliograph signal mirror at his side, sighted it upon the ship, and worked the mirror rapidly. He waited, repeated the call. There was no response.
