Collected short fiction, p.161
Collected Short Fiction, page 161
From them flew tattered flags of every nation. The stars and stripes, the Union Jack, the tricolor of France. The red ball and the many-rayed sunburst of Japan. The German flag, with its swastika. Red, white and green of Italy. The dragon of new China, and the crosses of Scandinavia. The red flag of Russia, with its golden sickle, hammer and star. And many more.
Fleets of death. No deck showed movement. No funnel belched smoke. No canvas was set nor signal hoisted.
How came the ships of all the world in San Francisco Bay, Ellis and Keening demanded of each other, abandoned, derelict? Why the ships here, when the men were gone?
Into Market Street the Cosmobile dropped. It was as San Jose had been. Eerily empty. Now it was late afternoon, the sun declining toward the sea beyond the lovely green Presidio and the Golden Gate. The hour when thousands were wont to throng the lower street, on their way to the Ferry Building and their homes across the bay.
But Market Street was deathly still. No man was in view, nor any vehicle save an abandoned push-cart, yet laden with fruit long decayed.
In the windows of a jeweler priceless gems blazed in vain allure. No purchaser to try their glow against satiny skin, nor salesman to offer them. No officer to guard them nor thief to snatch them.
Dust lay on the pavement, and the trolley tracks were rusty.
ELLIS and Keening went back aboard the iron globe, and drifted above the dead fleet upon the bay. Derelicts of many nations. Ferries of Charon abandoned on the Styx.
Over Alameda they flew—and it was mortally quiet as San Jose and San Francisco had been.
And then over Oakland. The streets of half that little city were black with motionless, crowded cars. Its railway tracks were lined unendingly with rolling stock. Its flying-field was thick with planes.
The other half of Oakland was gone.
Between Broadway and the bay, the city had been razed, leveled, annihilated. Where buildings once had stood was now an open plain, scattered with structures and machines of silver-white metal.
The Cosmobile sank to earth once more, and the two men descended the ladder to bare and hard-packed soil. Before them lay the new-cleared field, stretching from Broadway to the bay, clustered with cumbrous mechanisms of unfamiliar aspect, all of some white metal, and all abandoned.
In the center of the field was a flat forest of massive white girders, interminable ranks of braced uprights, which carried to Ellis a curious suggestion of incompleteness, as if they had been merely a foundation for something not erected, deserted unfinished.
Walking close together and a little fearfully, Ellis Drew and little Keening left the foot of the ladder, and approached the nearest enigmatic mechanism. Its silver-blue metal, Ellis recognized, was aluminum. At one side of it, beneath two enormous claws of white metal, was a heap of red clay. Beyond its cumbrous, intricate bulk were stacks of aluminum ingots, new and bright.
The machine was motionless, silent, abandoned.
“A machine,” Ellis murmured in awed tones, “for refining aluminum from common clay. And, Keening, human beings did not design it. In a thousand ways it shows the stamp of something alien. No bolts, you see, or screws or rivets. It is fastened together with slotted plates.”
They went on toward the maze of girders. A forest of aluminum uprights, braced and trussed, all rising to a uniform height of perhaps fifty feet. A framework of mighty metal beams, covering a square nearly a mile on a side.
“Notice how thick those I-beams are?” muttered Ellis, wonderingly. “The thing must have been designed to support a prodigious weight. But why—a foundation like that? A mile square! And you can see it’s no human engineering. No rivets. The whole thing, except for the welding, is put together with U-staples and slotted disks.”
“But human beings must have made it, Drew!” came the dry whisper of the man Keening, muffled in the bandages on his face. “People came here! The ships in the bay. The abandoned automobiles, the aircraft, the deserted trains. Couldn’t a series of great inventions account for it?
And then a disaster of some sort——”
“I tell you, Keening, those things weren’t designed by men—at least, not by men of our civilization. The slotted disks are no better than bolts and rivets—merely different. No, Keening, those things were built by an alien science. But why? Why? What was the reason for building a foundation like that, strong enough to hold up all the cities of the Earth, if they were piled on it? And then abandoning the thing, unused? As you say, men must have come here. But where have they gone? What has become of humanity?”
“I think I know, Drew,” the little man whispered softly through his bandages. “I think the foundation was used.”
Ellis faced him blankly. “What do you mean? What could——”
“Drew,” Keening whispered, “you remember the cube?”
“Cube? Oh, that cube?”
“Yes, the cube we saw in space. It was nearly a mile on a side. About the right size to have rested on that trusswork. It was white—the color of aluminum. And we met it; it must have been flying away from the Earth!”
“That’s it,” muttered Ellis. In a dazed voice he repeated, “That’s it!”
And he swung upon the little man with incredulous awe in his eyes.
“Yes, Keening, you’ve hit it. The human race congregated here while we were gone. Every man of it, perhaps; these ships and planes came from all over the Earth. They built that cube, and flew away into space.”
“But why?” whispered Keening. “Why? Were they afraid? Some catastrophe foreseen? Was the cube a second ark?”
“No, Keening. We know that couldn’t have been. There was no warning; you remember the papers we found. And no delay; they took no time to gather up their valuables, or to lock their houses, or even to finish their meals. No, Keening. They didn’t go willingly. They were carried away by something—nameless, alien. Remember the slotted disks. They didn’t design the cube. It was something else. Something, Keening, that called the human race away from the Earth as the Pied Piper called the rats from Hamelin town!”
“And we are left alone!” whispered the little man. “Saved, because we were on the moon. Alive, because we had dared the most dangerous thing . . .”
“Just think of it, Keening. All our friends, on that cube. All the people we ever knew. All we ever saw. Carried off . . .”
The little man had turned; he was staring silently into the strange vistas of white metal pillars.
“We’ve got to follow, Keening!” cried Ellis. “We have the Cosmobile. We must find what happened. And we might be able to save a few. Enough . . . so that men could have another chance . . .”
The bandaged face turned slowly back. “Must we go, Drew? It seems so—so terrible. Any power that could carry off all humanity! . . . What chance would we have, against it? . . . And here we have all the world.”
Ellis’s blue eyes blazed on him suddenly.
“You want to stay? What would life mean to us, here? Growing old on a dead planet! Ghosts of the lost race all about us! Ghosts and dreams and memories! Surely, Keening, you aren’t going to be a——” He checked the harsh word, and said in its place, “—to be afraid?”
The slight form stiffened, and the bandaged face looked at him quickly.
“Very well, Drew. We follow.”
Ellis was instantly regretful. “Sorry, Keening. I didn’t mean what I said. Guess all this is getting on my nerves.” He nodded at the grotesque, white machines. “Lord, to criticize your courage, after all we’ve been through together! Don’t mind it, Keening.”
“That’s all right,” whispered the other. “I thought of staying. But I see now that we have to go.”
By dusk they were back in the steel hull of the Cosmobile. Ellis went to the bridge and consulted upon the charts the notations he had made of the white cube’s positions and velocity. At last he came down to the galley, where Keening was preparing a meal.
“You found out——” whispered the little man.
“Yes, Keening. We had enough of the elements to plot its course.”
The technician stopped, with a platter of smoking ham in his hands, stared expectantly.
“Hard to believe it, Keening. But the cube is evidently bound for the ninth planet. For Pluto!”
“Pluto? . . . We must follow, there?”
“As soon as we can find supplies.”
THE steel ball rose in the dawn, and crossed the bay again, to empty Market Street. For a week they were busy there. Canned food they discovered in abundance. In a machine shop, Ellis found cylinders of compressed oxygen. Keening visited a hardware store, and brought back sporting-rifles, revolvers, and ammunition.
But they did not often separate. They were held together by instinctive dread of the lonely, lifeless Earth.
Ellis had intended to find some small dynamo-generator, which he could run to re-charge the batteries of the ether-ship. But none came to his attention, and presently, with a better idea, he moved the Cosmobile to an electrical supply house, and there replaced the old cells with new ones.
The cylinders of oxygen and the heavy batteries had not been easy to handle, and both were exhausted at the beginning of the long flight to Pluto—the outermost planet. Standing watch and watch beneath the steel dome of the hull, staring out endlessly into the black vacancies of the star-powdered void, they had ample time to rest.
Four hours long were the watches—by the chronometer. They seemed four minutes, sometimes, or four thousand years. No sun rose and set; time hung motionless. Silently the chronometer ticked. Their hearts beat. They watched and sometimes ate and slept, and spoke only in infrequent monosyllables.
And the ether-car drove out into dark infinity. Into void inconceivable. Earth and moon were two bright points, small and white, larger and green. Against endless night they dwindled, crept into one.
The sun shrank. Argent Venus and Jupiter, red Mars and yellow Saturn drew toward it, and waned. The sun became dimensionless. A bright star, lost and futile in the void of universal night.
Still they flew outward. To Pluto. The black planet. The border-world. The last outpost against night of void cosmos.
Pluto, the ultimate planet—and the eldest. It must have cooled enough for life when Jupiter was still a second sun, when Earth was not yet flung molten from the central star. Evolution—planetary and organic—must there have run its course.
Pluto, whose book of life should have been written to the end, sealed, forgotten. Star of darkness and death, was it yet undead? A vampire world, reaching from death across the void, to pluck from Earth the warm fresh fruit of the sun?
THE voyage was done.
A black landscape, beneath the Cosmobile, expanded into frozen, starlit desolation. Perilously, the iron ball settled upon a ragged ebon crag. All about, in pallid star-shine, tumbled bleak and elemental wilderness of barren stone.
Dark planet. Livid, jagged mountains leaping with savage teeth at cruel, star-jeweled sky. Titanic peaks, gigantic buttresses of dark rock, cleft with colossal canyons that were wells of ominous obscurity. Jet, cyclopean ranges, plunging into gigantic gorges.
Air there was none. The cold was unutterable; the sun merely a yellow star. Nothing lived or moved upon all this tangled, alpine desolation of darkness and doom.
Yet to this world humanity had come—in a cube of aluminum. Why? To what evil end?
The steel sphere rose from the peak, and circled above grim, cataclysm-born ranges—above titanic mountains reared in the last fierce convulsions of a dying planet. Above sheer and incredible twisted crags and black, fathomless abysms. A weary time slipped by, measured only by the restless, silent ticking of the chronometer. And then they looked into an illuminated pit.
A volcanic shaft, rimmed with black and monstrous peaks. Miles it was across, and scores—or hundreds—of miles in depth, piercing to the very heart of the black planet. Blue the rocks glowed in its depths, with eldritch fire of radio-activity.
In that ghostly phosphorescence, so dim that it looked a specter thing, they saw the cube. Tens on tens of miles below, upon the rugged, pallidly glowing floor of the azure abyss. Like a child’s building-block painted silver and carelessly dropped among jagged boulders.
Did that cube, after all, contain the race of man?
Ellis wondered. And he wondered if one girl was in it, Tempest Durand. Once she might have been his, with her lithe, athletic beauty, her wit, her gay vivacity. And he had left her, because his work was too important, because he had no thought to spend upon a woman, because she disturbed his delicate mental processes. Had he then lost her? For ever?
The Cosmobile hung a long time over the rim of the pit.
“Must we go down?” whispered little Keening, watching Ellis Drew from his bandaged face. “Down into that blue flame? What can we do? What—against a power that could reach across to Earth?”
His whisper was frightened and pleading.
After all, Ellis asked himself, what could they do? What, when they did not even know the nature of the power they must fight? But he remembered Tempest Durand.
“Yes,” he told Keening. “We’re going down.”
The Cosmobile fell into the well. Past smooth, fire-glazed walls of volcanic obsidian. Past jagged ledges like threatening teeth. Past mysterious cavern-mouths.
The feeble gleam of starlight vanished from the rocks. And then the walls of the shaft were blue, glowing increasingly bright. Beneath was a field of boulders, cyclopean stones that had fallen from the sides of the chasm, a tumbled confusion of rugged masses, shimmering pallidly phosphorescent.
The opening above, a patch of cold stars, narrowed disquietingly. The black walls closed above the ether-car like a swallowing throat. And the blue bottom of the pit seemed to expand as it dropped.
At last the steel sphere was brought to rest upon the boulder-fields between two colossal masses of blue-glowing stone that offered it some concealment. Three miles away, perhaps, across ragged, luminescent rocks, rose the pale argent sides of the cube, smooth and unbroken. Beyond the cube, and in every direction, leapt up walls of shimmering rock, growing darker and narrowing at the top of this cyclopean well, about a tiny, star-flecked disk.
“We are here,” whispered Keening.
“Here,” repeated Ellis. “To do what we can. To find what has happened. And rescue a few—if we can. I had a friend . . .
“There is air here,” he announced, consulting his instruments. “Breathable air, though thin and dry and cold. We won’t need the atmospheric armor.”
They descended from the bridge, hurriedly donned heavy clothing, and each selected from their racks a heavy rifle and a revolver. And at last Ellis opened the valve and unrolled his metal ladder, and they climbed down upon rocks that shone dimly, with chill blue radiance.
The air was scanty and bitterly cold. Both of them were panting a little, even from the exertion of climbing down the ladder. There was no wind; but the gelid chill of this dead and frozen world drove through their garments.
Furtively, they slipped away from the steel sphere, along the floor of the rugged ravine in which it was hidden, following in the direction of the gigantic aluminum cube.
THEY had gone perhaps a hundred yards, when Keening voiced through his bandages a muted, whispering scream. With an icy, shaking hand, he grasped Ellis Drew’s arm, and pointed. Then both men dropped to their knees, and began to fire.
It is significant of their instinctive horror of the approaching things that they shot at once, without question or hesitation.
The little group of beings that came running toward them along the bottom of the ravine, between frowning walls of blue-shining stone, wore the shape of men. Men they were in form, but less than human and more than human. Weird metamorphosis had overtaken them since they had been snatched from the Earth.
Specters of elemental horror. Most of them were nude; a few wore foul and tattered scraps of garments. Like the rocks, their livid flesh glowed with pallid, bluish light. And it was translucent, so that their bones were visible.
Skeletons animated, clad in lucent flesh of ghostly blue.
They moved, though rapidly, with a curious stiffness, like inert and nerveless marionettes. Their faces were fixed, lifeless—dead, transparent masks in front of grinning skulls.
They made no sound; they did not speak. Each seemed unconscious of his companions. Those who fell beneath the rifle bullets neither screamed nor groaned. They spun about and went down silently—and the others trampled inexorably over them.
The things revealed no fear. Unarmed, they came on in the face of barking rifles, moving with stark and uncanny automatism. They were machines, bent ruthlessly upon one single end. Death alone stayed their stalking advance.
The rifles were empty, and half a score of the things strode grimly on. Fumbling for cartridges, Ellis cried to Keening:
“Back to the ship! I’ll stand them off!”
Loading his own rifle, the little man laughed through his bandages with a curious dry sound, and moved closer to Ellis.
The guns were empty again when the remnant of the band reached them—now reduced to four monstrous things, grappling at them with long-nailed, skeletal talons, clothed in blue light. Ellis had no time to load again, or even to find the revolver in his pocket.
One went down beneath his clubbed rifle; the stock of the weapon splintered upon its ghastly skull. Then hands grasped him from behind. Icy hands, fiendishly strong, colder than living flesh could be, freezing with the eldrich chill of this black world of death.
Ellis struggled savagely, vainly, in strange arms whose bones were visible through ghostly-blue flesh. Then Keening’s revolver cracked; the arms relaxed and slipped from him.
The two then stood back to back.
Again the rifle-barrel rose and fell in Ellis’s hands, and Keening’s revolver barked.
The battle abruptly was done, and they stood over sprawling skeletons that were clothed in translucent, shimmering flesh. No blood seemed to flow from the things. Dead, they were no more silent than they had been, living. Tense, waiting quiet reigned.
