Collected short fiction, p.167
Collected Short Fiction, page 167
He saw that Gorkon was staring up at him. Black, gigantic, hairless, muffled in thick robes of scarlet. His face was an evil leer. His eyes were yellow and sunken and terrible. The long whip was in his ebon hand.
Harshly, the brazen voice boomed out a strange question:
“Who are you?”
“Terry Webb——”
Ato Lu did not understand the syllables that had rushed to his lips. He stopped with a gasp, said: “Oh! Gorkon, you must know that I am Ato Lu!”
Yet there was a doubt, an uncertainty, in his tone. He had the faintest shadow of a memory that he was not Ato Lu alone, but also, incomprehensibly, some one else named Terry Webb.
Gorkon’s eyes—yellow, huge, and strangely triangular—stared up at him. He boomed again:
“You have a memory that you are other than Ato Lu?”
“Gorkon,” he answered slowly, “it seems that I do. Do not whip me for it! I did not mean——”
A red glare of triumph had come into the great amber eyes.
“Stay and guard the wall, Ato Lu,” the terrible voice commanded. “My whip will cut the last shred of flesh from your bones if you fail.” The red-robed Martian touched his girdle to move a little stud. A faintly luminous shell at once surrounded his body. He rose and floated swiftly away, as if in defiance of gravitation, toward the silver dome in the center of the valley.
Ato Lu remained upon the wall for a little time, shivering. He was trying in his dim, slow way to understand the memory that was growing ever stronger, that he was not only Ato Lu, but also Terry Webb.
Then the Ku-Latha came again to the attack. Blue, formless, gaseous things. They were like small, detached clouds, crawling along the dark ground. They bore terrible death by cold.
Ato Lu did not wait for them. He feared them more than he did the memory of Gorkon’s whip. He fled, carrying his flame gun. Yet, as he fled, he had the strange feeling that the other being, waking in him, was not afraid. Terry Webb, he felt, did not want to run.
He left the wall, ran down the defile into the black, star-roofed crater. Beyond the half-frozen salt lake, beyond the pitiful fields, rose the inner peak, crowned with Gorkon’s silver dome, and with the golden globe of the atomic flame burning above it.
The Ku-Latha followed him, an implacable wave of cold blue death.
Panting, he came to the caves by the shore of the lake and lay down to rest by a tiny fire of moss in the cave that had been his sister’s.
Ato Lu slept on his bed of moss. A little furry man, uneasy with hunger, shivering with the nip of eternal cold. And he had a strange dream.
He dreamed that he was no longer Ato Lu. He was Terry Webb. And Terry Webb had no body. He was floating in a black void that was featureless save for tiny, drifting points of enigmatic green.
He was Terry Webb, he dreamed. And Gorkon had stolen his body. And, in his body, Gorkon had taken the girl he loved. Terry Webb, somehow, was fighting desperately to recover his body and the girl.
In the dark abyss, among the floating sparks of green, he demanded of Gorkon:
“Give back my body! Give back Eve Audrin, whom you have taken with my body!”
The voice of Gorkon seemed to come to him in the void:
“This body is mine forever. The body of Gorkon lies in the dome by the lake. But the mind of Gorkon is waking in the body of Terry Webb. The mind of Terry Webb is waking in the body of the slave, Ato Lu. It will die when Ato Lu dies. And Ato Lu will soon die, for the creatures of cold will come into the cave.”
“It may be that Ato Lu will die,” answered Terry Webb, in the dark emptiness. “But, before he dies, he will kill you, Gorkon. Or I will, with his body.”
A note of fear, it seemed, was in the reply of Gorkon, though mocking contempt covered it.
“Ato Lu kill Gorkon?” It was a jeer and a taunt. “Ato Lu is a little man. Gorkon is a giant. And Ato Lu is a coward.”
“So,” said Terry Webb, “is Gorkon.”
“And the Ku-Latha have taken the valley,” came the mocking response. “Ato Lu could not pass them to reach Gorkon.”
“He could try.”
“The silver dome is a fortress. The door is barred. He could never enter.”
“But,” insisted Terry, “he could try.”
“Even if he did enter,” responded the taunt of Gorkon, “he is a very small coward, and I am a Martian warrior. I can wake and destroy him.”
“We shall see,” said Terry Webb.
“Very soon now,” resumed the mocking voice, “you may destroy the body under the dome, and welcome. The transfer of my mind to the body of Terry Webb is already far progressed. A little time more, and I have no longer need of the black body under the dome.”
Mocking laughter came up through the green-shot blackness. And a final taunt:
“Gorkon gives you thanks, Terry Webb, for the gift of so fair a woman with your body. One who already has learned to love it!”
THE DREAM ended. Ato Lu came up out of the dark, green-flecked void. He woke, trembling, by the smoldering fire of moss.
But the memory of Terry Webb was strong, now—as strong as the memory of Ato Lu. He was two beings in one. His body was the body of Ato Lu. He had Ato Lu’s hatred of Gorkon, Ato Lu’s fear of Gorkon and of the Ku-Latha. But he had also a burning love for Eve Audrin. And a coldly desperate determination to destroy the body of Gorkon, so that the Martian’s mind, not yet completely transferred, could not hold forever the body it had stolen.
Both parts of him had reason enough to kill the big Martian. But Ato Lu’s fears, his habit of timid obedience, were terrible obstacles.
There was a silent battle in the little furry man. A dozen times he crept to the opening of the cave. But when he looked out upon the creeping, gaseous shapes of the Ku-Latha all over the floor of the valley, he cowered back in terror to his little fire.
Yet the part of him that was Terry Webb became ever stronger—the mind of Terry Webb, if one may put it so, was flowing steadily into his furry body, as the mind of Gorkon was flowing from the body under the dome into the body of Terry Webb.
So the last man at length found courage to come into the open. He stood, faint with cold and hunger, on the salt-crusted beach of the icy lake. Across the lake stood the mountain, with the white dome of Gorkon’s house upon it.
The golden globe of the atomic flame was burning on its tower above the dome when he first stepped out. But the beings of cold had made some attack upon it with their rays. White swirls of frozen air danced suddenly about it. It flickered, went out!
Final night descended on the valley.
It was a pit, walled with black mountains. The black sky domed it, immutable, glittering with frosty stars. Creeping over the floor of it were the Ku-Latha—formless, crawling clouds of blue gas.
With the atomic light extinct, the thin air grew swiftly colder. Life, human life, would not long be possible on the earth.
Ato Lu, the last man, began running around the salt-crusted shore of the freezing lake toward the dark bulk of the starlit mountain. He was sick with terror of the amorphous, gaseous creatures that came behind him. But the part of him that was Terry Webb would not let him stop.
He still carried the small bright cylinder of his flame gun.
He reached the road that led up from the lake toward the silver dome. His furry body was numb and quivering with the increasing cold. The air seared his panting lungs. Ato Lu wanted to lie down and give himself up to death. But Terry Webb made him go on.
He had thought himself ahead of all the Ku-Latha. But one of them came suddenly into view upon the road before him, cutting him off. One of its formless limbs carried a black weapon of cold. It saw him, used the weapon. A rock beside him shattered explosively; an icy blast shook him.
The furry man flung himself flat, deliberately used his flame gun. It was a difficult shot. But presently the hissing white needle stabbed into the blue cloud; it disintegrated.
Terry Webb—he was dominant now in the furry man—ran on. He had been victorious. But he was colder. He had used half the reserve of power in the flame gun. He had been delayed, when time was the vital element. All about the base of the mountain the Ku-Latha were closing in. Blue, formless, weirdly luminous; a tide of frozen death.
Terry came to the dome. It was a huge structure of polished, silvery metal. It had no windows, but one door. The door was locked. He beat upon it with small, furry fists that were numb with cold.
The blue, amorphous things were following up the mountain.
Ato Lu was sick with fear. Even Terry Webb in him was numb with bleak despair. But the mind of Terry Webb, he knew, would not give up until it was dead.
It was Terry Webb that suggested that the flame gun might serve as a cutting torch. The little furry man turned the hissing white needle against the silvery metal. It glowed and spattered; a little incandescent furrow was cut in it.
Deliberately he set out to cut through the door. He was numb, nearly dead with cold. The bitter air was an agony in his lungs. His furry skin was stiff, like armor. His lifeless fingers could hardly hold the flame gun.
He had cut away, at last, a section of the outer shell. The massive bolt was laid bare beyond it. He attacked it with the white flame, weaker now, as the fuel was running low.
Behind him, the Ku-Latha were marching steadily up the hill.
He reeled, staggered. He was forced to prop himself against the metal, to keep from falling. He was giddy. Cold made him half blind. Tears froze on his eyelashes. The diminishing bright jet of flame was all he could see. That began to spin and whirl.
He had exposed the bolt, cut almost through it. The white jet of flame flickered suddenly. It went out, with a little explosive sound. He flung his freezing body against the door. It would not open. The forms of the Ku-Latha were near.
He staggered away from the door, found a stone. He lifted it, reeling under the weight of it, hammered on the bolt. It snapped at his deep cut. The door swung open.
The little furry man, dying with the agony of frozen lungs, staggered into the Martian’s dwelling. He carried the stone and the empty flame gun.
He had no thought for the strange luxury of it, that had been whispered of in the caves. He was too blind to see the wondrous fountains of colored light, the strangely gorgeous hangings. His feet were too dead with cold to feel the deep piles of the splendid carpets. The warm, perfumed air only increased the agony of his frozen lungs.
In an inner room he found Gorkon. The chamber glowed with rosy light. On a couch of blue, soft stuff the Martian lay, a great black giant, crimson-robed, motionless.
Even in this extremity, Terry Webb would not strike an unwarned man. He stopped in the door and made some gasping sound—his voice was gone.
Gorkon woke and stood up. A gigantic, menacing figure, black, red-clad. His eyes were yellow and triangular and terrible. He snatched some weapon as he rose. Green light flickered at the furry man; red agony paralyzed his arm.
But the little man had flung the bright, empty cylinder of his flame gun. Whirling end over end, it struck Gorkon’s weapon, knocked it beyond the blue couch.
An angry bellowing sound came from the black giant. He picked up his whip, lunged forward. The lash cut through furry skin to the bone; it flicked drops of scarlet.
Ato Lu rushed at him, in the face of the whip. His sound hand lifted the rock. It was a single thought that kept him alive, throbbing like an engine in his brain—to kill Gorkon.
The Martian, for an instant, was confounded. No man in a hundred thousand years had dared to revolt. Fear flickered in the yellow eyes. The black hand dropped the whip.
And the stone came with a dull, fatal impact against the huge, hairless black skull of Gorkon. He staggered silently back, and lay motionless under the rosy light, half upon the blue couch and half upon the rugs.
Ata Lu fell upon him, and lifted the stone again, and died before he had struck.
And so the invading Ku-Latha presently found them, the last man and the last warrior from Mars, lying dead beneath the rosy light. And the conquerors of cold were masters of the planet.
INVISIBLE FEET grated toward Eve Audrin upon the concrete floor of the laboratory. She shuddered at the touch of unseen hands upon her body. But they were torn away abruptly; the unseen form fell against her, collapsed upon her feet.
She heard a gasp. And then, suddenly, sitting before her on the gray concrete, was Terry Webb. His face was worn and haggard, his stiff red hair all tangled. He was still stripped to the waist, as he had been when the experiment began. But he looked at her, wan though he was, with his old familiar grin.
“Hello, Eve,” he said.
And he began to unfasten an odd little device that was fastened to his wrist.
She was kneeling beside him in an instant, trembling with incredulous joy.
“Terry?” she gasped. “It’s you? Really you?”
“In person!” he assured her, with his weary grin. “And permanently! There aren’t going to be any more uninvited tenants. I’m going to stay at home in my own body, after this. I promise you! Because look who I have to stay at home with!”
Still smiling wanly, he patted her hand on his shoulder.
“That horrid thing?” she breathed. “Gorkon?”
“Gorkon is dead,” he told her. “Back in his own body, and dead for keeps! Let’s look after your father. I think, though, that the green ray merely stunned him.”
And that, they found, was true. The nervous little scientist was soon himself again, uninjured save for a long blistered area on his upper arm.
DOCTOR AUDRIN was—and still is—vastly curious about the adventure of Terry Webb in the far future. He knows that Terry emerged from that weird tangle of brains with his own identity intact, and with a good share of the memories of the last man and of the vast knowledge of Gorkon, the Martian scientist. But Terry is oddly reticent about what he remembers. And Doctor Audrin has a strange fear of him, since he was Gorkon. He has never dared to ask Terry outright what he remembers. And Terry has never told him.
And the little man consented very hastily when Terry asked him for the hand of Eve.
1934
The Flame from Mars
METEOR CRATER is a thing strangely, darkly desolate. You may have seen it, a livid unhealed scar on the barren waste of Arizona desert, forty miles east of Flagstaff—it lies some six miles south of State Highway 66.
If you have seen it, you must have felt the bleak loneliness of the sere surrounding desert. You must have been repelled by the alien hostility of its wild, shattered ramparts. You must have wondered at the ancient cosmic cataclysm that tore this milewide pit, ringed it with a hundred-foot barrier of broken rock.
Meteor Crater has—for me, at least—the same awful wonder and the same wild, archaic mystery as the ring-shaped craters on the moon.
Many excellent descriptions of it have been published. But this, I believe, is the first news to appear of Don Belgrand’s mining operations there in the past six months, and of the “meteor’s” true nature—it turned out to be no meteor at all. Even now, Don won’t allow me to use his real name, which is one far better known to American readers than Belgrand.
Until six months ago, tourists who braved the deplorable road could pay twenty-five cents to a girl on the rim and look down into the six-hundred-foot pit, its brown floor leprously patched with the strange, snowy sand that came from the abandoned shafts.
I climbed down into it, six months ago, with Don Belgrand. We scrambled down over naked rocks tumbled and shattered and half fused by that stupendous cataclysm of forty thousand years ago. A stiff undertaking, it was, for a man of fifty; I felt the twinges of it for a week.
The bitter, archaic loneliness of it, the bare harshness of the cragged, vertical walls that had swallowed us, its brooding air of ancient, hostile mystery, made me very anxious to be out of it again—and very reluctant to see good Belgrand money spent within it.
But Don Belgrand had come off his yacht, the Western Belle, with an option on the mining lease. He came into possession of it, somehow, I think, in a poker game on board—Don is no gambler, but he did inherit his father’s instinct for poker. Anyhow, he hauled me out of our New York office the day after he docked, brought me by air to inspect the crater.
“I tell you, Red,” he insisted, “there’s something here!”
Tall and powerful, Don is, with the narrow hips and wide shoulders of a fighter. He has the gayest smile and the most winning manner I ever knew—they would make him welcome anywhere, without the aid of the Belgrand millions. But he has his father’s eyes, sober and steady and gray, and, behind the careless ease of his manner, all his father’s common sense.
“Yes, there’s something here,” I agreed. “Anybody could see that the thing was made by a falling body. Even the Indians had a legend, I believe, that an evil god fell out of the heavens and buried himself where we’re standing. Personally, I feel as if he’s still haunting the place. There’s something here, all right. And here is a mighty good place for it to stay.”
But Don’s scientific enthusiasm had been fired. I hope I haven’t given the impression that Don is just a useless playboy. Most young men would have been, with all old Bill Belgrand’s millions to spend. But Don has worked harder than most young men. He had made himself a real scientist—a metallurgical engineer. I know of a dozen firms that would be eager to employ him, almost at his own figure.
“The thing weighs millions of tons,” he told me. “Nickel-iron, with small quantities of gold and platinum and iridium. The fragments they’ve found prove that. There’s a fortune here!”
“Yes?” I said. “Sunk in these abandoned holes!”
I pointed at the long-deserted shafts, at the scattered, rusting pieces of hoisting machinery that were like red skeletons, at the leprous-white heaps of strange quartz sand.
“And they haven’t found anything,” I added, “but that shattered, floury quartz and water that rises faster than they can pump it out.”
