Collected short fiction, p.174
Collected Short Fiction, page 174
A doubled knee drove into Foster’s groin. As he writhed in agony, hard fingers twitched under his. A blinding finger of yellow light stabbed from the little tube. It wavered across the wall of the garage. Slowly it came down.
The poison ray! If it touched him, to make a deadly venom of his own blood——
Intolerable agony burst suddenly from the tortured wrist of his resisting arm. He trembled with the pain of effort. Hot sweat burst out on his face.
The orange ray touched the floor, trembled toward his shoulder. The talons that moved it were hard as steel.
Foster was giddy with the unbearable pain from his twisted arm. The world spun; a wave of blackness rose. Then, in the moment of defeat, a queer something happened to him, a blinding revelation. In a moment of crystal vision, he saw himself not as one man fighting for his own life, but the champion of humanity, battling for ultimate survival.
A NEW strength came oddly with the vision; deathless purpose flowed into him like a strange tide.
He straightened his tortured arm. Red agony flamed in it. But the orange needle flickered away. The hard body against him knotted with exertion; the ray flashed back. Faint and dizzy, Foster drew on his new strength to the utmost.
He heard the dull snap of a breaking bone. The steel talons in his grasp turned to limp flesh. The orange blade described a sudden arc, that touched the head of the other man. Then the little tube crashed against the wall, the ray went out.
The other was already dead from his own weapon when Foster staggered to his feet.
Barron Kane lay still on the snow outside, a small gray huddle in the pale dawn light. Foster ran to him, heard his faint whisper:
“The poison ray—my wrist—a tourniquet at the elbow—bleed it.”
Foster pushed up the sleeve on the thin brown arm. He whipped his handkerchief around the right elbow, twisted it tight with a spanner he snatched from the wall. On the lean, stringy wrist he saw a swelling, lividly purple, swiftly increasing in size. He dug a keen penknife out of his vest pocket, slashed deep into it, put his own lips to the wound to draw out the poison.
“That will do,” whispered Barron Kane at last, his voice a little stronger. “Guess I’m done for, anyhow. Just hope I live to see you win, Foster. No matter. I’ve done my part. It’s up to you, now, to save the seed of mankind.”
“I—I’ll do my best,” Foster promised him, choking. He was still strong with the strange self-forgetful resolution that had come to him in the fight.
“Drive on,” whispered Barron Kane, “to the mill!”
Foster lifted him into the roadster. When he switched on the lights he paused a moment to look down at the dead man on the floor. His face was yellow, Mongoloid, with a hawklike thinness. It was set, now, in the fearful, derisive grin of death.
“Open his clothing, Foster,” commanded Barron Kane. “Look on his body, under the left arm.”
Foster obeyed. Under the man’s arm, on the yellow skin stretched like parchment over the ribs, was a scarlet mark, like a large O.
“He’s branded!” he cried. “With a red circle!”
“That is the emblem of the secret cult,” whispered Barron Kane. “He came from L’ao Ku.”
Foster leaped in beside Barron Kane. The stiff motor came to bellowing life. The roadster lunged forward, swerved past the dead man, skidded out upon the icy drive.
The leaden, frigid day had come when they drove into the grimy mill town. Gaunt, ugly, the little buildings of the workers huddled over hillsides gray with snow and soot. The mill stood in the level valley; gigantic blast furnaces marched, like a grim army of black steel monsters, against the gloomy clouds.
Foster drove straight through the gates to the emergency hospital. He carried Barron Kane to a cot inside.
“The doctors will soon be here,” he promised.
“Don’t worry about me,” the little man whispered. “You have work to do. I’m going to try to live to see you finish it!”
III.
THREE months later, a new fence surrounded the steel mill. It was twenty feet high, and the first ten were bullet-proof concrete and steel. The top of it was wired to powerful generators. At hundred-foot intervals it was studded with rotating turrets of steel and bullet-proof glass, in which sentries watched always, behind frowning machine guns.
Inside the fence, on a huge pier of reenforced concrete, the space machine was building.
Its hull was already completed—a feat unprecedented in engineering. A colossal sphere, nearly five hundred feet in diameter, it dwarfed to insignificance the flanking armies of blast furnaces. The top of its gray bulk was visible for many miles across the low Pennsylvania hills, that now, in March, were green with the last spring of Earth.
Much, however, remained to be done in perfecting the interior arrangements, by which human life was to be sustained indefinitely in the sunless void. Greatest lack of all, the motor-tube, which was to utilize Foster Ross’ omicron-effect to propel the machine, was still um perfected.
“The rest will be finished in a month,” Foster promised Barron Kane, one windy spring day. “But a lot of good that will be if the motor-tube won’t work. A million tons of steel and glass! We have no way to move it an inch, unless——”
They were in a room in the emergency hospital, from the windows of which the sick man could watch the tremendous gray-painted sphere of steel, looming against pale-green hills and wind-torn sky.
Barron Kane was still on his back. The venom formed by the orange ray had affected spinal nerve centers; he was unable to walk, even his hands were partially paralyzed. But his brain remained keen as ever; despite his helplessness and pain, he had helped the solution of many a problem in the building of the space machine.
“Unless?” he whispered. “You’re trying something else?”
“We began this morning to work out a new design. We started from a new beginning, suggested by the equations of the omicron-effect. We don’t know that it will be any better. Even if it works, the installation will take six weeks.”
“Six weeks?” breathed Barron Kane, in weary alarm. “We may not have that long before the Earth breaks up!”
His gray eyes stared at Foster from the pillow, calm, yet dark with dread.
“The moon of Neptune, you know,” he whispered, “left its orbit last week. It turned greenish and followed Pluto off into space. And there’s another thing——”
His shrunken, half-useless hands fumbled for the newspaper on the blanket beside him.
“What is it?” asked Foster.
“In the morning paper. Still no one sees that’s coming. They have the story hidden on an inside page—nobody saw what it meant. But it’s about the most important thing they ever printed. Here it is!”
Foster read the item:
QUAKES SHOW RHYTHM
A new series of tremors is shaking the earth, announced Doctor Madison Kline, noted English seismologist, speaking to-day before an international convention of geologists.
These recently observed earth tremors occur at regular intervals of about thirty-one minutes, said Doctor Kline. He believes they reflect some rhythmic disturbance deep within the planet.
Doctor Kline and his associates, he stated, have had the phenomenon under observation for several weeks, during which time it has steadily and markedly increased.
No conclusively definite explanation can yet be offered, Doctor Kline said, though he believes that the period of the vibration corresponds to the natural fundamental frequency of the planet.
FOSTER’S hands closed until the knuckles went white. “That means,” he muttered huskily, “that we’re near—the finish.”
“You see,” whispered Barron Kane, “you must rush the installation of the new motor-tube.”
“We will!” Foster promised. “Though the thing may not work, when it’s done. We’re trying, you see, to compress a generation of scientific progress into four months.”
“There are other things,” Barron Kane reminded him. “We must be ready to cut all connection with civilization.”
“Our supplies are mostly on board, already,” Foster informed him. “And our people are moving into the machine as fast as the quarters are ready. Six hundred picked men, representing every race and every craft and every creed, with their wives and children. Two thousand, all told—and the very cream of humanity.”
“The laboratories?” queried Barron Kane.
“Oh, they’ll be finished in time,” Foster assured him. “In a month, Barron, we’ll have our own artificial air and our own synthetic food, made on board from the refined elements of the waste.
“Once out in space,” he went on, a ring of enthusiasm in his voice, “we’ll be independent. Our generators will tap the limitless energy of the cosmic ray. They will supply warmth and light and power, the means for the manufacture of oxygen and food, and current for the motor-tube.
“The machine can sail on forever, Barron. It’s a little world, itself, independent of the Sun——”
Foster stopped himself, bit his lips. “Here I am,” he muttered sheepishly, “ranting about the thing! When I couldn’t move it an inch, to save my soul! So long, Barron. I must get back to the shops.”
“Wait!” whispered the sick man. “There’s another thing. Where is your fiancée?”
“Why,” Foster told him, “June has gone back to Florida for a short visit with some friends. I want her to forget, as much as she can, what’s coming. It’s so terrible, for a girl like her——”
“Have her come back,” advised Barron Kane. “Have her move on board, with us.”
“There’s danger?” demanded Foster. “Already?”
“The first quiver of the Earth’s crust will be enough to shatter the thing we call civilization,” whispered the little man. “She must be here before that happens. And there’s another danger.”
“What’s that?”
“L’ao Ku hasn’t shown his power, Foster. But don’t forget that he has a power. He’s just waiting, getting ready. Don’t be deceived; don’t let down your guard.”
“Oh!” breathed Foster, relieved. “I thought you meant some danger to June.”
“I do,” whispered Barron Kane.
Foster leaned over him, tense with alarm.
“In that temple in the Gobi is an altar erected to the Great Egg. Above it is an image, cut from black stone. The image is a globe, with the outlines of the continents engraved on it, so you can see that it represents the Earth. It is split, and a thing is emerging. A thing obscenely monstrous!
“Regular ceremonies are held in the temple, Foster. On that altar, under the image of that unthinkable obscenity breaking from the earth, L’ao Ku offers sacrifices. The victims are always women. When possible, they are heretics or members of their families.
“It is possible, Foster, that June Trevor might—suffer, just because you plan to save her.”
Foster’s face was gray, drawn. Hoarsely, he rasped: “I’ll send for her to come on board. Right away!”
THE SCIENTIFIC world was stunned from the first. The aberration of Pluto shattered the whole painfully built structure of western science. The pulselike tremors of the earth, which soon became violent enough to be felt as one walked in the street, received no adequate explanation.
Scientists, for a time, took refuge in pitiful charges of inaccurate observation. But they could not long deny that the solar system was breaking up. The planet Neptune shifted unaccountably from its calculated position. One by one, the greater moons of Saturn and Uranus assumed a greenish color and departed from their orbits. The change, spreading inward through the solar system, overtook the four large moons of Jupiter.
The very universe of science collapsed.
The common man, however, at first was only slightly concerned. Business went on as usual; the public attention centered in turn upon unemployment, the stabilized dollar, the sensational murder of a Hollywood actress. There was no real panic, even when the “Earth-beat,” as the newspapers termed the oddly rhythmic tremors of the planet, became a chief topic of conversation.
Real panic began only with loss of life. Late in March a series of terrific earthquakes and accompanying tidal waves overwhelmed, one by one, Tokyo, Bombay, Rio de Janeiro, and Los Angeles. The cataclysms were progressively more violent. Hardly a paper, so long as papers were printed, lacked its story of a new holocaust.
Even then, the old order did not immediately fall. “Business as usual” was a catchword, though prices rocketed, governments and corporations crashed, and crime ran wild.
New leaders, radical movements, fantastic fads, won tremendous support. New religions, in particular, were widely and feverishly embraced. Ten thousand new prophets rose and were acclaimed; but the greatest following was won by the disciples of that strange oriental sect, the Cult of the Great Egg.
They, alone, professed to understand the change. They, alone, could offer bewildered humanity a rational, if fantastic, key to the astounding riddle of the crumbling solar system. Even though he promised only grim death—death as a sacred duty—L’ao Ku became the master of fanatic millions.
The mad tide of his increasing power, Barron Kane and Foster Ross recognized from the beginning, was sure to be turned against them. They had made a fortress of the steel mill. They hastened the construction of the space machine to the utmost. They could do no more.
IV.
THE CRISIS came on the night of April 23rd. The Moon was full. The skies, often of late strangely clouded, were clear over most of North America. Horror-stricken millions, that night, watched the change overtake the Moon. Few, having seen it, were ever completely sane again.
It was the madness born of that incredible vision of mind-breaking horror, guided by the fanatic genius of L’ao Ku, that led to the mass attacks on the space machine.
The Planet—so June Trevor had named the space machine, since it was to be the sole future home of humanity—lay still upon the concrete pier, inside the fence. And still it could not be moved; the motor-tube was yet incomplete.
Atop the gray, colossal sphere of steel was a little domed space roofed with crystal panels. It was reached by a short stair from a door below. Gleaming mechanisms crowded it, the intricate instruments designed for the control and navigation of the space machine.
On that fatal night, Foster Ross and June Trevor came into the little control room, Foster carrying Barron Kane in his arms. They made the wrecked body of the little scientist as comfortable as possible in an invalid chair amid the shining instruments.
“Last night,” Foster said, “observers saw cracks spreading across the Moon. Its crust is splitting.
Beneath is something—— It is greenish, incandescent. To-night, we shall see the end of the Moon!
“Watching the Moon, we can see the thing that, in a day or so, is going to happen to the Earth!”
June Trevor moved, quickly, anxiously, to his side. June was a tall girl, dark-eyed, with a grave, classic beauty. She smiled at Foster—it was a wan, anxious little smile. Apprehensive, she slipped her hand into his.
“Foster,” she whispered, “will it be very—terrible?”
“The terror of it,” he told her, “will not be in what we see. It will be in what it means. In the fate of the Moon, we see the fate of the Earth, of human civilization. But try, dear, not to be afraid.”
“I’m not—not exactly afraid,” she whispered, shivering a little. “But it’s dreadful to think of so many—perishing——”
Foster’s hand tightened on her own. “June,” he said huskily, “you must try not to think of that. We’ve each other, remember. Without you, I—I’d go mad!”
“And there’s a bigger thing,” she breathed. “We’ve a duty. To save the race!”
Foster turned out the lights, then, in the tiny room. They looked upward through the panels of heavy fused quartz. Flooded with moonlight, the sky was silver-gray; in the south were white, luminous feathers of cloud. The Moon was high in the east, a supernal disk of mottled gold.
They stared at it. June Trevor quivered; she pressed close against Foster’s lean body.
“There are cracks!” she murmured, breathless. “I see them! Like a net of wire.”
“They’re spreading,” muttered Foster. “And—I see a green something, breaking through.”
From his pillow came the queer, voiceless whisper of the paralyzed scientist: “The being is emerging.”
Breathless, speechless with fearful awe, the three watched the Moon—as maddened millions were watching it over all the continent.
They saw the familiar seas and ring craters of the lunar topography dissolve in a network of cracks, black and shining green. They saw the face of the Moon, for the first time in human memory, misty with clouds of its own.
They saw a thing come out of the riven planet—an unthinkable head appeared——
It broke through, in the region of the great crater Tycho. It was monstrously weird. Colossal, triangular, a beak came first, green and shining. Behind it were two ovoid, enormous patches, like eyes, glowing with lambent purple. Between and above them was an enigmatic organ, arched, crested; it was an unearthly spray of crimson flame.
Incredible wings—reaching out—stretching——
They pushed through the shattered, crumbling shell, which already had lost all likeness to the Moon of old. Wings, alone, could human beings term them. Yet, Foster thought, they were more than anything else like the eldritch, gorgeous streamers of the Sun’s corona, which is seen only at the moment of total eclipse, spreading from the black disk like two wings of supernal light. They were sheets of green flame. They shimmered with slow waves of light, that faded indistinctly at the edges, like the uncanny fans of the aurora. They were finely veined with bright silver.
A body, both horrible and beautiful——
It came into view, when the slowly expanding, supernal wings pushed back the cosmic debris that had been the Moon’s crust. It uncoiled into a sinuous loveliness, long and slender, delicately tapering. It was green as emerald, bright as flame, and strangely marked with silver and black.
