Collected short fiction, p.183
Collected Short Fiction, page 183
“Just what have you done?” demanded John Star in a swift, cold voice. “And where did this flyer come from?”
He kept his eyes, his menacing weapon, fixed on the other.
“That ship came from the star Yarkand, John. You’ve heard, I suppose, of the dying men we brought back from the expedition? Heard of the horrors they babble of? They aren’t as insane as men think they are, John. Most of the horrors they talk about are real. And those horrors are going to help me crush the Green Hall.”
“You brought back—allies?”
Eric Ulnar smiled mockingly at the horror in his tone. “Yes, I did, John. You see, the things on the planet we found—they are as intelligent as men, though not at all human—the things we found need iron. It is not found on their world. Their science needs it—for magnetic instruments and so forth. So I made an alliance with them, John.
“They were to send this ship, with some of their weapons; they have fighting machines that would surprise you, John; their scientific achievements are really remarkable. They were to send this ship to help crush the Green Hall and restore the empire. In return, we were to load the ship with iron.
“Iron is cheap. We may do it. But I rather think we’ll wipe them out, after we have AKKA and the Purple Hall is safely in power again. They’re too dangerous to have about. Too terrible! Those insane men——I was near going mad, myself! I’ll destroy them after I get the secret weapon.
“The girl must have told you about AKKA, John?”
“She did! And I thought—I trusted you, Eric!”
“So she suspects! I’ll have to strike fast, to get the chains on her before she has a chance to use her weapon. But I suppose Vors and Kimplen have cared for her by this time. They were to watch her.”
“You—traitor!” whispered John Star.
“Of course, John! We’re taking her away. I suppose we’ll have to kill her, after she’s told the secret. I don’t like to kill such a beauty, but with what she knows she’d be dangerous to keep around.
“I’m a traitor, John—by your definition. But you’re something worse. You are a fool, John. I brought you along because I had to have a fourth man to complete the guard. And because my uncle insisted that you be given an opportunity. He seems to have an exaggerated idea of your ability.
“You’ve been a fool, John. If you want to know how big a fool, just look up above your head.”
The handsome face smiled mockingly again.
John Star had kept his eyes riveted on the other, expecting some ruse to distract him. But Eric Ulnar’s insolent confidence made him glance swiftly upward, then; and he saw his danger.
Some fifty feet above him swung a sort of gondola, a car of dull red metal suspended on cables from a great, jointed boom that reached out of the flyer’s confusion of titanic ebon mechanisms.
Inside it, he glimpsed—something!
BEYOND THE red sides of the gondola John Star could not see it clearly. But the little he did see made the short hair rise on his neck, sent up his spine the cold, electric tingle of involuntary horror.
His breath was checked, his heart pounding, his whole body tense and quivering. The merest glimpse of the thing set off all the danger instincts of the primitive man in him; the very presence of it roused utter, elemental terror.
Yet in the shadows of the queer red car, he could see little enough. A bulging, glistening surface, translucently greenish, wet, slimy, palpitating with sluggish life—the body surface of something unspeakably gross, incredibly vast.
Fastened malevolently upon him, from between shielding plates—an eye! Long, ovoid, shining! A well of cold purple flame, veiled with ancient wisdom, baleful with implacable evil.
The bulging, torpidly heaving green surface. The malignant, enormous eye. He could see no more. But they set off in him every instinctive reaction of unreasoning primal fear.
Horror held him for a time, frozen in the numb paralysis that stops the breath and squeezes the heart; that pours choking dust down the throat and bathes the rigid limbs with icy sweat. He broke free of it at last, threw up his weapon.
But the half-seen, monstrous thing struck first. A puff of reddish vapor from the side of the swinging gondola. A quick, light blow against his shoulder. A red avalanche of unendurable pain that hurled him back to the sand. The black mercy of oblivion.
When consciousness returned, he contrived to sit up, weak, miserably sick, his body trembling and wet with perspiration, arm and shoulder still paralyzed, still aflame with scarlet agony. Dizzy, half blinded, he looked about.
Eric Ulnar had vanished, and at first he did not see the gondola. But the Cyclopean ship still overshadowed him with its strange black vanes, and at last he discovered the swinging car.
The titanic boom had reached out, over the fort. The car was just rising above the red walls when he found it. Swiftly the cables were drawn in, the mile-long lever folded, the gondola vanished into the great black globe.
It had picked up Eric Ulnar, he realized, then swung over the fort to take aboard Vors and Kimplen, with Aladoree. The girl, he realized, heart utterly sick, was already in the colossal machine.
Very soon, it rose. Cataracts of green flame thundered from beneath the ebon vanes; the vanes turned into new positions; the ground trembled under him as the black walls of the skids moved forward a little. Very deliberately, the machine left the surface, rose obliquely across the sky.
The noise of it beat about him, tremendous seas of sound. A furnace-hot wind whipped up curtains of yellow sand, dried the sweat on his body.
It shrank against the dark-blue sky, to be a grotesque flying insect; the green flame faded, the thunder died; it dwindled, grew dim with distance, at last was lost.
John Star lay on the sand, ill, agonized, helpless. It was late afternoon before he rose, still weak and faint. Shoulder and upper arm, he found, were strangely burned, as if some mordant fluid had been squirted on them. The skin was stiff, lifeless, covered with hard, greenish scales.
The scar was like that on Captain Otan’s body. And the eye in the gondola—it was like the malignant eye that had stared through his window! Yes, it was something from the ship that had killed the officer.
Driven by a faint spark of irrational hope, he staggered back up the hill to the old fort, searched the inhabited section. It was silent, deserted. Aladoree was really gone, with AKKA—the legion and the Green Hall had been betrayed.
He had failed, he realized with a sick heart. Ruin lay ahead, punishment and disgrace. And then he forgot himself in anger and pity at thought of Aladoree, so freshly lovely, in the hands of Eric Ulnar and the monstrous things from fearful Yarkand.
To be continued next month.
Follow this great epic. Three musketeers of space set about the great adventure on which the fate of the Universe rests. You will thrill with them as they meet and conquer strange scientific forces.
Xandulu
l At the conclusion of the first part of this story, we were left with great mystery enshrouding the fantastic land of Xandulu, from which came the terrible globes of light that had taken Su-Ildra back down into the abyss of their origin.
Miles Kendon keeps his promise to rescue Su-Ildra and returns to the Well in the lost city, this: time descending to pass through weird adventure among three strange types of creatures, alien to the surface world.
WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE:
l Brandy, a cripple, who had been cruising around the Mediterranean, spies a strange sight one night. An airplane appears in the distance fighting with some strange globes of light. The aviator wins the battle at the cost of his plane and is thrown into the sea. Brandy had recognized the flying tactics of his old buddy, Miles Kendon, and sends out a rescue boat to bring him in. His assumption had been correct, for it was in truth, Miles Kendon. With him is a strange girl. After they had rested from their ordeal, Kendon tells Brandy a strange story. He had landed on the site of a lost city in northern Africa a while before and did a little exploring. Oddest of all his discoveries in the lost city, which must have been populated thousands of years ago, is a huge well of dizzying depth. One day, a great bird flew from out of the mouth of the abyss with a girl on its back. The bird died after its tiring flight, and Miles rescued the girl. She is an odd creature, and Miles could not understand her language, winch was utterly alien to all that he had ever heard. However, she makes it imperative to him by her actions that they must leave the place at once. He does so. While nearing the Mediterranean, he had been attacked by the strange globes of light, and Brandy knew the rest of the story. The light-balls, Miles was convinced, were evil things sent from Xandulu, the great land below the Well from which Su-Ildra, the girl, had fled, to capture her and return her to the world of her origin.
The next night, with the yacht steaming full speed toward France, the mysterious globes appear in the night sky from out of the direction of Africa. Miles tries to fight them off, but fails, and Su-Ildra is carried away by the sinister balls of light. After securing new supplies, he returns to the Well in the lost city, planning to descend into Xandulu himself, to rescue Su-Ildra from some unknown danger which he was sure threatened her life. Brandy waits patiently for word from him, but none comes for a long time. Now go on with the story.
BOOK TWO
The Red God of Xandulu
l Aboard the Gay Moth III, I had spent a winter of idle invalidism afloat upon the crystal Mediterranean. It was late March, 1929, when we put into Algiers. I had long since abandoned all hope of seeing Miles Kendon again. It was indeed a joyous surprise to me when a boat brought my old friend out to where we fey in the outer harbor, even before we docked.
“This is luck, Brandy!” he shouted, as he came striding down to my chair on the foredeck. I started to pull myself erect to meet him, and he cried, with quick concern, “No, keep still, Brandy! With you in a jiffy!”
He was smiling, and it brought me a warm glow of pleasure to survey again his clean, athletic figure. Dressed in crisp white linens, he was thin of waist, powerful of shoulder, with his old alert air of vigorous enterprise. Lean and hard, his face was; the same restless, daredevil light twinkled in his greenish eyes, and his smite was twisted maliciously, as always, by the long, livid scar of the mad Malay’s kris, beneath the edge of his stiff, reddish hair.
He ran to me and took my shoulders to push me lightly back into the chair, then swallowed one of my hands crushingly in a steel-sinewed paw.
“Mighty glad, Miles!” I gasped. “I’ve been wondering, afraid. Did you find Su-Ildra?”
A shadow of bitterness swept the glad smile from his face; his mouth hardened grimly. The twinkle of gaiety vanished from his wide-set, greenish eyes; they were abruptly ice-cold, yet with a glitter of steel determination in them.
Yes, Brandy,” he told me, in a strange, quiet voice. “I found her—for a little time. I found her in Xandulu and had to leave her there.”
“Then you’ve been,” I asked, “into the place where—where those screaming globes came from?”
He nodded quietly, gravely.
“I’ve been there. I saw the man—or the being, for his race is whose face was in the globes. I saw him. I tried his power. Perhaps I won. But I am here, and Su-Ildra is still in Xandulu still in his insidious power!”
“You must tell me the story, Miles.”
That night it was warm. Mingled with the sea smells of the harbor was hint of the desert’s subtle fragrance. Lights shimmered on the oily waters. The modern French town was a low jeweled band, with the Kasbah, the native quarter, a dark and tawny heap on the heights beyond.
Miles and I sat in chairs on the open deck. Carlos, my Filipino boy, had left us wine and cigars, but we indulged sparingly, for Miles was engrossed in his story, which I lived as he narrated it.
Earnestly before he launched into his story, Miles leaned toward me and said: “I want you to remember what I tell you, Brandy. The world may some day need to know about Xandulu. There is a—menace! It seems shadowy, fantastic—now. The world would laugh at it. But if you had been to Xandulu.
His voice trailed off, and he stared broodingly across the dark ocean for a long minute before he gathered himself and began very abruptly.
CHAPTER I
The Lost Loud of Xandulu
l Disaster overtook him at the very beginning, he said. Landing at Algiers for fuel, he flew westward over Morocco, over Fez and down across the great plain of Marrakesh, over the barrier ramparts of the High Atlas that have so long guarded immemorial Xandulu. Beyond the snow-capped summits, over the lower, barren inner ranges that are parched by the Sahara’s killing breath, his motor failed.
The trouble, he thinks, was clogged fuel lines; he had been doubtful about the gasoline he got in Algiers. But there was never opportunity to confirm the notion. To land the plane was out of the question. At the last moment, failing to revive the engine, he “bailed out.”
Down his parachute drifted into a mad tangle of gullies, canyons, gorges, of sharp peaks and fantastic buttes and tortured pinnacles, into a lifeless, sun-baked wilderness of dark schists and red sandstones. He watched the plane roll down a mountain slope, a pinwheel of flaming wreckage.
The misfortune cost him not only means of transportation, but arms and equipment and food. In moments, fate had reduced him from superman to savage. He was on foot in unexplored mountains lifeless with the drouth of the Sahara, a region so cruelly desolate that it is shunned even by the Berber mountaineers.
At first he meant to return, though it would have taken months of toil to retrace his last hour’s flight. But, characteristically, another idea took possession of him before the flames had died from his plane. He still had the parachute. That would serve to lower him into Xandulu!
It was a desperate, a foolhardy thing to do, plunging into unknown peril unarmed and without any way of retreat—but not the first such thing that Miles Kendon had done. The mountain of the city had been already in sight before he fell. He could not turn back when it was so near.
Once he had thought it impossible to reach the ruins save by air—but that was before he was forced to do it. He packed the parachute and set out for the mountain. Three days later, exhausted and rather hungry, he clambered over the last precipice and entered the hidden city.
Time-broken, brooding, silent, it was like a cemetery of Titans. Across the whole flat mountain-top—it was about four miles by six—extended the forest of ruined green pylons, like colossal crumbling gravestones.
Staggering across the debris between the green shattered piles, some of them still hundreds of feet high, Miles reached the spot where he had landed before, found water and the supplies that he and Su-Ildra had abandoned at their old camping place.
After two days of recuperation from his terrific climb, he went to the Well, climbed the rude stair of loose stones he had built against the curving green wall. He walked across the top of it—it was like a wide, curving pavement of green porcelain—and threw himself on his face, looking again into the yawning abyss.
A sheer green-walled pit, a thousand feet across, falling into the heart of the earth, it was—green walls, falling, falling, to a tiny enigmatic disk of argent radiance. He lay there some minutes, thinking of Su-Ildra, the lovely being who had come up out of the pit to him, had been carried by the dread instrumentalities of Bak-Toreg.
“Coming, Sue!” he whispered.
He stood upon the broad top of the wall, made sure that the harness of the parachute was properly adjusted, and leapt as far as he could into the Well. A blast of air was flung at him from below. The circle of blue overhead leapt up, shrank. The green-walled pit swallowed him, like a great throat, into increasing darkness.
He pulled the rip cord. It was the longest parachute drop in history. He was falling, Miles knew, a mile every five or six minutes. He looked at his wrist watch —it was just past nine in the morning. By noting the time, he could roughly calculate the distance of his descent.
Steadily the disk of enigmatic silver grew larger beneath him, the light about him fainter. An hour had passed—he must have dropped ten miles—when the silver circle expanded suddenly; the walls of the pit, brighter again, drew up and away from him. He was in the world below the Well!
Swaying under the parachute, Miles was suspended beneath an inverted bowl of green, under a green dome of the same eternal material, no doubt, as the walls. In the distance, it was vague with the blue mist of sheer space, until it seemed a sky of silver-green, reaching down to the horizons of the hidden land.
Miles had expected no more than a series of natural caverns. The green dome was so astounding in its revelation of the inconceivable powers of the dread makers of Xandulu that its impact on his mind was almost stunning.
Far below Miles, but above the gray-blue mists that veiled the floor of the space beneath the dome, hung the luminaries of Xandulu—seven suns!
Seven bright orbs, six of them spaced about the central globe, they were. Blood red was the central sun. Of those that circled it, one was dazzling white, one cold-green, one deep, ethereal violet, one other blue and gold and ebon.
The suns were many miles beneath him, and the disk of the secret world was a dizzy space beyond, a featureless expanse of heavy gray vapor.
l Xandulu, he had known from the first, was no natural world. It was a creation! Some science, infinitely beyond the comprehension of man, some vast pre-human power had hollowed this colossal hemisphere within the planet, walled it with the perdurable green material, set spinning within it the seven orbs.
The descent took nearly fifteen hours. He fell close past the strange clustered suns—their globes, he estimated, must have been a mile in diameter; he wondered futilely how they were suspended and whence came their light. For a time, he was uncomfortably hot and climbed the cords of the parachute to spill the air from it and hasten his descent.
