The legion of space the.., p.19
The Legion of Space: The Complete Saga, page 19
“Ah, yes, you seem to be. Just now. Adam Ulnar had this solution. It neutralizes the gas. If one has not been exposed too mortal long! The green flakes went from your body days ago. But we were afraid——”
“Did any of the others——”
The wheezing voice fell. “Yes, lad. The lass——”
“Aladoree?” Pain throbbed in John Star’s hoarse cry.
“Ah, yes! All of the rest of us escaped; we all used this solution. But the lass caught the madness when you did, in the Belt of Peril.”
“How is she, Giles?”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “The green flakes are all gone from her skin. But still she is not herself. She lies, as you lay, in a dead trance we can’t wake her from. She was mortal weak and weary, you know, when it took her.
“Ah, lad, it’s bad. Mortal bad! If she doesn’t wake she cannot build the deadly weapon. And all our trouble has been in vain! I like the lass. Life knows I’d hate to see her die!”
“I—I——” whispered John Star, through his agony of apprehension and despair, “I—like her, too, Giles!”
And he sobbed.
JOHN STAR was able to return to the bridge by the time they entered the outskirts of the system, passing Neptune and Pluto. All the familiar planets, they saw in the tele-periscope, were red. Even Earth was a dull spark of crimson, ominous, baleful.
“Red!” breathed Jay Kalam, in a tone edged with horror. “The air of every planet is full of the red gas. Soon it will be too late. Too late to save humanity from madness and death.”
“And still,” John Star whispered bitterly, “Aladoree is no better. Still sleeping in that dead trance.”
“We’ll land on Earth, anyhow. Find a piece of iron. And wait. Perhaps she will recover.”
“Perhaps! Though her pulse, Giles says——” He broke off, muttered fiercely: “But she can’t die, Jay! She can’t!”
They were slipping past the Moon, five days later, toward Earth.
Aladoree still lay unconscious, heart and breath frighteningly slow. Her frail body, weakened by utter exhaustion, by the strain and anxiety of her long captivity, by the months of exposure to the slow poison of the red gas, was fighting desperately for life itself. The others watched her, bathed her lax body in the neutralizing solution, forced a little food down her throat. They could do no more.
The Moon was a red world of menace. John Star scanned it through a tele-periscope. Its grimly rugged mountains were shrouded in deadly crimson gas; the human cities were lifeless ruins. On a bare, cruel plateau of lava, he saw the Medusae’s fortress.
An unearthly citadel! A replica of the weird metropolis on their own planet of horror. Titanic walls and Cyclopean towers of metal, portentously black. Bristling with the fantastic, colossal confusion of black mechanisms—ships and weapons!
“The hordes of them are waiting there,” whispered Jay Kalam. “Making the red gas. Bombarding the planets with shells of it. And their fleet—on guard. If they discover us——”
His voice fell. He had seen the same thing that had shocked John Star with horror. A flaring burst of eerie green flame, above a black tower. An ominous black flier rising, coming toward the Earth!
“Perhaps they have, already! But we have time to land ahead of them, look for a piece of iron.”
“But Aladoree is still unconscious,” John Star muttered. “Unless she wakes, to build AKKA, we have no weapon. Unless she wakes——”
On they plunged, toward the weirdly red Earth, fearfully watching the black flier crossing after them from the crimson Moon.
XXIX.
INTO THE atmosphere of Earth, strangely and ominously crimsoned, the Purple Dream dropped, over western North America, to land at last by the Green Hall, on the brown mesa beneath the mile-high, rugged Sandias.
John Star had volunteered to leave the cruiser, to look for iron. There had been none aboard, when the ship came back into their possession. Space craft are nonmagnetic, since magnetic fields interfere with the operation of the geodynes; and the Medusae, refitting the vessel, had removed the few bits of iron about the instruments, precious to them.
“Carry this,” Jay Kalam told him, and gave him his old thorn dagger. “And be cautious, if you meet men. They will be mad, dangerous. And hurry. We must get the iron and slip away, somewhere, before the black ship comes. Hide, and wait for Aladoree to recover.”
Dropping outside the air lock, John Star paused to gaze in horror at what remained of the system’s once proud and splendid capital.
The sky was clouded with a haze of fatal scarlet, through which the midafternoon sun burned with a bloody and sinister light. Bare mesa and cragged mountains were strange and grim and incredibly desolate under the ominous illumination.
The Green Hall had been destroyed by a great shell from the Moon.
In the edge of the grounds, that once had been a luxuriantly verdant garden, a ragged crater yawned, rimmed with torn, raw masses of rock. Beyond the pit the great building tumbled down in colossal ruin, a mountain of shattered emerald glass, from which protruded skeletal arms of twisted metal.
A moment he waited, horror-struck. Then, remembering the urgent need of haste, he plunged forward through masses of neglected weeds, among the bare skeletons of trees killed by the explosion, across lawns piled with rocks flung from the crater and shattered fragments of green glass.
Curious, he soon had cause to reflect, how difficult it is to find even a nail when it must be had. He found assorted metal objects, a bronze lamp stand, a little figurine of cast lead, the charred, twisted aluminum frame of a wrecked air sled. Even an iron girder flung from the building, many times too heavy to carry.
He hurried on, desperately searching the devastated grounds for any fragment of iron small enough to move, with an occasional, anxious glance at the lurid scarlet-hued sky. If the Medusae had seen them, if the black ship was coming to attack them.
He stumbled around a great heap of broken green glass and came face to face with green horror.
It had been a man; a gigantic man; it must have survived through the days of terror by sheer brute strength. Nearly seven feet tall, its body was half naked, half clad in the ragged, filthy fragments of a legion uniform—the uniform of the Green Hall guards. Its skin was a mass of bleeding sores, scabbed and crusted horribly with hard green flakes. Red-rimmed eyes, green-clouded, hideous, stared from the green horror of its face, half sightless. Its lips had been eaten away. With naked fangs it was gnawing avidly at a fresh red bone that John Star knew, shudderingly, from its shape, to be a human humerus.
Sight of this man-beast, crouching, gnawing, snarling, sickened him with infinite pitying horror. It meant more than one man’s fate. It epitomized the doom of all humanity, under the insidious attack of the Medusae—a doom that would fearfully soon be complete.
Involuntarily he had cried out at sight of it. Then, realizing the danger of it, he tried to slip away. But it had already become aware of him. It made a curious, half-vocal, questioning sound—its vocal organs were evidently too far eaten away to admit of articulation. The red-rimmed, clouded eyes peered swiftly about, saw him. It came toward him with a lumbering, shambling gait.
“Stand back!” he shouted sternly, tension of panic in his voice.
The effect of his sharp command was curious. The shambling figure straightened suddenly to military erectness, came to attention, stiffly raised an unspeakable, green-crusted paw in salute. But it was no more than a mechanical reaction left over from its old life. It slumped back, into the same stooping posture, lumbered on toward him.
“Attention!” he shouted again. “Halt!”
A moment it paused, then came on faster. Voiceless, protesting sounds came from its lipless mouth. He stood, faint with horror, trying to understand its cries, until it uttered an abrupt, eager, animal squeal, and broke into a run.
He knew, then, that it was stalking him for food.
Swiftly he looked behind him, for a path of escape, realized with a wave of sick apprehension that it had trapped him. Mountains of broken green glass hemmed him in. He must face it.
True, he had the black thorn. But he was not so strong, he knew, as he had been before his long sickness. And this green-scaled thing was well over twice his weight. The green death, apparently, had not greatly wasted away its strength.
He hoped, as they came to grips, that the tricks of combat he had learned in the legion academy would make up his disadvantages. But, as one green paw seized his dagger wrist in a clever, cruel hold, he realized that this thing had been another legionary, that its crazed brain had not lost its animal cunning in battle.
The dagger dropped from his paralyzed hand. Rough green arms locked him in a pitiless embrace. One of his own old tricks. A knee in his back, the other locked over his thighs; his shoulders twisted, twisted, until his back should break.
He struggled vainly in the merciless hold, blind with pain and panic. The hard green scales were harsh against his body, foul odor of decomposition sickened him. For a moment, as his efforts failed, he was faint, hopeless.
Naked fangs slashed at his shoulder; the thing made an eager whine.
Something of his old cool composure came back, then; through the mist of agony he imagined himself back at the academy, listening to an old instructor’s directions: “Twist your body, so, drive your elbow into the plexus, so, slip your arm here, so, then lock your leg and turn.”
He did it, as the dry old voice whispered in his memory, hardly aware where he was, knowing only that the torturing pain would cease when he had done it, and he would be free to search for a nail.
Snap!
He rose slowly, beside the quivering, hideous body, awareness returning as agony ebbed away.
AMONG THE shattered green ruins, John Star staggered on again, scanning the battered earth. He must hurry! If the black flier came——It was a child’s toy that caught his eye. A rusty, broken little engine, that could no longer move its tiny burden—but might yet save the system.
He tore the shaft out of it, assured himself that it was iron, hastened back toward the cruiser.
Clambering over a heap of broken green glass, he looked up, and saw the machine from the fortress on the Moon. It was slanting down, across the crimson-dyed sky, already very near. A gigantic thing, a sphere, with vast vanes and enigmatic mechanisms projecting. It was monstrous, like some fantastic beast parodied in black metal.
He broke into a dogged run, staggered into view of the Purple Dream. Tiny, torpedo-shape of silver, a pygmy in the shadow of the huge mechanism plunging down above the Sandias. It was still beyond the yawning crater, a quarter mile from him.
Hopelessly, he staggered on. The cruiser was unarmed; the terrific weapons on the Medusae’s flier could annihilate it in an instant.
Wondering dimly, as he ran, he saw a little group appear on the lowered valve of the air lock, hurry down the accommodation ladder. Jay Kalam and Hal Samdu and Giles Habibula, he recognized, carrying the inert figure of Aladoree.
The valve closed above them; Adam Ulnar had not appeared.
They ran away from the cruiser; evidently it was about to take off, with Adam Ulnar at the controls. But why? Still running grimly on, John Star remembered his old doubt. Had his kinsman turned again? Had he put the others off, to go back to the Medusae? John Star could not believe that. Adam Ulnar had seemed sincere. But——
Then the Purple Dream moved.
It plunged forward in the fastest take-off he had ever witnessed. It leaped away so swiftly that his eyes lost it. They caught it again, flashing toward the black flier, its hull already incandescent.
Even as he realized that it was driven, not by the comparatively feeble rockets, but by the terrific power of the geodynes, it struck the central sphere of the black flier, with a startling, blinding burst of white flame.
The machine from the Moon, twisted, flaming, fell with a curious deliberation out of the red sky, struck the barren slopes of the Sandias, rolled down them, looking oddly like a black monster struggling in slow agony of death.
John Star’s old, haunting doubt was gone.
“You are the last Ulnar,” Jay Kalam greeted him, when he came up to the lonely little group on the edge of the mesa. “Adam Ulnar said he was trying to pay a debt to the system. And he told me to tell you, John, that he hoped you would be happy in the Purple Hall.”
John Star dropped on his knees by the limp, white-faced girl on the ground, whispered anxiously: “Aladoree! How is she?”
“Ah, me, lad,” dolefully wheezed Giles Habibula, fixing a pillow under her head, “she seems no better. No better! The same trance she’s been in for mortal weeks. She may never wake! Ah, the poor lass——”
He flung a tear out of his fishy eye. They tried to make her comfortable, under a little shelter made from the dead branches of a shattered tree. They found rude clubs, to defend her, if the green beasts should find them. Hal Samdu and Giles Habibula went to search for food and water, returned, at sunset, empty-handed.
“Mortal me!” wailed Giles Habibula. “Here we are lost in a desert, without food or drink for ourselves or the lass! Ah, me! And fearful mad green creatures are roving all about us, hunting for mortal human food!”
The Moon came up in the scarlet dusk, a huge, fearful, blood-red globe, above the rugged ramparts of the dark Sandias. And they saw, against its sinister face, a little cluster of tiny black specks, creeping about, growing, expanding. A little swarm of black insects that became steadily and ominously larger.
“A fleet coming down from the Moon,” whispered Jay Kalam. “Since the one ship did not return——A whole fleet of the gigantic black machines, coming to make sure we are destroyed. They’ll be here in an hour.”
XXX.
“SHE MUST wake,” whispered John Star. “Or she never will!”
“I’m afraid so,” agreed Jay Kalam. “Probably the fleet will destroy the very mesa, with those suns of flame. To be sure we trouble them no more. But there’s no way——”
“She must wake!” John Star muttered again.
With a sort of fierce tenderness, he lifted her from where she lay. Her body was limp, relaxed. Her eyes were closed, her pale, full lips parted a little, her fine skin very white. Her pulse was beating almost imperceptibly; she was breathing very slowly. Deep, deep, she was still sunk in the coma in which she had lain so long.
So quiet, so helpless, so beautiful! He held her fiercely in his arms and stared in mute, savage defiance at the menacing Moon, red and pocked with black. She must not die! She was his! Forever—his! So warm, so frail, so lovely! He would not let her die.
No! No, she must wake, and use her knowledge to build the weapon and destroy these menacing horrors. He must wake her, so she could be his forever.
Unconscious, he had been whispering it to her. And he spoke louder now, in a desperate appeal. He called to her in a mad attempt to break through her coma, to make her realize the desperate need that she should wake.
“Aladoree! Aladoree! You must wake up. You must. You must! The Medusae are coming, Aladoree, to kill us with the opal suns. You must wake up, Aladoree, and build your weapon. You must wake up, Aladoree, to save humanity! You mustn’t die, Aladoree! You mustn’t! Because I love you!”
He always believed that his appeal had reached through to her sleeping mind. Perhaps that was it. Perhaps, as a medical scientist has suggested, it was the irritating stimulation of the red gas in the atmosphere that roused her, after the change from the pure air on board the Purple Dream. It does not greatly matter.
She sneezed a little, and whispered sleepily: “Yes, John, I love you, too.”
He almost dropped her in his eager start at her response, and she came wide awake, staring about in amazed alarm at her strange surroundings.
“Where are we, John?” she gasped. “Not—not back on that planet——”
She was gazing in horror at the scarlet Moon in the red-bathed sky.
“No, we’re on the Earth. Can you finish the weapon, quickly, before the Medusae come? We brought the parts you made by the river.”
She stood up, looked around her, clinging uncertainly to John Star’s arm, still dazed with astonishment.
“Can this be Earth, John, with the red sky? And that the Moon?”
“It is. And the Medusae are coming down.”
“Ah, the lass is awake!” wheezed Giles Habibula joyfully.
And Jay Kalam hurried forward with the odd little device that Aladoree had built back on the Medusae’s planet, that had been useless for want of a little iron.
“Can you finish it?” he asked, still calmly grave. “Quickly? Before they come?”
“Yes, Jay,” she said, equally calm, seeming to recover from her first bewilderment. “If we can find a bit of iron——”
John Star produced the broken shaft of the toy engine. She took it, examined it swiftly.
“Yes. This will do.”
In the fatal light of the blood-red rising Moon the four stood silent about Aladoree and her weapon, tense with hope and dread.
They were alone on the mesa, a barren waste bathed in terrible light. Behind them was the murdered Green Hall, a tumbled black mass looming monstrously against the red-washed sky. Before them the mesa sloped up to the rugged Sandias, beneath the baleful disk of the scarlet Moon, dark with the growing swarm of the Medusae’s fleet.
Dread silence hung over them, the awful silence of a world treacherously slain. Only once was it broken—by a fearful, hideously half-vocal sound of agony and terror from the ruin.
“What was that?” the girl whispered, shuddering.
It was one mad thing, stalked by another human beast, John Star knew. But he did not tell them.
Aladoree was busy with the weapon—a tiny thing. It looked very simple, very crude, very frail. The parts of it were fastened to a narrow piece of wood, which was mounted on a rough tripod, so that it could be turned, aimed.
John Star examined it, amazed again at its simplicity, incredulous that such a thing could ever overcome the terrible, ancient science of the Medusae.
