Collected short fiction, p.197
Collected Short Fiction, page 197
His greenish, narrow eyes jerked at the glassed windows.
JASON glanced out upon a gray, windy sky; he saw, far under them, a grim, leaden sea, glittering with innumerable vanishing flecks of spray. They must be, he supposed, somewhere over the Atlantic—and driving into a storm.
He moved his throbbing wrists, and leaned over to look downward through the glass, following the glance of the greenish eyes. A wild sea stretched, illimitable, under the lowering, gloomy sky; an endless sheet of tarnished lead, picked ominously with the dull flash of spray. Over it, far away, he saw a remarkable thing, a thing that amazed him—a gray, glistening dome, resting on the leaden sea. Enormous, he knew it must be; a full half-mile across, he estimated, and many hundred feet high. So huge it was, that the white fury of the sea made only a thin gleaming line along one edge of it.
It was gray, like glass. Its flattened top bore tiny buildings. A triangle of smooth water lay to leeward of it, black, unscarred by the vanishing stabs of foam.
“Look yer fill,” advised the hard voice of Jabez Head, maliciously. “Reckon it’s about the last thing ye’ll see, brother.” Jason looked, and gave himself to mad conjecture. The thing was stupendous, incredible. It must have cost millions, many millions. It was the construction, he knew, that had been built on the Arabian coast; it was here that the secretly purchased equipment and supplies had been taken—and also, he guessed, Jerry Travers and Tonia Hope!
But what was it? What strange purpose lay behind it? Could it be the secret rendezvous of the fabulous Oriental called Iskandar, Wizard of Life? If so, of what sinister plan was it part? And—a more personal concern—why might Tonia have been brought here, and what had been her fate?
The throbbing of numb limbs, the discomfort of his dry throat, the pulsation of the blood-caked bruise on his temple, brought him from fruitless speculation back to more immediate concerns. He lifted his swollen wrists, restlessly. His body shrieked for relief; yet it would gain him nothing, he knew, to demand it. He asked another question:
“What do you want with me?”
He thought he knew; he thought it was because the unknown power against him wanted to stop his investigation, his search for Tonia Hope. But he wanted to hear the answer.
“Reckon ye’ll find that out soon enough,” Jabez Head chuckled evilly. “We’re bringing ye to call on Mr. Iskandar. The Wizard of Life, he likes to be called. Reckon he’ll tell ye what he wants.”
That fitted in, definitely; another astounding piece of the puzzle. And it was becoming a dreadful and sinister picture. Jason shuddered, contemplating it. A strange Oriental, calling himself the new Alexander, collecting about him the power of modern science, lifting the head of unthinkable menace to the safety of the world.
But yet the puzzle was not complete. What weird power could lie beyond those fantastic tales that had earned the man the title, Wizard of Life? Why had Jerry Travers, the brilliant young biologist, been abducted? What insidious design might have been laid against lovely, innocent Tonia Hope? What unaccountable purpose lay beyond the whole astounding project?
Those riddles were swept from Jason’s mind, as the roar of the motor died, as the seaplane sloped down, over the black triangle of smooth water, toward the colossal dome of the floating island.
2. The Thing that Weft
A LONG, unbroken deck rushed up to meet them, gray, glistening. Jason felt the shock as the landing-gear touched—the plane, he realized, was amphibian. The motor idled, and stopped. He could hear the scream of the wind, the thunder of seas that smashed to white foam on the walls of this astounding, man-made isle. There was no rolling, no vibration. Even in the storm, the floating structure was steady as a rock.
Jabez Head stirred himself. Hap Nino, the gorilla, rose, yawned, stretched his long-armed body; he patted an ominous bulge at his breast. Forward, the Oriental pilot was silently busy with his instruments.
“Well, mugs, we’re here,” snapped Jabez Head’s hard voice. “Everybody out!” He turned to Jason. “Hold still, brother, if ye like yer health. And obey orders!”
He loosened the cords to let Jason rub his numbed wrists; he sloshed water from a canteen into his face, and let him hold it to grip a few swallows.
Hap Nino was opening the cabin door. They dragged Jason out, into the bitter, ice-laden wind that lashed across the open gray platform. He stumbled on numb feet and fell to hands and knees—the deck was glass, he found, dimly transparent; he could see through it into vague, gloomy spaces.
“Keep on yer pegs, brother,” Jabez Head advised him, grimly.
Hap Nino jerked him roughly back to his feet. He managed to stand; reeling, he peered about him. The flattened top of the immense glass dome was five hundred yards across. Nearly half of it had been left clear for the landing-deck.
The rest was railed, scattered with low white buildings—a line of hangars, by the open deck; a radio station, with steel masts; long buildings that must have been barracks; a huge, low structure in the center, with a many-windowed turret. And there were three low spires or towers that bore huge globes, shining, silvery.
Men in white coveralls came out of the hangar to take charge of the plane. They were Chinese, squat, expressionless, impassive. Jason felt something sinister in their silence, in their swift, mechanical efficiency. They reflected an organization, an unseen power, a pitiless purpose, that bent men ruthlessly to its ends.
Jabez Head snapped, “Come on, brother.”
He seized Jason’s arm and hurried him away. A few times he tripped, on numb, lifeless feet. The gaunt man jerked him roughly up. Hap, the gorilla, kept ominously behind.
“Stand up, brother,” cracked Jabez Head, “if ye prize yer skin.”
Beyond the hangars, they entered a broad way paved with heavy gray glass. They approached the huge low building, of gray-painted metal, that stood in the center of the dome’s flat crown. A door opened for them, silently; they walked into a gloomy hall.
The man by the door, Jason noted, was Chinese. His tawny face was a grim mask, inscrutable, lifeless. Ominous it was, with the shadow of some insidious, implacable power that molded men like clay.
From the gloomy hall, they climbed a short flight of steps, into a remarkable room. It was, Jason knew, the interior of the turret he had seen from below. Through great windows the flattened top of the glass dome was visible, and the gray buildings upon it, and the angry sea beyond, glinting with spray, reaching off to horizons of gloomy cloud.
Mechanisms glistened along the walls, a few of them familiar—barometers, radio compass, a powerful telescope—but most of them unfamiliar either in nature or application. This was, Jason understood, the bridge of the colossal ship, the nerve-center of the vast and complex machinery that must exist to control it and protect it and make it habitable.
The modern effect of the gleaming brass and nickel-instruments was offset bizarrely by elements of Oriental atmosphere. The deep-piled, darkly rich rugs had come from Isfahan; the silken tapestries, between the windows, were woven with scarlet dragons. A massive jade Buddha squatted in a niche; elaborately delicate silver lamps hung from the green vault of the ceiling; fragrance of incense haunted the room.
The man there was as Oriental as the room; yet there was about him nothing voluptuous, no hint of Eastern languor. He had an air of ruthless aggression, of resistless, dynamic power, that seemed Occidental.
Attired in a long robe of richly brocaded purple silk, trimmed with white fur, the man in the room was an impressive figure. His face was massive, ivory-hued, with lips startlingly, almost femininely red and full. Intense, piercing, magnetic, his long eyes were slightly oblique. His hair was black, his nose prominent, his ivory forehead high and bulging. His face was coldly and completely impassive, yet somehow indefinably sinister.
“Here’s yer man, Mr. Iskandar,” briefly reported Jabez Head.
THE man rose slowly from the heavy teak desk, where he had been thumbing papers, and came deliberately toward them. He was very tall, almost statuesque in the purple robe. Jason watched him, with a little catch in his breathing.
Iskandar! This was the new Alexander, whispered of through restless Asia. Iskandar, Wizard of Life, who could reputedly mold living things into any shape he fancied—the tales that Jason had heard were fantastic, dreadful. And he must be also the mysterious Mr. Alexander, whom Justina Todd blamed for the disappearance of Tonia Hope.
“How do you do?” he greeted Jason, his voice deeply musical, equally devoid of accent or expression. “Your name is Jason Wade?”
“It is,” affirmed Jason, promptly, glad of a chance at least to speak for himself. “And I don’t mind saying,” he added, “that I’ve been outrageously treated!”
Slanted, enigmatic eyes stared bade at him, unreadable—but, whatever they were, certainly not genial or friendly.
“You were brought here, Jason Wade,” the richly musical tones rang back, “because I wish to ask you a question.”
“Very well,” said Jason, still unabashed. “And I want to ask you one!”
“Why, since you returned from the Orient,” resumed Iskandar, “have you been so diligently seeking information along—certain lines?”
“Because,” Jason grimly replied, “I want to know what has become of a certain young woman. And that brings us to my question: where is Tonia Hope?” The oblique eyes stared at him, dark, magnetic, veiled.
“Jason Wade,” asked the richly musical voice, suavely ignoring his question, “you are not connected in any way with the military forces of your Government?”
“Why, no——”
The long, coal-black eyes stabbed into his frank gray ones.
“Or of any country?”
“No.”
“You were merely searching for the girl, on your own initiative?”
“That’s right,” agreed Jason, grimly. “And I’ve reason to suspect that you know what happened to her!”
“Yes, Mr. Wade,” Iskandar said deliberately, “I do. I tell you out of gratitude.” The musical tones were faintly mocking. “You have relieved me of an apprehension. I had feared that you were a spy of some Government. And I am not yet ready to have an official interest taken in my activities.”
Jason realized, then, that he had made a mistake in admitting that he played a lone hand. But it was too late to correct it.
“She’s here?” he asked, tight-lipped.
“She is. Would you care to see her?” The black, almond-shaped eyes were still upon him, with that intent, impersonal, unreadable stare.
Hope had come to him, sudden, throbbing, painful, with Iskandar’s question. And red anger followed it; he knew that it was asked in mockery. But he tried to conceal his anger, and replied in a quiet, even tone:
“Yes, I’d be glad to see her.”
“Follow me,” said Iskandar; and, to Jabez, “Bring him.”
And Jason, still conducted by Jabez Head and Hap Nino, followed him out of the amazing tower room, and down a gloomy hall. From the hall, they came into a small, curious room, whose floor was glass.
“There is tire young woman,” said Iskandar, and pointed down through the glass.
Jason looked into a metal-walled space beneath, into a square tank, windowless, with a locked metal door. It was simply furnished, like a room, with a narrow bed and a table and a chair. A few ragged, worn magazines lay on the table. One the bed, in a long white garment, was a woman, sleeping. . . .
His heart leapt. It was Tonia Hopei with misty eyes he recognized the thick golden hair, die very fair skin, the smooth, familiar curve of the brow, the impudent little tilt of the chin. His heart ached with gladness. It was Tonia, unharmed, sleeping peacefully.
Abruptly, then, his gladness gave way to gnawing dread. Why was she locked up, alone, in that odd little tank? Why was she imprisoned under glass, like—well, like a bug under a microscope? Why, anyhow, had she been brought here?
He was wheeling on Iskandar with his questions, when she woke, as if she had sensed their presence. Her wide blue eyes stared up through the glass at purple-robed Iskandar, shadowed with infinite weariness and with hopeless despair and with—terror!
Jason, then, made a little angry movement toward the tall, ivory-skinned Oriental, and the terrified eyes found him. Instantly they changed. Gladness came into them. Ineffable joy. Throbbing hope. And pleading. . . .
She sprang up, and reached out her arms toward him. Her lips moved, but no sound came through the glass.
Jason was blind and giddy, and confused with a whirl of thoughts. Tonia was a prisoner here! She still loved him! There had been no mistaking the joy in her tortured eyes. And she was in awful terror of Iskandar!
He tried to shout something to her, through the glass floor.
“Come,” said Iskandar. “You have seen her.”
JABEZ HEAD and Hap Nino dragged Jason out of the little room. He was choking with anger, sick with cold fear. He had no idea why Tonia was shut up in the strange little cell under the glass, but it was obvious that she lived in devouring terror.
“What have you done to her?” he demanded of Iskandar, as the tall Oriental strode ahead of him. “Why did you bring her here? And what is she doing in that—pit?”
The man stopped, looked bade at him with stabbing almond eyes. Again Jason felt that he was merely the subject of a casual experiment. He felt that the Wizard was playing with him, applying one stimulus or another, simply for the satisfaction of watching him respond. Rage boiled in him at the man’s impersonal, pitiless cruelty.
“You wish to know my purpose with the young woman?”
“I do.”
The full lips, red, strikingly feminine against the ivory mask, tightened to a crueler curve.
“I shall tell you, to reward you for your assurance that you represent no official power.” There was a sinister mockery in the musical tone. “First, you must know that I am called Iskandar, Wizard of Life.”
“I knew that.”
“For many years,” went on Iskandar, “I have carried on research into the secrets of life. I have fathomed the nature of the protoplasmic cell, which is the basis of all life. I have mastered its control and manipulation by radiations, by chemical means, by feeding.
“Perhaps you are familiar, Mr. Wade, with some of the surprizing results that have been attained along this line, by the use of radium, X-ray, endocrine extracts, and so on?”
“Yes,” whispered Jason, thinking of articles he had read, about monstrosities of life that science had created. Dwarfed and gigantic and monstrous things science had grown, he knew, by manipulation of the ductless glands. Fantastic freaks had been created by a force of evolution accelerated a hundred times by mutations caused with the X-ray.
He shuddered a little, in spite of himself. A faint amusement flickered in the dark, tilted eyes of Iskandar.
“I have gone far beyond other investigators along that line,” the oddly reverberant, musical voice rolled on. “And I have achieved results that, I believe, you will find surprizing. I feel that I am justly entitled to be known as the Wizard of Life.”
“Yes?” said Jason.
He waited, cautious, on his guard against some shock of horror. He had the uncomfortable feeling that he was a fly on a dissecting-needle, being dismembered for the satisfaction of this pitiless Oriental.
“I shall show you one of my creations,” said the golden voice, softly rich, coldly free of expression. “Sight of it, I’m sure, will give you a more comprehensive idea of the nature of my work. And it will help you to understand my purpose with the young woman in whom you appear to be so interested.
“Come,” he said, nodding to Jabez Head and the apish Hap Nino.
Jason, warned by a hint of the sinister in Iskandar’s manner, was prepared for a shock. Yet the horror of the thing he saw dazed him, rocked his very sanity.
“Come,” repeated the tall, rich-robed Oriental, and led him deliberately into another small room, also with a floor of glass.
“There,” throbbed the musical voice, “is the creation of my science that I wish you to see. Does it not give me a fair right to be called the Wizard of Life?”
He pointed down through the crystal floor. Jason gazed after his long-nailed ivory finger, voiceless with horror, shuddering.
Beneath the glass was a square pit or tank, like that in which he had seen Tonia Hope. It was flooded with intense light, of a blue-green, uncanny hue, that came from great, strangely twisted tubes fastened high at the ends of the tank.
On the filth that littered the floor, bathed in the terrible light, was a thing of pure, mind-cracking horror—a scorpion, Jason’s dazed brain perceived, with the head of a man!
Sprawling on the foul floor, it was a huge thing, infinitely dreadful. Its body was larger than a man’s, and was armored with red plates that gleamed strangely in tile fearful green light. Tapering, yards long, the slender tail was armed with a hideous sting. The great forelimbs bore enormous, fearful pincers.
And, though his whirling, horror-numbed mind revolted at acceptance of the fact, it had a man’s head—a head unmistakably human, set above the dreadful forelimbs. It had thick red hair, shaggy, matted. The neck of it grew into that body of crimson-armored horror. It was alive, Jason saw incredulously . . . and weeping. . . .
The face looked up at them, through the floor of glass—a white, haggard face, drawn with the most terrible look of agony and despair that Jason had ever seen. The eyes were blue and dark and sunken, bright with tears. They were shadowed with grief and pain and hopeless hate—and with horror unutterable.
The thing was weeping.
And he knew the face! It was the face of Jerry Travers, the brilliant young biologist who had vanished unaccountably, with his bride, as Tonia Hope had vanished. It was the face of the big, jovial, red-headed Westerner, whom Jason had known at Yale. Jerry Travers! The keen-minded, good-humored young scientist, with his body grown into a monstrous scorpion! The thing was horrible beyond credence; yet Jason saw recognition of himself in those horror-filmed eyes—and a tragic appeal.
