Collected short fiction, p.200
Collected Short Fiction, page 200
But it was the head of it, the face, that riveted Jason’s gaze with soul-chilling dread . . . the head of Jerry Travers, matted with shaggy red hair, growing out of that fearful body . . . the face of Jerry Travers, haggard and drawn and twisted with unutterable agony, with inconceivable horror, with flaming, deathless hate.
Hate. . . .
Hate burned in the blue eyes, through the shadows of suffering and horror and despair. It was a terrific, malignant, consuming fire. It was all that kept this creature alive, overwhelming hatred for Iskandar.
Jason had started mechanically forward. He stopped, was dazed, reeling, with the horror of what he saw. He tried to tear his gaze away from the thing in the chamber. But the eyes of Jerry Travers held him, with a hideous fascination.
He saw recognition come into those dreadful orbs—and hope. Hope flamed up, beside the hate. A desperate resolution came abruptly to Jason, an insane resolution. He did not stop to weigh it. He had suffered too long the agony of inaction. He must fight again, even if he died. He must fight, because he would never have another chance.
He leaned into the door and shouted out imperatively: “Come, Jerry! Come out! You can fight!”
And he jabbed a short, vicious left into the body of the man fettered to him, and flung his weight abruptly against him, so that they both toppled against the open door.
Even as he shouted, he saw hope bum stronger in those suffering eyes, beside the hate. He saw understanding there, and savage decision.
The stocky yellow man screamed in instant terror, and tried to slam the door. Jason kept his body and the body of their leader against it. The man chained to him gasped; he struggled, pulling at his revolver. Jason caught him on the jaw with a second short, stiff punch with his free arm, that dazed the man and flung him back against the door so heavily that his head cracked against the metal. He went down limply, so that his body still propped open the door.
IT ALL happened in a few seconds.
The other man dragged at Jason and the lax body; he butted and kicked and swung at them; doggedly he kept his place, for the one vital moment. One of them dropped back, hauled out his revolver, and opened fire.
Jason ducked his head and jerked another of the yellow men down upon him, free arm hooked about his throat, so that their bodies and that of the dead man still propped the door open. A bullet spattered on the metal by his head.
The red-armored thing, then, came scuttling through the door. It moved with a fearful, deadly quickness—no more than three seconds, perhaps, had passed since Jason’s call. It sprang upon the struggling man that Jason had pulled down. He shrieked bubblingly, and was silent.
The two others backed away, livid with terror, shooting furiously.
The thing rushed at one of them. Its red armor made a strange clatter on the metal floor. The Chinese fell before it; the tapering, slender sting arched, touched him; he began a scream that ended in a strange rasping whistle.
The one survivor dropped his revolver and fled. He vanished into an intersecting passage. He would, Jason knew, spread the alarm.
The red creature left the body of its second victim. The human head looked about, a little awkwardly, for its neck was not very flexible. Seeing that the remaining Chinese had gone, it came back to Jason, clattering on the metal floor.
Jason was still leaning against the great door, burdened with the corpse chained to his right wrist; he was panting, trembling with weakness of hunger and exhaustion, dizzy with a confusion of elation and horror.
The thing stopped in front of him. He shuddered, and recoiled from it, dragging the dead man. The drawn lips of the head moved, then. Sound came from them—harsh, strange whisperings, dry, rusty, hideous. It was a moment before Jason realized that it was speaking.
“Jason Wade,” he distinguished the weirdly uttered syllables. “Old Jason. Remember me? ’Course you remember me! You call me Jerry! Say, don’t you remember me? I’m Jerry Travers.”
Jason fought down his horror and steadied himself against the massive door. He forced himself to speak, though the voice from his husky throat was almost as harsh and dry as the uncanny voice of the other.
“Certainly I remember you, Jerry.”
That was all that came to him. He tried to get a grip on himself. Now was the time to strike, before the alarm had spread. The one surviving Chinese would warn the Wizard—but this thing that had been Jerry Travers could fight. Together, if they moved before it was too late . . .
The terrible, painful whisper was coming again:
“The Wizard! Where is he? You know, Jason, where the Wizard is?”
“I think I do,” Jason forced out the whisper. “I think I can find him. But that man that ran away will give the warning. We must be quick. . . . But wait. I must find the keys, and unfasten myself from this dead man.”
He tried to be very plain. He was sure that the brain of Jerry Travers had cracked a little. Nor was that strange—the wonder was that he was not insane or dead.
Jason bent; he began searching the limp body beside him.
The dreadful, agonized whisper came to him again.
“Come, Jason. Take me to the Wizard. I’m going to kill him, Jason. I’ve waited to kill him. Waited, waited——”
The dry, harsh rustlings trailed away. The thing sobbed with eagerness and hate, and great tears burst out of the tortured eyes. Jason found a ring of keys, and began trying them in his manacles. Presently the whisper came again:
“The Wizard changed me, Jason. You can see how the Wizard changed me. My body feels so strange, Jason! And it pains. . . . And he left May to watch me, Jason. He left her over the glass. She went mad, Jason. She went mad, watching me. I’m going to kill him, Jason. I’ve waited——”
The whisper died again, into a hiss of hate.
The manacles came open, then, and Jason dropped the inert body from him. He snatched up two revolvers from the floor, and searched until he found a box of cartridges in the pockets of the man he had killed.
“Come, Jerry. We must find the Wizard.”
He started at a trot down the hall, and the red thing clattered after him.
A SHOUT of warning met them, and a little group of armed yellow men, nervously descending a stair. Jason threw up one of his revolvers. Though by no means a two-gun man, he shot accurately enough, if rather deliberately, with one. Four shots dropped three men on the stair in that many seconds.
The Chinese did not return his fire. Their scattering volley of shots was fired at the thing that had been Jerry Travers. It scuttled swiftly ahead of him, and leapt up the stair into the little knot of men. Its lashing sting touched one, then another. They broke in screaming panic as it came among them, and fled up the stair, leaving five men dead.
The scuttling horror followed up the steps. Jason ran after it.
The head of Jerry Travers, he saw, had been hit. One cheek was laid open, hideously, to the teeth. Dark blood was dripping from a long furrow on the temple. Other shots, he knew, must have struck the red-armored body, though it yet showed no weakness.
They came, at the top of the stair, into a passage vaguely familiar to Jason. It was the one, he recalled after a moment, that he had traversed when Iskandar took him to look through the glass at this battling abnormality and at Tonia Hope.
He ran beside the scuttling thing, calling:
“This way, Jerry! Come this way, and I think we shall find the Wizard.” And he asked, huskily, “Jerry, are you hurt?” Harsh, rusty, the reply whispered back: “Nothing. No matter—if we find the Wizard. Just find the Wizard, Jason! . . . He made May watch me change. May was my wife, Jason. He made her watch . . .
They came to the steps that led up to the strange tower room, that was the bridge of this amazing ship. It was there that Jason had first seen Iskandar, there that he hoped to find him again.
At the top of the steps he heard a gasping, hoarse cry of consternation. A door slammed. Jason ran up the steps, revolvers ready. The red monstrosity clattered after him, with horrific eagerness.
Jason tried the door. It was locked. He held the muzzle of a revolver a foot from the catch, and fired three times. Lead and bits of metal stung his body. He hurled his weight against the door, gun ready. It flung open. He sprawled forward on his face.
The fall saved his life, for Jaber Head and his gorilla-like bodyguard, Hap Nino, were waiting behind the door. Jabez had a heavy revolver; Hap, a short, ugly automatic. They fired through the door, where his body would have been if he had not fallen.
From the floor, he shot twice.
Hap Nino slumped slowly down upon his face, Jabez Head flung a thin hand up to his small greenish eyes; and his hard voice shouted, loudly, the one odd word, “Tarnation!” He tottered back over the inert body of Hap Nino and fell at full length, face up, upon a priceless Persian rug.
The scuttling terror leapt over Jason. It was in the middle of the room before he could scramble to his feet.
Perfectly motionless, across the room, stood the mail who called himself Iskandar, Wizard of Life. His slender ivory hands were fixed on the spokes of a heavy wheel of brass, by the wall.
The red horror was rushing at him.
The scene was graven on Jason’s memory: The great, strange room, rich with soft-hued Eastern carpets; walls tapestried with scarlet dragons; air faintly fragrant with incense; immense, fantastic silver lamps swinging from the emerald vault of the ceiling; the green jade Buddha squatting, serenely contemplative, in its niche. The many wide windows, looking out upon the flattened crown of the immense glass dome; upon barracks, hangars, radio station; upon the three strange pylons with the ominous globes of bright argent—weapons of unknown power. Beyond the dome, the slate-gray sea, still wild, heaving in mountainous, white-crested seas; the horizons above it still gray with storm; the wind yet roaring, laden with freezing mist.
Inside the room, by the brass wheel, Iskandar stood impassively watching the scuttling, red-plated horror that he had made. The man, it seemed to Jason, was motionless as a statue of ivory. His tall, purple-robed body stood rigid. His long, slanted, night-black eyes were fixed upon the advancing horror, inscrutable as ever.
It leapt at him, after what had seemed to Jason an eternity of static tension, though it must have been the merest instant.
Iskandar’s long-fingered, ivory hand spun the brass wheel.
He went down, beneath the spring. He did not struggle. After the slender, seeking barb had found him, after Jason had thought him dead, his voice spoke out, strong and expressionless and richly deep as ever:
“You win, Mr. Wade. And lose——”
His words were cut off, with an abrupt little catch. His ivory body grew rigid, quivered convulsively, then ceased to move.
The red monstrosity remained upon him, the black barb of the sting driven into his side. Jason spoke to it. It did not move, and he walked to it.
The head of Jerry Travers was dead. It sagged forward, on its short neck, from the red, fearful body. Black blood was slowly dripping from it, upon the richly brocaded purple robe. Red hair had fallen against the gash in the temple; it was stuck there, glued with blood.
The eyes were open. The grief was gone from them, and the agony, and the unspeakable hate. They were blue and wide. They seemed to smile again, as Jason remembered them smiling on the campus at Yale. He closed them, tenderly.
He hastened, then, out of the tower room. He remembered the brass wheel the Wizard had spun—and his dying words, with a mockery in them:
“You win, Mr. Wade. And lose——”
What he had done, Jason could not guess, but it was something, he knew, aimed at him—or at Tonia Hope. He ran down the hall, toward the little room through whose glass floor he had looked down into the ray chamber where the girl had been imprisoned.
6. The Isle’s End
THE lookout on the U.S.S. Darnholt, six hours later, sighted a gray amphibian airplane. The diminutive destroyer, crusted with ice and brine, was wallowing into the wind, against towering seas. The airplane, flying low over the plunging leaden ocean, was evidently crippled.
Twice it circled the destroyer, then came down. Swiftly it broke up in the mad green water, but a boat succeeded in taking away the pilot and his passenger. Jason Wade was the pilot. The passenger was Tonia Hope.
After the two had been warmed and dried and filled with hot food and allowed a little sleep, Captain Wilkins had them brought to the tossing bridge. A lean, oldish man was the captain, with sharply jutting jaw and a mouth like a trap; but beyond the frosty sternness of his blue eyes shone a hint of geniality.
Jason Wade was haggard, and dead-weary. He wore bandages over the contusions on his head, as well as upon the insignificant flesh wound in his side. His gray eyes were still a little bloodshot, with fatigue. But they smiled as they rested on the girl by him.
Tonia Hope, he thought, was lovelier than she had ever been—even in Captain Wilkins’ pink pajamas. Slim and tall she was, her skin very white, her hair a glory of fine-spun gold. Her wide blue eyes were shadowed still with the darkness of horror and tragedy; her face was still pallid and strained. But the shadow of horror, Jason knew, would fade. She still loved him. She still could laugh. Her brightly vivacious, generous temper was unchanged. She had been very much concerned over Jason’s slight wounds, and had helped to dress them.
In response to Captain Wilkins’ questions, Jason told his amazing story. He was doubtful, at first, and hesitant, expecting unbelief. The old officer encouraged him, told him finally:
“Don’t be afraid to tell it all, Mr. Wade. You see, Washington has come on some information about the thing. The Darnholt was dispatched to investigate a menace to navigation existing in the North Pacific.”
“This is the Pacific?”
“Yes. You must have been flown across the continent, Mr. Wade, after your abduction. . . . There have been rumors of some unusual activity in the Orient. And two trans-Pacific flyers and a Danish tramp have been recently lost in these waters.”
“They must have stumbled on the thing,” said Jason. “They must have been destroyed with whatever force came from those silver globes. The globes were weapons, Iskandar said.”
“We had come to investigate,” repeated the officer, “but you seem to have saved us the trouble——”
“It was Jerry Travers,” Jason disclaimed credit, “or the creature that had been Jerry. He killed Iskandar. I couldn’t have done a thing, alone.”
“The structure, the floating island, as you call it, was sunk, you say? How, Mr. Wade?”
“Iskandar turned a wheel, before he died,” said Jason. “That opened seacocks, I suppose, and flooded the lower compartments. Anyhow, the structure began to list and settle, at once.”
“It was after that, that you got possession of the plane?”
“Yes. The Chinese were pretty much disorganized by what had happened. They must have lived in terror of the—of Jerry Travers. Jerry died on the body of Iskandar. But the top of the dome was already deserted—the warning had spread. And I was left with a good supply of arms.”
“He fought to get me out of the horrid little place I was locked in, Captain,” put in Tonia Hope, with admiration in her soft voice. She added, in a quieter tone, “There were two men dead in the hall, when he let me out.”
Jason flushed a little at the admiration in the girl’s soft voice; he shook his head, protestingly.
“You see,” he explained, “I already had the keys I had taken from my jailer. One of them happened to fit. . . . But we couldn’t have got away,” he added, “if the men hadn’t been frightened and disorganized.”
“Mr. Wade had to fight again,” Tonia insisted on saying, with a laughingly defiant look at Jason, “to get the plane. There were Chinese in the hangar. They attacked us.”
“That’s where Tonia got her man,” Jason said. “She took a revolver and blazed away like a veteran, while I was getting the motor started.”
“You know I didn’t kill any man,” protested the girl, with an indignant smile. “Why, I just shot at the glass in front of them!”
Captain Wilkins put in a question:
“Were there any other survivors?”
“I think not, Captain,” said Jason. “No oilier plane came away; and nothing could have floated, in that vortex. The structure was listing steeply before we took off. It went down in a few minutes, almost on edge. It left a white whirlpool; and great bubbles of air came up. I’m sure nobody lived.
“And we wouldn’t have been alive much longer, Captain,” Jason added, gratefully, “if you hadn’t come in sight. The Chinese shot at us a few times as we were getting away. They put a hole in one of the gas tanks. I tried to plug it, but we were about out when we saw you.”
“So I can radio Washington,” observed Captain Wilkins, “that the new Asiatic menace has ceased to exist, thanks to Jason Wade.”
“No,” insisted Jason; “thanks to Jerry Travers. And,” he requested, “please radio Mrs. Justina Todd, at New York, that her niece is free.”
“No, Captain,” protested Tonia Hope, with a hint of laughter in her wide blue eyes. “Don’t say free; say permanently attached. Because she’s going to be, Captain, just as soon as you have time to do the attaching.”
And Jason, smiling at her with tired eyes, nodded.
The Legion of Space
Part Four
The “Three Musketeers” of the void move on toward the breath-taking climax of their adventure in:
UP TO NOW:
In the thirtieth century, John Star—then John Ulnar—receives his commission in the legion of space, with orders to join the guard of Aladoree Anthar, a lovely, mysterious girl, keeper of AKKA—the secret weapon of humanity, so terrific that its plans are intrusted to only one person in the system.
