Collected short fiction, p.220
Collected Short Fiction, page 220
FOR KEN DARREN, the incidents of the following space of time had never any solid, connected reality. The coherence of his memory was torn to shreds by terror and wild hope and the pressure of desperate urgency.
Only a series of pictures were left him, each vividly clear, cruelly unforgettable—each madly disjointed from all the rest.
The first was that moment in the shaft, when he and Teddu Len bent over the dead man, and Teddu Len whispered in frantic dread:
“—torture—death.”
Ken was sinking in the blackness of the old man’s ultimate despair when his eyes caught the gleam of the dead guard’s neutron-blast pistol shining out of greenish darkness. His mind fastened upon it with the strength of a new-born, urgent hope.
“His gun is there,” Ken found himself saying, and he was himself surprised at the cold, deliberate quietness in his voice. It was a little strange, he thought, that he was not confused like the old man, numbed with terror.
“I shall take his gun,” he was saying, “and go down the tunnel. There are thousands here, who hate Dakkil Kun. I shall raise them against the guards.”
He caught up the weapon, swiftly tested its mechanism.
“If the guards were overcome,” he continued, “and we had possession of the caverns—— There might be a ship above that we could take. If we could return to Nydron, reach Dakkil Kun and take the great okal from him——”
swiftly, intent over the cylinder. “Once he was my friend. But he destroyed the Princess Wyndonee, and I loved her.”
A blue tongue stabbed from the heavy barrel.
“The gun wasn’t harmed,” he said. “I’m going.”
“Wait, Ken.”
A fierce, momentary light had come into the eyes of Teddu Len, but it was fading; his bruised head sank forward.
“We can’t do that, Ken. We might take the cavern—revolting miners have done that before. But the guards always close the great valves which seal the shafts from above. Always they hold the fortress—the great building on the surface, where the ships come down.
“All the stores of food and water are in that fort; and the air pumps and the conditioning apparatus are there. The guards have only to stop our supplies, protect themselves in the fortress—and wait.
“They have done that before. Hunger and thirst and suffocation have always won the battle for them.” He shook his bleeding head. “No, Ken, it is hopeless.”
Fiercely, Ken’s jaw stiffened. “It could be done,” he said.
Swiftly, his mind was racing along old paths. He cast the situation into an old, familiar pattern. Suppose he were back in the wild hills of Pylos and a tiger had trapped him in such a cavern as this.
“Even if some miracle gave us the fortress,” Teddu Len was going on, hopelessly, “it would gain us nothing. The fleet is in the hands of Dakkil Kun. And with the fleet against us, we could never reach Nydron—not even if we captured the single ship that comes to bring supplies to Kardon.”
“It could be done,” Ken Darren repeated, in a vague, absent tone.
If, he was putting the problem to himself, the guards were the hunting tigers of Pylos——
With a word to Teddu Len, he was running along the dark tunnel.
At the end of the drift, three alert guards were waiting. They were calling into the tunnel, apparently becoming anxious about the man whom Ken had killed. His disk light switched off; Ken crept toward them, silently.
A green finger of light came searching toward him. He crouched against the face of the drift, motionless. He did not breathe until it was gone. Then he ran forward, without a sound—as if he stalked a beast.
He stooped, when he was near enough, and caught up a pebble. He flung it to rattle against the wall of stone beyond the three. They spun away from him, with exclamations of alarm, and he struck from darkness.
THAT INSTANT when his finger pressed the firing lever was forever etched upon the mind of Ken. The bulky outlines of the three guards, black against the green disk light beyond, frozen in attitudes of surprise. His own fierce elation of combat, and a savage ruthlessness of purpose that rode down his shrinking compunction at killing men thus, from darkness.
And the next, blinding instant, it always seemed to Ken, he was storming into a huge, rock-hewn chamber, where a hundred guards had barricaded themselves. At his back were more than a hundred half-naked men, grimed with sweat and blood, armed with shovels and torn-up rails and captured neutron guns.
The great, rugged vault was blazing with the green rays of suspended, diskshaped photon tubes. Blue flashes were spurting from the neutron-blast pistols of the guards along their barricades of piled ore sacks and overturned cars.
His own captured weapon was hissing in his hand, spurting blue flame of death. All about him was the dry crackle of the guns and the uncontrolled cries of fighting and dying men, and the deafening clangor of metal against metal, as the miners attacked the barricade with battering-rams of torn-up rails.
A dark bundle came hurtling over the barrier, and down among his men. He saw the bright trail of sparks behind it and realized that it was an explosive bomb. Flinging his body down, he screamed a warning:
“Lie flat! A bomb!”
The scene was gone, with that, into chaotic oblivion.
Hours later must have been his next starkly vivid impression. His aching body was caked with sweat and blood-sodden dust. His shoulder was ripped and blistered where some hot, merciless neutron jet had touched it. A little well of dark blood oozed from his thigh, where a fragment of the bomb had struck.
He was standing in the cavernous space beneath the great valves which communicated with the surface. The valves had clanged remorselessly shut. The disk lights had faded into darkness. The cooled air currents had ceased to blow from the ventilators. The atmosphere about him was already stifling, hardly breathable, reeking with the odors of hot human bodies, sickening with the faint smell of blood.
To Ken it seemed only a moment since he had run down the tunnel with the dead man’s weapon. He knew how long the time had been only because he sagged with exhaustion, because he was faint from hunger, parched with thirst.
“I want water,” a wounded man was sobbing near him, huddled in the vast, thick darkness, where shouts and groans continually murmured, and the faint glows of the miners’ disk lights danced like luminous green insects. “I want water!” he wailed again and again.
“There is no water,” said Ken. “They have shut it off. We shall have no water, no food, no fit air, until we have taken the fortress above.”
“Or until we give up our weapons and our leaders, and beg for it,” spoke a thick, weary voice out of the gloom. “Men have attacked these valves before. Always they have failed and died. Let us surrender our leaders, I say, so we may have water.”
“We are fools to fight,” assented another voice. “The advantage is always with the guards. These valves are great walls of armor plate. We could never break through them.”
“We need not break them,” Ken shouted his appeal. “Listen!”
HIS KNEES buckled under him, and the leaden mists of fatigue came down on him, and he choked in the stifling air. He fought fiercely to control himself and to put down his own despair. He must make these men follow him. To fail now.
“We must take the fortress,” he shouted. “And we can. And we can seize the ship that they say is in the cradle there, and the ship will take us to Nydron to fight Dakkil Kun. There is a way.”
And his mind was shaping the situation in familiar molds. If this were a hunt on Pylos——
“We need not break the valves,” he went on confidently. “We will find another way out of the mines. Somewhere, we will drive a shaft to the surface. Then we can attack the fortress unexpectedly, from outside.”
“You are a fool,” some voice called out of the darkness. “We can’t live outside, under the sky of Kardon.”
“That’s what the guards think,” answered Ken. “They won’t expect us, there. But we can live there, long enough—— We must!”
And then, as the scene grew dim in his memory, he was asking for some older prisoner, who would know where the passages of the mine came nearest the surface.
Again—and it was the last, wildest memory of that frantic day—he had come up out of the hurriedly driven shaft, into the pitiless day of Kardon.
The ancient planet’s barren, eon-flattened landscape shimmered with reverberating heat. Age-riven rocks, naked plains, scorched, utterly lifeless. The sky was a sheet of flame, white, merciless, agony to the eyes. The air was dry, parching; a furnace blast against the skin, a searing blaze within the nostrils.
Nowhere was life, no tiniest plant or minutest insect. No sound, no motion save the delusive shimmer of heat. No liquid water, no merciful cloud. Kardon was dead, dried and baked.
Upon the bare hill above them, rippling and dancing in the heat, stood the fortress. A colossal, looming mass, it spread wide over the hilltop, supporting the wide-reaching arms of the landing cradle.
“The ship is here, sure enough,” gasped Ken.
It was the Wanderer, which had brought him here. It lay in the cradle, a massive globe of copper-colored alloy, refulgent, burning with the flame of the sky.
“We must take the Wanderer,” whispered Ken. “It could carry us to Nydron. But if it escapes, it will send back the fleet, and we are doomed.”
The heavy walls of the fortress, of metal and stone, were painted white to reflect the heat. They were manyangled, but featureless. There was no need of doors to let out into the hell upon the planet, nor of windows, to let in its terrific radiation.
“We can never enter that,” muttered a despairing voice at Ken’s side. It was Sinl Mran, the stout little company inspector from Pylos; he had fought beside Ken from the beginning of the uprising.
“We must,” said Ken.
“I have a wife on Nydron and a son I have never seen,” the little man gasped in the blinding heat. “I have fought for them. But we can’t take that fort. There’s no way inside.”
His old friend’s despair struck Ken like a blow; it sent his spirits plunging toward defeat. Then his weary eyes, squinted against the pitiless radiation, saw a dark grid set in the white walls above.
“There is a way,” he said to Sinl Mran.
AND to the bewildered, desperate men clambering from the shaft behind him—a haggard, bloody crew, more than half dead from thirst and foul air and exhaustion, many of them wounded, most of them with no other weapons than shovels and iron rails—he called:
“We shall enter that port, where the air is drawn into the conditioning apparatus.”
With puffing little Sinl Mran beside him, the men—the mere hundred or so hardly enough for this desperate venture—straggling along behind, he started up the hill toward those blazing white walls.
For a space again his memory was confused. He was aware only of the tortured, gasping breathing of his men, of the small clatter of their bleeding feet upon blistering rocks. Aware only of his own weakness and pain, of the blinding, consuming, overwhelming heat that pressed in upon him, until he could see only the white walls, burning mockingly through scarlet mists of pain.
Then, somehow, they had come through the smashed grating, and past the great, frost-rimmed coils of the air-conditioning apparatus. The vibrant throb of the great pumps had covered the sounds they had made. The cool, merciful breath of the fans had put new life in them’.
Fixed in his mind was a rough plan of the fortress, sketched from the memories of men who on one chance or another had visited it. Guided by that, he led his haggard little company first to an arsenal. By the time the alarm was fully spread among the unprepared and incredulous garrison, they were fully equipped with new neutron-blast guns.
“We must take the Wanderer,” he shouted, as his men were handing out the weapons. “All this is nothing unless we take the ship.”
Leaving half his men, under Sinl Mran, to pursue the surprised, screaming guards through the corridors of the vast building, to avenge many an old brutality, many a death in the torture cells, he forced his way upward with the rest.
With more warning, the men in the upper level of the fortress closed a massive metal door in the face of his charge. Desperately, his men attacked it with the cutting electron jets from their pistols, with improvised bars and rams.
Despite their furious efforts, precious minutes had gone when it burst open. Ken led the rush forward beneath the great metal canopy that sheltered the entrance to the flier. Beyond blazed the white, cruel sky.
Gasping with helpless despair, Ken looked upward.
A dwindling silver bubble within its dynamic space shell, the geodesic flier was drifting swiftly upward athwart the flaming bowl of the sky. He drew back wearily, wiping tears of pain from his dazzled eyes.
“The ship is gone,” he said hopelessly, rejoining the victorious Sinl Mran, down in the captured fortress.
The little man’s ruddy face fell. Dejectedly he muttered: “Then our victory means nothing.”
“Nothing,” repeated Ken. “We have the fortress, but we can only die in it, of hunger and thirst, or under the bombs of the fleet.”
To Be Concluded.
Islands of the Sun
(Conclusion)
V.
TWELVE days more, perhaps,” said Teddu Len. “Then we are done.”
The old scientist was sitting with Ken in an office in the fortress. Heavy, insulated walls shut out the pitiless heat of the prison planet; cool air rustled from a ventilating fan; the room was soft with the roseate, filtered rays of a photon disk.
Sinl Mran, plump, pink-cheeked, energetic, was with them. All three wore bandages. But they were washed, refreshed, comfortable.
Ken, a little reluctantly, for he had wished the place to be Teddu Len’s, sat at the commandant’s desk. The revolting miners had been organized into a fighting unit; Ken Darren in command, Teddu Len and Sinl Mran beneath him.
“In twelve days,” repeated Teddu Len, “the fleet can be here from Nydron—and bombs falling on this building.”
“The weapon you invented?” asked Ken. “Would it save us now?”
“The device, you mean, that I planned as I lay in the torture cell? It is an atomic power wave, carried upon a tight beam of subelectronic radiation, which will penetrate the dynamic space shell. It would be a powerful agency of destruction—but we cannot build it.”
“Why not? We have shops, materials.”
“Each projector requires the use of a crystal of okal—without it the instantaneous generation of atomic energy is impossible.”
Ken’s heart sank.
“Always we need okals,” he muttered. “We can’t save the planets without the great one that Dakkil Kun has. And we can’t recover it for want of a small one.”
Little Sinl Mran had let out a startled exclamation.
“We have an okal, Ken,” he cried excitedly. “I saw it. It is one some prisoner found long ago. It has been kept hidden, passed from man to man. It made life here endurable; its beauty is like a refreshing drink.”
“How large——”
“It is small as a grain of sand—but a grain of perfect beauty.”
“Let us see it,” commanded Teddu Len eagerly. “Perhaps——”
Word went out. Within a few minutes the jewel was in the old man’s hand. It was a minute and perfect sphere, harder than diamond. The touch of his skin set strange, soft fires to blazing in it, so that it burst up with a wondrous, changing, many-hued radiance.
“It will do,” said Teddu Len. “I shall draw plans for the penetrator and have the parts made.” Gloomily, he added: “But the thing is untried, and we are yet marooned on Kardon.”
“But it gives us a fighting chance,” said Ken.
His hard chin set and his level, gray eyes darkened with grim purpose.
“We can fight,” returned the thin, tired old voice of Teddu Len. “But Dakkil Kun has the geodesic fleets, and the forts on Nydron. And the flame creatures are with him, with their dread science and their great black ships.”
Eleven days later the fleet was sighted, descending upon the fortress. The alarm brought Ken to the top of the great building. Beyond the sheltering canopy, he came under the white and featureless sky. Streaming with tears, even behind dark lenses, his eyes peered up into the dome of pitiless heat—and found the ships.
Out of a sea of white flame, the geodesic fliers were drifting down; huge and shimmering bubbles of mirrorlike refulgence, their surfaces were nowhere broken. Nine of them he counted, floating down over the dark, age-leveled horizons of flame-seared Kardon.
The “penetrator” was close beside him, a relatively small mechanism, the minute okal lost in a mass of intricate tubes and coils. It was sheltered beneath a dome-shaped shield which also protected Teddu Len and his two assistants.
“They are coming within range,” called the thin voice of the old inventor.
“Wait,” called Ken. “One ship is coming ahead. Let them land it if they wish. Perhaps they want to parley.”
He watched, shading his smarting eyes.
“Yes, they are coming in. I’ll go aboard myself and offer to surrender the mines, undamaged, in return for a ship.”
“No chance that they’d do that,” muttered Teddu Len.
“But—somehow—we must have a ship.”
The vast, silvery sphere hung for a moment, silent, motionless, above the arms of the cradle, a bubble of mirror whiteness, its fulgor blinding in the terrible light, its unmarred perfection almost unreal.
Then the dynamic space shell was gone. The dull, copper-red of the hull, broken with rivet heads, air-lock and ports, caked with greenish oxides, collapsed into the cradle.
A petty officer came off to announce, importantly:
“Lar Radnu, Admiral of the Fleet of Dakkil Kun, Lhundar of the Planets, wishes to speak with the leader of the rebels here.”
With a word to Teddu Len and Sinl Mran to keep on the alert, Ken followed the officer aboard. Within the great, cylindrical chamber of the ship’s airlock, he met Lar Radnu.
