Collected short fiction, p.241
Collected Short Fiction, page 241
And for three timeless, frigid days, they had been stumbling through the misty dark.
More hopeful, yet with new apprehension, they went on from the remains of Justin Malkar. Dark fog breathed upon them with the breath of death. Bob Star led the way around crumbling boulders, up frozen slopes, across midnight declivities, as Jay Kalam, watching his glowing instrument, softly called directions.
The plateau remained bare of any other mark of life or man. Bob Star was trembling with cold, reeling with fatigue and hunger, when Jay Kalam said: “Swing to the left, Bob. We can’t go any farther——”
“Ah, thank you, Jay,” gasped Giles Habibula. “I feared you would never turn, until we died.”
“Yes, commander,” said Bob Star, fighting sick despair. “But there’s a big boulder to the left——”
His voice stopped, with a little eager catch. He strained his eyes. The thing was vague, ghostly. He tried his light tube again, although he knew that it was burned out, useless. Breathless, he stumbled nearer.
The shimmering shadow took on reality. His heart leaped against his ribs. The thing was a cylinder of gray metal, fifteen feet through, eighty long. He made out the black ovals of observation ports, the bulge of a gun turret.
“Bob?” called Jay Kalam.
Bob Star stumbled back toward him, whispering urgently: “Quiet! There’s a ship. They will hear——”
His words were cut off by a beam of blinding light that struck against a rock beside them.
“A searchlight,” he gasped. “They heard! Get down——”
They tumbled flat, scrambled swiftly for cover. The protecting bulk of stone was stabbed abruptly with a sword of violet flame, riven. Fragments of incandescent rock spattered from it.
“Bob,” whispered Jay Kalam. “Giles. Hal. All safe?”
“Aye, Jay,” rumbled Hal Samdu. “But where are the others?”
“Bob!” called the commander, louder. “Giles!”
But frozen Neptune made no reply.
BOB STAR, standing nearest the ship, barely escaped the hissing violet blast of the great proton needle. Electricity transmitted on ionized air hurled him to the frozen soil, momentarily dazed, paralyzed.
He saw the slender needle swinging down, still faintly glowing, a spectral finger of death. Desperately he rolled over, and began to drag himself toward the ship. The gun reached the bottom of its arc, violet flame spurted again. Rocks exploded behind him, but the shock reached him only faintly.
Crouching, safely beneath the needle, he ran to the gray hull. He slipped back to the valve. An instant’s inspection told him that it was locked from within, impossible for him to open.
The nameless oppression of the Neptunian night sank into him once more. Then he started.
“Lad! Where are you, lad?” It was Giles Habibula, frightened. “Mortal me!”
Bob Star saw him creeping swiftly toward him.
“Ah, lad!” It was a bitter sigh. “We’re trapped, against the mortal ship. The light blinded me. I ran in the wrong direction.”
“Here, Giles!” Hope caught up Bob Star again. “Can you open this lock?”
“Wait a moment.” He fumbled in his great pockets. “Ah, here it is—the bit of wire that let us into the Invincible. But why, lad? We two cannot storm a ship!”
“Open it,” begged Bob Star. “Hurry!”
“Ah, if I must. But the folly is on your own head, lad.
“Strange are the wheels of genius, lad,” he said, already busy with the lock. “Never could I use my gift in peace and comfort. It sleeps till the scream of danger rouses it. It is ever sluggard, without the tonics of darkness and haste or——”
Motor within hummed softly, the valve was swinging downward.
“Well!” He retreated hastily. “ ’Tis your own folly, lad!”
Bob Star sprang into the open chamber. Quick, cautious footsteps were approaching along the deck within. He flattened against the curving wall, caught his breath. The blunt nose of a proton gun came into view.
Few such situations had been neglected in Bob Star’s very thorough course at the legion academy. And he was master of all he had studied—until it came to the very act of killing. It was only then that the mounting pain of the old scar staggered him, that the fear born of the ray came screaming to seize him.
He caught the weapon and the hand that grasped it. His quick tug brought a burly, bearded man to his knees within the little chamber. He was twice Bob Star’s weight, rugged, powerful; yet quickness told, and the skill of long training. A last thrust found a nerve in his neck; he collapsed, with a final, shuddering shriek: “Don’t——”
Bob Star tumbled him out of the valve.
“Giles,” he called softly, “a prisoner for you.”
HE RAN BACK within. Silence met him on the curiously littered deck. The bridge was deserted, the floor scattered with torn, neglected charts. Doors to the cabins swung open upon dusty disorder. The air reeked of stale food, decay, filth.
He climbed into the gloom beneath the blazing searchlight, and found the turret empty. The man he fought had been alone. He returned to the air lock and called:
“Commander, the Halcyon Bird is ours.”
The prisoner, recovering in the icy mist, was screaming: “I am Mark Lardo. I can pay for my life; I can buy food!”
Bob Star and Jay Kalam, twelve hours later, were in the small bridge room. Disorder had vanished. The mutilated charts had been gathered up. Bob Star was cleaning and inspecting the scattered instruments.
Hal Samdu, who had been clearing the rubbish from decks and living quarters, entered to report: “Jay, the prisoner in the brig is howling like a wolf.”
“He’s insane,” said Jay Kalam. “And not much wonder. We can’t do anything for him. Have you finished?”
“Aye, Jay, she begins to look again like a proper legion cruiser. Have you learned yet how she came to be here?”
The commander’s eyes fell briefly to the torn, stained pages before him.
“Justin Malkar’s log,” he said, “gives the outline of the story. It seems that Malkar wanted to surrender on Callisto. Conscience had overtaken him; he was ready to pay for his treason with his life.
“Mark Lardo, however, came aboard with a dozen of his armed henchmen, and forced him to start on the flight to Neptune. Departure was hurried. They were short of fuel in the beginning, yet there seems to have been enough to have made the voyage.
“Malkar’s entries are a little obscure, yet it is quite plain that he drove the ship off her course, deliberately wasting fuel. The cathode plates were exhausted before deceleration of space velocity was complete, and it was necessary to use all the rocket fuel, to prevent a crash into the planet.
“Until the end, Malkar let his companions believe that they would land safely on the Isle of Shylar—he could have taken them there, just as easily. He records their consternation with evident satisfaction, together with the fact that the food aboard was sufficient to last only a few months.
“His last entry is an odd, jingling little Ode to Justice.”
He turned a soiled, mutilated page.
“The rest we must read for ourselves. Somehow, as the food ran low, Mark Lardo got his twenty-two companions outside—perhaps he reported a rescue ship landing near. Anyhow, he locked them out to perish.”
“The remains we found——” Bob Star was voiceless with horror.
“Precisely. Mark Lardo was the beast.”
“Ah, so,” said Giles Habibula, shuffling in. “The galley is full of mortal human bones.”
“The artist in the queer soul of Justin Malkar,” mused Jay Kalam, “would be well satisfied with the retribution of Mark Lardo.”
Faintly, from the distant brig, Bob Star could hear the hoarse, animal screams of the mad fugitive: “Don’t turn me out! They are waiting in the dark, waiting for my flesh. Don’t turn me out!”
“Ah, Jay,” Giles Habibula said sadly, “ ’twas a mortal weary task you gave me. But I’ve cleared up the power rooms, as you bade me, and inspected the rockets and geodynes.”
All three faced him anxiously as Jay Kalam asked: “Are they in working order?”
The old man inclined the yellow globe of his head.
“Ah, so, Jay. The generators are the sweetest I ever touched. But the cathode plates are gone, to the last ounce. And the rocket fuel left in the tanks would not move the ship a precious inch!”
XIII.
GILES HABIBULA remained on guard, while the others tramped the frozen miles to the wreck and staggered back under heavy drums of rocket fuel. Then the old man primed the injectors, and Bob Star, navigator, took his stand on the bridge. With a roar of blue flame, the Halcyon Bird broke free of the frost, and soared through green dusk to the wreck.
For many hours, then, they labored, carrying cathode plates and drums of rocket fuel from the intact stores beneath the chart house of the dead Invincible. Giles Habibula set the galley in order and stocked it from the wreck, and when, at last, the Halcyon Bird was ready for flight, his deft hands had a hot meal waiting.
“Now,” said Bob Star, “we’re off for the comet!”
“Aye,” rumbled Hal Samdu, gloomily savage. “But it took us too long. If that murderer has found Aladoree there——”
His eyes fell to his spoon, and Bob Star saw that it was crumbled into shapeless metal.
“It isn’t long,” said Jay Kalam slowly, almost wearily, “since I left this spot, for the comet. I had a ship a thousand times the size of this, with a thousand times the fighting power. Out there is the wreck of it.”
But elation surged up in Bob Star as he rose hastily from the neat white table. Relaxation and warm food filled him with confidence. He was drunk with the joy of escape from bleak Neptune, eager for the bright freedom of space and the blood-hastening song of speeding geodynes.
“We’re all dead tired, I know,” Jay Kalam was saying. “But we must take no time to rest, until we’re off.”
He sent Bob Star back to the bridge, Giles Habibula to the power rooms, Hal Samdu to the gun turret.
And they burst at last from freezing clouds into the clear immensity of space. A dimly green, oblate sphere, Neptune fell away into a blackness that was pierced with the myriad eternal stars, webbed with the pale silver stuff of nebula:. Bob Star shut off the rockets. The geodynes sang loud, and the greenish sphere, below the small, ghostly globe of Triton, visibly diminished.
The Sun flamed bright and tiny in the void, an amazing star. Great Jupiter and tawny Saturn were faint and far-off flecks, beside it. Earth could not be seen.
Bob Star’s eyes were on the green, pale ellipse of the comet ahead. He was alone in the little room. The only sound was the high-pitched hum of hard-driven generators, and the faint clickings from chronometers and charting instruments. Out of the hard, eternal splendor of space, the comet returned his gaze, like a green, malignant eye.
He was thinking again of its mystery, its wonder. Twelve million miles long, it had a thousand times the mass of Earth—yet the Cometeers had steered it Sunward like a ship.
The Cometeers!
Obviously, they were superintelligent. They were invisible, or could make themselves so. The armament of their unseen scouting vessel had destroyed the system’s most powerful fighting ship, had dissolved mankind’s strongest fortress into liquid flame.
MEN knew no more of the Cometeers.
Looking at that green, hypnotic eye, Bob Star tried to picture them. Could they be human? He tried to believe that they were, for their humanity meant to him the reality of the girl—or the vision—who had come to warn him in the prison. The alluring, baffling riddle of her was always with him, and he clung to his belief in her reality, in spite of Giles Habibula and Jay Kalam.
“Lad, lad!” the old man had chided. “You’ve been dreaming. You’ve lived too much alone. ’Tis true you have a mortal need of such a lovely maid as you describe. But you must not let the need build her out of your dreams.”
“Dreams!” cried Bob Star. “She’s as real as you are! And in terrible trouble—you could see it on her face. And if ever Stephen Orco is killed, and I am free, I’m going to find her——”
The tall commander had expressed an equal skepticism.
“If she were real, Bob, she couldn’t very well be a native of the system. We have no inkling of any scientific principle that would enable the projection of such an image as you describe, without terminal apparatus. You believe she’s an inhabitant of the comet, Bob. But the odds against that are multiplied billions to one.”
Bob Star whispered, “Why?”
“The forms possible to life are so infinitely various,” the commander said deliberately, “the structural adaptations of protoplasm to environmental influences are so amazingly complex, that probably on all the planets of all the suns in the entire universe, there never was and never will be another race that could be called human.
“I think, Bob, that Giles is right—you should regard your vision as purely subjective, a product of your fears together with the curious force that rendered you unconscious. Rather than human, it is more likely that the Cometeers are something you wouldn’t recognize as life at all.”
Bob Star stared back at the never-blinking, insidious green orb of the comet, until the ship and the world ceased to exist. He and the eye were alone in space. And the eye was drawing him onward, into nameless doom.
If the Cometeers weren’t human, what were they? Grotesque things of flesh? Formless amoeboid protoplasm? Animate vegetables?
Or stranger still, could they be collocations of elements unknown in the system? Perhaps spheres or cubes or other fantastic forms?
Or could the comet, he wondered, be a single sentient entity? Might its life exist not in discrete individuals but as an attribute of the whole?
Horror took root in his mind, feeding upon his fantastic speculations. The commander brought no relief, when he came to take the bridge. Bob Star reported their course, position, and velocity mechanically.
He was reeling away, with hardly another word, when the exclamation stopped him: “Pluto! Isn’t it beyond its normal orbital position?”
Like an automaton, Bob Star stumbled to consult his log.
“Pluto had already left its orbit, commander,” he reported wearily, “when I took the first observations, off Neptune. It has since been moving toward the comet, with continually increasing acceleration.”
“Toward the comet?” The commander’s face was grave, but the grimness of his dark face revealed consternation.
“Perhaps,” Bob Star suggested from his dull apathy, “the planet has been grasped with such a beam of force as you say seized the Invincible.”
Wearily, he rubbed at the white scar on his forehead.
“The people——” whispered Jay Kalam. “The colonists—what will become of them?”
“I don’t know, commander,” said Bob Star, blankly.
“If Pluto has been snatched away, another planet may be taken, and another.” Jay Kalam was husky with dread. “The Sun may be stripped of planets.”
“Yes, sir,” said Bob Star, without interest.
The commander looked at him with sudden intentness.
“You are very tired, Bob. Go ahead to your quarters and sleep.”
BOB STAR saluted like a run-down robot, and staggered away. He dropped, fully dressed, upon his bunk. But sleep evaded him. The green eye of the comet had assumed a fearful, penetrating power. It was looking into his cabin, searching his very mind. He shrank from it, shuddering, but he could never escape it.
The thin whine of the generators was eerie, hypnotic music. His numbed mind broke it into weird minor bars. When it carried him at last into an uneasy half sleep, horror followed.
Nightmares came, in which the Cometeers assumed every dread shape that his waking brain had suggested, and beset him in frightful hordes. He and the girl struggled side by side, vainly, to fend off nameless doom.
He woke with a sudden start, rigid, drenched with ice sweat. Loud and uncouth and terrible, he could hear the screams of fear-ridden mad Mark Lardo.
The four days that followed were to Bob Star four eternities of anxious strain.
“In five hours at our present rate of deceleration,” he reported to Jay Kalam at last, “we should reach the surface of the comet.”
“Still,” said the commander gravely, “I cannot believe that we shall be allowed to approach it, unopposed.”
He took the controls, and Bob Star went to see the others. Hal Samdu was in the gun turret, lying back in the padded seat, fast asleep. It was no quiet slumber. His great limbs were tense, jerking spasmodically. He was muttering, groaning.
“Take that!” Bob Star distinguished the words. “For Aladoree!”
He went down into the power rooms. Giles Habibula was sitting on the floor beside the geodynes, with his fat legs spread wide. Empty bottles were scattered about him. One not empty was standing between his legs.
He was very drunk. Only his voice and the uncanny deftness of his hands seemed unaffected.
Jay Kalam’s soft voice whispered from a speaker. The old man dragged himself heavily to his feet, and lurched toward the generators. His hands made some quick, skillful adjustment. His small, dull eyes scanned their humming masses with affectionate care.
He collapsed again, beside the bottle.
His bloodshot eyes, wandering across the floor, found Bob Star’s feet, and climbed to his face. He started.
“Mortal me!” he gasped. “You gave me a dreadful fright, lad. My first fancy was to see some bloody, monstrous thing, creeping in to destroy me. Ah, ’tis a fearful voyage, lad! A fearful voyage! ’Tis mortal certain we’ll never live to reach the comet.
“Sit down with me, lad,” he urged, “and share a drop of wine. The blessed warmth of it will drive a little of the cold fear from your heart. Ah, old Giles Habibula should have been a sorry soldier, lad, but for the precious courage that comes foaming from the bottle!
“And now it matters not what the miserable doctors may say. Old Giles has no fit stomach for his blessed wine, they say. And his poor old heart is about to stop. But wretched old Giles Habibula will never die of his precious wine—that is mortal clear!
