Collected short fiction, p.283
Collected Short Fiction, page 283
It was an uncomfortable and perilous business. Even in the calm, numbing cold seeped into my furs. One false step could hurl me to death—perhaps in the same frigid chasm that already had swallowed Bell. If a blizzard should rise, there was small chance that we could retrace a way through its blinding fury back to camp.
I pressed on steadily, however. During the months at the Pole my old friendship for Merry Bell had deepened. I understood the torture of guilt he felt for Mawson Kroll’s old crime. And I had come to share his eager hope of thawing the polar world.
Sometimes I called Bell’s name into the frosty silence, but there was no reply save some brittle echo from the ice peaks. The hours passed, and my hope ebbed away. Glancing back, I saw an ominous bank of haze blotting out the poleward stars.
A blizzard was on the way.
DESPAIRINGLY, I was about to turn back when I saw a tiny gleam of light, far off to the left. Thinking that it was Bell, perhaps helpless, making a signal with his flashlight, I turned toward it.
Half an hour of stumbling effort brought me to the beacon. It was Bell’s pocket light, lying on the top of a lofty hummock and weighted with a block of ice. But he was not with it. The wavering trail of his boots led on across tire snow, northward, toward the Mountains of Uranus.
But he must have left the light for a signal. Why?
The answer was a fluttering sheet of paper, pinned under the light. I snatched it out. A sheet torn from Bell’s notebook, it was written awkwardly with ice-numbed fingers, addressed to me:
Dear Ron:
I can see the reflection of your light. I know you must be following. Please come no farther—it will only endanger your life. Let me go in peace.
You may have seen her—the wondrous being who came for me. If you did, you can understand. If you did not, no word of mine can tell you.
She is Maru-Mora, the Seeker, the last survivor of an elder people. She has wisdom older than the human race, and powers that science has not dreamed of. And she is alone.
She has come to me often, Ron, while I slept. She has taken me three times out of my body, to her dwelling on the mountain. Now she has called me again.
For ever.
This may be hard to understand, Ron. But I hope you will try, for we have been friends. I love Maru-Mora. I know she is non-human. Ours is no physical love, but a calling of kindred minds. And we are to be together.
I know already that this will cost my life, Ron. That is a small price, and I pay it cheerfully. I feared that you and the rest would think me insane. That is why I have said nothing. But please understand.
For I love the Seeker as I could never love any woman. And life holds nothing more for me—you know that Mawson Kroll murdered my soul.
There is another reason, also, why I must go. I once hoped to thaw the polar ice, but that can never be. Maru-Mora has showed me the unthinkable horror that dwells beneath, waiting its chance to overwhelm the world. She says she warned you, Ron. For the sake of humanity, heed that warning!
Therefore I go, taking the secret of atomic power with me, lest it should fall into the hands of another Mawson Kroll. Good-bye, Ron. I am sorry to leave you. I beg you to watch Harding. The change in him is more diabolical than you suspect.
I am getting cold. Can’t write more.
BELL.
THAT paper trembled as my hand held it in the silver funnel of light. With a strange mixture of feelings, I read it twice.
Maru-Mora! All the golden beauty of that elfin bust in its opalescent shell came back to me. I could see how such a man as Bell, lonely and estranged, might love that alien being with a passionate devotion.
Yet, Bell was a dear friend of mine. I could not see him surrender to an emotion so tragic, so hopeless. Ignoring the threatened blizzard, I followed his trail on into the north.
The surface for a space was more level. The tracks in the snow were clear. They showed that Bell was exhausted, reeling, staggering. This wild march had been too much for his unaccustomed strength. I knew that it would be difficult to get him safely back to camp before the blizzard struck.
It must have been an hour later when I saw—the Seeker!
Silently, she rose from a point on the trail ahead—a golden woman, scarlet-crested, flying in a vase of shining pearl. High and swiftly she soared away, straight toward one black rounded peak in the far-off Mountains of Uranus.
I stumbled fearfully ahead. At the spot from which she had risen, I found Merry Bell, lying motionless where he had fallen from a twenty-foot ice cliff.
Dull red stained the snow about his head. His extremities were already frozen, but warmth was still in his body. I knew that he had lived until a few minutes before—until about the time I had seen that weird shining being fly back toward her mountain.
I cursed the Seeker, then, despite all that Bell had said of loving her, of giving his life willingly. For he had been a friend, and she had lured him out to die. . . .
I covered his body in a shallow grave, with a cross cut into the ice above his head, and whispered the Lord’s Prayer over him. Bell had not been religious, nor was I. Yet the strangeness of that alien being, flying away from his dying body, had made me shudder with a superstitious fear.
Grief was heavy in me, and my senses dulled with a wondering dread, as I left the grave and turned wearily back toward camp. Bell’s death, of course I thought, had ended the attempt to thaw the ice. I supposed that, as soon as the weather permitted us to level space for a take-off, we should fly back toward civilization.
That ominous bank of haze rose swiftly before me, however. And the blizzard struck, with insane sudden violence, before I had covered a fourth of the distance. Savage wind hammered me. Cold pierced like probing needles. Whipped ice-crystals blinded and stung.
In the teeth of it I struggled on. I was soon reeling with fatigue, but, already numb with cold, I dared not stop to rest. Wind whipped the drifts into strange configurations. I could not retrace my steps. Blundering along, blinded, I slipped into a black pit.
Snow fell with me, buried me, suffocating. I floundered about, gasping for breath. It cost me an hour’s exhausting struggle to escape the chasm. Then I was dismayed to find that the compass, as well as my gun, had been lost in the snow.
The wind had grown harder, and, I thought, shifted. Without the compass, I knew, there was no hope of finding camp. I was lost in the blinding storm.
8. The Thing in the Snow
THE remainder of that march is like an evil dream: bitter cold, draining effort, screaming wind piercing through my furs, driving snow a cruel blinding mist. My body was numb. Sensations became vague. Sense of time and reality were gone.
Without the gyro-compass, there was small chance of finding the camp again. It was little more than the old stubborn will to live that kept me on my feet. My dulled mind, however, felt no surprize when the up-tilted wing of a plane loomed dark in the flickering cone of my light.
It was the Austral Queen, I thought, uncovered and blown out of her hangar by the fury of the storm. She would have to be moored and covered again. Dimly, I wondered if she had been damaged, if our ice-hewn shelter had survived the wind.
The others—Jerry, Harding, Veering—might be in need of aid. But the thin beam of my light, smothered in flying snow, revealed no familiar landmark. I didn’t know which way to search. And I was too far exhausted for any continued effort.
Dazedly I staggered up the last frozen slope, against that blast of stinging, blinding ice, pried open the frost-locked door, and stumbled gratefully into the shelter of the slanting cabin.
I remember no more: I must have fallen immediately asleep. The wind had moderated a little when I woke. However cold, stiff, and weary, I was still alive. Reluctantly I stirred, to search for the others.
The plane lay on one side. The cabin was a confusion of broken instruments, equipment, and wreckage, covered with sifted snow. I clambered outside to investigate the extent of the disaster. The light’s white finger played over the wreck. My heart sank. It was hopeless. One wing was altogether crushed. The plane was beyond repair.
The catastrophe staggered me. I couldn’t understand it. Our ice-hangar had been constructed with habitual care. I had thought the plane safe from any possible freak of the wind.
My searching light quivered, stopped. There was something unfamiliar in the cambre of the intact wing, in the design of the crushed fuselage.
This wasn’t the Austral Queen at all!
Lost, I had stumbled by sheer accident upon the wreck of some other plane. And I was still lost. In the gloom I clambered over the wreckage, found the shattered propeller, the motor hurled forward from its mount. I identified the ship: it was an old Albatross monoplane, twenty years out of date.
I scraped the crust of frost from the side of her crumpled fuselage, traced with the flashlight the painted letters: Elida L——
Elida Lee! I thrilled to a shudder of wondering dread. My boyhood came back, and the newspaper stories that first turned my mind to flying. Those had been the pioneer days of aerial exploration, when the exploits—or, too often, the deaths—of Lindbergh, Will Rogers, Wiley Post, Amelia Earhart, Amundsen, Ellsworth, Byrd—of them and many more, filled the front pages. And the “Flying Lees,” as the papers called them, had been the bravest of that daring band.
I remembered their last flight. It was twenty years ago, when I was fourteen. Emulating the feat of the Russians, in making a highway of the top of the world, they had left Capetown, planning to fly to New Zealand across the South Pole. Their radio had failed as they came over the ice-blocked coast of Enderby Land. The last interrupted message stated that they had decided to go on, in spite of the trouble. And they had never come back.
This shattered wreck, then, must be the coffin of those gifted flyers, man and wife, Wilbur and Elida Lee, whose dauntless skill had thrilled my boyhood!
Searching through the snow in the fuselage again, however, I did not find the gruesome things I expected. I uncovered navigation instruments, a hunting-rifle in its case, empty food cans, a little gasoline stove, blankets, and finally the frost-stiffened brief-case that held their records.
I saw that they must have survived the accident, living on in the poor shelter of the cabin. In the brief-case I found the diary of Wilbur Lee. Breathlessly, numb with the horror of that old tragedy and yet trembling with increasing amazement, I read the brief, inadequate notes the doomed flyer had written:
MARCH 18, 1939. Wrecked two days ago. Both well enough, but for my crushed foot. But there is no hope of rescue or escape, so late in the season. We must face that.
I was a fool—I see it now. And Elida was too good a sport to tell me so. This flight was a reckless thing. We were going to retire. This was the last throw.
It was the landing that cracked us up. We came down to examine a thing we saw on the snow. It looked like some prehistoric monster. It is near, though a drift hides it now. I shall examine it when my foot permits.
March 19. God knows why I write this. The odds are a thousand to one that no other eye will ever see it. Rescue is impossible. Yet there is a satisfaction in pretending to carry on.
Elida is brave. We should have been prepared for this. But we aren’t. We had a trust in our luck. We never looked straight at the horrible reality. It couldn’t happen to us. But it has happened—as surely as if we were already dead. There are supplies for two months. After that——
March 26. A week’s blizzard. I had no heart to write. I tried to comfort Elida, though the truth may be that I am the more dependent on her calm strength. I was never made for such a trial as this. If it weren’t for my foot——
March 27. We are weak already, from trying to conserve our rations, though why the urge to prolong our hopeless existence, God knows. We have the rifle. Two quick shots would solve our problem. Is that the better way?
Still I have not seen the Thing. I spent yesterday improvising a crutch, meaning to go. But this morning I found excuses to stay. Am I afraid?
March 28. Last night’s wind removed the drift. The thing can be seen from the plane. It is incredible. Surely the earth never gave birth to such a monster. Did it land here, a visitor from Space, and freeze in the ice? So Elida suggests.
Alive, it must have stood twenty feet tall. God! it must have been frightful. Fortunate, if Elida is right, that it came down here, not in civilization.
March 50. Two days of blizzard. Bitter cold. We suffer. But it is a blessing, for drifting snow shuts out sight of the monster. That would drive us mad.
April 2. Last glimpse of the sun yesterday. We shall not see it again. Weak and hungry. What is the use?
April 3. Elida today confessed her state. A shock to me. She knew before we left Capetown, but said nothing because she didn’t want to disappoint me about the flight. It makes no difference now, for we can only die. But the tragedy is doubled.
April 4. Last night I did not sleep, considering the possibility that Elida, alone, might survive the winter. Surely another expedition will come with the sun. I have only to walk away on my crutch, while she sleeps. Perhaps it is my duty, for the sake of the child. Yet what hell it would be for Elida! Very scant rations, even for one. And she fears the monster more than I.
April 3. Elida must have read my mind. She begs me not to go—not to leave her alone with That. Better die together, she says. And so I gave my word.
April 13 (?). I have lost track of the terrible days. Weak. Delirium. One vision most persistent. Haunts the plane like a ghost. I have seen it three times. Elida also. Collective hallucination? Or are we going mad?
It appears like the head and shoulders of a tiny golden woman, rising from a conical shell. The shell flies above the snow. She sings. Elida says she is calling us to follow her across the snow. But it is death to leave the plane.
May (?). Food half gone. I insist we eat enough. No benefit in hours of agony. An effort at resignation. Would it be better to walk together into the blizzard? There is no hope. Yet Elida’s love is a joy. She was praying today.
May (later). Maru-Mora came again. Elida calls her that. She sang again. It is a terrible thin crying, yet musical. Elida wanted to follow her. I restrained her by force. Maru-Mora will give us food, she says, and shelter. That I know is delirium.
The scaled black thing is still outside on the snow. It is real. I kept looking to see if it had moved, until Elida covered the window. I wonder whence it came. And when it was alive.
Later. The thing is still alive. It never moves, but I feel life in it. An indwelling horror. I know that it is waiting for us to die. Waiting. God! can it take us after death?
I want to take all our food and leave the plane. No hope of escape—I am helpless on the crutch. But I want to get as far as possible from the thing. I don’t want to lie dead here beside it. For I have dreamed twice that we were lying stiff and cold, and it woke and stirred and came to eat our bodies. I have not told Elida that.
Later. Elida is gone. Maru-Mora was here again. She was singing, calling to Elida. I slept—it was because of this damned weakness; I had been putting food back. When I woke they both were gone.
I feel stronger now after eating. I am going to search for Elida. Probably I shall not find her. I know I can’t go far on the crutch. But at least I shall die farther from the thing in the snow.
FAINTLY scrawled in a trembling hand, that was the last entry. Foreseeing his fate, Wilbur Lee had left his diary and gone to seek his wife, as I had followed Merry Bell. That was twenty years ago.
Maru-Mora! what manner of being was she? Splendid in her alien beauty, how many had she lured to death on the glaciers? Could she lead some vampire-life, feeding on those who followed her?
The diary had warned me of the thing waiting beside the wreck. I should have been prepared for. it. Its stark reality, however, came with an impact of shattering violence.
The dark sky was almost clear again, although the bitter wind still swept a few wraiths of cloud across the wheeling stars. Like dying embers sprinkled with some chemical, the aurora burned with feeble, changing, many-colored flames, beyond the poleward range.
The questing white finger of my light found the thing that had brought the Lees down to die, sixty yards from the wreck. Huge and monstrous, it loomed appallingly above the wind-carved drifts. I staggered a little way toward it, until amazed terror stiffened me.
For it was incredible.
And it woke all the horror of my most dreadful memory.
Barrel-like and hideous, the black-scaled body of it towered colossal above the ice. Thick tremendous cables, snakelike, its three giant limbs coiled fast about the projections of a shattered granite boulder.
Unmistakably, it was the Watcher! The same fearsome frozen being that Maru-Mora had shown me in that weird experience that I had tried to believe a dream, when she had also carried me down beneath the ice to witness the frightful horde of this monster’s fellows, rigid in the ice that held their Cyclopean ship.
The Watcher of the Tharshoon! I needed no more support of Maru-Mora’s warning that the unthinkable invaders, now held motionless by her weapon of sleep, might wake again to attack the world.
Bitterly, vainly, I regretted my blind folly in bringing Harding’s expedition to the Pole. And I was glad, in the rigor of horror that gripped me—almost glad—that Merry Bell was dead, so that his discovery of atomic power could not be used to thaw the ice.
I wanted to go closer to this frozen creature, to examine it in detail. But an inexplicable, overwhelming fear had come into me at the first glimpse of it. My heart was pounding. I had to put down an insane urge to run, a trembling fear that the monster would wake to pursue me.
Utterly irrational as I knew that dread to be, all the knowledge thirst of the scientist in me could not overcome it. I did, nevertheless, examine the being as well as possible from where I stood.
A curious smooth ridge, black, glassy, and about two feet wide, belted the middle of it. Above were three curious protuberances, equally spaced, which, I imagined, must cover organs of sense. A hideous triangular snout projected above the great scales of its bulging upper hemisphere.
