Collected short fiction, p.423
Collected Short Fiction, page 423
“You’ll be paid.” Brand gestured violently toward the door. “Now get out! One of my freighters is blasting off for Mars, tonight. Kellon will give you your hell-stone, and see that you are safe aboard.
“Now, get—”
Brand’s voice was choked off. The threatening gesture froze. His narrow face went lividly pale. Agony twisted it, and his rolling eyes dilated hideously. He uttered a dry, gasping shriek. The weighted belt dragged his shuddering body to the floor. He snatched frantically at the leg of a desk, as if afraid he would fall out of the room.
He had the gillies.
CHAPTER III
A DOOR burst open. Two men in white brought a stretcher into the room. They lifted upon it the sobbing, screaming thing that was Vero Brand, and strapped down the jerking limbs. They carried the stretcher away. One of them looked back at Haldane with sardonic eyes.
“So you’re the great psykinetologist?” he said. “You can cure the gillies?”
The closing door shut out the sounds of Brand’s agony.
A little ill himself, Haldane walked out of the laboratory, back into the cold violet light of the Chardion field. The fantastic rugged landscape had lost all its eerie beauty. It was merely strange. The nearness of the horizon was somehow frightening. He couldn’t escape a dim mad nagging fear that he would fall off Veron.
A guard followed him, on clicking sandals.
“Your guide, doctor,” he said respectfully. “By Mr. Brand’s order. Do you want to see Veron?”
Perhaps he was a guide, but he was also a keeper.
“Take me back to my rooms,” Haldane said. “I want to see Miss Kane.”
But Madelone had already gone, with Kellon. Haldane waited for her, fighting a dim but growing alarm. The luxury of the castle on the lake, and all the wonders of Veron, meant nothing to him. He tried to get the guard to take him to Madelone, or to carry a message to her.
“My orders don’t include that, doctor.”
Haldane urged and begged and questioned him, in vain. More and more, he felt that he was a helpless prisoner. At last—when he knew it must be almost blasting time, for the freighter—there was a rap on the door. He ran to answer, hoping that it might be Madelone. Kellon entered, alone.
“Dr. Haldane,” he said stiffly, “Mr. Brand is a man of his word. Despite your failure, he has ordered me to give you the hell-stone you were promised. Here it is.”
He held out a little black jewel-box. Mechanically, Haldane accepted it. He opened it, and an involuntary cry of admiration escaped his lips.
“Do you like it?” Kellon’s voice had a suave, maddening mockery. “The name of it is the Star of Dreams.”
The jewel, against the black velvet, was a drop of living, incredible light. A little crystal sphere, no larger than the end of his thumb. But the dancing color and splendor within it somehow filled his eyes with tears.
“Madelone,” he whispered, “will love it.”
Queer, how the jewel made him think of Madelone. The red sparks that danced in the bright tiny globe were suddenly the red of her hair. The emerald flecks were the green of her eyes. He saw her lips in the wings of red, her fair skin in the moon-white shadows.
“She must see it.” He snapped the box shut, and looked into Kellon’s hard brown face. Alarm choked him. He tried to swallow it. “Where—where is Madelone?”
Kellon’s smooth face held a secret triumph.
“I’ve brought you a message from her,” he said suavely. “She has decided to remain on Veron. She must like our little world, because she has promised to marry me. She asked me to bring you her farewells.”
Haldane gulped incredulously. Perhaps they had quarreled. Perhaps he had been jealous and unjust. After all, any woman might prefer a dashing spaceman to a struggling doctor, and the strange luxury of Veron to a suburban bungalow. But it wasn’t like Madelone, not to tell him so herself.
“I don’t believe it,” he blurted.
“What you believe is no longer important.” Kellon’s voice rang cold with undisguised dislike. “You have the hell-stone, and that’s what you came for. The freighter Moonbrand is blasting off in fifteen minutes. I’ll escort you aboard.”
Haldane caught his breath.
“I won’t go—not until I’ve talked with Madelone.”
Kellon said nothing. He merely made an amused hard smile, and let his steady, space-burned hand drop toward the bright ion-gun at his belt. He nodded toward the door.
Haldane felt sick inside. But there was nothing he could do. He had trained himself to conquer the secret terrors of the mind. But he wasn’t fitted to deal with hard fists and flaming jets and the savage law of space. He picked up his bag, and walked obediently ahead of Kellon.
An elevator dropped them out of the palace, through the heart of Veron, to the space port. Haldane stumbled unwillingly into the Moonbrand’s air-lock. A blue-jowled, sloppy looking fat man was waiting there.
“Captain Roe,” Kellon told him, “this is Dr. Haldane. You have your orders.” He turned to Haldane. “Captain Roe will take you to Mars. My suggestion, doctor, is to keep to your cabin and mind your own business.”
The valves clanged. The elevator lifted, to the gloomy passenger deck. A cowed, hungry-looking cabin boy showed Haldane to a dingy, cramped cubicle. The blasting-siren wailed, and Haldane lay down on the hard narrow bunk.
Booming rockets hurled the Moonbrand into space. Inflexors hummed, driving her away from the strange, invisible rock named Veron. Haldane sat up on the bunk. He felt weak and ill. He was tortured with an agony of doubt.
Had Kellon told the truth?
Had Madelone stayed behind, of her own free will? This dirty little room, the sodden blankets, the stale damp air reeking with soured human odors—all made a strange contrast to the splendid luxury of Veron. No, he couldn’t blame Madelone, for her choice.
But still it wasn’t like her, not to say goodby.
He opened the little black box. The Star of Dreams transformed the room. It banished the odors from the air, and the spots from the metal walls, and the soggy chill of the blankets.
A drop of living light. How could anything so tiny hold such perfect beauty—such haunting and somehow terrible beauty? His throat ached. Tears dimmed his vision of it.
The spinning colors in it seemed to dance with joy for a moment, in a way that was somehow like the dancing of Madelone. Then they spun into a frantic madness. Red flared angrily. That brief fury ebbed into a weary and hurt defeat. The pulse of strange life became hopeless and slow, and the only color left was a dull sad blue.
“Madelone,” he whispered to the jewel. “Didn’t you know I loved you?”
Somehow, that set the wings of color to spinning again. Once more he saw the bright glint of Madelone’s hair, and the cool green of her eyes. The dance swirled faster, and the colors grew wrathful. It slowed again, and they faded into blue despair. Sadness crept out of the Star of Dreams, and into his heart.
Was true beauty always painful?
Slowly, he replaced the jewel in the box.
Sitting dispiritedly on the narrow bunk, he tried to look into the future. In two weeks, he would be back in New York. He would collect his fees from the Bank of Mars, and find a purchaser for the Star of Dreams, and set about organizing the Psykinetic Foundation.
But Madelone wouldn’t be there, to laugh with her green eyes at his blunders, and made her own clear-headed suggestions. He supposed he would have to look for another nurse. The thought filled him with a dull gray ache.
Suppose that Kellon had lied?
He tried to keep the fear out of his mind. Even if he knew that Madelone was a prisoner, there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t even guess the location of that invisible, fortified rock, not within a hundred million miles.
He couldn’t escape the urge to do something, to find out the truth—somehow. He grappled again with the riddle of Vero Brand. Where had the sick man got his millions? From the sale of hell-stones? Was the long-sought hell-stone lode on Veron? What was the secret dread that held Brand a prisoner there—the fear so terrible that he refused to speak of it, even to save himself from the gillies?
But the answers, Haldane thought bitterly, were no use, now. He tried to forget those mocking questions. He tried to forget that he had failed, in the most important case he had ever attempted to treat. He tried to forget about Madelone Kane. At last, with the jewel in its case under his pillow, he went to sleep.
He dreamed of Madelone.
She was standing beside his bunk, tall and slender and beautiful. Her face was pale, her dark eyes brimming with tears of bewilderment and fear. She was trying to tell him something urgently important.
Only, somehow, she couldn’t speak.
Haldane woke tense and trembling. It was hard to dispell the impression that Madelone had actually been with him in the room. He sat up on the sodden blankets and snapped on the dim unshaded light and opened the jewel-box.
The Star of Dreams flashed joyously. It flamed into red wrath. The wrath died once again, into a slow dull blue pulse of hopeless despair.
“Madelone,” Haldane whispered, “what has happened to you?”
The weary colors throbbed again, and died. He turned the jewel on his palm. Every movement of its dancing lights spoke to him of Madelone. What grim mockery had made Kellon name it the Star of Dreams?
What was a hell-stone, anyhow?
He remembered a report that he had seen, from a laboratory of the Space Police. The tested jewels had been absolutely weightless. They were too hard to be scratched by any other material. They didn’t conduct heat or electricity, and they were unchanged by the highest temperature of the electric furnace. Chemical and spectographic tests failed to identify the matter that composed them—if they were composed of matter.
He let the jewel drift off his palm. He remembered reading of one that had come out of its setting, when a society dowager dropped her brooch on the street, and floated away like a tiny balloon. A bubble of cold, mysterious light.
What was it?
Wearily, Haldane recaptured the Star of Dreams, and put it back in the box. He tried to sleep again. And once more he thought that Madelone was with him. She was trying to speak to him, wrathful and weeping and afraid because she couldn’t.
Abruptly the room spun, and fell with them. He grasped for Madelone, and woke, and knew that she had been only a dream. The jewel-box was clutched in his clammy hand. A smothering silence filled the ship. The hum of the inflexors had stopped.
Weightless and clumsy, Haldane hastily pulled on his clothes. Sharp intuition told him that something was wrong. He slipped the Star of Dreams into a zipper-topped inside pocket, and hid the empty box under the bunk, and flung himself out into the circular corridor.
The frightened-looking cabin boy was staring into the elevator shaft. Gripping a hand rail, to keep from going head foremost into the dark pit, Haldane demanded:
“What’s happening?”
“An armed ship,” stammered the pasty-faced boy. “P-p-p-pirates, maybe. They fired a geo-torpedo, and made us cut our inflexors. They’re locking valves, now, to c-c-c-come aboard. I guess they want m-m-m-men—we’ve no valuable cargo.” He shuddered. “I don’t want to blast with pirates. The M-M-M-Moonbrand’s bad enough.”
Down the black shaft, valves clanged. Air hissed. The elevator mechanism hummed softly. Haldane thrust himself back, as the little cage stopped in front of them. The trembling boy fled into an empty cabin.
Two big men in Space Police uniform stepped clicking out of the elevator, followed by the freighter’s blue-jowled captain. Pointing a fat grimy finger at Haldane, the latter rasped:
“He your man?”
“He is if he has the stolen hellstone,” said the one with the inspector’s badge. “Search his quarters, lieutenant.”
The lieutenant clattered into Haldane’s room. Clinging with sweaty hands to the rail, Haldane felt sick and helpless. He saw what was happening, but there was nothing he could do. In half a minute the lieutenant came back and thrust the empty jewel-box under his nose, snarling:
“Where is it?”
Haldane said nothing. It wasn’t necessary. Rough efficient hands found he Star of Dreams, and tossed that droplet of wondrous light triumphantly in front of him. The jewel was alive with frantic light again, the purple of alarm.
“That’s all we wanted, Captain,” the big inspector said. “We won’t delay you any farther. You can turn the doctor over to the regular authorities on Mars—if he doesn’t decide to cheat the lethal chamber by hanging himself in the elevator shaft.”
“We’ll take care of the doctor,” promised Captain Roe.
The little elevator dropped, with the three.
Haldane gripped the rail with wet, tense hands. Real police wouldn’t leave a suspected criminal to continue the voyage—with veiled instructions for his murder. Suddenly he was quite certain that Madelone hadn’t willingly stayed behind. He remembered Kellon’s “sister.” Vague suspicions crystallized, into a grim conviction that Veron was the rendezvous of the criminal ring that had been selling hell-stones, and stealing them back, and abducting the women who bought them.
The elevator flashed up past him. Fat Captain Roe was returning to his bridge. Down the shaft, metal clanged. In a few moments, the valves would be unsealed. The ships would separate. The pseudo-police would carry the Star of Dreams back to Veron. Presently, no doubt, Captain Roe would order him to be hung in the Moonbrand’s elevator shaft.
Haldane’s clammy hands trembled on the rail. He wasn’t trained to deal with hard men and cold metal and flaming ion-jets. But he tried to thrust that reservation out of his mind. There was nothing else to do.
He dived headfirst into the narrow dark shaft.
He had no weight to speed him, for the inflexors still were silent. But the bottom of the dim-lit shaft came silently to meet him. The valves were swiftly closing. Four pairs of massive metal jaws, that could slice through skin and flesh and crushing bone.
He had to pass through three of them. He flung himself into the Moonbrand’s lock-chamber. Cold metal scraped and bruised his skin. Now to get through the twin outside valves, into the lock of the other ship. The closing slit was already terribly narrow. His body—or sheared-off fragments of it—might be left adrift in space between the separating ships.
No place, he muttered, for an expert psykinetologist!
But he clutched those polished, inexorable edges. He thrust his head between them. He kicked and squirmed his way through the first pair. He hurled himself between the second. His head and his chest went through, but his hips were caught.
He stifled a scream. He lunged and twisted desperately. Clothing tore, and skin slipped. He snatched his feet out of danger. The great jaws closed, behind him—and the inner valve, before him—with a dull ringing clang.
He was safe!
The magnetic clamps were released, with a muffled clatter. Rockets coughed, driving the two ships apart. Inflexors hummed. New acceleration flung Haldane against the bottom of the lock. He lay there, drenched with sweat of exhaustion, gasping for breath.
Safe! He laughed grimly at the idea. He knew space, from the long confessions of his patients. He had heard of men who stowed away in air-locks. How sometimes they were asphyxiated, when the air in the chamber was used up. How sometimes the cold of space reached them. How sometimes they had been discovered—and disposed of, spewed into the frigid vacuum, by the mere opening of a valve.
The crew of the Moonbrand might discover his absence, and guess what had happened. They might heliograph—A psykinetologist wasn’t trained to deal with such grim situations. Haldane tried to thrust the danger out of his mind. He pulled himself upright, shakily, and began to clamber into the stiff bulk of the space suit hanging on its hooks in the corner by the side valve.
The inflexors hummed, and time dragged away. The tiny chamber was utterly black. The deadly chill of space crept into it. Unable to exercise, lest he exhaust the air too fast, Haldane grew cold even in the insulated suit.
The icy air grew damp and bad. It didn’t help him to know there were three gallons of oxygen in the flat tank at his back—of course he had no key for the locked valves. His breathing became hurried and painful. His stiff, tingling limbs began to cramp.
Despite all that discomfort, he tried to think.
He struggled again with the riddle of Vero Brand. Why did the sick man stay on Veron, when his illness would have been relieved merely by return to the normal gravity of Earth? Was it to guard the hell-stone lode?
But it occurred to Haldane that he had seen no evidence of any mining operations on Veron. If that had been the answer, modern machinery would have completely pulverized the tiny rock, years ago.
Brand had received him in a huge laboratory. A new idea caught his breath. Suppose that a whole generation of hopeful explorers had been wrong about the natural origin of hell-stones? Suppose Brand manufactured them, in that laboratory?
That would explain why none had been found anywhere else.
But it didn’t solve the riddle. It didn’t explain why Brand must hide himself on a fortified invisible rock, and market his precious wares through underworld agents. It didn’t account for the abducted women.
The black and ominous face of mystery mocked him yet.
It leered inscrutably, out of black oblivion—
A clean breath of warm conditioned air revived Haldane. Slumped in the space suit, his body was stiff and cold. It took him a moment to remember where he was. Then he knew that the ship had landed, probably on Veron.
For the inflexors had ceased to hum. Only the feeblest tug of gravity reached his dead body, and he had an eerie sense of floating disembodiment. The upper valve had opened, above his head. In a moment the side valve clanged open, also. The metal floor was flooded with the cold violet light of Veron’s sky.
Stiffly, Haldane tried to move his numb, aching limbs. His problem now was to get out of the lock before he was discovered. But his chilled body failed to respond.
