Collected short fiction, p.462
Collected Short Fiction, page 462
I knew that, had the red-hot rocket ship in which we had crossed the Silver Sea chanced to fall in the jungle instead of on the barren hilltop, a conflagration would have spread from it at once. Abruptly I remembered that the glowing fragments of the one we had wrecked had fallen in the northern forest. Austen’s cabin lay in that direction! I knew that the red vegetation was peculiarly inflammable and that the fire, feeding on the oxygen of the heavy atmosphere, would advance with terrible speed.
From the north came the crackling roar of a mighty conflagration. Any attempt to find Austen and induce him to give up his plan of self-sacrifice would be terribly uncertain. Melvar was in immediate danger, and I knew that Austen valued her life above his own. Even now I might be too late. Fire was a pitiless and remorseless enemy.
At a dead run I started up the trail by which we had entered the clearing. Ever the smoke became thicker and more acrid, while the crackling roar of the fire rang ever louder in my ears. I ran on through the ghastly gloom of the scarlet jungle until the hot suffocating breath of the flames was choking me, until the bright lurid curtain of the fire was spread before my eyes, and the intense heat radiation blistered my skin. The vast wall of flame swept forward like a voracious demoniac thing of crimson, implacable, irresistible, overwhelming. It plunged forward like a rushing tidal wave of red. Already the fire had passed the site of the cabin!
I was suddenly hopeless and despairing. The flames rushed forward faster by far than a human being could force a way through the jungle. With the knowledge that I had just lost the only two beings in all the world who mattered to me, it hardly seemed worth while to try to save my own life. For a moment I stood there, about to cast myself into the flames. But it is not the nature of an animal to die willingly, no matter how slight the promise of life may be.
I turned and ran back toward the clearing. Behind me, the flames roared like a lightning express. The fernlike fronds burned explosively, like gun cotton. My nostrils and lungs were seared and smarting. The hot wind dried my skin and left it scorched and cracked. I was blinded by the smoke. I longed to throw myself down and seek the temporary ecstasy of a breath of clear air from near the ground. The red jungle reeled about me, but I fought my way on, like a man in a dream.
At last I staggered into the open space. The last of the giant trees exploded into flames not a score of yards behind me. Sparks rained upon me. My clothing caught fire. I ran on, fighting at it with my hands. The jungle back of me roared deafeningly, an angry, surging sea of lurid red flames, awful, overwhelming, fantastically terrible.
HEAT radiation poured across the white sand away from the flames until I reached the shelter of a great boulder on the slope below the cliff.
I flung myself down behind the rock, gulping down the cool air and rubbing out the fire in my clothing with my blackened hands. For hours I lay there, tortured by thirst and pain. At last I fell into a stupor.
I was awakened after a time by a cool wind that had sprung up from the north. For a moment my mind was lost in blank wonder. Then came the desolate memory that Melvar and Austen were lost. In hopeless misery I got weakly to my feet and walked unsteadily around the boulder until I could look across the clearing.
As I leaned against the rock, gazing eastward, it was a strangely altered and desolate scene that lay before my eyes. The red forest was gone. Below me was a region of low, rolling hills, black and grim beneath the lowering, smoky purple sky. The white sand about me stood out in sharp contrast to the charred and gloomy waste beyond, from which a few slender wisps of dark smoke were still rising. All life was gone. It was a dead world. But still the dense, purple clouds poured calmly out of the shafts of the underworld, adding their weight to the dismal sky.
A great homesickness for my world and my fellow men came over me. Then I heard a strange humming behind me, a slight metallic clatter. I turned around in apathetic curiosity. And I came face to face with a monster so utterly strange and weird that the very shock of it almost unseated my wandering reason.
But so completely had my interests and hopes in life been severed, so near was I to the great divide of death, that I was past emotion of any kind. At first I looked on the thing with a curious lack of interest, as the soul of one newly dead might look with numbed faculties on his new habitation. But as I looked an icy current of fear stole over me like the creeping cold of the north, clasping me to its frozen breast. I had met so many horrors that I had begun to think myself immune to terror. But I had met no such thing as this.
I knew it was an intelligent, a sentiment being. But it was not human, not a thing of flesh and blood at all. It was a machine! Rather, it was an entity encased in a machine. I felt far more of it than I saw—the will of a cold and alien intellect, a being malefic, inhuman, inscrutable. It was a thing that belonged, not in the present earth, but in the tomb of the unthinkable past, or beyond the wastes of interstellar space amid the inconceivably horrors of unknown spheres.
There was a bright, gleaming globe, three feet in diameter, lit with vivid flowing fires of violet and green. A strange swirling mist of brilliant points of many-colored lights danced madly about it—a coruscating fog of iridescent fire that flicked in an incredible rhythm.
That unearthly thing rested upon a frame of metal, the head of a metallic monster protruding from an oblong box of white metal to which were attached six long-jointed metal limbs. The being stood nine feet high, at least. It was standing on three of the limbs, holding my rifle which I had left where I had been lying, turning it and feeling of it with a cluster of slender, fingerlike tentacles on the end of the metal arm. It was working the mechanism of the gun apparently looking at it, though it had no eyes that I could see.
SUDDENLY the gun went off, throwing up the sand between me and the monster. With a grotesquely half-human attitude of alarmed surprise, the being dropped the gun and sprang back like a gigantic spider. The motion freed me from my paralysis of horror. I started backing cautiously around the boulder, afraid to run. As I moved it sprang forward, and a slender tube of white metal in one of the tentacled hands was suddenly pointed toward me. As the monster moved, there was a humming sound from it, and little jets of purple gas hissed from holes in the sides of the box-like body.
I drew my automatic and fired at the metal tube. The object was knocked from the metal grasp and fell spinning to the sand. On the instant I turned and ran toward another great boulder that lay fifty yards to the north. As I ran I heard the clatter and whirring of the mechanical being. I paused at the edge of the rock for a last glimpse back.
The monster was holding the little tube in one of its limbs, apparently adjusting it with another. Then it suddenly extended the thing toward me. I dived behind the rock just as a bright ray of orange light shot past the boulder—a beam like that which had come from the being in the door of the rocket ship. Then I knew that here was an entity of the same kind as the one I had destroyed that night—one of the ruling intelligence of the crater. The Krimlu!
For several minutes I crouched behind the boulder, expecting the terrible being to come striding around after me at any instant. But it did not come, so presently I began to think. Perhaps the things were not so powerful or so extremely intelligent after all. I had killed one, even if it was just by a chance shot in the dark. This one had seemed surprised and alarmed when the rifle went off. A being so intelligent as I had at first thought it to be might have inferred the nature and use of the weapon from its appearance. Could it be afraid of me, after my pistol bullet had knocked its own weapon out of its grip? Why didn’t it follow me around the boulder. I began to wonder what it was going to do.
It evidently intended to strike me with the disintegrator ray weapon. Not only did it respect me, but it knew that I stood in deathly fear of it. It knew that I was trying to escape, so it might reasonably expect me to leave the unscalable cliff and attempt a break across the open country. If I were to do that, I would naturally keep in the shelter of my own boulder as long as possible.
If the monster thought in that way, the logical thing for it to do would be to creep out of the upper side of its rock, where I would inevitably come into its sight by whatever direction I left my breastwork.
Of course there was a frightful risk in taking any action on such a hypothesis, a greater risk than I realized at the time, but I had to do something. If the monster were less intelligent than I supposed, I might blunder on it. If it were more intelligent, it might have anticipated my plan—might be waiting to trap me.
But I crawled out along the upper side of my boulder and peered over a smaller rock which would serve me as a breastwork, my automatic ready. I expected to see the creature in my range, and itself intent upon my other lines of retreat. But it was not there. For a moment I thought I was doomed, but the orange ray did not strike, and I was forced to the conclusion that the monster was not in a position for action at all.
FOR a moment I was tempted to break into flight across the clearing, but I knew that such a move would surely put me at the mercy of the ray. It might not yet be too late to carry out my original plan. I lay flat, my gun trained on the spot where I expected the thing to appear.
For perhaps fifteen minutes nothing happened. Then my hypothesis was justified. The weird being suddenly sprang into view, the strange weapon grasped in its glittering arm. It seemed to be looking beyond my boulder. I was lying ready, with the automatic leveled. It was a matter of the merest instant to aim at the green sphere and pull the trigger.
The globe was shattered as if it had been made of glass. The glittering fragments showered off the metal box, while the whole mechanical body suddenly became very rigid, and fell heavily to the side. A puff of coruscating green mist floated out of the globe as it broke, and swiftly dissipated, and the sparkling lights were about the thing no more. The monster was evidently dead.
For a moment I hesitated, but I was sure the thing had been killed, and my curiosity got the better of my fear. I cautiously approached it, marveling at the wonderful workmanship of the machine and the cleverness of its design. Then I saw something that made me forget all else. Something beside the crystal shell had fallen.
The tissue of it was very delicate, and it had been broken by the fall, so that the body juices were running from it. The brain cavity of it was very large—perhaps larger than that of a man—and covered only with a thin chitinous shell. The limbs were but thin tentacles, almost altogether atrophied. In fact, the brain seemed three-fourths of the total bulk. The body was so badly smashed that I could tell little about it, but the tiny limbs were covered with chitin, and there were the rudimentary stumps of fine, tissuelike wings. There were no visible traces of digestive organs or mandibles.
But the thing was plainly an insect. From just what species it had sprung in the long process of evolution in this Australian crater it would be difficult to say. For several reasons, I believe it was an ant. At any rate, it had reached about the ultimate stage of evolution. Machines had altogether replaced bodies of flesh. The thing had been nourished by the sparkling green vapor which must have circulated like blood through the protecting crystal sphere.
It seems incredible to find great intelligence in any form of life other than human, but science thinks that life and intelligence must rise and fall in recurring cycles. The earth has probably been ruled by many different forms of life, each which has been blotted out by some cataclysm. The Krimlu were a surviving remnant of archaic insect life!
CHAPTER XIII
When Austen Struck
I lost little time in examination of the dead creature. The shaft from which it had come was but a few hundred yards below, and the purple gas was still rolling out of the funnel. I did not know when a second monster might follow the first.
My mind was too much upset by grief and terror to be capable of intelligent planning, but I knew I had better get away from here. I considered reaching the northern pass, of getting back to an unburned growth of the red vegetation, for I was weak with thirst and hunger.
I walked around the wells, keeping at a distance, and struck out for the east as fast as my wearied limbs could carry me. At last the cliff was out of sight. All about was the desolate, rolling black landscape, with the gloomy purple sky overhead. My thoughts were as dark and sere as the world. Memories of dear old Austen and of lovely Melvar were always with me, even when I tried to banish them and to think rationally of my position.
When I had gone perhaps three hours from the cliff, and had almost lost my fear of pursuit, I saw a great cigar-shaped object of gleaming white on a low hill before me. So dulled were my perceptions that it was many minutes before I realized that it was the rocket-ship in which we had come over the Silver Sea. Then bringing a faint thrill of hope, the thought came to me that it might possibly be in a condition to fly. If so, and I could succeed in controlling it, it offered an avenue of escape from the crater.
I walked up to the thick metal walls. They were undamaged by the fire, of course, being used to withstanding the far higher temperatures developed during flight. Rounding the ship, I was surprised to see that the heavy metal door which we had left open had been swung shut. Lying against it was the charred skeleton of a man. About the bones were woven metal garments and crystal armor. With a shock I recognized the accoutrements of Naro.
For a moment I stared grimly at the remains. Then, animated by a sudden ray of hope, I sprang to the door, pulled it open, and leaped into the ship. There, lying on the floor, was the lovely form of Melvar!
Her clothing was tattered and smeared with stains of red and black from the burning forest, but she was unharmed. It was almost incredible to me to find her restored. I was half-afraid that my mind had failed at last, and that she was but an illusion. I dropped on my knees beside her, and kissed her warm red lips. She stirred a little and, still but half-awake, put a trustful arm about my shoulder.
“Winfield, I knew you would come,” she whispered at last. “But where are Naro and Austen?”
“They will never come,” I said gently.
She drew me fiercely toward her, as if to use me for a shield against the awful truth. It was some time before she was able to talk, but presently she told me how Naro had seen the smoke, and how she had thought of seeking shelter from the fire in the rocket ship. They had run down the trail we had made in leaving the ship. The fire had overtaken them just as they reached it. The boy had carried her the last few yards, lifted her through the door, and then had been unable to enter himself.
But, a hero to the last, a worthy warrior of old Astran, he had swung the door shut with his dying motion.
Presently I turned my attention to the ship. The marvelous periscope still gave the illusion that the bow was transparent. When I moved the little control lever, the jets of purple gas rushed out again. After a time I had the vessel worked loose from its place in the earth. Then, once again, I pulled up the little metal knob and pushed it forward.
We were in flight.
THE blackened terrain was colored by the purple mist. It dimmed, blurred, blotted out. We shot through the purple cloud and abruptly plunged into clear air and blessed sunshine. Melvar stood by me, her arm upon my shoulder. She cried out gladly as we came into the light. It was not quite noon and the sun was shining very brightly into the crater. The crescent Silver Lake was still gleaming with the same argent luster, and Astran shone like a great gem set in the dark red upland beyond.
Suddenly the clouds of purple mist below were thrown up and scattered in a thousand ragged streamers. A great blaze of opalescence burst out where it had been. A flood of fire ran over the Silver Sea. It was a white, milky light like that we had seen between the blue crystal globes of the great machine in the chasm.
In a moment the whole crater was a torn and angry ocean of iridescent flame. The red upland was blotted out, and Astran vanished forever.
White flames that were like the tongues of burning hydrogen from exploding suns flared up behind us.
Then we heard the sound of the cataclysm—a crashing roar like the thunder of a thousand falling mountains, as deep and vast and awful as the crash of colliding worlds. At the same instant we felt the force of the greatest explosion that had ever occurred on earth. The rocket was flung upward as though shot out of a mighty cannon. The blue sky darkened about us, and the stars flamed into being like a million scintillating gems, gleaming cold and hard against the infinite empty blackness.
We had been hurled out of the atmosphere and into interplanetary space!
Austen had struck. The world of the Krimlu was no more! The whole Silver Sea had detonated in a colossal explosion. From our ever-rising craft we could see the desert spread out around the mountain like a vast yellow sea, rimmed on the south by a steely blue line that was the ocean. The white fire dulled, faded, and was gone as quickly as it had flashed up. The crater of the Mountain of the Moon was left a wild black ruin of jagged, scattered masses of smoking stone. Of the Silver Lake, of the red vegetation upon the upland, of brilliant Astran, not a trace was left!
The crater was left far behind in the long arching flight of the rocket. The white frozen brilliance of the stars faded out, the untold glories of the solar corona were dimmed, and blue was restored to the midnight sky. We were plunging toward the desert in the direction of Kanowna. I pulled back the lever and used the full force of the rockets to check our meteorlike flight until the fuel was exhausted.
A moment afterward we struck the earth.
We climbed out and left the vessel there on the sand. Just as the stars were coming out that night we arrived at the headquarters of a great sheep ranch. People were very much excited over the earthquake. I learned later that the shock of the explosion of the Silver Lake had been registered at every seismographic station in the world.
