Collected short fiction, p.72
Collected Short Fiction, page 72
The little man remained unconscious.
For a very long time they stayed there, near the wreck—they did not know how long. George had lost his watch, and Juanita’s had been broken. There were no days in this weird world, no sun. The somber, angry crimson of the sky did not change, no luminous object appeared within it.
They grew thirsty, for there was no water to be had. They felt the pains of hunger. They reeled with weariness, and dared not sleep. But the physical hardships, at first, were more endurable than the mental torture.
They were in a strange world, absolutely foreign. It seemed that chemical and physical processes here did not always follow the same course as on their own earth. There was no sun—only the sullen gloom of the crimson sky. No living things except themselves to break the terrible monotony.
Blood-red Rain!
THEIR minds struggled for an explanation of it all. How had they come here? Was there any chance for escape? What was the meaning of the red sky? of the huge green crystals that scattered the stony wilderness? Of the inconceivably colossal black mountains?
The air was neither cold nor hot, its temperature remained constant. Faint radiation of heat, as well as light, seemed to fall from the somber scarlet sky. George suggested that the higher atmosphere was filled with some radioactive gas.
Cann never recovered consciousness. Nor did he die of his hurts. He was murdered. It came about in this way.
They must have been in the fantastic world of the adventure for many hours, for both George and Juanita were suffering keenly from hunger and thirst. They were still watching beside Cann. During those long, lonely hours, they had talked a great deal. They felt drawn together by a powerful sympathy, as if they had long been friends.
Both of them were startled immeasurably by the bullet. They had been waiting there a very long time, anxious, alert, waiting. They had been fearful of unknown dangers, fearful of the weird life that this world might possess, fearful even of the dead, endless silence.
The bullet came whining angrily past them. It struck the sheer face of the black cliff behind them with an explosive plop, and showered them with fine fragments of broken rock.
George started uncontrollably. Juanita half screamed, clapped a hand to her lips, and apprehensively grasped the engineer’s arm.
“What is it?” she gasped.
“Sounded like a bullet,” he said, uneasily. “Suppose the inhabitants of this world have firearms?”
“Look!” she whispered suddenly, in a strained voice. “Something moving!”
She pointed out across the cragged wilderness of dull black rock. Following her slender arm, George glimpsed a dark object slowly rising into view behind a twisted black boulder.
A little wisp of bluish smoke floated up beside it. They heard a crashing report, as another bullet sang past them and thudded against the precipice behind them, scattering bits of shattered rock.
“A man!” Juanita cried.
George saw that it was. A human head, covered with unkept black hair and a thick stubble of black beard. A human body rising behind it, grimy, clothed in tattered garments. It was the huge, sullen individual companion of their voyage.
“Why, it’s an old friend!” George whispered. “The man who admired you so much in the plane!” He grinned grimly.
“What does he mean, shooting at us?” Juanita cried.
“Guess it won’t hurt to ask him,” George said. He raised his voice, and shouted at the man. His tones came oddly shrill and strange from his dry throat.
“What do you want?” he called.
The man did not reply. But he left the shelter of the black boulder and stalked cautiously toward them, a huge, terrible figure, a pistol ready in his hand—a heavy automatic.
“What’s the idea, shooting at us?” George shouted again, in a shrill, thirst-cracked voice.
“I’m dyin’ for a drink,” the huge man growled back. “No water in this damn place! I’m thirsty as hell! I’ve got to drink! Blood!” Again and again, as he ran toward them, he repeated the word in a voice that had become almost a scream. “Blood! Blood! Blood!”
“He’s crazy!” George muttered.
Cann still lay unconscious on the bare black rock. When the huge man, charging down upon them, was thirty yards away, he shot again—into the body of the unconscious man. George saw the body jerk with the bullet’s impact.
“Oh!” the girl cried out in horror. Then whispered, “Let’s run! We can’t do anything!”
George took her hand; they ran off along the foot of the Cyclopean wall of dull black stone. They were weak from thirst and hunger and weariness; their bodies seemed very heavy. And the black rock over which they fled was so cracked and twisted, pitted with yawning chasms and broken with peaks and boulders and hummocks, that real running was impossible. Many times they stumbled. They leaped, and crawled, and climbed—jumped bottomless cracks, crept across narrow ledges, clambered up cliffs and boulders.
THE huge maniac shouted at them to stop, but they paid no heed. He fired at them twice. The bullets screamed past, and ricocheted among the black summits before them.
“Down!” George cried.
He leaped into a deep traverse crack in the black rock, between two massive, twisted summits, helped Juanita down beside him. They were out of the big man’s sight. Swiftly, they stumbled on, down the narrow ravine.
Half an hour later, when they had covered perhaps five hundred yards, they came up to where they could see the lunatic again. The huge fellow was bent over what was left of inoffensive little Cann, tearing at his body like a hungry wolf.
Horrified, they stumbled on again.
Long hours—tortured ages—crept by. On and on they drove themselves. A man and a woman lost in an alien world. Sick with fear. Tortured with thirst. Weak from hunger. Reeling from fatigue. Driven on by the horror of what they had seen—one human being rending another like a ravening beast.
They did not travel many miles. For they were weak. And the wilderness of black rock was incredibly rugged, twisted into fantastic, sharp-edged masses, carved with wild, volcanic energies.
The Cyclopean cliffs still hemmed them in, an impassable barrier, inconceivably lofty. Grim precipices leaped sheer half way to the zenith, all about them. Those mighty black cliffs were terrible, oppressive, like the stone walls of some ancient prison.
The scarlet sky still gleamed above the jagged summits of the ebon cliffs, with a dark and sullen glare, changeless, monotonous. There was neither day nor night; no sun nor moon nor stars ever broke the monotony of grim, forbidding crimson twilight.
It was a long time after they had left the sight of the wreck, when the red rain fell. Memory of the hideous orgy of the maniac already seemed faint to George; it had become unreal, a fantastic horror so far past that it did not matter.
Huge red drops began abruptly to fall from the crimson sky.
But they were not water that could be drunk—the laws of nature, or at least the chemical composition of the atmosphere, seemed to have been different on that weird world.
The great drops, red as blood, were at least a foot in diameter. They came thudding down with terrific force, scattering the waste of black rock. They did not spatter. They remained lying about, in spheroids shaped like drops of mercury—but larger than footballs!
George and Juanita sought shelter in a cave, beneath a sloping ledge of dull black rock, while the weird rain was falling.
The ground was by no means covered with red globules. George estimates that no more than two or three fell on every hundred square yards.
“Must be some new chemical, with an enormously strong surface film,” George speculated. “Mercury forms round drops like that, or water dropped in fine dust. But these drops are huge, compared to those. Atmospheric conditions here must be quite different to what they are on earth. You remember those big green crystals we’ve been finding. They must be a sort of snow, that falls here. Some chemical crystallizing in the air, and falling as snow falls on earth—”
“There’s one!” Juanita cried.
She pointed from under the sheltering ledge of dull black rock. A broad, rugged ravine lay before them, a deep, cruel scar that bore witness to the cataclysmic birth of this alien world. On its farther slope, fifty-yards away, was a glitter of green, standing out against the dead black of the rock. A huge, six-sided emerald crystal, sparkling and brilliant, like a snow crystal tinted green and enormously magnified.
Another of the riddles of this strange world.
Hours went by. The enormous red drops widely scattered still thudded down from the sky. The wanderers could see several of the puzzling scarlet spheroids. Suddenly George noticed that those they watched were dwindling in size.
“Look!” he cried. “They’re going away. Evaporating, I suppose. Must be some red gas in the sky, which condenses and falls, as rain does on earth. And they evaporate, to form clouds again.”
It was not long after that an amazing phenomenon took place. A falling red drop happened to strike the green crystal that Juanita had pointed out. George chanced to be watching the green formation speculatively when it occurred. He heard crashing explosion, saw a vast cloud of luminous purple vapor rise, as if some violent chemical reaction had taken place between the scarlet spheroid and the emerald crystal.
The great burst of shining red-violet vapor rushed up as suddenly as the white smoke of a bursting shell. It formed an enormous cloud. The cloud of purple contracted swiftly. But then it seemed to form an immense disk, which they viewed obliquely.
Nearing the End
A FEW seconds went by, as they watch in astounded wonder.
Then the purple disk contracted swiftly and vanished.
George broke their silence with an excited cry, which came queerly through his dry throat.
“The purple circle that came in front of the plane looked just like that!” he cried. “We have seen the gate to our world opened again—I am sure of it—”
“There’s a bird!” Juanita broke in. “See!”
She pointed to a little gray sparrow, flitting uncertainly from where the purple disk had vanished. It circled aimlessly, rose in a wild, bewildered flight, became a little brown speck against the sullen crimson sky and vanished. . . .
“Yes,” George said slowly. “The bird came through it. A sparrow from our own world! It blundered through just as the plane did. I wonder—” He fell into silent speculation.
“You wonder what, George?” Juanita asked.
“I must think, dear!”
He patted her hand. A little hand, thin from starvation, red with cuts and scratches gained in their long struggle through the desert of wild black rocks.
Feeling a faint thrill of pleasure at the “dear”, she fell silent, and sat watching him with cool gray eyes brightened with a faint light of hope. A long time went by, while the engineer remained silent, immersed in thought. The red rain stopped.
“We might try it!” he said suddenly. “There’s no way of telling whether it will work the other way. We are pretty likely to kill ourselves in the experiment. But it’s better to take a pretty big risk than end our days here, eh?”
“You mean—” Juanita cried tremulously. “You mean—there’s a chance to get back home?”
Her gray eyes were wide with excitement and sudden hope.
“A chance,” George said. “A bare chance. But better than staying here until we die for want of food and water.”
“What is it?” she cried.
We can find one of the green crystals, of course, and dump it one one of the red drops. There ought to be another explosion—and another opening of the gate to our world. I don’t understand the formation of the purple disk, of course. But something that results from the explosive union of the red drop and the green crystal seems to break down the barrier between the two worlds—some form of radiation, perhaps.
“Are you willing to try it?”
He looked into her cool gray eyes.
“Of course, George!” She smiled at him. A little smile, wan and strained. It had meant an effort against the weakness of hunger and the torture of thirst. “I’ll do anything you want to try. But we must hurry. I The red drops, you know, are going away!”
“That’s right!” George replied in the hoarse whisper that his voice had become. “I’d forgotten. We must try it right away. It must be a rare coincidence for the green crystals and the red drops to be on the ground at the same time.”
Weak and reeling, they rose, and tottered out from beneath the sheltering black ledge. I Searching down the long ravine, they camel upon a few of the scarlet spheroids. Already they were shrunken to the size of a man’s fist. They were evaporating swiftly; little streamers of pinkish vapor were rising! up from them. One of them dwindled and! vanished, even as they were watching it. I For half an hour, they could not find one! of the green crystals.
Then Juanita’s keen eyes discovered one landing on edge in a narrow crack in the dull black rock. George bent beside the crack, lifted it out. A great, six-pointed star of glistening green, brilliant and transparent, the feathery structure between the points delicate and perfectly symmetrical.
It weighed no more than thirty pounds, but the engineer, weakened by long hardship, reeled beneath the burden of it.
“Now to find one of the red drops,” he muttered.
They struggled on down the ravine, George staggering beneath the weight of a blazing thing that might have been cut from a monster emerald by some gargantuan jeweler, Juanita dragging herself along by his side.
Once they came upon one of the scarlet spheroids. But it was no larger than a baseball, when they first saw it. As they staggered up to it, it dwindled swiftly, seeming to hiss like a drop of water on a hot stove. It was gone.
A sound came suddenly from behind them. A hoarse shout, insane, incoherent.
George turned in alarm. He saw a man running after them, a huge man with a black, bearded face—and red blood on his hands. The man who had reached this alien world in the plane with them. The man who had fallen like a wolf on the body of little insignificant Cann.
AN automatic pistol was in his bloodstained hand.
“Guess he’s finished Cann,” George whispered. “Looking for fresh blood.”
“Oh, it will be dreadful if he catches us,” Juanita whispered. “Let’s run!”
“I don’t feel exactly fit for a Marathon!” George muttered.
But they broke into a stumbling run.
The wild, blood-stained figure behind them shouted, gesticulated. Then they heard shots. Bullets whined and screamed about them, crashing on the dull black walls of the canyon.
They ran on—or tried to run. It was a pitiful, staggering pace; they were almost too weak to move. George, reeling under the burden of the green crystal, was gasping for breath. His tongue, swollen and leathery, seemed to fill his mouth, choking him. Juanita dragged her feeble, abused body along, keeping back any word of complaint.
The man running behind them was far stronger; he had had food recently. Swiftly he gained upon them, pausing to fire wildly after them with the pistol whenever a straight section of the ravine put them in his sight for a few minutes.
Then they came to the end of the canyon.
Rugged walls of dead black rock rose before them, sheer, impossible to climb. They stopped, looked at it. George dropped the green crystal. He looked at Juanita.
“Well, I guess this means good-by,” he managed to articulate, in a hoarse, grating whisper. “Hope he makes it merciful. Anyhow, being with you has made it a lot more pleasant.”
He took Juanita’s hand, looked into her cool gray eyes, and tried to grin.
For the first time in their terrible adventure, Juanita burst into tears. She fell weakly into the engineer’s arms, sobbing uncontrollably, clinging to him with her thin, bruised arms.
The huge, blood-stained man came into view again, a hundred yards away. He stopped, threw up his automatic, and began to shoot. Bullets rang against the cliff behind them, sent splinters of black rock flying.
Then George, holding Juanita’s sob-shaken body in his arms, looked over her shoulder and saw the thing lying in a little crevice in the ebon rock, almost at their feet. A red spheroid, nearly a foot in diameter, with pale pink vapors hissing up from about it.
Several of the huge, strange crimson drops must have run together in the crevice, forming a single larger drop which did not evaporate so rapidly.
“Buck up!” the engineer cried, pushing the girl to her feet. “We’ll try it yet. We’ll beat our friend out of his dinner!”
He picked up the huge, glistening green crystal that he had dropped, tossed it into the crevice, upon the spheroid of scarlet-red liquid.
An explosive out-rush of purple vapor hurled them bodily backward, against the canyon wall. They crouched there a few seconds, waiting. George had an arm around Juanita’s waists half-supporting her.
Abruptly the red-violet vapor receded from about them. It became a straight wall of purple light, the surface of a great disk.
“Now!” George whispered.
Half carrying Juanita’s slight body, he ran forward, leaped into that wall of red-blue light.
* * * *
The next thing the engineer knew, they were lying sprawled in soft green grass. Juanita had fallen across his body, he sat up with her in his arms. He gazed at the world about him, and shed tears of relief and joy. The sky was no longer a sullen, angry red—it was soft and warmly blue.
Cyclopean, nightmare mountains of dull black stone no longer hemmed them in—they were surrounded by the green fields of the San Joaquin Valley. On one side of them a herd of Jersey cows was grazing. Beyond them stood a pleasant-looking farmhouse. On the other side was a fence, and beyond the fence, an unpaved country road.
The sound of an automobile engine reached George’s ears—sounding strange after his ages of silent imprisonment in that other world.
