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Title: Juggernaut of Space
Author: Ray Cummings
Release Date: June 17, 2020 [EBook #62416]
Language: English
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Juggernaut of Space
Ray Cummings
Never had the mind of man conceived so horrible a
doom as was reaching for Earth. Never had a greater
need for Earth's valiant champions been needed.
And yet the only ones who could fight the menace--were
five futile humans, prisoners on another world.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Fall 1945.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
My name is Robert Rance. You've heard of me, of course--through the
recent weird affair of the Crimson Comet, if for nothing else. It seems
to me rather ironic: for five years I have been reporting popular
science items on the split-wave band of non-visual broadcasting.
Station WANA-NYC--the main outlet of _Amalgamated Newscasters'
Association_, for whom I work. I struggled for personal publicity.
Then I was plunged--certainly entirely against my will--into the
blood-chilling, gruesome adventure which is now popularly known as "The
Death of the Crimson Comet." Out of it has come publicity beyond my
wildest dreams. And now that I've got it, I don't want it. I'm not a
hero, of dauntless, fearless courage. I'm not a scientific genius, who
has made possible to Earth the New Era of Interplanetary Travel. But
I've been called all that by broadcasting asses who are my friends.
I'm just a plain American, who, when his life is in danger gets
frightened as the devil, fighting to get himself out of a jam, and with
not much thought of anything else. I didn't relish that Crimson Comet
business, and I don't want ever to experience anything like it again.
I'm not alone in this. There were four others in it with me. They don't
like all this public fuss being made over them any more than I do. They
weren't heroic. They just tried their best not to get killed. So on
their behalf, and my own, I'm writing this narrative of exactly what
happened to us. Not the professionally glamorized version which you've
heard so many times. Just the facts.
The thing must have been brewing, under cover, for many months. Like a
smouldering, unnoticed fire. No one knows; we can only guess at what
happened. But looking back on it now, there were incidents, seemingly
unrelated at the time, which now I can see were significant. The first
of them was in August, 1985--about a year ago. I had just finished a
broadcast on some trivial, popular science subject, which I had tried
to make sound important to my listeners. And Dr. Johns of the White
Mountains Observatory telephoned me. I knew him quite well; he had
often steered me into little subjects for my broadcasts, but this, I
could see at once, was something different The tel-grid showed his
thin face without its usual smile. His grey hair was rumpled; his eyes
bloodshot. He looked as though he hadn't slept for much too long.
"I thought you might want to come up and see me, Bob," he suggested.
"Sure I will. I always appreciate your tips, Dr. Johns."
His smile was queer. "I haven't got anything--not that you can use,"
he said. "Certainly not yet. I guess I just figure I'll feel better,
talking about it. When can you arrive?"
"I'll come right away," I told him. "Not busy tonight. I'll be there by
midnight."
We disconnected. I was just about to leave when Shorty Dirk walked
in on me. Shorty was--and still is--connected with the _American
Newsprint Publishers_--a reporter in the Crime Division, specializing
in reporting the work of the Bureau of Missing Persons. He and I were
good friends, perhaps because we are so different. I'm big and rangy,
slow-going and easy-tempered. In college I was a good athlete, but now
this radio work was putting quite a bit of soft poundage on me which
didn't belong--poundage which, I do assure you, the Crimson Comet
business got rid of in a hurry. Like all of us five, I was something
like an undernourished greyhound when we got back.
Shorty isn't much over five and a half feet, thin and wiry and alert--a
sort of little human dynamo; a freckle-faced fellow with a shock of
bristly red hair and a good-natured grin.
"Where you going?" he asked.
I told him. "I'll go with you," he said. He grinned. "I'm only here,
Bob, because I haven't got anything better to do."
* * * * *
We took my small flyer from the roof stage and headed north. It was
a handsome night, warm and almost cloudless with the upper air so
clear that the stars were packed solid on the purple-blue vault of the
heavens. Shorty and I didn't theorize, during the brief trip up to the
White Mountains, on what Dr. Johns might have to say. Shorty wasn't
much interested in astronomy, anyway--to him, as he often said, it was
an uninteresting enigma. He mentioned that tonight.
"Good," I said. "Then, how is crime coming? Many people missing lately?"
Things were dull, he assured me. Nothing but the usual run of stuff
that you couldn't write up or broadcast because nobody but a few
relatives were interested. As it happened, the Crimson Comet affair
caused five mysterious disappearances, Shorty, myself and three others.
I think I can understand now why it happened that I knew them all. I
must have been marked, through my widely broadcast popular science.
That involved Shorty, because he was so much with me. And as for
the other three--looking back on it now I realize that each of them
vanished soon after having been with me. I was being trailed and was
seized last.
We landed on the private stage of the big Observatory about midnight
and presently were with Dr. Johns in his study. What he had to tell us
didn't seem very startling at the time. But in the light of what was
to happen, looking back on it now I can see its deadly significance.
Like a great pattern of evil, to involve disaster and death to all
the world! Grim, stealthy events creeping upon us--little things here
on Earth just involving me and those few others; and with them, giant
events mysteriously taking place out in the great vault of the stars.
"Here at the Observatory," Dr. Johns was saying, "we thought that
somehow we must be making miscalculations. A fraction of a second in
the axial and orbital movements of the Earth, which involved the visual
movement of all the starfield. But we checked and rechecked. And then
other observatories reported it."
The Earth's axial rotation, and its movement around the Sun apparently
were changing infinitesimally.
"Too bad," Shorty commented. "I'm sure sorry."
But Dr. Johns didn't smile. "There seem to be many unrelated things,"
he said. "You can shrug any of them off. But then, if it once occurs to
you that they might be connected--"
"What other things?" I asked.
Meteorologists were admitting that the weather was peculiar. Nothing
which had not occurred before, of course--unusual, freakish storms in
many parts of the Earth.
"And for a month now," Dr. Johns went on, "there has been noticeable a
peculiar purple radiance in the air at night."
"Purple radiance?" Shorty echoed. "Hadn't noticed it."
"Because it isn't visible to the naked eye," Dr. Johns retorted. "But
it has disturbed the exposure time of our photographic work. Slowed it
down. And our spectrograms show it, or at least they show its effects
so that we know if we could see it--it would be a purplish glow."
And there was a new comet which several of the observatories recently
had located. I had heard that much--had mentioned it in one of my
broadcasts.
"We call it a comet," Dr. Johns explained, "because there's a crimson
radiance streaming back from it as it comes in toward the Sun. But
its nucleus seems sizable--five hundred miles in diameter possibly. A
planetoid, with a radiance. You might just possibly call it that."
"And it's just about now crossing the orbit of Mars," I said. "That was
the last report made public, wasn't it?"
Dr. Johns nodded. "Our calculations of its orbit--made a month
ago--showed it would pass within about twenty million miles of Earth.
But that's all changed now. It's erratic."
I was beginning to see why he was startled. This new Crimson Comet
wasn't obeying the normal laws of Celestial Mechanics. It was swimming
erratically in Space. Could it be a solid body as big as five hundred
miles in diameter? Solid enough to be the cause, by its proximity, of
the Earth's axial and orbital disturbances?
"And this purple radiance," Dr. Johns said soberly, "we've just been
wondering if that could be coming from the comet."
* * * * *
I need not specify all the weird theories that Dr. Johns and I talked
of that evening. With me, a broadcaster of popular science as lurid
always as I could make it, weird, gruesome theories came natural. But
with him, a man of cold logic and careful science--well, it must have
been a premonition. Was this Crimson Comet hurling a lethal radiance at
us, attacking the Earth? A tiny, inhabited world of diabolic science
enabling it to direct its own course through Space, peopled with weird
enemies coming at us now, bent on destroying us?
You couldn't make such speculations public. People would laugh. But
some wouldn't. Some would believe you, and go into a wild panic. And
Dr. Johns had sent for me--a sort of kindred spirit in the concocting
of wild tales.
"You two, say nothing of this," he warned us. "And if it goes on,
you can announce it, Bob." He shrugged again, and tried to laugh
lugubriously. "I feel like an idiot, talking about the end of the world
with a couple of news-hounds. And yet, somehow, I also feel that maybe
everyone of us on Earth is in more deadly danger than he ever was
before!"
And we certainly were!
That was the general gist of our talk that night with Dr. Johns. I
never found out more from him--I had no time. The thing struck at me
four days later. During those four days, it happened that quite by
chance I met the three other people who were destined to be plunged
with Shorty and myself into adventure. The first was Peter Mack. I
was walking at night in Washington Square, in New York City--small
remaining tradition of little old New York. To me it's like a Monks'
Garden, flowered, tree-lined rectangle enclosed by the massive building
walls with the canyon of Fifth Avenue running into it.
The night was hot and clear. The little tent of blue over the Square
was star-filled. I chanced to sit down for a moment on a bench.
"Got a light?" There was a young fellow on the bench with me. He
shifted toward me. He was a thin, lanky fellow about my own age,
hatless, with the starlight on his sparse, rumpled sandy hair. A
slack-jawed fellow, with shabby clothes. He had a grimy cigarette butt
between his fingers.
"I can do better than that," I smiled. I gave him a cigarette and
lighted it for him.
"Thanks." He would have turned away, but I stopped him. I don't know
why, but there seemed something about him that was likable. He needed
a shave badly; his clothes were torn. I had a look at his eyes,
red-rimmed, bloodshot. Just a down-and-outer on a park bench. But you
don't see many of them these days.
"Maybe you haven't got a job," I said. "I can tell you a dozen
places--easy work too--in case you're a stranger in town."
"I'm not," he said. "Thanks for the cigarette. I'm just minding my own
business."
I shrugged; and as he gave me a resentful look and shifted back to his
own end of the bench, I let him alone.
I know now a lot of things that were the matter with Peter Mack, but
he has asked me not to go into details. It isn't important anyway;
resentfulness at a girl; the escape mechanism of too much drink;
trouble with the authorities in a lot of minor ways. And then a sort
of sullen resentment at everything and everybody. A derelict who could
salvage himself but he didn't want to.
* * * * *
Anyway, that was Peter Mack. And then there was Vivian La Marr. I met
her back stage at the _Gayety_ with Shorty who was there to see the
stage manager who was to be a witness in some trivial crime-affair that
Shorty was reporting. This Vivian La Marr was the main reason why the
_Gayety_ was having trouble with the Anti-Vice League and was about
to lose its license. She came up to me back stage--a lush, artificial
blonde, heavy with makeup; with an amazing expanse of flesh smooth as
satin, and a negligible tinseled costume that the Anti-Vice League did
not like at all but which pleased the _Gayety's_ customers very much.
"You're Robert Rance," she said. "I saw your picture an' wasn't you
televized a few times."
I agreed that was so.
"I also heard one of your astronomy lectures," she added with a wry
grimace. "I was wonderin' how a guy like that could live with himself."
She looked me up and down. "Now I see you ain't so bad," she said. She
was grinning.
"Much obliged," I said. "Maybe I can teach you astronomy some time!"
"From you I would be glad to learn anything," she retorted, mockingly.
We were standing by the stage door where it was cooler, and a moment
later she was called back on the stage.
That was Vivian La Marr. The other person who was destined to be
involved with us was J. Walter Blaine, the International Financier. I
interviewed him at his Fifth Avenue Club. He tells me now that I may
say what I like concerning my impression of him that first time I met
him. So I will be absolutely frank.
A man of multi-millions and international importance makes many
friends, and inevitably many enemies. Seldom can he know what people
really think of him. His enemies exaggerate the worst, and his friends
mostly fawn. Blaine's personal reputation, by hearsay, had reached me,
of course. I had no expectation of liking him, and, very frankly, I
didn't. I found him a big man, as tall as myself, heavy, portly from
easy living. But I must say his appearance was impressive--a big mane
of shaggy hair, a rather handsome, large-featured face, keen dark eyes
under heavy brows, a jutting chin.
He was playing chess with a fellow club member and I sat down to
watch. I know something about chess and I think his playing very well
displayed his character. He won, with skill of aggressive attack. But
there was about it something you didn't like. His incisive moving of
his men, as though there could be no doubt that it was the correct
move; and his whole attitude made you hope it wasn't. It was a quite
informal game. Once Blaine made an obvious, rather silly mistake,
exposing a piece. His opponent offered to have him take it back. He
didn't; he pretended it was what he wanted to do, taking the loss
rather than admit his error.
Then he was finished and turned to me. I was there to interview him
for the Editor of a booklet being issued by the Royal Astronomical
Society of London. It seems that the Society was issuing a booklet with
little character sketches of the people from whom they had obtained
donations--sort of a tribute of thanks. I was commissioned to write the
one on Blaine.
"Did they tell you how much I gave them?" he demanded of me now.
I shook my head.
"No," I said.
His smile was ironic. "I gave them a hundred pounds. What they wanted,
and expected, was ten thousand. So now you'll write something very nice
about me which they hope will flatter me so I'll give them more. Don't
bother, young man."
Blaine was a bachelor. My first impression of him was that he was doing
some woman a favor by keeping himself in that category.
So much for J. Walter Blaine.
It was the next night that the weird thing struck at me. I was walking
along the edge of the park, alone on my way to the mid-town office of
Amalgamated Newscasters. The street was fairly brightly lighted. I
recall that there chanced to be no pedestrians near me, just an empty
length of grey-white stone pavement in front of me, with the park on
one side. And quite suddenly it was as though I had stepped through
a black door into nothingness! I could have been stricken blind, yet
it was not that, for in another split-second I could see a dim, red
radiance and hear voices. Then I could see the shapes of people--three
men and a woman--stumbling like myself on a strange earthy ground here
in the red darkness.
"Look! Here comes another one of us!" It was a terrified man's voice,
vaguely familiar.
"My Gawd, it's the handsome astronomer! _I_ know him!" The voice of
Vivian La Marr.
And then there was Shorty's voice! "Bob! Bob Rance!" I could feel him
gripping me and there was the vague outline of his frightened white
face at my shoulder. "Bob! Tell us--what's happened to all of us?"
And Vivian cried: "Hang onto him! There he goes!" I was trying to speak
but my tongue was thick, my throat dry and congested.
Things were dim and hazy in my mind; and I could feel the cool
blankness stealing through my muscles. The touch of hands on my arms
faded, until at last there was no more sensation. I made one last great
effort to bring myself out of the fog.
Then I felt myself falling into a soundless blackness.
II
I think I did not quite lose consciousness. I was aware that I had
fallen to the earthy ground, with Shorty and Vivian bending over me.
My head was roaring; I was bathed in cold sweat. Then I began to feel
better, trying to sit up, with Shorty's arm holding me.
"You're all right now, Bob? Can't you speak?"
"Yes. I--guess so."
Whatever had happened which had brought me here when an instant ago, it
seemed, I was walking alone by the park, none of us could imagine. The
identical experience had happened to Shorty, to Vivian La Marr; and to
Peter Mack, and J. Walter Blaine.
"But--where are we?" I demanded, when in another moment I was strong
enough to struggle upright in the crimson glowing darkness.
"Damned if we know," Shorty said. It seemed a sort of underground
grotto. I could begin to make out its rocky walls and ceiling now, with
that glow like a crimson phosphorescence streaming from them. One by
one my companions had found themselves here. Blaine was the first. Then
at intervals it seemed as though the wall across the grotto had opened
and Shorty, Vivian and Mack came stumbling in, standing an instant,
dazed, and then falling, as I had fallen, almost in a normal faint.
"No way of getting out of this damned place," Shorty was saying. "The
rock-wall over there moves like a door, but we haven't been able to
open it."
How much time had passed since we were stricken with this weird thing,
none of us could guess. Suddenly I was startled. My clothes were too
big for me. My body felt thin; I had lost twenty or thirty pounds. And
in the dim crimson glow now I could see Mack, Vivian and Blaine fairly
well. All of them thinner than I remembered them, with faces drawn and
haggard and big glowing smouldering eyes. And we men had a growth of
beard.
Weeks could have passed! Vivian laughed lugubriously as she met my
startled stare. "De-glamorized," she said. "I feel like a lost alley
cat." She was clad in a thin, summer street dress. Her lush lissome
curves were gone so that it hung drably on her. The vivid artificial
blonde hair was darkish at the roots; it fell in a tangled mass to
her shoulders. Her makeup was gone; her lips pallid. "We're all about
starved to death, if you ask me," she added.
"He brought us food a while ago," Blaine put in.
"Try to eat it," Mack said. "There's some of it over by the wall. If
that's what we've been living on, no wonder we're starved."
"He? Food?" I stammered.
Since Blaine had found himself here, what seemed like perhaps twelve
hours had passed. Our captor had come twice. They had only seen him
dimly.
"But he's human--semi-human, anyway," Shorty said. "And he seems to
talk English a little."
"Look!" Vivian suddenly murmured. "Here he comes again."
The red glow across the cave for an instant brightened. It seemed as
though a rock had slid aside and closed again. A dim upright shape
moved toward us; stopped and stood regarding us with eyes that gleamed
green, smouldering in the dimness.
"The Great Mind--ready--see you soon," the figure's weird, guttural
voice said.
I moved forward, unsteadily on my feet. "I want to talk to you," I
said. I could see him now, quite plainly. A man? I suppose you could
call him that. He was about five feet tall, squat and square, with
high square shoulders, a rectangular torso and two legs which seemed
encased in a flexible metal grey fabric. His head was round, set upon a
triangular neck with its apex under his chin--a bullet head, hairless,
with a weird, box-like face, square-chinned and broad square nose. His
two arms, long and powerful-looking, dangled at his sides.
* * * * *
This, we were soon to learn, was a Radak. I recall my first clear
impression that there was about him a queer sense of power. And
something else, mysterious, yet even more apparent. An automaton-like
quality. It was as though here were an individual who was only acting
his role as a tiny part of some great, organized thing. A cog in a
machine. The German Nazis of my father's boyhood, must have been
like that. And here with these Radaks of the Crimson Comet it seemed
intensified to be almost gruesome. You could not tell why, but you
could sense it. Human individuals who lived only to do what they were
told. A great mental force dominating them from birth to death, so that
they thought what they were told to think; only did what they were told
to do.
This Radak answered our questions now; he seemed willing enough to
talk, though in many ways his knowledge of our language, newly absorbed
by his weird brain, was inadequate. I think it best to summarize
briefly here, the total of what we learned and saw of the strange
little world and its people. In actuality we were destined to see very
little. Doomed little world! And since its death now, as you all know,
most of its secrets will forever remain a mystery.
It was some five hundred Earth-miles in diameter, doubtless of immense
density because we were not aware of much change of gravitational
force. Of its past history, no one knows much. Somewhere out in
Interplanetary Space it must once have had a normal orbit. I shall
explain more of that later.
Two human races were here now. The Radaks--there were perhaps something
like a thousand or two of them--were the rulers. The others were the
Lei--a primitive, gentle people, no more than slaves to the dominating
Radaks. Nature always had been cruel, uncompromising, here on Zelos.
(Which was the word their native language seemed to call their world.)
Both Radaks and Lei lived always in great underground caverns with
which this section of the surface was honeycombed. Above them, on the
outer surface, weird storms and erratic extremes of heat and cold were
prevalent. And out there strange monsters roamed--the Deathless Things,
as they were called, since it was impossible to kill them. Creatures
of indescribable horrible quality who seemed unwilling to come into
the confines of the underground corridors and grottos, so that all
the humans were of necessity driven here, eking out a drab and grim
existence.
How the strange science of the Radaks developed will forever remain
a mystery. Perhaps it was brought here from some other planet.
Despite the science, life here was primitive--a struggle for the bare
necessities. Queerly enough, the Radak science seemed not concerned
with better living. They had a few small space-fliers--the secret of
interplanetary travel was known to them. Perhaps only recently--that
seems rather certain. Beyond that, there was nothing save the weird,
mysterious mechanisms by which at last they had been able to control
the space-movements of their tiny world. It was all here, in what they
called the "Great Cavern of Machines." Shorty and I were there for a
brief time--an unforgettable time of horror.
"The Great Mind will see us soon?" I was saying now to this Radak who
stood stiff and stolid beside me. "Who--what is that?"
We were soon to see. Another Radak appeared, motioning us imperiously
to follow him. Neither of these fellows seemed to have any weapons on
them, though of course there was no way of telling. Shorty nudged me,
muttering something about starting a fight.
"You're crazy," I whispered. "We'd be killed."
"The Great Mind--want see you now," one of the Radaks said. He led us,
and we followed him, with the other Radak behind us, out into a dim
rock-corridor gleaming with that same crimson phosphorescence.
The banker, Blaine, pushed past me. "I'll attend to this," he said.
"This Ruler, whoever he is, he can be bought. I'll get him to take us
back to Earth--promise him riches--"
The ragged, cadaverous Mack gave Blaine a glance of contempt. "I guess
it's strange to you, not being able to buy everything with your money,
isn't it?" he commented.
A distant murmur of voices sounded ahead of us now, and we could see
where the light-glow widened as the corridor emerged into another
grotto. More Radaks were around us now, herding us with their stiff,
jerky movements, jabbering with their strange guttural voices. The
murmur ahead of us grew louder; then we emerged from the tunnel.
* * * * *
It was at first almost like being above ground--a huge grotto with
red-glowing ceiling high up, dim in the crimson haze. To the sides the
precipitous rock-walls widened rapidly out. Ahead of us, down a ragged,
undulating slope, there was only a red haze of distance. There seemed
to be distant fields, with things growing in them. There was a spindly
blue and red stalk-like vegetation growing like trees perhaps to a
height of a hundred feet. And off to the left, under the trees, there
were mound-shaped little buildings.
We were on a broad level space at the top of the slope. A hundred or
more Radaks were here, some crowding at us, but most standing stiff,
gazing at us with gleaming, animal-like eyes. And now I saw Radak women
and children among them--the women broader-hipped, narrower shouldered.
But they were all cast in the same mold--even the children stood at
attention, like rows of little statues waiting for something to move
them, with only their eyes in motion.
Most of the murmuring voices were further down the slope. A crowd of
figures milled about, down there, trying to see us better. A thousand
perhaps. The Lei, the slaves of this little world. Certainly they
seemed far more human than the Radaks--slim and slight, and some of
them as tall as Shorty. They were dressed in simple flowing fabric
garments. A bronzed-skinned people, the women with long-flowing hair.
"You come--this way," the Radak said. "Now--you stand still--the Great
Mind speak to you."
Ruler of the Crimson Comet. He sat on a sort of stone throne with a
leafy canopy over him. Our captors shoved us forward until we stood
in a wavering line, all of us staring blankly at this Being whose
mentality encompassed and dominated every living human on his tiny
world. He looked as though once he had had the aspect of a Radak. But
that perhaps was a hundred or two hundred Earth-years ago. He sat
now with his shriveled, wrinkled grey body small as a child, encased
in a single garment of woven fabric. His round head, devoid of hair,
wobbled on a spindly neck. Skin like shriveled grey parchment covered
his shrunken bony face giving him a mummy-like appearance of immense
age. His shiny, smooth-grey skull seemed bloated by the pulsating
brain-tissue within it. It bulged in places, with worm-like knots under
the scalp, dilating, quivering, as his huge green-glowing eyes regarded
us.
Then he spoke, slowly with a measured, sonorous voice of weird
sepulchral tone. And what he said--it was as though here we faced
a mental power too great to resist; as though there could be no
question but that his thoughts must be our thoughts. I felt it with
a sudden strange shudder--a radiance of thought from him, beating
down, destroying whatever was within me of independent individualism.
And the realization swept me; if I yielded to this radiance--these
thought-waves, whatever they might be, then all that was Robert Rance
would be gone. I would be nothing but an automaton.
He was saying, "You will listen. There are things I shall explain to
you Earthmen. I have sent to Earth and brought you here--because each
of you has a knowledge of many things on Earth that I wish to know."
* * * * *
I listened, numbed, somewhat perhaps as though hypnotized. In this
Radak ruler's judgment, Blaine the banker, Mack the derelict, Shorty,
myself and Vivian--the sum total of the myriad things that were stacked
in our brains--were what now must go into his. Certainly a varied,
representative strata of Earth-knowledge.
"You want to learn everything we know?" Blaine suddenly said. "How can
you do that? Suppose we don't want to teach you? And why do you want to
learn it? What are your plans? What I want to know is--do you realize
who and what I am, on Earth?"
Of us all, undoubtedly the dominating nature of J. Walter Blaine made
him best able to resist that weird mental force that was engulfing us.
Yet his manner, his querulous, arrogant questions under these strange,
unearthly conditions here on the Crimson Comet certainly were fatuous,
childish. Mack gave a short, disagreeable laugh.
"On Earth, okay," Mack muttered. "But you don't amount to much here."
"Money of course, won't mean anything to you," Blaine was saying. "But
I have other things on Earth--things you would want. Look here, if
you'll send all these people away, I'll have a talk with you. I'll--"
He got no further. It seemed that a look of wonderment was upon the
shriveled, ancient grey face. The eyes were darting little green fires.
The measured voice said, "I shall attend to you later--" And then
droned into the Radak tongue. Four of the squat little men marched upon
Blaine, seizing him.
"What in the devil--stop that!" Blaine remonstrated. There was a
scuffle beginning. I recall that I shouted,
"Blaine! Take it easy! You'll be killed!"
Amazing power of these squat little men! A claw-like hand was clapped
over Blaine's mouth; his flailing arms and kicking legs were pinned by
the Radak's clutches; and then they picked him up and carted him away.
"I shall begin with you, Peter Mack," the Radak ruler said quietly.
"Come forward, bend before me."
For a second Mack hesitated, flinging Shorty and me a questioning
glance. But we had nothing to offer. Then the shabby, lanky figure of
the bearded Mack shambled forward, guided by two Radaks until he was
standing with head bent before the Ruler. Down the slope the murmurs of
the crowd of Lei rose into a babble. The milling throng of slave-people
a hundred yards or so from us crowded curiously forward to see Mack
better. There was a sudden, low-voiced command from the Radak Ruler. A
dozen or more of the squat, grey Radaks ran at the Lei, cuffing them,
knocking them back ... I saw a young Lei girl, slim, with flowing
white and tawny hair framing her face. The little automaton Radak ran
at her, struck her in the mouth so that the blood spurted out.
And through it all, near me a row of Radak children stood stiffly
at attention, motionless, with only their round green eyes turning
sidewise to watch the scene.
Then the ancient Radak Ruler's smouldering gaze was upon Mack's head.
An awed silence fell over the scene as Mack stood motionless. Who shall
say by what weird and gruesome process Mack was now being sapped! No
one on Earth knows what a thought is. No one can say what is within our
brain cells to constitute knowledge. But something is there, something
in our conscious and subconscious minds upon which our memory can draw.
And we do know that thought is a wave of vibration--an infinitely
tiny, infinitely rapid vibration. A thing that at least has a tangible
entity. And this Radak's mind now was drawing, sapping from Mack.
A minute. Five minutes. In the tense silence, I felt Shorty clutch at
me, heard him mutter: "God, it's weird!"
Mack now was drooping. A mental agony, rasping his nerves now, drawing
vitality from him so that he drooped, swayed, and suddenly let out
a groan. Mental anguish, with screaming nerves translating it into
physical pain.
"It's torture!" Vivian murmured. "Look at him--stop it! Stop it!"
Mack had fallen to the ground, writhing now, mumbling with futile hands
clawing at his face and head as though to pluck away that damnable,
torturing gaze. But still, calmly, inexorably the green-eyed, monstrous
little Radak held him--this shriveled Radak Ruler, avidly, greedily
drawing in the knowledge of Mack's past life--those myriad little
things of Earth-life stored within Mack's brain. Surely it must have
been a torture most horrible.
* * * * *
Shorty and I were starting to leap forward in protest. But Vivian was
ahead of us, raging, rushing heedlessly at the old Radak. She almost
reached him. She was screaming, "You--you rotten damn Thing--you--"
Her hand went up to strike him. It was all a sudden chaos, just a few
seconds. Radaks caught Shorty and me; with almost machine-like strength
their arms pinned us. I think I yelled at Shorty not to struggle. In
that same second, I saw Vivian's arm with clenched fist trying to hit
the Radak Ruler, but a little squat grey figure standing guard there,
jumped and seized her. It was an amazing tableau. At the threatened
blow, the Ruler shrank back. His whole little body quivered, pulsated;
and on the weird, almost unhuman face, there was a look, not of fear,
but of strange revulsion--as though the threat of that physical blow
were something too horrible to contemplate.
"Vivian! Vivian--you--they'll kill you! Run--Vivian, run--"
Mack was staggering to his feet, stumbling, half falling. But he
reached Vivian, clutched her. Both of them were confused, dazed so that
all they could do was stand there, holding onto each other. I saw Mack
gazing defiantly at the oncoming Radaks--Mack who on Earth probably
wouldn't have lifted a hand to help anyone, ready now to fight to
protect this girl.
"You will all--stand--away from them." It was the Ruler's quiet,
measured voice. And abruptly I saw that his shriveled hand had gone
to his belt. A weapon was hanging there--a little pot-bellied black
cylinder. His fingers shifted it, seemed aiming it at Vivian and Mack.
Shorty and I were struggling, but the Radaks held us. And we were both
shouting. Then there was a soundless, almost invisible flash, just a
vague spitting glow of light from the little cylinder. It leaped and
for a second clung upon Mack and the girl. They seemed to stiffen. Just
that; nothing else. Still clutching each other they stood transfixed,
and on their faces there was a blankness, a strange emptiness.
"You will walk together, hand in hand," the Ruler's soft voice was
droning. "One of my Radaks will lead you to the upper exit. And then
you will walk together alone--out into the Realm of the Deathless
Things."
He added something in his own language. A little Radak moved in front
of Mack and Vivian now. Hand in hand they were standing docile, and
then they were following the Radak--following him with slow measured
steps, their faces blank, their eyes staring straight ahead of them.
Like somnambulists, walking in their sleep.
"Good Lord," Shorty murmured. "That could be the way we were abducted
on Earth! Do you suppose--"
* * * * *
His words were cut off. The Ruler had given another command. The
Radaks gripping us were pulling us away--shoving us back into the dim
crimson tunnel from which they had brought us. I turned to look behind
me. The stiff figures of Mack and Vivian still were visible, walking
in a trance, following the square, box-like little Radak who marched
silently ahead of them. For a moment they wound along the edge of the
slope; then the crimson murk of radiance enveloped them and they were
gone.
Roughly Shorty and I were shoved along the tunnel by our captors. Then
a rock panel slid aside. We were shoved in, and the panel slid closed.
"Well," Shorty murmured. "That's that. We're in a jam, Bob--a damn
weird jam."
It was soundless in here, and darker than out in the main open grotto.
But still there was that dim crimson glow. We were in a small cave-cell
now. The air was hot, fetid, earthy. Presently we could see a little
better. There was nothing but black, spongy ground, glowing red rock
walls and a rock ceiling close over us. In the dimness I fumbled,
feeling the wall, trying to find the crevice of the sliding door panel;
but could not.
Time passed. Shorty and I both realized now that we were weak and faint
from hunger--not altogether the hunger from missing a meal or so, but
the depletion of long under-nourishment. Together we lay down on the
fibrous ground. I think at that moment I was more despairing than ever
before in my life. I seemed unable to cope with even the thought of
what we might possibly plan. I closed my eyes. I seemed just to want to
drift into the blessed relief of sleep.
"This is one jam we might not get out of, Bob," Shorty murmured
presently.
"Yes, looks so."
Then suddenly both of us were galvanized into alertness. The door-panel
was sliding open with a little rasp and an influx of brighter red glow.
Outside in the corridor we saw a group of Radaks on guard. But none of
them came in. They moved aside and a figure came past them--a Lei girl.
Her slim body was draped in a bluish garment of thatch. Her long tawny
hair flowed down over her shoulders. She was carrying a slab on which
there was food and drink for us.
Then she set the slab on the ground near us. She was between us and the
door, almost a silhouette but I could see that her hand was at her lips
and her glowing eyes seemed warning us to be silent.
For an instant she leaned close toward me. "I am Tahn--the wife of
Taro, the Lei." Her voice barely whispered it. "You say nothing. I
come again--with Taro's plan to help you! We would save you and your
Earth--if we can!"
Silent, Shorty and I just stared. Then she had turned and was gone. The
rock panel slid closed upon us.
III
I must explain now what was happening to Mack and Vivian as they
afterward told it to me. Mack recalls quite clearly that moment of
dazed, numbed anguish when he writhed on the ground with the horrible
sapping gaze of the Radak Ruler upon him. Then he heard Vivian scream,
saw her rushing at the shriveled old Radak.
He called, "Vivian! Run--they'll kill you--"
He found himself staggering to his feet, stumbling until he was
by her side. He felt her clutch him, both of them standing there,
numbed and dazed, terrified, with the feeling that the rushing Radaks
would instantly kill them. He remembers that the girl and himself
took a stumbling step forward. To Mack it was like stumbling through
a suddenly appearing black curtain of emptiness. Just an abyss of
soundless nothingness, except that there seemed still to be Vivian's
clutch on his arm. No, it was her hand holding his as they stood
peering at a distant blur of red radiance.
"Viv--where are we? What happened?"
"Pete--I'm frightened--can't--see anything--"
But the red radiance was growing, spreading to dispel the blank empty
darkness so that in a moment he could see the drab, disheveled form
of the girl beside him, her moist, cold hand convulsively clutching
his, and the red light on her pallid, terrified face. And in the
distance now there were outlines--a sort of red line that looked like a
shimmering cliff with jagged spires upstanding in a row.
"Vivian--everything's gone--the Radaks--we're not where we were--Bob
and Shorty--gone--"
The red glow in a moment had brightened to be far more luminous than
they remembered it in the caverns. Obviously there was a sky overhead
now--a lurid, murky, blood-red haze of infinite distance. This was
the outer surface of the little planetoid. The Realm of the Deathless
Monsters! Mack realized it with a shudder of terror. He and Vivian
now could see that they were standing upon a little rise of ground,
in what could have been called a forest. Everywhere great stalks of
spindly blue and grey vegetation towered into the air. Growing things
of fantastic shape, woven in places to be a solid jungle. Or again
there were open glades of rocky ground--buttes and little spires, small
ravines and crevices. All of it bathed in crimson, as though here were
a bloody landscape of unutterable horror. The horror of things not yet
seen ... things lurking--
"Oh Pete, what can we do?" Hungry and faint she swayed against him. But
in the blood-red light she was trying to smile. "You tell us what we
ought to do--I will help us do it, Pete. I'm not--not afraid."
But the terror of despair was clutching at both of them. Mack tried to
gather his wits. Alone here on an alien world. Could they find food and
drink? Wander here, until some ghastly monster engulfed them? Or should
they try to get back underground? Why? To have the murderous Radaks
fall upon them and kill them?
But the will to live in every human is very strong. No one will lie
down and just hopelessly wait for death.
"Viv--those cliffs over there--cliffs with the spires--there ought to
be tunnels maybe at the bottom of them. If we could get back--maybe get
to Bob and Shorty--" His voice trailed away. It all seemed so hopeless.
Then he felt the girl clutch at his arm. "Look! Maybe that's water? I'm
so thirsty--"
"I see it. Maybe it is. Come on."
In a nearby open glade, surrounded by stalks of the towering fibrous
vegetation, what could have been a shallow pool of water was spread on
the open rocks. A little pool, twenty feet or so in diameter. Rivulets
extended off to the sides of it in crevices of the rock-surfaces. It
was quite shallow, seemingly only a few inches deep. The red radiant
glow that suffused everything stained it like blood, but it was
translucent so that the rocks showed through it.
Was it water? As they approached, Vivian stepped over one of the
branching rivulet arms. The translucent red stuff suddenly lifted from
the rocks, the little tentacle arm of it wrapping itself around her
ankle!
* * * * *
The girl screamed. In a panic Mack reached down, plucking at the red
mass. Ghastly horror! It was like quivering, sticky glue. Frantically
he tore at it. Warm, pulsating, protoplasm. It stuck to his fingers,
greedily fastening upon his flesh until he wiped it away. Vivian,
too, was frantically flailing at the stuff. And in that second Mack
was aware that the whole twenty-foot spread of it on the rocks was in
motion now--rolling itself up from the rocks, congealing, gathering
itself into a great circular mass. Huge, eight-foot ball of blood-red,
pulsating protoplasm. Yet now it seemed there was a nucleus, a little
central part, more solid than the rest, suddenly growing to look almost
like a head and face in the center of the mass. Red-gleaming eyes; a
sucking mouth, yawning.
All this Mack saw in a horrified second or two while still he was
flailing to cast away the broken, pulpy arm of the monster. And he saw
now that the great ball of it was rocking. Then it started to roll and
bump toward them!
"Vivian! Run--good Lord, here it comes!"
They fled. But behind them it was coming, gathering speed, bumping and
squishing over the rocks. Mack tried to keep his wits. The monstrous
thing was only twenty feet behind them now. And as it rolled, it was
expanding. A lashing ball twice as high as their heads. Then ahead of
them Mack saw a narrow pass between two huge rocks--a space some three
feet wide. He shoved Vivian into it--a space too small for the monster
to follow. It was a crevice only some ten feet long. They dashed
through it.
Mack turned to see what the crimson Deathless Thing would do. It had
hit the rocks, and now it was oozing through the narrow space--thin red
streamer of protoplasm feeding itself through the crevice. Mack and
Vivian had fled to one side, and as the jet of red pulp came through,
out on the other side it rolled itself again into a ball--ghastly
thing that kept on going down the slope! In a moment it was a hundred
feet away. Panting, Mack clutched his companion and they stared. The
bumping, rolling circular mass had reached a patch of forest. It
slowed; stopped.
"Pete, look!" The girl's terrified, awed voice murmured it. "Look at it
now!"
There in the forest glade the monstrous crimson ball was sagging,
flattening, spreading itself out into a thin, translucent layer on the
rocky ground. Then it was motionless, quiescent, waiting.
"Well!" Mack breathed. "At least we know now what to avoid! We--"
But again Vivian gripped him. "What's that over there?" Her shaking
hand gestured to one side. It was an upright blob moving in a patch of
trees. A tree hid it; then it showed again. It stopped, seemed to turn
upon itself. Still upright. Then again it moved.
Suddenly Mack gasped, "A man! Look--see it now--a man--why--why it's
Blaine!"
Startled relief was in his voice. The figure came to another open
space, where the crimson glow in the air showed it plainly. It was
Blaine. He was moving along, gazing around as though searching.
"Blaine! Blaine!" Mack called.
The banker turned at the voice; saw Mack and Vivian who now were
running toward him. "You Mack--Vivian--you're safe--"
"Yes, sure!" It was a blessed relief to Mack.
"I've been looking for you," Blaine called. He was running to meet
them. "And I've got something--something important! A weapon--"
The three reached each other. Blaine and Mack gripped hands. Then
suddenly Vivian gasped: "Another! Another of those Things--"
Out among the trees beyond where Blaine had been a moment before, a
slithering red shape was visible. Another of the Deathless Things which
soundlessly had been stalking Blaine. Like a huge thirty-foot crimson
python it was sliding through the vegetation. Its neck and head came
up, reared up as for a second it stopped, peering with red-green eyes
seeking its prey. Then it lowered its head and came slithering rapidly
forward!
* * * * *
I must go back now for just a moment to recount what had happened to
Blaine, from that moment when the Radak guards hustled him away from
their shriveled ancient ruler. Ignoring his protests, he was shoved
along a corridor, thrown into a cave-cell and its door-slide closed
upon him. But he wasn't alone there for long. Presently the slide
opened again and a figure came in. It was obviously a Radak, but of
somewhat a different type. The same square, powerful look. But this one
was taller, almost as tall as Blaine. Grey-skinned, lean and muscular.
He seemed fairly young, thirty Earth-years perhaps.
"I have come for to talk to you," the visitor announced. He sat stiffly
on a rock by a wall of the cave. His grey-black woven garment swished
as he motioned Blaine to sit on the ground before him. "You are very
interesting to me. Sit down."
"Thanks. I'll stand," Blaine said. "You speak my language very well."
"That I should." The Radak's smile made his strange face wrinkle into
a grimace. "I am Ratan. Our Great Mind sent me to your Earth. I picked
you Earthmen, and ordered you seized. I will tell you about that. You
can be very helpful to us, I am thinking. Perhaps especially so. I am
commanded to tell you our plans."
Carefully Blaine listened to the strange things this Ratan quite calmly
was telling him. With their weird mechanisms, the Radaks now were
directing their tiny world through Space, toward our Earth. Already
they were bathing Earth with a radiance which was disturbing the
Earth's axial and orbital rotations--that vague, dim purple haze which
Dr. Johns had described to Shorty and me. Then when Zelos was closer to
Earth, the vibratory beam would be intensified.
The Earth would be drawn from its orbit. Engulfed in this weird
gravitational force, it would follow Zelos back from the Sun--out into
Interplanetary Space.... The abduction of the Earth! Blaine knew
little of science, but enough to realize what soon would happen on
Earth....
"Storms--the disturbance of all your atmospheric pressures--" Ratan
was saying with his ironic smile, "that will very soon kill many of
your people. And then will come the congealing cold. Certain it is that
human life on your Earth will not withstand it."
Our atmosphere, not adapted to insulate the cold of Space--
There was no need for this Ratan to picture for Blaine the wild
devastation of Earth. "Perhaps even before we have drawn you out to the
orbit of Saturn," Ratan was saying, "then there will be no Earthman
still living."
The end of human Earth-life. It might take another Earth-year,
or many. But it was coming. Inevitable. A thing that the Radak
Great-Mind had long planned, and that already was being successfully
accomplished.... There are on Earth now as I write this brief
narrative, many scientists working to understand the theories of
the strange, diabolic mechanisms of the bandit Crimson Comet. The
projection of some new application of gravitational force. The purple
ray was something of that nature, of course. A link between Zelos
and Earth, like a chain binding them together--a powerful little tug
pulling a great ocean liner. And the same force unquestionably was what
made Zelos itself mobile in Space. That much we know definitely because
in miniature, but doubtless of the same approximate nature, the purple
gravitational ray is the motive power for the Radak Space-ship which we
now have intact.
"So you are planning to kill everyone on Earth," Blaine said. His heart
was pounding, but he tried to hold his voice calm. He stood with folded
arms, gazing at Ratan. "And what will that gain you?"
"Our little planet here we do not like," Ratan retorted. "Many
space-ships we will build, and when your Earth-people are gone, then we
will migrate to your much better world. The Lei, and the Radaks to rule
them. The Great Mind has planned it all. We have been secretly to your
Earth, we have studied life there. It will be much better for us than
this. The Great Mind will rule your whole world for a while--until he
dies. And then--do you not see something unusual in me?"
"What?" Blaine demanded.
"I am the appointed one to be the next Great Mind. When I was born it
was decided. I have been trained for that. Just for that, nothing else."
* * * * *
Blaine could see it in him now. That air of quiet, confident dominance.
"I see what you mean," Blaine agreed. "I am like that, on Earth. You
realize it?"
"It is why I chose to bring you here," Ratan said.
"I can be very helpful to you," Blaine added. "My companions--they
are just captives. But I would like to be more than that." The banker
shrugged. "I bow to the inevitable. If you are to seize my world, then
I would like to do the best for myself. That's good sense, isn't it?"
Was he gaining this fellow's confidence? The big Radak smiled also.
"What do you mean?"
"On Earth I am very powerful. I have money, property."
"Of what good could that be to me?" Ratan smiled. "And when I get
there--I have it all anyway."
"What I mean," Blaine persisted, "I am an organizer. I know the
resources of Earth--"
"And to that I agree," Ratan interrupted. "You mean, you would join us,
as a friend."
"For a position of power among you Radaks, yes. You will find I can
handle the Lei." He smiled cannily. "On Earth they called me ruthless.
I could bend men to my will--and always to my own profit."
Blaine's keen, appraising gaze was watching the Radak. Ratan was
smiling; he could understand talk like this, and it was obvious that
he liked it.... Blaine's heart was pounding. At Ratan's broad grey
belt a little pot-bellied metal cylinder was hanging. He gestured to it
casually.
"What is that, Ratan?"
"That? It is a weapon of ours. Very important. There are only very few
of us who may carry it. A Rak-gun, perhaps your language would term it."
"Let me see it. How does it work?"
But Ratan was only fingering it lovingly. He made no move to detach it
from his belt. He was smiling. "It is what brought you from Earth."
He seemed willing enough to describe it. The projection of a
vibration akin to thought-waves, but infinitely more intense. In
effect it paralyzed the conscious mind, yet left the motor area
intact. The victim, to all intents and purposes was a somnambulist.
The subconscious mind, with will power numbed, then was open to
any suggestive stimulus which it received. The victim's muscles
instinctively obeyed commands. And the memory areas recorded nothing.
Shorty and I had seen it happen to Vivian and Mack. Blaine did not know
of that. But it had happened to him, on Earth, as it had to all of us.
"And, then, after a time it wears off?"
"Exactly. An hour--what you would call an hour on Earth, perhaps. But
another shock of it can be given. You were under its influence for
about three weeks--the time it took for our Space-ship to bring us
here."
"And you fed me very badly," Blaine commented. He was taut inside now.
He took a casual step forward so that he was almost within reach of the
seated Radak. "Is that thing easy to operate?"
Blaine's heart leaped as Ratan unclipped the little cylinder from his
belt. "Very simple," the Radak said. "Just a pressure on this little
lever. But it will be years before the Great Mind or myself would let
you handle one of these."
"I was thinking," Blaine said, "when we get to Earth you yourself will
not be the Great Ruler. But if, perhaps, the Great Mind should suddenly
die? Then it would be only the great Ratan, with me to help him--"
Blaine had leaned forward confidentially and lowered his voice. "Did
you ever think of that?"
Surely at least the idea of murdering his commander was startling to
Ratan, and for that instant he was off his guard. Just a second, but
it was enough for Blaine. The banker abruptly reached, snatched the
cylinder and leaped backward.
"Now you damned villain--"
* * * * *
Blaine raised the cylinder level. With a roar, Ratan was on his feet.
There was a soundless, vague little flash. Ratan, tensing his muscles
for a leap abruptly relaxed, wavered.
"Quiet now! Stand still!" Blaine ordered sharply.
He stood listening, with the quiescent, blankly staring Ratan before
him. Had Ratan's roar of startled anger aroused any guards out in the
corridor? It seemed not. There was only silence.
"Now we will go out of here," Blaine said softly. "We will go out. You
know where Robert Rance is now. You will lead me to him."
With hands outstretched, the big Radak moved to the door, slid it open.
At this moment Shorty and I were confined in another cave-cell not far
away. Ratan knew it; he was leading Blaine there. But suddenly, at a
corridor intersection, voices sounded! Radaks were coming.
"Crouch down!" Blaine commanded. "Be quiet! Not a sound from you!"
There was a wall recess. Blaine shoved his numbed captive into it.
Together they crouched. And now Blaine saw that in a sheath at Ratan's
belt, there was a knife. He drew it out; held it in his other hand and
kept the cylinder ready. Two Radaks were coming. They were talking
together in their own language. They stopped nearby, evidently with the
intention of parting here at the intersection.
Blaine listened. Then he whispered to Ratan: "Answer me softly. What
are they saying? Tell me in English."
"Those Earth-people banished--into the Realm
of--Deathless--Monsters--and they will die--of course." Ratan's words
were mumbled, queerly mouthed, like one who talks in his sleep. Blaine
assumed that all of us were out there on the upper surface, not just
Vivian and Mack. Swiftly he changed his plans.
"In a moment when I command you," he whispered, "you will lead me
there. You know where the Earth-people would probably be now? Out which
exit they went? Answer me--softly."
"By the--big cliff with the--rock spires.... The exit is--down this
left corridor."
Tensely Blaine waited. The nearby Radaks parted and moved away. "Now,
lead me," he whispered.
Again they moved forward, down the left-hand corridor-branch now.
And suddenly behind Blaine there was a shout. He whirled. One of the
Radaks had changed his mind and was coming back, calling something to
his fellow. Blaine had no time to get himself and Ratan out of sight.
The Radak saw them--saw the stiffly walking Ratan, and Blaine with the
cylinder in his hand.
With a startled shout, the little Radak leaped at Blaine. The flash
met him; he stopped in his tracks, stood stiff. But from the other
direction, his companion was coming. And now the commotion was bringing
others. Blaine could hear several of the guttural voices and the thuds
of their oncoming footsteps.
With a leap Blaine went past Ratan. The squat little shape of the
other Radak came charging down the center of the narrow corridor.
His greenish eye-beams were weird in the crimson gloom. Again Blaine
fired his cylinder. But this time evidently he missed and in another
second the Radak was on him. The shock of the impact flung them both
to the ground. The cylinder was knocked from Blaine's hand. He felt
his adversary's arms clutching him, squeezing him with machine-like
strength. In another moment Blaine's ribs would have smashed. But his
left hand still gripped the knife. With despairing effort he drove it
into the Radak's side.
Ghastly knife-thrust! It went in with a crunch, a rasp as it severed
the strange flesh. There was a hiss as hot fluid spurted. The Radak's
scream was horrible. His arms fell away. Blaine disentangled himself.
On the ground near him he saw the cylinder, snatched it, dropped it
into his pocket. A commotion was all around him now. Oncoming Radaks in
several of the branching corridors. But ahead of Blaine there seemed no
one.
He ran. Behind him he could dimly see the squat little figures gazing
at their dead fellow, and surrounding the stricken Ratan. No one seemed
to notice the fleeing Blaine as he ran the length of the winding
corridor until at last he was out upon the crimson upper surface.
For a time he wandered. He did not see any of the crimson monsters, or
at least did not recognize them for what they were. Then he heard Mack
shouting at him; saw Mack and Vivian running toward him.
"I've got something important--a weapon," he called to Mack.
Then abruptly the three of them saw that huge, python-like crimson
Thing which had been silently stalking Blaine.
"Look!" Vivian gasped. "Another of them!"
It was slithering rapidly at them now, no more than fifty feet away.
Its green-swaying eye-beams clung to them. For that instant they were
standing stricken with terror. To one side of them there was the brink
of an abyss a few yards away, and to the other, and behind them, a
ragged little cliff.
"Got to try and climb those rocks!" Mack gasped. "Can't get past that
snake thing--we're trapped--"
But Blaine swept him aside. The cylinder was in Blaine's hand now.
"This will stop it!" he muttered. "You two--get behind me!"
The monstrous thirty-foot thing was only half its own length away from
them now. Then, as its head reared over a projection of the uneven,
rocky ground, Blaine carefully aimed the cylinder and fired. But the
monster didn't stop! There was no conscious, thinking brain in that
ghastly, pulsating crimson head! Just motor-ganglia reacting to the
impulses of instinct!
Blaine fired again. But the monster kept on coming and in another
second was upon them!
IV
Back in our cave-cell, Shorty and I stared blankly after the figure of
the Lei woman, Tahn, as she motioned to the Radak guards who slid our
door-panel closed. Again we were alone.
"Well," Shorty murmured. "What do you make of that? The wife of some
Lei named Taro, she said."
And that she would come back and try to get us out of here. That her
husband had some plan--
Eagerly, Shorty and I waited. Would it be an hour, or a day? Both of
us were thinking of Blaine, locked somewhere around here, perhaps in
a cell like ours. Or had the Radaks killed him by now? And Vivian and
Mack, wandering out there in the Realm of the Things you couldn't kill.
"Guess they're done for," Shorty said, when I mentioned them.
"Unless we can get out there to them--"
Shorty's smile was ironic. "That would fix everything, of course. Don't
be an ass, Bob. If we were out there, we'd all be trying to get back.
For what? So the Radaks would jump on us and kill us."
It was all so utterly hopeless. But it was queer, that instinct all
five of us had, to try and keep together.
The young Lei woman had brought us food and drink. Shorty and I slumped
on the earthern floor now and sampled the food. Nauseous stuff,
indescribable.
"If it's been weeks since we left the Earth," Shorty said, "no wonder
we're nearly starved to death."
But we managed to eat and drink some of it, and then exhausted by the
nerve tension of what we had been through, we drifted off into an
uneasy slumber.
The rasp of the sliding door-panel jerked us into alertness. I had the
feeling that only a little time had passed. The panel slid open just a
foot or two, and a figure came in. It was Tahn.
Both Shorty and I were on our feet. "You came as you hoped," I said
softly. "We're ready. Just tell us what you want us to do."
She barely whispered, "The Radak guards just now are changing. There is
no one outside. We go, quickly."
"Go where?" Shorty demanded.
"To my husband, Taro. He is in a corridor near here. Come now, quickly."
The faintly red corridor outside was empty. Swiftly Tahn led us along
it, around several sharp bends, past a cross-corridor intersection.
I was tense, expecting every moment that Radaks would leap upon us
from the shadows. But so far we had escaped notice, though obviously
there were many Radaks near here. Several times we passed the dim oval
openings of little grottos, and often there were guttural, chattering
voices from within them.
"Won't the guards discover we're gone?" Shorty murmured.
"Perhaps not for maybe much time. I am in charge of you, I bring you
food and drink. The guards stay outside, should you try to break out."
Our tunnel was descending now. And suddenly from the dimness to one
side, there came a murmur: "Tahn! Tahn--"
A young Lei man was crouching in a shadowed recess. It was Tahn's
husband, Taro.
"She has brought you, Earthmen. That is good."
We crouched down with him. He was a youngish fellow, tall, slim
and powerfully built. His single draped garment exposed one bronze
shoulder. His grey-black hair was chopped at the base of his neck, with
a narrow band of bright-colored fabric tied around his forehead. With
his high-cheek bones, hawk-like nose and gleaming dark eyes he could
have been a stalwart young savage of Earth.
"I want to help you," he was saying. "Your coming here fits my plans,
and believe me I have worked on them a long time. Tahn and I, making
the Radaks trust us."
"Say," Shorty murmured, "you certainly are fluent with English."
The young Lei's face wrinkled into a smile. "Why should I not, my wife
and I? We Lei learn things quickly. Perhaps a different mind-quality
from yours, almost at once to absorb what we hear. Ratan--he is next to
the Great Mind as leader of the Radaks--he chose Tahn and me to go on
the expedition to Earth. We were carefully watched, or we would have
escaped to warn you. It was Tahn who took care of you on the way here."
* * * * *
He told us then of the weird Radak-gun, with its flash of
mind-current--the weapon which probably just at this exact moment no
more than half a mile away in this maze of subterranean corridors,
Blaine was snatching from Ratan.... And Tahn told us, too, of the
Radak plot to devastate Earth.
"You have some plan?" Shorty murmured.
He told us then that he knew how to get into the Cavern of Machines--a
huge, guarded grotto where all the diabolic, giant mechanisms of the
Radaks were housed. The power plant of little Zelos, and the source of
the purple radiance which was bathing Earth.
"If we can kill the guards and get into the Cavern--only the Great Mind
himself--or Ratan--will be there. No one else but those two are allowed
there. No one else knows the secrets of the mechanisms to operate them."
"So we just get in and overcome the Great Mind himself," Shorty
commented. He gave a mock shudder with an attempt to be humorous. "All
right. Figure that's done. Then what?"
Taro's plan was certainly desperate, but at least it promised the
possibility of success. "Do you know where the Earthman Blaine is?" I
demanded.
Tahn said, "He is in a cave-cell. I am ordered to take him food and
drink very soon."
"What weapons have you got?" Shorty asked. "Say, if you could get one
of those brain-paralyzing guns--"
Taro shook his head. "Never could I even get near one. The Great Mind
always carries one--and so does Ratan. But there is no chance--"
"We must get to Blaine," I said. "And then try and find Vivian and
Mack. We've all got to be together--"
We planned it for a few moments more. Then cautiously Taro and Tahn led
us to a corridor intersection. "We will hide here," he said, gesturing
to another shadowed recess where the ragged rocks of the wall jutted
out in an overhang. "Tahn can go best." The young Lei turned to his
wife. "Tahn, listen. You get food and drink. You take it to Blaine's
cell. There are not always guards perhaps. You watch your chance--"
"Listen!" Shorty suddenly interjected. "Maybe I'm crazy, but there's
some kind of commotion around here."
We could all hear it now--a distant murmur of turmoil down one of the
side corridors. Taro nodded. "Something is wrong. And Blaine's cell is
down that way. You Earthmen wait here! I will go with Tahn. Then we
come back to you."
* * * * *
They were gone only a few moments. From a little distance they had
stood unnoticed, watching and listening. Blaine had escaped! He had
seized Ratan's thought-gun; turned it upon Ratan and one of the guards;
had stricken them. And had knifed another guard, and vanished.
"Well! Good for Blaine," Shorty murmured. "He's smarter than all the
rest of us put together! And he's got one of those guns! Where'd he
go--"
"They think perhaps out to the outer surface," Taro said. "He ran that
way."
"To find Mack and Vivian!" I exclaimed. "Well, that's what we want to
do. Show us that exit, Taro."
"I will go with you," the young Lei said quietly. But there was no
mistaking his shudder and the grim look on his face. "Tahn, you stay
here."
"I will go with my husband," she retorted. "Taro, please--"
We took her. It seemed that the commotion at Blaine's cell must have
drawn all the Radaks from these other passages. We were not discovered
as we threaded our way back, until presently we were ascending a
winding tunnel which ended at the crimson upper surface. How long it
took us to sight Mack, Vivian and Blaine I do not know. It seemed an
eternity of apprehension, as Taro and Tahn cautiously led us along
winding rocky defiles and past patches of that weird, fantastic forest.
Shorty and I saw none of the monsters. But there were many times when
suddenly, without explanation, Taro turned us from where we would have
wandered.
Then we were far enough from the tunnel entrances so that we dared talk
without possibility that the Radaks would hear us.
"Blaine! Blaine--where are you?"
"Mack! Vivian--are you here?"
It was Tahn who first saw them. We were in a cluster of rocks with a
brink ahead of us. I could see lower ground perhaps fifty feet down--a
precipitous descent close ahead of us. It chanced that Tahn was
leading, and suddenly she turned, gave a cry, and then pointed over the
brink.
"There they are! Down there! Look--look at them--"
We crowded to the brink. Fifty feet down this ragged wall, Blaine,
Vivian and Mack stood backed against it. An abyss was near them. And in
front of them a great crimson, python-like thing was slithering, almost
upon them now, with Blaine futilely firing his gun at it!
There was nothing we could do; and for those seconds all four of us
stood staring, mute, numbed with horror. The scene on the ledge below
us was clear as though on a little stage. The monster in another second
would be upon its victims. I saw Blaine throw down his gun in despair.
His voice floated up to us.
"Damn thing won't work! Got to--try to run--"
Then, suddenly we saw Mack leap forward, not toward where he might
have a wild chance of climbing up our ragged little cliff-wall, but
the other way--toward the brink that dropped down to another terrace,
between the brink and the monster's slithering length. His intention
was obvious--to lead the monster over that other brink after him....
To sacrifice himself so that his companions might escape.
In the chaos of that second we saw Mack get past the monster's head and
neck. Its head turned. And then, before Mack could hurl himself down
the hundred-foot drop, a loop of the great crimson body lashed out. It
seemed that a tentacle whipped separate from the undulating snake-like
body--a tentacle that seized Mack, looped around him and flung him into
the air.
Just a ghastly second or two as Mack's whirling body came up diagonally
toward us in the air, and then fell back, into a ragged cluster of
rocks beyond the monster's tail. Horribly we could hear the thud as it
struck. For another second the great crimson head of the monster seemed
to rear, with swaying eye-beams searching. But Mack's body was hidden
by the rock-cluster.
* * * * *
Then, suddenly the gruesome python shape, head down, began oozing over
the brink beside it. Flowing mass of protoplasm. It thinned out as
it sagged down the hundred-foot drop--thinned until it was a narrow
ribbon--a blood-red rivulet of waterfall. Then it was all on the lower
level, gathering itself together until in a moment it was a great
congealed, quivering crimson ball with the head in the center. For
another instant it pulsated; then it bumped and rolled down a ragged
slope, reached a little patch of distant vegetation where we could
dimly see it spreading itself thinly out.... Spread like a blood-red
pool, quiescent, waiting.
With Taro and Tahn, Shorty and I climbed down the ragged little
descent, joined Vivian and Blaine.
"He tried to save us," the white-faced Vivian murmured.
"Yes," I agreed. "We saw it."
We found his broken body in the cluster of rocks fifty feet away. He
was still conscious but we thought he was dying. One of his arms hung
limp. Blood was coming from a head wound. But his pallid face was
trying to smile.
"My leg and arm," he mumbled. "Can't move them."
One of his legs undoubtedly was broken. As we told him that the monster
had gone his gaze seemed only on Vivian.
"Thought it would kill you, Viv," he muttered. "Didn't want that." Then
he fainted. He had been trying to get up on one elbow as Vivian knelt
with an arm under his head. Then his eyes closed, and he sagged, went
limp.
"We must stop that blood from his head," Tahn murmured. "And then try
and get him into one of the tunnels."
Vivian jumped up. "Here's what we need--bandages." She flashed us a
little twisted smile as she tore off her waist and skirt and ripped
them into strips. "Here--bandages." She handed the strips of fabric to
Tahn. Then she grinned at me. "This underdress--not too becoming, is
it?" She gestured at the brief undergarment that now partly covered
her, and her whimsical smile broadened. "Well this time, anyway, I had
a good motive, didn't I?"
Shorty and I carried the still unconscious Mack back to one of the
tunnel entrances. And Taro led us to a shadowed, cave-like little place
where we laid him down. Good luck seemed with us. We had encountered,
so far, no Radaks.
"You and Tahn will stay with him," I told Vivian. And Shorty and I
had decided that Blaine had best stay also. For once Blaine had to do
something against his will.
"Think I'm too old to help you young fellows now?" he said. "All right,
maybe I am."
Certainly he was in no physical condition to be much help in the
desperate venture we were planning. He handed me the Radak-gun, showed
me how to use it. I dropped it in my pocket.
"Good luck to you," Blaine said.
"Thanks. We'll need it," I acknowledged.
Then Shorty, Taro and I left them. Taro had hidden the only weapons he
could get, near here. We found them--sheathed knives that the Lei used
in the underground fields. They were odd-shaped knives; they seemed
made of a highly polished, metallic stone. I thumbed one. It was sharp.
"Very handy," Shorty commented. "Come on, Taro, let's go. Where is this
Cavern of Machines?"
It was perhaps half an Earth-mile, low down in the maze of underground
passages. Shorty clutched his knife; I held the Radak-gun as we
followed Taro down the dim, descending crimson tunnel.
V
"There's one of the guards!" Shorty whispered. "See him?"
I pushed Shorty back. "No, two of them! The other one's sitting down.
You and Taro keep behind me. I'll tackle them with the Radak-gun."
We could see the square grey figures of two Radaks down the little
length of tunnel ahead of us. They were by an opening that seemed to
lead sharply downward, with a glow of radiance streaming up. And now in
the heavy underground silence we could hear the faint muffled thrum and
whine of mechanisms.
My hand silently gripped Taro. All three of us crouched. "That's the
entrance to the Cavern of Machines?" I whispered.
"Yes."
"Two guards. Are there liable to be more of them around?"
Taro shook his head. "I think not. Though I cannot surely say."
"The machines are operating," Shorty said. "Hear them? That means only
the Great Mind, or Ratan will be down there in the Cavern?"
"Yes," the young Lei agreed.
"It's most likely not Ratan," I said. "Blaine got him--struck him
insensible. Or would he be recovered by now?"
Taro had no way of guessing. With an ordinary Radak the shock
would have lasted longer than this. "But Ratan's mind is
trained--developed--more powerful as you would say. He could recover
more quickly."
"Are there other entrances?" Shorty asked. "They'd have guards at them.
If we make any commotion down there, and a bunch of Radaks come rushing
us--"
"This is the only entrance."
"Right," Shorty chuckled. "Come on then, let's finish off these
fellows." He fingered his knife. "You tackle 'em with that gun, Bob.
But if you miss, trust me--I'll slip this knife into them--"
With Taro and Shorty behind me I crept soundlessly forward. In my hand
the pot bellied little Radak gun, so unfamiliar, gave me an uneasy
feeling. Suppose I should miss. An uproar from these guards might bring
dozens of others.
"How close do I have to get?" I whispered to Taro.
"This now--close enough."
One of the Radaks was standing up, lounging with his back to the wall.
The other was lying down. To send my flash clinging to the heads of
both of them, I would have to shift my aim, and fire twice. My hand
trembled a little. Then I pressed the lever.
There was that vaguely visible flash. The gun-hilt in my grip vibrated,
and at the muzzle of it there was a faint little hiss. A hit! The Radak
on the ground seemed to stiffen. He raised his head, staring blankly.
The Radak who was standing noticed it. He started, whirled around
toward us. It took all my will power to withhold my second flash for
that instant. But I did; and then as the standing figure steadied, I
fired again.
"Got him!" Shorty murmured. "Good work, Bob! Come on!"
We ran forward. The standing Radak was motionless, gazing with vacant
stare. Shorty dashed up to him. "Lie down, you're asleep! If you're
not, you ought to be."
But the Radak did not move, just turned his empty gaze toward the sound
of Shorty's voice. I got it. "They don't speak English! Tell them,
Taro."
The Lei murmured commandingly in his own language, and in a moment the
two guards were lying inert with closed eyes.
"Mighty neat," Shorty whispered. "Come on--here we go."
Beyond the guards an earthen ramp led sleepily downward, winding to a
circular spiral. Then presently we emerged upon a little ledge with the
great Cavern of Machines spread out before us.
"Crouch down! We will see who is here," Taro whispered. There was awe
in his voice. "We must not be seen until we attack."
It was a huge, vault-like cavern, with glowing roof high over our
heads, and we were about twenty feet above its lower level, with a
narrow, steep ramp leading down from near us. I saw that it was a
weird, dim grotto, lurid with swaying, prismatic glows of colored
radiance, and throbbing, humming with a myriad mechanical voices.
Distant railed terraces held frameworks of metal, where opalescent
tubes were glowing. Beams of light-radiance seemed to carry the power
from one strange mechanism to the next, like wires connecting them
in series. No Lei, no ordinary Radak, and certainly least of all us
Earthmen, could by any chance have understood the scientific details of
what we were seeing.
I recall there was a convergence of beams, high up in mid-air at
the center of the cavern, where a shower of tiny electrolyte sparks
glittered like a fountain of pyrotechnics. And out of it a narrow
concentrated beam of violet-purple glow shot upward to a grid in the
ceiling--the gravitational force, doubtless, which from there was
conducted to some point above where it was hurled into Space.
How long I stared, awed, I have no idea. Then I was aware of Taro
beside me, whispering, "It is the Great Mind who is down there. He has
just come into sight--down by that yellow glow."
The floor of the cavern held a dozen or more of the huge mechanisms,
and in the center of them there was a throbbing space that seemed
to hold the controls of all these intricate machines. Down there in
the weird glow we could now see the lone figure of the ancient Radak
leader--shriveled and bent, he moved around, occasionally reaching to
shift some lever or make some adjustment.
"He must not see us coming!" Taro whispered. His voice was tense.
And on his face now as the multi-colored glow bathed it, there was
unmistakable terror. This young Lei, like all his people, born and bred
to fear the dominance of the Great Mind--to attack that little figure,
to Taro was almost unthinkable. Taro had planned this; dreamed of it.
But faced with it now, there was only terror sweeping him, so that had
he been here alone, easily he could have turned and fled.
Shorty and I had no such inhibitions.
"What in the devil," Shorty murmured. "He's got a Radak-gun--sure, I've
no doubt of it. We've got to duck that. But once I get close to him--"
Shorty's gesture with his knife was significant.
For minutes more we tensely waited. Then we got down the ramp without
being seen, and on the lower floor we crouched between two of the giant
whining machines.
"Easy now!" I whispered. "You two--keep behind me--"
I held the Radak-gun in my hand. We waited another moment; then ducked
forward and crouched again, behind a great glowing mechanism through
which two beams of colored light were passing. We were only some
twenty feet from the leader now. Close enough for my shot, or for us
to rush him. He was bending down over a glowing dial. Green light
from it streamed upward, bathed his weird mummy-like countenance so
that suddenly he seemed like some horrible ghoul intent upon a task
diabolic, gruesome.
"Let him have it!" Shorty whispered. "Now's your chance!"
I must confess my heart was racing, with a sudden nameless premonition
of terror. Thoughts are instant things. I tried to tell myself that
this was just a weazened old man. Helpless, with three of us about to
leap on him. Of course he was helpless! With sudden relief I saw that
he had discarded his belt. It hung on the peg of a rack, several feet
away from him--his belt, with his Radak-gun! Shorty saw it at the same
instant.
"There's his gun, Bob! He can't reach it! We've got him!"
Of course ... I leveled my weapon. I was sighting it ... I shall
always wonder if my racing thoughts were projected then to warn the
Radak leader. Or did he sense us in some other way? I was standing a
little out into an aisle between two big mechanisms when suddenly he
lifted his head, turned and saw me. The movement, and my own startled
reaction, spoiled my aim ... Mustn't fire until I was sure....
I recall that in that split-second I was aware that the old Radak had
not moved. He was just staring at me with glittering eyes and his
shrunken grey face horrible with the intensity of his menace. He knew
of course that he couldn't reach his weapon. He didn't try....
* * * * *
Just a helpless, weazened old man. But as I sighted my gun I was aware
of the power radiating from him. The power of his mind, pitted now
against mine; his will commanding me to drop my weapon and my own brain
demanding my muscles to sight it, to fire it. Conflict most horrible.
It was as though every fibre of me was being outraged, seared and torn.
My nerves screaming.... And my mind was screaming--kill him! Got to
kill him now!... Don't drop the gun! Hold your fingers tight!
But I could feel my fingers loosening their grip. The muzzle was
swaying. Everything seemed blurring before me, swimming into a
phantasmagoria of horror.... It was all in a second or two. I heard
Shorty mutter a startled oath beside me. But it was Taro, despite that
he must have been unutterably frightened, who kept his wits. He uttered
a grim shout, jumped to his feet, sidewise away from me.
It did what Taro had hoped. For just an instant that baleful gaze left
me, fastened on Taro. Then it swung back--but in that instant I had
recovered myself, leveled the gun and fired.
New horror! The Radak leader's gaze, again on me, seemed to meet the
flash of my gun in mid-air between us. I could imagine there must have
been a conflict there--a little almost soundless, almost invisible
puff of deranged vibrations. And the derangement must have been forced
backward to me. All in the flash of a thought. To my conscious mind
there was only my pressing the gun-lever, and then a bursting explosion
at my hand as the Radak-gun flew into fragments! One of them struck my
forehead; I staggered back, went down. But I was aware that Shorty,
with Taro close after him, had leaped--Shorty, with knife upraised, his
catapulting body hitting the crouching, ghoul-like figure.
Shorty thinks now his knife never reached its mark. There was just the
impact of his body, knocking the weazened figure backward. The Radak
screamed a shrill, weirdly horrible cry. But it ended in a gurgle--just
for an instant, a gruesome, liquid gurgle. Then there was only Shorty's
gasp of horror.
I was scrambling to my feet. I crouched, stricken, staring. Shorty had
drawn back, standing staring. And Taro too had checked his rush. All
three of us, frozen with revulsion. On the floor, weird in a green-red
glow from a nearby machine, the weazened, mummy body of the Radak lay
huddled. A thing which had been nearly all of mental quality. And now
it had encountered a physical blow, to which every atom of its weird
makeup was foreign.
And what a second before had been living, solid substance now was
dissolving! The clothes sagged, deflated. A bubbling ooze was where
the face had been. Just a brief moment, and then before us the
Radak's garments lay crumpled and flat in a little pool of stenching
putrescence!
I turned away, sickened. Then Shorty recovered himself. "It--that
damned thing screamed! Others will come--"
"Hurry now! Smash the machines! It is what we came for--" Taro gasped.
I made a leap for the control panels; then stopped, whirled around.
There was a cry from behind and above me. On a narrow, railed little
balcony which connected with the ramp down which we had come, the
figure of a Radak was standing! A tall grey shape! It was Ratan, though
I did not know who it was then. He had a knife in his hand, and he was
in the act of leaping over the rail to land upon me! I had no time to
avoid him. His body came sprawling, landed on my shoulders, bore me
down.
* * * * *
Simultaneously I was aware that Shorty and Taro were smashing at the
control apparatus. It crackled, tinkled like breaking glass, with
a huge flash of colored light and sparks that sent Shorty and Taro
reeling backward, dazed so that they did not see what was happening
to me. Then they were up, at it again, hurling broken fragments of
the controls at the nearby grids, tubes and prisms. And in that same
second, the multi-colored flash spread--deranged--weird current. Like
burning powder-trains it leaped everywhere around the grotto. Puffs,
sparks of fountain-glare, the hissing, whining, screeching of breaking
machines....
On the floor I struggled with Ratan on top of me. He had no gun--just
a long, thin knife with polished blade that glittered as he tried to
thrust it into my throat. My own knife was gone. I reached, clutched at
the grey wrist, turning the knife so that it went past my throat. Then
I heaved upward. In the struggle Ratan dropped his knife and neither of
us could reach it. Locked together we rolled, pummeling, scrambling.
Then I knew that I had him. My fist landed on his hawk-nosed grey
face--a solid blow that made him scream with revulsion and pain.
Then I had heaved him off, staggered to my feet. I seemed to be in a
cloud of yellow-green, choking, acrid vapour through which only dimly I
could see Ratan struggling erect. And there was Shorty's voice:
"Bob! Bob, where are you? Got to get out of here! Taro--Taro--"
It seemed that somewhere near me, Taro was coughing, choking. Then I
realized that the shape of Ratan was plunging at me through the heavy
chemical smoke. I was swaying, but I squared off, hit him solidly in
the face again. He went down, and I leaped on him, lifting his head
and shoulders, then banging his head back against the corner of a
mechanism-frame--pounding it again and again until suddenly I was aware
that it had smashed and was dripping upon me.
With a shudder I cast the inert body away and leaped to my feet.
"Bob! Got to get out of here! Taro--" Shorty was still shouting.
Green-yellow vapour was swirling around me. Electrolyte flashes seemed
everywhere--the whole grotto, an inferno of pyrotechnics. Then I saw
the figure of Shorty staggering to help Taro from where he had fallen.
I swayed and joined them.
"That ramp," I gasped. "Behind us! Come on--"
We tried to hold our breath as we staggered up the ramp. Then there
seemed a little puff of breathable air. As we plunged into the exit
tunnel, for an instant I turned. The big grotto was alive with swirling
turgid smoke and flames and leaping, bursting light-fire. And a bedlam
of weird bursting sounds. The death of the monstrous Radak science,
screaming with its agony of dissolution.
Coughing and choking, we ran up the tunnel, with the sounds and the
glare fading behind us; and the pure air reviving us.
"All the Radaks will be after us," Shorty panted. "Faster, Taro!"
Distant cries were all around us in the maze of tunnels. The alarm was
spreading everywhere. We saw a few plunging Radak shapes, but were able
to avoid them.
Taro was leading us; I gripped him as we ran. "You say you know where
they keep their space-flyer?"
"Yes. Not far from Blaine and the others."
Then we reached the girls and Blaine, who were crouching in that tunnel
recess with the still unconscious Mack. Vivian and Tahn just stared at
us white-faced, with little cries of relief.
Blaine gasped, "You did it!"
"We sure did," Shorty agreed. "Come on--the space-ship--"
"You and I--we'll carry Mack--" I said. Shorty nodded, and we lifted
him.
Carrying Mack slowed us. But his emaciated body was light. In a moment
I slung him over my shoulders, and with Shorty steadying him, we made
better speed. It wasn't far, but there were Radak figures everywhere
now. Weirdly, only one of them came near us. Shorty and Taro were
ready to attack him. The squat little shape came plunging along a side
tunnel, apparently heading for us. He seemed to be gibbering, mouthing,
then screaming. But he ignored us, running, knife in hand, until he
bashed himself into a rock....
* * * * *
We ran on, and then suddenly I realized that we had emerged into that
huge underground space where first we had met the Great Mind. Taro
ran toward a wall, found some hidden mechanism. I saw, in the crimson
radiance, that by the wall a hundred yards or so away, a big slide had
opened. A small, gleaming, pot-bellied cylinder was standing there. It
came automatically out on rollers, and stopped in the open--a little
thirty foot Space-flyer. And over it, high up, the ceiling of the vast
cavern seemed to have opened; the murky purple-red of the sky was up
there.
All this I saw in those few seconds. But there was far more here.
A turmoil of sounds and moving, milling figures. A scene of weird,
ghastly horror so that for a moment I stood swaying with the limp body
of Mack slung over my shoulders and my companions clustered around
me. Down the slope where the little Lei village stood under the trees
in the red gloom, a crowd of Lei were struggling. And everywhere
among them, squat grey shapes of Radaks were plunging.... Radaks
with knives and scimitar-like swords, and some with rock-chunks and
bludgeons ... Radaks screaming, running amok. I saw one lunge with
a knife at a Lei woman. The knife went into her and she fell; and the
Radak kept on going until he crashed into a tree.
The Great Mind was dead. Ratan, who might have taken his place, was
dead. The Mental Force of all this little Radak world was gone. The Lei
themselves had not been under its control. For generations they had
been cowed, terrified into sullen obedience, but that was all. With
the Radaks it was different. They were born, bred and trained to be
automatons. To think what they were told to think. Mentally dominated,
controlled so that the very essence of their mind was shaped and held
together by their leader.
And now they had no leader! For them, there was nothing left but mental
chaos, so that gibbering with the insanity of minds unhinged, they were
plunging here in wild, unreasoning chaos, obeying their instinct to
kill.
"My people--I must help them!" Taro's unutterable horror at last found
voice. He would have plunged down the slope with his young wife after
him. But Vivian seized Tahn, clung to her. I shouted at Shorty,
"Hold him! Don't let him go!"
Shorty hung on to him. "No, you don't!"
"You can't help them!" I protested. "And we can't operate the
space-ship! You want Earth-people to help your world--got to get back
there, we--"
The words died in my throat. We all saw that none of us could get to
the Lei now, even if we had tried. A group of a hundred or more of the
screaming, gibbering Radaks had swept between us and the Lei village.
But the way to the space-ship still seemed open. We ran for it. One of
the Radaks, by chance perhaps, turned toward us; and all the ones near
him, like sheep followed him. A horde of grey, maniac Things charging
us....
We got to the gleaming little cylinder with only an instant to
spare--reached it, tumbled through its doorway. I laid Mack on the
white grid of its floor. Shorty banged the door-slide, hanged it as the
bodies of the Radaks thudded against it. Taro ran for the controls and
in another instant the little ship quivered and lifted.
There was a transparent bulls-eye window panel near me. For a second
I had a glimpse of horrible, snarling, maniac faces pressed against
it. Then they fell away; and in a moment we were out through the upper
opening, slanting upward with the crimson surface of little Zelos
dropping down. Then we were in space, with the brilliant, beautiful
miracle of the Universe glittering around us....
* * * * *
I think there is little more I need add. You have all heard and
read, of course, of the events of this past year. The secret of
space-flying! We have it now. Earth-scientists, studying the Radak
ship, had no difficulty in constructing others far larger. Fortunately
our Earth-materials proved adaptable; there was nothing vital that we
lacked. Many large ships were swiftly built, and an armed force went to
Zelos. Haste was necessary, as you will recall, for when the mechanisms
of the Radaks were smashed, it was soon found that the Crimson Comet
was plunging directly toward our Sun.
J. Walter Blaine wanted no publicity when he freely gave the millions
necessary for the scientific research and the myriad activities which
went into the building of the space-ships. You all offered your own
donations, and they were refused only because Blaine felt he had earned
the privilege of financing the enterprise. He wants me now to extend
his thanks to you.
Our first expedition to Zelos was when, in its Sunward plunge, it had
crossed our Earth-orbit and was at its closest point to us. And the
expedition found that no more than a thousand of the Lei had been
killed by the maniac Radaks, who in those terrible hours after our
departure, plunged around, screaming until they bashed themselves to
destruction, or were killed by the Lei.
Taro and Tahn were with our first expedition to the doomed little
world, and they stayed there throughout all the several trips of the
many big ships which evacuated the Lei.
I am glad that it was finally decided not to bring the Lei here to
Earth. They would have been just curiosities here; and then lost,
whirled away into the maelstrom of our huge world. Surely it was the
best of good fortune for them when our exploring ships found that Venus
was uninhabited, and with conditions for life so propitious.
And now the Lei, with Taro and Tahn to lead them, are masters of a
great world of their own. With the friendly world of Earth nearest to
them. Surely we will prove a helpful, friendly, neighboring world, with
no greedy thought of anything more than that.
Zelos is gone now. I was one of those who saw it go--that night about
a month ago. It was a little dot in the sky, with a great flaming
streamer of the Sun licking upward as though eager to meet it. And then
it was gone.
I recall the earnest solicitations of so many of you who prayed that
Mack would get well. He wants me to thank you all again. I saw him
only last week, in the little mountain home where he and Vivian went
after their wedding trip. That astoundingly pretentious wedding they
had--well, that was because Blaine insisted on doing it. He may insist
again, if and when a layette is needed. I don't know about that.
But Mack, who now has an executive position in one of Blaine's many
industries, got their little house himself. He and Vivian remained firm
on that.
And as I said at the beginning, you must see now that none of us are
glamorous heroes. We're all at our regular jobs, with the Crimson Comet
just a gruesome memory.
So now, kind friends--please forget us. Except me. I'm certainly no
hero, but, well, I won't mind if you'll remember that I broadcast twice
a week on subjects of Popular Astronomy--Station WANA-NYC.
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