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Title: Tama of the light country
Author: Ray Cummings
Release date: September 20, 2026 [eBook #79620]
Language: English
Original publication: New York, NY: The Frank A. Munsey Company, 1930
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79620
Credits: Greg Weeks and Mary Meehan
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TAMA OF THE LIGHT COUNTRY ***
Tama of the Light Country
By RAY CUMMINGS
_Author of "The Fire People," "The Man Who Was Two Men," etc._
_All New England was terrorized by the mysterious midnight raids on
girls' camps and lonely homes--nor was that terror lessened by the
suspicion that the kidnapers were not of this world._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Argosy All-Story Weekly December 13, 20, and 27 1930.]
CHAPTER I.
SCREAMS IN THE NIGHT.
The first of the strange midnight raids was made upon a girls' school
on Moose Head Lake, in Maine. It was a summer camp on the lake, with
something like eighty girls, almost all between the ages of fifteen
and twenty. The affair--which occurred during the night of August 10
and 11, 1950--was kept as secret as possible. It did not get into the
newspapers, nor did the newscasters send it over the air until about a
week later.
But it terrorized the immediate neighborhood at once. Little wonder!
There were ten of the girls missing when, despite the confusion and
terror, the others could be counted. Two more were dead. The principal,
a Professor White, was wounded. Two of the other men teachers were
killed, and one of the matrons.
I heard of the affair about noon of August 1th, I was twenty-five years
of age that summer of 1950 when the mysterious attack upon the White
Summer Camp in Maine began those fantastic events which brought a
menace to two worlds and an utter chaos on one of them.
I am Jack Dean, a newsgatherer for the Broadcasters' Press Association,
and occasionally doing some actual newscasting.
I was in the New York studios of the B. P. A., had just been on the air
with a routine news account, when the aviator Jimmy Turk called me on
long distance from Boston.
"Take your plane and come up," he told me. His voice was vibrant with
excitement. "Drop your work. Tell 'em it's business, the biggest piece
of news of the year--if you can get a release on it!"
Jimmy Turk was an operative of the newly established Interstate Flying
Patrol. A friend from my university days, though of recent years we
had not seen much of one another. A short, stocky, red-headed little
dare-devil, this Turk--one of the most skillful, wildest flyers in the
service.
"Trouble up at Moose Head Lake in Maine," he went on. "Meet you at
Bangor--the Lancet Field. We'll go in my Dragon, leave your tub-boat
there. What time will you be up? Four o'clock? The devil! If you leave
now you can be there by three, or earlier."
"For how long, Jimmy? An overnight job?"
"Tell 'em you don't know. A day or two. A week. Just tell 'em it's the
biggest thing ever--if you get it for the air. It's been suppressed so
far. I'm in it from the police end. Damn it, Jack, don't make me talk.
There's no time."
* * * * *
I flew up the coast and met him at the Lancet Field in mid afternoon.
He was wild-eyed; his fiery red hair tousled; his whole little body
shaking with excitement. It was the strain of waiting for me. With
action Jimmy Turk was cool and calculatingly deliberate.
He hustled me into his fleet little Dragon--the smallest, swiftest
thing that flies.
"I've been over there and back. It isn't far; half an hour or so."
We settled down in his tiny oval cockpit. He lifted us and we sped
away over the forest reaches toward the famous lake. It was a
surprisingly wild country for this day and age--a playground for summer
vacationists, yet there were deserted lakes and unbroken stretches of
primeval forest.
"Well, Jimmy, now that we're here, what's the trouble?" I put in
jovially. "Something drastic?"
"No trouble--nothing at all except about ten young girls abducted, a
few killed, and a few other miscellaneous murders."
He told me all he had learned about it. Little enough, in truth. It
was wholly confused--a chaos of conflicting accounts, none of which
dovetailed to make any rational explanation.
The White Summer Camp for Girls consisted of a group of log-cabin
style bungalows set on a promontory of the lake, with a larger cabin
as mess-hall. A boathouse with canoes, a dock, float, and diving board
were at the end of the point. There was a small stable with saddle
horses, and a taxi-runway leading from the lake to a hangar-garage in
which several small sport planes of hydroplane type were housed for
such of the pupils whose parents would allow and could afford the use
of them.
The camp was in one of the wildest portions of the lake. Unbroken
forest lay about it, with only a few houses in the neighborhood and a
dirt road leading to the nearest village three miles away.
The place was in a turmoil when we arrived. Planes lay thick on the
water about the runway. The road was jammed with automobiles. A
police cordon was about the camp to keep the crowd back, but inside
the lines there was a group of excited officials, investigators, and
curiosity-seekers who had the pull to get in there.
The pupils--such of them who were not killed, or vanished--had fled
to their homes. Professor White lay unconscious in a Bangor hospital.
What he had to tell, if there were anything rational, as yet remained
undisclosed.
The affair was secret. It was held off the air, and out of the printed
press; but by word of mouth the news had spread like flames before a
wind in prairie grass. We got through the lines. Jimmy had a conference
with his superior; I wandered about the place, talking with as many of
the excited people as I could, picking up a connected story of a sort
for use provided they let me give it out.
A weird, disjointed account, indeed. So far as I could piece it
together, it ran like this:
At about midnight the previous night the camp was aroused by the wild
screaming of some of the girls. The night was dark. This was a period
of nearly full moon, but heavy clouds had obscured it. And a night of
noises.
A fresh wind off the lake pounded waves on the shore and sang through
the forest trees.
But above the noise the screams of terror-stricken girls had sounded.
There were evidently screams from everywhere about the camp within a
few minutes. But most of it was the panic of terror.
* * * * *
The original alarm came from one of the larger cabin dormitories where
twelve girls and a matron were sleeping. The doors and windows were all
open; the unbroken forest depths lay only a few paces away. Something
or some one, human or otherwise, had made an attack. When it was
over--in a few moments, no doubt, and before any one from the adjacent
buildings seemed to have reached there--ten of the girls from that
cabin had vanished. The matron lay dead just outside the doorway. One
of the girls were found dead on the floor beside her bed; the other lay
across the road at the edge of the forest.
The two men instructors, and Professor White, were all found on the
road; they had evidently been running toward the sound of the screams
when they were struck down.
I had an opportunity later to see one of the bodies where it lay in the
police station of the near-by village. All the deaths were from the
same cause. A hole the size of a lead pencil in the chest, penetrating
the heart. Or in the head, piercing the brain. But there was no bullet.
Nor had there been any sound of shots--every account agreed on that.
Some weapon wholly soundless had drilled the victims. It seemed like a
burn; a blast of intense heat burning a tiny round hole. Through flesh,
or the bone of the skull, it was the same.
No one had seen any of the attackers. Hysterical pupils told of vague
shadowy forms of men along the road. Men huge; but some said small.
There were other girls who claimed that they were not men at all, but
weird monsters half like beasts in pseudo-human form. And there was
mention of dragging, shuffling footsteps in the underbrush--presumably
the fantastic monsters dragging away their screaming victims.
Most of this was discredited by the investigators. The night was too
dark and noisy to see anything, or hear very much. But the ten girls
were vanished; there were five dead bodies--very tangible evidence! And
the wounded, perhaps dying, Professor White.
There may have been strange footprints about the place. But if so, they
were trampled upon and obliterated long before the authorities got
there. There was another clew which appeared to be fact, since every
one agreed in the telling of it. The attackers used no lights; but
there had been a few soundless, blue-green flashes in the darkness.
Little stabs of light. Tiny beams a few feet in length, instantaneous,
like a miniature lightning bolt. Presumably these were the shots of
some unknown weapon which had killed the five victims.
Jimmy Turk joined me. "Well, what do you make of it, Jack? Come here
and meet Dr. Grenfell."
He inserted us into an excited group near by and detached a short,
thick-set middle-aged man with a massive head and a stoop to his wide
shoulders which made him look almost like a hunchback.
"Who was that?" I demanded, when, after a moment, Dr. Grenfell had
hurried away from us.
"Scientific fellow. Head of the Bolton Astronomical Research Society.
He's investigating this--one of the first to get here this morning."
"What's astronomy got to do with it?"
"I'm damned if I know, Jack."
But we were very soon to find out!
* * * * *
Such was the beginning of the mysterious assaults. A heavy guard was
placed about the White Camp that night. One or two of the men teachers
remained there, and three of the women.
Mrs. White was at her husband's bedside in Bangor. The professor still
lay unconscious, hovering between life and death. His lung had been
pierced; he had fallen in the road, struck his head and suffered a
brain concussion. But the physicians hoped to pull him through.
What had he seen in the darkness of that weird night assault? We were
all waiting eagerly for that time when he might be able to tell.
There was one girl pupil who remained in the camp--an orphan, who lived
with the Whites both winter and summer. I met her a few days later.
That second night was as dark as the one preceding. The cordon of
police and a few State troopers were hidden about the camp and in its
buildings. But nothing happened. Jimmy's orders were to fly at about
two thousand feet back and forth over the lake. I went with him.
We flew his Dragon without lights and with the engines fully muffled.
Both of us realized that the authorities knew more of this thing--or
suspected more--than we could guess. We were told to watch for any air
vehicle rising or descending over the lake or the near-by forest; or
for any strange lights. But there seemed nothing.
At dawn we landed at the village, turned in our report, and went to
sleep. At about noon Jimmy woke me.
"By the gods, Jack, listen to this!"
The White Camp had been undisturbed. But from a town thirty miles away
came the report that a young girl had vanished from her home during the
night. It was an isolated farmhouse, with the girl's room on the lower
floor.
Her parents said she had retired as usual; they had heard nothing; but
in the morning she was gone. One of her window shutters had been taken
off, the wood around its hinges burned as though by a blow torch.
"And there are others, Jack! This damnable, weird business!"
Other reports were coming in. Another girl was found murdered; her
heart pierced by the same strange hole burned into her chest. She had
screamed in the night; they had found her lying by her bed; a chair had
been overturned with evidence of a struggle. And two girls, sleeping
together, told of a queerly horrible face at their window--gray,
thick-featured, flabby. They had heard dragging, shuffling footsteps
outside as the face vanished. One of them said it was like a man
paralyzed and trying to walk.
During the next few days a flood of such incidents were reported from
all this section of the State. But except for those first two nights
there were no missing girls, and no murders. Merely strange things that
girls claimed to have seen and heard. Some seemed to have a fair basis
of fantastic rationality--but most of the reports were now the product
of hysteria.
* * * * *
"The thing is about over," said Dr. Grenfell, as he, with Jimmy, myself
and one or two others, sat examining the reports in the dining hall of
the White Camp. "There is nothing more undependable than reports from
adolescent girls. This is hysteria now."
But there were occurrences which were not the imaginings of hysteria.
The aërial patrols had observed strange light-glows down in the forest.
One pilot had even seen a shape rushing upward from the lake. He
was some miles away from it and could not reach it with his light.
He described it as a shape like a vague silver ball, mounting with
tremendous velocity into the leaden clouds overhead. This was reported
by one of the air patrols, of which fully fifty were on duty. And there
were surface parties constantly searching the forests of the entire
State. Every effort was being made to recover the missing girls, but it
was all unavailing.
It was about this time that I met the single girl pupil who was living
at the White Camp. Her name was Rowena Palisse. Romantic circumstances
surrounded her. She was a ward of the Whites. Ten years ago her only
relative, an elder brother, Guy, had invented a Space-rocket and
endeavored to reach the Moon. It was acknowledged to be a suicidal
attempt; he had provided no way of returning.
I had been fifteen then; I still recalled my boyish interest in this
Guy Palisse Moon-rocket. It had successfully left the Earth, but never
was heard of again. My interest now was renewed by meeting this sister
of the adventurer who had so stirred my youthful fancy.
Rowena Palisse was twenty-two years old now. A very tall girl,
fully five feet ten or eleven inches. Not slim, but slender, with
a regal aspect in her bearing. Her long, brown braids hung forward
over her shoulders in the modern fashion. Her modish long skirt and
short-waisted jacket made her seem even taller than she was. A handsome
girl, rather than beautiful. A girl of so queenly an aspect that she
seemed born to command. A Nordic queen; she had a heritage of that, I
feel sure.
But there was a gentle, wholly feminine softness about her as well. I
understood that she had loved devotedly her brother Guy. As a child of
twelve she had watched him with big wondering, frightened eyes as his
cumbersome rocket carried him away from her into the mysteries of outer
Space.
I found that look in her eyes now. A gentle, wondering softness--a
wistfulness. It had spread to mark her whole demeanor. There was a
poise in her manner, a calm dignity; but under it, wistfulness.
I stood before her, that first afternoon when Jimmy Turk introduced
us. She was a head taller than the wiry little patrol flyer. But I am
several inches over six feet; she extended her hand and smiled up at me.
"I have seen you for several days past. I wondered when some one would
introduce us."
* * * * *
I was with Rowena Palisse a good deal during those ensuing afternoons.
I made the occasions. She was frightened at the events which had
transpired, but there was nothing hysterical about her. A matured girl,
with a poised intellect which precluded hysteria.
I was more amazed at it when I realized that the investigators--there
were a number of them still here, including Dr. Grenfell--still felt
that another assault might be made, and they were for some reason
using Rowena as a possible decoy. She made herself prominent about
the grounds, both by day and night, though always carefully, secretly
guarded.
Then there came a night--it was just a week after the original
assault--when the trap was sprung. Dr. Grenfell, who was in charge
here, had admitted me in the capacity of assistant. Perhaps because
Rowena did not hide her friendly interest in me; and because my giant
stature made me one who could put up a good fight with any midnight
marauder.
This was a black, overcast night. There had been a great show of
withdrawal of the guards that afternoon--though after dark many of them
had crept back.
Jimmy and I, armed with automatics, crouched with Dr. Grenfell in the
forest underbrush just across the road from Rowena's lighted window.
She stood at it a moment, braiding her hair. And though there were a
dozen armed men lurking close at hand to protect her, I marveled at her
poise.
Her light went out. We waited, an hour or two at least. The heavy
leaden clouds hung close overhead. The wind swished through the
tree-tops; the lake waves pounded the shore; the dark silent buildings
of the White Camp stood around us.
It began to rain a little. I was cold and stiff. Beside me the bulk
of Dr. Grenfell's figure was a hunched black blob. At my feet Jimmy
crouched like a coiled spring. There was a dim vista of the road; the
roof-outline of the building near us, and the vague black rectangle of
Rowena's open window.
There came at last a sound, different from those of the forest to which
we had listened for so long. An eerie, indefinable sound. Quite close
to us. We all three heard it. Dr. Grenfell stirred a trifle. Jimmy
tensed, ready to leap.
A rustling of the bushes. Or was it out in the road?
I was swept suddenly with the chilling sense that this Unknown was
supernatural. Something advancing upon me, invisible, intangible!
From the darkness of the road the sound became clearer. Footsteps. But
they were gruesomely unnatural, uncanny. Dragging, shuffling footsteps,
like a wounded thing dragging itself heavily along.
A moment or two. Jimmy touched me in warning, but I shoved off his
hand. Dr. Grenfell's electric torch was raised. We had arranged not to
move, or shoot, until he flashed it on.
Certainly something tangible was out there in the road. I thought I
could distinguish a slowly moving, formless shape. Or perhaps two
shapes, mingled in the darkness.
Abruptly there was another noise, a swishing, flapping sound. Not
on the road, but over it. A monster, flying; or a giant bird. I saw
something white, fluttering out there.
Dr. Grenfell's torch flashed on. Figures were disclosed in the road
some twenty feet from us. Figures so fantastic the sight of them barely
registered on my bewildered brain. A gigantic man-shape. Another,
similar but smaller. And a great fluttering white thing behind and
above them.
Jimmy leaped, with me after him. My shot and Grenfell's stabbed the
darkness together. The forest rang with the other guards rushing
and firing. From the road came-an answering "shot"--a tiny stab of
blue-green light. It sizzled close past me, withering the shrubbery.
The gigantic figure in the road made a slow desperate bound into the
underbrush. The smaller figure fell with our shots. The white thing was
hit; it came fluttering down; lay quivering--flapping in the dirt of
the road.
No one thought, those first moments, of pursuing the escaping figure.
With swaying torches we gathered in the road. A man lay there, dead
from our shots. A squat, thick-set fellow clad in rude garments of
animal skins. His flat-featured face was heavy with pouchy gray skin
and goggling, staring dead eyes.
Near him, the wounded white thing lay struggling in death agony. A
girl! Her blue-white draperies were stained crimson with her blood. A
small, strangely frail-looking girl, with huge blue-feathered wings
nearly as long as her body! They flapped, and then were still; she lay
sprawled on the road like a great dead bird!
[Illustration: _The white creature lay quivering, flapping in the dirt
road._]
We bent over her. She was still alive. For a moment she tried to speak.
It seemed that the words were English! I thought that she gasped,
"--warn you--" But we could distinguish nothing else intelligible. And
presently she was dead.
CHAPTER II.
FROM ANOTHER PLANET.
That was the last of the incidents at the White Camp. But such an
affair could not be kept secret. The world rang with it.
For a time, however, it seemed destined forever to be shrouded in
mystery. Professor White died without recovering consciousness. The
body of the man we had shot, and the strange winged girl with him,
remained as the only tangible evidence. The giant figure which had made
off into the forest was not caught. Nor were any of the missing girls
recovered.
There was a weapon found in the road that night where we gathered over
the two bodies. It was quite evidently the projector of the blue-green
bolts. A small, globular affair, with a mesh of wires across its face,
a firing mechanism, and what seemed a queer form of storage battery in
its handle.
What current it may have used could not be determined. The thing was
empty of charge when found; evidently its last available shot had been
the blue-green stab which sizzled past me.
The two bodies were examined by many learned men before they were
interred. Obviously the winged girl was nothing of Earth. Nor could
the man be identified with any race on this planet. Yet the two were
clearly not of the same race.
One extremely curious circumstance was brought out by this
investigation. The man's body was short and abnormally thick-set;
ape-like, but with a flabby, pallid, hairless skin. A man of such build
would normally weigh a full hundred and seventy pounds. I was present
at the investigation. Gazing at the body, I was convinced it would
weigh a hundred and seventy. Yet on the scales it weighed a hundred and
twenty-two. A different density. I felt of the body. Small-boned--a
light skeleton. And the flesh was putty-like, with what seemed
microscopic air-cells in it.
The girl was an extraordinarily beautiful little creature. Fantastic,
with those great blue-feathered wings arching out from her
shoulder-blades. But her face, composed now in death, was humanly
beautiful, with a delicate ethereal beauty.
She seemed certainly no more than sixteen years old. A clear white skin
which in life might have been flushed rose-pink. Long pale-golden hair.
Blue eyes. A queerly frail-looking body, yet rounded almost to matured
girlhood.
She was four feet seven inches tall. Such a girl might have weighed a
hundred pounds. This one, with allowances for the weight of the wings,
weighed only sixty-five pounds.
Queer, inexplicable facts! And I could not forget that this dying
winged girl had tried to speak to us in English! That, to me, seemed
most inexplicable of all.
* * * * *
By the end of August the world was beginning to talk less of the
affair. Then, on August 30 Dr. Grenfell made public his paper of
theory, and explanation--and warning. It was more startling than
anything which had gone before.
I give here, not the original paper which was couched in the more
technical and detailed phraseology of science, but the transcription
made for the general public which Dr. Grenfell gave me to put on the
air:
"The affair at the White Camp occurred on the night of August 10. On
the previous night upon one of the star-field photo-diagram plates made
in the routine work of the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona, a
dot of curious aspect showed which had no logical right to be there.
With a subsequent, longer exposure made a few minutes later, that dot
became a tiny hairline streak of light, proving that it was in motion.
"Observations made at the Lowell Observatory that night established the
conviction that the dot was something extremely small and quite close
to the Earth--only a few thousand miles beyond the upper reaches of our
atmosphere.
"The Mount Wyndam Observatory, near Summit, New Jersey, made similar
observations during the early evening of August 10th. But the dot was
moving fast, and soon disappeared to the northward. And the sky became
overcast as the evening advanced, preventing further observation.
"The inescapable conclusion of both observatories is that this was some
form of interplanetary vehicle hovering above our earth. Spectrographs
showed it to be shining with reflected sunlight. How far away it was,
how great its velocity, or what was its size, could not be determined.
"Other strange facts came to light during that memorable week of August
10th to 17th. Many of them apparently were unrelated. On the night of
August 10th, a shooting star of abnormal aspect was reported by many
eyewitnesses in Maine. It fell very slowly from a point near the zenith
toward the northern horizon. The 'star' was pale-white.
"A meteor, which generally is a mere fragment of star-dust burning with
the heat of friction as it hits our atmosphere, blazes with a streak
of fire for an instant; and then, consuming itself, burns out and
vanishes. But this was different. It seemed floating down, glowing with
a silvery light. A few moments, and then it disappeared from view.
"The observatory at Flagstaff saw nothing of this. But at Mount Wyndam
they saw it! The thing seemed a silvery metallic ball. It glowed
with friction-heat and with sunlight. But when it descended into the
night-shadow of Earth, it was seen no more. The time was 8:55 P. M.
"This, we believe, was a smaller vehicle descending from the larger
one hovering out there in Space. As a tender comes from a liner lying
outside the shoals, this silver ball came down with its human occupants
and landed somewhere in the forests or upon one of the lakes in Maine!
"And other facts: This smaller vehicle--though there may have been
several of them--was observed subsequent to August 10th, upon at least
two occasions by pilots of our patrol flyers. The sky, day and night in
Maine and vicinity, was during that week almost constantly obscured by
heavy clouds. At a hundred thousand feet such vehicles would be safe
from discovery.
"One of our climbing planes, with Navy pilot Rankin, present holder of
the altitude record, on the night of August 12th, and again during the
day, ascended over Quogg, Maine, to a height of sixty-five thousand
feet--but discovered nothing. As a matter of fact, an interplanetary
vehicle--these silver balls for instance--could easily attain a
velocity enabling them to follow the night-shadow around the world.
* * * * *
"We are forced to the conclusion that the attacks upon the White
Camp and elsewhere in Maine were made by beings of human form and
intelligence from another planet. But which one? To our knowledge,
whether or not any of the other planets of the Solar System are
inhabited has been problematical. Yet here is proof!
"We believe that these beings came from the planet Mercury, and have
now returned there. Many astronomical and astro-physical phenomena
recently observed lead to that conclusion. And so do the biological
facts concerning the two bodies. Much of this is of too technical a
nature to include here. I need only explain that Mercury revolves about
the Sun once in eighty-eight of our days. That is the length of its
year. On August 10th it and the Earth were near inferior conjunction,
_i. e._, at their closest points to each other.
"The marauders came then! They have gone back now, for Mercury, moving
faster in its orbit than does the Earth, is rapidly drawing away from
us.
"But why did they come? Certainly not with friendly intentions! Nor yet
with the boldness of an invasion--an attempted conquest. These were
prowlers in the night, using every effort for secrecy. Abducting our
women--our young girls. Again, that is an inescapable conclusion: they
made no move, did nothing save for the purpose of abduction.
"A dozen young girls have vanished. The prowlers have gone, back into
Interplanetary Space to Mercury or wherever they are native. The menace
is over.... _But is it?_
"We killed one of these men. And his companion, a strangely fantastic
young girl with wings. She was a beautiful girl, no more than a
child--in racial appearance no more like him than he was to an
Earth-man. And, dying, she spoke English! That is indeed beyond all
possible explanation by the deductions of our logical science. Even the
wildest conjecture cannot encompass it.
"But we may imagine that she was not friendly to him and his fellows.
A captive perhaps. With her dying breath she gasped something about
warning us. Of what? Presumably the abduction of our women. And our
imagination flings out--can there be so few women upon Mercury that the
men must needs come to Earth to steal ours?
"Is the menace over? When the winged girl and the man were shot by
our guards that night of August 17th at the White Camp, the gigantic
figure of a man escaped into the forest. It seems impossible--with our
aërial patrol, our multiplicity of watchers in the neighborhood--that
one of the vehicles could have taken him away. We believe he is still
on Earth. Every effort is being made to find him, but so far without
success.
"Will the marauders come back--to rescue him, or to pursue their
mysterious purpose? Can we believe that if the men of Mercury desire
our women, the abductions are not to be planned upon a larger scale?
Was this not a mere tentative foray to learn of conditions here?
"We believe just that! And when will the real attack be made? Mercury
is speeding away from us now. Thousands, millions of miles are being
added to the distance between it and the Earth. In eighty-eight days
from August 10 last Mercury will have completed one revolution about
the Sun. But during that time the Earth will have moved along a
distance requiring twenty-eight days more for Mercury to overtake us.
"Therefore, during the first week of next December Mercury and the
Earth will again be approaching inferior conjunction, again at their
closest point to each other. At that time we may expect another attack!
Undoubtedly it will be of far greater proportions, menacing the safety
of our women everywhere in the world!"
CHAPTER III.
THE ASCENT OF THE FLYING CUBE.
This was put into the press and on the air on August 31. I need not
enlarge upon the public sensation it caused. Consternation, hysteria
and ridicule, all intermingled. Then, within three days came a new
sensation, more far-reaching, more astounding in what ultimately it was
to disclose.
But at first it was merely an astronomical report. Technical, and hence
undramatic. It caused almost no public comment.
On the nights of September 1, 2 and 3, several observatories in
different parts of the world saw what seemed a tiny cylinder just
outside the Earth's atmosphere. Observational conditions were
favorable. The cylinder--if it were that--seemed to be circling the
Earth like a satellite. But with each revolution it approached closer.
By September 3 it began to skim the thin outer atmospheric stratum, and
glowed faintly with friction-heat.
It was very small--too small for an interplanetary vehicle. Indeed,
except for the extremely favorable conditions prevailing, it would
not have been seen at all. The scientists concluded, after many
observations, that it had approached the Earth at a tangent, propelled
only by the inertia of its own velocity. If power it had once had, that
power must have been exhausted. The attraction of the Earth had caught
and held it, the combination of forces resulting in its becoming a tiny
Earth satellite.
But the centrifugal force of its velocity was lessening. Already it had
struck our atmosphere, the friction of which was slowing it down. The
Earth was drawing it closer. In a few more revolutions, coming down
into the denser air strata, the friction-heat would consume it.
Both Jimmy Turk and I were during these days in close connection
with Dr. Grenfell and his associates. I had learned now for a fact
what formerly had been only hearsay. For ten years, financed by the
millionaire J. G. Bolton, the Bolton Society for Astronomical Research
had been working to develop a practical means of conquering gravity.
The problem was said to have been solved.
I learned now that in the southern New Jersey workshops of the Bolton
Metal Industries, an interplanetary vehicle was ready for trial. Had
this weird affair in Maine not transpired, the Bolton Space-ship might
not have made its test flight until the following spring. The intention
had been to try a voyage in the direction of the Moon. Possibly to land
there, and hunt for evidence of what had become of Guy Palisse and his
Moon-rocket of ten years ago.
The vehicle now had been rushed to completion. On the morning of
September 4, Jimmy excitedly arrived with the news.
"I've persuaded Grenfell to let us in on this, Jack! We're going, you
and I!"
"Going? Where?"
"In the Bolton vehicle. They've got it ready! Well, ready enough,
anyway, for a short test flight. They're going out to try to get this
cylinder that's circling the Earth. It has to be done at once--in a few
more revolutions the thing will burn up."
We flew Jimmy's Dragon down to the Bolton plant that same day, where
in the center of the huge cluster of buildings stood the laboratories
and workshop for the building of the vehicle. And among the busy and
tensely excited scientists and mechanics here, we found the pale, calm
Rowena Palisse.
She too was permitted to go on this test flight. I sat with her in one
of the laboratory rooms where they were preparing the chemicals for
the final charging of some of the Space-ship's batteries, while Jimmy
hurried away to find out when we could go aboard and inspect it.
* * * * *
Strangely reticent girl, this Rowena Palisse! I told her so.
"Am I?" she mocked.
"I thought I knew you," I protested. "We talked for a good many hours
and a good many different times at the White Camp. You never mentioned
this Space-ship."
"Didn't I? It was held a secret, Jack."
"You're going on it?"
"Yes."
"You've known Dr. Grenfell for years? Somebody told me--"
"Yes. I have." She was amused. "All girls do not necessarily have to
tell everything in their minds to every chance young man of their
acquaintance."
I frowned, and at once she turned serious.
"When I was twelve years old, my brother--left me. I think, ever since
then, I've been interested in astronomy--passionately so."
"Oh!"
A girl passionately interested in astronomy was something new to me.
This was, indeed, a girl who in the midst of busy scientists did not
seem out of place.
She added, "I studied under poor Professor White. He was teacher and
father to me. And I've had some practical experience--I was one of the
clockers of the last transit of Mercury. You see, even when I was a
child, Dr. Grenfell promised me that some day he would take me to the
Moon."
Her voice was slow, calm, but strangely intense. "I think I've been
living for that--some day to get to the Moon.... My brother--"
Jimmy dashed up. "Come on! They say we can look over the ship."
We followed Rowena, who seemed as much at home here as any of these
goggled, gray-robed laboratory workers. We threaded a crowd in the
inner yard and entered a square flat building with a bulging dome-roof
which housed the vehicle. It stood on a concrete platform, raised a few
feet above the level of the floor. Impressive, awe-inspiring thing: the
first, the only one of its kind in the world. For a moment Rowena did
not speak, but stood regarding us as Jimmy and I silently gazed at it.
In outward dimensions it was an exact cube, each of its faces fifty
feet square--a great sugar-lump, girded with fantastic trappings. The
upper face--the roof, so to speak--bulged convex with a dome-peak, as
though upon the sugar-lump a little conical hat were set.
A low doorway with a thick bull's-eye pane was at the bottom of one
face. There were round bull's-eye windows in tiers which indicated
three stories in the interior. And girdling it near its middle, some
twenty feet up, was a sort of outside balcony, or deck. Parallel with
the base, this deck encircled all four sides. It was about ten feet
wide, and eight feet high, entirely inclosed with metallic plates in
which large circular windows were set like a row of portholes in an
airplane cabin.
Such was the Flying Cube's outward aspect. It was of a dull-white
aluminum color. The lights in the room glistened on it with a silver
sheen.
"Well!" said Jimmy. He was speechless with awe. I turned and met
Rowena's gaze. Her face was placid, calm, but her big blue eyes glowed
with a fierce emotion more intense because it was suppressed.
"It is going to take me to the Moon, Jack--some day soon."
* * * * *
The cube stood vibrationless. Yet somehow it seemed trembling to be
away. Held here on Earth--but eager to be gone. Like the restless
spirit of man, which had created it; ready to dare everything for the
adventure, the conquest of the Unknown.
We entered the single lower doorway. I saw that the door was some two
feet thick, with mechanical fastenings upon its inner side like the
door to a bank vault. A few mechanics were inside; the shop outside
rang with the hum of the last details for the trial trip which was to
be made the following night.
No one paid any attention to us as we followed Rowena about the
interior. I saw none of the mechanisms of the ship upon this visit,
save in a cursory glance at the engine rooms and the banks of controls.
Some time later, upon a far different flight than any one of us could
now anticipate, Dr. Grenfell explained to me the fundamental operating
principles and many of the working details.
Jimmy was not interested now--nor ever, for that matter. This Flying
Cube was leaving to-morrow night to try and capture a little cylinder
which was encircling the Earth. And he would be aboard; that was enough
for him. His thoughts flew ahead, eager only to capture the cylinder.
Twenty times he had asked me what I thought the cylinder actually was.
The interior of the cube was divided into three stories. The lower was
merely a single, low-ceilinged metal room with several small rooms
partitioned off on two of its sides--cubby-holes which were an electric
galley, storerooms for food and miscellaneous supplies, and a lower
control room.
The main room had somewhat the aspect of the small lounge of a
dirigible gas-ship. In the center of its grid-floor was a large oval
bull's-eye pane--a window gazing downward. There were small rugs, and
rattan chairs and tables. A phonograph; books set in metal shelves; and
tables with chess, checkers and cards.
To one side a narrow metal ladder, like a steep stairway, led upward.
The second story had a single transverse corridor cutting it in half.
It was fifty feet long; at each of its ends a door opened to the outer
balcony-deck.
On each side of the corridor were four small doorways, giving access
to as many rooms. Four of them were sleeping cabins, with windows
and doors opening to the deck. The other four were instrument and
mechanism rooms. Electric pumps for charging pressure-tanks by which
the pneumatic valves shifted the gravity plates; ventilators; chemical
air-renewers; the heating and cooling system; interior air pressure
and interior gravity controls; the lighting system. All small, compact
mechanisms. Miracles of science; astounding tributes to man's inventive
skill.
Most of them were here, though some were in the upper tier. We ascended
the ladder from the dimly lighted corridor. The top story held a
circular central room surrounded by small cubby-holes which were
additional instrument and control rooms. A tiny circular staircase led
upward into the interior of the dome-peak--a small observatory with an
ultra-modern though not very large electro-telescope.
* * * * *
"Well," said Jimmy again, "there's plenty to it. Compact, isn't it?
Let's see the outer deck--we haven't been there yet."
We descended to the middle story; went out one of the corridor
end-doors. The deck interior was somewhat less than ten feet wide and
eight feet high. Entirely inclosed, it was like a narrow corridor.
Doors and windows at intervals opened into the second-tier rooms, and
bull's-eye panes were set in a row along the outer wall. There were
similar panes both in ceiling and floor; and the ceiling held a row of
hooded light bulbs. There were small lounge chairs out here. The deck
was fifty feet long on each side--two hundred feet in all, it girdled
the cube, as the deck of a surface ship girdles its superstructure.
One of these fifty-foot stretches of deck differed from the other
three. D-face, Rowena called this section. An exit-porte was here--a
low, six-foot square room bolted outside the deck. It was an air-lock,
in which the air pressure could be changed by pneumatic pumps and
exhausts.
"For landing upon the Moon," said Rowena.
Along the deck here she showed us somewhat similar, though more
complicated portes in which guns might be mounted and fired out into a
different air-pressure, or even into the vacuum of Space.
We wandered about the Flying Cube for fully an hour that late
afternoon, tremendously interested. Yet with what intensified emotion I
would have made that inspection if I could have seen into the future!
The weird, stirring events in which I was destined to participate
within the narrow confines of those inclosing walls! On that narrow
deck, at those pressure-portes--that air-lock!
At 10 P.M. on the evening of September 5 the Bolton Flying Cube left
the Earth on its attempt to intercept the cylinder.
The orbit of this mysterious projectile--if projectile it was--had been
calculated. It would approach from the west, passing over the middle of
North America, and reaching the longitude of the Atlantic seaboard at
about midnight.
Its altitude was now estimated to be about two hundred and fifty miles
above the Earth's surface.
There were nine of us on board. Dr. Grenfell, with five assistants,
and Jimmy, Rowena and myself. We three had no part in the details of
this departure. There was nothing we could do. We stood together, in
the dimness of one of the deck lengths, at a bull's-eye window. We were
silent--words seemed inadequate. The cube had been resounding with the
tramp of mechanics, but they had all left it now.
Jimmy glanced at his watch. "Nine fifty-five--we ought to be on our way
soon."
* * * * *
Rowena stood beside me. I felt the pressure of her hand on my arm, but
she did not speak. The portes were all closed now, save the lower door.
Then the mechanism of the ship came on. The hum of air-circulating
system; the pressure equalizers; the throb of the little pumps on
the pressure-tanks of the plate-shifters; the hissing of the exhaust
valves; and the low whine of the current in the magnetic gravity plates.
Through the deck window we could see the lighted interior of the
workshop. The dome-roof was rolled back. The deep purple sky with
blazing star-gems stretched overhead, waiting to receive us.
I heard Jimmy mutter, "Why the dickens don't we get going?"
The hum in the cube's interior grew louder. The hissing of the
shifting-valves sounded. There was a slight vibration of the deck-floor
under my feet. I clutched suddenly at the heavy fastenings of the
window. It was nothing, however; in a moment even the tiny vibration
was gone.
But outside the window there was movement. The room dropping away. I
caught a glimpse of the white emotion-swept faces of the men out there
gazing up at us as we lifted.
Then there was the open roof of the building. The grounds about it; the
high wall; a crowd of people and gathered vehicles outside the wall,
for the news of our test ascension, however closely held, had spread to
draw a thousand spectators.
Then there were trees and a starlit landscape. A few moments, with the
feeling that I was upon the deck of a rapidly lifting airship. But only
a few moments, for the landscape shrank amazingly. Concave at first,
with the horizon a great upstanding rim, like the upper edge of a
circular bowl with us near the bottom.
There were clusters of tiny lights to mark the villages far down.
Moving lights along the roads--a passing airplane occasionally, but now
far beneath us. Off to the west, I saw the line of seacoast. Starlight
on the sea.
How long we stood there I do not know. I can't recall that any one
of us spoke--even Jimmy was stricken into an awed silence. I became
conscious that I was intolerably, suffocatingly hot.
The landscape was a landscape no longer! A surface. The surface of the
Earth. Cloud-banks were visible. But we were high above them, up in the
starlight.
I saw with a sudden thrill of awe that the surface was convex! A great
upward-bulging curved surface beneath me. Shrunken, map-like contours
of land and water, mottled with cloud-areas.
The Earth! But I was no longer part of it!
CHAPTER IV.
THE MYSTERIOUS CYLINDER.
A step sounded behind us. It was one of Grenfell's assistants, a man
named Baker.
"Come up. Dr. Grenfell thought you'd like to know that the cylinder is
visible."
We ascended to the upper tier. Dr. Grenfell was alone in the
observatory dome. Baker rejoined one of his fellows in the near-by
control room. The other men were dispersed at their posts about the
cube.
I realized again how intolerably hot it was from the friction-heat
of our rapid upward passage through the atmosphere. Dr. Grenfell sat
hunched over the telescope. He was coatless and collarless, his sleeves
rolled up exposing his thick muscular forearms, mottled with dark hair
wet now with sweat.
There was barely room for us all in the dome-chamber. Through the
circular overhead pane the star-field blazed in an almost dead-black
sky. A new glory to the stars--amazingly steady, amazingly brilliant.
"Hot, isn't it?" Grenfell greeted us. "Have the cooling system on full.
It will be better presently. We've stopped ascending--the atmosphere is
very rare here--little friction now."
His gaze fell on the quiet, intent Rowena. "Child, didn't I tell you
this cube would be successful? Didn't I?"
He was triumphant. The test ascent was a success. The cube was
controlable--the secret of interplanetary flight had been conquered!
Strange, but in all my awe at this new experience, never once had I
thought of that.
And Jimmy was only concerned with the oncoming cylinder.
"Where is it, doctor?" he demanded. "I don't see it."
Through the small telescope it was visible off to the west where the
Pacific slopes of the Rocky Mountains showed, with the snow on their
higher peaks still brightened by the fading sunlight.
The cylinder was a faint luminous dot. We hung poised and the dot
grew, took form. And suddenly I realized that it was quite close
to us. Perhaps we were moving along with it. I do not know. But it
seemed approaching at a leisurely rate. At first I could not guess its
size, or its distance--the one factor dependent upon the other, and
nothing with which to compare either of them. A glowing, silver-white,
bullet-shaped projectile. It sailed majestically along, heated
luminous, with a faint trail of light-fire like a fan-tail behind
it--gases from its heated metal burning faintly in this rarefied air.
We could soon see it plainly without the telescope. Grenfell spoke into
a telephone mouthpiece.
"Baker? Raise us slightly. Can you see it? Close now. Swing D-face
westward, if you can. A little--not much!"
Through the silent, vibrationless interior of the cube Baker's
signal-gongs were ringing; and we could hear the hiss of the
plate-shifter valves.
The electronic rocket-streams were cut off now. The gravity plates
were shifted; and our turning was aided by the streams of etheric
pressure-vibrations darting from each corner of the cube like streams
from a pinwheel. As we swung the vault of the heavens moved around in a
slow twist--then steadied.
* * * * *
Grenfell's voice was hurried, tense. "Dean, you and Turk go down to the
deck, on D-face. Stand by the exit-porte. I can only spare Gibbons for
down there. You can help him with the manual locks. I don't dare trust
the automatics. We'll have the thing aboard in a few minutes--if we're
lucky. Rowena, child, you stay with me."
The cylinder seemed no more than half a mile away now. It was much
closer when in a minute or so we gazed at it again from the deck
bull's-eye window.
The man Gibbons stood by a series of hand-levers that operated the
pressure doors of the lock-chamber. Its inner deck-door was closing as
we arrived.
The pane was of massive glassite, transparent. Through it the interior
of the little lock-room projecting out from the deck was visible. The
outer door-slide was closed.
Gibbons shifted a lever. "Hold that, will you?"
I held it, and he bent and opened a valve-cock. The outer door of the
lock slid open--an aperture six feet wide and five feet high opening
into the empty realms of Space. The air in the lock-chamber, which had
been under a pressure of one atmosphere like the rest of the cube's
interior, went out with a rush. The hiss and surge of it were audible
with the first widening slit of the outer door.
No wonder care was needed in the handling of these controls, being
operated now for the first time! If we should let this inner slide
open, half the air in the cube would rush out in a tornado-blast! And
we would be sucked out with it! There was a heavy iron wrench which
had been lying neglected on the floor of the lock. It went out like a
wind-blown feather when the outer slide opened.
The glowing cylinder slowly approached. I judged it now to be no more
than two or three feet long. It came point toward us. Silent, dramatic
meeting--our poised cube and this wandering projectile! Up in the
starlight with the blazing firmament above and the Earth spread like a
gigantic convex relief-map beneath us.
I knew that Dr. Grenfell was endeavoring to hold us so that the
cylinder might fall into the open outer door-slide of the lock-chamber.
It needed several trials. The men were inexperienced as yet in handling
the cube.
We missed it completely at the first trial. It seemed to waver with
the attraction of our greater mass. We circled it several times. The
disturbance we caused made it begin to rotate end over end upon an
axis of its own creation. And with forward velocity destroyed it began
sinking toward the Earth.
Then at last we moved at it diagonally from above. A true aim this
time. It settled through the yawning open porte and fell upon the metal
floor of the lock-chamber, to lie there with a fading glow as instantly
it began to cool.
Gibbons flung the outer slide closed. Dr. Grenfell triumphantly joined
us on the deck, and Rowena with him. The other men arrived. The
controls of the cube were set-locked. We were sinking very slowly back
to Earth--so slowly it would take hours to reach the lower atmospheric
strata.
"No hurry," said Grenfell. "Don't let the pressure in yet--let it cool
slowly."
It lay on the floor of the lock, apparently undamaged, though
its metallic outer shell was fused, pitted and scarred by the
friction-heat. It was a small affair, not much over two feet long.
"Now, Gibbons--easy at first. Don't be rash."
Opened pressure-valves began admitting the cube's air pressure into the
near-vacuum of the lock's interior. They hissed and sizzled, and after
a moment Gibbons turned them full. The cylinder stirred, rolled and
bumped against the lock-wall.
In five minutes the inner door-slide was opened. A last rush of
wind-pressure sucked at me as I stood near by.
Gibbons and Jimmy bent and entered the lock, to come out, gingerly
carrying the prize.
"Not heavy," said Jimmy. "Thirty or forty pounds."
Our gravity-equalizers in the inner shell-floor of the cube's base were
set to give us a gravity-pull normal to Earth. The cylinder had an
Earth-weight of some forty pounds.
Jimmy and Gibbons laid it on the deck.
* * * * *
"Hollow," said Jimmy. He tapped it with his knuckles. But Grenfell
stopped him with a sharp command. "Don't do that! Want to blow us up?"
I had not thought of that! This could so easily be a bomb--a strange,
deadly missile aimed at the Earth!
Jimmy leaped back as though the thing had stung him. Unreasonably,
ludicrously I took a step away and drew Rowena with me. As if that
could help us!
"Don't touch it!" cautioned Grenfell. "Rance, look it over."
Rance, I learned later, was head of the so-called bomb squad of New
York. An expert in dealing with "infernal machines." He bent over
the cylinder. Under the light of his flash he ran careful, practiced
fingers along its pitted sides. Suddenly he straightened.
"Grenfell, look here. Something written--etched in the metal."
Scrawled, hand-written words, burned away in places. Almost illegible,
but not quite! Three words:
FROM GUY PALISSE
As Grenfell uttered them, there came a cry behind me.
"From Guy--"
Rowena stood trembling, her face white as chalk with the blood draining
from it.
"Guy! Oh--if he is alive! If only--alive--"
I thought she would fall. My arm went about her, but she pushed me away.
"I'm--not so silly, Jack." She even mustered a smile. "From Guy! Why,
then, he must be alive. He must be alive!"
We carried the cylinder down to the lounge-room of the cube's lower
tier and gathered over it. Rance showed us its series of small vents
through which some chemical charge giving etheric wave-pressure had
propelled it by a rocket principle through Space.
"Open it!" Jimmy urged impatiently. "Can't you open it?"
Then Rance located the lever, embedded in the burned metal, by which
presumably some hidden slide would move. But the lever was fused solid;
the cracks of the slide were barely discernible along the scarred metal
surface.
But at last we got it open. The interior was a series of compartments
holding the operating mechanism. But there was one packed with a thick
layer of what seemed a strange form of paper. A hundred or more sheets,
covered with handwriting burned into them with a faint tracery of black
hairlines.
Dr. Grenfell seized them, carried them to a light, riffed through them.
"Front Guy! He's alive! It was not the Moon he reached, but Mercury!
He's alive!"
Fully half the sheets contained astronomical data, technical notes and
diagrams. But the rest held a message from Guy Palisse. A message and a
warning to us of Earth!
We sat there in the lounge-room of the cube, listening breathlessly
while Dr. Grenfell read from the pages. They were all fully legible.
How well this strange narrative fitted into the weird events in Maine
through which we had just passed! How much, inexplicable to us, was now
explained!
And as I listened, I forgot this dim interior of the Bolton Flying
Cube, hanging in Space high above the Earth's surface. Forgot Rowena
sitting white-faced and tense beside me, with her hand gripping my
forearm. My thoughts conjured the naked, rain-swept copper hills of a
strange planet.
CHAPTER V.
THE WARNING FROM MERCURY.
I am Guy Palisse (the message began). Ten years ago--I suppose it
must be that long--I left the Earth in what popularly was called a
Moon-rocket. Any scientific institution will know of me. Whoever finds
this message, I beg you to turn it over at once to some recognized
scientific society.
Particularly I want this to be delivered to the Bolton Society for
Astronomical Research, in New York City of the United States of
America. Dr. Norton Grenfell will remember me. And I want my dear
sister notified that I am alive. Her name is Rowena Palisse. I left her
in care of Professor and Mrs. James White. They can be located in New
York. Or, during the summer months, at the White Summer Camp for Girls,
near Quogg, Maine.
I am preparing this quickly, unexpectedly. At first I thought I would
use my cylinder to send an appeal for help, because we have been in
trouble here. But just as I was ready to start the writing of this
message I have learned strange terrible things which far outweigh our
own personal trouble. The Earth is menaced! Earth's women--particularly
the young girls--are in deadly danger! Here on Mercury these young
girls of the Light Country whom I am vainly trying to aid have
unwittingly been the partial cause of the menace threatening the girls
of Earth. And we learned it a few hours ago.
So my message is a warning! I pray it may reach you in time.
I fear that I cannot leave Mercury, though I may perhaps make the
effort. My rocket is demolished. A week ago I would have said that
there was no interplanetary vehicle on Mercury. I know now that there
is one! But I have not access to it.
I want to give you a picture of what is here--what has happened to me.
These two worlds, the Earth and Mercury, so many million miles apart,
are now strangely linked with crossing, interwoven destinies! When you
understand conditions and events here, the menace threatening you will
be clearer--you will know better how to deal with it.
I have no time to write in terms you would wholly comprehend. So I must
leave much to your imagination.
Ten years I have been here. Until the recent crisis--the whirl of
events which I will try now to sketch for you--I had taken my place
among the people of the Hill City, capital of what is called the Light
Country. They thought I was a god, miraculously appearing from the
heavens. But the scientists, the learned men, the government, soon
accepted me for what I am.
As you know, my age was eighteen when I left the earth. I am about
twenty-eight now. Time seems different here. I have lost count of
Earth-days, months and years. There are no days and nights in the Light
Country. It is in a zone of half-light. Always the same brightness,
except for the weather.
There is generally a pall of gray cloud masses overhead. But
occasionally there are the black storms, when we have inky night such
as there sometimes is on earth. Fearsome things, these black storms.
They last the extent of two or three Earth-days. Sometimes longer. I
shall have much to say of one of them; it has played so large a part in
the events which have brought us now into these dire straits.
* * * * *
My life for the first years was quiet in the Hill City. I worked for
the government, as does every one. The men of learning were much
interested in what I had to say of Earth. I taught them English. They
learned it readily, with their curiously retentive minds, capable of
learning far more quickly than is normal to us of Earth.
I told them all I could of our civilization, our science, our weapons
of war. And finally I was installed in the government laboratories.
They were very primitive at first. But I helped make them less so. My
rocket was smashed. I have worked to reconstruct it; and to devise
other methods of gravity nullification. And I planned and built a
projectile-cylinder by which I might communicate with Earth.
Slow, patient work, for ten years. The laboratories were established in
subterranean rooms beneath the palace of the ruler of the Light Country.
I must be brief; there seems so much to tell you! I can give you
so inadequate a picture. Around the Hill City is a barren waste of
metallic coppery hills. Jagged spires, cañon like gashes filed by some
Titan metal-worker in mountains of metal. Bleak landscape! For leagues
there is no blade of vegetation. No soil, save a metallic dust, worn by
the rain and wind. Pools of water from the rain lie glistening in all
the hollows.
A landscape fantastic. It looks like nothing of Earth, nor of the Moon.
This is the Light Country, the best region of Mercury. It is not all
quite so forbidding. There are oases--valleys where rock which was
not metallic has been worn into a soil. In them, with the abundant
rainfall, and the heavy humid heat, there is always a luxuriant,
tropical vegetation. Great spindly shafts of trees, flimsy and porous,
and air vines, with giant, spreading leaves and vivid, exotic flowers.
Quite a contrast to the naked copper hills!
In such a valley the capital, the Hill City, was built. It occupies the
bottom and the inner sides of a huge bowl-like depression in the great
metal plateau surrounding it. The level floor is perhaps five miles
across.
The level streets, tree-lined, are really roads rather than streets.
There is no congestion of houses. Fertile fields of soil lie around the
homes--each tilled by its controller. The low houses are built of the
prevalent copper. There are gardens, trees, and always a profusion of
brilliant flowers.
The outskirts of the city lie upon the surrounding inner slopes of the
bowl. Boulevards, like concentric rings, circle the fifteen-mile area.
And there are other streets running like spokes of a wheel from the
valley floor up to the thousand-foot height of the upper circular rim.
And an artificial reservoir-lake is beside the palace, in the center of
the valley floor.
Such is the Hill City. Its people, inhabitants of this Light Country
zone, are generally smaller than Earth people. The men average perhaps
five feet. They are often heavy-set, squat fellows, with wide shoulders
and thick chests, but of lesser strength than an Earth-man, so that
though the gravity here is something less than half that of Earth, they
move about much as you do.
But it is not so with me here! On Earth I weigh about a hundred and
forty pounds. That is seventy pounds or less, here on Mercury. I can
run with twelve-foot strides, and leap some thirty or forty feet. The
Mercutian men were afraid of me at first, but they are used to it now.
* * * * *
I shall never forget my first meeting with Tama. Like all Mercutian
women she is winged with those sleek feathered wings which are the
cause now of our disaster.
I am not one to attempt an explanation of the purpose of an all-wise
Creator in thus endowing the females of this world. I think perhaps
there is a logical justice to it. The male is created to pursue, to
capture, to enslave the female. At least, it was so on Earth throughout
the history of mankind.
But the women here are by nature given the means to be free. They
are slight of body, small in stature--I suppose an average height at
maturity would be four feet six inches--with a Mercutian weight of
forty pounds or less. Winged from the shoulder with a ten-foot spread,
they fly like an albatross.
They are free by nature. But man could not let it rest like that. At
marriage, to insure submission to the will of her husband, the wings
are clipped so that she may no longer fly. A cruel mutilation, an
intolerable humiliation.
But for generations the virgins at marriage were forced to it,
in surrender to man's conceit, the masculine desire for physical
superiority and dominance. The virgins submitted, but always with a
smoldering rebellion. I sensed that even when I first came here--a
growing rebellion on the part of the women against this mutilation.
It was always unexpressed. But I saw, with the passing years, how
it was growing constantly stronger; a smoldering hate against this
man-made law. A few of the young men, perhaps, were always in sympathy
with the virgins. But not one had ever dared publicly proclaim that he
wanted to take for mate a woman with wings unclipped. I suppose it was
partly personal pride--the fear of ridicule from other men; and partly
because the laws of the country made such a union illegal, its parties
moral outlaws, and its children illegitimate, to be put to death unless
the mother's wings were clipped.
The rebelliousness of the virgins intensified for generations. Then,
just about a year ago, a leader arose to fire them into deeds--a young
virgin, inspired with the desire to right this wrong.
A Joan of Arc? A warrior? Ah, yes, I have already seen her as that. And
destined to be a martyr? I pray God it may not be so.
This leader is Tama. I met her first a year ago. She was then about
twenty years old. I think I loved her from the beginning, though we
have never spoken of love. From the moment I met her, she was obviously
one who fought against the possibility of love, because to her it
represented mutilation.
There were always men who wanted her in marriage. Roc was one of them,
a young Mercutian newly risen to power in the Hill City Government. A
sort of captain of the army, and chief of police--it is all one here.
* * * * *
Roc hated me from the first--and the hate was mutual. But I taught him
English, and for years answered all his avid questions concerning our
Earth.
I wish that I had not. And I wish that I had had the curiosity to
inquire more closely into Roc's personal history. He never spoke of his
family. But there were tales concerning him. I understood vaguely that
some fifteen years ago--five years before I reached here--Roc's father
had lived in the Hill City. They said he was a gigantic fellow, named
Croat; a clever man, versed in science, but an unscrupulous scoundrel.
Roc was only a boy at the time his father Croat tried to seize the
Light Country Government. Roc's father raised an army. It contained all
the criminals at hand; adventurers; and slaves of the barbarous Cold
Country, that rims the dark side of the planet.
But Croat was defeated. Sent away into exile. It was said he was still
living in the Cold Country--a leader among those benighted ignorant
savages, and surrounded by all the other criminals who have been
banished from the Light Country.
The boy Roc remained in the Hill City, and in these passing years rose
to a position of trust in the Hill City Government. He never spoke of
his father. How could we know that they were secretly meeting? Slowly,
carefully they were planning this thing which has now burst upon us;
but no one ever guessed that the crafty Roc was always merely a tool of
the unseen, almost forgotten rebel Croat!
I taught Tama English--and taught it to Toh, her twin brother, so that
now they speak it fluently. I told them about our Earth. And I recall
how Tama very strangely smiled at me.
"It seems to me, Guy, that the women of your world have had a history
and a struggle not so very different from ours."
I come now to that momentous night just a short time ago when Tama
told me her purpose; and with her brother Toh I became embroiled in
the tumultuous events destined so quickly to sweep us into desperate
plight. And now they force me to send this warning to you of Earth.
CHAPTER VI.
THE FIRST MURDER.
I was sitting alone in my bedroom in the Hill City, the capital of the
Light Country (went on Guy Palisse's amazing message), one evening
after the last meal of that day-cycle, when Tama's brother Toh arrived
to see me. My room, with workshop adjoining it, lay buried in a dark
gloomy labyrinth of passages beneath the ruler's palace. The half-mile
long artificial lake was near by. Water draining off the hillsides
of the circular valley walls came down the vertical streets in open
conduits and into the lake for the city's water supply. It drained from
the lake in a wide, swift-flowing flume which penetrated the hill in a
tunnel and spilled the surplus water outside the city.
The flume ran just above my subterranean room. I could always hear the
vague murmur of the flowing water, especially after the rain of a black
storm, surging with a lashing roar.
A storm seemed impending this evening. The normal daylight was gone.
Heavy clouds were gathering close overhead, slowly circling in a lofty
wind, the presage of a black storm. With evening of the cycle, darkness
fell upon the city, as dark as I remember it on an overcast, stormy
night of Earth. But there was no surface wind. A heavy, steaming,
oppressive stillness; and a lurid green sheen in the air. A sinister
portent of evil came always with these Mercutian storms; and sometimes
it was justified.
The storms whirled sometimes from the Fire Country, with a fetid,
fiery, blasting breath. Or again, from the Cold Country of eternal
blackness, with a sullen roar and a congealing cold.
With the darkness, the emergency lamps of the city winked on. A
weirdness settled upon everything. The streets lay black with shadow,
green-cast with the gathering murk.
But in my underground room none of this was apparent. I was sitting in
the little chair which I had built in Earth-fashion when Toh knocked
upon my door-slide, and I bade him enter. He stood before me; the light
from my animal-fat lamp flickered with its yellow glow upon him.
"Guy, I have been sent to you by Tama."
A slim, slender little fellow, this Mercutian youth of twenty-one. High
class, of pure Light Country blood--not squat and thick-set like most
Mercutian men who so often have Cold Country native blood in their
heritage. He was some five feet two inches in height, slim and straight
and boyish. He wore his thick black hair long to the base of his neck.
A ribbon of red was about his forehead.
With his high-bridged nose, he looked something like a North American
Indian youth. But except for his face and head the resemblance ended.
His short-sleeved jacket flared at the waist. His wide trousers were
knee-length, with a gaudy sash and dangling tasseled cord.
And in the sash I saw a knife handle sticking up.
"Toh, you have no right to wear that. Especially in the darkness of a
coming storm. Suppose one of Roc's men should seize you!"
"No one will--seize me." He was panting, out of breath. He gazed
furtively around my little room. "No one saw me come. The storm, it
upsets the city. I came by your lower passage under the palace. The
guard there was gone." He tried to smile--it was a strange simile
indeed. "Or maybe in the darkness he did not see me."
* * * * *
"Why do you come?"
"Tama wants you."
"Wants me?"
"Yes. Now. To come with me--to her. Will you?"
"Where?"
He gestured. "Out of the city. But near. We can most easy get there--in
what you call half an hour."
"But--"
"1 cannot answer questions." There was a hurried tenseness about him.
And a pleading, "Guy--Tama asks you to come."
"All right." I agreed. "Toh, how is the storm?"
"Just the same. Not upon us yet."
"Maybe it won't break. I hope not."
"Do you?" he responded vaguely. "I don't know about that."
He was waiting impatiently for me to get on my shoes. Resilient-soled
buskins suitable for running over the jagged metallic rocks. For the
rest, I wore only short fabric trousers and a white, sleeveless shirt.
In the heat of Mercury the costume was all I ever needed.
Toh gestured at the white shirt. "Have you no dark one? They can see
you, maybe, in that."
I changed it.
He said suddenly, "Have you a weapon?"
"You know I have not. None are available outside the sealed government
rooms."
"We could not get in there?"
"Of course not."
"Well, then--" His voice trailed away.
I was ready. Bareheaded, like himself; and I tied a band about my
forehead to keep the hair from my eyes. I recalled suddenly that twelve
years before, in a very similar costume to this I had run my college
races back in the old days on Earth. That sent a pang through me. I was
no more than a prisoner here on this strange world. In all its affairs,
there was for me only Tama.
"All right, Toh."
But he insisted. "Take a knife--like this." He waved his thin,
keen-edged blade. "You have one?"
"Yes. But, Toh--"
"Please. Tama asked that you hurry."
I got my knife and we started out through the hundred-foot vaulted
corridor sloping upward. The murmur of the flume-water near by was
audible as we crept forward. The guard at the gate was not there. We
slipped through the small opening; its bars stood wide; we reached the
open air.
We were just beyond the palace garden wall. The reservoir-lake showed
its dim expanse of water, unrippled in the breathless darkness. Behind
us loomed the government building. It should have been almost dark
at this hour of sleep, but it was not. Many of its window slits were
lighted.
Toh pulled at me. "Come."
But I lingered. Some instinct.
The trees arched overhead, great, spreading, spindly branches of the
lush, porous vegetation of Mercury which grows with miraculous speed
where-ever there is soil and water. Through the tree branches I could
see the luminous green haze of the sky. And near by, spreading around
us, was the circular city. Mere dots of light now, winking like eyes in
the murky, abnormal darkness of the coming storm.
"Guy, please come."
* * * * *
Suddenly I saw, not fifteen feet from us, a dark form lying on the
ground. I jerked from Toh's grip and with a single bound pounced upon
it.
It was the guard. He lay on his back; his heavy-jowled face a contorted
mask, his eyes staring. And on his chest, his thin leather shirt was
ripped with a hole. There was a dark stain of blood.
Toh gripped me again. "Yes, I killed him! He tried to stop me from
getting in to you! Roc ordered you kept a prisoner--until this is over."
"This--what?" I shook him. "Toh, see here--murder! Good God, lad!"
He was shaking from fear or excitement. "Guy, now that you see him,
help me carry him. I tried it. He's too heavy for me."
He added, almost with a stark whisper: "Guy, the first murder! I did
it! This is for Tama. All this--for Tama and the virgins."
A surprising, matured force came to him. "Guy, my friend, is it with me
you want to act? With me and Tama? Or with Roc? He had you prisoner, in
there to-night."
He broke off; we both stood listening. The city was in a turmoil; the
distant murmur of voices in the streets; and nearer to us, voices at
the palace doorways, in the garden--coming this way!
I cast my lot then.
"You mean, throw him in the flume, Toh?"
"Yes. I wanted to do that."
I lifted the body in my arms. The twenty-foot wide flume passed near
us. I lowered my grisly burden gently into it to avoid a splash. There
was blood on my shirt as I straightened.
"Gone, Toh."
The floating shape disappeared in the darkness.
There were voices at the garden wall, but we had not been seen. And
then the first surge of the black storm broke upon the city. A sigh
of hot wind stirred the fronds over us into a rustle. It rippled the
mirror-like surface of the little lake.
A hot, sulphurous breath. Overhead the green-black sky was shot with
luminous red streaks, and puffs of red like tiny silent bombs bursting.
And then, a moment later, came the dull staccato sounds of the thunder.
"It's on us, Toh."
We ran around the lake shore, circled its farther end, and plunged into
one of the city streets.
CHAPTER VII.
REVOLT OF THE WINGED VIRGINS.
It was a run of some two miles across the level of the city to where
the street began the ascent of the inner slope of the valley-side. A
street like a wide road, with verdure over it, sometimes interlocking
overhead; and low stone houses, set back in gardens or small cultivated
patches of field.
The emergency street lights were not adequate. It was dark everywhere;
dark and confused. People were in the street, or gathered before their
dwellings, apprehensive of the coming storm. But I saw it was more than
that--an excitement at something transpiring.
No one heeded us as we dashed along. I had to measure my pace for Toh.
With my giant leaps, I could at once have outdistanced him.
A city cart passed us, drawn by a gruesome, insect-like _brue_, a giant
jointed thing. I heard a girl crying within the cart.
There were many girls flying about. Like huge, aimless frightened
birds, they flapped overhead. We passed a house with one of Roc's
official carts standing before it. His yellow-jacketed guards were
lined at the garden wall--gray-skinned, heavy, dull-featured men from
the Cold Country. The _brue_ in the cart harness stretched its jointed
length at ease along the ground and lifted its head with an uncanny
pseudo-human movement as though listening.
And from the house came the screams of a girl.
"Toh! What is happening?"
But Tama's brother urged me to the other side of the street. We passed
the house unnoticed by the guards. But I think that the _brue_ was
aware of me. Its head turned with bristling, waving antenne.
Toh panted, "Faster, Guy. I can--go faster."
We climbed the hill, passed the last of the houses. I carried Toh in my
arms for a little way so that he might recover his breath. We reached
the top of the cliff. Naked metal crags up here. The valley of the city
lay stretched beneath us. Lights were moving everywhere. The forms of
flying girls--a party of them went over us, their great wings waving as
they breasted the wind, their draperies flowing behind them.
The naked, rolling waste of the uplands lay before us. The lurid sky
hung close overhead. The wind was increasing. Soon the rain would come.
"Which way, Toh?"
"Near here."
We attained a near-by eminence, half a mile or so from the city rim,
a level space of jagged, broken crags. The city was hidden from here.
Bowlders lay strewn about. Rifts yawned like black gashes in a wild
confusion of metal rock. The smooth places gleamed like burnished
copper in the brief red lightning-flares of the storm. It was an
inferno of glare and crackling thunder-puffs.
Toh gasped throatily: "Let us--wait here."
We crouched in a hollow of an arching rock-spire. Then Tama came. She
had been waiting near by, and saw us arrive. She came soaring from
overhead--a dark blob against the red sky.
Toh gripped me. "There she is!"
Her body hung breast down. Her ten-foot spread of wings tilted, swayed
as she circled, balancing, descending. She fluttered down, her feet
dropping, her wings flapping backward as she righted herself to land on
tiptoe before us.
[Illustration: _She waited for them on the metal cliff._]
"Guy--you came! I was afraid that Toh could not get in to you."
* * * * *
It was brighter up here than down in the city. The red sky painted
Tama's deep-red feathered wings a lurid crimson. They were folded now
as she stood before us, arching from her shoulder-blades, with their
tips just clearing the ground behind her.
She wore the usual silky gray-blue trousers, bound at her ankles; her
bare feet were encased in sandals, with gold cords crossing her instep
and fastened to the lower trouser hem. And a silken, gray-blue scarf
wound about her waist, crossing in front, passing up over her breast
and shoulders, crossing again between the wings behind and descending
to the waist.
Her hair was a glossy black. It covered her ears; and its two long
thick plaits were laced tightly with silken cords. They came forward
over each shoulder; each was fastened to her body in two places--at the
waist, and again where the plait ended, at the outside of her trouser
leg, just at the knee.
"Guy--"
I noticed that from her belt a knife handle protruded. I seized her
out-stretched hands.
"Tama, what is going on to-night? This turmoil--?"
Several inches shorter than Toh, she stood like a child before me. But
there was nothing of the child in her swift vehement words. Nor in the
flash of her dark eyes, the set of her jaw.
"Guy, I have need to question you. Quickly. Please, will you answer?"
I held her hands and stood gazing down at her upturned face. The red
sheen of the storm deepened its flush.
"Yes," I said.
"You know not--you know nothing of the events of the two day-cycles
past. To-day--yesterday--Roc has held you really a prisoner."
"That I did not know, Tama. I did not realize--"
"No," she retorted cynically, "because you had work; no need to go out.
But yesterday I sent Toh to try and get you. They would not let him in.
And the things that are transpiring in the city--"
A vision of Roc rose before me. His hawk-like gray face; his long black
hair, shot with white for all his youth, streaming over his ears. His
leer as he assigned the work that I was to do, and told me to proceed
with the completion of my rocket-cylinder.
Tama demanded abruptly, "Guy, can you get control of any weapons?"
"No."
"What weapons are there? We girls know nothing of such things. But you,
in your work--"
There are no weapons used in the Light Country of the sort which on
Earth would be called modern. Explosives are unknown. There are knives,
and feathered arrows flung with a sling. And several devices for longer
range, mostly of the catapult principle. Crude, mechanical things.
But I understood that the government had small electronic weapons, and
defensive electro-armament. There is an electro-magnetic current known
to the Light Country scientists. I suppose it is something akin to
what is called electricity on Earth. But I had never seen the weapons
developed from it.
"They are all sealed in the storehouse, Tama, under the palace. They
keep an arsenal there in case of need--an attack of savages from the
Fire Country, or a revolt of the Cold Country slaves."
That last word affected her strangely. "Revolt--of slaves. Ah, yes!" A
murmured, tense bitterness. Then she added, "Could you get in there?"
"No, I don't believe so."
"Have you ever been in the arsenal?"
"Let me see--yes, once, years ago."
She thought a moment. The rain was starting big, splattering drops. The
wind was steadily increasing, and growing hotter now; this storm was
whirling down upon us from the Fire Country.
* * * * *
Tama drew me closer under the overhanging rock. Toh crouched with us.
He said abruptly, "There was once a long-range ray. My father told me
of it."
Again a vision of Roc rose jeeringly at me. It was Roc who originally
had told me of this high-powered ray, a lost and almost forgotten
weapon. Centuries ago, the Light Country civilization had reached a
higher peak than now. There had been many wars with the neighboring
savages of the hotter and colder regions. With these declining and the
population of Mercury steadily decreasing, the Light Country began to
turn primitive. The ray was lost now in the dim pages of history. It
was almost a legend handed down from generation to generation.
Tama said, "What sort of a ray?"
I answered, "An electronic ray-projector. The ray-current itself is
known. I think the government has small hand projectors. The lost
mechanism was for long range. Very high-powered. A death-ray."
Roc had smiled very strangely at me when he described what the ray must
have been.
Toh put in again: "They are trying to discover that lost ray, in the
government workshops."
"Yes," I agreed.
"But it is not ready now?" Tama interjected.
"I think not."
"Then we cannot get it--nor can it be used against us. You cannot get
any other weapons, Guy?"
"No. Tama, these questions must tell me what--" I gripped her. "Tama,
child, this turmoil to-night--?"
"I will tell you what is the meaning of this turmoil, as you call it."
I listened, amazed by her vehement, passionate words. For months past,
the virgins of the Hill City had been refusing marriage--isolated
instances of rebellion. I knew that, of course. But what I did not know
was that two days ago, news had spread about the city of a law which
Roc was proposing to the Government Council. That law had been passed
this morning. And they were starting to put it into effect to-night.
"Forcing us into marriage, Guy! No longer now can we keep our wings
until we take a husband."
They were clipping the wings of every girl over sixteen years of age in
the city.
"So we will have no reason to refuse marriage, since we are mutilated
anyway."
I thought of Roc's official cart as I had seen it before that house.
And the girl screaming inside.
The city was in chaos. The girls had had two days' warning. There had
been plans--preparations. The thing that they had been contemplating
for months under Tama's leadership was now forced upon them.
"We are going, Guy! Open rebellion now. Two thousand virgins--I think
we can get that many."
* * * * *
A flight--an exodus of the marriageable young girls from the Hill City.
There are five other large cities in the Light Country. The girls in
them would soon come also. All day the word had been circulating. This
black storm aided them in escaping. A preliminary rendezvous had been
determined--a hundred miles or so off in the metallic barren desert
toward the central Fire Country.
Even now the girls were flying there, singly, in groups, slipping from
their homes--seeking out friends to tell them also--winging away from
the Hill City into the lurid, storm-filled gloom.
"And we have built little platforms," Tama was saying. "With handles,
so that the girls can fly with them. We're taking the victims--the few
we can gather who have already been mutilated this night. Guy, when you
see the poor things! Their wings, once so beautiful, with the feathers
clipped and plucked--the muscles cut--the blood streaming--"
Toh said suddenly: "I killed a man to-night."
She seemed not to hear him. I had leaped to my feet, pulling her with
me. She stood now, clinging to me. And she was suddenly trembling.
"We--I want you, Guy. Want you with us. I will take you on one of
the little platforms. We will hide--off in the desert. We are going
permanently, Guy. Two thousand of us. And there will be others come
to join us. We've got to do it! There is nothing left now. We'll find
soil. Some little hidden valley where we can build shelters and grow
food. There is nothing else left for us to do!"
She silenced my questions with her tumult of words: "Will you come? We
need you--we are not such fools that we do not realize a man can fight
for existence in the desert better than girls. There is Toh--and a few
other young men are coming. A little band of you men to help--to lead
us."
She ended with a wild appeal. "You of the great Earth who know so
much--and yet you know so little of how the virgins of Mercury feel
about their wings! Guy, will you come?"
CHAPTER VIII.
THE FLYING PLATFORMS.
When she paused, I said abruptly, "Yes, I'll come."
And I stood watching her as she walked to the brink of the jagged
eminence. She faced the rolling naked landscape, a dark blur out there
in the murk of the storm. It was raining heavily now--hot rain that
slanted down on the wind in great sheets.
The turgid green of the sky caught the raindrops and turned them to
emeralds, and to rubies when the lightning flashed in puffs like
crimson bombs. One seemed to explode directly over us. The report was
deafening; the crimson glare blinding.
Tama stood with upraised arms and her crimson feathered wings
out-stretched. In the lightning her figure showed clearly.
A signal. And in a moment it was answered. From some other rocky point
near by two blobs rose into the air. They came soaring, swooping. Two
rectangular platforms with girls flying beside them, carrying them.
They came with a rush, swept by the wind; turned and steadied over our
heads.
I gazed up, and a distant lightning flare illumined them clearly.
One was a small platform, possibly twelve feet by six. Three long,
flexible poles were fastened crosswise under its bottom and bound with
vine-strands. The poles, some eighteen feet long, thus extended out
each side about six feet.
At each of these handles a girl was flying. Six to the smaller
platform, three on each side. I saw that the other platform was
similar, save that it was several times larger, with sixteen girls
bearing it.
They turned into the wind and with a great flapping of wings settled
down to the rocks near us. The smaller platform was empty. Upon the
larger, perhaps a dozen girls were lying. I went over and gazed at
them, standing silent while Tama told them that I had joined the
flight. They lay huddled, clinging to the low railing that outlined the
platform.
A lump rose in my throat at their strained white faces. Some of them
shifted their positions, trying to hide from me the white bandages,
blood-stained, with which their mutilated wings were bound. The
platform carrying them was presently back in the air. We watched it
as it fled off into the face of the storm, off away from the city
toward the wilds of the Fire Country. A moment, and then the lurid murk
swallowed it.
"Come, Guy. I will ride with you and with Toh."
Toh took his place on the platform; he gestured to me. My mind was
confused, whirling with all Tama had told me--the shock of this
catastrophe.
Then the confusion fell from me. I stopped, stood a moment in thought.
And questions rushed at me.
I faced Tama. "Did that platform start for your distant meeting place?"
"Yes! Yes, Guy."
"And now you want to take Toh and me there?"
"Yes. All is ready."
"But is it?"
"Yes."
I knew vaguely the locality the girls had selected.
"There is no valley with soil off there, Tama."
"No. But I had to select some place that all the girls knew. We have
often met there in little groups--to try and plan what we might do."
"And because you have done that before," I said, "Roc probably knows
the place. He'll follow. Did you think of that?"
She had not. But it was too late now to change. Every moment girls were
leaving the city.
"On foot," Toh said, "Roc and his men cannot get there in less than two
day-cycles. More, in this storm. The cañons will be river-torrents."
It was true enough. The ferocity of the storm here on the exposed
height where we stood, was only too apparent. The wind tore at us. The
rain-sheet beat and drenched us.
* * * * *
"Come," I said. "No more of this." I realized that the wind was tearing
at our almost shouted words. I took my place on the platform. "Tell
your girls to circle over the city, Tama."
She stared at me. "But, Guy--"
"I'll explain as we go. And I must know more about your plans. It will
be death--out there in the desert--without every possible safeguard."
She gave the order. We rose into the wind. The light platform swayed
and bucked. The girls struggled with it. For a time I thought they
would lose control. They had had little practice; the wind caught us,
bore us away despite their struggling wings. Then they pulled more
evenly, turned us, held us soaring. Then they turned again; and more
steadily this time, we swept upon the heels of the wind, out over the
circular valley.
The lights of the storm-lashed city gleamed a thousand feet beneath us.
Down all the inclined streets the water was pouring. The little lake by
the palace showed its surface lashed by the wind.
I crouched by Tama. "Tell me, quickly, what preparations for food and
equipment you have made."
They were surprisingly complete. It was obvious that there was no way
by which we could now improve them.
We crossed over the city, and turned back while she told me.
"Our plan, Guy, is to gather at this meeting place. And when we are all
there and the storm is past, we can find a suitable valley with soil."
There were girls rising occasionally from the city. One passed near us.
I said abruptly, "Tama, call her."
She obeyed at once. And for all my ten years on Mercury, the action
gave me a start. She stood up on our tiny, tilting platform, and I had
the sudden absurd shock of fear that she would fall--a thousand feet
down into the city under us.
"Tama, you--"
I choked it back, as she spread her wings and leaped into the void.
Followed the other girl. Called to her. And the two came winging back
to us.
This other was a girl hardly sixteen. She gazed at me and smiled to
know that I would help them.
"Tama," I demanded, "how many young men are coming?"
"Twenty. Thirty, perhaps. The platform bearing them should be gone by
now."
It occurred to me that Roc, if he had wind of this, could so easily
place a spy among those men.
"You think you can trust them all?"
"Yes. We thought of that. They all have been in sympathy with us for
months."
"Are there any others?"
"Other young men?"
"Yes. Who would come--but have not heard of this?"
"Many others," she said.
"You know who they are?"
"Oh, yes. I have been testing them--talking to them, with caution, for
a long time back."
"Then tell this girl who they are. She is under sixteen, isn't she?"
"Yes."
"Then Roc's men will not bother her. This new law does not touch her."
The girl listened eagerly while Tama translated. She was to stay in the
city for a day or two, and find other girls of her age who would spread
the word.
"Gather all the young men she can trust--tell her that, Tama. Have you
any other platforms down there?"
"Yes. Lina knows where they are hidden."
The girl nodded when this was told her. There would be other girls in a
day or two who would be wanting to leave. And there were fifty or more
waiting now to gather the victims of Roc's first execution of the new
law, and bring them on platforms.
The girl left us and dropped back into the city.
* * * * *
Tama asked me, "Now, Guy, shall we start away? I do not want to tire
our girls, flying here in this wind and rain, with the long flight
before them."
"Presently, Tama. Circle around a moment more."
I had been studying the situation beneath us. One does not relinquish
his native world without a struggle. My rocket-cylinder was down
there, in my workshop under the palace. It was practically ready for
operation. The small cylinder with its mechanisms was ready. I could, I
felt sure, even unaided and alone in the desert, find means to load its
firing chambers, and launch it. I had been living for ten years upon
the hope of communicating with Earth.
And now it came to me clearly that even more important than my own
desire to send a message to Earth was the fact that it might be the
best thing to do for these girls. I saw myself now their logical
leader. The responsibility for their safety would rest with me.
And we were burning our bridges. This rebellion, this flight was
an irrevocable step. The government, dominated by Roc, would never
compromise.
We might be followed by the Light Country army, found, assailed. Or if
not that, then there could be starvation in the desert, or death from
savages or the strange fearsome animals that lurked in the Fire Country.
As though with prophetic vision I could see us embattled. And I knew
that every one of these virgins would choose death before she would
return beaten and yield her wings to the mutilating knife, to marry and
bear girl children, perhaps, to suffer the same.
I said abruptly, "Tama, I'm going down and get my cylinder. We may have
need to send a message to the Earth."
I told her why. There was no argument. Both she and Toh could see it.
"I killed a man to-night," said Toh, and turned his white face to his
sister as he told her how he had killed the guard to get me out. "We
are in this--there is no returning."
I had been pondering how I could best land and get to my room unseen. I
knew that Roc would stop me, seize me if he could. The opened gateway
and the vanished guard had perhaps by now been discovered, along with
my own escape.
We were now almost directly over the flat roof of the palace. The
simplest way to get to my rooms was from the lake, over the wall into
the garden, through the corridor gate--the way Toh and I had come out.
But I saw, as a flare illumined the scene, that there were figures down
there. Not at the gateway, but so near it that Tama could not land this
platform unobserved anywhere in that vicinity. And the trees would make
a ground landing very difficult and precarious in this wind, almost
anywhere on the city level.
But the flat roof of the palace seemed empty. It would take only a
moment to touch the roof. I could leave the platform and it could
at once dart away. Even if it were seen from below, it could not be
assailed so quickly. Probably no one would realize that I had left it.
And from the roof, I would take my chances on getting down through the
palace unseen.
"Then we will wait for you on the roof, Guy?"
"No! You girls would be seen. It would cause comment, and they would
come up after you."
I thought I had a quick way of getting out of the city. I told her
where to meet me with the platform, in a secluded place well away from
the city.
She gazed at me sharply when I described the place.
"I can get there," I smiled. "You forget, I am more agile than the
Mercutian men. The whole thing will take no more than half an hour--if
I have luck."
* * * * *
We were dropping toward the roof. Its flat top was a little lake of
water with the rain pouring on it and gathering there. The men outside
the palace saw us as we came down. There was no doubt of that. The
red puffs in the sky were almost continuous now. The glare showed us
clearly; and I saw the men staring up at us.
Half a dozen of the official carts were coming up to the main doorway
of the building, the _brues_ drawing them through the water on the
roadway. Girls were being taken from the carts and shoved roughly into
the palace. One went fighting. Her cries floated up to us through the
surge of the storm.
We landed on the rain-soaked roof with a splash.
"I am going with you," Toh said suddenly.
"No. I can manage it better alone. If I meet any one, he may not
necessarily know that Roc had me imprisoned. Hurry now, get this
platform away. I'll be there, Tama, in half an hour."
The platform lifted. One of the girls had already shown signs of
tiring. Tama took her place.
I crouched in the water by the roof palisade, watching the platform
sweep away. From the ground the roof-top was invisible. I thought no
one had seen me land.
I waited a few moments. Then I went to the hooded trap, opened it, and
descended the ladder into the palace.
CHAPTER IX.
MADMAN'S GAMBLE.
The upper story was dim and silent. But sounds came floating up the
central spiral. And the dragging tread of the Mercutians downstairs. I
stood at the head of the spiral. No one was on it--no one in sight. It
seemed as good a time as any.
I got down to the main floor, and unexpectedly ran into a man.
"Ah, it is you, Palisse. They are rebellious, these idiot girls. Listen
to them."
He spoke his native language. He gestured to a near-by room-arch,
"Listen, Palisse. Roc puts the new order at once into effect."
"Yes," I said. I had pushed past him. Evidently in the dimness of this
foyer he had not noticed that I was drenched with rain, nor had he seen
that I was coming from the roof-top. He went past me and disappeared.
From a near-by room came the sounds of gruff men's voices; the
terrified murmurs of girls. A low moan, then a scream.
I did not linger. From the direction of the main doorway another party
was bringing more girls. I moved away toward the incline leading
downward, and reached the underground level. There seemed no one down
here--just a dim candlestick in a bracket bowl.
I reached the inner door-slide of my apartment. It stood ajar. I
could not remember that I had left it ajar. Perhaps I had. Roc had
been keeping me a prisoner, but he had not let me know it. Instead of
scaling this inner door upon me, he had doubtless put a guard near by,
to turn me back if I tried to leave my rooms.
But the guard evidently was not here now. I hastened into my rooms. The
doorway opened directly into my bedroom. The place seemed undisturbed.
It was not so long since Toh and I had left here. My single light was
still burning. The door-slide to the lower corridor-exit was closed. I
recalled distinctly that Toh and I had closed it after us.
In the silence as I stood an instant upon entering, I could hear the
sound of the flume-water outside, vicious now, an angry torrent swollen
by the rain of the storm. I went into my workshop. My benches, shelves
of chemicals, all my familiar apparatus stood in order.
I gathered the loading chambers of the rocket-cylinder, the fuses, the
little coils of rotary magnetizers; and parchment sheets and etching
pencils with which I could write a message. I could put them all into
the cylinder's hollow interior, to keep them dry against the storm.
Lastly, I collected the few chemicals needed to complete the apparatus.
It would take me not over two or three days out there in the desert
with the girls.
I piled all the articles on my center-bench. But when I turned to the
box where I kept the cylinder itself, I found the cylinder missing!
It turned me cold. I stared into the little box, in the shadows of
the room corner. It was empty. But I had left the cylinder there. I
searched quickly.
It seemed that I heard a sound from my bedroom. I had entered with my
knife in hand. The knife now lay on the center-bench. I seized it and
rushed for the bedroom. In my frantic haste I stepped too briskly. The
lesser gravity of Mercury was not enough to hold me down, and my head
struck the eight-foot top of the connecting arch. It knocked me dizzy,
but I regained my feet, and reeled into the bedroom.
The cylinder lay on my bed. And from behind the head-curtain Roc rose
up to confront me!
* * * * *
"So you came back, Palisse. What a luck for me! I need you."
I was still dizzy from the blow on my head. I stood wavering, and saw
that he was backing away from me, saw his grinning, leering face with
the point of hair coming low on his forehead to give him a queer,
Satanic look. His pointed ears came out from the locks of his hair as
he listened.
Some one coming? I seemed to hear distant voices back in the lower
passages of the palace.
"Where have you been, Palisse? In the rain?--well, that is evident."
His voice was unduly loud--trying to attract attention to us. He was
backing behind my bed, and fumbling at his belt where I saw that he
carried a small arrow-sling.
My head cleared. If I turned to close my door he would be on me. I
said nothing. I was moving sidewise to avoid my table. And suddenly I
leaped. I caught him at the bedpost. He had not got out his weapon. He
twisted, seizing my hand that held the knife.
Together we swayed out into the room. The table went over, and my light
with it. For a moment we fought in the darkness, both silent, panting,
fighting grimly. I was far stronger than he. And there is a curious
fragile quality to the Mercutians. But his fingers clung desperately to
my hand that held the knife. And his other arm was around my neck.
We struck a chair and fell, still locked together. Suddenly he
relinquished my wrist and his groping hand on the floor found the
smashed table lamp. He flung it into my face; the hot fat burned me. My
waving knife went wild.
The voices outside seemed nearer. I regained my feet, lifting Roc up,
and with all my strength heaved his body away. It broke his hold. He
crashed against the overturned table and lay still. There was just a
little glow of light straggling in from the passageway. I could see Roc
lying there in the wreck of the smashed table.
I did not stop to investigate. The congealing fat of the lamp smeared
my burned face, and was in my eyes. I wiped it away, then caught up the
cylinder from the bed--a two-foot, cylindrical metal contrivance.
I hastened into my workshop, stuffing the apparatus from the
center-bench into the cylinder and closing it. In a moment I was out
through the lower corridor doorway.
I went up the ascending passage almost at a run, the cylinder under one
arm, and my knife in the other hand. There would be pursuit, I knew. I
could already hear the voices back in my bedroom. Doubtless I had not
killed Roc; perhaps he was only shamming as he fell.
The outer gate was ajar. I went through it, into the open air. The
storm was raging as before. The red torrent of rain coming down; the
trees here bending their porous branches like reeds in a wind.
I had hoped to be able to make off into the city without raising a cry
after me. But the alarm was already given. A puff of lightning showed
me my surroundings clearly: the garden wall curving behind me; the
stretch of lake wall with the waves dashing over it; and the other
side of the triangle, hemmed in by the metal flume. Its ten-foot depth
was depressed into the ground, its sides rising only a foot or two. It
passed quite near me. I caught a glimpse of its turgid whirling current.
* * * * *
An arrow sang past me as for an instant I stood undecided. At the gate
out of which I had come, men appeared. They stood shouting. I could see
that the way along the lake was blocked by other men, who had heard the
shouts, and now came running at me.
I was suddenly aware of a sound close behind me, a queer sloshing.
I turned. A _brue_ was slithering forward through the water and mud
of the path. In the lurid half-light its eyes gleamed balefully. A
gruesome thing, ten feet long. Its upraised head as it advanced was
nearly the height of my own; its feelers, muscular arms the length of
my body, with the strength to crush me, waved over its head.
The watchful insect was partly between me and the flume. There was an
instant when I was confused. A _brue_ could leap suddenly, swift as a
coiled snake. I turned the other way, back toward the wall. Arrows came
at me, but a gust caught them and flung them away. The men by the wall
scattered as they thought I was about to rush them.
The turmoil was rising around me. Shouts from everywhere. Figures were
approaching, it seemed, from every direction. I was caught, hemmed in.
I saw a bowlder lying under a tree, and seized it, raising it aloft--a
tremendous chunk, but it was light to my strength here on this little
world. I had shoved my knife back in my belt, but it was awkward to
have to cling to the cylinder.
The _brue_ did not leap, but with lowered head came slithering toward
me. I heaved the rock with one hand. It caught the giant insect full
in its gruesome, pseudo-human face, mashing it. The thing let out a
shrill, horrible scream and lay quivering.
The men behind me seized this opportunity to advance. A thrown knife
winged past my shoulder, tearing my shirt. I went with a twenty-foot
leap over the writhing, crushed insect, and reached the flume. Clinging
to the cylinder, I plunged into the boiling, tumbling current and was
swept away.
* * * * *
The water was hot, with a heavy mist of vapor rising from it. I sank,
with my plunge, but desperately held to the cylinder. In a moment I
came up like a cork. But for all my buoyancy, it was difficult to keep
my head above the surface. A chaos of spray and boiling, lashing water
swept viciously down the incline of the flume. I could see dimly the
smooth metallic sides rushing past me. Red puffs in the sky overhead
illumined the sweep of passing tree branches.
I tried to swim, but could not. Momentarily I was under the surface;
then up again, tumbling end over end, rolling--beaten against the
rushing side of the flume when it turned a curve. The hermetically
sealed cylinder, with the air inside it, floated high. It jerked and
pulled to escape from me. Once it got away; but I lunged and caught it
again.
It was two miles across the city to where the flume plunged into
the cliff tunnel. It seemed unending, yet I must have made it with
racing-flyer speed. Houses went by--dim shapes with lights in them,
racing backward, momentarily visible over the flume edge. There was a
great sweeping curve where the swollen torrent surged and slopped over
the edge and I was very nearly flung over.
But presently I was able to keep my body from turning and to swim a
little. Then I tried holding the cylinder before me like a buoy and
kicking it forward. I got along better after that. The relief was
short. The widening mouth of the tunnel entrance yawned out of the
darkness ahead and swallowed me.
In the solid blackness I lost all track of direction. I could not see
the sides of the flume. There was nothing but the inky chaos of sounds.
A roaring reverberation now. The beat of the waves against me. The
thuds as I struck the flume-side and was hurled back into the center of
the current.
A racing, tumbling black chaos. Then abruptly I saw the red lightning
in the sky again. The cliff-wall opening swept backward. I was through
the tunnel. In the open stormy night, outside the city valley. Naked
rock spires were passing--
The flume abruptly ended. I was spilled out in a great cascade of
water. The cylinder was torn from me. Rocks struck me. I felt myself
rolling, tumbling on a rocky surface.
CHAPTER X.
BESIEGED IN THE METAL DESERT.
For an instant my senses must have faded. When they cleared, I was
lying away from water, save the rain that beat upon me. And Tama and
her brother were standing over me. The cylinder was unharmed. We found
it lying on the rocks near by.
"You got it!" Toh exulted.
I was bruised and battered, half choked with water, but not injured.
The platform was here. We mounted it, Tama, Toh and I crouching
together with the precious cylinder held between us.
The girls lifted us; we struggled up into the night, circled the
outside of the city valley, and headed out into the metal desert,
toward the Fire Country. The storm seemed now to burst into the
height of its fury. The whirling rotary clouds were at times close
over us--green and red vapor masses, hurling rain and wind heavy with
sulphur.
The clouds sometimes rifted into gigantic vertical funnels through
which the clear daylight of the sky was visible. It brightened the
scene. The bleak, desolate landscape beneath us was at moments clearly
shown. Great rippled sheets of metallic plateau, drenched with water.
Shining coppery; then cast with green--then blinding red when the
lightning puffed. Or again a wild, broken area with spires and crags
and bowlders strewn as though some frenzied Titan had flung them.
And we swept over tiny valleys where soil had collected and trees and
verdure had sprung up. The trees bent low in the wind; the rain-sheet
blurred the vision of them as we struggled past.
It seemed unending. It would have been called a hundred miles on Earth.
The storm abated a trifle or we could never have gone on. Tama relieved
the girls to the limit of her strength--but Toh and I had to crouch
there helpless.
Then the deep pit of the caldron-valley, with jagged, upstanding buttes
and spires towering over it, lay beneath us. Caves down there to give
us shelter. A great shaft of green-red light came down from a rift
in the tumbling clouds. It fell like a cathedral shaft and disclosed
the mile-wide pit floor. The close-encircling walls offered a measure
of protection from the wind. Girls were down there, flapping about.
Platforms lay discarded. Figures of girls and a few men were dragging
supplies and equipment into the near-by caves.
The meeting-place at last!
The light from the clouds held only a moment. Then it was gone. There
was darkness in the little valley under us. We descended into it. There
were five hundred or more girls here now. At intervals more straggled
in.
The valley floor was naked metal rock, thickly studded with bowlders.
There was not a blade of vegetation; as I had anticipated, this was
indeed no place where a permanent camp could be made.
But there were caves to give us shelter. In the dark confusion I
located a dozen or so of the Hill Country young men. We got all the
equipment sheltered underground. Meager supplies! A few knives for
weapons. Agricultural implements. Food-bulbs and seeds. A little
clothing and personal effects.
With my strength and activity, abnormal on this small world, I raised
the equipment in great armfuls and staggered with it into the caves.
* * * * *
As order gradually came out of the confusion, Tama and I began to feel
that the situation was not quite as drastic as it had seemed at first.
When the storm was over we could fly to find soil, and build houses
there. We had what might be called some carpenters' tools, and the wood
on Mercury is very porous, easy to work. In this lush soil, vegetation
grows rapidly. In a dozen day-cycles with favorable weather, some of
the food would be ready for harvesting. We had enough food with us now,
with luck, to last that long.
The caves, most of them, communicated. It was presently a weird enough
scene in there. Animal-fat lamps spluttering with flickering yellow
light. And there were some blue-green bulbs--small battery affairs of
the electrocurrent which a few of the girls had been able to secure.
For hours, while the storm raged, the girls struggled in. Presently we
had a thousand--I suppose that many; there was no way of counting them.
Some were from the City of the Water, the second largest settlement of
the Light Country.
"The word has spread there," said Tama. We were in the cave which I had
rigged for myself. Already I had started preparing my chemicals for
the charging of the cylinder. Tama added, "Every virgin in the Light
Country will join us in time. Except those ... unable to fly."
Some of the mutilated girls with us now were in pitiable condition. The
exposure to the storm, the chill of the wind, the rain-soaked platforms
upon which for so many hours they had lain inactive, had given them
cold. Fever was attacking them.
We got some sleep. We prepared meals of a sort. I tried to arrange
some form of organization by which with concerted, planned effort the
necessary work of existing might be performed.
That night-cycle passed and the next day began. Day and night were
alike in the darkness of the black storm. The rain fell in an almost
continuous down-pour. The wind surged and sang around the naked
pinnacles that towered over the valley. The puffs of lightning came at
intervals. Within our caves it was only a distant turmoil, but outside
it was an inferno of raging angry nature.
I posted the young men as guards at the cave-mouths where they could
see across the caldron. It was about a mile in diameter, a pit
depressed a hundred feet or so below the level of the surrounding
plateau uplands. The rim was broken with gullies and ravines and
studded with pinnacles like great pointed church spires. The caves we
had chosen were all close together at the bottom of one wall.
As one stood at the cave-mouths, all was a green lurid murk outside.
The wind came only in fitful, crazy gusts down here at the caldron
bottom. The opposite valley wall could be dimly seen, its rim outlined
against the turgid sky. Then a lightning puff would momentarily redden
everything with its glare.
I had my chemical reactions well under way. We expected every hour
that the storm would abate. I was preparing to write this narrative,
an appeal to Earth. Dr. Grenfell once said to me that within ten years
he and his associates would conquer the secret of space-navigation. I
hoped that might by now have been accomplished.
Two day-cycles passed. Again the storm lulled, but it still hung
threatening. We had just had an evening meal in our cave, when one of
the young men guards came rushing in. He knew a little English but he
forgot it now. He called excitedly to Tama.
She sprang to her feet. There was a flutter around the dim cave, for a
dozen or more of the girls were here with us. Tama whirled on me.
"They've come, Guy! Roc's men are here!"
Before I could stop them, several of the girls ran, half-flying, out of
the cave-mouth. I rushed out, calling after them. The rain had ceased.
The valley floor held black pools of water between the bowlder masses.
The sky overhead was brighter; slow, funnel clouds with green shafts
piercing them.
On the upper rim I saw the figures of skulking men. Roc's pursuing band
had found us! Our girls came fluttering from the caves to gaze up at
them.
"Inside!" I called. "Tama, get them inside!"
It was too late! A group of them had run into an open space. From
above, a long winged arrow came sailing down. Tama shouted. But the
arrow caught one of the scattering girls. She fell on the rocks with
the arrow sticking up from her back.
* * * * *
From then, it was open warfare. How little we had intended it! All that
day men were appearing in greater numbers up there on the rim-top.
They did not dare come down, apparently, but were content to camp up
there in the upper crags and harry us. We did not know if Roc was here
besieging us or not.
Nor how many men were here.
They tried to open communication with us. I was in favor of it, but the
infuriated girls refused. A last platform had arrived from the Hill
City, with a few young men and nearly twenty mutilated girls on it.
Roc's men flung a rain of arrows and sling-shot stones at it as it came
down. Two of the girls were killed.
But down below we were more wary now; we kept cautiously within the
caves whenever the sky was bright. The storm still clung around. Then
there came a period when the sky was black as night again. We added to
our guards; it seemed not unlikely that Roc would take advantage of the
blackness and come down.
The thought of that gave me an idea. If Roc were up there with these
men, why could I not prowl out and seize him? I told Tama and Toh the
idea.
"If we could capture him, hold him as hostage--threaten his life--"
We could make him disperse this band. I desperately wanted them to be
gone; they would hamper me, perhaps could even stop me from launching
the cylinder. And when we were ready to fly from here, some of the
girls undoubtedly would be killed by their arrows. There were many of
the girls now who wanted to fly out in force and try to drive Roc's men
away. But I was obdurate against it. These young girls, flying, armed
with knives, to enter into deadly combat! It was unthinkable.
But Tama and I might prowl quietly out into this blackness and bring
Roc back with us. I hardly planned how it might be done; some fortunate
chance--
Toh wanted to go, but I would not let him. Tama could fly; and I, an
Earth-man, had unusual strength and agility.
We started with a knife and a small electro-torch in each of our
belts. We picked our way slowly out to the floor of the valley. It was
like the blackest of nights on Earth, save that there was that queer
green-yellow sheen on the clouds. The wind swirled overhead, but there
was no rain.
Tama walked beside me, with her wings occasionally flapping slowly.
"We must keep together," I whispered. "When we get near the top, I'll
wait, while you fly around."
"Yes, Guy."
"But keep out over the valley. If they fire at you, fly back down."
We arranged light flashes by which we could call each other if desired.
We passed the line of cave-mouths, splashing in the pools of water
which lay on the valley bottom. Then we began to climb. No lights were
showing on the rim overhead; it seemed that Roc's men were back from
the brink, in cave openings perhaps.
* * * * *
Climbing was not difficult for me. With my weight less than half what
it was on Earth, and my strength of muscle the same, I could leap up
this ascent with ease.
And to Tama it was nothing. She flew from one crag, upward to the next,
and waited for me to arrive.
There was a place where we had to cross a transverse ravine. It was too
broad for me to leap with safety--sixty feet, perhaps.
Tama whispered, "Hold me, Guy."
I put an arm about her thighs; and as I crouched under her wings, we
leaped together. She could almost sustain me--we fluttered over the
ravine and landed scrambling but unhurt, on its opposite, lower brink.
She was laughing softly. "We get along very well.... Look there!"
Her tone changed abruptly. We crouched among the rocks, gazing up to
where the valley rim showed black against the storm-sky.
A dark shape! It sailed slowly across the little valley, a thousand
feet up. An oblong shape. Tiny lights were on it. A flying vehicle!
Its small headlight ray was searching the plateau up there as though
seeking a landing place. It passed over the rim and vanished.
That was the first I knew that a flying vehicle existed on Mercury. We
could see now, behind the rim-top, the answering signal-beams of Roc's
men.
It took us all of an hour to locate the flyer and get near it. But at
last, without raising an alarm, we reached its vicinity. It had come
down on the plateau perhaps a mile from the caldron-valley, concealed
from the caves by an upstanding line of buttes. The figures of Roc's
men on the upper plateau unwittingly guided us. Their small hand lights
showed, as they picked their way along the broken rocky upland toward
where the vehicle had landed.
Tama and I made a wide detour, ten miles to one side at least.
Scrambling, running, flying, we made good speed.
Was this vehicle from the Hill City? Bringing Roc, perhaps, to join
his men and plan what they were to do with the insurgent virgins? The
scientists of the Hill City had never really admitted me into their
secret activities. Flying vehicles had once been used on Mercury; had
this one been reconstructed from the lost secrets of history?
We reached it at last, a great metal bird lying on the rocks. We
crouched on the top of a butte, overlooking it. There were lights on
its deck and in its portes. And hand lights showed a crowd of Roc's men
swarming around it outside.
As I gazed, I got another shock. This was more than a mere flying
vehicle; it was a space-ship! Its convex panes, the dome like a
transparent bell over its deck, bore evidence to that. A ship from
another planet? From Earth?
My heart leaped. But the hope was at once dispelled. Men showed,
working under the bell of the forward deck. It was bright under there;
we were not far away, gazing almost directly down upon them, for the
ship lay close against our wall of rock. They were Mercutians, not
Earth-men.
Tama whispered, "Those are Cold Country men! This thing is not from the
Hill City."
Then we saw Roc approaching. A chance beam from the ship struck him and
clung. He stopped and waved his arms. From the deck of the ship, where
a porte in the dome had been rolled back, a gigantic figure answered
his greeting.
* * * * *
We had relinquished hope of capturing Roc now. With all these men here,
and in the glow of light, it would have been too desperate an attempt.
We watched Roc approach the ship, dispersing his men while he climbed
aboard and met the giant figure on the deck. We could see them greet
each other; then they turned and went into the ship's interior.
A moment later a light in a lower porte of the hull flashed on. It
seemed to suggest that Roc and this giant were down there in a cabin.
"Tama, if we could get down there--hear what they're saying!"
It seemed barely possible. The cabin porte faced the butte wall which
was perhaps twenty feet away. The porte-hole was low in the hull--only
a few feet above the rocks on which the ship rested. There seemed none
of Roc's men down there; they were all on the other side.
We approached the brink. It was about a hundred-foot drop from where we
stood.
"Can you lower us, Tama?"
"Yes."
If we were not seen! It was fairly dark, but there was a reflected glow
from the ship.
"Hold tight, Guy."
I put my arms-around her. We stepped off the brink. My head was at her
waist, my arms about her thighs, my body dangling lower than hers to
be out of the way of her wings. She struggled, flapping with all her
strength to check our fall.
There was a wind moaning around this naked rock-butte. The wall slid
up past us; the ship seemed coming up. We dropped into the twenty-foot
wide space, fluttering, scrambling.
My feet struck the ground. The impact was not too severe. We fell in a
heap, but unhurt. The porte stood open, quite near us. Voices sounded.
We found a place where we could both see and hear. We were in a glow of
light, but we forgot that.
Within the small metal-walled cabin, Roc sat with the giant Mercutian.
There was no one else in the room. They were conferring earnestly--the
giant man talking, Roc doing most of the listening.
He was a man of perhaps fifty, this stranger. He chanced to be in
a glow of the interior light and I could see him plainly as he sat
sprawling his great lazy length on a padded bench. A man almost
seven feet tall, I judged him. Heavy-set, but not with the thick,
barrel-chested look of the Cold Country natives.
He was a Light Country man, by his aspect, but head and shoulders
taller than the tallest Mercutian I had ever seen. He was garbed in an
animal skin belted about his waist; naked limbs, and naked, hairless
torso with great muscles that glided beneath his skin as he gestured.
A black mane of hair was on his head, long to cover his ears. It was
white at the temples, and came in a peak over his forehead, with that
same Satanic aspect characteristic of Roc. But Roc generally wore a
grinning, crafty smirk. This older man's face held a look of rugged,
intellectual strength. A beak-like nose; eyes deep sunken under black
bushy brows; a massive, square jaw.
It was Roc's father, the exiled Croat. They were talking in the Light
Country tongue. I could understand some of it--enough so that in a
moment I was tense with amazement. And Tama clung to me as she listened.
* * * * *
How long we crouched there I do not know. Abruptly I heard a _ting_! An
arrow flashed past us!
We started into a realization of where we were; the porte glow was
on us, had disclosed us! A group of Roc's men were coming around the
forward end of the ship. Another arrow sang past.
I leaped the other way. It was fifty or sixty feet to the stern of the
ship. Tama fluttered above me. I recall that I shouted, "Tama, fly off!"
I ran the ship's length in gigantic leaps. From under the stern another
group of men appeared, directly in my path! I landed among them. They
tried to scatter; I made an effort to check my leap and take another
to clear them. A stone hit me. An arrow bit into my leg; I stooped and
plucked it out. Four or five of the men rushed at me, fell upon me, and
I went down.
But they could not hold me. I plunged my knife into one of them and
lost it as he fell. I stood struggling, kicking, flinging them off.
But there were a dozen or more here now. They came back at me like
terriers. Their shouts raised the alarm. More men arrived at a run. On
the ship's stern over us, Cold Country men were peering down in amazed
curiosity at our swaying forms.
I was the center of a struggling group. Then from over us, Tama came
like a fighting eagle into battle. A swoop. Her knife ripped a man's
throat. She went past, came swooping back again.
I tore myself loose, crouched and sprang. My thirty-foot leap carried
me over them all.
"Guy!"
Tama swooped at me with a rush of beating wings, and seized me. A rain
of stones clattered around us. A torch-beam fell upon us and held us in
its disclosing circle of light.
I cast Tama off. "Fly away--before you are hit!"
I ran on. But she came with another swoop, and caught me as I rose in
one of my giant bounds. Struggled and flapped, carrying me until my
weight pulled us down again.
The ship and its turmoil dwindled into distance behind us.
CHAPTER XI.
THE PLOT AGAINST EARTH'S WOMEN.
We are still here in the caves at the bottom of our valley (continued
the warning message from Guy Palisse). Tama and I got back safely,
circling on the upper plateau, reaching the caldron rim and dropped
down. Tama, with practice now, could hold me in a long descent.
[Illustration: _She could hold him in a descent._]
There seemed no pursuit. Roc's men were quiet up there on the rim. And
after a time we saw the Space-ship depart.
During these last three cycles I have been absorbed in this narrative;
and in preparing my cylinder for launching. My chemicals are about
ready and now I am finishing these pages. A warning to you of Earth!
We did not know it was to be a warning until we stood at the window of
Croat's Space-ship and heard him talking to Roc.
Even then, at first. I was too amazed to grasp the full import of what
they were saying. I am not overly skilled in the Mercutian language;
but now Tama and I have had time to compare what we heard. Some of it
we have had to infer. Croat was explaining to Roc their future plans.
But we came in the middle of it, after Croat had been talking for some
minutes.
Yet we learned much, and I set it here as a warning. Croat now is
leader of the barbarous Cold Country government. He must have stolen
the formulas of the Light Country scientific devices of former ages;
for he has developed the lost death-ray projector, and the small
heat-rays which at twenty paces can burn a hole through a man.
Roc for all these years, was in occasional communication with his
father, spying upon the Light Country government. We think it was Roc
who secured the records. And Croat built the interplanetary flying ship
in the Cold Country.
I must explain that the women of the Cold Country, through long
generations forced to toil under every adverse circumstance of living,
have long since lost any semblance of beauty. Heavy, pallid creatures,
barely able to fly; they are, besides, few in number. There is now in
the Cold Country scarcely one woman to ten men. The savage race is
dying out.
No doubt it was Croat's idea at first to develop lethal weapons and
attack the Light Country, to capture and enslave the flying virgins.
Roc's part was steadily to agitate more stringent laws regarding the
clipping of the virgins' wings. He and Croat did not anticipate what
immediately happened--the widespread, open revolt of the virgins.
Meanwhile I--an Earth-man--had come with tales of a greater world, with
women, beautiful, who cannot fly. Curse my innocent readiness to tell
Roc all I could of Earth!
And so I warn you! We got no details, as we listened there at that
cabin porte. But we learned enough. Roc mentioned that he was leaving
the Hill City permanently. That is good. Without him, the government
there will be more conciliatory toward the insurgent girls. Indeed, it
has been decided that they will return and try to make peace. We feel
that the government will now realize how drastic was that last law. And
there are thousands of men--fathers, brothers, and potential husbands
of the girls--who now will see things in a different light.
The danger is not here--we realize that now--but on Earth. Croat's
ship is leaving for Earth; it may be gone by the time I can get this
cylinder launched.
How little Tama and the virgins realized that their revolt would spread
to menace the women of another world! But it has.
Oh, my accursedly loose tongue! I had told Roc of my sister, and
Professor White with his girls' camp in Maine. I had made maps of the
earth countries for the Hill City government.
Roc had access to them. Croat has them now! From the way he talked,
he will land in Maine. I think it is summer now, in Maine. Professor
White's camp will be open. I warn you--we fear an attack will be made
there!
* * * * *
You can imagine how I feel, to have unwittingly been an aid to this
menace! Croat even mentioned my sister Rowena, there in the Space-ship.
With diabolical cynicism he told Roc how amusing it would be if Rowena
Palisse chanced to be among the captive Earth-women whose beauty
he would soon be able to display to his men of the Cold Country!
Just a few Earth-women this first trial trip. Then at each inferior
conjunction he will make other raids.
My sister Rowena! He even calculated her age. I pray you guard her--if
only this message reaches you in time!
What Tama and I will do when the virgins return to the Hill City, I do
not know. If only we could help you!
One of our girls--a blue-winged child barely sixteen--heard all this
from Tama; and she disappeared yesterday. We have been wondering if she
flew to Croat's vehicle, possibly to hide upon it and go with it to the
Earth? To warn you! Tama says, knowing the girl, that it would be just
like her unselfish courage.
Tama and I may try it. I don't know. I cannot think of anything yet but
the launching of the cylinder. And we must get the girls safely back to
the Hill City.
The storm is really abating now. Roc's men seem to have left this
vicinity. We think the Space-ship has gone.
I must stop and get the cylinder launched. If only it reaches you! We
pray for that.
(_End of the manuscript of Guy Palisse._)
CHAPTER XII.
NIGHT-PROWLING GIANT.
Dr. Grenfell's voice died away. And I--Jack Dean, newsbroadcaster, who
had never dreamed of such strange news as this--slowly became aware of
my surroundings: the lounge-room of the Flying Cube; Dr. Grenfell at
his table, with the pages of Guy Palisse's message before him and the
Space-traveling cylinder at his feet; the other men, all sitting tense;
Jimmy Turk staring wide-eyed, breathless.
The spell broke. But still I saw those naked rain-swept copper
hills--the Mercutian Space-ship--its lighted cabin with the giant Croat
telling his son how he was about to raid the Earth!
How well this message explained what had already happened to us on
Earth! Croat had come, as Guy Palisse warned. Croat's Space-ship had
come faster than the cylinder; he had made his raid, captured some of
the desired Earth-girls. His ship had gone back to Mercury now. Croat
had been left on Earth perhaps; but in less than four months, his ship
would come again.
I became aware of a hand on my arm. I heard a sob. Rowena was sitting
staring with tear-filled eyes. I put my arm around her, and she yielded
like a child, clinging to me.
"Well," gasped Jimmy. "That explains it--by George, it does.
Everything. He even mentions the winged girl we shot at the camp.
Poor little thing--come to warn us, and we killed her! At the next
conjunction that ship will come again. Palisse says it plainly. A raid
in greater force!"
The men were all excitedly talking at once. Through the bull's-eye
pane in the floor, the Earth's surface showed under us--a spread of
mountains through a rift in the clouds; we were over the western United
States.
"Get back to the controls," Dr. Grenfell ordered. "Good heavens, we
might have dropped and smashed on those peaks for all we knew what we
were doing!"
We checked our descent and swept eastward. It was 1 A.M. on the morning
of September 6.
Dr. Grenfell was glancing through the other pages which Palisse had
sent. "He evidently hoped we would have a Space-ship ready. These
contain astronomical data concerning Mercury. Facts unknown to us of
Earth. Its size. Density. Inclination of its axis; orbital rotation
period; axial rotation--the scientists of that Hill City seem fully
as advanced as ourselves for all the primitive, decadent civilization
Palisse pictures. These notes will be of great interest--"
"To heck with that!" Jimmy muttered. "Dr. Grenfell, when is the next
conjunction of Mercury and the Earth--the time when they're closest
again?"
"The first week of December. That's three months from now."
"Doctor, that's when the Mercutians will come back! You said so--you
warned the Earth of that in your public statement."
"I did, Jimmy." Grenfell's gaze was still on the pages of notes. He
added slowly. "He has given us full landing instructions. How best to
approach Mercury; the location of the Hill City--there is a sketch
map here of all that section of the Light Country; and details of the
location of that valley where he wrote the message and dispatched the
cylinder."
I burst out: "Dr. Grenfell, we're going, aren't we? If we could get
there before the Mercutians are ready to start for Earth again--"
I felt Rowena's body grow tense. She sat erect, staring at Dr. Grenfell
with tear-filled eyes, but still she did not speak.
Dr. Grenfell smiled, a queer, grim smile. And as his gaze met mine I
saw that his dark eyes were smoldering.
"Oh, yes, we're going! Do you suppose, with the cube successful, as
undoubtedly it is, I would be content to make a futile trip to the
moon? We'll try for Mercury. Take what weapons we can and try to join
Palisse. He evidently did not come on Croat's ship or we would have
heard from him."
"When are we going?" Jimmy demanded. "How soon?"
"At once! I won't wait for the next conjunction. Twice as long a voyage
now--but what of that? If they're planning a raid upon the Earth for
next December--attacking our women--Palisse says 'Earth-women to
display to the men of his Cold Country'; and that's just what he's got.
We must go there at once!"
* * * * *
It was just before dawn of September 16 when the Bolton Flying Cube
left Earth for its voyage to Mercury. There is so much which of
necessity belongs in my narrative that I pass over these ten days of
preparation with only a summary.
It was soon decided that a considerable number of men aboard the cube
would be a hindrance rather than help. The multiplicity of supplies and
equipment needed, and the haste of this departure, made Dr. Grenfell
desire as much simplicity as possible.
There were but nine of us--the same nine who had been upon that trial
ascent after the cylinder. Dr. Grenfell, Jimmy, myself, Rowena. I was
not present when they tried to tell her it would be better for her not
to go; what she said I never knew, but she came back to me, white-faced
and grim--and it had been decided she was going!
Nor was she a handicap. Accustomed to working among busy scientists,
she was a help, not a hindrance. And those tears of thankfulness which
had overcome her when she heard her brother's message, learning after
all these years that he was not dead--never again did she show such
weakness.
The ten days of preparation were busy ones. Equipment had been prepared
for a voyage to the Moon. Apparatus for landing and maintaining life on
the airless, waterless Moon; and most of it was unsuitable for Mercury.
A multiplicity of details indeed! Things necessary to the vehicle's
operation for so long a flight: food; water; personal effects--I saw,
when I was given the task of checking them over, Dr. Grenfell's wisdom
in holding down our personnel to nine.
There were weapons; and a great variety of scientific instruments,
including the most modern wireless receivers and transmitters with
which we hoped communication with the Earth might be established.
A series of exasperating delays seemed to afflict us, with Mercury
daily adding tremendous distance to our voyage; but at last we were
ready.
Everywhere in the world during those ten days, the public eye was upon
us. There was no way of keeping the affair secret. The message from
Guy Palisse was given out in brief summary; the public knew that in
December the Mercutians probably would come again, and that we were
going to try to stop them.
We meant to capture Croat's Space-ship, kill Croat, smash his ship,
and thus end the menace. Yet such is the public mind--there were
learned discussions by self-styled experts who in reality knew nothing;
astrologers and every manner of publicity-hungry charlatan who read the
stars, or gazed in crystals, or dealt the mystic cards and solemnly
foretold what was going to happen. And there were newscasters with
facile tongues and silly wit who thought it clever to be humorous.
Two startling incidents occurred on Earth during those ten days. The
first was the experience of the Rev. Arthur T. Hoskins, of Westville,
Maine--a town about twenty miles from the White camp.
This report was never made public; I give it substantially as Dr.
Hoskins told it to the authorities the following day. He was not a
hysterical man, this middle-aged rector; nor a publicity seeker. A man
of matured, logical intellect--we could do no less than believe exactly
what he said.
* * * * *
On the evening of September 11, at about eight o'clock, he was sitting
alone in his study on the ground floor of the rectory. He was an ardent
lover of broadcasted music; he sat before his sound-grid, listening
to a Mozart minuet, which was a favorite of his. There was no one but
himself in the house; his wife was attending a meeting of one of the
ladies' church societies.
It was a cool night, but the rector, fond of fresh air, had his ground
floor window wide open. The strains of the minuet floated out that
window, and the rector was carried back into dreams of his boyhood.
Then abruptly the music was split by the peremptory oscillating wave of
the Boston Newscasting Studios. He did not tune them out; instead, he
listened, with the minuet fading, to an account of the Bolton Flying
Cube which shortly was to make an attempt to reach the planet Mercury.
The rector was presently aware of a figure standing in the dimness
of his garden outside the study window. A very tall man, apparently
listening to the radiotroned words.
The intruder saw that he was discovered--made a movement as though
about to go away, seemed to think better of it, and came slowly
forward. He presently stood head and shoulders in the window. The
rector's study light fell on him.
He was a man of really giant stature; bareheaded, with black hair
graying at the temples. It was queerly cut, this hair. Close-cropped to
the man's round skull; but gouged, as though the fellow had inexpertly
cut it himself. His face was hairless; massive of feature. A beak of a
nose; wide, thin lips; a heavy jaw; heavy black brows, with dark eyes
deep-set.
A foreigner, quite evidently. A tough-looking fellow. Yet his was, in
a way, an intellectural face. But of what nationality, the rector was
puzzled to determine. And he was more puzzled when the man spoke.
The rector said, "What do you want, my friend?"
"I was listening to that instrument you have." The heavy, thick voice
spoke good English with an indefinable accent. He spoke carefully, as
though with an effort to get it right. And the man repeated: "--that
instrument, there, which was talking to you."
The rector had shut off the receiver. He made a move to turn it on
again, but the stranger checked him. "I have heard enough."
Strangely commanding sentence! An unconscious command. The man's gaze
was on the table where the rector's habitual ten o'clock meal had been
placed by his wife. A little stack of biscuits and a glass of milk.
The stranger eyed it. "Food---give me that--will you?"
It seemed, to the surprised Dr. Hoskins, that his visitor was about to
climb into the window. And the rector felt a thrill of fear. There was
something uncanny about this fellow--something unnatural. His clothes,
for instance; he wore a somewhat dilapidated suit which was far too
small for him. And his soiled linen shirt, open at the throat, strained
across his great chest muscles, causing a rip in the fabric.
He did not climb in the window, but he leaned far forward. "Give me
that."
Again it was a command; but made as though the man hardly realized his
tone.
The rector steadied his voice. "You are hungry, my man?"
"Yes. Very."
He wolfed down the biscuits which the rector handed him. The glass of
milk he eyed calculatingly, then smelled of it tentatively.
* * * * *
To Dr. Hoskins, with a vague shudder, now came the thought that this
man never had seen milk before.
At about this point realization swept upon the rector. It had been
growing on him with a shuddering fear, but now it swept him with
conviction: this man--not much under seven feet tall, the rector
estimated, as he loomed in the window--was not of this Earth!
Dr. Hoskins was no coward. But he had had no experience in deeds of
violence. He was unarmed. His first instinct was to escape from his
study. Then it flashed to him that he should make some effort to
capture this fellow--apprehend him, or at least set the authorities
upon him. There was a telephone across the room; but the rector,
transfixed by the shock of his realization, did not dare move.
The stranger drained his glass of milk, tossed it to the floor,
appeared surprised when the fragile glass was shattered. Looking up, he
met the rector's horrified gaze. He began what seemed words of thanks
for the milk; but they died on his lips.
He stepped back suddenly from the window.
"You--think that you know me?"
Dr. Hoskins found himself looking into the muzzle of a leveled weapon.
A strangely fashioned weapon, small and globular, with a mesh of wires
across its face. The man's huge gray arm, with his grotesquely short
coat-sleeve hanging halfway to his elbow, was extended; his hand held
the weapon with steady fingers. His voice was quiet, but now held a
grim menace.
"I want you to help me. I came for that. Do not move--make no noise!"
The rector sat frozen.
"Is that your flying car in the little house outside? I am not going to
hurt you. Answer me. Is it?"
The rector moistened his dry lips. "Yes."
"You are able to fly it?"
"Yes."
It was a small sport plane, given to Dr. Hoskins by the members of his
parish.
"Then, come out." The intruder stepped further back from the window,
but still held his weapon leveled. "Come out! I want you to show me how
to fly it. Come out, I say!"
Dr. Hoskins was somewhat rotund. And with his fright, he climbed over
the sill with difficulty. The stranger gripped him by the arm, helping
him; and, outside, stood gazing down at him with a faint smile. He was
indeed a gigantic man, head and shoulders above the rector. He cut a
grotesque figure, the cuffs of his trousers hanging far up his legs.
But he stood erect, commanding--and amused at his captive's fear.
"Stop shaking; I will not hurt you. If you shake like that you cannot
fly your little car. You will kill us both. Do not do that!"
Still Dr. Hoskins could not speak. The giant pushed him down the garden
path. Its shrubbery secluded it from the road; no one saw them. They
reached the little wooden hangar.
The rector found his voice at last. "What do you want me to do?"
"Take us up. Can I trust you not to wreck us? Or must I kill you--and
go away disappointed?"
Dr. Hoskins steadied himself. He gazed up to his captor's heavy gray
face, and he managed a smile. "You will be safe with me," he said.
"Where--where do you want to go?"
But that the man did not answer. They were presently in the little
barrel-winged Dinsler and away into the starlight. The rector sat at
the sticks; the stranger jammed beside him. There was barely room for
them both in the tiny pit.
* * * * *
Beneath them lay the Maine forests; the starry vault was overhead.
Dr. Hoskins, occupied with the controls, found his nerves steadying.
He demanded again, "Where do you want to go? It was unnecessary to
threaten me. It is not my custom to refuse a service to my fellow man."
"Just around here." The gray arm gestured north toward the valley of
the St. Lawrence with the distant mountains behind it. "Just around and
back. I want to learn how to sail your little car."
For an hour perhaps, the astounded rector explained how the Dinsler was
operated. The engine controls; and then the flying. His captor showed
remarkable intelligence, as though familiar with engines and flying
controls, though these were wholly strange to him in details.
"Let me try," he commanded at last.
Dr. Hoskins's heart was in his mouth as he yielded his place at the
sticks. But presently his captor had caught the knack of it.
"This is not difficult," the strange giant stated. "We will go back
now."
"You are going to land us?"
"Land _you_. It is the little car I want."
The rector was momentarily emboldened. "To go--where?"
"Back home." His companion turned and in his sunken dark eyes the
rector saw a gleam of irony. "I am trying to get--back home."
He said no more. He turned the Dinsler in an arc southward. A plane
passed overhead--a Greenland freight ship heading north from New York.
The stranger chuckled. "No one notices us? That is good." He gazed down
at the lights of a little town set in the dark stretches of forest.
"Those orange lights are the flying field?"
"Yes."
"I can read the number: M-4870. The 'M'--is that for Maine?"
"Yes."
"The number would tell us the town?"
"Yes."
"And you have maps here?"
The rector produced his field maps. Explained them.
"Yes--I understand. I, too, have maps." He touched his clothes. "I have
studied--been taught. And the landing fields of the other States are
lettered and numbered like this?"
"Yes. Look here, my man, what are you--"
"I shall not use the public fields. The attendants would be curious....
Is that your settlement?"
They were back within sight of the rector's village. "Yes," he said.
"Please take us down." He was trying to decide what he could do when
they landed. His captor seemed to read his thoughts.
"Not there--we will have to find a more secluded place."
He landed them, with what seemed an intuitive skill, in an empty field
near a neighboring town.
"Climb out."
The rector got out of the cockpit, stood on the ground. The field, with
no houses near it, was dim in the starlight. The rector saw that again
the strange weapon was leveled at him.
"You stand still until I have gone!" Again that gleam of irony shone in
the giant's dark eyes. "I ought to kill you. I suppose I shall be sorry
I did not. You will tell the officials all about me. That is your plan,
is it not?"
"Why, I--"
"Well, you may, if you like! What harm to me? Tell them what you like."
He leaned out of the pit. The engine was purring; his low voice seemed
to purr with it.
* * * * *
"You are what they call a man of God, are you not?"
It suddenly struck the rector that this amused, unhuman giant was
planning to kill him and then fly off. He stood stricken, clinging to
the side of the pit.
"Take your hands off that! Are you a man of God?"
"Yes. I--"
"Then you will not dare speak other than the truth. I have some
questions; I want the truth. Will you give it?"
"Yes," gasped the rector.
"There is a girl--a young woman. Her name is Palisse. Rowena Palisse.
Have you ever heard of her?"
"Yes."
"Do you know where she is now?"
"They say, in southern New Jersey."
"The same settlement near where they keep the Bolton Flying Cube?"
"Yes--I think so."
"In that town, where does she stay? Has the building a number?"
"I don't--don't know. I have no idea--"
"Then that is all I can get from you. I think I will not let you talk
about me."
The terrified rector felt his senses fading. The dim outlines of the
field whirled about him. He realized clearly his deadly danger. The
realization was too much for him. His pounding heart flung the blood
into his head; then it receded. He felt himself fainting; falling,
stricken by his own rush of terror.
And to this undoubtedly he owed life. Simultaneously with his fall,
he dimly saw a flash, heard a hiss, and felt a burning stab in his
shoulder.
Then the field went into black silence as his senses left him.
They found the unfortunate Dr. Hoskins lying in the field the following
morning. His shoulder was pierced by a hole burned into it. His
aërocar, with the mysterious man, had vanished. Undoubtedly as the
rector fell, the assailant believed he had killed him. He had left him
lying there for dead--and flown away in the Dinsler.
That was the first of the incidents. That this mysterious man was Croat
the Mercutian, we could not doubt. We recalled the giant figure who had
escaped that night at the White Summer Camp when we shot the Mercutian
man and the winged girl.
The forests had been constantly searched for that giant Mercutian,
but without success. The message from Guy Palisse, picturing Croat so
vividly, caused the search to be renewed with additional vigor. When it
continued unsuccessful, there were many--Dr. Grenfell among them--who
believed that Croat had got back to his Space-flyer. The Ayer, it was
thought, had never descended into the Earth's atmosphere. The small
silver ball--whether one or more was never determined--which had
brought the Mercutians down from their hovering ship and took them up
again with their captives, must have rescued Croat.
But now, after these many days, it was proven that Croat was still on
Earth--still in the general vicinity of the original raids. We could
picture how he must have been living--hiding in the depths of the
forest by day, prowling at night to steal what food he could. Stealing
clothes--trying to make himself less conspicuous--so that if seen he
could pass momentarily for a man of Earth. There had been reports
from various farmhouses of midnight disturbances. The authorities had
discredited them as the products of public hysteria; but they were
discredited no longer.
And Croat had been listening at windows, perhaps for the radiotroned
newscasters' voices. Hearing about the Bolton Flying Cube. Trying to
locate Rowena Palisse.
He had been unable to travel far on foot. But now he had Dr. Hoskins's
little aëro, and had disappeared in it.
The assault upon the rector was made on the evening of September 11.
The Dinsler was gone. All that day of the twelfth, by every means of
our scientific age, it was searched for. And Rowena, in a hotel of that
South Jersey town, was kept heavily guarded.
But the Dinsler had vanished. And no attack was made upon Rowena.
Then, at dawn of the 13th, came news of the Dinsler. It was sighted,
passing slowly over a village near Philadelphia, heading southwest, at
a considerable altitude. Pursuit planes were immediately sent up after
it. They fired at it; but not to hit it, for the orders were to take
Croat alive if possible.
The little Dinsler sailed serenely on. The police pilots overhauled it,
to find its controls lashed and its cockpit empty! Pilotless, it had
been launched and was riding the skies until its fuel would have been
exhausted.
That was the 13th. Three days later--just before dawn on the 16th--the
Bolton Flying Cube, carrying Dr. Grenfell, Jimmy Turk, myself, Rowena,
and five assistants, left the Earth upon our voyage to Mercury.
CHAPTER XIII.
IN THE AIR-LOCK.
"There's the Sun, Rowena. It's day!"
Day! Already the word had lost its meaning. Day and night--mere terms
of our rotating Earth. Here in Space the Sun blazed in its field of
black; the stars gleamed untwinkling; the quarter Moon hung white, like
a broken, curved limb against the dead-black infinity of emptiness.
Time seemed eternal here.
Rowena stood beside me on the Flying Cube's deck. Together we gazed at
the firmament. We were only a few hours upon the voyage; and the Earth
still hung beneath us, a great spreading expanse filling all the lower
heavens.
We had long since passed through the atmosphere, ascending an edge of
the Earth's conical shadow; and now we plunged from it and the Sun
blazed with a strangely flaming glory.
Rowena gestured to the Earth. "It's dwindling. Our little Earth--how
small it looks now, Jack!" Her hand touched my arm. I seemed to feel
a difference in that touch. As though her fingers were lingering,
caressing.
"Rowena--"
Within me there sprang a sudden rush of emotion. I think, perhaps, that
from the first moment I saw her I felt instinctively that of all the
world, this was the woman for me--This girl, so queenly, aloof, but
with gentle, wistful eyes.
"Rowena--"
Perhaps it was the starry firmament around us; the tiny cube seemingly
hung here motionless with great soundless blazing worlds strewn about
the black heavens. And our Earth seeming so small--dwindling every
moment that we watched it. It was as though all this were drawing
Rowena and me together, making us realize our littleness, futility,
unimportance, and because we were so unimportant to all the Universe,
it made us much more important to each other.
"Rowena!"
I must have stood there stupidly reiterating her name. The length
of deck was empty save for us two. Through the bull's-eyes, mingled
moonlight, sunlight, starlight and earthlight came slanting in soft
silver shafts.
"Jack--"
She swayed toward me; was in my arms; her arms up about my neck; her
lips returning my kisses, with all her calm regal dignity swept away so
that this was just a girl.
There was a moment when we floated off upon the torrent of a new-found
love, clinging together, alone in the Universe.
Then I heard a step, and a voice--Jimmy's voice: "Oh, I say--beg your
pardon--I'm gone!"
"Oh!" Rowena cast me off. But Jimmy had made good his words, whirling
like a rabbit and vanishing into the upper corridor doorway.
We both were laughing. "Oh," said Rowena. "How dreadful!"
"Dreadful? Rowena dear--"
I touched her, but she moved away.
"Dreadful," I said, "that Jimmy should have seen us?"
"No, of course not."
"That you should--love me?"
"No--"
"Well, you do, don't you?"
"Jack--" Her smile was gone. She faced me with quiet, level gaze. "Do
you think so, Jack?"
Her eyes were shining in the earthlight, and in them I could not miss
the light of her love for me. Just a moment, while we gazed. The spell
broke, she laughed again.
"Dreadful, Jack, that I should yield to a thing like that--now, with
this voyage ahead of us--with Guy, out there on Mercury."
* * * * *
We were presently talking of saner things. Dr. Grenfell had calculated
this voyage would be a matter of some three weeks. Mercury would be on
the other side of the Sun before we reached it. We would pass Venus in
five or six days; the Moon we were already passing.
And we talked of Croat. It seemed obvious that he was the mysterious
stranger who had assaulted the Maine rector.
"Still on Earth," I said. "His ship came, sent down its silver ball
like a tender, while the ship itself hovered out here. Just about here,
probably."
That had been on August 10th. It was now September 16th. Croat's
ship had hovered out here while the ball went down into the Earth's
atmosphere, stayed about a week and the raids were made. Then the ball
had come up--with the Earth-girl captives, but without Croat. Mercury
was drawing daily further away; the Mercutians, afraid to go back down
for their leader, had doubtless taken their ship back to Mercury. Croat
was now on Earth. At the next inferior conjunction--next December--the
Mercutian ship would doubtless come again to try and rescue Croat.
"But we will reach Mercury before that, Rowena, and stop them. If we
can get that vehicle and smash it, down on Earth they'll capture Croat
in time, of course, and this threat will be removed."
We had no specific plans of what could be done when we reached Mercury.
Rowena said suddenly, "I'm wondering if Guy and Tama were on the
Mercutian ship when it waited out here."
"But if they had been--"
"That winged girl who was shot at the White Camp did what she intended
and stowed away on the ship. In his message Guy hinted that he and
Tama, were going to try it."
This was the old calm Rowena, discussing the affair with calm logic.
"But if they did hide on the ship, Jack, it's evident that they were
not able to get in the silver ball and descend. Either they were still
in hiding, or Croat had found and captured them, keeping them up here
on the ship, while he went down--"
It was all theory, of course. An hour went by. The Earth shrank
amazingly with our upward flight. And as the cube turned and swung
toward the Sun, using all the Sun's giant gravitational force to pull
us, the firmament shifted. The Earth seemingly came up level with us--a
monstrous ball hanging level with the deck windows. The sunlight struck
it full; a great reddish ball, shrinking and turning silver.
Again a step sounded behind us; a cautious step--Jimmy again.
"I say, all right for me to show up now?"
"All right, Jimmy," Rowena laughed.
He came toward us along the deck. "You going to stand there forever?
We've had breakfast downstairs. I told them you two were busy."
"Jimmy!" Rowena protested.
"Why not? You were, weren't you? Anyway, the doc says for you to come
down now--at once. That's an order. You're to have your breakfast and
then go to sleep."
We followed him obediently into the second floor corridor and down the
ladder-steps and into the lounge.
"You're sleepy," Jimmy added. "If you don't know it, that's your hard
luck. We've all been up all night. The doc has turned in, and Rance is
in command."
At 4 P.M., by Eastern Standard Time back on Earth, which we were
maintaining on the Cube, it was Grenfell's plan for us to start the
regular routine of watches which would be held throughout the voyage.
It was now 9 A.M.
Rowena and I had a light meal. She went to her cabin--one of those off
the second floor cross corridor. Diagonally from her, on the corridor's
opposite side, was the cubbyhole Jimmy and I were to occupy. At
Rowena's doorway we left her.
"Sleep well, Jack."
Jimmy whirled on her like a little bantam, gazing frowningly up at her.
"And how about me?"
"You too, Jimmy!"
"Thanks."
* * * * *
He was grinning as we entered our room. "Nice girl that. Crazy about
you. Well, I don't blame her. You two giants look as though you were
born for each other."
We lay in our bunks. Earthlight streamed in the bull's-eye window,
until Jimmy drew down its shade.
I think that in a few moments Jimmy was asleep; but for a time sleep
would not come to me. The interior of the cube was silent save for the
faint hum of the current in the gravity plates. And vibrationless; an
utter lack of the sense of movement, though now we were plunging toward
the Sun at a velocity which in comparison to the planets was still
slow, but inconceivably rapid compared to any vehicle traveling upon
Earth or in the air.
I drifted off into an uneasy slumber.
This must have been about 10 A.M. Dr. Grenfell was asleep in his cubby
up in the third tier. In the room next to Jimmy and me, Baker and
Gibbons were sleeping.
It left Rance and two other men--Jones and Allen by name--in command of
the cube. Rance was in the little dome-observatory, at the telescope
and working out a chart of our course. For all his skill with
explosives and his experience with the New York bomb squad, he was
versed in higher mathematics, and upon him Dr. Grenfell depended for
much of the routine navigational work.
Jones and Allen were both in the lower tier, watching the mechanisms
there and answering Rance's occasional bell-signals.
I have no idea what awakened me. I found myself fully aroused, with the
startled feeling that something was vitally wrong. Jimmy was peacefully
snoring in the bunk over me. The cube interior was silent as always.
Our slide-door to the corridor was closed, as Jimmy and I had left it.
My watch gave 3 P.M.; I had slept five Hours.
The ominous feeling passed after a moment. I sat up in the bunk,
thinking about it; and concluded it was caused by the strangeness of my
surroundings when I had so suddenly awakened.
I tried to doze again; Dr. Grenfell did not want us to assemble until
4 P.M. But I was restless; Jimmy's snores annoyed me. I went to the
bull's-eye porte-window, raised the shade a trifle. Our window faced
the Earth. How amazingly it had dwindled! It hung level with us--a
full-round sunlit ball, filling no more than a tenth of the visual
hemisphere of the firmament. The tracery of the continents and oceans
was plain.
And beside the Earth, to make the third apex of a triangle with our
cube, the Moon hung cold and bleak--incredibly black and white with
shadows and sunlight.
I turned from the window, and decided I would go down to the lounge
room and wait for the four o'clock conference. Perhaps Rowena would be
there.
As I passed her corridor cabin-door, I found it flung wide. She had
closed it, I recalled, when she retired. And in the corridor, just
outside her threshold, lay one of her slippers. I stumbled over it,
picked it up; and found my heart unreasonably pounding. She had been
wearing these slippers when Jimmy and I left her at this door five
hours before.
As I straightened with the slipper, I glanced into her cabin. It was
empty. Its drawn shade was bright with the sunlight glare. The bed had
been occupied; a chair beside it was overturned.
All this was utterly unlike Rowena. I hurried down to the lounge. No
one was there. The shades were drawn to bar the sun-glare; but on the
other side they were up and the earthlight and moonlight streamed in
full. The room was bright. And it suddenly seemed horribly empty and
horribly silent.
I called, "Hello there! Any one around?"
* * * * *
From one of the adjoining mechanism rooms, Jones appeared. A big,
florid fellow in white shirt and linen trousers. His inevitable huge
black cigar was in his mouth.
"Hello, Dean. Sleep well?"
My sudden fear dissipated. "Yes. Where is everybody?"
"Asleep, I fancy. Allen went up to the dome a while ago to stay with
Rance. I'm on duty here--but there's nothing much to do. It was the
deuce keeping our pressure equal, but we've got it right now. Your
breathing comfortable?"
"Quite." I had flung myself in one of the wicker lounge seats; but
immediately I was up again. "Have you seen Miss Palisse?"
"No. She's in her cabin, isn't she?"
"No, she isn't. The door was wide open as I passed."
"Well, she didn't come down here--went up to the dome with Rance
probably."
But she was not in the dome. Rance and Allen were there, and they
had not seen her. Dr. Grenfell was still asleep in his cubby off the
third-floor chart-room.
Fear was plucking at me. But Rance said with a smile, "Try the deck,
Dean. No doubt she's Earth-gazing. She'll be glad to have you join her."
I hurried down, and again went the length of the second floor corridor.
This time, I peered into each of the rooms as I passed. Jimmy was still
sleeping noisily; Baker and Gibbons were asleep in the adjacent cabin;
and all the other rooms were empty.
I went out to the deck. Went around all four sides almost at a run. No
one was there.
Panic was upon me now. Back within the cube I called frantically:
"Rowena! Rowena, where are you?"
It aroused them all. "Rowena, where are you? Rowena, answer me!"
Jimmy came rushing out. "Heavens, Jack--what in the devil--"
"I can't find Rowena!"
I tried to calm myself. She was here somewhere, of course.
Baker and Gibbons came tumbling from their room. "What's the trouble?"
From the third tier Dr. Grenfell was calling, "Dean! Dean, what is
it?" and from the lounge-room downstairs Jones shouted up a similar
question. We were all in a moment, wildly searching. Shouting back and
forth to each other; and calling:
"Rowena! Where are you? Where are you?"
The cube echoed with our voices and the tramp of our feet.
But Rowena had vanished!
Stark horror seized us as we gathered in the lounge. Rowena had
vanished. But there was only a moment of that baffled horror; and then
a new alarm.
Jimmy's voice from the second tier:
"Jack! Jack! Here she is!"
His words, "Here she is!" should have been reassuring. But his
terrified tone combined with them was infinitely frightening.
I leaped up the ladder-steps, with the others after me. We met Jimmy.
He was wild-eyed and breathless, waving his automatic.
"Jack, my God, she--Jack, he has--Come here!"
I went after him at a run, out the corridor door to the deck, around
one of its angles to D-face. Five minutes ago I had run this length; I
had unheedingly passed the closed door-slide of the air-lock room.
Jimmy dashed there now. Halted, with upraised weapon.
"Jimmy--look!"
In the little air-lock room projecting out from the deck, Rowena was
crouching. And beside her, the huge figure of a man. His arm was around
her, holding her half caressingly, half in menace. His other arm hugged
his upraised knees; in his hand, a strange globular weapon pointed at
Rowena's breast.
It was Croat!
CHAPTER XIV.
HUMAN PROJECTILES.
"Steady, Jack! He's got her!"
We could hear his voice through the door-slide. Calmly ironical.
"Well, and so you have me!" came Croat's voice. "It took you a fair
long time to find me--find us--did it not? Sit quiet, Rowena!"
Grenfell came shoving his way through the group of horror-stricken men
behind me. "Dean, what--good God, it's Croat!"
We stood stricken with upraised, futilely gesturing weapons; we held
each other back, fearful that one of us would make an incautious move
to startle or anger Croat into killing Rowena. He could so easily do it
by the merest pressure of his finger against that cylinder in his hand.
Gibbons stammered, "The air in there--I left it at five pounds."
"It is quite comfortable now," came Croat's slow voice. And I realized
that the door-slide was slightly ajar. "This girl--Rowena Palisse, is
she not? By your gods, a woman worthy of mastering Mercury. They will
say, 'Croat's mate chosen from all the Universe could be no better
suited to him.' I had no idea!"
We stood dumb, with horror, listening to him. Past his great thick
shoulder Rowena's white face peered at us.
"Quiet, Rowena." His arm tightened around her. "Do not be foolish or,
as I told you, I will have to kill you. And that would be a pity. Sit
still, while I tell them what they must do."
Dr. Grenfell stood at the pane. He was unarmed; he had shoved us behind
him with a warning command. He put his hands up on the pane of the door
and his face close to it.
"You are Croat, the Mercutian?"
"Why, yes." Croat shifted so as to face the door more comfortably. I
saw now that he had both of Rowena's hands pinned by the tightness
of his encircling arm. "Yes, I am Croat, the Mercutian. You seem to
know me. That is strange." His gray face gazed insolently at Grenfell,
though he was obviously puzzled. "My fame must have spread quickly to
Earth. How did you--"
Grenfell waved it away. He had recovered from his first shock of
horror. He stood calmly calculating; his shoulders hunched, every
muscle tense.
"That's not important. We know you. I am in command here. You cannot
escape."
"Escape? For a commander you are stupid! Escape? And you make still
another error--you are not in command. You were, but now you are not. I
command here."
I heard Dr. Grenfell answering, but it hardly registered on my mind.
It seemed that Rowena was trying to attract my attention. I caught her
glance, and the vague gesture of her head to indicate something behind
her. And Jimmy was plucking at me, whispering, "When I first saw him he
was starting to robe them in those Moon-landing suits. Then he stopped.
Look, he's got the Moon-suits behind him."
I saw then what Rowena was indicating: the pressure suits and helmets
for disembarking upon an airless world. We had brought them in case of
unforeseen necessity. My mind flashed back to what undoubtedly Croat
had done: stolen the rector's aëro to carry him from Maine to southern
Jersey; hidden himself on the cube, having boarded it during the
confusion of loading for our departure.
We found later that he had hidden in the small lower room where raw
bulk foodstuffs were stored--those which obviously we would not need
during the first part of the voyage. Then, while she slept, he had
captured Rowena; forced her to tell him of the Moon equipment.
He had secured two of the helmeted suits--elastic, rubberite affairs,
double-shelled, with interior air-pressure circulating system to
withstand the explosive pressure of fifteen pounds to the square inch;
and great goggled helmets like an old-fashioned sea-diver. Croat had
been about to use them when Jimmy came upon him.
Use them? For what? And why had he tarried?
* * * * *
He was arguing calmly with Grenfell. He had said: "I am a different
race from you. Perhaps you think I would not dare kill this girl and
meet my own death almost at once? Perhaps an Earth-man would be afraid
to make good his threat? But that, I promise you, is exactly what I
shall do. If you cross me--attempt to stop me--I promise it."
And we did not dare take the chance! Grenfell stood there alert.
Gibbons was beside him. The door-slide was ajar. In a matter of five
seconds Gibbons could have widened that slit, fired in and killed
Croat. But in those five seconds the watchful Mercutian would have
bored Rowena with the deadly blast from his little cylinder.
Rowena suddenly moved, twisting violently to test him. If she could
distract his attention even for a moment--
It alarmed Grenfell. He warned sharply: "Don't do that, child!"
Croat did not turn; his arm again tightened to hold her. And Rowena
called:
"He sent an ether-signal for his ship. A flare--didn't you see it? His
ship is coming!"
"We have been waiting for it," said Croat; and he added sharply: "Close
that door!"
His weapon came up. Swung at us, and back at Rowena. His gray face,
the darting fire of his dark eyes, seemed suddenly unhuman. This was a
man of a different world. He would plunge heedlessly into murder and
suicide.
Gibbons snapped the deck slide closed. Baker exclaimed: "Grenfell--his
ship is in sight. It was down by the Moon!"
The Mercutian ship coming! Then it had not gone back to Mercury, but
had been waiting out here, perhaps for a signal from Croat? And I saw
Croat now menacing Rowena, making her draw on the Moon-suit.
I plucked at Jimmy. "Come! We've got to get other suits!"
No one noticed us as we dashed away along the deck. Grenfell was
murmuring to his companions--trying to plan something--watching, trying
to dare make an opportunity to open the slide and leap in upon Croat.
We were gone only a minute or two. I came back alone, robed in a
pressure-suit; and Jimmy was still searching for another for himself. I
passed Baker.
"Where are you going?" He stopped short, turned and followed me back.
I carried the helmet in my hand. Baker was stammering: "You got one,
Dean? I thought--He's taking her outside!"
The group at the slide stood transfixed with horrified confusion.
Within the lock now were two grotesque figures. Round goggled helmets
in place; humps on the shoulders where the pressure-batteries were
assembled. Bloated figures, with the air-pressure in the suits already
operating. I saw that the rubberite of Croat's garment was stretched
by his great height. He bent at the outer door-slide. Rowena was
struggling now, but he held her; and turned with his weapon to menace
the men on the deck.
Grenfell opened the inner slide; closed it again in a panic. The men
were all shouting different orders at once. If Croat were to open the
outer slide simultaneously with the opening of the inner one, all the
air in the ship would go out with a blast. Death to every one on board!
I came with a wild rush. A sudden madness was on me. I calculated
nothing--chanced everything. Grenfell and the others scattered before
me. They were all shouting, but I did not hear them. I jammed on the
helmet; locked it; started up the mechanisms. My suit began bloating;
the pressure made my head roar. Then it cleared. Through the visor-pane
I could see the deck, and the door-slide to the lock.
I rushed at the manuals. Baker was ahead of me. He swung the lever;
pushed me through the opening slide. I stumbled into the lock. The
slide closed instantly after me.
And in the next instant Croat opened the outer door. The lock-air went
out with a rush; a torrent of pressure escaping into the outside vacuum.
Like projectiles, we three in the lock were hurled into the black void
of Space!
CHAPTER XV.
THE COMBAT IN SPACE.
I recall that my first emotion was one of utter amazement. There was
no sense of movement. I was motionless, while things moved around
me--all very slowly, hastelessly. In the midst of them I seemed poised,
unmoving!
There were the distant motionless stars--blazing points of white light
in the dead-black velvet of the void; there was the great ball of
Earth; the Moon; the flame-enveloped Sun. All visually motionless. I
had gone head first through the air-lock door. I hung level, with no
axial rotation.
But there was some movement. The helmeted figures of Rowena and Croat
lay near me--twenty feet away, perhaps. They were clinging together and
rotating slowly end over end. Croat had lost his weapon. It floated
fifty feet behind us. We were falling toward the Earth, undoubtedly;
falling with a steady acceleration of velocity which soon would be
meteorite swiftness. But none of it was apparent in the vastness of
Space.
The cube was over me. In all the glittering scene, the cube now was
endowed with the most obvious motion, a hundred feet or so above me,
and slowly sailing past. It was turning on a vertical axis: from its
corners faint etheric blue rocket-streams were visible.
Then far to one side, off by the Moon, I saw another object--the
Mercutian Space-ship! A great white bird-like shape. I twisted my head
to see through the lower lens of the helmet visor. It magnified the
image, showing Croat's vessel speeding upward at us; its rocket-streams
were behind it, fan-shaped like a comet-tail.
How long I hung there I cannot guess. Time, like movement and like
all these astronomical bodies of which I now was one, seemed hanging
poised. And I think my mind, too, functioned differently--a detached,
far-away haze of thought.
I recall that I was helpless to move, save that I could kick and
flounder. Celestial forces were upon me now, irrevocable, inexorable
beyond all puny human influence.
It penetrated to my consciousness that the Mercutian ship was only a
few miles away; and that Grenfell was manipulating the cube around
me--and around Croat and Rowena. I saw the yawning, opened air-lock
door. Grenfell was trying to get us back in it.
If only I could reach Croat I would try to strangle him with my grip,
rip and tear at his bloated garment with the knife which I had in my
belt, and rescue Rowena.
The bulk of the passing cube pulled at me. I began rotating; the
heavens turned over.
The cube momentarily moved away to take a new position. I suddenly
realized I was drawing nearer Croat, or else he and Rowena drifting
slowly toward me; the gravitational attraction of our bulk was pulling
us together. But it seemed, at first, desperately slow movement.
The heavens again stopped rotating. I found the Mercutian ship directly
under me. I gazed numbly down at it. A mile away? Ten miles? Distance
could not be calculated here. But through the visor's magnifying
lens I saw it clearly, and across this airless void saw details with
microscopic, undistorted clarity.
But my brain hardly encompassed what I was seeing. There was a
commotion on the Mercutian ship's upper deck under its bell-like dome.
There were figures there, fighting! Hot flashes of blue-green were
visible. Men were fighting. And I thought I saw a winged girl; and
other girls--Earth-girls?
It was a vague impression. Now there was a rush of figures into a round
object standing on the deck. A man's figure, fighting, holding back
other men as the girls crowded behind him.
Tumultuous, silent events were happening swiftly down there on that
ship's deck. There was one great blue-green flash. I know now that
it must have ripped the ship's dome. The air rushed out with a great
explosion. I recall seeing the dome lift apart. The figures of men were
blasted out--dead instantly as they struck the airless frigid void of
Space.
* * * * *
The Mercutian ship was wrecked, and slowly turned over. But its mass
held most of the mangled figures rotating in narrow orbits around it.
Gruesome satellites! A broken litter of wreckage, it began slowly
falling toward the far-distant Earth.
And with the explosion, I saw the round object catapulted out from the
deck. A small silver metal ball, with tiny door and a row of windows,
it hurled free; and instead of falling, seemed to rise.
I was suddenly aware that Croat and Rowena were within reach of me!
My outflung hand reached him; I touched a metal plate of his sleeve
with my metal-fabric glove. It gave us audiphone contact. I heard his
breathing his muttered oath. And then, as he realized that he could
hear me, his words:
"And you think you can save her? You--cannot!"
We locked together. He had seen the wreck of his ship--knew it was
the end for him. His wild laugh sounded in my ear-grids with an eerie
jangle.
"Death! A fitting death for Croat and his Earth-woman--twin stars,
falling!"
And I heard Rowena's voice as I touched her. "Jack! Get away! Let me
push at you! Don't let him hold you!"
His great arms seized me. Our bloated suits pressed together.
Weightless adversaries scrambling in a weightless void! He caught my
wrist that held the knife and twisted it. But despite his giant size,
I found that I was the stronger. The knife was above him. I forced it
slowly down against all his efforts to stop me.
He gave a last wild laugh. Tried to rip at Rowena's garment. Then my
blade punctured his suit. With the out rush of its air, I felt it go
flat against me. Felt his grip tighten convulsively; and his last human
scream, with all the irony gone out of it, jangled at my ears.
His grip loosened, I kicked him free. Like a log shoved violently in
water his body floated away.
I clung to Rowena; became aware of the Cube over us; the yawning
lock-opening coming with true aim this time to swallow us.
We struck the lock interior, fell in a heap on its metal floor, and the
outer slide closed upon us.
CHAPTER XVI.
FALLING STARS.
My senses very nearly faded, the air in my helmet was fouled, but in
a moment I had the mechanism cleared again. Rowena held me; her voice
rang in my ear-grids:
"Jack! Jack, dear--what's the matter?"
I gasped, "I'm all right--the oxygen--was clogged."
We were sitting on the floor of the lock. The pressure was coming in; I
could feel it against me. Across the lock, at the inner slide, I could
see the anxious faces of Dr. Grenfell, Jimmy and the others peering in
at us.
The pressure came steadily and we yielded our garment-pressure to
balance it. Presently they were equal. I saw Grenfell signal. The inner
slide opened. Jimmy led the rush of men, pouncing upon us, lifting off
our helmets.
"You're not hurt, Jack?" Jimmy's arms held me. "Thank God: for that!
And Rowena--you all right, Rowena? Let me help you up." His face was
white and drawn. "We were so helpless, standing inside, watching you
out there."
They carried us to the deck and took off our suits. But there was no
time for further talk. Outside the deck windows--out there in the
starry vault--portentous events were sweeping slowly on.
The wreck of Croat's ship was far beneath us, with the Earth under
it. Croat's body was still near at hand. But it was falling. Grenfell
had the negative current in the gravity plates of the cube-base. A
repulsion there; and Croat's body had come within its influence. The
twisted shape of him, gruesome with the sagging helmet and the deflated
suit hanging in wrinkled folds, was moving swiftly away from us. The
Earth's attraction had caught it.
And the silver ball was mounting. It was quite near us now; the
sunlight gleamed on half its sphere with a brilliant white glare; the
earthlight painted its opposite side with a mellow silver glow. It was
holding a vertical axis upon which it slowly turned so that its tiny
windows went in procession before us. Its power-streams were around it
like a faint green-blue aura.
Was this ball coming to attack us? The thought struck me. I was
still far from normal, confused, with my head roaring and my muscles
trembling. Rowena was the same. We stood together on the deck, clinging
to each other and to the bull's-eye window-fastenings as we gazed out
into the immensity of Space.
Around us the deck was in turmoil. They were rolling one of the guns to
the firing porte. Then Dr. Grenfell's voice sounded from the near-by
deck speaker-grid. He was calling from the dome-room of the cube.
"It's all right! Baker, swing D-face toward them! It's all
right--that's Guy Palisse and, I suppose, Tama!"
Guy and Tama! Rowena held me close. Have I said that only after Guy's
message did she yield to the weakness of tears? Not so--for there were
tears in her eyes now.
"Jack! He says--it's Guy!"
Again, Grenfell's voice: "I can see them at the windows. It's Guy, and
a winged girl, and Earth-girls."
There was a rush of feet on the deck. But Rowena and I were in no
condition to join any activity. We could barely stand and cling to
each other. I felt that now the reaction was making everything seem so
swift--our minds could hardly grasp it. Yet it must have taken half an
hour at least.
The silver ball came level and poised. We saw faces at its windows.
Rowena recognized her brother. I held her then, or she would have
fallen.
Another interval. Jimmy came beside me, volubly triumphant. But I
hardly heard him.
Then Dr. Grenfell manipulated the cube until D-face with its open
lock-entrance moved slowly toward the hovering ball, which was poised
with its porte fronting us. The openings met, with gravity holding the
ball as though glued to us.
Another interval.
I murmured, "Rowena, they're here. In a moment or two--your brother,
safe!"
"Yes! Jack, everything's blurred--we--what's the matter with us?"
"Just--blurred. I feel it too. The pressure change--being outside
there. We're all right...."
A rush of feet. Excited voices. I saw Tama--strange, frail little
girl-shape--flowing drapery-garments--sleek-feathered wings.
And the Earth-girls, the kidnaped girls from the White camp. They were
frightened, pale, some of them sobbing with the joy of their rescue.
And then I saw Guy. Torn white shirt and trousers; a band of red fabric
about his forehead. And with him a slim boyish youth like a little
American Indian chieftain.
Guy turned: "Toh, stay with Tama a moment. Is that my sister over
there? Why, Rowena! You--you're not the little girl I remember!"
Rowena cast me off, and stood wavering, with opened arms to receive him.
* * * * *
I recall how Guy explained that he and Tama and her brother had hidden
upon Croat's ship, as in his message he had hinted they might try to
do. They had been discovered, caught, and held while Croat and some
of his men descended to the Earth, using the silver ball as a sort of
tender.
The silver ball had returned, with the girl captives, but without
Croat. The ship had waited, hoping, expecting perhaps that Croat
would--signal. Twice, when heavy clouds were over Maine, it had
descended.
Then, with the confusion on the Mercutian ship at Croat's etheric
flare-signal from our cube, Guy seized his chance to break loose. I had
seen the fight on the ship's deck.
Eight of the Earth-girls were saved. I heard Jimmy ask what had become
of the others. Guy avoided the question, and no one asked it again.
There was still one last scene out there in the black vault of the
heavens. The body of Croat, and the wrecked ship with tiny dots of
Mercutians' bodies revolving as satellites around it, were falling
toward the Earth. We followed them down.
Again that slow, measured astronomical movement! A tiny instant of time
amid the stars; but to us, watching humans, it was literally hours.
The Earth slowly grew larger, spreading out beneath us. Silver, turning
yellow-red, then red like a map faintly tinted. And then with other
color coming to it: bluish oceans; gray-green continents; white-tipped
mountain peaks; banks of obscuring gray haze and solid cloud-areas.
The torn ship and the little dot which was the body of Croat fell
steadily. Inexorably....
The Earth grew to a great shining surface spread half across the lower
firmament.
The wrecked, falling ship was first to enter the atmosphere. It turned
faintly luminous with friction-heat. Above it a tail of burning gases
streamed out. It was falling like a plummet within an hour--down into
the denser air-strata--blazing into a great fiery ball of burning gas
until it was consumed.
Then Croat's body became a luminous point of light, a dot of fire, a
little falling star.
It puffed into sudden brilliance at the end, as though the spirit of
the man might be making a last ironic gesture; then faded and vanished
into nothingness, with only the unseen ashes like scattered star-dust
sifting down.
* * * * *
I really have no more to add. The events I have narrated are world-wide
property. Every one knows them from every public source. I have tried
merely to give what the newscasters have been pleased to call "an
actual eyewitness description."
There are some who have struggled for fame, and when they got it, found
it anything but pleasant to possess. Take mine now; in the quiet that
follows those extraordinary events of last year, it is not-exactly
fame, but it certainly is notoriety.
I do not find it pleasant, nor does Rowena, nor any of the rest of us.
The world is relieved that Croat's ship is destroyed, Croat himself
dead, and the next inferior conjunction of Mercury and the Earth passed
safely.
The affair is over. But now people want to know where Rowena and
Guy Palisse are; and where is Jack Dean living? And why does not
Guy Palisse or Jack Dean go on the lecture platform or into the
sound-motion plays--or join a circus, with that winged girl named Tama
who came from Mercury? They could make lots of money; why don't they do
it?
We answer: that is no one's business. We wish you would let us alone.
Rowena and I are living--in as much seclusion as we can find. Tama and
Guy are near us. Jimmy Turk is still in the patrol service. Any one is
free to try to find out from him where we are.
Guy is beside me as I finish these pages. He likes the tone of these
last paragraphs. But Rowena, who came in a moment ago, did not.
"Aren't you a little aggressive?" she said. "After all, every one who
reads your narrative hasn't necessarily insulted you. I believe you
should change it."
"Not at all," said Guy.
Rowena kissed me and went outside.
"I'll think about it," I called after her. "Maybe I'll change it."
But I haven't.
It is night now. We are in a lonely spot. Forests, and a lake. No, it
is _not_ Maine.
Tama is outside, flying up into the starlight. She likes it here on
Earth, though flying is much more difficult for her than on Mercury.
But she is worried over her comrades of the Light Country. The Hill
City government took them back, promised them new laws. But Tama is
suspicious of those quickly given promises. She and Guy are returning
to Mercury as soon as Dr. Grenfell will take them.
Tama keeps very secluded in the daytime here. But at night she flies
out. We never grow tired of watching her. Guy called me to the window
a little while ago. She went past with fluttering wings and flowing
draperies; waved her white arm at Guy as she wheeled and soared out
over the starlit lake.
THE END.
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