The 53rd Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK; Geoff St. Reynard
Page 43
He sprawled full length and knew his ankle was broken or sprained. Jerry rolled free and collapsed, sighing into his radio. Pink tried to stand and the ankle buckled. Horrified, he looked at his glove watch.
He had seventy seconds.
CHAPTER XXIII
Pink bellowed, “Jerry!” He yelled it so loudly that his ears protested at the helmet echoes. Jerry said groggily, “Wha?”
“Stand up!”
Jerry sat up and at once fell flat again. “Judas priest, I can’t. That you Pink?”
“We’ve got to make the ship,” he bawled, twisting with pain.
“Make it what?”
“If you want to live, son—stand up!”
Jerry got to his knees. “I’m sick, Pink.”
He had used up six seconds. He had to try it on his own. Jerry was too far gone to function properly.
Pink stood up. His teeth were grinding together like millstones, but he didn’t stop. He knew pain and dread and rage that shook him. He faced the ship, and stood on his good leg and bent his knee and gave a tremendous hop.
As he fell on his face, an unknown number of yards nearer, a great alien passed him, the mighty sole slamming the rock a few feet from his prone body. Pink struggled upright and balanced on the right leg and made another hop. This time he didn’t fall when he lit. Praying thankfully for the two seconds that saved, he sprang again. And fell, painfully.
It was a useless piece of bravado. It was impossible to reach the ship. He got up and leaped. He fell. He forced himself up and sprang and didn’t fall and sprang and fell.
He couldn’t waste a blink of time in looking at the watch or yelling with agony or even praying now. He went through his routine automatically, his mind a thing of terror. Eons seemed to pass him by as he hopped over the djinn-infested gray rock plain.
A superb spring took him abreast of the big lead vat. What wild scenes of delirium were going on there he could not even imagine. He hopped twice more and was at the ship.
At any instant, at this very second the ship would blossom into red-white carnage of metal and flesh and death. Impossibly Pink stood on his good leg and aimed for the scanner-port which he knew, or hoped, connected with the screen in the control room where Jackson sat.
Now the Elephant’s Child was done, Jackson was shoving the switch over, now it would all disintegrate in his face. He flew through space and struck the hull flat; all the perishing strength in him glued his body, his fingers in their thin gloves, to that curving surface. His great helmet, with the crest insignia of comets and spears that marked him as the captain, hung for a short time directly in front of the scanner-port.
He shook his head violently, back and forth, back and forth. No, he screamed in his mind, wishing insanely that his radio were constructed so that it could be heard in the ship. No, he shook, no, no!
Then his precarious grip on the smooth side slid off, and Captain Pinkham fell lightly but finally to the asteroid.
He lay there unresisting. He had done his best, absolutely his damned best. Let it blow. Let it blow.
After a while he looked at his glove watch. It was two minutes past the time for explosion.
He had saved the Elephant’s Child.
He turned and looked across the plain and saw, beyond the great trap into which giant-smoke was settling, two figures come running toward him with unearthly strides. One of them halted and gathered Jerry into its arms. The other reached Pink and knelt beside him and hugged him tightly. Pink laughed, a passionate sound of relief. Circe said, “You made it, darling. You made it!”
The air-lock began to open.
CHAPTER XXIV
The djinni on the floor said, “I concede this battle to you, Captain. I have seen the ending on the screen. But there are others out there, on Oasis and in the void. We’ll win to Earth some day in spite of this victory.”
Pink, snugly ensconced in a foam-chair with his sprained ankle propped up, his surviving officers seated around him, and Circe on the arm of the deep chair, took another drink of lemonade. He made a face, almost asked for brandy, and remembered. He said, “Maybe the same way you came to these asteroids?”
“No, not that. That way went only in one direction, through the fourth dimension, I think. The people of the continent you call Atlantis built that way for our use, though much against our desire; and the machine they made was so fearful that its use sank their whole land into the sea. They were a great, scientific people, and we have not their skill.”
“Atlantis too,” Jerry said. “Now we’ve heard everything, all but the Little People and Pan.”
The djinni did not seem to hear him. Its eyes, like dead coals now in the yellow face, rested on Pink. “It was clever of you to recognize us from history.”
“You go into bottles, speak Arabic, fly and are humanoid in form. I should have guessed your race hours before.”
“We are not humanoid. You are djinnoid. We came before you in evolution.”
“How do you know?” asked Daley.
“Our legends ... I cannot tell, being no more than six or seven thousand years old myself. But we are told we predate man.”
“When were you relegated to this belt?” asked Jerry, who was still a little pale. “You were around in Solomon’s time.”
“Yes. He caught and trapped most of my race—we are not so numerous as you cursed rabbits—by the same means you used. One great vat he collected, after some years of the bottles, and sealed up a multitude of my folk and cast them off a ship; somehow the currents dragged the box to Atlantis. There my people were freed, and set about to conquer the land. But the Atlanteans captured them after several decades and, having constructed the terrible machine, sent them off to this forsaken hole in space. The cataclysm the machine made—evidently they hadn’t been so clever as they thought, may Allah rot their souls!—set off volcanic action, which eventually sank their country. It was never very large, anyway....”
“How do you know this?” asked Pink. He was a bit breathless; at any moment the being might decide to shut up and die. He had to satisfy his curiosity about the space-dwellers.
“I was one who escaped Solomon. I made my way to England after a few centuries of wandering, of being a minor deity here and there, and in England in the late seventeenth century I met a brother. He had been on Atlantis, and hovering above it had seen the exiling of our race and the death of the land. Together we determined to find the machine, repair it if need be, and bring back our people. We thought they were somewhere in the bowels of the earth, or perhaps held invisible in the machine itself.
“We felt we were the last djinn at liberty. We went under the sea—”
“How?” This was Bill Calico, nursing a broken leg on the couch.
“We are oblivious to our surrounding elements, so long as they are not too dense for us to penetrate. After a year or two we found the machine. It was partially destroyed, but so simple that we easily repaired it. We could not see how it could make our race vanish, but as we are indestructible except by lead, and the Atlanteans did not know of that metal, we knew that they had vanished rather than died. When we had the machine fixed, I volunteered to try it out and see what happened. He was to reverse it and draw me back shortly.”
* * * *
The monstrous thing sighed. “It was too complex for us. First I found myself floating a mile or so off Oasis, and then my friend joined me. His adjustments had failed. The cursed machine had relegated us both.”
“God bless Atlantis,” murmured Circe.
“I presume you are taking the bottles and the great vat of lead back to Earth?” it queried slyly.
“Not on your life,” said Daley. “As soon as we’re out of System Ninety, we’ll drop ‘em into the void. Your damn tribe will be marooned properly this time.”
“But they are alive in those prisons!” it shouted, its eyes momentarily reddening again. “Such compression is most irksome to them, and they must constantly shift about to keep clear of the
lead in the stoppers. It’s inhuman!”
“You’re right,” said Pink grimly. “It’s djinnlike.”
“How did you learn English?” asked Jerry suddenly. “Modern English, I mean.”
“You forget; when you brought me aboard, in the guise of a Martian, you handed me a lingoalter. It was simple to speak the English of the 17th century into it and listen as modern speech came out.”
“That’s another thing. That Martian suit—how’d you get it?”
“They had come this far. We found the suit, with its occupant long turned to dust. We kept it for such emergencies. When the space ships foundered nearby a few years ago, we refrained from molesting this woman, thinking that she might some day be a fine decoy.”
“You watched me in the suit,” said Circe.
“We did. We had not seen a human in a long time.” The djinni paused, then said, “The Martians had space travel when Earthmen were barbarians. They came to Terra, and we, sensing danger in them, drove them out. We saw to it that the Martians would tell tales of the horrors of Earth life, and never come back.”
“By God,” said Pink, “that’s why they never colonized Earth, though they had spaceships! It’s one of the biggest problems we’ve known.”
“Then I’ve solved it for you. Will you do me a favor in return?”
“What?”
“Have you any lead left?”
“A little.”
“Then lay it on my chest, and give me a quick death.”
“Get it,” Pink said to Daley. The lieutenant started a protest. Pink said, “My Lord, can’t we afford to be merciful now? After all that slaughter?” And Daley went to find the lead.
Circe said, “Why do you want to go to Earth so badly? What’s there that you want? You’re such an independent form of life....”
“Atmosphere,” said the djinni.
“But you don’t breathe!”
“We do, however, talk; and we cannot hear each other in a vacuum. We wanted to find Earth again and know the pleasure of communication. On Oasis we had to talk with our hands.” It groaned, grotesquely human in its agony. “Can you imagine living for centuries without the joy of conversation?” it asked pitifully.
Circe shook her head. “I don’t much blame you,” she said in a small voice.
Daley came back. He handed a small rough bar of lead to Pink. The Captain’s mind seethed with questions he longed to ask; but the reaction of the battle was settling in with vengeance, and he could not see this great paralyzed brute live on because of his own more or less idle curiosity. He bent forward from the chair. “Sorry,” he said, and dropped the bar onto its chest.
“Wait!” said Jerry. “How did you know how to spell phony?”
The djinni made a small hissing noise that had something in it of contentment. Its eyes turned jetty, and they knew it was dead.
“It died happy,” said Daley to the slim O. O. “It knew it was leaving us a problem that we’d never solve. What a—what a malicious character it was!”
“Poor devil,” said Circe. “No conversation for five hundred years!”
CHAPTER XXV
Four days later Pinkham and Circe stood quietly before a scanner screen, Pink leaning on a cane, and watched the great lead vat and then the multitude of bottles go tumbling into space. “We are giving them a chance of survival,” mused Circe. “There’s about one chance in a billion that some day they’ll be found and released again.”
“I wonder,” said Pink, “if they did predate man in evolution? Or if they were originally native to another planet that expelled ‘em? There were always legends of giants and ogres and djinn and demons on earth, myths that started to die out about the time this late friend of ours left the globe for good. Maybe the djinni developed side by side with man, but was limited because of his flaws. There are a million life-forms in the universe so alien to man as to be unexplainable, and a lot of them are right home on Terra.”
Circe shook her dark head. “Is the whole thing real, Pink? Or is it a fantasy we’ve uncovered out here in the void?”
“Every damn thing about them is scientifically possible. But I know how you feel—it seems like a fairy story. If so many good guys weren’t dead back there, I’d disbelieve it myself.” He scowled a moment, then looked at her and brightened. “Honey,” he said, “remind me that I have to send a radio message to Earth as soon as we’re close enough.”
“Radio message? What?”
“A sort of temperance warning, that’s all.” He grinned. “It goes like this: If you find any bottles, don’t open them!”
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