Collected Tales (Jerry eBooks)

by Leslie F Stone

  The backing of the power screen made a dim mirror of the ship’s walls, and Brett used that for his shave. After some difficulty in hacking away the hirsute growth, and nicking himself more than once he managed a fairly clean shave. Then he relinquished the razor to the next in turn. Luckily, the boy had likewise purchased a package of blades. Each man kept his blade for further use.

  Dell made her appearance with the other women. “I feel like a new woman,” she laughed. “One could scarcely believe that a little water could work such wonders . . .”

  The effect of their ablutions was to give the Earthlings a new lease on life, an uplift in their morale. Their eyes had brightened, and their cheery voices filled the ship.

  When it came his turn at the controls Brett again threw off the power screen to ascertain if the decapods were still on their trail. No sooner was the screen replaced than a rocking shook the ship. The decapods were most assuredly on their tail.

  He conferred with George. Should they again attempt to rid themselves of the enemy? They decided to consult the others on the momentous question. The majority vote was for War!

  ONCE more the ship was swung out of its course, turned about so it could face the enemy, and Brett worked until the big ship lay centered in the vision-screen. Then with one finger he depressed the button that released their own screen, while almost immediately, he switched it on again. There followed a rocking of the ship as a pencil beam from the decapods’ machine flashed across the Void.

  Twice he used the same tactics, and twice the other struck; but the third time the decapods resorted to the same strategy, dropping their own screen. Instantly Brett shot out his ray. It worked.

  “A HIT! A Hit!” cried George, and they saw the big ship stagger, sideslip and try to right itself. Only it could not. It was careening wildly, from side to side. But the decapods were not done yet. A white beam cut the blackness, but the ray was wild, and did not come anywhere near their ship.

  Twice the decapods attempted to restore their protective screen, and though it flashed on each time, it faded almost instantly. Again Brett used his ray upon it, but now the other was quickly dwindling in size and the range was too great.

  For several minutes they followed it, but hurt though it was, the big ship could accelerate more quickly, and was swiftly moving away—back in the direction from which it had come—back to Mars . . .

  Breathing a sigh of relief the pilot turned about, heading for Earth once again. Earth was still far, far away, and there was no way of computing how long the voyage would be.

  With no further interruptions the monotony of space began to tell upon the travelers, voices grew low, eyes lack-luster, bodies listless with nothing to occupy mind or body. They commenced to hate the sight of food, most of them suffering from cramps as well as from the colds they had brought from Mars.

  Brett commenced to wonder if they should reach home alive. He realized he was feeling pretty rotten himself, only the excitement of the escape and the fight with the decapods had taken his mind from it, but now that he had time to allow himself to dwell upon his condition, he knew that he was actually sick.

  Endless hours slipped by, and with them the sickness aboard grew apace. Clarice and Mrs. Burton were very sick, staying in the other room, not even coming out at meal time. Mattie who had taken to prayers again, calling upon God as witness to their sins, sometimes forgot to pray as she moaned instead. Miss Snowden sat slumped in a corner most of the time, and the Militant Matron, though she tried to help Dell cheer the others, was visibly sick. Several men were in the same condition, refusing food, and Forrest’s eyes were over-bright.

  Swung in the seat woven from the overhead straps facing the control panel or lying in his corner Brett found that there were long lapses of time in which his mind seemed away from his body. His body grew to be something unattached, his lucid moments becoming fewer and fewer. Sometimes he thought he was on Mars, sometimes at his desk in the Bureau of Standards back home. Sometimes he heard himself talking aloud, to no one in particular.

  “It’s the food,” he heard Dell mutter to George one time. “It’s rotting –—”

  That woke him up. He hurried to the open tub they were using, three of the others were empty. He tasted it, and only with effort kept from retching. It was rotted.

  He called George. “Let’s open the last barrel.” It too was rotting. “No more food,” he said.

  The next meal time, only water was doled out from the now half-empty barrel. No one seemed to notice the change, nor care. Brett crawled up to the control board to check the course. The green mantled Earth lay in dead-center of the screen, but it still seemed far away. He grew panicky. Perhaps they no longer moved!

  CHAPTER XII

  FOR a long time he stared at that far away globe. For a time he forgot what it actually was; it had revolved into a symbol, a symbol of attainment, but outside that he could not remember. It seemed that the Void had always been, all that he had ever known. Only he could not put out of his mind that deep longing he felt for that greenish half-globe with its diminutive moon alongside, for Luna had since detached itself slightly from the side of Earth and rode the darkness, shedding its light on the mother planet.

  Once someone aroused him to tell him that Clarice was dead, and Mattie was fast sinking, but the words scarcely meant anything. He knew that Kent had already passed away, and that several others were in a deep coma from which they could not be aroused.

  The next time his brain roused itself he became aware of a distinctly unpleasant odor around him. He puzzled over it a while before he realized that it came from their fouled food supply. Something snapped within him, and he was more fully alert than he had been for some time. He realized the need of ridding the ship of the stuff. Before this, he had puzzled about their air-supply, afraid that that might also give out on them, but he had come to know that one of the ship’s two motors was designed to keep it clean and pure. Only with that putrefaction rising from the tubs, the air would soon grow stale. They had to be emptied.

  Glancing about for help he saw George sleeping, making vague stirrings that bespoke a troubled body. Moore, the merchant, lay supine, snoring spasmodically, the little rolls of fat gone from his face, his skin an unhealthy yellow. Howell lay in a strange unnatural position. Leaning over him Brett realized he was dead. The mulatto, Harris, was doubled in a knot, sweat streaking from his face. Jeff the big negro and Jerry the reporter seemed the only two that looked normal. Forrest was breathing with difficulty, and McCarthy lay with an arm around the dog, mumbling in a delirium. Shaking Jeff and Jerry awake Brett told them what had to be done. None of them were strong enough for the task, but together they managed to push the pair of casks to the air-lock, tip them over so their contents spilled into the small receptacle. When it filled up, they closed and dumped it. This procedure had to be repeated many times, the three of them suffering time and time again over their ugly task as the evil smell of the mass affected them. They were forced to scoop out the bottoms, but at last it was finished, the casks tightly closed.

  THE dead presented another problem, but they did not like the thought of consigning them to space. Dragging the bodies to one side they covered them with a few coats taken from the screen shielding the women.

  On, on drifted the ship of death, moving slowly toward its objective. From his place on the floor Brett raised his eyes from time to time to the body of George slumped within the straps above his head, eyes closed. But those facts scarcely registered upon his brain as he drifted again into the unreal realm of a deathlike sleep. Several times he sought to drag himself out of his lethargy, but each time the effort was too great. He did not know that like a sleep-walker he had gotten up a number of times to wander among the others, putting a hand to a forehead here and there. When next he awoke, he found his arms wrapped around a thin though warm body.

  Focusing eyes with some difficulty he found that it was Dell Wayne who lay within his grasp. He was startled by her appearance
, her sunken cheeks, the depths of her eye sockets. He grew frightened, fearing that she was dead, and laid his head upon her heart. It beat. The movement awakened her. Somehow she managed a smile. “Brett—good Brett,” she murmured in a scarcely audible voice. “I—I guess this is the end—isn’t it? It’s been nice knowing you—Brett . . .”

  The import of her words fell upon him, and suddenly he knew he did not want to die. “NO—No . . . we shan’t die—we can’t. We’ve come too far together for that—I can’t let you die—you understand? Why, Dell—I love you—I love you. We can’t die—yet . . .”

  She did not answer, smiling at him instead, an enigmatical smile. Then, they both were silent, drifting again into that half-way death of sleep.

  The first shout did not rouse them, nor the second. It took a heavy shaking on the part of the boy, Forrest, to awaken them. “Earth—” he was shrieking . . . “Earth—in our path. Can’t you understand? We’re almost—home-HOME!”

  The last word did it. Brett woke, staring wildly into the wilder eyes of the boy. “Home?” he asked querulously, “HOME?”

  Then he was struggling to his feet, dragging Dell with him. He glanced out the ship’s side (the power screen had long since been down, after they had ascertained that the decapod ship was really gone). It was true. Before them, filling most of their sky, loomed the broad green globe of Earth. To one side shone a thin sliver of the moon. They were already within Luna’s orbit.

  Weak though he was Brett managed to climb up to the control panel, staring with yearning eyes at the great body before him, picking out the familiar features of the continents as the globe was turning slowly, half in darkness, half in light.

  How long he hung there in the straps, he did not know. Below him he could hear the stirrings of his fellows, almost all aroused now by Forrest. He knew it must have taken hours, that slow approach to the globe, but it did not matter, nothing mattered as the lineaments of Earth grew before his eyes, sometimes blotted by that line of darkness. Gradually it lost its globular form, horizons straightened out, and with a suddenness that startled him, he found that the sky around them was no longer dead black—that it was taking on color—pale blue at first, then deeper and deeper. They were well within the atmosphere blanket!

  Now it seemed they were falling, falling too swiftly as land and water rushed up to meet them. “Do something, do something,” his brain commanded, “do something before we crash.”

  The knobs—three of them must be turned. With both hands he tugged and pulled; then someone was helping him, and he found it was George. The ship leveled off, and now the same speed that had seemed so incredibly slow out in space swung them rapidly through the air, five miles or so above the landscape. Again the acceleration was lessened and Brett jiggled the “stick.” They had reached Earth at its most southern point, and he turned the ship northward.

  Those who had the power to do so had risen to their feet, crowding to the walls to stare hungrily at the twilighted land beneath. Night came upon them, and still they moved on, on. Brett knew when they crossed the equator by the constellations; steered his course by the pole-star. Dawn was breaking when he realized they lay off the Virginian coast. There was that great arm of land that was the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay. He headed the ship over the bay, followed it, trying to name the rivers emptying into it.

  He found the river he sought, the lordly Potomac and followed its course. Soon they saw the beautiful pattern that was Washington, the tiny sliver of stone that was the Monument. A few minutes later the ship hovered above Haines Point, and Brett halted the oscillating stick.

  Instantly the ship nosed down, dropping evenly to the ground, forward motion halted. As the land came up to meet them, George and he twisted the three dials to neutral. The journey was at end.

  Like a feather the ship settled upon the grass of the municipal golf-links, not far from the spot, where, on that memorial day, five weeks since, the great drum-ship of the decapods had rested.

  Again Washington had witnessed the early morning arrival, but there were only police, and soldiers to receive the travelers. Boiling Field and the Naval Airdrome had dispatched planes to the scene, machine-guns pointed downward menacingly. A shout of wonder greeted the first of the emaciated passengers to disembark. Willing hands helped them while those unable to walk were carried out tenderly.

  A week later Brett Rand with an arm around his wife received the news-reporters in his brother’s home. Still thin and wan from their experience the pair expressed their joy of being “home.”

  “I’m going to make a life work of freeing every animal pet in the land!” declared Mrs. Rand when asked if she was going to follow a “career.”

  “After our honeymoon,” Brett said, “George and I are going to study the decapod ship. There are great things to be learned there, mechanisms entirely new to science . . .”

  “And that, boys, is one tall order!” It was George, speaking from the shadows.

  THE END

  The Great Ones

  THEY COME! The great ones come!” There was fear and hysteria in that wild cry, as the hunters came rushing pell-mell toward the cave-spattered cliff. “The great ones come! To the caves! To the caves!”

  The women felt the meager, rock-bound slope of the tor, their few rough tools left between the furrow’s. The fishermen at the water’s edge swarmed up the beach, the day’s catch left where it lay. The weavers and the skin workers threw down their handiwork and grabbed at their sleeping babes; while the old men, who had been squatting around the community fire, caught up lighted brands before herding the young children that had been playing near by into the caves. The Great Ones were coming!

  In less than ten minutes after the delivery of that dire warning not a single member of the tribe of Lunda was to be seen. Some had rolled huge boulders over the face of their caverns; others were building roaring fires that soon heated the stone at the cave mouth to white heat. And behind these boulders and fires crouched the hunters, armed with spears, axes, bows and arrows, even as they knew in their hearts what slight defense these were against the enemy. Chance alone could save them and their families. Neither fire, boulders nor their weak weapons could stave off the berserk great ones who came only to kill—kill—kill.

  Just so had the ancestors of this people once crouched in caves, in fear of a common enemy, seeking to protect their women and offspring with fire and crude weapons. Had a man out of the twentieth century materialized in this era he would have believed that instead of being transported into the future he had, instead, been flung backward into the past. One could scarcely have believed that these shaggy-haired, skin-clothed people were the remnant of a once-proud, mechanized race moving rapidly into an age wherein it was to reach the heights of human existence.

  But wait! What is that thundering sound? That great roaring? What manner of creature is producing this fearsome din that drives needles of terror into the hearts of the cave people? What new behemoth ranges the world in this far-advanced day and age?

  From the other side of their crackling fires men watched, shivering as the enemy made its awful appearance, moving through the trees that masked the beach and cave mouths from the uplands. Fifty-foot trees were shoved aside like matchwood; underbrush mashed flat as the monsters crashed through. And the ground shook to their mighty tread.

  Reminiscent in size to monsters of another time-gone age, they stood taller than the trees. But what made their appearance all the more horrific was the fact that they were cast in the likeness of man himself!

  There were four in all, two of which stood over seventy feet high; the third somewhat shorter; while the fourth, a mere stripling, stood some forty feet. They had great barrel chests; huge, bloated abdomens that looked soft and pouchy; arms hanging heavily from wide, hunched shoulders; hands several feet in area, with thick, stubby fingers that dangled open; legs thicker than tree trunks, terminating in huge, flat feet that were longer than an ordinary man is tall. In color they were a
grayish-brown with a scaly, wart-covered skin. Yet, hideous though the body, it was the head and face that struck real terror and repellence into the soul of the cave people.

  For there was something horrible in the sight of those small heads, so out of proportion to those tremendous bodies—heads less than a fiftieth of the height, scarcely more than one foot high from chin to crown! There were no foreheads at all; the coarse, black hair seemed to stick straight up from beetling brows. The backs of their heads were all but flat, without any cranial development at all, so that from the side view they looked cone-shaped—and a very narrow cone at that.

  On either side of these inhuman heads jutted forth floppy ears several times too large, which twitched continuously this way and that as sounds from below came to the creatures. The faces themselves were ghastly dull and vapid. Set in deep, fleshy pouches were staring, red-rimmed, piggish eyes that somehow bore a soul-stirring evil in their witless depths. Although they had huge jaws, the chins were a mere recession of bone from the wide, sloppy mouths. And from the pale, flabby lips that exposed yellowed, broken fangs issued that terrifying, bellowing roar of the Brobdingnagian idiots.

  For the great ones of the one-thousandth century were monstrous idiots with a wild, insatiable urge to kill—and kill. Nothing that stood in their way could hope to live. Even after the tremendous appetite was sated the animus to kill, to rend, did not abate.

  OUR twentieth-century man would have had no explanation for this horrible travesty of mankind that was existing in that future age. It was for Prince Toms of the one-hundredth century to have visualized him, to predict his advent. And it was to his twin brother, Fergus V of Mediterraneania[1], that he had given his prognostication.

  Fergus refused to believe the results of his brother’s researches. Calling Prince Toms to him he had sought to belie the truth with his shouts: “Gross giantism! Race imbecility! Fool! Blasphemer. You are mad! Mad!”