Space Lawyers: A Collaborative Collection
Page 5
They listened. Not a sound penetrated to them. In a barely perceptible whisper Dunton directed. “Open the door, then jump aside. When I have gone out, close it again, and you stay here till I knock six times on the wall—three slow, three fast.”
A rectangle of opalescent light appeared. Beyond was the spiral slope that first had brought the American to the dome. Just above him a maroon guard was floating upward.
Dunton stepped out onto the slope. At once he felt the levitating force grip him. He floated on and up.
Almost at once the summit of the slope was reached. As the attraction was released momentarily for the opening of the trap above, Dunton viciously struck the guard’s head with his clubbed automatic. Then immediately the explorer ripped off the now unconscious Mongol’s maroon robe and hat, and donned them in mid-air as he rose to pass into the great hemisphere above.
A scene of great activity burst on Dunton as he reached the floor of his objective. A horde of the lama’s minions were rushing about in the ordered confusion of an enormous enterprise. A hum slowly rising in pitch told of the starting of the huge generator. The screen was gone, and the great tubes were beginning to glow cherry red as the electrical current commenced to heat their filaments.
Dunton merged himself with the busy throng till he reached the rear of the thought transference screen; then crouched there, securely hidden. To his delight, he found that the screen was a network of fine wire, and thus, from his dark vantage point the explorer could see every corner of the brilliantly lighted room, himself unseen. Before him Shaitan’s High Priest was seated on his throne, listening to reports and dispatching orders through a constant stream of messengers.
A deep-toned gong reverberated through the space. The old lama arose as a sudden paralysis seized the scurrying crowd. The priest raised his right hand high, and spoke:
“All is now prepared. In a moment the sun’s rays will gild the topmost peaks of the mountains, and the Shaitan’s Day will dawn. I would be alone in the hour of His triumph, alone with Shaitan. Ye have done well, ye faithful servants of the true Master of the World. Go ye now each to his quarters, and await my call. When next ye behold me ye shall have received your reward.”
As the crowded space cleared, Dunton gasped with horror. Leila, whom he thought safely hidden in the secret passage, was making her way through the retreating mob to the lama’s throne. The priest saw her. “What do you here, maiden? Have you not heard my command?”
“Father,” the clear voice replied, “Think you that I could be any other where at this moment. Despite your command or that of any other one, my place is here.”
Dunton realized that the speech was for his ears. In spite of his distress he glowed with pride at her desire to be at his side in the hour of danger.
“So be it! I had not thought of thee, but I am indeed glad that thou art here. For look you, those fools who have labored here, and whose usefulness to Shaitan and to me is now at an end will indeed receive their reward ere they again behold me. Their quarters are filled with a most deadly gas, and their next meeting with me will be in Shaitan’s realm. Silence now, while I invoke Him to witness His triumph.”
The old man strode to the center of the room, raised his arms to the image of his Master on the dome overhead, and intoned a prayer.
“O Lord of Evil, great Shaitan, Thy humble servant brings thee now the great gift which he so long ago vowed to make Thee. The whole world and all its people I lay at thy feet, asking no reward, content but that Thou shall be glorified. I invoke that Thou accept this my offering!”
Did Dunton dream it, or did an unholy expression of evil triumph illumine the face of the fiend painted on the dome?
“And now to throw the master switch,” the priest turned toward the great board.
“Stop!” Dunton had leaped from his hiding place with his menacing automatic outthrust. “Stop, or I shoot!”
The startled priest stared incredulously at the sudden apparition. A moment of realization, then with a snarl of baffled rage he turned. With uncanny swiftness he seized Leila and swung her before him as a living shield. Then only he spoke—
“So, you think to defeat me in the very instant of realization. Shoot then, but your woman’s God will not let you shoot a woman even in his defense.” With this he commenced backing slowly toward the switch which would debase the globe.
Dunton was aghast. He must choose between killing his beloved and the ruin of the world. White-faced he tried to force his reeling brain to make the awful decision. But Leila was not quiescent. Frantically she beat and clawed at the old man’s face, frenziedly she kicked and struggled. That slight form seemed to be invested with a strength almost equal to the madman’s own. He reeled and staggered. Then with a final surge of desperate force she broke loose from the lama’s clutch—he fell with her fierce thrust. But as he fell, he reached for the switch—his hands grasped—not the switch but two huge terminals. A scream of agony—a blinding flash—a smell of burnt flesh—and an inert body dropped to the floor.
When the two saviors of the world somewhat recovered from the terrific strain of that scene, and determined that the arch-enemy was indeed dead, Dunton seized a small ebony chair and turned toward the intricate maze of apparatus. Leila detained him.
“What are you going to do, dear?”
“Smash up every bit of the hellish devices so that never again can anyone use them to menace civilization. I want to destroy every vestige of that product of distorted genius, and then forget even the little I know of its working!”
“But wait just a minute, John. Think first of those poor slaves whom we saw last night. They are still under the spell. If you destroy the apparatus now, they will remain forever in its power. Why not bring them back here first and release them?”
“You are right, dear heart. And now that I stop to think, only one of the old devil’s inventions is essentially evil. It would be a shame to destroy that marvelous transportation device—that at least is of tremendous value.
“Now let me see, there are the keys which will bring back those poor lost souls. ‘Turn this way’—he said.” And Dunton operated the switches he had pointed out.
“Now let’s get down into the garden. Good clean air will be most welcome after that cell, and all we have gone through in this horrible place.”
Again they entered the gorgeous garden. Beauty had been there before, but an evil beauty. Now the bright morning sun illumined a flowery fairyland whose fresh colors bespoke the beauty of Nature’s loveliness.
“Look there, dear—they are coming.”
Over the snowy caps of the towering peaks that rimmed the gardens, now appeared, one after another, what seemed huge birds. High in that illimitable blue they soared, then in great swooping spirals they descended. From every point of the compass they came, till the garden was again peopled with a throng of men of every race. Again they walked the garden with their lack-luster eyes.
When the sky was clear again, Dunton ascended again to the great hall. He found a sliding panel through which he could see the garden.
“How am I going to release them?” he pondered. He walked over to the tubes which he knew produced the nerve-vibration. Only two were glowing, the same two which had been lit when first he had beheld them.
“Hmm, perhaps these control the vibrations. I’ll chance it!” Picking up the ebony chair he had intended to use before, he sent it crashing through the glass of the two tubes. Then he leaped back to his lookout. Far below him he could see the crowd of men. But no longer were they moving about aimlessly, mechanically. Most were still, as if in bewilderment, but even from that great height the American could determine that there was no mechanical stiffness about the gestures of those who were not still.
Hastily he descended to the garden. It was true. Bewildered, wondering where they were and how they had been brought there, the erstwhile robots were human once again!
Little remains to be told. A
fter the explanation of what had occurred to them had finally penetrated the astounded minds of the freed ones, they aided Dunton with a will in obliterating that part of the lama’s apparatus which produced and controlled the nerve-vibrations. It was unanimously decided that the unbelievable tale should not be told to the world, and it was also voted that the transportation rays be not used until their operation had been thoroughly studied by qualified scientists.
The experience of the explorer stood all in good stead in organizing and conducting the return to civilization. Major Blakely’s astonished joy at the recovery of his long-lost daughter need not be described, as need not the simple ceremony which united the American explorer and the maiden.
One incident is, however, worthy of mention. As the long cavalcade struggled over the summit of a pass through the mountains guarding the gardens of the Tower of Evil, John and Leila intoned the immemorial phrase which every Tibetan voices as he reaches the highest point of his journey from one side of a mountain range to the other. Never had that phrase been more appropriate:—
“Lha Gvalo! De Tamche Pham.”
(The Gods win! The demons are defeated!)
The End
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The Menace from Andromeda,
by Arthur Leo Zagat & Nathan Schachner
Amazing April 1931
Novelette - 11023 words
With a puzzled frown, Donald Standish looked up from the photographic plates in front of him to the patch of dark blue heaven visible through the half-opened dome of the Mt. Wilson observatory. There floated the enigmatic nebula of Andromeda—the huge telescope probing directly toward it—as if to pluck out the very secret of its being. He arose, and paced the confines of the huge room. Under thirty, clean cut in features, he had already earned an enviable reputation as an astronomer, which had won him a coveted place in the world-famous observatory. From the very beginning, the great nebula had exercised a peculiar fascination over him. In some inexplicable way Standish had always felt that there lay the secret of the universe waiting for him in the role of a Perseus to deliver and bring forth.
In truth, many other contemplative observers had speculated about that faint, dusty patch of light sprawled athwart the enchained and enchanted body of the legendary daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia. For centuries men had pondered in vain, seeking the nature of the faint light-cloud which so persistently evaded their probings. It was not until recently, with the great advance in the manufacture and use of precision instruments and telephoto lenses, that the astounding truth had been revealed to startled astronomers—this faint glimmer in the skies is a great island universe of stars; far beyond the confines of our own galaxy—millions on millions of suns and attendant planets, careening through the outermost reaches of space-time, so inconceivably remote that a ray of light traveling 186,000 miles per second would take nearly a million years to reach the earth.
Standish turned once more to the sheaf of photographs. Yes—there was no doubt about it, the faint pin-prick of light labeled on the sky charts as 12478, which he had himself named Alcoreth, showed an unmistakable increase in brightness in this most recent of his photographs.
For over a year, on every clear night, he had photographed the great nebula. The minute pin-pricks of light, representing huge stars, had been laboriously ticketed and compared. This queer behavior on the part of Alcoreth, hitherto a placid, ordinary star, aroused his interest.
“Something interesting happening to the constellation of that old lady,” Donald remarked to himself, meditatively stroking his chin. “I’d better turn the prisms on her and see what’s going on in her innards to account for it.”
Deftly he adjusted the great spectroscope, and swung it on the errant orb. As he gazed, a startled “Whew” escaped him. These were not the spectral lines and bands customarily associated with hot gaseous stars in eruption.
“This is becoming more interesting—better verify it,” he thought. Quickly he took out his series of comparison spectra. None of them checked with this spectrum.
Again he arose, and paced the room. This was evidently not a burning sun. Apparently it was a relatively cold mass. What then was it? Was it shining by reflected light? But, he argued with himself, there was no sun within billions of miles to produce such a vast outpouring of reflected light. There must be some other cause for its luminosity. Excitedly Standish paced about. Luminescence—phosphorescence. This must be a world composed of some radio-active mineral! He strode back to the spectroscope. No, these were not the characteristic lines of any radio-active mineral known to science. Again he took up his restless pacing. The word phosphorescence brought to his mind pictures of the fields at night alive with the darting sparks of fireflies—of the forests, and the glow of rotting fungus and decaying wood—of the tropic seas under the Southern Cross, criss-crossed with pallid witch-fires.
He stopped in his tracks. By George, that was it! Life forms—protoplasm—under certain conditions would become strongly luminescent. But no—that was too fantastic for serious consideration. And yet—and yet. Try as he would to dismiss the thought from his mind, it occurred again and again, until it obsessed him. He must check it, and that this very minute.
In the course of his researches, Standish had discovered that by causing the light of luminous protoplasm to pass through a series of gases, the spectroscope was capable of resolving the constituent elements. As yet the process was a guarded secret, but the material was at hand.
With trembling hands the astronomer set up four thin walled transparent chambers, put into each a definite quantity of a rare gas—different for each chamber—attached them in series to the great spectroscope in such a fashion that the light from Alcoreth passed through them, before reaching the prisms that would cause it to yield up its secret.
“What an idiot I am to waste my time on such a crazy idea!” he scoffed aloud, at the same time looking around guiltily. “It’s damn foolish, all right, but what’s the odds. Let’s take a look-see.” He inserted a comparison spectrograph of the organic elements, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulphur and phosphorus—the essentials of life as we know it on this planet.
With elaborate carelessness, hardly masking his inner trepidation, he gazed into the aperture. The spectrum appeared. A quick look, a longer one, then a concentrated stare—a feverish scribbling of calculations—then he arose with a mighty shout, that echoed from the great white dome. “Eureka, I have found it!” The cry of Archimedes on making his famous discovery. The impossible was true. The life elements were all present on that distant star, and what was infinitely more, its spectrum showed the peculiar arrangement of lines and bands which his research had shown was invariably associated with living protoplasm.
His immediate impulse was to broadcast his discovery to the scientific world. But then a thought sobered him. So fantastic a theory would never be accepted unless supported by impregnable proof. Premature publication, and he would become a laughing-stock. No, he must wait until his spectroscopic research was perfected. In the meantime, keep on observing this strange new world.
For three weeks he took innumerable photographs, barely pausing for sleep and food. The star increased in brightness, then tiny streamers shot forth intermittently, then slowly it waned. From a fifteenth magnitude star it passed gradually down the scale, till finally a last plate failed to show any trace of it. Alcoreth was gone, and with her, Standish’s hope of everlasting fame.
The astronomer was in despair. How now could he convince the scoffers that he had witnessed the impossible—a world of living protoplasm! His proof was gone.
Yet, when he pondered over it—it did not seem impossible. Life—protoplasm—was only a particular combination of five or six elements. These elements are found throughout the universe. Was it inherently impossible, or even wildly improbable, for these elements to combine in some other world to form living matter, just as on our own earth various elements combined to form the rocks t
hat constitute the structure of the world?
So Standish argued, and thought wistfully of Douglas Cameron, his chum of college days, now a research worker on cancer in an isolated laboratory in the fastnesses of Colorado. He thought of Douglas and his sister and assistant Mary. Those two would listen to his tale of discovery. How he wished Mary was with him now! Well, another month and she would be with him always, his wife and helpmate. He could see her now, the laughing eyes, tilted nose, puckered lips. She was fair to look upon, his Mary, but wiry and strong, and behind that clear brow was a brain which made her fit sister to one scientist and wife to another.
“Well, to work again,” he sighed, and continued the search for living worlds.
Alcoreth heaved herself in long undulations that caused a plashing of luminous vibration in the surrounding ether. For Alcoreth was hungry. Eons of slow starvation stretched everlastingly ahead. Already huge vacuoles were dotting her interior, as the plasmic matter shrank and shriveled away. The food supply was disappearing—no more did rocky crags of green and purple hue rise above Alcoreth’s bosom. Only the inner core of minerals remained—and that was wearing dangerously thin over vast Alcorethean fires.
Never to be forgotten was that frightful time when, questing for food to still the retching hunger, she had greedily absorbed too large a section of life reaching bottom rock, and torn through the thin layer.
In an instant, the devastating flames had leaped and seared through the protoplasmic tissue. The very thought of it caused vast shudders to course through Alcoreth. For ages, the hellish fire spewed and roared—devouring, incinerating—bringing the tortures of the damned to her viscid frame. In agony, she heaved and twisted, but to no avail. Her sister spheres gazed on in helpless pity, but could render no aid. That final period—when annihilation seemed imminent—and almost welcome—a slipping of the rocky substratum had miraculously closed the gap, and once again imprisoned the ravaging fires. Slowly, painfully, and with difficulty, Alcoreth recreated sufficient plasma to cover the wounded surfaces; but her marvelous powers of reproduction were lessened. Since that fateful time, she only nibbled gingerly at the food rocks, and the pangs of hunger grew and grew.