Through a special process the tremendously powerful current was forced through the wide-angled nozzle in a spreading thin plate ray that sheared through earth and rock and metals as if they were butter.
Such was the machine we were after.
It was but the work of a few seconds to smash the delicate television and sono-boxes placed on the top of every machine. Now we were sure no warning could be given the master machine as it sat in its metallic cunning at the control board, ceaselessly receiving its messages from the area apparatus focused above it.
Quietly, very quietly, we trundled the precious instrument along on its wheel base. The green lights dotted the sky above: the search-rays were firmly set on the rim.
At last, without any untoward alarm, we reached the welcome shelter of the base, but not, as I had expected, back to our tunnel. On the contrary, Keston, who had directed the party, had led us almost a quarter mile away. I looked up again, and understood.
The great overhang of the Glacier was directly above us!
Without a word, with hardly a sound, we trundled the disintegrator into a natural niche we found in the icy surface. It was almost completely hidden; only the funnel with its lens protruded into the open. The nozzle orifice was pointing directly at the interior of the ice pack.
“Now everything is set properly,” Keston remarked with satisfaction as he straightened up from adjusting the various controls on the machine. “When the first ray of the morning sun strikes the lens, the disintegrator will start working. It will shear through a layer of ice over a radius of at least a mile. That huge crevasse, coupled with the terrific heat and the pressure from the mountain of ice above, will start the whole Glacier moving, or I’ll be very much mistaken.”
“Come, let us get back to our shelter before the alarm is given.”
As he started to move, a dark bulk loomed ominously in front of us—Abud. His voice was harsh, forbidding.
“Do you mean to say nothing further is to be done here—that the disintegrator will work without any attention?”
“That is just what I said,” Keston replied, somewhat surprised. “Step aside, Abud, and let us go. It is dangerous to remain here.”
But Abud made no move to comply. Instead he thrust back his great shaggy head and gave vent to a resounding laugh.
“Ho-ho, my fine friends! So you were the brainy ones, eh? And Abud, the obedient dull-wit again? How nicely you’ve been fooled! I waited until you accommodatingly evolved the plan to reconquer the world, and put it into effect.
“Now that you’ve done so, I’ve no further need for you.” The voice that heavily tried to be mocking, now snarled. “You poor fools, don’t you know that with you out of the way, I, Abud, will be the Lord of the World. Those prolats up there know better than to disobey me.”
“Do you mean you intend to kill us?” Keston asked incredulously.
“So you’ve actually grasped the idea!” was the sarcastic retort.
Meanwhile I was gradually edging to the side, my hand reaching for the bone knife in my bosom.
Abud saw my movement. “No, you don’t!” he roared, and sprang for me, his long gleaming knife uplifted. I tugged desperately at my weapon, but it was entangled in the ragged furs. In a moment he was on top of me. Involuntarily I raised my arm to ward off the threatened blow, raging despair in my heart.
The point fell, but Keston struck at the savage arm with all his might, deflecting the blade just in time. It seared my shoulder like a red hot iron, and in the next instant all three of us were a rolling, kicking, snarling trio of animals. We fought desperately in the dark. There were no rules of the game. Biting, gouging, kicking—everything went.
Keston and I, weakened as we were from long starvation and the biting cold, were no match for our powerful, huge-muscled opponent, well clad and well nourished as he was. Though we fought with the strength of despair, a violent blow from his huge fist knocked Keston out of the fight. Hairy fingers grasped my throat. “I’ll break your neck for you,” he snarled, and his hands tightened. I struggled weakly, but I was helpless. I could just see his hateful face grinning at my contortions.
I was passing out—slowly, horribly. Keston was still motionless. Colored lights danced before my eyes, little spots that flared and died out in crashing blackness. Then the whole world leaped into a flaming white, so that my eyeballs hurt. In the dim recesses of my pain-swept mind I thought that strangulation must end like this. The brightness held dazzlingly.
But suddenly a fiercer pain swept into my consciousness—the pain of gasping breath forcing air through a tortured gullet into suffocating lungs.
I struggled up into the fierce illumination. From a sitting position I saw Abud, now clearly visible as in midday, craning his head way back. I looked, too—and, in spite of my stabbing gasps for air, jumped to my feet. The search-rays from the scout planes were focused directly on us!
I knew what that meant. The sight of us was even then being cast upon the 2-RX visor-screen in the Central Control Station. The devilish master machine was even then manipulating the proper buttons. We had not a second to lose!
My strangled throat hurt horribly, but I managed a hoarse yell, “Run!” and I tottered to where Keston yet lay, bathed in the deadly illumination, unmoving.
There was a snarl of animal fear from Abud, and he started to run, wildly, with never a backward glance at us.
Even in my own fear, expecting each instant the crash of terminite about me, I managed to hurl a last word at the fleeing figure. “Coward!” That relieved my feelings considerably.
I tottered over and tugged at Keston. He was limp. I looked up. Hundreds of planes were converging overhead; the night was a criss-cross of stabbing search-rays. I lifted my friend and slung him across my shoulder. Every exertion, every move, was accompanied by excruciating agony, but I persevered. Abud was already halfway to the tunnel, running like mad.
Then, what I had dreaded, happened. There came a swoosh through the night, a dull thud, a blinding flash and roar that paled the search-rays into insignificance. The first terminite bomb had been dropped!
For a moment the landscape was filled with flying rocks and huge chunks of ice. When the great clouds of violently up-thrown earth had settled, there was no sign of Abud. He had been directly in the path of the explosion!
Staggering under my load, I headed as close to the ice pack as I could. There was no safety out in the open. I groaned heavily past the disintegrator, whose very existence I had forgotten in the crash of events.
A sizzling hum, a thin eddy of steam, halted me in my tracks. I stared. The machine was working! Even as I watched, a great wedge was momentarily being driven further and further into the ice—a great fan-shaped wedge. Clouds of steam billowed out, growing thicker and heavier. A rushing stream of unleashed water was lapping at my feet.
I was bewildered, frankly so. What had started the disintegrator in the dead of night? “Of course!” I shouted exultantly to the limp body on my shoulder.
For a search-ray was fixed steadily on the funnel. There it was. From that blinding light the machine was getting the energy it needed. If only the visor did not disclose that little bit of metal to the unwinking master machine! I looked again and took heart. It was almost undistinguishable against the dazzling blur of ice in the fierce white light. If those rays held, the salvation of the world was assured!
There was only one way to do it. I shrank at my own thoughts, yet there was no alternative: it must be done. I was hidden from the rays under a projection of ice, terminite bombs were dropping methodically over a rapidly devastated sector with methodical regularity. Sooner or later the master machine would feel that we were exterminated, and the search-rays switched off. That would mean that the disintegrator would cease working, and the whole plan fall through. In the morning light, the sector signaling apparatus, at the first sign of renewed activity, would give warning, and the unhuman thing of metal at the controls wo
uld discover and wreck our last hope.
No, I must walk boldly into the bombed area and discover myself as alive in the visors of the planes and make them continue to bomb and throw their search-rays on the scarred plain. That meant the disintegrator would receive the vital light.
But how about Keston? I couldn’t leave him there on the ground, motionless, while I deserted him. Nor could I take him with me. I was prepared to take my chances with almost certain death, but I could not trifle with his life so. I was in an agony of indecision.
Just then the form on my aching shoulder stirred, sighed, struggled a bit, and suddenly slid down to a standing position. Keston swayed unsteadily a moment, straightened, looked about him in amazement.
“What’s happening here?” he demanded.
“Why, you old war horse,” I shouted in my relief, “I thought you were out of the picture completely!”
“Not me,” he answered indignantly. “I’m all right. But you haven’t answered my question.”
A terminite bomb exploded not so far away from where we stood. I ducked involuntarily, Keston doing likewise.
“There’s the answer,” I grinned, “and a rather neat one, too. But I’ll explain.”
In a few words I sketched what had happened, and showed him the disintegrator spreading its deadly waves of destruction. By now there was a torrent enveloping us up to our knees. We would have to move soon, or be drowned in the slowly rising water.
Then, hesitatingly, I told him of my scheme to keep the search-rays in action. His lean face sobered, but he nodded his head bravely. “Of course, that is the only way to keep them at it. You and I will start at once, in separate directions, so that if they get one, the other will continue to draw the search-rays down on the plain, and into the disintegrator.”
“Not you, Keston,” I dissented in alarm. “Your life is too valuable. Your brain and skill will be needed to remodel the world and make it habitable for the few prolats that are left, after the machines are wiped out.”
“You’re just as valuable a man as I am,” he lied affectionately. “No, my mind is made up. We chance this together.” And to all my pleadings he was obdurate, insisting that we each take an equal risk.
I gave in at last, with a little choke in my throat. We shook hands with a steady grip, and walked out into the glare of light, on divergent paths. Would I ever see my friend again?
There was a pause of seconds as I walked on and on; came then an earth-shattering crash that flung me to the ground. The visors had caught the picture of me! I picked myself up, bruised and sore, but otherwise unharmed. I started to run.
The sky was a blaze of zooming planes that hurled destruction on the land below. Far off could be heard the rumbling roar of hurrying machines—tractors, diggers, disintegrators, levelers, all the mighty mobile masses of metal that man’s brain had conceived—all hurrying forward in massed attack to seek out and destroy their creators, obedient to the will of a master machine, immobile, pressing buttons in the Central Control System.
The night resolved itself into a weird phantasmagoric nightmare for me, a gigantic game of hide-and-seek, in which I was “it.” Gasping, choking, flung to earth and stunned by ear-shattering explosions, staggering up somehow, ducking to avoid being crushed beneath the ponderous treads of metal monsters that plunged uncannily for me, sobbing aloud in terror, swerving just in time from in front of a swinging crane, instinctively side-stepping just as a pale violet ray swept into nothingness all before it—I must have been delirious, for I retain only the vaguest memory of the horror.
And all the time the guiding search-rays biased down upon the torn and shattered fields, and the disintegrator, unnoticed in the vast uproar, steadily kept up its deadly work.
At last, in my delirium and terror, I heard a great rending and tearing. I looked up, and a tractor just missed me as it rolled by on swishing treads. But that one glance was enough. The ice cap was moving, flowing forward, a thousand-foot wall of ice! Great billowing clouds of steam spurted from innumerable cracks. The deed had been done! The world was saved for mankind!
Summoning the last ounce of strength, I set off on a steady run for the shelter of the rock cave, to be out of the way when the final smash-up came.
I was not pursued. The ponderous machines, thousands of them, were hastily forming into solid ranks directly in front of the tottering glacier wall. The master machine had seen its impending fate in the visors, and was organizing a defense.
Even in my elation, I could not but feel unwilling admiration for this monstrous thing of metal and quartz, imbued with an intelligence that could think more coolly and quickly than most humans.
Yet I did not stop running until I reached the cave. My heart gave a great bound. For there, peering anxiously with worn face into the growing dawn, stood the figure of Keston—my friend whom I had never expected to see alive again.
“Meron!” he shouted. “Is it you—or your ghost?”
“The very question I was about to ask you,” I parried. “But look, old friend: see what your genius has accomplished—and is now destroying.”
The mountain of ice was flowing forward, gathering speed on the way. At an invisible signal, the massed machines—thousands on thousands of them—started into action. Like shock troops in a last desperate assault they ground forward, a serried line that exactly paralleled the threatened break, and hundreds deep. This old earth of ours had never witnessed so awe-inspiring a sight.
They smashed into that moving wall of ice with the force of uncounted millions of tons. We could hear the groaning and straining of furiously turning machinery as they heaved.
Keston and I looked at each other in amazement. The master machine was trying to hold back the mighty Glacier by the sheer power of its cohorts!
A wild light sprang into Keston’s eye—of admiration, of regret. “What a thing is this that I created!” he muttered. “If only—” I truly believe that for a moment he half desired to see his brain-child triumph.
The air was hideous with a thousand noises. The Glacier wall was cracking and splitting with the noise of thunderclaps; the machines were whirring and banging and crashing. It was a gallant effort!
But the towering ice wall was not to be denied. Forward, ever forward, it moved, pushing inexorably the struggling machines before it, piling them up high upon one another, grinding into powder the front ranks.
And to cap it all, the huge overhang, a thousand feet high, was swaying crazily and describing ever greater arcs.
“Look!” I screamed and flung up my arm. Great freight planes were flying wing-to-wing, head-on for the tottering crag—deliberately smashing into the topmost point.
“Trying to knock it back into equilibrium!” said Keston, eyes ablaze, dancing about insanely.
But the last suicidal push did not avail. With screams as of a thousand devils and deafening rending roars, the whole side of the Glacier seemed to lean over and fall in a great earth-shattering crescendo of noise.
While we watched, fascinated, rooted to the ground, that thousand feet of glittering wall described a tremendous arc, swinging with increasing momentum down, down, down to the earth it had so long been separated from.
The clamoring machines were buried under, lost in a swirl of ice and snow. Only the Central Station remained, a few moments defiant under the swift onrush of its unfeeling foe.
With a crash that could have been heard around the world, the uppermost crag struck the Station. The giant Glacier wall was down. The earth, the sky, the universe was filled with ice, broken, shattered, torn, splintered, vaporized!
The ground beneath our feet heaved and tumbled in violent quake. We were thrown heavily—and I knew no more…
I weltered out of unconsciousness. Keston was chafing my hands and rubbing my forehead with ice. He smiled wanly to find me still alive. Weak and battered, I struggled to my feet.
Before me was a wilderness of ice, a new mountain range o
f gigantic tumbled blocks of dazzling purity. Of the embattled machines, of the Central Control Station, there was not a sign. They were buried forever under hundreds of feet of frozen water.
I turned to Keston and shook his hand. “You’ve won; you’ve saved the world. Now let’s get the prolats and start to rebuild.”
There was no trace of exultation in Keston’s voice. Instead, he unaccountably sighed as we trudged up a narrow winding path to the top. “Yes,” he said half to himself, “I’ve done it. But…”
“But what?” I asked curiously.
“That beautiful, wonderful machine I created!” he burst forth in sudden passion. “To think that it should lie down there, destroyed, a twisted mass of scrap metal and broken glass!”
The End
****************************
Venus Mines, Incorporated,
by Arthur Leo Zagat & Nathan Schachner
Wonder Stories Aug. 1931
Novelette - 10896 words
CHAPTER I
New Projector
“Hello, hello, hello—Chris, do you hear me?—hello, hello, hello!” Arnim Penger slammed down the teletalker and turned to his companion. “No answer yet.”
“It’s queer, all right, Mr. Penger. But what’s there to worry about? We got Mr. Bell’s message that he was back from his exploratory trip hours ago. And there’s nothing could happen to him at the post, is there? He wasn’t to start trading until tomorrow, so he must have had his Curtain charged and no Venusians in the enclosure. Besides, they’re a pretty harmless lot, anyway.”
Space Lawyers: A Collaborative Collection Page 19