“Lively, now,” said Ensign Wayton.
As captain, Lieutenant Carter had no questions to answer or reasons to give. He was glad of that. He had a competent officer in Ensign Wayton, who knew what to do if anything happened to his commander. And this was a job Lieutenant Carter could not relegate to anyone.
He faltered for an instant on the threshold of the burning Menace. It was not the heat which repelled him so much as the unwillingness to see again this dying little vessel which had been, until such a short time before, a well-ordered, shipshape example of what a United States Navy destroyer should be. Here, for two years, he had gone through the routines, the problems and the alternating bursts of good and bad news which had marked this campaign. He had been one with an alive, sensitive creature of steel and chromium and flame, and to enter her now was like walking upon the corpse of one’s friend. He had a feeling that she should be left alone, as she was, to die, still facing the enemy.
Lieutenant Carter stepped over the jagged sill of the hole which had been carved in the Saturnian. The need of haste was upon him now, both because the possibility of his getting through the flames before him required speed and because this was a hideous job, the better to be done quickly.
The first blast struck him when a gun charge fired somewhere on the deck nearby. He was catapulted against the steel bulkhead and stood there for an instant in the swirling yellow gloom, shaking his head and trying to recall what he was about. Anxiously, he gripped at the elusive facts, for he was badly stunned. Then, with clearing sight, he sped aft and up through the curling tongues which had already stripped the paint from the walls.
There was no resemblance to the trim little Menace in this twisted, blackened mess through which he drove himself. He tried to think there was not. He knew there was.
He fumbled in his bag for a grenade as he lurched through the painful fog and when he had it in his thick glove, it required much of his nerve to keep it with him, for tongues of fire were reaching at it, heating it.
He found the ladder to the engine room. The grease had burned away, and because it was hot, his shoes stuck tenaciously to the rungs as though the Menace, lonely, was trying for the company of her master in a last shiver of her death throes.
Lieutenant Carter could feel a throb which did not come from flames. He worked toward it. He seemed to be taking forever for this task. The air in his tank was already scalding his lungs. The ship’s oxygen tanks must be feeding these flames, and if that were so, then they might explode at any instant. They were close above him now.
He found the generators, still running furiously in all this heat, fed by the treble-protected batteries which made a boarding possible after a ship was in ruins. He hauled a plate from the first layer of armor and then groped through the second and third. That he tried to pull the pin of the grenade with his teeth recalled him into a calm and orderly chain of thought. He plucked at the pin with his glove-thick fingers and got it out. He dropped it upon the batteries and in the same motion spun about and staggered toward the ladder. The heat inside his suit was so intense now that he had to will himself to breathe, and each time he did he flinched as he felt his lungs shrink away.
He clawed through a hatch and scrambled down a passageway. Blind and groping, he found the door in the yellow smoke and stumbled through.
The jagged hole in the side of the Saturnian was just ahead of him, he knew. He could not see it. He sought along the plates with anxious fingers.
Abruptly, he was tumbling forward, breath knocked out of him by another exploding charge. Dazedly, he lifted his helmeted head.
There was a great sighing rush of smoke and fire and a mighty hand snatched him from the deck and slammed him against plates. Groggily, he fought again to rise and then fought even harder, for it would have been very comforting to slump and go out, with the hands of his sailors supporting him.
The smoke of the Menace had filled this compartment of the Saturnian. But there was no smoke here now. And there was no air. The empty vacuum was greedy and swelled out the spacesuits to their normal proportions. Where the Menace had been, there was now only a gaping black hole. Once her generators, which kept the grapnels alive, had been shorted out, the furious efforts of upper gunners in the Saturnian had at last succeeded in blowing her away from the side.
Ensign Wayton was grinning through his transparent helmet when he had at last ascertained that his captain was safe and not seriously hurt.
Through the phones, Ensign Wayton said, “Sir, we have carved our way through the bulkheads into their after bridge. We have lost but three men. Your orders?”
“Yes,” said Lieutenant Carter. “Yes, of course.” He shook his head vigorously to clear it. “Well done, Mr. Wayton.” Then thought took over from mechanical form and with a glad surge he gripped his officer by the shoulder. “Quick! Open their compartments! Open their compartments!”
The idea flooded in upon Ensign Wayton. It was less than twenty feet up to the hole their jets had carved into the bridge deck. The one dead sailor from the Menace and the officer and two quartermasters of the Saturnian were bloated, even exploded, into no semblance of humanity or Saturnity. The CPO, who held the fort there belligerently, cut away at the bulkhead with his jet and suddenly a great gust of air and equipment shot him back.
Ensign Wayton steadied himself at the compartment board and began to open the switches. Some of them were frozen and he realized that the master panel was on the forward bridge. The compartments went shut and their lights began to go out. An officer up there was thinking fast. Ensign Wayton thought faster. He snatched at the auxiliary voice tube caps and yanked them. Into the holes he poured a dozen flame shots. A scream of air, loud enough to penetrate the thick space helmets, greeted his action. The hurricane which came through the voice tubes from the forward bridge knocked him backward. The master panel had been cut in. Suddenly all panel lights glowed on the auxiliary board as lack of air pressure on the forward bridge threw control aft. With swift hands, Ensign Wayton switched the compartments open throughout the ship and a shuddering wail went through the vessel, every plate trembling as the life poured from her. Those suits, denied the Saturnians to ensure their fighting to the last compartment, had cost her, finally and forever, her crew.
Lieutenant Carter, beside his officer, spoke on the general-order frequency of his helmet. “Attention. Proceed carefully through the vessel and clean out anyone left in her.” He turned to Ensign Wayton. “Take over, Mr. Wayton.”
Seating himself at the communicator, Lieutenant Carter’s eyes were vague with thoughtfulness. Absently, he commented that Washington’s onetime predilection for trading patents was not without benefit, for this communicator panel might have borne the stamp of Bell Radiophone for its similarity.
He knew he should feel jubilant, knew that he should savor this report to the battle fleet, knew that victory and triumph were personally his. But, somehow, he had ashes on his tongue and the words he tried to arrange in his mind were dull, gray things.
He was thinking now of the Menace. In the letdown which had followed this battle, he knew he would think of her more and more. Proud, arrogant little space can, smashed by the insensate hates of a space war, drifting a derelict, a battered sacrifice to her pride, a dead cold thing lost in the immensity, to be shunned by all vessels who sighted her as a navigational risk.
There was victory but there was no victory. He could not think of a proper report, one which would measure up to the little scrap of history they had made. This story would be told in wardrooms for many years, how the little space can took on two larger than she, how she had saved the supply vessels of the battle fleet and how she had died in the saving. Lieutenant Carter could not see the panel clearly and was annoyed with himself. He flung away from it and the reports which were coming to him now concerning the state of the Saturnian, reports which were good, had only a routine meaning. They reached his ears, his official mind, but they went no deeper.
There was
a slight jar through the ship, a thing which required no explanation but which seemed to herald something electric. Lieutenant Carter glanced about him. He swung down the ladder to the lower gun room and glanced questioningly at the sentry stationed by the jagged hole in the Saturnian’s hull.
And then Carter froze.
For the hole was no longer empty! Had he dreamed that he got the Menace away from there? Had it been possible that she would not have herself abandoned?
There she was, the Menace! With her shattered bow pushed up into position and the fire-scarred depths of her clear of flame, she bumped gently against her conquered enemy.
And as Lieutenant Carter stared, he saw a man in a spacesuit moving toward him out of the shattered ship, followed by yet another.
Lieutenant Carter started and then quickly composed himself by pushing away the surge of elation which coursed through him.
The man in the spacesuit saluted. “Ensign Gates, sir. Fire shorted our conduits and cut us off. As soon as we dressed and opened the after bridge, we had things under control there. When the air went out of her hull, the fires stopped. She isn’t in such bad shape, sir. Your orders?”
Lieutenant Carter saw through a strange mistiness and carefully pitched his voice for calmness. “Very good, Mr. Gates. You will take charge of the repair parties as soon as we get air back into these ships.” He returned his engineering officer’s salute with unusual smartness.
Gently, the little Menace nudged her battered nose against the hull of her conquered enemy as though to remind the Saturnian that a ship, even when shot half to hell, should never be considered in any light save that of a dangerous adversary. For an instant Carter was startled into a belief that the Menace was laughing, and then he saw that the sound issued from his phones and was sourced aloft where Gates and Wayton were gladly greeting each other. It amused him to think that his ship could laugh, for the fact was most ridiculous. Or was it?—he asked himself suddenly. Or was it?
The Beast
The Beast
THE crash and the scream which reverberated through the stinking gloom of the Venusian night brought Ginger Cranston to a startled halt upon the trail, held there for an instant by the swirl of panicked blues which made up the safari of the white hunter.
Something had happened to the head of the line, something sudden, inexplicable in this foggy blackness.
Ginger Cranston did not long remain motionless, for the blues had dumped their packages and had vanished, leaving the narrow trail, which wandered aimlessly through the giant trees, clear of men.
He took one step forward, gun balanced at ready in the crook of his arm, and then the thing happened to him which would make his life a nightmare.
From above and behind something struck him, struck him with a fury and a savageness which sent him flat into the muck, which began to claw and rake and beat at him with a singleness of intent which would have no ending short of death.
The white hunter rolled in the slime and beat back with futile fists, kicking out with his heavy boots, smothering under the gagging odor of a wild animal, so strong that it penetrated through the filters of his swamp mask, the only thing which was saving his face from the sabers this thing had for claws.
Fighting it back, the hunter’s hands could find no grip upon the slimy fur; he could see nothing of it because of the dark and the fact that the blues had dropped their torches to a man. Ginger luridly cursed the blues, cursed this thing, cursed the muck and the agony which was being hammered into him.
He lurched to his knees, striking out blindly with all his might. The thing was driven back from him for an instant and Ginger’s hands raked the mud around him for some weapon, preferably his lost gun. When he could not find it he leaped all the way to his feet and ripped away the swamp mask. He could not see. He could hear the snarling grunts of the thing as it gathered itself for a second charge.
Something in the unexpectedness of the attack, something in the ferocity of the beast, shook Ginger’s courage, a courage which was a byword where hunters gathered. For a moment he could think of nothing but trying to escape this death which would again be upon him in an instant. He whirled and fumbled his way through the trees. If he could find some place where he could make a stand, if he could grasp a precious instant to get out and unclasp his knife—
There was a roaring sound hard by, the sound of battered water. Ginger knew this continent better than to go so far off a trail and he knew he must here make that stand. He gathered his courage about him like armor. He unclasped the knife. He could feel the beast not two yards away from him, but in the dense gloom he could not see anything but the vague shapes of trees.
It struck. It struck from behind with a strength which brought them crashing into the mud and branches. One cruel paw was crooked to feel out with its sabers the eyes of its victim, the others scored Ginger’s back and side.
Rolling in a red agony, strong beyond any past strength, Ginger tried to slam his assailant back against a tree. He could not grip the slimy, elusive paw but he could brace it away from him with his forearm.
A roaring sound was loud in Ginger’s ears and before he could halt the last roll he had managed, beast and hunter were over the lip and into black and greedy space. A shattering cry came from the beast as it fell away.
Ginger tried to see, tried to twist in the air and then he was gagged by the thick syrup of the depths and twisted like a chip in the strength of a whirlpool. He struck upward and then could not orient himself. His lungs began to burn and the syrup of the river seared his throat. The whirlpool flung him out, battered him against a rock and then left him to crawl, stunned and aching, from the stream.
He lay on the rocks, deafened by the roar of the water, trying to find strength enough to scan the space around him in search of the beast.
Two hours later the frightened blues, grouped in a hollow ring for security, found the white hunter by the river and placed him in a sling. One of the trackers nervously examined a nearby track and then cried, “Da juju! Da juju!” Hastily the carriers lifted the sling and bore its inert burden back to the trail and along it to the village which had been Ginger Cranston’s goal.
Ginger Cranston woke slowly into the oppressive odor of a blue village from the tangled terror of his dreams. The heated ink of the Venusian night eddied through his tent, clung clammily to his face, smothered the native fires which burned across the clearing. Ginger Cranston woke into a new sensation, a feeling of loss, and for a little while could not bring organization into thought. It was hard for him to bring back the successive shocks which had placed him here, helpless in this bed, and he began to know things which it had never before occurred to him that it would be important to know.
He had always been a brave man. As government hunter of this continent, relentlessly wiping out the ponderous and stupid game which threatened the settlements and their crops, he had been considered all about as a man without peer in the lists of courage. So certain had he been in his possession of this confidence that he had never wondered about fear, had found only contempt for those who were so weak as to feel that lowly emotion.
And now Ginger Cranston woke up afraid.
The shocks, wreaked upon another, would have brought madness. To have been struck twice from behind by a raging beast, to have tasted death between the claws of such fury, would have wrecked the usual nervous system. But Ginger Cranston was not a usual person and, never having been other than his gay, confident self, he had no standards.
He had lost his courage.
In its place was a sick nausea.
And Ginger Cranston, out of shame, was no help to himself but stood away from his battered body and gazed with lip-curled contempt upon this sniveling hulk, which shook at the brink of recalling that which had brought this about. He had no sympathy for himself and had no reasons with which to excuse his state.
He was ill and his spirits, as in anyone ill, were low. He had been expecting the same stupid, many-tonned brutes
which he had thought to constitute the only game of this continent. He had been set upon by a thing wholly unknown to him at a time when he had expected nothing and he had been mauled badly in the process. But he offered himself none of these. He was afraid, afraid of an unknown, cunning something, the memory of which was real in this dark tent.
“Ambu!” he yelled.
A Venusian of wary step and worried eyes slunk into the tent. Ambu had done his bungling best with these wounds, hurling the offer of help back into the teeth of the village doctor—a person who preferred a ghost rattle to a bottle of iodine. Ambu was of uncertain age, uncertain bearing. He was half in and half out of two worlds—that of the whites in Yorkville on the coast, that of the blues in the somber depths of this continent. He believed in ghosts. But he knew that iodine prevented infection. He belonged to a white, had been indifferently schooled by the whites. But he was a blue.
Ambu hung the lantern on the pole of the tent and looked uneasily at his white man. He was not encouraged by that strange expression in the hunter’s eyes, but the fact that Lord Ginger had come back to consciousness was cheering.
Ginger was feeling a strange relief at having light. He smiled unconvincingly. When he spoke his voice was carefully controlled.
“Well, Ambu! I’m not dead yet, you see.”
“Ambu is very happy, Lord Ginger.” He looked worried.
“What . . . er . . . what happened out there when . . . well, what happened?” said Ginger with another smile.
Ambu looked into the dark corners of the tent, looked out into the compound and then sank on his dull haunches at the side of the cot.
“Devils,” said Ambu.
“Nonsense,” said Ginger in careful carelessness.
“Devils,” said Ambu. “There was a pit. I have never before seen such a pit. It was dug deep with claw marks on the digging. It was covered over with branches and mud like a roof; when the trackers stepped upon it they fell through. There were sharpened stakes at the bottom to receive them. They do not live, Lord Ginger.”
The Scifi & Fantasy Collection Page 24