The Collected Stories

by Earl

  “Save your—breath!” admonished Dos-Tav. “Knowledge cannot help us now.”

  “To the glory and honor of Lemnis!” suddenly came from Bullo. “And may Kruaz some day be the torment of that Wrongness of Space!”

  A gamma bomb arced up gracefully and fell full upon the advancing hordes of fire-breathing monsters, to rain all about the place a crystalline mass of debris.

  Dos-Tev knew they could not hold out much longer. The unending stream of metalloid, glinting pyro-creatures, the very spawn of an earthly hell, showed no signs of backing down. The young prince, with a prayer to Tor on his lips, swung his force-plane projector wherever blood-shot eyes saw movement. Suddenly a gigantic figure loomed over the bodies of slain beasts and tumbled at him. The projector ray severed part of trunk, but with amazing vitality the monster reached down an incredibly long claw arm and raked his talons at the man. Dos-Tev felt a violent concussion that threw him bodily against the trunk of another dead beast. It was like being rammed by a cannon-ball and then thrown up against a steel wall. Dos-Tev felt a blackness come over him and he resigned his soul to Tor.

  But he was not dead, and came to consciousness finding himself supported by Bullo in a sitting position.

  “Dos-Tev! Wake up,” the anguished face of Bullo came to him, “the beasts have gone temporarily! We are free!”

  The prince of Lemnis shook his head, which ached throbbingly, and looked up to see Mea-Quin busily taking apart his projector.

  “The awful punishment we wreaked on them,” went on Bullo, overjoyed at seeing his beloved prince conscious and unharmed, “finally beat them back, thank Tor, and I fear none too soon. Seeing you fly off your feet from the blow of that long-armed demon, it seemed an example of what would soon happen to all of us. Then quite suddenly, as I leaped to protect your fallen body, I found nothing before the sweep of my rays.”

  Dos-Tev struggled to his feet with the help of Bullo. “Ayhuu, that was a hearty blow, but my bones are sound and the space suit must be yet intact or I would not be breathing.”

  “You would be breathing,” supplemented Mea-Quin, “but the gasses filling your lungs would quickly bring asphyxiation. Those crystalline pyro-creatures exhaust probably the same products as combustion engines, including carbon monoxide.”

  Even now as they looked around, they saw numerous puffs of smoky vapors issuing from carbon blackened vents amongst the monsters who were wounded but not yet dead. Here and there steel-like claws attached to thin piston rod arms yet moved spasmodically. Dos-Tev shuddered. What fearsome creatures, embodying the enormous strength and power of machinery with its practical indestructibility. Any ordinary weapon would have been laughably inadequate against their numberless might. Only the giant powered force-plane projector, designed to wipe out space ships and capable of volatilizing even meteors, had saved them from instant annihilation.

  “And you,” said Dos-Tev, turning to Mea-Quin, “what are you doing?”

  Busily, almost frantically, Mea-Quin was engaged with the inside of his projector. “You remember,” returned the scientist, still panting from the exertions of battle, “I said the Wrongness of Space had given me food for thought with what he told us of dimension-traveling.”

  “But what are you doing tampering with one of our weapons?” queried the prince, puzzled. “Tor help us if the beasts attack again while we have only two projectors in use.”

  Mea-Quin’s voice came back anguished. “Ayhuu, gods forbid that happen! Our only hope is that they give us long enough respite that I may finish this. Bullo, do you go to the top of that heap of bodies, the highest point, and keep a weather eye open for attack. But wait—first give me your projector.”

  Bullo left obediently and Dos-Tev, sensing that the scientist was working out something important with the projectors, watched avidly as Mea-Quin extracted the atomic valve unit with its precious vial of radioactive material from Bullo’s weapon and held it in his gauntleted fingers.

  “Bullo!” call the scientist. “Is all clear around us?”

  The giant Lemnisian, perched astride the twisted body of a beast atop a fuming heap of devastated monsters, looked carefully around thru the eddying fogs of amber that seemed an integral part of this queer world. “I see none of the beasts, Sire. Yet they may be no more than five hundred yards away, what with this thrice damned yellow fog to obscure the landscape.”

  “We will have to take a chance,” muttered Mea-Quin. “If only I had my hands free!—this way, with these clumsy gauntlets, it may take fifteen minutes. Dos-Tev, give me the atomic valve of your weapon.”

  “Now we are completely at their mercy,” said the prince. “You are making, I suppose, a triple-powered projector with completely circling rays?”

  “No. More than that. I am preparing a means of escape from this world—from this universe!”

  The prince gasped. Mea-Quin went on: “I must concentrate on this work now. Forgive me if I withhold explanation till after it is done and proves its worth—or uselessness.”

  For long minutes the greatest scientist of Lemnis pecked with clumsy, but sure, metal-meshed fingers at the inner mechanism of the projector, inserting in the one casing both power-units of his companions’ weapons. It was a trying ordeal, as they could not know but what any moment the ferocious, nightmare monsters might again charge upon them. Bullo, most endangered of all, fidgeted uneasily and more than once almost cried a warning as the writhing vapors seemed to darken with dreaded shapes. But they were tricks of his apprehensive eyes.

  Finally Mea-Quin straightened from his labors. “It is done! Pray Tor it succeeds as I hope it to. Now I will explain. The Wrongness of Space in his arrant boasting, unwittingly revealed to me the secret of fourth dimensional travel. Like a flash is came to me. Perhaps he underestimated my scientific understanding.” He smiled grimly to himself. On far off Lemnis the science of Mea-Quin was almost proverbial. “Anyway, you remember his statement that a certain force, applied in a certain way, can cast the matter in its vicinity from its normal three dimensions into a fourth and therefore into a different dimensional universe. Even when you, Dos-Tev, with the latnem thought isolation helmet, conceived and built the first projector at the nose of our ship, I had a faint glimmering there that the ray-force it produced was singular in its properties. Its ability to produce anarchy of motion, dissipate momentum as radiation, and release the kinetic energy of crystalline matter is—”

  “I see, I see!” the prince burst in. “The very elements of dimension transmutation! Long suspected in Lemnisian science, and here at our fingertips. But wait! It is still only a destructive force unless applied as a warping strain in the ether. How will we do that? Krzza knows the secret, but—”

  “Ah, but we do!” interrupted Mea-Quin. “That too came to me in a flash of understanding. The Flatlander analogy—if in Flatland this sort of energy which can reorganize matter were applied at right angles to their plane of existence, it becomes a force capable of throwing its possessor out of his normal dimensions. If we, in turn, can apply this projector’s energy out of our normal three dimensions—”

  “And how will that be done?” asked the prince hopelessly. “To us there is no conception of any but three dimensions as far as our senses indicate. It is the big obstacle to our duplicating the Wrongness of Space’s maneuvers in the fourth dimension.”

  “Ayhuu, what he can do, we can do. Look at the ground beneath our feet. Is it soil? No. No plant grows, no grass. It is not siliceous matter, but metallic! Ideal for our purpose.”

  “I see again!” answered the prince. “If the projector is buried nose down in this richly metallic soil, its ray will meet such sudden opposition that it will produce the very ether strain we desire.”

  “And all the matter within its influence, which will be for yards, would then be thrown out, erupted one might say, into the fourth dimension. That is, if our force is powerful enough. We have depleted the atomic valves a great deal in our battle. The oscillator tube has blackened d
angerously. It is but a gamble—”

  “But a gamble we must take,” supplied the prince calmly. “Here we are faced with eventual doom, whereas—”

  “Sires!” the voice of Bullo sounded ominously excited in their earphones, “they come! I see masses looming in the distance!”

  “Bullo, come and come quickly.”

  By the Bullo had reached them, Dos-Tev had dug a hole in the hard ground with the handle of one of the discarded projector cases, and Mea-Quin quickly buried the triple powered projector with only its handle and levers protruding.

  How crude and futile it looked as an instrument that should whisk them into the fourth dimension, yet the three Lemnisians hovered around it eagerly, holding hands and belts, like lost creatures warming themselves over tiny fire. Hardly had they set themselves and mumbled prayers for success than the vanguard of the attackers shoved fearsome, vaporing heads and gargantuan talons over the rampart of their dead fellows.

  Mea-Quin shoved over the lever viciously. In an instant they would know escape or sudden death.

  Dos-Tev saw a dragon-like monster rush at him with slavering jaws, flames darting from blackened nostrils. Great claws reached for him, swung hissingly toward his face. Then, like the closing of a door, the vision disappeared. There was a moment of intense pain; every nerve cried aloud. His body seemed in the center of a grist-mill. Then came a violent wrench that all but jerked his grip loose from Mea-Quin’s belt. His eyes closed in giddiness, and then opened when the welcome voice of the scientist drummed to his ears.

  “We made it! Ayhuu, Tor be praised!”

  “But—but this is not our universe!” cried Dos-Tev, opening his eyes to see a strange firmament, whose sparse stars gleamed with strange hues.

  “Indeed not,” agreed Mea-Quin calmly. “The Wrongness of Space isolated us in a universe many times removed, so to speak, from ours.”

  “Then what good has our escape from the monsters done us? Here we are isolated in the void of an alien world!”

  “Have patience and hope,” returned Mea-Quin unperturbedly. There was a note of exultation in his voice. The feat of traversing the fourth dimension was a balm to his scientific soul, even tho his lot might be no better than before. “Notice,” he continued, “that along with us came a good section of the metallic earth of the monster world, as I foresaw. We have but to repeat the process and project ourselves into another universe and then another and then another, till, if Tor be with us, we shall find our own. Our apparatus is not as refined and trustworthy as that of the Wrongness of Space, but it will do the trick, nevertheless.”

  “That means then, sire,” interposed Bullo, “that we are like mariners on an uncharted sea, skipping from island to island in search of our homeland.”

  “Exactly, Bullo. Now hold tight; we go again.”

  The stars suddenly swam before their eyes and winked out. Again the terrific wrench that betokened their passage from one dimension to another beat at their bodies with material tortures and at their minds with throbbing oscillations. Dos-Tev opened his eyes hopefully, only to see an alien sky again, this time with fiery stars set in numberless clouds of wispy vapor. It was a young universe, strewn with star forming nebulae.

  “It is but a gamble,” muttered Mea-Quin, again flicking the controls of the projector still buried in a mighty mass of earth that had come with them from the monster-world. A flaming sun smote their eyes suddenly and not many thousands of miles away floated a ball of iridescent colors. Without delay the scientist caused themselves to be wrenched away from the powerful radiations that well-nigh blinded them, into the next universe.

  In the soft blackness of a universe that was empty save for evanescent shimmerings of ghost-light, Mea-Quin allowed them a breathing spell. Their bodies ached in every joint and their brains reeled with pin-fires of shock. It was not pleasant, jumping from dimension to dimension. Something in the process was inimical to health and well-being. They floated in the void gasping and spent.

  A few minutes later—or was it hours?—Dos-Tev broke the depressing silence: “It is indeed a great gamble, Mea-Quin. For think once, if we once reach our own universe, reason forbids that we will arrive at the same spot from which we left. Perhaps we will find ourselves in the void of our universe, far from any planet, doomed to float till our air tanks empty themselves!”

  “Ayhuu—a great gamble,” agreed Mea-Quin. “But what would you—that we stayed with the monster creatures and tried to tame their alien natures of fire?”

  Again the soul-shaking wrench of dimensions—and again and again. Each time their eyes opened hopefully—and each time misted in intense chagrin. Were they perhaps wandering in such a course that they would never reach their own universe?

  Trouble came upon them like rain. Bullo’s air supply thinned and only quick action saved his life. But the faulty air-valves were fast approaching uselessness. Dos-Tev’s belt ripped suddenly and he ballooned out. After that a tiny leak kept his air-supply erratic, so that he had to let it pump to his lungs faster. Portions of the all-important mass of earth broke off and seeped away. The projector grew hot and melted off part of its tip; if more melted away, there would be complications. Mea-Quin fainted once from the strain and they began to fear his old body might succumb to the repeated wrenchings. But with indomitable spirit they disregarded their tribulations. Altho little had been said between them, each knew that perhaps on them rested the fate of the universe. Ay-Artz and the still more fearsome and mad Krzza—they three, lost in the mazes of alien dimensions, alone held the key to their defeat.

  Seven more times they jerked through fourth dimensions, feeling their endurance rapidly ebb away. Then, of a sudden, their eyes opened wide and their hearts bounded fiercely. Instead of queer, distorted visions of strange, alien universes, they saw the stars and nebulae of—their own universe! With sighs of joy that were far more expressive than shouts would have been, they drank in the sight of familiar firmaments.

  “Home!—home at last!” sobbed Mea-Quin brokenly.

  “Ayhuu! It is home, even to be in the spaces of our own three familiar dimensions,” cried Dos-Tev.

  “But Sires!” Bullo’s voice broke in dejectedly. “Look—where are we; somewhere in the vast interstellar space between suns?”

  It was dishearteningly so, it seemed. What good, after all, to be ‘home’, and yet marooned without a space ship in the void?

  Then, like a burst of heavenly glory, the sunlight bathed them as their little world of metallic earth slowly rotated to bring them into view of what had been previously blocked from their vision. And with the sight of the sun, they saw something else—the moon, earth’s satellite, looming large and friendly in space.

  “Unbelievable!” breathed Mea-Quin. That we are so close to the point of leaving. Why, we cannot be more than a radius away. Ayhuu—already the moon’s gravity draws us; we are descending upon it.”

  “Just what did you expect!” asked Dos-Tev curiously.

  “I would have expected being displaced in the void far more than this,” replied Mea-Quin thoughtfully. “The relative motions of the universes on their own axes—why did they not displace us? In each separate universe we visited, we must have been thrown first this way and that, and why should fate be so kind as to drop us off so near to the spot of leaving? There is something in this I do not grasp. Ayhuu—I suppose Krzza could explain.”

  Dos-Tev bent down and yanked the projector from the soil. “All musing aside, we have the immediate problem of landing on the moon safely, to consider. The force-plane will have to be elongated into a beam to act as a brake to our fall. Can we do it, Mea-Quin?”

  They all smiled at this. They who had just accomplished a hazardous journey thru alien dimensions and universes—what was a mere landing on a planet with such a versatile instrument as the force plane projector.

  While their tiny planetoid rotated slowly, gravitating in spirals in the grip of the moon, Mea-Quin ran a series of mathematical calculations thru h
is keen mind and gave the results to Dos-Tev, who memorized them. While traversing the immense reach of space between Alpha Centauri and the solar system they had trained themselves in space mechanics in those three years, so that all but the most complicated problems of spatial maneuvering had become as ABC to them. An hour’s tinkering with the projector and it had become a molecular brake, altering the powerful gravity of the moon so that it pulled them obliquely. This would eventually evolve into an orbit around the moon as they drew near.

  “It is relatively simple,” concluded Mea-Quin. “Following our formulae closely the orbit will spiral us to a tangent touching the moon at, or very near Copernicus. No doubt we will land rather abruptly, even with the full power of the projector softening our fall. In about forty hours we will be there.”

  They then partook of several food tablets, drank of the water supply in their separate suits, and took turns sleeping during the long time it took for them to fall close to the moon’s surface.

  In the jet darkness of the Crater Copernicus, the three Lemnisians talked over their predicament, not that they were once more within reach of their enemy, the Wrongness of Space. They had landed with a rather violent jar a few minutes before, due to the faultiness of the over-used projector. Their bodies sore and bruised, minds still reeling from shock, yet they were imbued with a mighty driving determination—the insane Krzza must be destroyed.

  “If we can somehow end his activity,” elaborated Mea-Quin, “we shall have done a great good, even if the solar system’s space fleets are no more. There would still be Ay-Artz to reckon with, but that lies in the hand of fate.”

  “Obviously, then, since we are isolated from contact with our allies,” spoke Dos-Tev firmly, “we must play a lone hand against Krzza.”