The Arthur Leo Zagat Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur Leo Zagat

  A hurtling form shot sideward, from above me, blue gas spitting. “Gurd. Your gas-tube! Your gas-tube, Gurd!”

  Jay’s howl shocked me back to thought, to action. I had clean forgotten that this was a self-propelled space suit. My hand-fork flashed to the control button. The death pool jerked away from under me. I thudded hard to the cavern floor, beside the prone figure of my brother. My head rang with the impact, my body felt a mass of bruises, but I was alive!

  Jay’s helmet was split across the forehead! Was he dead from the fall, or poisoned by unbreathable gases admitted through that ominous tear in his head cover? I rolled to him, peered in through his face-plate.

  His eyelids flickered, opened. Color flowed back into his cheeks, and he smiled, wryly.

  “I’m all right, Gurd. Just got a rotten crack on the head.”

  I was nauseous with relief.

  “I thought you were gone.”

  “Not yet. I was born to be gassed out.” He sniffed. “I smell flowers. What did you do, lay a wreath on me? A little previous, wasn’t it?”

  “Your helmet’s cracked open.”

  “Good Lord, but this air is salubrious. Open up and get a whiff of it.”

  I got to my knees, rigid with dismay. Across the level, grassy meadow from the shining pool a horde of creatures were rushing toward us, things out of some fantastic dream, gigantic in size, of vivid, kaleidoscopic coloring.

  As they came closer I saw that they were dome-shaped, more like turtles than any other Earth creature. But there was no shell, no tail, and their six unjointed legs were squarely beneath the ungainly bodies. From the topmost point of the hemispherical torsos, a full eight feet from the ground, sprang a series of long tentacles, thin and writhing snakily. In front, fragile-seeming, necks jutted, ending in comparatively tiny, globular heads, each featureless save for one unwinking green eye and two drooping, flapped ears.

  Before I could move the turtle men closed around us in a jostling, nightmare circle, leaving an open space about twenty feet in diameter. They squashed into one another, seeming to merge in a solid wall of obscene protoplasm, so that we were the center of a serried circle of ball heads thrust out from a high barrier. From that incredible ring came a high, squeaking chorus of whimpering sound, oddly infantile.

  I remained kneeling, gaping at that circled horror, could not have moved had I so willed.

  The whimpering squeals grew in volume, then, ceased altogether. The ring parted, the crowding hosts behind gave way tilt there was an open lane, stretching back to whence they had come. From the direction of the pool, down that long passage, moving with vast dignity, a little procession came slowly toward us.

  In front was a turtle man, similar to those we had already seen, save that his body was a steady blue and that in one of his tentacles there was a bundle of what seemed like long grass which he held aloft and waved slowly from side to side. Behind him, on some sort of discoid platform whose bearers were screened from us by the leader’s bulk, lumped another of the creatures.

  This one glowed purple, and even from a distance I could see that his legs and tentacles were rudimentary, while the sphere of his head was triple the size of the ‘others.’

  As they came on a wave accompanied them in the forest of uplifted tentacles. They came down in evident obeisance, then lifted again to resume their eternal weaving.

  I rose and tried to assume what dignity of posture I could muster. The blue turtle man came within the cleared circle of grass land and moved to one side, turning as he did so. And I saw who it was that bore the palanquin of his master.

  Their once natty uniforms hanging in torn strips, their faces smeared with dried blood and twisted in agony, their eyes great pits of suffering, the two Earthmen were bent almost double beneath the weight on their shoulders. Hal Sanders’ face was seared by two livid welts from ear to chin, and on Ralph Hollivant’s chest, where his tunic had been ripped away, another glowed angrily. I felt the hot blood of rage surge into my face. My fists balled within their gloved hand-forks.

  The blue-hued major domo flicked out a tentacle that touched the platform, and then the ground, in an obvious signal. The Earthmen knelt, their necks cording with the effort, and struggled to put the palanquin down evenly.

  One side slipped from Sanders’ shoulder, thumping against the ground. The prime minister lashed a tentacle across the poor fellow’s cheek! Hal’s shoulders jerked and I held my breath, thinking he would spring at his tormentor. But, pitifully, his head drooped and all he did was to rub the new mark of punishment with a trembling, grimy hand.

  I remembered Hal Sanders as a two-fisted, brawling chap, impatient of discipline. To see him meekly accept the lash told more eloquently than many words what he had gone through, what lay in store for us.

  The enslaved men heaved painfully upright. They looked at us with lack-luster eyes, not the least ripple in their dull faces showing recognition of us, or wonder at our appearance.

  “Hal! Ralph!” Jay cried. “What have these devils done to you?”

  Hollivant looked at his blue master, appeared to beg voicelessly for permission to speak.

  One of the turtle man’s snakelike arms reached out to me, swept shuddersomely over my metal suit, then to Ralph’s puffed lips.

  Hollivant’s voice was almost unrecognizable as human speech. “He wants you to get out of the space suits.”

  “Like hell we will,” Jay blurted. “Let him try to take them off.”

  “You had better. We tried to defy them, and look at us. They’re utter fiends.”

  Jay’s gesture of negation was evidently understood by the weird creature. His tentacle touched Hollivant’s lips again, then waved in an all-embracing movement.

  “Evidently they don’t want another scrap. We did some damage before they got us down. I’m to explain the uselessness of defying them.”

  “Never mind that,” I broke in. “Tell us about this place. With the benefit of what you have learned we may have a chance to get you away.”

  “Impossible. If you have any weapons the best thing you can do is kill yourselves and us.” They were licked, there was no question of that.

  “Chin up, Ralph. Arch your back. That way out is always available. Meantime we’ll try to make a fight of it. What happened to you?”

  “We got down safely enough, landing somewhere on the slope of the mountain through the center of which the entrance to this hell shoots up. Hal took a chance on opening his faceplate, and when we discovered that the air was breathable we decided to signal to Captain Silton. We climbed the peak, keeping on our space suits.

  “Just as we reached the underside of the clouds, what I thought was a snake whipped around me and coiled tight. I fought for a long time, there in the red fog, against writhing, snakelike things I could not see. The huge, soft, jellylike bulks gave no resistance as I slashed, and slashed, and slashed in a delirium of struggle. One of my hand-forks struck against rock and broke off, the other was bent and useless. I grew weary, weary, and I could fight no longer. The living ropes clamped tight around me, bound my arms, my legs.

  “I was dragged into pitch darkness, and then I was drifting down, slowly down and down till I thought there was no end to descent.”

  “Slowly? Our acceleration was tremendous at first.”

  The blue turtle man squealed protest at my interjection, and waved a threatening tentacle. Hollivant winced.

  “He’s getting impatient. I’ll have to cut it short.”

  “Get the salient facts over. I want to know especially how they get up and down that shaft. I’ve got a hunch that the solution to our problem lies there.”

  “Okay. Here’s the layout. The outside of this planet is uninhabitable because there are no life-giving rays in the light from its sun. But the pool in this cavern is a basin of highly radioactive liquid that gives off light with all the necessary vibrations at the violet end of the spectrum. As a result, animal and vegetable life has prospered here, their evolution culm
inating in these highly civilized creatures. Not only does the liquid give off light, but it is also tremendously repellent. Since it is sunk so deeply it acts only upward, more than cancelling the planet’s natural gravity.”

  “How do they manage to control that repulsion?”

  “They have a compound, a transparent, glasslike sort of stuff, that screens the pool effect. From the nearest building to the pond they swing out leaves of this material, or retract them, so as to moderate the repulsion; allowing it to act full force, or shutting it off entirely. Ordinary gravity acts through this glass, so the effect of covering the pool with it is to permit whatever is in the shaft to fall, instead of rise as it would if the pool were uncovered.”

  “I get it! By regulating the laminations they control the speed of ascent or descent. That is why we fell so fast at first, then had our speed gradually checked.” Many things were clear to me now, and already a desperate plan was forming in back of my head.

  “They go up there to obtain a certain ore needed in some of their scientific processes. One of their parties discovered and captured Hal and myself. Others must have observed your approach.”

  “We heard a scream of pain—”

  “That was when I got this.” He pointed to the scar on his chest. “The hole is a great speaking tube, carries sound perfectly. I heard what sounded like a space suit striking against rock, and tried to call a warning. But I was caught at it.” Memory of pain was a dull flame in the lackluster eyes.

  “You say they are civilized. The way they have acted to you doesn’t sound like it.”

  “They’ve outgrown all emotion, except one, loyalty and veneration for their king. He is the be-all and end-all of their economy. At a word from him the whole nation would kill itself.”

  I had heard enough. “Listen, everybody,” I said in a quiet tone, and set out my scheme rapidly and succinctly, gesturing meanwhile so as to indicate to the watching turtle man that although we refused to remove our suits we should go with them peaceably.

  At a gesture of command, Hal and Ralph bent to take up their burden again, and Jay and I stepped forward to aid them.

  CHAPTER IV

  Relativity Reversed

  The turtle king on his platform was unexpectedly light, despite his great size, and the four-of us bore him easily, as we followed his adjutant down the long passage that reopened through the compact mass of his fellows. I chuckled grimly when I saw that the path led straight to the edge of the pool.

  “The palace,” Hollivant whispered, “is on the other side. We will pass the structure from which the screens are swung and then swing around the pond.”

  Everything depended now on whether those screens were over the pool or not. We slowly neared it, and the brilliant light grew almost unbearable. It blazed through the major domo’s body and made of it a huge sapphire jewel. It struck pearly iridescence from the walled bodies lining our course. There was an obscene beauty in the play of color, but my attention was focused on the great vault of the cavern roof, and, directly over the deep-sunk shining pool, the black hole that betokened the lower end of the shaft.

  The procession leader reached the edge of the lake of light, turned ponderously half left to skirt it. His bulk no longer eclipsed my view. I saw the answer to the question that pounded at my brain. Folded up against the wall of a building at our right I saw the transparent screens, towering above the low structure’s roof. The pool was unobscured, was free to pour the full strength of its repulsion up through the long vertical tunnel where lay our only, way to release.

  The blue turtle man was some ten feet ahead of us, the following hosts a respectful twenty behind. It was now or never.

  “Ready,” I called, quietly, and shifted one arm so that it curled up, over the palanquin edge, and gripped the upper surface. The burden jolted, the least bit, and I knew the others had done the same.

  “Go!” my voice snapped, and I jumped straight for the center of the pool, still clinging to the turtle king’s support. It came with me, as Jay and Ralph and Hal responded to my command. Straight out over that blazing pond we leaped and suddenly we were falling!

  Falling! But the pool was above us, and the cavern roof beneath! The repulsion of that pond, taking the place of gravity, had reversed directions for us, and while to the astounded turtle men we were shooting upward to our own senses we were dropping as rapidly.

  Straight for the black aperture we went, and a squeal of rage came from the palanquin. I looked up at a vast thicket of agitated tentacles and saw a blue mound whirl and scuttle toward the building against which the screens were folded. The prime minister, rushing to cut off the pool’s power and bring us back to vengeance.

  I jerked out my trinite gun, aimed carefully upward, past my feet, at the huge plates that hung down from the ground. I winged the trinite pellet with a prayer.

  It struck, by the Pleiades! It struck squarely on the slowly unhinging screens, and they shattered into a million fragments!

  Even above the shattering crash of that destruction I heard a vast high-pitched wail from the tossing multitudes above, and saw them rush headlong into the pool, saw them hurtle downward after us. Then we were in the obscurity of the shaft; falling, falling, falling toward the surface of the red planet.

  “They’ll blow up the shaft with their bombs,” Sanders cried out. “That’ll cut off the pool power, and we’ll be trapped here in mid-earth.”

  “They won’t do that as long as we have their king with us. I thought they might use some such means of stopping us. That’s why I brought him along.”

  “Gurd!” Jay’s voice. “We’re accelerating rapidly. We’ll crash at the top. Now that you’ve destroyed the screens there’s nothing to stop us except the roof of the entrance cave.”

  “We’ll slow up with our gas-tubes.”

  “Yeah? And give the turtle men a chance to catch up with us?”

  “Pluto! I didn’t think of that! Well, it’ll be a clean death, anyway.” I was licked.

  But not Jay. “Try shooting at it,” he yelled. “Maybe we can blow off the top of the peak.

  “Good boy! Shoot!” We emptied our guns past the discoid resting place of the turtle king. Then we waited with bated breath, as we continued the headlong rise that, to us, seemed a fall. We knew the pellets we had loosed were speeding ahead of us, that they would surely strike the overhanging rock that threatened us. We knew the tremendous atomic power compact in each of the eighth-inch globules. Would it be sufficient to blast away the black peak?

  Thunder rolled back upon us, deafening. We were thrown violently from side to side of the shaft as the disturbed air soughed past us, and I heard a squeal of pain from the turtle king. I tried to see past the platform edge, for some gleam of light that would tell me our attempt was successful. But the darkness was complete.

  “No go, fellows. We’re in for it.”

  “Good-by, Gurd. It was a grand fight while it lasted.”

  I reached out, groping, and my hand-fork met Jay’s, gripped it hard.

  Suddenly I was flung against the underside of the palanquin! I heard a squashing thud, a high-pitched scream, gurgling horribly into silence. I was one of a writhing mass of human arms, legs, bodies, and was joining my voice to a chorus of shouted, husky curses and objurgations. Something was around my neck, holding my head as in a vise. A heel beat a tattoo on the metal of my space suit.

  “Hey, let up! Get your toe out of my eye!” That was Jay. I shook my head to clear it of the dizzy whirl that scrambled my brains, realized that we were no longer falling, that we were piled atop the bottom of the platform that had preceded us in all that long descent, that we were miraculously alive!

  “What—what’s happened?” someone gasped.

  “That’s easy!” I had figured it out. “The back-flash of the explosion of our trinite pellets against the roof slowed us up a darn sight more than we realized. And the eight-foot mass of jelly the other side of this sedan-chair did the rest. That turtle king
made a swell bumper.”

  “Whew! Let’s get out of here. That mob will be on us in a second.”

  “Gad! I’d forgotten them. How is it they haven’t caught us already?”

  “The explosion slowed them up also. But they’ll be here, too quick for comfort.”

  I pushed to the side of the platform, reached around, and got a grip on the under surface. I pushed out under the rocky floor of the tunnel. Instantly directions were reversed. I hung now, from the disc that had just been under me. What was down was now up, up, now down. I knew then that miles of solid ground was between me and the repulsion of the pool, that I was definitely out of the shaft. I let go, dropped, sprawled on solid, grateful rock.

  Jay landed beside me.

  “Next time I come here,” he grunted, “I’m going to paste a label on me, ‘This side up, with care.’ Am I on my head or my tail now?”

  “Hustle,” I yelled, and took it on the run. The others were close behind.

  Our stratocar still perched, birdlike on the outer ledge. We piled inside. The motor took hold sweetly, and the stratocar zipped out of reach.

  The Phobos’ power was triple that of the Luna. She lifted easily through the crimson clouds.

  “Where now?” Hal Sanders queried. “How are we going to get back?”

  “The same way Jay did, through the ether eddy?”

  “I suppose you’ve got a chart of the route,” Jay scoffed. “Just issued by the Interuniverse Flying Board.”

  “I have.”

  “Quit your spoofing.”

  “I’m not. The blind luck that attends children and drunks brought the eddy in your path, when you were here before. I, being somewhat more intelligent, know enough to look for it.”

  “I suppose it’s all set for you?”

  “Exactly,” I responded drily. “There it is, straight ahead. Look.”

  And so it was, shimmering discreetly, a vague intangible veil across the black curtain of this other-space. But now it breathed promise instead of fear. The Phobos plunged straight for its heart.