Between Worlds

by Garret Smith

  I passed gradually from intense suffering with the cold to a sense of numb drowsiness. I would undoubtedly have passed from this to the unconsciousness which I am told precedes death from freezing, had not the queen roused us from our lethargy and bade us get out and stir our congealing blood.

  I realized then that the wind had died down and the snow was ceasing. We were back now at the margin of the level Ice that lay over the sea. It could not be far from here to the point where our wrecked ship lay.

  After a little we clambered back to our sleds and started over the ice-field, all eyes strained ahead as far as Hunter’s light carried, to make out, if possible, any trace of our vessel.

  Hunter and the queen were now engaged in low-pitched conversation. From words that I caught now and then I inferred he was trying to induce her to go with us on the remainder of our voyage.

  Suddenly I heard her exclaim in tones that carried every word to Weaver and myself with ominous clearness.

  “I will go with you, my cousin, if you will have no mysteries hidden from me. Tell me the magic secret by which you disappear from my sight and return again without my seeing you come and go, and by which you bound up my brave warriors without their knowing it. I fear such powers when I cannot understand them. Teach them to me, and I will go where you say.

  We could not hear Hunter’s reply, and we were filled with deep misgivings lest he trust this wild woman with the secret which alone assured our safety.

  -My attention was diverted presently, however, by signs that we neared our goal. A wide strip of open water appeared beside our course. Along this we skirted for some distance.

  Suddenly there loomed up dead ahead an almost perpendicular wall that glistened dazzlingly under the rays of our light.

  It was one of the great floating ice-mountains lodged directly across our course.

  Our sled halted, and we stared stupidly at this barricade.

  After a moment there came a full-mouthed oath from Weaver.

  “Look! Look!” he cried.

  He was pointing at the top of the ice-mountain high over our heads.

  We looked and gasped in amazement and dismay. Some hundred paces up in the air, frozen fast in the summit of the great cliff far out of our reach, hung our devoted vessel. The wreck had evidently been caught in the edge of the mountain which had later turned half over, thrusting the ship high in air.

  Then we were aroused from our stupid contemplation of this appalling disaster by a mocking laugh.

  The queen had leaped from her sled and was executing a weird dance of exultation on the edge of the open water.

  In her hand we saw to our horror the little spraying apparatus and receptacle for the powerful anesthetic on which depended our hold over the savages.

  “Now, cousin,” she chanted tauntingly, “I have your secret, and you and your twoeyed followers are in my power. There is your ship. Take it away with you, if you can. You will not take it. You will stay with me in the Land of Darkness and do my bidding!”

  With that she flung the apparatus far into the flood.

  THE momentary silence following this disheartening denouement was broken by a hoarse cry from Weaver. Beside himself with rage he dashed at the queen with fist upraised.

  She laughed in his very face, and with a guttural word or two she dodged behind a group of her followers who, with outstretched arms, closed in on our infuriated shipmaster and quickly overpowered him.

  “Close around Hunter!” I yelled. “We’ll die fighting.”

  I dashed forward, and our comrades responded to my cry. There was a sharp command from the queen. In a twinkling a circle of menacing lances formed around us.

  All this time Hunter had stood as he was when the queen had executed her coup, the light still held above his head, his face turned toward his treacherous cousin in a look of hurt incredulity.

  But now his expression suddenly changed to one of wary sternness. An instant he glared at the queen in cold disdain; then turned his back squarely upon her and held up a restraining hand toward us.

  “Stop! No violence!” he commanded sharply. “We have no wish to disobey our queen. We will gladly stay with her if she wishes.”

  But the look he gave us belied his words. Not one of us but realized that his infatuation had vanished and that he was again his old resourceful self. Had the queen been reared among a people with faces capable of expression she would have been put on her guard by his change of countenance. But there was in her manner only an increase of triumphant vanity.

  We who knew Hunter, however, felt a sudden return of assurance. Between the words of his apparently submissive speech we read an admonition to make no outbreak for the present, but wait patiently till he could find means of circumventing our foes.

  “Little cousin,” he said—turning to her again, his eyes no longer revealing his feelings—“you were hasty with us. The thing you threw away was of no further use. It had lost its power. Our ship, too, is helpless. The moment I saw it fastened there I knew it was meant that we should remain together. That ship, though it can never again ride the water, will make you a palace such as you never dreamed of. I have told you a little of its comfort, its warmth, its great lights, the delicious food with which it is stored. We will be very happy in it, little cousin, if we can find a way to climb to it.”

  I could see at once that the queen was fascinated by the idea, and that she was of half a mind to trust Hunter.

  “We will visit the ship,” she ruled. “My men will cut steps up the ice with their spears. But, though you speak fair words, my cousin, I do not trust the two-eyed ones with you. I will first have their hands bound that they can do us no harm. You I will not bind, but I will take the light and with one of my spear men will stay with you to see that you try no further mischief.”

  So once more our hands were tied and we submitted with some misgivings despite our belief that sooner or later Hunter’s superior mind would get the best of this barbarian cousin. The mere prospect of getting aboard our familiar ship again and once more eating real food greatly heartened us. I am sure that the latter Item was uppermost in the mind of Weaver, whose outbreak had won him a severe mauling and the honor of a double guard. His bruised face now wore an expression almost cheerful.

  Several of the blind men were set to work chipping at the cliff, and they were evidently practised in scaling such obstacles, for they made rapid progress up the glittering slope. After no great space of time a pathway of rude steps was completed up to the foot of the very ship’s ladder which still dangled from her rail.

  Then, at a word from the queen, we began the ascent, she leading with Hunter.

  A little later our mixed company were all assembled in the big main cabin, which we packed to the door.

  Our good ship, to be sure, was like some mutilated dead thing, cold and damp from disuse and long inactivity of its heating apparatus, wreckage scattered from stem to stern, and withal perched high out of its natural element in the clutches of this ice giant.

  Yet to our fair captor it was all a bewitching novelty. Girlish curiosity utterly unseating her erstwhile craft and caution, she flitted from one thing to another, asking a thousand eager questions. Hunter, on his part, appeared to have no idea in his head save to act the kindly and obliging host.

  “Now, if the queen will permit and will accompany me while I do so,” he suggested at last, “I will repair our machine for making heat and light and give her the comfort I promised. Then we shall have some food.”

  She consented readily, but with some return of her caution, for she ordered two of her guards to accompany her.

  Hunter led the way from the main cabin, not to the motor cabin, where he would have gone had his purpose been what he stated, but to his own cabin, where he kept his cabinets of chemicals.

  Not many moments later he returned alone, a triumphant smile on his face and a warning gesture for silence. In his hands were a coil of rope, a heavy knife, and another anesthetic sprayer.
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  Our guards stirred uneasily at hearing Hunter’s footsteps alone, and our leader acted hastily. Pinching his own nose and motioning us to do likewise, he released a charge of the anesthetic. The savages stiffened into insensibility at once.

  Hunter threw open the cabin windows so that the vapor might be cleared away and give us a chance to breathe again, and then released us from our bonds.

  “Quick,” he directed. “Each of you take a piece of this rope and tie these fellows up.”

  As he spoke he began cutting the rope into lengths, and in less time than I have used in the telling the tables were again turned on our blind friends “Absurdly simple, wasn’t it?” he exclaimed when we were through. “Simply led my pretty cousin and her brute guards up to my chemical cabinet and unstopped a jar of anesthetic. They are tied up down there now.”

  At that moment an angry wail from Hunter’s cabin told us that the humiliated queen had recovered consciousness.

  “Now,” Hunter decided, “we’ll keep my cousin with us, and the two guards she has with her in my cabin. As for the rest of these brutes, we’ll take their spears away from them and let them slide back down the ice-mountain. We’ll loosen the rope on the last one a little so that in time he can untie the rest. By that time they won’t be able to bother us any.”

  I ASSURE you that we carried out these instructions with great gusto. I confess, though, that I felt some humane qualms as I saw these helpless creatures slide sprawling down from so great a height. But the promptness with which each bounced to his feet and continued his horrible clamor convinced me that these creatures were of too tough a fiber to be greatly injured by such an experience.

  I have invariably said “he” and “his” in referring to these beings, for convenience merely. All the while I was among them I was never able to distinguish between their sexes. As a matter of fact, we later learned that the two we held captive permanently were of opposite sexes.

  As soon as we had eaten and rested a little we set to work under Hunter’s directions to restore order on the vessel and repair the damaged parts. It was a long and difficult task. The ship had been injured more than appeared at first sight. As for the vital machinery, only Hunter was thoroughly familiar with its intricacies, and it was necessary for him to supervise his mechanics in every detail of their work.

  Meanwhile the queen alternately raged and sulked in the cabin to which she had been assigned as a prisoner. Her two blind attendants, once convinced that resistance was useless, accepted the situation with characteristic resignation.

  Not so with their brethren whom we had so unceremoniously thrust down into outer darkness. They kept up a continuous uproar of snarling rage, thrashing about in aimless circles, tugging at their bonds, and now and then a more enterprising spirit seeking to scale the ice cliff without the use of his hands, only to slip back helplessly to the ice field.

  But of what these impotent savages might do to us we had now little fear. They had not yet found means to unloose their manacles. They had no weapons. Even should they succeed in mounting to the ship, we had, as it seemed then, an overwhelming advantage, our company now armed with their lances and stationed in mass at the top of this difficult ascent, up which, at the most, only two or three could reach us at once.

  So we stationed a watch at the ladder-head with instructions to sound the alarm if the foe made any headway toward us, and went on with our work without further apprehension in that direction.

  What did harass my mind, however, and I dare say that of each of my fellows, save possibly Hunter, was as to what booted all this effort to put the vessel in shape when some hundred paces of perpendicular ice lay between her and the level of the sea, and even that so nearly frozen over that escape through open water was highly problematical. Did he intend to tumble the ship from its perch? If so, the wreck would again be more complete than ever.

  But we were spurred on against our Judgments by the calm, confident manner of our leader, and presently the craft began to assume an appearance of order. After some three sleeps Hunter had the heating and lighting apparatus at work again, and it remained only for him to complete the restoration of the driving machinery.

  It was at this point in the work that I was resting for a moment, standing near the ladder head and watching with sardonic amusement the gyrations of our baffled foe below us.

  I noted idly that one of the savages stood quietly apart from the rest, apparently giving all his attention to working at his bonds. Suddenly he gave a mighty wrench with both arms, and his hands flew free. He must have been the man whose hands we had tied loosely.

  Once loose, this man worked with incredible speed and purpose. He fairly flew from one of his companions to another, unfastening their bonds, and in a few moments they were all free.

  In the meantime I had called to several of my shipmates who happened to be at ease for the moment, and together we watched this performance with purely idle curiosity, little dreaming there was any menace in it.

  But now we realized a certain definiteness in the movements of the mob. Under the harsh direction of one of their number they were forming in a compact column three wide at the foot of the Ice stairway. Before we realized the wisdom of sounding a warning, there was another command, and with a rush this solid mass of infuriated savages swarmed up the cliff with irresistible fury.

  Then we cried out in chorus and our men sprang to the spears. But it was immediately evident that our untrained spearwork would make little headway stopping that rush of hardened fighters whom we had already seen held death in little concern.

  They were half way to us when Hunter stepped from the motor cabin and looked over the rail. He calmly watched the onrush for a moment, then turned away and entered the motor-cabin again.

  The top of the oncoming line was within a pace of the ladder when the ship’s motors suddenly began to whir at full speed. The next instant one of the savages seized the lowest rung of the ladder.

  At that we watchers from the deck gasped in amazement. The ladder had been snatched from the fellow’s hands, and he fell tumbling back over the heads of those behind.

  The deck trembled and lurched under us. We felt a sinking sensation in our stomachs. There was a wide and growing gap between the savage column at the ice-mountain’s top and the bottom of the ship.

  Our great vessel, like a giant bird, was rising straight into the air!

  MY FIRST thought, as I clung to the pitching rail for support, was that some new cataclysm of nature, some tremendous eruptive force in the great ice-mountain had hurled our ship skyward from its summit. Momentarily I expected the upward flight to cease and the ship to fall, pitching back to certain destruction.

  But, on the contrary, the steady rise continued. The air seemed to be rushing down past us with the speed of a great wind. The pitching quickly subsided, and the vessel rode on an even keel. While we still stared over the rail, too alarmed to speak, the icy surface of Venus passed beyond the reach of our lights. We were swimming, now, above a sea of swirling vapor.

  Weaver was the first to recover from his astonishment and grasp the real meaning of what had happened.

  “By the Great Over Spirit!” he cried. “This is what Hunter promised us! He has turned our vessel into a flying ship! But how, in the name of the Spirit of Light, has he done it?”

  In an excited group we gathered around the motor cabin, through the window of which we could see our chief at work over his controls. After a few moments he seemed satisfied that his apparatus was running satisfactorily and looked up. For the first time he became aware of our astonished faces. He raised the door and came out on deck.

  “It worked,” he said simply. “Just another case of applying a knowledge we already possessed. I’ll explain it all to you later. Just now we have something more important to look out for.”

  He turned his gaze intently upward, and wondering, we followed.

  “I think perhaps we could see it better if we put out our own lights,” Hunter m
uttered presently.

  We stared at him in deeper amazement, as with this contradictory statement he turned back to the cabin. The next instant we were in total darkness, and Hunter came groping his way out among us.

  We stood mutely wondering what vagary possessed our leader.

  Then the silence was broken by his excited shout:

  “Look up! Straight up! The Light! The queen spoke true!”

  For a moment nothing struck my vision but the blackness. Then my eye focused on a little glimmering point directly overhead. A chorus of exclamations told me the others had discovered it at the same moment.

  As we watched, the quivering spark grew brighter and more clear cut till it shone with a steady glow as of some great illumination at a vast distance.

  Then I saw a little way from it another spark, then another and another, until suddenly the shifting curtain of mist over our heads seemed to sweep away, and we burst out under a great black dome, studded from base to zenith with millions upon millions of these points of light. But none shone as did that steady ray we had sighted first.

  For a long time, it seemed, we stood there gazing aloft in speechless awe. Once only the voice of Hunter broke the silence.

  “Countless worlds of light besides ours!” he exclaimed. “But it is not as I thought. They are separated from us by vast, empty space.”

  Again Hunter displayed his uncanny intuition, how accurate I was not to realize until later. To me, at the moment, there appeared only a myriad of tiny points of light whose meaning was beyond question.

  But now I began swaying with giddiness. I looked down, thinking too much gazing aloft had caused it. In the faint light from above I could dimly see the forms of my companions. They, too, were affected. Several staggered and clutched the wall of the cabin for support.

  My sensations passed quickly from mere dizziness to acute distress. I was panting as if from grueling exercise. I seemed unable to draw enough air into my lungs. My heart hammered my ribs like a broken motor. I thought my ears would burst from the pressure that seemed to pervade my whole body. Blood was spurting from my nose.