Between Worlds

by Garret Smith

  The Englishman took upon himself the task of disposing of the lookout man. He selected one of the curious tubes with which the sentry at the barracks had been armed, a rifle, he called it, and explained briefly its deadly purpose.

  Hunter, seeing that he purposed killing in cold blood the unsuspecting man on the hill, expostulated vehemently against such a brutal murder. We all, I confess, looked at our mentor and guide with a new loathing.

  But he assured us that this was entirely within the rules of civilized warfare as the Earth-born conceived it. It was that man’s life or ours, he insisted. The fellow was due to be relieved soon by the day watch. Once let him suspect, when the relief failed, that all was not well below, and he would signal the patrolling submarine. We would then be slaughtered without hope of defense.

  At Hunter’s proposal that the anesthetic could be used on this sentry as on the others, he showed that it would be impossible to get near enough to the German to use the sprayer before he discovered his would-be assailant and shot him down.

  A rifleman, on the other hand, could climb half way up the slope under the trees and, without exposing himself, get a good shot at the man in the tree.

  So Hunter reluctantly consented to the repulsive plan. Before going on his errand the Englishman warned us that we must keep out of sight within the barracks while he was gone. If by lucky chance the patrolling submarine should return during his absence, he said our only hope was that the crew might come ashore unguardedly and put themselves within range of the anesthetic.

  I shall never forget the horror of the minutes that elapsed while we waited for the rifle report that would tell us that one human being had calmly executed a death sentence upon another with whom he had no personal quarrel.

  We crouched by the barrack window and listened, a cold sweat of horror streaming down our faces. The moments dragged by till it seemed a day must have gone. At the slightest sound of one of our company shifting a cramped foot we all jumped as though each had himself felt the assassin’s bullet.

  In the meantime it had been growing steadily lighter. Now, by craning our necks from one of the windows, we could just make out the tall, plumed tree on the summit, in which was posted the doomed man, all unsuspicious of the swift end that was creeping upon him up the trail below.

  Now the breathless silence was stirred by the distant note of a bird. Another took it up, then another and another, until the air rang with the glad chorus of feathered creatures in greeting to the sun.

  As we listened its first soft rays glinted across the little harbor and gilded our horror-paled faces. A faint breath of awaking sea breeze fanned us.

  Then the forest orchestra seemed to reach a period in its orison, and there came a brief pause. Even the breeze hung suspended a moment as if in expectancy.

  And it came! A sharp, rattling report, ripping the crisp morning air and reechoing again and again from hill to hill.

  A moment longer we held our breaths, avoiding each other’s faces. Then the hurried clattering of the Englishman’s footsteps as he raced back down the mountain. trail told us that his gruesome errand was accomplished.

  But we had not yet stirred from our cramped positions when from a new direction came a thunderous report, a wailing scream from the air as of a soul in anguish, a rending crash, and another appalling shock in our very ears.

  The ground shook under us. One end of the long room in which we stood flew away as if on a mighty wind. We were half buried under a shower of wreckage.

  WHAT had happened we knew not nor stayed to see. Before the echo of the first explosion had died away we had fled incontinently by the door opposite to the wrecked end of the room, and fairly falling over each other in our haste, were well within the shelter of the woodland before we stopped.

  Hunter had already determined, as soon as we had our captives secure in fact, that the queen was not a prisoner anywhere in the group of buildings, so we had no obligations as far as our party went, but the saving of each man by himself.

  I am a little chagrined as I look back, however, to think that after barely having finished censuring the Englishman for his callous attitude toward the lives of his enemies, we had instinctively adopted the same attitude. For in our panic we gave not so much as a fleeting thought to our bound prisoners who lay in the adjoining building helpless to save themselves.

  We had no more than achieved the shelter of the woods than the thought of our inhumanity struck us almost simultaneously. One by one we stopped and turned back and then hesitated at the very edge of the wood.

  For at that instant had come another stunning report, and another section of the barracks fell in ruins. It was followed almost instantly by another explosion. Out in the channel, perhaps half a mile away, we caught through the trees, a flash of flame and saw under it a strange craft lying low in the water, the flash coming from a great gun on its deck.

  We recognized it instantly, from its resemblance to the craft lying at the dock, as the dreaded German patrol boat. The Englishman’s shot had evidently come too late. The submarine crew had been warned that an enemy was holding their base.

  But even as we grasped this fact the Englishman dashed out from the end of the trail, crossed behind the shelter of the ruined barracks and, oblivious of the threatening gun, jumped aboard one of the moored submarines and went below.

  For some minutes the cannonading continued and the incoming vessel drew steadily nearer.

  Then we witnessed, this time as mere spectators, a repetition of the fate that had overtaken our own vessel. There was the same thunderous explosion, a detonation that made the late cannon reports seem puny by comparison, the same great column of water rising over the doomed vessel. The craft rose half out of the water, then seemed to break in two, and a moment later all traces of her had disappeared beneath the sea.

  The Englishman, as we learned later, had sunk her with a torpedo from her sister ship at the wharf.

  It was some minutes, however, before we grasped the fact that our danger was over, and came forth to view the ruins and give proper thanks to our rescuer, though even in our gratitude, we could not help shrinking inwardly from this man who committed wholesale murder in such matter-of-fact fashion.

  Thus we peaceful men of Venus, greatly against our will, made entry into the great Earth War, in which though we little dreamed it at the time, we were destined to play a part of paramount importance.

  Our prisoners we found by the sheerest miracle were unharmed, but thoroughly cowed. They were a group of men so coarse and brutal to our eyes as to make even the Englishman seem refined. They were even shorter than he, and sturdier in build.

  The Englishman at once went at them in most browbeating fashion, and by cross-questioning them, one after the other, got much important information.

  Hunter was greatly relieved when he was made certain that the queen had not been aboard the destroyed submarine. The prisoners informed us that the woman had been picked up by another submarine that had come in from a raid to reprovision before sailing to a larger base on the Siberian coast to be refitted. Its captain, a certain Von Herdweg, a man of noble family, of whom they stood in great awe, had taken her with him.

  They laughingly told how enthralled was the noble sailor with his beautiful captive, despite the fact that she overtopped him by a head, was apparently quite able to take care of herself, and treated him in most cavalier fashion.

  They had taken her for a barbarian member of some hitherto unknown island race, but were evidently greatly impressed by her beauty and intelligence. Her blindness she had cunningly concealed, a thing she could do quite readily from her long years of going about much in darkness among her eyeless people.

  Hunter was, I could see, somewhat chagrined to be told that his cousin had to all appearances been quite ready to accompany the barbarian captain. But this fact in no way deterred him in his determination to follow him up and rescue her.

  The Englishman, whose name, Floyd Gresham, we had at last le
arned to pronounce, was all enthusiasm for this course. He was eager to get credit for capturing a submarine base and two boats, and the destruction of another. He saw a chance to add to his exploit the destruction of still another base. But most of all he was determined to get Hunter back to his own country and make available for her use his marvelous anesthetic gas. It suited Hunter’s purpose to encourage him in all this.

  PREPARATORY to this expedition our own vessel was brought over to the base and our. company taught the use of the German guns to defend it against further attack. Hunter prepared a large additional quantity of his anesthetic preparation of added strength, and floating tanks of it were set at the harbor mouth, electrically connected with the base, so that an incoming enemy could be overcome before he could fire a shot.

  Hunter was for making the excursion in his own ship, but Gresham convinced him that his vessel would have no chance against the military flying ships of the Germans.

  Gresham’s plan was to seek the Germans on the main land in the two captured submarines. They would be able to sail right, up to this base before its occupants discovered that the boats were not operated by their own crews; then a heavy charge of gas would do the rest.

  So, two weeks later, we sailed, with twenty-four of our company, divided among the two boats, together with enough of our prisoners to complete the manning of the boats. Weaver had been left behind, somewhat under protest, to command the base until an English squadron could be sent back to take it over.

  The Lady of the South accompanied us perforce, as she absolutely refused to be separated from Hunter.

  The details of that frightful voyage are commonplace matter to Earth readers, momentous as they seemed to us. It would make but a tedious account of seasickness and all the excessive discomfort that goes with life on a submarine.

  Once we were nearly wrecked by storm. Twice we were attacked by cruisers, once by a Japanese, and once by a British vessel, to neither of whom were we able to prove in time our friendly nature, and we escaped only by diving.

  But at length we crept into the hidden base on the Siberian coast and captured it without a struggle, together with ten submarines, practically putting an end to the German menace in the Pacific, a part of the secret history of the great war now revealed for the first time.

  The Germans in the base had no suspicions of us till we were at their very wharves. Then we dropped a single shell in their midst, loaded with our potent anesthetic. The rest was a mere detail of making prisoners of unconscious men, and I will not weary you with monotonous repetition.

  But again we were baffled in the object of our expedition. The queen and her German captain had departed for Germany on a fast cruiser a month before. Captain von Herdweg had been ordered to home service, and had taken his blind sweetheart with him.

  And simultaneously with this disappointment developed another complication that doubled the motive of our search and greatly distracted our long-suffering leader.

  Among-the prisoners whom we took from the island base to Siberia was another submarine captain. Von Bendstrum by name, a man of striking appearance and in some ways attractive personality, barbarian though he was.

  From the first, the Lady of the South, though in no way ceasing her attentions to Hunter, gave much of her time to this man. She explained her interest by the fact that he spoke both English and German, and had offered to teach her the latter language. As we all were seeking every opportunity possible to learn what we could of our new, strange world, this interest of the lady caused no comment.

  But after the excitement of capturing the Siberian base had subsided, and we were in the midst of our chagrin in failing to find the queen, we made a startling discovery.

  Under Gresham’s direction, the prisoners on our two submarines were being conducted ashore to be held at the base until the Russian authorities could be notified.

  To our complete mystification Von Bendstrum was missing.

  On the heels of this mystery someone thought to inquire for the Lady of the South. Investigation showed that she, too, was gone.

  Though we made diligent search all about the base and extended it into the surrounding territory, later sending an alarm to the Russian secret service, not the slightest trace of them could be found.

  And the manner of their escape remained a complete mystery.

  SIX months after the mysterious disappearance of the second of the two women of our company of castaways in an alien and barbarous world, Hunter and I ceased for a while from our wandering and fruitless search and took refuge in a little country inn of Switzerland near the German border.

  We were completely discouraged by the apparent hopelessness of our quest, deeply disgusted with the general savagery of these murderous Earth people, utterly homesick for the sane, peaceful, unchanging world from which we had come. We were all but ready to abandon the queen and the lady to their fate and return to Venus, forever cured of our ambition to transplant any of the population of that happy world upon this hopeless, unsuitable planet.

  Indeed, our rest was a forced one. For the first time in our lives, and for that matter, in the life of any native of Venus in our modern times, save those smitten with extreme old age, we were overcome with physical disability. The mode of living on Venus, together with our highly developed science of disease prevention, had ages ago banished sickness from our planet.

  Among these Earth people of almost universal physical uncleanness, irregularity of living, and crude state of medical knowledge, infection and disease ran riot. Only our habitual practices in the elements of sanitary living which we had been taught as a matter of course in early childhood, prevented our succumbing to one of the many deadly plagues that surrounded us. As it was, our systems, unaccustomed to constant changes of temperature and climate, and in no way immunized by generations of infection, as are the Earthborn, fell easy prey to the lesser infections in almost continuous succession—colds, minor fevers, and the like.

  Moreover, our nerves, already severely strained by our many adventures, were near to prostration from the constant, daily multitude of changes that are the commonplaces of Earth life in ordinary times, and were greatly aggravated by the conditions of war.

  Indeed, most of those of our company who had accompanied us on the submarines as far as the Russian coast were in such physical state on arrival there that they had already lost all interest in further Earth exploration. Several were seriously ill during their brief stay in port. Those who were not were in a state of such constant bewilderment amid the unintelligible hurry and bustle around them, and the jumble of conflicting and unintelligible languages and customs, that they were soon near to nervous prostration.

  Not the least of our afflictions was the atrocious Earth food. I have never yet become reconciled to the barbarous eating of animal flesh, however prepared and seasoned. When these Earth people were not eating their unpalatable concoctions, they were seemingly either drinking some poisonous fluid that had the quality of making them for the time being semi-sane, or burning a rank drug, the smoke of which they drew into their nostrils with great gusto.

  And mind you, we had not yet been in the actual theater of war. The Earth people at peace were bad enough.

  So the rest of our company were quite willing to return to our island on the British cruiser that went with Captain Gresham to take possession of the German naval base there. Hunter deemed it best that they should do so as any considerable number of followers would only hamper his search, particularly if most of them were to become confirmed invalids.

  He gratefully accepted my company, however, as he did not wish, to be left entirely unfriended, and, moreover, he wished me to continue to keep a record of our voyagings.

  We parted with Gresham with a promise or Hunter’s part to consider the proposition to supply the anesthetic gas to the English government after he had become more familiar with the merits of the great war. So sure was Gresham that we would agree ultimately, however, that he provided us with an ab
undance of Earth money for all our needs.

  He, on the other hand, agreed not to divulge the secret of our strange origin, as Hunter felt that the notoriety would be a hindrance to us.

  Before leaving he gave us credentials and letters to Russian officials, and to the representatives of his own and allied governments, describing us as natives of the little known island on which we had landed, having a mixture of English blood, and claiming the protection of the British flag.

  By now we could speak an understandable, though very broken English, and could readily account for our ignorance of Earth affairs by our coming from an isolated island.

  Nevertheless, we were marked men wherever we went. Though we had adopted European dress, our height and exceeding slimness, together with our delicate, beardless features and extraordinarily light complexions, when compared with any of the varied Earth races, made us everywhere conspicuous.

  Moreover, as we progressed, we frequently found ourselves in trouble, through our own blunders or the interference of unfriendly police or officials. In each instance Hunter extricated us by the use of his anesthetic sprayer. Between us we were able to carry on our persons and in our baggage a large quantity of this condensed and highly volatile fluid. Its use made possible the continuance of a quest which I realize now would have otherwise been cut short at the outset.

  There persist to this day in various parts of Russia and Germany miracle stories of two “great white men” or “Ghost Men,” as we were called in some sections, who, when seized by police or soldiers, utterly vanished in the air, to reappear again at some distant place.

  Our entrance into Germany was effected through Switzerland. An official friend of Gresham in the latter country furnished us with new credentials giving us the apparent status of citizens of a land called America, which had then not yet entered the war.

  In Germany our course was much more difficult than in Russia. We were forced to make almost constant use of our bewildering anesthetic. We had by now corns in contact with individuals of all the chief warring races, but barbarous as they all seemed to us, the rest appeared civilized in comparison with the majority of these bloodthirsty people of Germany.