Between Worlds

by Garret Smith

  Yet I could not tolerate the thought of leaving her. I was secretly relieved, therefore, when Hunter again got into communication with Gresham and learned from him that the secret service of all the allied powers had taken up our search for the queen and the lady, and that we might better remain in France or England and await their reports, as we could not accomplish anything on our own account.

  He did not make it clear to us why these great nations were so concerned over the whereabouts of the missing members of our party. Indeed, we ourselves had about given them up for dead. But we were too unfamiliar with the relative values of Earth affairs at that time to be impressed by the strangeness of this interest. We rather attributed it to Gresham’s hope that he could eventually induce Hunter to give up the secret of his powerful gas.

  But Hunter, though often importuned by this English officer, who had been promoted for his exploits in the Pacific to an important post in the home office, could not yet bring himself to take active part in this Earth quarrel. He still held it our duty to return to Venus as soon as we were successful in rescuing our two missing women.

  So we compromised by taking up a work of mercy in one of the Salvation Army huts near the base hospital where the Fanwood sisters were employed.

  And as time went on we began, at first unconsciously, to take sides in the war. The French and English and Belgians, once we come to know them well, proved far less barbarous than all Earth people had at first seemed. We came to understand that they were engaged in this horrible butchery against their will, against a race of outlaw barbarians who sought to destroy them. The terrible sufferings of these people appealed more and more to our sympathies and aroused more and more our hatred for the Germans.

  Then, too, as the Fanwood sisters told us of their native land of America, we began to realize that the peoples of the Earth were striving for the ideals that were our birthright in Venus. And in some respects we had to concede that there were things we could profitably learn from them and as profitably transplant in Venus on our return there.

  At this point in our education a report from Gresham renewed our interest in startling fashion in our search for the queen and the Lady of the South.

  The Russian revolution had just taken place. But in-the midst of the rejoicing over the overthrow of the Czar of that country, the secret service had unearthed evidence that there was on foot a deep-laid and obscure plot to make the revolution of advantage to certain unknown seekers for power.

  A sect called the Bolshevlki had been formed. Their principles, when we learned them, reminded us strongly of the system of society without laws that had worked so peacefully in Venus. But we knew now enough of the nature of the Earth people to agree that such a system could never work here. Nor did we believe it possible that such an Idea could have originated in an earthly brain.

  This conviction gained strength when Gresham reported that the apparent originator of this plot was an unknown woman who had in her power a renegade German officer. These two, keeping behind the scenes with figureheads in the foreground, proposed to take control of all Russia.

  Meantime there were hints of a plot in Germany similarly bred by a woman and an unknown German nobleman. This pair proposed to overthrow the Kaiser and seize even more autocratic power than he had held, under the pretense of giving Germany a people’s government. They proposed to wait till the present German power had conquered the Allies, then seize the power themselves, and by acting in cooperation with the Russian conspirators, rule the world.

  These plotters could not be located or positively identified, but from bits picked up here and there, Gresham was convinced, as he had suspected for some time, that they had to deal, in Germany, with our Queen of the Night, and in Russia with the Lady of the South.

  After Hunter and I had carefully gone over the evidence, there was not the slightest doubt in our minds that Gresham was correct.

  We sat up long into the night debating this astounding news. These two women who had so nearly wrecked Venus must needs try their ambitious schemes on another planet, this time working together. The queen had evidently recovered her sight, and with it all her mad ambitions. The lady had meantime fallen under her spell.

  Here was the complex dilemma. We had saved Venus by removing these women from the planet. Must we now save the Earth in the same way? If so, where would we take these troublesome females next? If back to Venus, then that planet would be in worse case than before.

  Meantime it was still an academic question, for we knew not where to lay our hands on these women. And two long, disastrous years were destined to pass before we obtained that knowledge.

  My readers know too well to need repetition what happened in those two years, as far as open history is concerned—how Germany pressed her victories till it seemed indeed that she was about to swallow the world; how peaceful America was at last forced into the struggle when it appeared too late to stem the tide.

  The Lady’s Bolshevik plot in Russia became a hideous success. The queen’s machinations in Germany ripened to the point where it was ready to break forth the moment the expected triumph of the German arms was certain.

  In this crisis Gresham sent for us to come at once to London.

  His message was so urgent that we complied, and met him two days later in the London headquarters of the secret service.

  This was the substance of what he told us: it had just been learned that the queen and the lady and their male partners were to meet shortly in an obscure village on the Baltic Sea to complete their plans for the subjection of the world. Though the Germans were now apparently in retreat, that was a part of the queen’s plot. She would use the panic at home to overthrow the Kaiser’s government, and on the instant the renewed armies of Germany, re-enforced by Russia, would turn on the Allies and destroy them.

  The Baltic conference must be broken up; Hunter and his flying-ship alone could do it.

  Hunter paced the floor for a few moments in deep thought. When he spoke, Gresham and I both gasped in astonishment.

  “I will stop that conference,” he said, “if I have to kill both those women. Moreover, I will destroy the German nation so that it will never again trouble the Earth.”

  ONE dark night early in the fall of 1918, our flying-ship, repaired and once more in working order, with Hunter again in command, and all our party on board save the two still missing women, hovered high over the retreating German battleline at the pivotal point on the western front.

  Immediately after Hunter’s desperate decision to destroy the German people, we had left England on a swift cruiser bound for our deserted island in the Pacific. We had arrived there to find all our band still alive and slowly becoming acclimated to Earth surroundings, but terribly homesick for Venus, and loud in their expressions of joy at the prospect of returning thither.

  We had brought with us on the cruiser all the necessary supplies for stocking our ship for the great home voyage through space. In a day’s time we were ready for the departure.

  But first we must perform the tragic errand which now found us poised in midair back of the German lines.

  Now at a word from Hunter a great jar of strong anesthetic fluid was dropped over the rail. Then with gasmasks adjusted we slowly sank to the ground. For the dropping of the gas was only the beginning of our campaign.

  Our ship was now equipped with machine-guns from the cruiser to ward off any attack from German airplanes. But due to the darkness, and the fact that we were well back of the line of the air patrol, we had no such adventure.

  When our ship touched the aground Hunter came forth from the motor cabin swathed from head to foot in white gauze, with rubber gloves on his hands, and a mask over his face. In his hands he carried a small glass jar.

  He left the ship alone and was gone for about an hour. What he did during that time he never told anyone but myself.

  Ages ago, in Venus, before our scientists completed the elimination of disease, there broke out a deadly plague which kill
ed every victim it attacked and spread with terrible rapidity. It was at last conquered, and its germ absolutely eradicated, save as scientists kept and cultivated it in their laboratories so that succeeding generations of doctors might be familiar with it in case the plague ever revived.

  Hunter had brought with him on the ship a jar of these germs, with the idea in mind that in our search for a new world we might find a region inhabited by fierce beasts that could best be eradicated by use of these germs.

  Now his purpose was to treat the German people as he had planned to treat these hypothetical beasts.

  Accordingly he had taken his jar with him on this night and smeared these germ cultures on the faces of a score or more of the soldiers who lay unconscious from our gas.

  All Earth readers remember the terrible plague that started in Germany in the fall of 1918, and swept over the Earth. Your doctors called it Spanish Influenza. It was in reality the plague of Venus, started by Hunter in and attempt to wipe out the German people.

  That he failed in destroying that people, of course, you know. He could not foresee that the difference of constitution between the men of Venus and Earth rendered the disease less deadly with the latter. But, for all that, this plague had a terrible effect on this war-stricken population. It has been believed by many that the influenza epidemic in reality was the final blow to the morale of the German people and really stopped the war.

  It was a source of lasting remorse with Hunter, however, that he had not foreseen the spread of the plague to other nations, whereby thousands of lives he had never meant to take were sacrificed to the all too deadly scourge.

  But in little over an hour after our landing in Germany our task there was completed, and we were on our swift way through the air to the Baltic village where the momentous conference between international and interplanetary conspirators was taking place.

  I took that last Earth voyage with sinking heart.

  It meant to me that I was soon to leave behind a world which now held all that was to me most dear.

  I had not had the courage to bid a final farewell to Margaret Fanwood. Indeed, when Hunter and I had departed for England at Gresham’s call, we had not seemed to realize that it meant a permanent parting.

  I HAD up to that moment never avowed my hopeless love. But we must have felt at that parting some premonition that it was for more than a matter of days.

  I had started to bid her a formal farewell when my emotions flew out of control. I swept her into my arms and declared my love, and had the brief rapture of hearing her avow hers in turn. Then I parted from her abruptly without pledge and without hope. Now I realized that it was better that I had never seen her again. It could have meant only pain for us both.

  I was so absorbed in these bitter reflections that I hardly realized when we reached our rendezvous. Hunter called me to the deck and pointed down to a little huddle of buildings on the shore of a great sea.

  Through our telescope, another Earth contrivance that we had added to our ship, we could make out a streamer of white flying from a window of one of these buildings. It meant that this was the house where the conference was to take place. It was the signal agreed upon with the spy who had worked his way into the confidence of the conspirators only to betray them, another despicable Earth custom, of which perforce we must make use.

  We dropped down a little nearer to the village, and then once more, for the last time on Earth, made use of a jar of our anesthetic fluid that had played such an important part in the destinies of two worlds.

  A few minutes later we descended into a lifeless village and made our way to the house with the white streamer.

  In a barricaded basement we found the four conspirators senseless over a table around which they had apparently been settling the affairs of the world.

  When we restored the two women to consciousness, to our surprise they seemed relieved and delighted to see us, rather than chagrined as we had supposed.

  “Oh! Take us back to Venus! Take us back to Venus!” were the queen’s first words as soon as she was able to speak. Then, seeing her still unconscious male companion, she turned white and rushed to him with a cry of alarm.

  “Oh! He isn’t dead! He mustn’t be!”

  “He is all right I’ll bring him around as I did you, as soon as we decide what to do,” Hunter said.

  The Lady, who had shown the same fear as to her own companion, looked up at this.

  “There is only one thing to do. Go back to Venus!” she said. “We have learned our lessons, and we are cured. Let us go back.”

  “I don’t understand,” Hunter said at length, turning to the queen. “My cousin, is this another trick to hoodwink me again? How about your great conspiracy to rule the world? We know all about it and came here to stop it.”

  “We came here to stop it, too,” was her amazing reply. “I once wanted to rule Venus. Then when I came to this Earth and thought Venus was destroyed, I began planning how I should rule the Earth. Then when he took me away with him, and I learned to love him and he made me his wife, I saw my opportunity. He was ambitious, and I spurred him on.

  “Meanwhile the Lady had loved and fled with another ambitious man, a friend of my husband’s. When they were students together they planned some day to win power together. In Russia he saw his opportunity, and in her the one to help him.

  “So each pair of us plotted, and finally got together again. But I have been overfed with the sight of the terrible power I once coveted. I see now how dangerous and evil it is; how it had nearly ruined this Earth, how it would completely ruin it if our plans went through.

  “We tried to persuade our husbands just now to drop it all, but they would not. Can’t you save us? And in saving us save the Earth?”

  “But how about these men, your husbands?” asked Hunter doubtfully. “They will be left behind to go on with your conspiracy.”

  “No! No!” cried both women in chorus. “We can’t go without them!”

  “Can’t the custom of Venus be changed to let us keep husbands not of our clan?” demanded the lady. “Was I so far wrong in my old ideas? Many of the women wished it.

  “I see now how foolish I was in my attempt to make men support women in idleness. What I have seen of that on Earth has cured me. Let me go back and undo the mischief I wrought in Venus with that false notion.

  “But let me teach the people of Venus that love is free of clan. Love has come to Venus at last, and not any custom can stop it!”

  Hunter smiled in responsive sympathy.

  “I think you are right!” he said at last. “Perhaps I. can persuade my father to use his influence to change the custom. I see things differently now.”

  SOME hours later, when the ship was once more in the air and the two couples were in their staterooms, the wives beginning the long process of consoling their imperial-minded husbands for their lost Earth, I approached Hunter, who was alone in the motor-cabin. A faint hope was knocking at my heart.

  “Hunter,” I said, “when you absolved the queen and the Lady for marrying out of their clans, did you mean it to apply only to them?”

  He eyed me quizzically.

  “Just what do you mean, Scribner?” he demanded. “Have you by any chance someone in mind whom you’d like to carry back to Venus?”

  “No!” I said, emboldened by his manner. “I have someone, whom I want to stay on Earth with; someone whom I know would never be happy in our strange world of Venus. For to most people it is not given to adapt themselves to any other world than the one of their birth. I can be happy here with the woman I have learned to love.”

  “So you, too, have learned what real love means? The Earth has been a great educator!” was all he said.

  “I can scarcely bear the thought of leaving you, old friend,” I went on. “Will you think I am a deserter?”

  “I will not let you desert me,” he said sharply. “For if you desert me, you will have to desert my sister-in-law, and I won’t have a relative of
mine treated so.

  “I mean that just before we went to England to meet Gresham the old chaplain at the base hospital was good enough to marry me to the finest little lady in two worlds, formerly Miss Elizabeth Fanwood. I’m on my way back to France now to join her. If you care to stop off and console Margaret for the loss of a sister, you have my blessing.

  “I have arranged it all with Weaver,” he went on. “The gruff old sea.-dog’s heart is broken, but he is somewhat reconciled by the fact that neither the queen nor the Lady has caught me. He will drop us in France, in the night, without the knowledge of the rest, and then go on to Venus. I’ve written a long letter to my father which will reconcile him, and start some needed reforms in Venus.

  “Scribner, old friend, once we pined for change. We got many changes that we didn’t find so alluring at close range. But I think now we have found something changeable that will fascinate us to the end. For what is more changeable than the ways and moods of an Earth maiden?

  “At the same time we’ve found something that is unchangeable, yet will never weary us with its monotony.

  “For each of us, Scribner, there is a world of never change, the heart of the woman that is waiting for him in France.”