Ten (Stories) to The Stars

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  Dusk began to settle. Perry heard guns on the banks of the stream, and shouts and cries, as he drifted invisible through the human battle lines. Presently, looking through the goggles of his airtight oxygen mask, he saw light around him, then darkness, then light again. It was the regular play of a great searchbeam from up there on the hills. And there were noises too, now loud and near. At least he’d come this far without being detected.

  Clinging to a rock of the river bottom, he waited a little till it got darker. Then, still being careful to keep well beneath the surface of the water, he swam toward the shore.

  * * *

  He came up in the reeds at the river’s edge, and peered cautiously toward the low bluffs. He had to duck his head again, before he saw anything but humping, moving shapes, and part of a great, half-restored battlement; for the search beam, swinging majestically and regularly back and forth, swept blindingly toward him.

  But there were regular intervals between each successive blaze of light; and these allowed him to observe. Little, gleaming robots, walking like human beings on broad, elastic-shod feet, and provided with metal arms, were rebuilding the battlemented wall with limestone quarried from the hillside. They worked with perfect efficiency, raising blocks into place, and applying a kind of mortar with spatulate-ended arms. But their movements for each operation were always identical, betraying not intellect but standardized mechanical perfection.

  And it was the same with the other machines and weapons. A gun—it didn’t look so very different from a familiar artillery piece, except for its complex breech-loading mechanism, fired intermittently, without any crew to operate it. Watching, Perry concluded that its sighting and firing apparatus must be stimulated by certain sounds, movements, and lights, out there where the soldiers were entrenched. For when he heard a shout from the rear, or saw a cannon flash, or troops advancing from the trenches, there was always a volley of small, screaming shells, the latter directed with a precise, cold accuracy, that must depend on the spiritless exactness of instruments. And the result was massacre.

  Heat beam projectors, lensed boxes in their webwork supports, seemed to operate under the same kinds of stimuli, turning their faint, barely visible spears of heatwaves toward sudden light, noise, or movement. Searchlights swept the sky, probably drawn by motor sounds. And if they located a plane, the movement of its light-enveloped form was enough to attract the high-angling muzzles of slender guns that fired with soft pops, but reduced duralumin to powder. The aiming was always perfect.

  When the search beam was turned away from him, Perry got cautiously out of the water and dashed for the nearest bush. He crouched behind it, as the beam swept past him like a great eye. Then higher, to another bush. And so he advanced. Once, because he stumbled, he was caught in the open; but he threw himself flat and waited, cursing his clumsiness. But the blazing glare passed him, and no blasting death followed. Perhaps camera eyes had photographed his inert form; but mechanical, adding-machine brains had not enough reasoning powers to recognize him as an interloper, as long as he did not move. Perry breathed with relief, and continued his intermittent climb at each brief moment of darkness.

  Near the top, however, it didn’t look so simple. He was hiding in a clump of tall weeds, face to face with those guns—and nobody knew what other deadly devices. He was stumped as to how he should try to advance further. Make a rush? There was a pretty good chance of getting past the guns that way, as far as he could tell by visual inspection; but surely there’d be something there, in the narrow gaps between the guns—something to kill him, or at least detect his presence! It made his flesh crawl; but need gave his wits a sharper edge. He had to get through, somehow!

  He searched the line of fantastic, flame-spewing weapons avidly. A hundred yards away there was a small break in it, where an aerial bomb, dropped by one of the planes, had struck. The crater still smoked with the vapors of the explosive. If there was any detecting device there, any taut-stretched wire, or anything that would bring some death machine into play at his accidental touch, it would be shattered, now, and still unrepaired.

  Scrambling from bush to bush during intervals of darkness, as before, he got to the break in the line, and through it safely. Thus, he looked at last over the hilltops, and down into the area enclosed by that great, mounded rectangle.

  It was a queer, contrasting scene. Familiar farm buildings stood out in the weird illumination. But everywhere there were mounds of earth and deep pits. From some of the latter, red-lit smoke trailed up toward the stars. Massive things, not unlike army tanks, moved in circles, as if pacing beats, and there was the muffled clang of what could be buried factories. The old fortress had come to life once more, resurrecting itself from its bed of Carboniferous slumber. It was a camp, bristling with strange armaments and bustling with activity.

  Chapter IV Into the Robot’s Lair

  Perry lay prone in the high grass. He was panting and tired, and he felt a little sick again. He knew that whatever chances he had of accomplishing any good here, would be diminished if he waited. There were dozens of ways of getting uselessly killed. So far he hadn’t encountered any of that corrosive gas, but hisses, and distant human screams from the flats along the river, told him that it was being used. And though he had his oxygen mask, his clothing and skin could be eaten away and his blood poisoned. Two bombers burst overhead, their powdered wreckage silvery in paths of searchlights. Perry knew he might even be destroyed by the weapons of his own countrymen.

  So his gaze settled feverishly on the nearest opening in the ground. It wasn’t far away, and its depths were lost in darkness. But twice he saw crawling mechanical things emerge from it. It must lead, then, toward the heart of the mystery he was trying to probe.

  At the next opportunity, he made a dash for the pit. He lost his balance in the loose soil at its edge, and tumbled to its bottom. But except for a few scratches, he was unhurt. He picked himself up and hurried down a steep passage. Except for lights far ahead, it was dark as Erebus. But he advanced as rapidly as he could, his purpose only to explore, and to take advantage of opportunity, if it came.

  Once he heard the growl of machinery, as a great crawling automaton came down the passage, moving in his direction. The headlamp threw him into full view. And there was no place to hide. But remembering what Rod Murgatroyd had told him about these automatons, and making use, too, of his own experience with them, Perry flung himself against the crumpled alloy wall and froze rigid as stone, his heart thumping madly.

  The robot stopped. Its mechanical eyes must have seen his movement. Perhaps the delicate maze of wheels and cams and instruments, which was all it had for a brain, had responded to the stimulus of his moving form, and was forced, by the way it was planned and built, to wait and search for other evidence of a hostile presence. But finding none, the robot whirred on. As it passed Perry, he felt the heat of its driving mechanism. Through a quartz glazed spyhole in its flank, he saw a white, blazing globe within it—perhaps a mass of material throwing off atomic energy.

  Perry’s lips, sweat-daubed behind his mask, curved in a haggard smile at his oddly miraculous escape. He continued on his way.

  He had an odd, tense idea of being followed by something that was not quite mechanical. Behind him, in the darkness, and even above the confined din of the factories, he thought he heard, now and then, the patter and slither of footsteps.

  And so he hurried on, along the main tunnel, reaching at last a faintly lighted, circular compartment.

  In the center of the room a vat, a hundred and fifty feet across, was sunk into the floor. Its cone-shaped interior was full of a greenish liquid, and was covered over by an immense sealing disk of glass. There were grids, like colossal battery plates, in the liquid. Bus-bars, penetrating beneath the sealed edges of the glass disk, attached the grids to an apparatus standing at the vat’s circular rim. The apparatus resembled an electrical transformer.

  Just for a moment Perry was able to look. Then the light in the
chamber began to fade.

  There came a rattle of opening doors as the light died completely. He tried to hold perfectly still, as he heard the soft, heavy footfalls of great robot-guardians released. He should be able to fool them too, by keeping perfectly quiet.

  Now, again, he heard those lighter footfalls, that had seemed to be following him. They advanced to the entrance of the chamber. Instantly there was an answering rush of elastic-shod feet. And then a woman’s scream!

  Perry was petrified for a moment of utter consternation. Then he rushed toward the sound of the scuffle there in the weird dark. The slithering of his own feet betrayed him. There was a clanking rush in the gloom. Cold metal claws closed firmly about his shoulders. He struggled. The oxygen mask was scraped from his face. But the gripping members held him firm at last, and he desisted in his futile efforts to escape.

  “Who’s there?” he growled, panting.

  “It’s me—Troubles,” came the answer, half sobbing.

  Perry Wilcox was stunned. “How did you get here?”

  “Same way you did,” the girl choked. “When you ran away from the hospital, I sent an orderly to follow you, and bring you back. He didn’t get to you; but he saw you dive off the dam with the oxygen mask on. When he told me, I guessed right away what you were trying to do. So—I got leave, found myself a mask in the operating room, and—tagged after you.”

  “In the name of sense, what for?” Perry demanded.

  “For a lot of good reasons—Mister!” she said more decisively. “I used to be an ambitious newspaper woman, for one thing—always hunting up trouble and hoping for a scoop. You can believe it’s that way, if you want to. Or you can believe that I’m the little girl that used to keep clippings of all the Wilcox-Murgatroyd exploits, and that you’re still my hero—if you’re conceited and crazy enough. I don’t care!”

  It was a torrent of words that would have startled Perry Wilcox if he wasn’t so amazed already, here in this dark hole of a place, with metal monsters clutching him.

  “Okay—Troubles,” he stammered.

  The robots restraining him were motionless. Nearby there were hollow clankings. Trying to catch the significance of the sounds, Perry was sure that the cover of the great vat was being raised. Cold prickles raced over his body. What was it that would happen now?

  Lyssa Arthurs was talking again, out of the dark. “Perry,” she said more gently, though just as intensely as before. “Just when I started out it came over the radio that Kerwin was appointed Provisional Director of Defense. And—and there’s danger that the hospital will be stormed by a mob—to get Murgatroyd.”

  Before he could answer, Perry felt his feet hoisted from the floor. He was swung in metal arms, then tossed free. He flew through the air. Warm fluid closed about him. It was like water, only it stung his flesh—made his nerve-ends numb.

  He heard the girl give a startled, involuntary cry, as she too splashed into the strangely energized fluid in the great vat. Automatically he tried to swim toward her; but the numbness was quickly creeping over his nerves and muscles. He could hardly move.

  His voice was hoarse with half paralysis when he choked: “Keep your courage, Troubles.…”

  Perry’s head went beneath the fluid. His brain was spinning. He thought he heard a click of switches being turned on. The numbness increased suddenly, like a jolt of electricity. But he managed to hold his breath. He had a curious sensation of shrinking, of being pressed together.

  * * *

  He emerged at last from unconsciousness, knowing at least that he was alive. He was coughing, as though his lungs had been partly full of fluid. His head ached intolerably, and his heart was laboring like a rusty engine.

  He sat up on the wet surface on which he sprawled, and tried to look about. His vision was blurred at first, and he squinted to focus his eyes. He looked around a square room, one end of which was open. Its walls were like rough, black glass. Behind him was a dark opening, like a door, from which, judging from the wetness around him, he had recently been ejected, along with a considerable quantity of fluid.

  He saw the girl, Lyssa Arthurs, sprawled beside him. Worriedly, Perry scrambled over to her. She was still unconscious, though breathing raggedly. Her rubber oxygen mask was intact, except for the metal and glass parts, which were curiously pitted and malformed. By some unknown transformation the oxygen tanks strapped to her shoulders, were similarly distorted and useless. They were full of holes, and had lost their compressed content. Perry had parted with his mask during his scuffle with the robots, and now his tanks had broken loose from his shoulders somewhere too. He noticed that even the metal buttons of his shirt were rough and out of shape.

  He ripped the useless, ill-fitting mask from Troubles’ face, unfastened the crooked buckles that held the oxygen flasks in place, and applied artificial respiration.

  Meanwhile he searched his surroundings. What had been done to Troubles and himself, and where had they been taken? He looked again toward the open end of the compartment. Beyond was a gigantic, beautiful cavern, apparently many miles in extent. It was walled with coarse, jagged glass. Through a system of lenses in its azure roof, light was streaming down. It must be artificial, but it was just about like reddish sunlight. The floor of the cavern was like a beautiful, wild valley, crowded with strange, exotic trees and plants; and white buildings peeped through the foliage.

  What had happened looked almost simple to Perry Wilcox then. He and Troubles had merely passed down through the vat, to a vast, habitable, artificially excavated cavern below. But he couldn’t accept this idea, somehow. It was too simple. And there was an elusive strangeness, disquieting and hard to identify, about everything he saw and felt. It was more than just the oddity of the vegetation and the buildings.

  After a minute, Lyssa Arthurs sighed and tried to rise. She looked about, confusedly. “Where are we?” she demanded.

  “Your guess is as good as mine, Troubles,” Perry returned, awedly. “But we must be at the final center of things—at the place the robots up there were meant to guard. Whatever that may be.”

  They rested several minutes, not saying much. Then Troubles arose shakily. “Come on. Let’s explore, fella,” she urged.

  Perry supported her unsteady steps as they walked out of the open-ended chamber. The ground around them was covered with a kind of coarse, shaggy moss. Trees, formed like oversized bushes, reared up over them, bearing strange fruits. The light which came from above, was warm, like sunshine.

  “Kind of like a heaven here, isn’t it?” the girl asked.

  Perry grinned, though his head still ached. “What are you trying to do, pull my leg?—talking that kind of bunk!” he growled.

  “Only it’s so still and deserted-looking,” Lyssa went on. “There’s not a path anywhere. And look! That building!”

  They had passed through a grove. Near them was a long structure of white stone. But it was like a ruin. Its rows of windows, with their carved decorations, some of them human figures, were sightless and empty, except for intruding masses of coarse, vinelike plants. Once, from its appearance, the building might have been a gigantic apartment house, teeming with inhabitants. And there were others like it, near, and far off on the high slopes of the cavern. But all had that same tenantless aspect.

  * * *

  Perry and Troubles were moving along a street of what might have been a village. At the farther end of the street was a domed edifice of glass of different colors.

  And at the crest of the dome, standing firmly on a stubby cylinder which was evidently meant to represent some sort of ship, was the golden figure of a man, clad in flowing robes. The face of the colossus was stern and kindly as he stared off into the distance as if somewhere there he watched for the realization of a hope. The great staff he clutched, rested on his pedestal and rose straight upward to join with the roof of the cavern, above.

  There was a steep stairway leading down to the sunken grounds of the domed edifice. Lyssa, hurrying ahead
on still unsteady legs, and looking up too intently at the golden image above, lost her balance and pitched forward on the steep slant. She tumbled the full length of it. Perry gave a shout of concern and leaped after her, sure that she must have at least broken some bones.

  But she got up quite nimbly and promptly. “Stumble bum!” she muttered, frowning. And then in a new and different kind of tone: “Perry—that was funny, wasn’t it? I’m not hurt at all!” There was wonder in her dark eyes.

  He was puffing with relief, but was startled, too. “Yeah, I see!” he said. “It’s stranger than the desertion, here. I landed light myself. It was as though the air was holding me back—partly. As though it has a higher resistance, or something! But that’s looney!”

  They walked into the temple. The atmosphere there was cool and moist. Glass pillars, spiral in form, loomed in the shadows. Lyssa and Perry looked around intently, as if searching for the answer to a riddle.

  In an indented portion of the blue grass floor, there was a cluster of spherical globes, crystal clear. They were maybe three inches in diameter.

  Idly, yet with an odd and very significant thought lurking in the back of her mind, Lyssa kicked at one of the globes with her rough shoe. Immediately it broke, coalescing liquidly with several of its neighbors to form a slightly flattened ovoid. It was like a huge drop of quicksilver in shape.

  Lyssa was thinking deeply, but then Perry got her off the track. “Look, Troubles!” he shouted. “The air resistance really is higher here!”