“We all know it’s Dan he hates the most,” Faran said. “That’s why he must do the deciding.”
He looked directly at Blakemore. “Gilda may be right,” he said. “You may be walking into a trap that Malador has set for you. But before you decide, there are one or two things I think you should know. They have to do with how I feel about it. Malador could have killed you before he made his escape. Roger thinks he thought you were dead—or dying. We can’t know for sure whether he did or not. But if he did, it would have to mean he had some other reason for wanting to escape. And if he didn’t—wouldn’t going outside and trying to kill you by wrecking the machine or setting a fire be an insane thing to do—when he could so easily have done it inside the machine right after Roger let him out?”
“There’s no question about that,” Blakemore said. “But now he seems to be trying to destroy us all, if what you believe about him is true. Roger is sure he doesn’t hate you and Gilda at all, quite the contrary. For all we know, he neither set the fire nor moved the machine. But if he did, something very strange must have happened to make him change his mind. I’m basing my decision on one of those two possibilities—nothing more. I’m going outside because we’re in the deadliest land of danger until I find out.”
“No, Dan!” Helen Blakemore stumbled a little in her haste to grip him by the arm and swing him half-about, as if she felt if she did not look directly into his eyes her ability to sway him would dwindle and vanish. “If you go you’ll never stop regretting it, because I won’t be here when you get back. I mean that, Dan.”
“I think you will, darling,” Blakemore said. “Those flames outside aren’t going to die out for an hour or so. I’m almost sure of that. And in an hour you can do a lot—of sober thinking. It isn’t my life alone that’s threatened now, much as Malador seems to hate me. Philip said it was only natural for me to be more concerned about you than about anyone else.
“It’s true, of course. I can’t deny it. But there are five of us, not just you and the man you married. Each has a claim on the other. It will always be that way, I’m afraid, when people have shared great dangers, and have come to feel very close to one another.
“You’ll have time to think it over, darling, and change your mind about letting me go. I’m not worried at all about what your decision will be.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Blakemore descended first, with Tyson about eight feet above him, and this time the apprehension that had come upon him when he had first stared down into the sea of gigantic fronds and yard-wide blooms was of a different nature. He had no fear of sinking down into a bogginess that might be close to bottomless, or of stepping by accident into a yawning pit of emptiness, marked only by a blue-black, whorl-like swirling.
It was the fear of not being sure that a patch of ground that looked as if it were covered with a scattering of ashes might not turn into a bed of white-hot embers, concealed from view by a superficial layer of embers that had, in cooling, turned powdery white and dust-like.
Two-thirds of the vegetation directly below the machine had been so seared by the flames that only the blackened stalks of the great plants remained standing, like the trunks of titan oaks and cedars that had been lightning blasted. Most of them were as large as tree-trunks and a few were considerably larger. Between them were wide patches of bare earth not even covered with ashes, but brightly gleaming from the fire’s scouring. All of the sogginess was gone, dried up by the intense heat that the conflagration had generated.
It was a fire-blackened wasteland for the most part, and yet Blakemore could not see beyond it even from the summit of the machine, for it was still fringed by a row of very tall plants that had escaped destruction. Their blossoms still swayed in the breeze that was blowing across the fire-ruined acreage in erratic gusts, exactly as it had done on Blakemore’s first descent and nothing had marred a display of colors—vermillion and purple, orange and green—so bright that he had to shade his eyes when he stared at them.
Closer at hand the few blooms that still hung from the fire-ravaged stalks were withered or tarnished, and a few had collapsed into shriveled husks that looked not unlike gigantic pea pods half-eaten away by swarms of locusts just as gigantic.
There were no insects flying through the air or alighting on the ravaged growths, but Blakemore did not think that in the least surprising, for insects were slow to return to regions made desolate, whether by fire, flood or earthquake.
He paused suddenly—he was half way to the ground now—looked up and gestured to Tyson. “We don’t have to worry about snakes, I guess—but it’s just as well to be careful. We don’t know what might come crawling up out of a burrow that goes deep into the soil.”
“Makes sense,” Roger said. “I’ll keep a sharp lookout.” In a moment they had both reached the ground and were staring around them. Roger transferred the heavy weapon that Malador had made the mistake of not taking with him—or had it been a mistake?—from his left to his right hand and gestured toward the tall growths that were blocking the view.
“We might as well keep walking straight ahead,” he said. “The important thing right now is to get a wider view of our surroundings. There could be open countryside beyond this out-sized flower garden or just another garden. What do you think?”
“I’d prefer not to think,” Blakemore said. “Just to walk, as you suggest.”
It took them perhaps forty seconds to cross the ash-covered expanse of ground between the machine and the tall growths that hemmed it in in a half-arc that was not quite a semi-circle. They were careful not to step on the ashes, but to keep to the smooth patches that the flames had burnished. Once or twice they had to stop, and hopscotch from patch to patch.
They were moving between the tall, un-seared growths, and were so utterly dwarfed by them that they had the illusion, for a few more seconds, that they were advancing through the aisles of a tropical rain forest.
But when they finally emerged from between the outermost row of towering stalks—some were bright green and seemed bursting with sap and others were curiously mottled—not only did the rain forest illusion vanish, but the vista that stretched out before them was so unlike the region of gigantic blooms and fronds surrounding the ship that it was hard for Blakemore to believe that they could have existed side by side, in such close proximity that they could be thought of as brushing elbows.
It was a vista desolate beyond belief, stretching out for miles to a distant mountain that was aureoled in a thin grayish haze which hid its summit from view and obscured as well something gigantic and sharp-angled that bisected it from base to summit.
The vista did two things to Blakemore. It stirred memories deep in his mind that totally bewildered him, for he was quite sure that he had never seen the vista before and yet he had instantly recognized it.
The monoliths— There were at least fifty of them scattered across the plain that stretched from the mountain to where he was standing and he had a distinct recollection of having stood before three or four of them and examined the inscriptions which covered them.
The other thing that the vista did to Blakemore was strike him speechless, so that Tyson had to tug at his arm to jog him back to attentiveness.
“I said that the important thing was to get a wider view of our surroundings,” Tyson said. “But I didn’t think it would be quite as wide as that. It’s like walking out of a glass-walled hothouse with plants all around you and damp earth odors in your nostrils and finding yourself in the middle of the Sahara—or the Gobi. If it jolts you as much as it does me, it might be better if we just accepted the fact that talking about it would serve no useful purpose.
“I mean—how can we hope to find Malador out there—if he is out there. It’s too vast an expanse. With so many places he could—”
If Tyson had planned ahead and decided at what precise moment it might be best to carry out his suggestion and
fall completely silent it was hardly likely that he would have done so in the middle of a sentence. Yet fall silent he did. Or it might be more truly said that silence was forced upon him by the blinding flash of light that came into view on the plain about a hundred feet from where they were standing. It was followed by a deafening blast of sound.
The ground shook and Blakemore was hurled to his knees. Tyson swayed, but managed to stay on his feet by bending a little backwards and using Malador’s heavy weapon as an equilibrium-maintaining aid.
Something that looked like a fireball arose from the region of the blast and went streaking overhead, zigzagging for a moment and then hanging suspended almost motionless high in the sky. For five or six seconds it remained motionless. Then it sped on again until it was hovering directly above the vegetation from which Blakemore and Tyson had emerged.
Then it was gone, vanishing as abruptly as a meteor burnt to a cinder in earth’s upper atmosphere but leaving in its wake a trail of bright radiance that took longer to disappear.
Another blinding flash arose from the desolate plain and another fireball streaked across the sky, hovering precisely as the first one had done above the fire-ravaged vegetation when it had completed its zigzagging course, but vanishing just a little more slowly, as if a giant hand had closed over it, and some of the radiance had gone right on spilling out between the contracting fingers of the hand.
As Blakemore got unsteadily to his feet he was struck by the strange thought—strange at such a moment—that he had never before seen on a human face an expression quite like the one that had turned Tyson’s features into a grotesque, almost aboriginal-like mask.
Not only was his face livid and the lines about his mouth abnormal in all respects. His lips were so tightly contracted that they must have been giving him pain and his eyes had a glassy, protruding look.
Just the fact that he had remained standing seemed to mean nothing at all to him, for he gripped Blakemore’s arm the instant the latter regained his feet, as if he, and not Blakemore, were most in need of support.
“It’s another attack on the machine,” he muttered hoarsely. “I—I don’t see anything out there. Do you? How do you explain it? That burst of flame seemed to come right up out of the ground.”
“There’s nothing moving out there, that’s for sure,” Blakemore heard himself replying. “We’re too near to where that fireball came from to be mistaken about that.
“Fireball? Yes, that’s what it looked like. Do you suppose it could be some land of natural phenomenon? I was sure it had been fired from a weapon, but—I just don’t know.”
“I think it was fired deliberately,” Blakemore said.
“Not at the machine, perhaps, but at us. That traveling ball of flame could well have missed its mark.”
“What shall we do? Go back to the machine? I think we should.”
Blakemore shook his head. “If the attack is being made on the machine—and we don’t even know if it is an attack—we’re not going to stop it by giving up what he came out here to do. We’ve got to get over to where that blast came from before we’re blown apart.”
“Are you crazy? When there’s a blast like that you don’t walk right toward where there could be another one at any moment. You get as far away from it as you can.”
“There was just one blast, followed by two balls of flame,” Blakemore said. “We’ll wait a minute to see if another one comes. If it doesn’t—I think we should take the risk. There are a few boulders out there—large ones. We can dodge and weave about until we get up close. There’s no other way we can hope to put a stop to it.”
“Well, all right,” Tyson said, after a pause. “It isn’t just taking a risk. It’s making four-fifths sure there’ll be a funeral cortege for both of us, but without a hearse. “I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be ‘buried’ that way, in shining fragments spread out across the sky.”
“We may find out,” Blakemore said. “But we’ve no choice. If we go back to the machine the attack will go on, and— Look, I said it may not be an attack. You think Malador is behind it. I’ve never been sure. We’ve got to settle it, once and for all. If it’s a natural phenomenon it’s not too likely to be repeated. How often do freakish lightning bolts, the kind that can fork down and kill you without harming a tree or a house, occur more than once in the same place? If it’s a natural phenomenon we’ll have nothing to worry about. But we’ve got to determine whether it is or not or everything will stay the way it was. It’s not a good way to have everything stay.”
They waited at least three full minutes before they left the shadows cast by the tall stalks at their backs and started out across the plain. They moved toward the nearest of the scattered boulders, almost but not quite running, for the ground was rugged underfoot and crouched down behind it for an instant before continuing on. It was perhaps a useless precaution, but it had occurred to Blakemore, as he had pointed out to Tyson, that a very large boulder might afford some protection if another blast came.
Whether it would have concealed them as well from watching eyes was a moot question, for their swift advance could hardly have remained unnoticed otherwise, unless the eyes had been trained in some other direction nine-tenths of the time.
There were five more boulders to pass, behind each of which they crouched briefly, exchanging glances that were meant to be self-congratulatory but could hardly have looked that way, before they came in sight of something that made them duck down behind the fifth boulder with their eyes widened in disbelief.
Projecting straight up out of the ground—or almost straight, since it was at a slight tangent—was a long, shining tube.
It seemed like no more than a tube at first, burnished a coppery bronze. Then they saw that it was smoke-blackened over a third of its length and bore a distinct resemblance to a weapon of large-scale warfare that had been used in the twentieth century over a span of more than twenty-five years. A bazooka. But no—it wasn’t like that either. There was something about it that gave it more the look of a weapon that hadn’t been invented yet—if by “yet” you meant as late as the early years of the twenty-first century.
There were some incredible outside gadgetry attached to it near its base, so complex-looking that it made Blakemore’s vision reel and seemed actually to hurt his eyes, precisely as the weapon which Tyson was now carrying seemed always to do whenever he stared at it for more than a few seconds. Except that the complexity was a great deal more pronounced than it was in the weapon they had taken away from Malador, and there was a glitter too, which made it even more difficult for him to keep staring at it.
“Well, that’s it,” Blakemore said, but with no note of triumph in his voice. “Apparently you and Philip were mistaken and I was right. Malador couldn’t have hurled that fireball toward us—or the machine—just by monkeying around with the hidden powers of his mind. It came from that weapon, and he not only couldn’t have known he’d find a weapon like that—if he has found it—but—well, can you picture him as discovering how to operate it fast enough to launch an attack on the machine in less than a half hour after he made his escape? I certainly can’t.”
“But if Malador didn’t launch the attack, who did?” Tyson asked, and there was a shakiness in his voice that was so uncharacteristic of him that Blakemore preferred not to meet his gaze. No man likes it to be known that so great a shattering can take place in his mind that, if only for the barest instant, all of his courage recedes, like channels of water running with quicksilver speed down a slanting beach at ebb tide.
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Blakemore said. “There’s nothing to be gained by putting it off.”
“But it was just fired! There’s no one in sight, but someone must have operated it.”
“Malador could have fired it this time,” Blakemore said. “He could have mastered its complexity by now. I don’t think so, but it’s
remotely possible.”
“Where is he then?”
“Underground—whether it’s Malador or someone else. Can’t you see—the emplacement is just a shallow trench. A weapon that massive would have to have just as massive an operational base. The gadgetry at the base of the tube itself provides no solid support.”
It took them only a moment to emerge from behind the boulder and advance to within a few feet of where the weapon towered.
They halted for an instant, but only long enough to confirm what Blakemore had been almost sure of. There was a cavernous opening in the earth immediately surrounding the tube, visible from where they were standing.
It completely encircled the tube, which jutted up at its precise center.
“What do we do now?” Tyson asked. “Go to the edge and look down? We’d better do that before we start down. There has to be someone at the bottom and he’s not going to rush up and embrace us.”
“We’ll see,” Blakemore said. “Keep a tight grip on that weapon. We may need it at any moment.”
They moved forward again, and came to another halt at the edge of the cavernous opening. They could see nothing when they looked down—just a swirling darkness.
They were steps leading downward. That much they could tell despite the darkness, for the three uppermost ones stood out distinctly. The one at the top was even gilded by the sunlight.
They did not appear to be stone steps, and had a metallic luster.
“I’ll go first,” Blakemore said. “Stay about four feet behind me and make sure that you can bring that weapon to bear on anyone who leaps out at me. I hope that what Gilda said isn’t true. That you do know how to operate it.”
“I never told her that,” Tyson said. “I swear it.”
“But are you sure you can operate it?”
The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel Page 62