I was almost lifted from my feet once by a dank fold of gelatinous stuff that wrapped itself about me. I heard Jan cry out, and caught her about the waist just in time to prevent her from being swept away.
It was a hopeless battle. Yet I fought on, bitterly, vainly, until I saw a great black bulk floating down toward me through the murk. Was this new menace the nucleus of the fog-monster?
Light came; cold, white, vivid radiance. The bulk came to a stop not three feet away. It was an airship.
Not an earthly airship. It was like a conical bullet, tapered and rounded at both ends, twenty feet high and twice as long. From a circular port the cold light streamed out.
Hope came suddenly, and somehow I battled my way across that three feet of grey, coiling death. I stumbled over a metal threshold, dragging Jan with me. We collapsed on the floor of a small cubicle, while a door clanged shut behind us, shutting out the grey cloudy billows.
Jan was scrubbing weakly at an odorless, greasy-looking slime that covered her. I, too, was smeared from head to foot.
“Quite a world,” I said, with a feeble grin. She tried to smile, glanced up quickly at a quiet rustling sound.
Another door had opened. A figure was standing in the portal. I stared in amazement.
He was man-shaped—but not human. A scanty harness of some kind of leather comprised his clothing, permitting a view of the amazing structure of his body. He was translucent!
Light shone through his body! Like cloudy glass, his flesh glowed milky and semi-transparent, and within his body—like an X-ray photograph—I could trace the glowing outlines of unfamiliar-looking organs.
A curious phenomenon puzzled me. There was a heart, although an abnormally large one, and other organs clearly discernible, but apparently there were no bones, or else they were quite transparent.
His face was masklike, rigid and whitely translucent. He was hairless; his eyes were large and black. His jaws seemed hinged like mandibles, the only part of his face, I was to learn, that ever moved. His face was without muscles, covered with a chitinous translucent exoskeleton.
HE said something in a language that was all vowels. I shook my head, and he beckoned.
“Come on, Jan,” I said. “He seems friendly, although he looks like a freak.”
“I be not freak,” the translucent man said. He said it in English!
Jan and I stared at each other. “You speak English?” I got out rather shapily.
He nodded. “Yes. Enter.” Questions teeming in my mind, I followed him into what was probably the control room, a room obviously furnished for utility only. A few stools and chairs, a table or two, a metal-mesh hammock dangling from the ceiling, some paraphernalia in a corner, and an instrument panel set in the wall.
The translucent man pointed to chairs.
“Hello—sit down,” he said, accenting the words wrongly. “How is it that you speak English?” I said.
He picked up two books from a table and held them out to me. A scientific textbook and a popular novel. Then I saw the heterogenous collection in the corner and realized the truth. There were several chromium chairs, some small blocks of stone, specimens of metals and fabrics, familiar earthly things.
“Jan,” I said. “Degg tried his blue ray on these books, among other things, and our friend here found them. He’s learned English from them.”
“My name be Ruug,” our host said. He waited expectantly, and I introduced Jan and myself, with a mad feeling of unreality.
“The man must have a remarkable brain!” I said to Jan.
Ruug stared at me uncomprehendingly. “Brain machine,” he said. “You wonder many things. I shall tell you.”
He went on in a flat, emotionless, mechanical voice. I will not attempt to reproduce his curious phrases, his garbled English, but it was a fantastic history I learned. This was a world utterly alien to ours. Evolution had created here an anthropoid ruling race, although it differed from the human race in many particulars. Ruug was the last of his kind.
Ages ago Ruug’s race had developed an exoskeleton—a shell outside the body, like earthly Crustacea, instead of the human endoskeleton. In time this shell had softened, sloughed off, and become unnecessary as the body beneath it had become a mass of tough gristle and tendon.
Ruug was actually boneless; he needed no skeleton, for his flesh was incredibly hard; akin, I think, to the tough human heart-muscle fibers. His mind was, as he had said, a brain machine. Through the eons emotion had been bred out, leaving a highly trained machine of flesh and blood.
He wasn’t a super-scientific genius, but he was practically a mechanical thinking machine. With two books in his hands, he had been able to learn our language, even approximating the correct pronunciation. He was a human robot—a thinking robot.
He spoke of the fog-thing we had encountered. It was, as I had guessed, a living entity. It had come, Ruug thought, from space.
A hundred years ago this world had been thickly populated with beings like Ruug. Then the fog-creature had come, Cyclopean, terrible—and hungry. Life had been wiped out.
A few survivors had fled to underground retreats, or to airships like this. But one by one they had died, until Ruug was the last survivor. Nor could he escape, for his race had not conquered space travel.
I glanced at Jan and realized that she was asleep. I turned to awaken her.
“Let her be,” Ruug said. “I made her thus. Purposely.” He pointed to a tiny orifice in the wall beside her head. “A sleep gas I released. She will awaken not long.”
He read the anger in my face, put up a restraining hand. “Wait, I saw enmity in her eyes. We can help each other, I think. But she would cause trouble.”
Resentment was rising within me, but I fought it down. After all, this man had saved our lives.
“Well?” I said.
“First tell me what happened to you.
I gave him my story. He sat there motionless, his huge black eyes brooding. When I had finished he spoke again, and I was surprised at his increased fluency. That amazing machine-mind of his had learned much from listening to my narrative.
“It is as I supposed,” he said. “A vibration world. When I first found those objects—he pointed to the pile in the corner—“I suspected something of the truth. So I kept watch in this spot. Your science-man should have guessed. There are not only two, but innumerable worlds, different in vibration, lying on the same plane. By increasing or decreasing one’s vibration rate it is possible to move from one of these worlds to another.”
“You’re able to do this?”
“Not yet. One advantage of your type of brain, swayed by emotion, is that you have imagination, which I have not. Given the factors of an equation I can accurately compute the solution. But the initial step—there I am handicapped.”
Hope faded. “Then there’s nothing—”
“Wait. You have given me the factors of the equation. I want to leave this world. So do you. We can do it in the same manner in which Degg sent you here—by vibration. Will you picture again exactly what happened in your earthly laboratory and describe the weapon which projected the blue ray?”
I EXPLAINED Degg’s weapon as well as I was able.
At last Ruug nodded.
“It is well. There are not many factors, but I can find the missing ones. We shall go to your world—” He paused, eyeing me. “Degg and the other—Marlin—would destroy you, would they not? And me also they would ill. They must go. That will leave your world without a ruler.” The great black eyes were glowing. “Shall we rule it ourselves?”
There was a sound behind me. Jan was on her feet facing us as I swung about. “I heard what you’re planning, Falcon!” she blazed. “You don’t intend to—”
Ruug’s chitin-masked face was expressionless. “Well, why not?” I said.
Her lips were a white line. “You’d give Earth to this creature? You—a human being?”
“What has earth done for me—a hunted outlaw with a price on h
is head?”
“No one drove you to become a pirate.”
I felt myself flushing. “Well, I am a pirate. To the devil with Earth!”
“You swine!” Jan’s eyes were wet. “You—”
I TURNED to Ruug. “Can you put her to sleep again?”
Swiftly he touched a button set in the wall. Abruptly the light went from Jan’s eyes. I caught her as she fell.
“You’ve not hurt her?” I asked Ruug, my voice uneven.
He shook his head. “Asleep. She’ll wake after a time. Put her down in this hammock. You, too, had better sleep for awhile. I will need your help presently, perhaps, and wake you then.”
He touched the wall; another hammock dropped from the ceiling. I put Jan’s limp form into it and climbed into the other one myself. A little breath of sweet-smelling perfume brushed my face—and I was asleep . . .
* * * *
“It is ready.”
Ruug’s hand was on my shoulder, shaking me. I blinked, climbed out of the hammock. Ruug gestured.
“I did not need your help. The equation was not too difficult.”
A square block stood near by. But only the square floor-platform was of solid metal; the sides and top were a grille of fine-meshed wire. There was an oblong opening in the side facing me. The platform was perhaps fifteen feet square. A lever protruded from the floor in one corner. That was all.
“An improvement,” Ruug said, “over Degg’s device.”
“This will take us back to our world?” I asked.
He nodded, said, “Come.”
“Wait,” I said. “Jan—the girl.”
“Leave her here.”
Our eyes clashed. “She’s going with me,” I said.
I lifted Jan’s unconscious form, carried her into the cage, put her down gently. Ruug handed me a tube that looked like an old-fashioned Twentieth Century flashlight.
“It kills by destroying the nerve tissues,” he said. “Simply squeeze the sides.”
He held one of the tubes in a translucent, glassy hand as he moved to the lever, swung it over. The mesh walls of the cage began to glow with a soft blue radiance. I felt a tingling go through me.
Blackness . . . shuddering, unstable void . . .
Light came again. Through the mesh of the cage I saw that the walls of Ruug’s ship were no longer around us. Instead there were the stained metal walls of Degg’s laboratory.
A man was chained where I had stood hours before. A dozen guards stood rigidly at attention. Degg was lifting his vibration weapon.
I shouted, leaped out of the cage, Ruug at my heels. Their backs were turned to me, but Falcon had never killed an unwarned enemy.
I leveled my ray-tube, snapped, “Lift ’em! Quick!”
Before either the guards or Degg could move a blinding beam of white brilliance flashed over my shoulder. I dared not turn to strike down Ruug’s weapon, with the guards swinging to face me.
They died. Bathed in Ruug’s white ray, they slumped like bags of meal and dropped, their nerve tissues burned out by the dreadful power of the beam. Degg had leaped aside, his vibrator weapon leveled at me. The blue beam fingered out from the bell-shaped muzzle while amazement still contorted his gaunt face.
RUGG’S white ray caught him. He fell. His face went blank, and his weapon clattered to the floor, exploding with a hiss of burned-out wires.
The white ray clicked out. “There remains the other—Marlin,” Ruug said.
“Damn you!” I cried hoarsely. “You gave them no chance!”
He looked at me blankly. Before he could speak Jan appeared in the door of the cage. There was loathing on her face.
“You butcher—Falcon!” She spat out at me.
Ruug kicked at the smoking remnants of Degg’s weapon. “It is destroyed,” he said tonelessly. “You said it was the only one. We must get rid of this, too.” He pointed to the vibration cage. “With so many worlds, so many dangers like the fog entity in my own, the gate should be kept locked. This is a good world of yours, Falcon. We must keep it isolated.”
I heard Jan cry out. Even in that flashing second I wondered why she warned me if she hated me so. I spun about, saw Marlin standing in the doorway, flanked by guards, electro-guns blazing.
My shoulder flamed with blazing agony. Ruug said something incoherent, his ray-tube clattering on the floor. I flung my own tube up, squeezed it desperately.
The white beam sprang out, blinding, deadly. The three in the doorway stiffened. Bathed in the blazing glare, they crumpled nervelessly. Marlin’s ruddy face stared up, an angry grin frozen on it.
Then, without warning, a sickly sweet perfume was strong in my nostrils. My brain shrieked warning. Involuntarily I held by breath, but I had already inhaled some of the anesthetic gas. The floor seemed to be drifting up toward me. I hit it, but there was no pain.
I was partially conscious, but unable to move. Presently I felt myself being tugged toward the vibrator cage. Desperately I struggled to move, felt life seeping back into my veins. I saw Ruug’s clouded-glass face bending over me, felt something cold snap about my ankle. Prone on the floor of the cage I 3aw Jan lying limp and unconscious.
Ruug was fumbling with the lever in the corner. Instantly I realized his plan.
He would not share the rule of earth with me—no. I had served his purpose, like the vibrator cage. And, like the cage, I was to be destroyed—sent with Jan into endless vibration-worlds from which there would be no return.
Chained as I was, I could not reach the control lever, but I tensed, waiting for my chance. Ruug swung over the lever, turned hastily to hurry from the cage.
As he passed me I lunged at him, felt his bare legs sliding through my fingers. I wrenched desperately and he toppled back.
I grappled with him.
The meshes of the cage glowed. The warning blueness shimmered over them. Blackness took us . . .
THERE was that familiar, terrible feeling of unstable shaking; then around us rose the walls of Ruug’s airship. This time the blueness did not fade; it glowed even brighter. Handicapped as I was by my chained leg, I was at a fearfull disadvantage. Ruug’s inhuman body was strong, but one thing was in my favor; he knew nothing of modern wrestling—and the Falcon was a master of it.
It was like battling a giant reptile. I think the most horrible part of it was the utter lack of expression on Ruug’s chitin-masked face. The blue fire flamed weirdly and there was no sound but the harsh rasping of my breath. The blackness of the metamorphosis closed around us.
I almost lost my grip in that second of trembling nothingness. Somehow I locked my legs about Ruug’s as he was slipping away, gripped his throat with murderous fingers.
Through the blue glow, I caught a glimpse of this amazing new vibration-world into which we had been hurled. World of ice! Polar world of white desolation and death! Yet there was life here, for I saw blazing streaks of red light flashing outside in ordered formations.
I lost sight of them in a maelstrom of battle-mad conflict with Ruug. We clawed at each other, slugging and tearing, while the blueness flamed brighter. There came the shock of disorientation, the nerve-racking trembling—and still another world sprang into existence about us.
Cyclopean towers, jet black, reared toward a sky aflame with battle. Fantastically shaped airships raced and fought and fell in the great canyons between the colossal piles of masonry.
There was time for but a flashing glimpse; iron fingers were at my throat. I strove to break them, then remembered that Ruug had no bones. But I tore his hands away at last.
Blackness, shuddering void, and yet another world as we raced on through the vibrations. A dead world this time. Ebony glass stretched beneath a red moon. With a desperate twist I got my legs locked about Ruug’s torso and strained desperately.
I fought to hold back his hands as they fumbled toward my eyes. His stomach-muscles were rigid as metal. Abruptly his hand swept to his belt, brought out something. He tried to throw it out of the cage.
As I struck down his arm a key-shaped bit of metal clinked on the floor near Jan, out of my reach.
The void took us again; then another new world was about us. The ground, of a uniform pink color, heaved and billowed; it seemed to be alive. Without warning the rigid muscles of Ruug’s torso caved in. His jaw fell, he shouted something unintelligible and went limp.
His eyes glazed. Colorless froth bubbled from his nostrils. Ruug was dead.
AGAIN the metamorphosis came—and this new world was the most dreadful of all. It was utterly dark, as though underground. A moist, hot wind, blew on my face, laden with acrid odors that made me shudder. “Jan!” I called. “Wake up, Jan!” She opened her eyes, staring at me.
In swift obedience to my command she picked up the key, hurriedly she freed me. I got to my feet, staggered to the control lever. The premonitory shuddering was already racking me as I reversed it.
From the shaking nothingness we emerged into the world where the ground was pink and billowing with strange life. Then came the dead world of the hurtling red moon.
Jan was at my side. “We’re going back,” I said hoarsely.
The Cyclopean city sprang up outside the cage.
“You could rule Earth now, Falcon,” Jan said.
The polar world sent its icy breath into the cage. Almost immediately the interior of Ruug’s airship took its place.
“I don’t want to rule Earth,” I told her. “There are other things more important to me. Jan, the Falcon is dead. There’s only Paul Dent now.”
She did not answer, but her hand was warm in mine as the walls of Degg’s laboratory swam into reality outside the cage.
HYDRA
A unique tale of the fourth dimensia dangerous experiment in occultism, and the ghastly horror that reached back from that other plane of space
“There are sacraments of evil as well as of good about us, and we live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a place where there are caves and shadows and dwellers in twilight. It is possible that man may sometimes return on the track of evolution, and it is my belief that an awful lore is not yet dead.”
Collected Fiction Page 85