by Ray Cummings
15
"This will be the place to land, Gregg Haljan."
We were drifting down upon a barren region of naked crags, dark,frowning rock-masses, broken and tumbled, as though by some greatcataclysm of nature. Mountains upon the Moon could not be moredesolate of aspect.
We landed on the rocks. The heights here had a purple-red sheen fromthe starlight. We had seen frequent evidence of the storm; and itshowed here. Rocks were abnormally piled in drifts; smooth areasshowed, where the pebbles, stones and boulders had been swept away bythe wind.
Snap and the girls landed beside us. We spoke softly. None of us, noteven Molo, knew how far sound would carry in this air.
"Where is the place from here?" Snap demanded.
"Off there."
Molo spoke with docile, guarded softness. He gestured with his headand shoulder. A quarter of a mile away, over these uplands, the brokenland went down in a sharp depression.
"It is there. I think from here we should go on the ground. There isno guard, and I think seldom is anyone on top."
"If I help you now, if we should wreck the gravity controls, thenWandl will be helpless to navigate space, or to interfere with therotation of Earth, Mars and Venus. The allied worlds might then defeatthe Wandl ships in battle. If that happened, perhaps your governments,because of my help here, would forgive what my _Star-Streak_ hasdone."
"Your piracy?" I said.
"Yes. I am outlawed. I might be reinstated if you would speak the goodwords for me."
"Maybe."
"Maybe even they would reward me. You think so, Gregg Haljan?"
He wanted to be on the winning side; this suited us. "Let's try it andsee, Molo. I'll speak plenty of good words for you."
Now, as we landed on the uplands, he said, "You will do best to freemy hands."
"Oh, no!" Snap declared.
"But I am a good fighter. Something unexpected might come."
"Too good a fighter," I said. "We trust you because we have to, Molo,but no more than is necessary."
A small recess in the rocks was near us. We put Molo there, with hishands bound, and with Anita and Venza to guard him. Venza held theelectronic gun; she knew how to fire it. The girls crouched in adepression about twenty feet away. They could see Molo plainly; if hemoved, a flash of the gun would kill him. He knew that.
The girls gazed at us as we were ready to start. "Good-by, Gregg.Good-by, Snap. Good luck!"
"We won't be long. Sit where you are." Snap touched Venza's shoulderfor his good-by. "Listen, Venza: Molo has already told us enough toenable us to find the ship. If he tries anything, kill him."
"Right," she said.
We left them. A minute or two, cautiously shoving ourselves along therocks, and we were crouching there. The cauldron was about two hundredfeet broad and fifty feet deep; an irregular circular bowl. Thestarlight gleamed on it, and there were dots of small artificiallight. We saw a group of small metal buildings, very low and squat,like balls mashed down, flattened in a bulging disc-shape; betweenthem were tiny skeleton towers.
The towers, twice the height of a man, were spread at irregularintervals in a hundred-foot circle, with a group of three or four inthe center. There seemed some twenty of them. Taut wires connectedtheir tops, each tower with every other, so that the wires were alacework above the small disc buildings. The bottoms of the towerswere grounded with electrical contacts, and every tower had a groundconnection with each other by means of cables.
Far to one side, across the bowl from us, was a single globe-dwellingwith lighted windows. From its ground doorway, a narrow metal catwalkextended like a sidewalk on the ground, winding and branching amongthe towers and discs.
This was the exterior of the Wandl gravity station. It lay silent anddark, save for the starlight and the little lights on the towers. Nosign of humans. Then we saw movement in the globe-dwelling. A man cameto the doorway, gazed at the sky and went back.
I whispered, "Which is the best entrance to the underground rooms?"
We saw where, at several points, the winding catwalk terminated inlow, dome-like kiosks, giving ingress downward. One was on our slopeof the cauldron. "That's the one we'll try," Snap murmured.
He stopped suddenly. The top of the distant globe-dwelling wasglowing. A little round patch there was radiant, like a lightedwindow. A transparent ray was coming from inside. The operators withinthis globe were observing the sky, training instruments upon it, nodoubt.
And now we saw in the sky the third of those sword-like beams. It hadprobably been visible there for some time but we had not noticed it."That's Venus," I murmured.
It seemed so. A blurred star, red in this atmosphere, was close abovethe horizon. The light-beam stood out from it, sweeping up to thezenith.
The gravity station here was about to make contact with the Venusbeam. We heard a muffled siren, a signal echoing from the subterraneancontrol rooms. The current went into all these wires and towers andtwenty-foot ground discs. The hissing and throbbing hum of it wasaudible. The discs and towers were glowing; red at first, then violet.Then that milky, opalescent white. The overhead wire-aerials weresnapping with a myriad of tiny jumping sparks.
I saw now that the top of each tower was a grid of radiant wires, asix-foot circular projector with a mirror reflector close beneath itand a series of prisms and lenses just above. It all glowed opalescentin a moment, a dazzling glare.
Then the tower tops were swinging. The lights from them had reachedthe intensity of an upflung beam, and the projectors were swinging tofocus the beam inward. The focal point seemed about a thousand feetoverhead. All the beams merged there; and guided by the towersdirectly underneath, a single shaft was standing into the sky.
The entire cauldron depression was now a blinding mass of opalescentlight. We could see nothing but the milk-white inferno of glare. Itpainted the rocks up here on the rim so that we shrank back, shadedour eyes and gazed into the sky. And from the cauldron, the hum andthe hiss of the current, the snapping of sparks, were all lost in awild electrical screaming turmoil.
Overhead, we saw the Wandl beam from Venus.
Apparently this control station had two functions: the control of theplanet's movements, its axial rotation and its orbital flight, and itsability to apply gravitational force to other celestial bodies.
Wandl was controlling her own movements by applying gravity force,attraction and repulsion, to all the celestial starfield; anddoubtless also by applying the repulsive beam tangentially against theether like rocket streams. In this respect, I realized, the planet wasprobably operated not unlike one of our familiar spaceships. Ineffect, it was itself a gigantic globular vehicle. Later I learnedthat it was thought that Wandl's atmosphere could be highlyelectronized at will, with a resulting aberration of the naturallight-ray reflected from her into space. This could have caused theblurring of the image of Wandl when viewed telescopically from otherworlds.
Again, for a moment of the contact, there was that bursting light inthe sky.
The contact with the Venus beam lasted a minute or two. Snap and I, onthe cauldron rim, were engulfed in the blaze of reflected light andthe wild scream of sound. Then presently the turmoil subsided. Thecontact in the sky was broken. The tow-rope of Venus jerked itselfaway. But on the next Venus rotation it would be attacked again.
Another few minutes passed. The little circular depression beneath uswas dim and silent as we had first seen it. Figures were moving withinthe dwelling structure. From several of the underground entrancesfigures came up, the ten-foot insect-like shapes of workers. Three orfour of the brains came bouncing up, moving along the ground catwalkwith little leaps. All the figures entered the distant main dwellinghouse. The contact was over.
"Probably hardly anyone left down below," Snap whispered. "Now's ourchance."
"If we can get into that opening without being seen," I said.
"Shadows, down the rocks to the left. Damnation, Gregg, we can make itin one calculated leap."
"I
'll try it first. I'll get in and wait for you."
"Right."
We each had a gravity cylinder at our belt and a ray-gun in our hand.The slope of the depression was dim here, merely starlit; it was asteep, broken and fairly shadowed descent, fifty feet to the littledome-like kiosk which marked the nearest subterranean entrance. I wentdown it with a swoop, landed in a heap beside the kiosk and duckedinto it. Instinct made me fear a guard, but reason told me none wouldbe here; there was only the danger of encountering someone coming up.
I was at the top of a winding, descending passage, a step-terracedfloor; there were occasional lights in the ceiling. In a moment Snapjoined me. "Got here! I wonder how far down it goes?"
I gripped him. "Snap, no matter what happens, do it with a rush. Keepwith me. And if I shout to get out...."
"We go out with a rush!"
"Yes. Back to the girls. Use your ray-gun and the gravity projector ingetting back to them and get away without me, if I fall."
"Same for you, Gregg."
We went down the deserted passage. We had had experience in movementon Wandl now; we handled ourselves more deftly. We went down severalhundred feet. The passage branched, but there always seemed a maintunnel.
It was all deserted. There were distant, dimly-lighted, silent rooms.Were these factories of the strange forms of electronic gravitycurrents Wandl used? Some were in operation. A hum issued from them.Workers moved about.
We stopped to consult. The girls, and Molo himself, had described whatwe would find: a main route leading to the control room where thedelicate mechanisms which operated all this were centralized, thenerve center of Wandl. It seemed that we were following that mainroute.
A worker came with a swimming leap past us. We dropped into a hollowedshadow at a tunnel intersection, and he went swooping by.
"Lord, Snap," I muttered, "that was too close for comfort."
Again we advanced. The tunnel turned sharply. Down a short slope, aglowing room was disclosed, with two or three workmen moving withinit.
The main control room! We could not doubt it. Molo, in his enthusiasm,had once described it clearly to the girls, its great skeins of littlethread-like wires spread upon the walls, the myriad tiny opalescentdiscs contacted with the small gray rock surface under the tangledmasses of thread-wire, the levers and dials banked on the circulartables: they were unmistakable features.
"There it is, Snap," I whispered in his ear. "In that central rack.Those insulated rods, see them? Anita told us they used them to adjustthe discs. Watch out for the current."
"But it's off now, Gregg!"
"There's still danger in it, and you'd short-circuit somewhere. Keepyour hands off. Use the rods."
"The operators...."
He got no further. A figure lunged into us from behind, a giantworker! His largest pincer bit into my shoulder; his hollow shoutresounded. The operators of the control room came with leaps at us.
There was a moment of wild confusion. Light, seemingly almostweightless bodies flapped against us. Arms gripped us, but they wereflimsy. The huge body-shells cracked gruesomely as we struck with oursolid fists.
A moment of turmoil passed. No bolts were fired. The shouts were briefdown here in the narrow confines of the tunnel. Panting, bruised moreby our collisions against the rocks than by our adversaries, we ceasedour wild lunges. We did not look at the scattered, broken and crushedbodies drifting now to the floor.
"Now, Snap! Hurry! Others may come."
We lunged into the glowing control room, seized the long insulatedpoles from the central rack. They had a grateful feel of weight. Ipicked one up, jumped with a twenty foot leap to the wall.
The wires came down like cobwebs under my sweeping blows; the littlediscs knocked off as though they were fungus growth. Sparks flewaround us. Shafts of electronic radiance spat out. The wall washissing over all its length as I ranged up and down it. The tangledbroken threads of wire writhed like living things on the floor; thencrumpled, fused and turned black.
I swept that wall-segment with frantic haste, lunged around andstarted another way. Across the room I saw Snap doing the same. Aturmoil of electrical sound was reverberating around us, deafening,and the glare was blinding. A belt-shaft shot from the wreckage undermy rod. It seared my left arm. My sleeve burned off; the arm hung limpand tingling at my side. I stopped to rub it; in a moment strengthcame back to its muscles.
Snap was raging like a great heavy bird gone amok. Through the greenfumes of electrical gases which were filling the room I saw himlunging at the circular tables, overturning them. They cracked likethin polished stone as they struck the metal floor.
I finished with the wall. There was a twenty-foot square piece ofmetal apparatus, ramified and intricate; I heaved it over upon itsside. A thousand little mirrors and prisms, dislodged from it, cameout in a splintering deluge.
I was aware of Snap fighting with a brown-shelled figure. Then he wasfree of it. I saw it mashed and broken at his feet as I dove past,swimming in the smoke to lunge the length of a great fluorescent tubewhich was still dimly glowing. My pole pried it over; it crashed witha brief puff of light and the rush of an explosion as air went intoits vacuum.
I found Snap panting beside me, clinging to me in mid-air. The glarewas dying around us; the din was lessening. We were choking in thechemical fumes of the released, half-burned gases. Turgid darkness wascoming to the wrecked room, with little hissing flares spittingthrough it.
"Enough, Gregg! Listen! Up overhead...."
A great siren from up there was screaming into the night.
Snap panted, "Got to get out of here. Can't breathe."
Together we lunged for the tunnel by which we had entered. I stood amoment, gazing back upon the strewn and scattered room.
The delicate nerve-center of Wandl. Heavy green-black gas fumesswirled in it; darkness and silence closed down.