The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 03

by Anthology

  * * * * *

  Nadia had been tossed out into pure air, beyond the zone of the stupefying perfume, and she recovered her senses in time to see the finish of the battle. Stevens, assured that his foe was hors du combat, turned toward the spot where he had thrown Nadia's body. He saw that she was unharmed, and sprang toward her in relief. He was surprised beyond measure, however, to see her run away at a pace he could not hope to equal, encumbered as he was; motioning frantically at him the while to keep away from her. He stopped, astounded, and started to unscrew his helmet, whereupon she dashed back toward him, signaling him emphatically to leave his armor exactly as it was. He stood still and stared at her, an exasperated question large upon his face, until she made clear to him that he was to follow her at a safe distance, then she set off at a rapid walk. She led him back to where the hexaped had fallen, where she retrieved her bow and arrows; then, keeping a sharp lookout upon all sides, she went on to a small stream of water. She made the dumbfounded man go out into the middle of the creek and lie down and roll over in the water, approaching him sniffing cautiously between immersions. She made him continue the bathing until she could detect not even the slightest trace of the sweet, but noxious fragrance of that peculiarly terrible form of Ganymedean life. Only then did she allow him to remove his helmet, so that she could give him the greeting for which they both had longed and tell him what it was all about.

  "So that's it, ace!" he exclaimed, still holding her tightly in his iron embrace. "Great balls of fire! I thought maybe you were still a little cuckoo. Anaesthetic perfume, huh? Hot stuff, I'd say--no wonder you bit--I would, too. It's lucky for us I was air-tight--we'd both be fee...."

  "Stop it!" she interrupted him sharply, "Forget it--don't ever even think of it!"

  "All x, ace. It's out like the well known light. What to do? It's getting darker than a hat, and we're a long way from home. Don't know whether I could find my way back in the dark or not; and just between you and me, I'm not particularly keen on night travel in these parts after what's just happened. Are you?"

  "Anything else but," she assured him, fervently. "I'd lots rather stay hungry until tomorrow."

  "No need of that--I've brought along enough supper for both of us. I'm hungry as a wolf, too, now that I have time to think of it. We'll eat and den up somewhere--or climb a tree. Those wampuses probably can't climb trees!"

  "There's a nice little cave back there about a hundred meters. We'll pretend it's the Ritz," and they soon had a merry fire blazing in front of the retreat. There they ate of the provisions Stevens had brought. Then, while the man rolled up boulders before the narrow entrance of the cave, Nadia gathered leaves and made a soft bed upon its warm, dry floor.

  "Good night, lover," and the girl, untroubled and secure now that Stevens was at her side, was almost instantly asleep; but the man was not sleepy. He thought of the power plant, even now sending its terrific stream of energy into his accumulators. He thought of the ultra radio--where could he get all the materials needed? He thought of his friends, wondering whether or not they would receive his message. He thought of Breckenridge and the other human beings who had been aboard the Arcturus, wondering poignantly as to their fate. He thought of Newton and of his own people, who had certainly given them up for dead long since.

  But above all he thought of the beautiful, steel-true companion lying there asleep at his mailed feet, and he gazed down at her, his heart in his eyes. The firelight shone through the chinks between the boulders, casting a flickering ruddy light throughout the little cavern. Nadia lay there her head pillowed upon one strong, brown little hand. Her lips were red and sweetly curved, her cheek was smooth and firm as so much brown velvet. She was literally aglow with sheer beauty and with perfect health; and the man reflected, as he studied her hungrily, that this wild life certainly had agreed with her--she was becoming more surpassingly beautiful with every passing day.

  "You little trump--you wonderful, lovely, square little brick!" he breathed silently, and bent over to touch her cheek lightly with his lips. Slight as the caress was, it disturbed her, and even in her sleep her subconscious mind sent out an exploring hand, to touch her Steve and thus be reassured. He pressed her hand and she settled back comfortably, with a long, deep breath; and he stretched his iron-clad length beside her and closed his eyes, firmly resolved not to waste a minute of this wonderful night in sleep.

  When he opened them an instant later, it was broad daylight, the boulders had been rolled away, the fragrance of roasting meat permeated the atmosphere, and Nadia was making a deafening clamor, beating his steel breastplate lustily with the flat of his huge saber.

  "Daylight in the swamp, you sleeper!" she exclaimed. "Roll out or roll up! Come and get it, before I throw it away!"

  "I must have been kind of tired," he said sheepishly, when he saw that she had shot a bird and had cooked breakfast for them both while he had been buried in oblivion.

  "Peculiar, too, isn't it?" Nadia asked, pointedly. "You only did about ten days' work yesterday in ten minutes, swinging this frightful snickersnee of yours. Why, you played with it as though it were a knitting-needle, and when I wanted to wake you up with it, I could hardly lift it."

  "Thought you didn't want that subject even mentioned?" he tried to steer the talk away from his prowess with the broadsword.

  "That was yesterday," airily. "Besides, I don't mind talking about you--it's thinking about us being ... you know ... that I can't stand."

  "All x, ace. I get you right. Let's eat."

  * * * * *

  Breakfast over, they started down the valley, Stevens carrying his helmet under his arm. Hardly had they started however, than Nadia's keen eyes saw a movement through the trees, and, she stopped and pointed. Stevens looked once, then hand in hand they dashed back to their cave.

  "We'll pile up some of the boulders and you lie low," he instructed her as he screwed on his helmet. She snapped open his face-plate.

  "But what about you? Aren't you coming in, too?" she demanded.

  "Can't--they'd surround us and starve us out. I'm safe in this armor--thank Heaven we made it as solid as we did--and I'll fight 'em in the open. I'll show 'em what the bear did to the buckwheat!"

  "All right, I guess, but I wish I had my armor, too," she mourned as he snapped shut his plate and walled her into the cave with the same great rocks he had used the night before. Then, Nadia safe from attack, he drew his quiver of war-arrows into position over his shoulder, placed one at the ready on his bow-string and turned to face the horde of things rushing up the valley toward him. Wild animals he had supposed them, but as he stood firm and raised his weapon shrill whistles sounded in the throng, and he gasped as he realized that those frightful creatures must be intelligent beings, for not only did they signal to each other, but he saw that they were armed with bows and arrows, spears, and slings!

  Six-limbed creatures they were, of a purplish-red color, with huge, tricornigerous heads and with staring, green, phosphorescent eyes. Two of the six limbs were always legs, two always arms; the intermediate two, due to a mid-section jointing of the six-foot-long, almost cylindrical body, could be used at will as either legs or arms. Now, out of range, as they supposed, they halted and gathered about one who was apparently their leader; some standing erect and waving four hands while shaking their horns savagely in Stevens' direction, others trotting around on four legs, busily gathering stones of suitable size for their vicious slings.

  Too far away to use their own weapons and facing only one small four-limbed creature, they considered their game already in the bag, but they had no comprehension of earthly muscles, nor any understanding of the power and range of a hundred-pound bow driving a steel-headed war arrow. Thus, while they were arguing, Stevens took the offensive, and a cruelly barbed steel war-head tore completely through the body of their leader and mortally wounded the creature next beyond him. Though surprised, they were not to be frightened off, but with wild, shrill screams rushed to the attack. Steven
s had no ammunition to waste, and every time that mighty bow twanged a yard-long arrow transfixed at least one of the red horde--and a body through which had torn one of those ghastly, hand-forged arrow-heads was of very little use thereafter. Accurately-sped arrows splintered harmlessly against the re-enforced windows of his helmet and against the steel guards protecting his hands. He was almost deafened by the din as the stone missiles of the slingers rebounded from his reverberating shell of steel, but he fired carefully, steadily, and powerfully until his last arrow had been loosed. Then, the wicked dirk in his left hand and the long and heavy saber weaving a circular path of brilliance in the sun, he stepped forward a couple of paces to meet the attackers. For a few moments nothing could stand before that fiercely driven blade--severed heads, limbs, and fragments of torsos literally filled the air, but sheer weight of numbers bore him down. As he fell, he saw the white shaft of one of Nadia's hunting-arrows flash past his helmet and bury itself to the flock in the body of one of the horde above him. Nadia knew that her arrows could not harm her lover, and through a chink between two boulders she was shooting into the thickest of the mob speeding her light arrows with the full power of her bow.

  Though down, the savages soon discovered that Stevens was not out. In such close quarters he could not use his sword, but the fourteen-inch blade of the dirk, needle-pointed as it was and with two razor-sharp, serrated cutting edges, was itself no mean weapon, and time after time he drove it deep, taking life at every thrust. Four more red monsters threw themselves upon the prostrate man, but not sufficiently versed in armor to seek out its joints, their fierce short spear thrusts did no damage. Presently four more corpses lay still and Stevens, with his, to them incredible, earthly strength, was once more upon his feet in spite of their utmost efforts to pinion his mighty limbs, and was again swinging his devastating weapon. Half their force lying upon the field, wiped out by a small, but invincible and apparently invulnerable being, the remainder broke and ran, pursued by Stevens to the point where the red monsters had first halted. He recovered his arrows and returned to the cave, opening his face-plate as he came.

  "All x, sweetheart?" he asked, rolling away the boulders. "Didn't get anything through to you, did they?"

  "No, they didn't even realize that I was taking part in the battle, I guess. Did they hurt you while they had you down? I was scared to death for a minute."

  "No, the old armor held. One of them must have gnawed on my ankle some, between the greave and the heel-plate, but he couldn't quite get through. 'Sa darn small opening there, too--must have bent my foot 'way around to get in at all. Have to tighten that joint up a little, I guess. I'll bet I've got a black spot and blue spot there the size of my hand--maybe it's only the size of yours, though."

  "You won't die of that, probably. Heavens, Steve, that cleaver of yours is a frightful thing in action! Suppose it's safe for us to go home?"

  "Absolutely--right now is the best chance we'll ever have, and something tells me that we'd better make it snappy. They'll be back, and next time they won't be so easy to take."

  "All x, then--hold me, Steve, I can't stand the sight of that---let alone wade through it. I'm going to faint or something, sure."

  "As you were!" he snapped. "You aren't going to pass out now that it's all over! It's a pretty ghastly mess, I know, but shut your eyes and I'll carry you out of sight."

  "Aren't we out of sight of that place yet?" she demanded after a time.

  "I have been for quite a while," he confessed, "but you're sitting pretty, aren't you? And you aren't very heavy--not here on Ganymede, anyway!"

  * * * * *

  "Put me down!" she commanded. "After that crack I won't play with you any more at all--I'll pick up my marbles and go home!"

  He released her and they hurried hack toward their waterfall, keeping wary eyes sharp-set for danger in any form, animal or vegetable. On the way back across the foothills Stevens shot another hexaped, and upon the plateau above the river Nadia bagged several birds and small animals, but it was not until they were actually in their own little canyon that their rapid pace slackened and their vigilance relaxed.

  "After this, ace, we hunt together and we go back to wearing armor while we're hunting. It scared me out of a year's growth when you checked up missing."

  "We sure do, Steve," she concurred emphatically. "I'm not going to get more than a meter away from you from now on. What do you suppose those horrible things are?"

  "Which?"

  "Both."

  "Those flowers aren't like anything Tellus ever saw, so we have no basis of comparison. They may be a development of a flycatching plant, or they may be a link between the animal and the vegetable kingdom. However, we don't intend to study 'em, so let's forget 'em. Those animals were undoubtedly intelligent beings; they probably are a race of savages of this satellite."

  "Then the really civilized races are probably...."

  "Not necessarily--there may well be different types, each struggling toward civilization. They certainly are on Venus, and they once were on Mars."

  "Why haven't we seen anything like that before, in all these months? Things have been so calm and peaceful that we thought we had the whole world to ourselves, as far as danger or men were concerned."

  "We never saw them before because we never went where they lived--you were a long ways from your usual stamping-grounds, you know. That animal-vegetable flower is probably a high-altitude organism, living in the mountains and never coming as low as we are down here. As for the savages--whatever they are--they probably never come within five kilometers of the falls. Many primitive peoples think that waterfalls are inhabited by demons, and maybe these folks are afflicted the same way."

  "We don't know much about our new world yet, do we?"

  "We sure don't--and I'm not particularly keen on finding out much more about it until we get organized for trouble, either. Well, here we are--just like getting back home to see the 'Hope,' isn't it?"

  "It is home, and will be until we get one of our own on earth," and after Stevens had read his meters, learning with satisfaction that the full current was still flowing into the accumulators, he began to cut up the meat.

  "Now that you've got the power-plant running at last, what next?" asked Nadia, piling the cuts in the freezer.

  "Brandon's ultra-radio comes next, but it's got more angles to it than a cubist's picture of a set of prisms; so many that I don't know where to begin. There, that job's done--let's sit down and I'll talk at you awhile. Maybe between us we can figure out where to start. I've got everything to build it lined up except for the tube, but that's got me stopped cold. You see, fields of force are all right in most places, but I've got to have one tube, and it's got to have the hardest possible vacuum. That means a mercury-vapor super pump. Mercury is absolutely the only thing that will do the trick and the mercury is one thing that is conspicuous by it's absence in these parts. So are tungsten for filaments, tantalum for plates, and platinum for leads; and I haven't found anything that I can use as a getter, either--a metal, you know, to flash inside the tube to clean up the last traces of atmosphere in it."

  "I didn't suppose that such a simple thing as a radio tube could hold you up, after the perfectly unbelievable things that you have done already--but I see now how it could. Of course, the tubes in our receiver over there are too small?"

  "Yes, they are only receiver and communicator tubes, and I need a high-power transmitting tube--a fifty-kilowatter, at least. I'd give my left leg to the knee joint for one of those big water-cooled, sixty-kilowatt ten-nineteens right now--it would save us a lot of grief."

  "Maybe you could break up those tubes and use the plates and so on?"

  "I thought of that, but it won't work--there isn't half enough metal in the lot, and the filaments in particular are so tiny that I couldn't possibly work them over into a big one. Then, too, we haven't got many spare tubes, and if I smash the ones we're using, I put our communicators out of business for good, so that we can't
yell for help if we have to drift home--and I still don't get any mercury."

  "Do you mean to tell me there's no mercury on this whole planet?"

  "Not exactly; but I do mean that I haven't been able to find any, and that it's probably darned scarce. And since all the other metals I want worst are also very dense and of high atomic weight, they're probably mighty scarce here, too. Why? Because we're on a satellite, and no matter what hypothesis you accept for the origin of satellites, you come to the same conclusion--that heavy metals are either absent or most awfully scarce and buried deep down toward the center. There are lots of heavy metals in Jupiter somewhere, but we probably couldn't find them. Jupiter's atmosphere is one mass of fog, and we couldn't see, since we haven't got an infra-red transformer. I could build one, in time, but it would take quite a while--and we couldn't work on Jupiter, anyway, because of its gravity and probably because of its atmosphere. And even if we could work there, we don't want to spend the rest of our lives prospecting for mercury." Stevens fell silent, brow wrinkled in thought.

  "You mean, dear, that we're..." Nadia broke off, the sentence unfinished.

  "Gosh, no! There's lots of things not tried yet, and we can always set out to drift it. I was thinking only of building the tube. And I'm trying to think ... say, Nadia, what do you know about Cantrell's Comet?"

  "Not a thing, except that I remember reading in the newspapers that it was peculiar for something or other. But what has Cantrell's Comet got to do with the high cost of living--or with radio tubes? Have you gone cuckoo all of a sudden?"

  "You'll be surprised!" Stevens grinned at her puzzled expression. "Cantrell's Comet is one of Jupiter's comet family and is peculiar in being the most massive one known to science. It was hardly known until after they built those thousand-foot reflectors on the Moon, where the seeing is always perfect, but it has been studied a lot since then. Its nucleus is small, but extremely heavy--it seems to have an average density of somewhere around sixteen. There's platinum and everything else that's heavy there, girl! They ought to be there in such quantity that even such a volunteer chemist as I am could find them!"