by Anthology
Chet cursed the gas for the dimness that clouded his eyes, and he rubbed at them savagely as he turned and walked to a side lookout.
Through the riot of impressions of the fight outside the port, he had known that there was a human body over which he stumbled at times. He saw it now—the body of Schwartzmann's henchman, killed these long weeks before but preserved in the ceaseless flow of gas.
But now, sprawled across it, was another and bulkier shape. Sightless eyes stared upward from a face turned to the cruel gas clouds and the hideous green moon above. The mouth sagged open in a black, bearded face, and one hand still clutched a pistol. It would have shattered his human opponent had the man been given an instant more, but against the enemy that rolled down and overwhelmed him in billowing clouds no weapon could prevail. Herr Schwartzmann had fought his last fight.
* * * * *
The package—the last gift of Kreiss—was still securely wrapped. It lay on the metal floor. Chet stooped to lift it, to work at the knotted vines and lay off the thick wrappings of fibrous leaves, until he stood at last, under the white glare of the bubbling nitron bulb, to stare and stare wordlessly at the cage of metal bars in his hand.
Crude!—yes; no finely polished mechanism, this; no one of the many connection clips that the other had had, either. But Chet knew he could solder on the hundreds of wires that made the nervous system of the control and fed the current to the cage; and Kreiss had believed it would work!
There was no thought of delay in Chet's mind, no waiting for daylight. This was the fourth night since he had been in that place of horror, since, above him in that Stygian pit, an inhuman satanic something had said: "… the captives … a sacrifice to Vashta … on the sixth night…."
Chet threw off the rags that once had been a trim khaki jacket and went feverishly to work. And through the time that was left he drove himself desperately. The hours so few and each hour so short! As he worked with seemingly countless strands of heavy cables, where each strand must be traced back and its point of connection determined, he knew how long each dreadful minute must be for the two captives deep inside the Dark Moon.
* * * * *
It was as well, perhaps, that Chet did not have the power of distant sight, that he had no messenger like those from the pyramid who might have gone down in that place and have sent him by mental television a picture of what was there. For he would have seen that which could have lent no clarity of vision to his deep-sunk eyes nor skill to the touch of fumbling, tired hands.
Walt Harkness, no longer under hypnotic control, stood in a dim-lit room carved from solid stone; stood, and stared despairingly at the surrounding walls and at the pair of giant ape-men who guarded the one doorway. And, clinging to his hand, was a girl; and she, too, had been released from the invisible bonds. She was speaking:
"No, Walter; we both saw it; it must be true. It was Chet's pistol; he was there in that horrible place. And I will not give up. He will save us at the last; I know it! He will save us from the inhuman cruelty of those terrible things. He shoots straight, Chet does; and he will give us a bullet apiece from the gun—the last kindly act of a friend. That's what the signal meant."
"Then why did he wait! Why didn't he do it then?" Walt Harkness had made the same demand a hundred times.
And Diane answered as always: "I don't know, Walter, I—don't—know."
Chet, cursing insanely at strange machines—equilibrators that controlled the longitudinal and transverse and rotative stability of the ship and that refused to take their electrical charge—knew with horrible certainty that the last night had come. But to the two humans, in the depths of this world where all knowledge of time was lost, the knowledge came only when they were dragged by their guards into a familiar room.
* * * * *
Ape-men were all about; they stared unwinkingly at the captives who stared back again in an effort to keep their eyes averted from the monstrous repulsiveness on the platform above them, till their eyes were drawn to meet the compelling gaze of the "Master" of a lost race.
A something which, at first glance, seemed all head—this was the "Master." The naked body, so skeleton-thin, was shrunken and distorted; it was withered and leathery-brown, like the aged parchment of mummified flesh. It was seated in a resplendent chair, whose radiating handles were for its carrying; and, above it, the head, so incredibly repulsive, was made more hideous by its travestied resemblance to human form.
Soft, pulpy and wetly smooth—a ten-foot sac, enclosed in a membrane of dead gray shot through with flickerings of color that flamed and died—the whole pulsing mass was supported in a sling of golden cloth. And, dominating it, in the center of that flabby forehead, a focal point for the gaze of the horrified observers, was a single glassy and lidless eye.
Cold, unchanging, entirely expressionless except for the fixed ferocity that was there, the eye was a yellow disk of hate, where quivering lines of violet culminated in a central, flaming point; and that point of living fire swelled prodigiously before their staring eyes. It seemed to expand, to slowly draw their senses—their very selves—from their bodies, to plunge them down to annihilation in that fiery pit where a soundless voice was speaking.
"Slaves! Apes! Take the captives to the great altar rock of Vashta, to the Holy of Holies. The others you were permitted to slaughter for our food; hold these two safely. For one shall die slowly for Vashta's pleasure, and one shall live on for mine. And we would not have them under our mental control, so guard them well; the offering is more pleasing to Vashta when the blood in his cup flows from a creature unbound both in body and mind." And the two helpless humans found themselves released from the flaming pit that became again but an eye in the forehead of a loathsome thing.
* * * * *
They were fully conscious of their surroundings as they were herded up through the pyramid and out into the night, where rough, calloused hands seized them and dragged them to a smooth table-top of rock that stood only slightly above the ground before the great rocky pile. Stunned, waiting dumbly, they saw swarming ape-men clustered like bees on the lower pyramid face; they saw coverings of stone being removed and a great recess laid open, while the ape-things dropped in awe before a grotesque and horrible beast-head carved from a single piece of stone.
The eyes of the beast shone with some cold, hidden light. They seemed fixed hungrily upon a cup in a distorted hand, and, though the cup was empty, there was promise of its being filled. For little sluices of stone sloped from the place where the captives stood, and they ended above the cup so that the life-blood of a slaughtered creature, or a sacrificed man, might pour splashingly in, a streaming draught for this blood-thirsty god.
The arena filled with abominable life. Now, in the dark silence of a moonless night, the cold stars shone down on a gathering of spectators, wild and unreal—nameless, spectral horrors of a blood-chilling dream.
The flat capstone of the pyramid was the resting place of the "Master"; his huge head showed pulpy and gray above the glittering gold of the metal carrying-chair where a misshapen body was seated. Others like him had poured from the pyramid, carried by thousands of slaves to their places about the arena.
Monsters of prodigious strength, their forebears must have been, but this degenerate product of evolutionary forces had lost all firmness of flesh. Their bodies, sacrificed for the development of the bulbous heads, were mere appendages, fit only for the propagation of their kind and for the digestion of human food.
* * * * *
The clean air of night was polluted with abominable odors as it swept over the exudations of those glistening, pulpy masses. To the two waiting humans on the great sacrificial stone came a deadening of the senses, as an executioner, armed with strange torturing instruments, drew near. But, of the two, one, clinging hopelessly to the other, abruptly stifled the dry choking sobs in her throat to lift her head in sharp, listening alertness.
Walt Harkness was speaking in a dead, emotionless tone:
"Chet has failed us; he is probably dead. Good-by, dear—"
But his words were interrupted and smothered by a breathless, strangling voice. Diane Delacouer, staring with agonized eyes into the night was calling to him:
"Listen! Oh, listen! It's the ship, Walter! It's the ship! It's not the wind! I'm not dreaming nor insane!—Chet is coming with the ship!"
It was as well that Chet Bullard could not see the two, could not hear that voice, trembling and vibrant with an impossible, heart-gripping hope; and surely it was well that he could not share their emotions when, for them, the silence became faintly resonant, when the distant, humming, drumming reverberation grew to a nerve-shattering roar, when the black night was ripped apart by the passage of a meteor-ship that shrieked and thundered through the screaming air close above the arena, while, with the rock beneath them still shuddering from the blasting voice of that full exhaust, the sky above burst into dazzling flame.
* * * * *
For Chet in that control-room that was darkened that he might see the world outside—Chet, grim and haggard and stained of face and with thin-drawn lips that bled unheeded where his teeth had clamped down on them—Chet Bullard, Master Pilot of the World, had no thought nor emotion to spare for aught beyond the reach of his hand. He was throwing his ship at a speed that was sheer suicide over a strange terrain flashing under and close below.
He overshot the target on the first try. The twin beams of his searchlights picked up the dazzling black and white of the arena; it was before him!—under him!—lost far astern in one single instant that was ended as it began. But his hand, ready on a release key, pressed as he passed, and the sky behind him turned blazing bright with the cloud of flare-dust that made white flame as it fell.
Such speed was not meant for close work; nor was a ship expected to hit dense air with a blast such as this on full. Even through the thick insulated walls came a terrible scream. Like voices of humans in agony, the tortured air shrieked its protest while Chet threw on the bow-blast to check them and slanted slowly, slowly upward in a great loop whose tremendous size was an indication of the speed and the slow turning that was all Chet could stand and live through.
* * * * *
He came in more slowly the next time. Floodlights in the under-skin of the ship were blazing white, and whiter yet were the star-flares that he dropped one after another. Brighter than the sunlight of the brightest day this globe had ever seen, the sky, ablaze with dazzling fire, shone down in vivid splendor to drain every shadow and half-light and leave only the hard contrast of black and white.
In the nose of the ship was a .50 caliber gun. Chet sprayed the pyramid top, but it is doubtful if the two below heard the explosions. They must have seen the whole cap of the mountain of rock vanish as if, feather-light, it had been snatched up in a gust of wind. But perhaps they had eyes only for each other and for a glittering, silvery ship that came crashing toward the place where they stood, that checked itself on thunderous exhausts; then touched the hard floor of the arena as softly as the caress of a master hand on the controls.
But from them came no cry nor exclamation of joy; they were dazed, Chet saw, when he threw open the port. They were walking slowly, unbelievingly, toward him till Diane faltered. Then Chet leaped forward to sweep the drooping, ragged figure up into his arms while he hustled Harkness ahead and closed the port upon them all. But, still haggard and stern of face, he left the fainting girl to Harkness' care while he sprang for a ball-control and a firing key that released a hail of little .50 caliber shells whose touch could plough the earth with the ripping sword of an avenging god.
And later—a pulverous mass where a huge pyramid had been; smoking rock in a great oval of shattered crumbling blocks; and, under all the cold light of the stars, no sign of life but for a screaming, frantic mob of ape-men, freed and fleeing from the broken bondage of masters now crushed and dead!
All this Chet's straining, blood-shot eyes saw clearly before his hand on the firing key relaxed, before he covered his eyes with trembling hands as realization of their own release rushed overwhelmingly upon him.
* * * * *
There were supplies of clothing in the ship—jackets, knee-length trousers, silken blouses, boots, and even snug-fitting, fashionable caps. Very unlike the ragged wanderers of the mountainous wastes were the three who stood safely to windward of a spouting fumerole.
Mud, coughed hoarsely from a hot throat, and green, billowing gas!—there was nothing now to show that here was the scene of a companion's last moments. With heads bared to the steady breeze that had been their undoing, they stood silent for long minutes.
Behind them, at a still safer distance, where no chance flicker of a fire-god's finger might strike him down as it had the white man, a black figure danced absurdly from foot to foot and indulged in unexpected gyrations of joy.
For did not Towahg hold in one hand a most marvelous weapon of shining, keen-edged metal, with a blade that was longer than his two hands? What member of the tribe had ever seen such an indescribably glorious thing? And, lacking the words even to propound that question, Towahg spun himself in still tighter spirals of ecstasy.
Then there was the ax! Not made of stone but fashioned from the same metal! And besides this a magic thing for which as yet there was not even a name! It made flashing reflections in the sun; and if one held it just so, and moved one's head before it, it showed a quite remarkably attractive face of a man who was more than half ape—though Towahg had never yet been able to catch that man beyond the magic that the white men called "mirror."
He was still enthralled in his grotesque posturing when Diane looked down from the floating ship.
"He'll be the Lord Chief Voodoo Man for the whole tribe," she said, and, for the first time since they had stood at the fumerole, she managed to smile. "And now," she asked, "are we off? What comes next?"
* * * * *
Chet's hand was on a metal ball in a crudely constructed cage of metal bars. He looked at Harkness, and, at the other's almost imperceptible nod, he moved the ball forward and up.
"We're off!" Harkness agreed. "Off for Earth—home! And it will look good to us all. We will take up things where we left them when we were interrupted: there's no Schwartzmann to fear now. We can show our ship to the world—revolutionize all lines of transportation; and we can plan—"
He failed to finish the sentence. To his reaching vision there were, perhaps, more potentialities than he could compass in words.
And Chet Bullard, fingering the triple star on his blouse—the insignia that had gone with him through all his hopes and despairs—looked out into space and smiled.
Behind him a brilliant world went slowly dark; it became, after long watching, a violet ring—then that was gone; the Dark Moon was lost in the folds of enshrouding night. Ahead was an infinity of black space where only the distant stars struck sparks of fire in the dark. And still he smiled, as if, looking into the unplumbed depths, he, too, made plans. But he moved the little ball within his hand and swung the bow sights to bear upon a glorious globe—a brilliant, welcome beacon.
"Home it is!" he stated. "We're on our way!"
But there was needed the rising roar from astern that his words might have meaning; it thundered sonorously its resounding hum in a crescendo of power that brooked no denial, that threw them out and onward through the velvet dark.
* * *
Contents
PALOS OF THE DOG STAR PACK
by J. U. Giesy
Chapter I
It was a miserable night which brought me first in touch with Jason Croft. There was rain and enough wind to send it in gusty dashes against the windows. When I heard the doorbell ring, I was tempted to ignore it. But as it rang again, and was followed by a rapid tattoo of rapping, I rose, laid aside my book, and stepped into the hall.
First switching on a porch light, I opened the outer door, to reveal the figure of an old woman.
"Doctor," she began in a tone of almost frantic
excitement. "Dr. Murray—come quick!"
I am Dr. George Murray, in charge of the Mental Hospital in a Western state. The institution was not then very large, and since taking my position at the head of its staff I had found myself with considerable time for study, seeking to learn what I might concerning both the normal and the abnormal manifestations of mental force.
But I was not thinking of anything like that as I looked at the shawl-wrapped face of the little bent woman. I said to her, "But, my dear woman, there are other doctors for you to call. I am really not in general practice. I am connected with the asylum—"
"And I always said I would come for you if anything happened to Mr. Jason," she cut in.
"Whom?"
"Mr. Jason Croft, sir," she returned. He's dead maybe—I dunno. But he's been that way for a week."
"Dead?"
"Dead, or asleep. I don't know which."
Clearly there was something here I wasn't getting into fully, and my interest aroused. "Come in," I said. "What is your name?"
"Goss," said she. "I'm housekeeper for Mr. Jason, but I'll not be comin' in unless you say you'll go."
"Then come in without any more delay," I replied. I knew Croft—by sight at least. He was a big fellow with light hair and a splendid physique. He had the eyes of a mystic—of a student of those very things I myself had studied more or less. I decided I would go with her to Croft's house which was not very far down the street. I gave her a seat, said I would get on my shoes and coat.
We set out at once, my long raincoat flapping about my legs, and the little old woman tottering along at my side, as we hastened down the storm-swept street.