Star of Ill-Omen

by Dennis Wheatley

  Kem knew that if he had still had his sight and been perfectly fit there was nothing he could do that Harsbach could not; so he concentrated such little energy as his sadly weakened state enabled him to muster in trying to take Carmen’s mind off the awful uncertainties that faced them.

  On the morning following her disclosure, she told him that, now there was no longer any fear of his injuring himself during a fit of delirium, she ought to leave him for a few hours each day until she could get the Saucer tidied up from the results of its terrifying loops and twists while Harsbach had been experimenting with its controls. Since the flight of the bee-beetles the highest priority had obviously had to be given to trying to find out how to navigate it; so Harsbach and Anna, with only short intervals for sleep, had devoted themselves entirely to that, and were relying on her to put things straight on the upper deck as soon as she possibly could.

  When she got up there she found herself faced with a Herculean task. Not only had the thousands of beans and all the other things been thrown violently about, but many of them had drifted over the edge of the deck and now lay halfway between it and the lower deck, against the wall of wire formed by the outer surface of the great magnet.

  She made a start by collecting the beans and water flasks that were still scattered about the deck, and storing them in the empty tanks; and that alone occupied her for the best part of four days. Next, she got from Harsbach two struts that he had removed from inside the control tower. To the end of one she tied an angle piece, obtained from the same source, and to the other a landing net made of an expanding bag-top and the sleeve of an old blouse sewn up at the wrist. Then, with these two implements, she spent another five days fishing up the scores of items that had floated down between the two decks.

  Meanwhile, Harsbach and Anna were systematically examining every feature of the control tower, and removing such parts as it seemed they could without danger, in order gradually to work a passage up into the hollow of its mast, as the Herr Doktor thought it possible that somewhere up there lay the mechanism by which it could be navigated.

  Carmen completed her labours by removing her own belongings to the lower deck and, now that Kem no longer might require her instant attention, making up a bunk for herself in the bomb-aimer’s box over the unexploded bomb.

  Owing to the protection from the constant sunlight that these boxes gave, they made excellent sleeping places, but she still spent a good part of her time lying beside Kem in his, and doing everything she could to relieve the tedium of his gradual recovery. Yet, after she had finished her tidying-up, she continued several times each day to visit the upper deck for a while, in order to perform such small services as she could for the two workers, and learn how they were progressing.

  It was on their eighteenth day after leaving Mars that she wriggled into Kem’s bunk, and said a little breathlessly, ‘Darling, I have a present for you.’

  Into his outstretched hand she pressed a round, flat object. He held it up near his face and caught the sound of a rhythmical ticking. ‘Why!’ he exclaimed. ‘This is Estévan’s watch. It must be.’

  ‘It is. I meant to give it to you on the morning you went out to incite the giants to mutiny; but I didn’t have the chance, because after you got back everything happened so quickly. Now that you can’t see, I’m afraid it won’t be much use to you; but I wanted you to have it as a sort of symbol.’

  He groped for her hand, found it, and pressed it. ‘I understand. You mean the fact that it had belonged to him, and your decision to give it to me signifies that you had made up your mind that I was innocent of his death. Poor old Estévan. I don’t think we had enough in common ever to have become real friends; but he behaved damn’ decently from the time we found ourselves kidnapped. I’m glad to have such a memento of him. And infinitely more so on account of the reason for your giving it to me. But why did you keep this sweet gesture till now, when I’ve been compos mentis for very nearly a fortnight?’

  Her voice held a tremor of excitement as she replied: ‘As I had no chance to give it you when I intended, I thought I would keep it until some occasion which might call for a celebration. Perhaps I am being premature, but I believe we may have good reason to render special thanks to God today.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked quickly.

  ‘Because Kruger Harsbach has got up to the top of the mast, and found inside a little compartment there a disc like a gramophone record, set on a short pillar. It is under a small transparent dome that forms a crown to the mast, and has an attachment like a pair of sights fixed across its surface. He believes that by aligning them on any star the Saucer can be directed towards it.’

  Kem drew in his breath sharply. ‘Then there is… after all… a chance of our getting back to Earth?’

  ‘He thinks so; but we’ll have to wait for a bit until we can be certain.’

  The next few hours proved for all of them a period of even more nerve-racking anxiety than those after they had first left Mars. Then, the question had been whether they were to be wiped out by a painful yet sudden death; now it was whether they were to escape the far worse fate of a lingering death from thirst, perhaps preceded by madness. During the eighteen days that Harsbach’s efforts to keep the Saucer on a set course had failed, there had always been the hope that as he and Anna explored its machinery they might yet find a way to do so. They had reached the top of the mast. There was no other mechanism left to explore. If the thing they had come upon there worked, all might be well. If not, their fate was finally sealed.

  While flying wild the Saucer had, at times, kept moving steadily in one direction for several hours before, for no ascertainable reason, veering off in another; so they had to exercise all the patience they could muster until next day. Then, just before issuing the morning ration, Harsbach told the two girls that for the past twenty hours the Saucer had adhered steadily to the course he had set to Earth.

  Carmen quickly carried the great news down to Kem, but she added soberly: ‘All the same, he warned us not to be too optimistic. You see, he has no instruments of any kind by which he can tell the speed at which we are moving, or the distance we are from Earth. There is always the possibility that our rations may give out before we get there, or that the Saucer’s magnet is not sufficiently highly charged to carry us that far. If it isn’t, and peters out, we should have no way of keeping on our course; and the Saucer would become like a piece of helpless driftwood floating in an illimitable ocean. Then, even if we suceeded in getting to within a few hundred miles of Earth, there still remains the frightful problem of landing. We may find it impossible to reduce speed sufficiently to get down without smashing ourselves to pieces.’

  Nevertheless, their chances of life seemed so immeasurably greater than they had twenty-four hours earlier, that all of them thrust these gloomy possibilities into the back of their minds, and in the weeks that followed showed no lack of confidence that they would, somehow, survive their amazing journey.

  A routine of games and exercises was started to while away the interminable hours, and at Kem’s insistence Carmen joined the others in them on the upper deck. As his burns healed, he, too, began to take gentle exercise with Carmen’s help; but he was now only a caricature of his former robust self. He had lost so much weight that both his face and body were thin to the point of emaciation; and although he was allowed as many beans as he could eat, they seemed to lack the properties necessary to build him up again. The terrible burn on his chest, too, had drawn up his flesh there so that he could no longer stand upright, and when he walked he was almost bent double.

  Occasionally Harsbach came down to have a chat with him, but Anna never did so. She had long since ceased to want him for herself, yet she still resented Carmen having got him back from her; and, as she had since tried but failed to seduce Harsbach, her present enforced chastity increased her bitterness towards Kem to the point of hatred.

  In consequence, for a great deal of the time the Saucer became a strange mircocosm
of Earth—on which Britons walk one way up and New Zealanders the other—as Harsbach and Anna sat on the so-called upper deck, while Kem and Carmen sat, theoretically, head downwards on the lower.

  When the two lovers were together they often discussed what they would do if they got safely back to Earth. Carmen would not listen for one moment to Kem’s objections that his blindness and crippled state now constituted a bar to their marriage; so, putting that aside, they built many lovely ‘Castles in Spain’. Yet they knew that even if the Saucer landed safely all the odds would still be against the full realisation of their dreams.

  They had spoken of it only once, but both of them were fully agreed that there was now no prospect of Harsbach setting them down in Mexico. With Escobar’s death they had lost even the advantage of numbers; the other two were armed, while they were not, and Kem was virtually helpless. Moreover, only Harsbach and Anna knew how to fly the Saucer. It was certain that they would not willingly bring it down in any place where the risk would have to be faced that they might not be able to get it up again in order to fly on to Russia. Nothing bar force of circumstances could now prevent their flying it straight to the Soviet Union, and when Carmen had tackled the Herr Doktor on the matter, by an evasive reply he admitted as much.

  During the hours that Carmen was with the others Kem cudgelled his wits in vain for a means of persuading or tricking Harsbach into landing Carmen and himself outside Soviet territory; for, once they were in it, he would have bet his last penny that they would never be allowed out again. He would, too, have given everything he possessed to secure the Saucer and its secrets for his own country. But to pull off either coup seemed utterly beyond the bounds of possibility.

  It was in the second week after Harsbach had got the Saucer on a course for Earth that a slight accident caused Kem’s heart to bound in his warped chest with excitement. He had by then learned to feel his way about the deck without Carmen’s aid, and sometimes got out of his bunk to stretch his legs when she was not there. On this occasion, as he crawled out he misjudged his distance, struck his head sharply on the empty bomb cradle, and jerked up his hand to the hurt place. In doing so he partially pushed aside the bandage over his eyes. Instantly the blackness before his face was broken by a patch of greyness, and he knew that his sight was coming back.

  For a few days, by the exercise of the greatest will-power, he both refrained from telling Carmen—because he did not want to raise her hopes until he was quite certain—and forced himself to resist the temptation to make further trials. Then, with trembling fingers, he took the bandage right off. He could see brightness and shadows, and even make out the blurred outline of the great bomb on the far side of the deck. Quickly, he replaced the bandage, and lay with a fast-beating heart till Carmen joined him.

  When he told her of his marvellous discovery, she burst into tears of joy and kissed his scarred face all over. Then she told him that she had never lost hope that if he kept the bandage on long enough his sight would come back, but had pinned her faith even more on her prayers that it should do so. Then, kneeling down beside him, she offered up her heartfelt thanks that those prayers had been answered.

  It was half an hour later that she said to him, ‘Kem, dearest, you will continue to keep the bandage on for a long time yet, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘It will be much safer not to rush things. To start with I shall take it off for only a few minutes each day.’

  ‘And you won’t tell Harsbach that you are recovering your sight if he comes down on one of his periodical visits, will you? Or Anna?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Please don’t. Keep it as a surprise for them until your sight is fully restored. Promise me you will.’

  He smiled. ‘I hardly think either of them is likely to turn a double somersault from joy on account of a surprise that means good fortune for me. Still, I’ll keep it dark if you wish.’

  No more was said on the subject till the sixtieth day of their voyage. By that time Kem’s sight was so nearly back to normal that he decided to abandon his bandage for good. Taking it off that morning, he said to Carmen:

  ‘It’s two months today since we escaped from Mars, and to mark this anniversary I mean to treat myself to an excursion. I’m going to pay my first visit to the upper deck.’

  The blood drained from her face, and she seized his arm. ‘Kem, you’re to do nothing of the kind! And you’ve got to keep that bandage handy all the time, so that you can slip it on again whenever Harsbach comes down here.’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ he exclaimed in amazement.

  ‘I could not bear to tell you till I had to,’ she gulped, then hurried on: ‘It’s something I overheard weeks ago. When I am on my way up through the control tower I often catch snatches of their conversation before they know I am coming. They were talking about you; so I waited and listened. Anna was saying that you may have kept notes while you helped with the making and fitting of the atomic warheads of the bombs. Harsbach said he doubted if you had sufficient scientific knowledge to make notes of any value. She said that to take the least chance of his new formula falling into wrong hands would be treachery to the Soviet Union, and he agreed about that. Then she said since you had become only a useless drain on the rations the sensible thing to do was to get rid of you as soon as possible. She wanted him to keep me out of the way for a while that evening, so that she could come down here with a free field and put a bullet through your head. He wouldn’t let her; but only because of the difficulty of disposing of your body without stopping the Saucer. It makes me faint with horror to even think of it; but they agreed that they dared not leave it to putrefy, and Anna baulked at the job of having to cut it into pieces with the few small implements that are all we have with us. Harsbach closed the conversation by saying that as long as you remained blind you couldn’t possibly play them any tricks, or escape from the M.V.D. police to betray any secrets you may have learned, after landing.’

  Carmen paused for a second, wrung her hands together, and cried: ‘So you see, darling, how terribly careful you’ve got to be. If they find out that you have recovered your sight, they’ll never let you land. Rather than take any risks at all they’ll come down here first and murder you.’

  * * * *

  Kem quietened her fears as well as he could with an immediate promise that from then onward he would act as though his blindness had become permanent. He realised, too, that any slip-up on his part might now bring him into immediate danger. The disposal of a body without stopping the Saucer and risking it going off its course presented no real difficulty—only an unpleasant and fatiguing labour—so if the enemy were given the least reason to suppose that he had recovered sufficiently to make an attempt to get the better of them, they might quite well decide to insure themselves against trouble by shooting him out of hand.

  The thought that he had made such notes as he could about Harsbach’s new method for the swifter production of nuclear energy from uranium made him smile a little grimly to himself. He had devised a cunning method of concealing them; for he had made them in Spanish and apparently as additional paragraphs on a number of Escobar’s papers about rockets. Carmen still had the red brief-case that contained them in her suitcase; but Kem knew that his chance of getting away with them could hardly have been more slender. It looked as if he was going to be extremely lucky even to get away with his life, and he knew that the only hope he had of doing so was from now on to walk like Agag—delicately.

  After a moment he gave Carmen an anxious look, and said: ‘What about youself, my sweet? If you have any reason to believe that their hellish designs include you, for God’s sake don’t conceal it from me.’

  She shook her head. ‘No; you need not worry about me. Even Anna hasn’t the face to pretend that I am the sort of woman who is capable of ferreting out scientific secrets. Besides, Kruger Harsbach would not let her harm me. He is in love with me—if you can call it love. But he is much too c
lever to attempt to rush his fences. He has the patience that goes with middle age. He knows that I would never become his mistress willingly as things are; but I’m sure he is banking on my agreeing to accept that role, rather than be carried off to prison, when we land in Russia.’

  Kem gave a heavy sigh. ‘Heaven alone knows what will become of us when we do land. But the odds are that he will not take the risk of crashing into any buildings by trying to come down in their immediate vicinity; so will land in open country. If I can keep up my bluff about being blind, that may give us a chance to take them by surprise and get away before any villagers or police come on the scene. Anyhow, as he is not being difficult at the moment, I think your best line to ensure your protection would be to pretend to be a bit bored with me, now that I’ve become such a useless wreck. Encourage him to believe that you’re ready to play on reaching Earth, but mean to stand out for marriage.’

  Carmen agreed to do as he suggested. Then, that same evening, she produced a curious object from her dressing-case and, handing it to Kem, said: ‘I have been wondering what this is, for a long time. Now you have the proper use of your eyes again, perhaps you can tell me.’

  It was a nine-inch length of thick lead piping, one end of which was sealed and the other open, showing that it was filled with some whitish substance.

  ‘Where did you find it?’ he asked.

  ‘On the upper deck, when I was clearing up there.’

  Turning its open end away from her, he said: ‘I’ve never seen such a thing before, but I can give a pretty good guess who made it and why. That whitish stuff inside the pipe is a paste made of powdered uranium; so it must give off radium rays in whatever direction the open end is pointed. For lack of a better name one might call it a Radium Torch.’