by Anthology
"We had all better get on the job," Chet was saying, as he took his bow and a supply of arrows, "we've got our work cut out for us to-night."
And Harkness nodded grimly as the flickering lightning played fitfully over far-distant trees. "We crowed a bit too soon," he told Chet; "there's a big storm coming, and that's a break for Schwartzmann. No light from either moon or Earth to-night."
The moon-disk, as he spoke, lost its first clear brilliance in the haze of the expanding clouds.
"Watch sharp, Towahg!" Chet ordered. And, to the others: "Get this fire moved away from the huts--here. I'll do that, Walt. You bring a supply of wood; some of those dried leaves, too. We'll build a big fire, we have to depend on that for light."
* * * * *
With the skeleton of a huge palm leaf he raked the fire out into an open space; they had plenty of fuel and they fed the blaze until its mounting flames lighted the entire enclosure. But outside the barricade were dark shadows, and Chet saw that this light would only make targets of the defenders, while the attackers could creep up in safety.
"'Way up," he ordered; "we've got to have the fire on the top of the rocks." He clambered to the topmost level of the rocky outcrop and dragged a blazing stick with him. Harkness handed him more; and now the light struck down and over the stockade and illumined the ground outside.
"Here's your job, Kreiss," said Chet, "if you're equal to it. You keep that fire going and have a pile of dried husks handy if I call for a bright blaze.
"We've got to defend the whole works," he explained. "That bunch today tried to jump us just from one side, but trust Schwartzmann to divide his force and hit us from all sides next time.
"But we'll hold the fort," he said and he forced a confidence into his voice that his inner thoughts did not warrant. To Harkness he whispered when Diane was away: "Six shells in the gun, Walt; we won't waste them on the apes. There's one for each of us including Towahg, and one extra in case you miss. We'll fight as long as we are able; then it's up to you to shoot quick and straight."
But Walt Harkness felt for the pistol in his belt and handed it to Chet. "I couldn't," he said, and his voice was harsh and strained, "--not Diane; you'll have to, Chet." And Chet Bullard dropped his own useless pistol to the ground while he slipped the other into its holster on the belt that bound his ragged clothes about him, but he said nothing. He was facing a situation where words were hardly adequate to express the surging emotion within.
* * * * *
Diane had returned when he addressed Walt casually. "Wonder why the beggars didn't attack again," he pondered. "Why has Schwartzmann waited; why hasn't he or one of his men crept up in the grass for a shot at us? He's got some deviltry brewing."
"Waiting for night," hazarded Walt. He looked up to see Kreiss who had joined them.
"If Towahg could tend the fire," suggested the scientist, "I could fire my little catapult with one hand. I think I could do some damage." But Chet shook his head and answered gently:
"I'm afraid Towahg's the better man to-night, Kreiss. You can help best by giving us light. That's the province of science, you know," he added, and grinned up at the anxious man.
Each moment of this companionship meant much to Chet. It was the last conference, he knew. They would be swamped, overwhelmed, and then--only the pistol with its six shells was left. But he drew his thoughts back to the peaceful quiet of the present moment, though the hush was ominous with the threat of the approaching storm and of the other assault that must come in the storm's concealing darkness. He looked at Diane and Walt--comrades true and tender. The leaping flames from the rocks above made flickering shadows on their upturned faces.
* * * * *
The moment ended. A growl from where Towahg was on guard brought them scrambling to their feet. "Gr-r-ranga!" Towahg was warning. "Granga come!"
They fired from their platforms as before, then raced for the rocks and the elevation they afforded, for the black bodies had reached the stockade quickly in the half light. But they came again from one point--the farthest curve of the U-shaped fence this time--and though a score of black animal faces showed staring eyes and snarling fangs where heavy bodies were drawn up on the barricade, no one of them reached the inside.
"We're holding them!" Chet was shouting. But the easy victory was too good to believe; he knew there were more to come; this force of some thirty or forty was not all that Schwartzmann could throw into the fight. And Schwartzmann, himself! Chet had seen the bronzed faces of Max and another standing back of the assaulting force, but where was Schwartzmann?
It was Kreiss who answered the insistent question. From above on the rocks, where he had kept the fire blazing, Kreiss was calling in a high-pitched voice.
"The water!" he shouted, "they're attacking from the water!" And Chet rushed around the broken rock-heap to see a lake like an inky pool, where the firelight showed faint reflections from black, shining faces; where rippling lines of phosphorescence marked each swimming savage; and where larger waves of ghostly light came from a log raft on which was a familiar figure whose face, through its black beard, showed white in contrast with the faces of his companions.
* * * * *
Still a hundred feet from the shore, they were approaching steadily, inexorably; and the storm, at that instant, broke with a ripping flash of light that tore the heavens apart, and that seared the picture of the attackers upon the eyeballs of the man who stared down.
From behind him came sounds of a renewed attack. He heard Harkness: "Shoot, Diane! Nail 'em, Towahg! There's a hundred of them!" And the wind that came with the lightning flash, though it brought no rain, whipped the black water of the lake to waves that drove the raft and the swimming savages closer--closer--
Chet glanced above him. "Come down, Kreiss!" he ordered. "Get down here, quick! This is the finish. We could have licked them on land, but these others will get us." He stood, dumb with amazement, as he saw the thin figure of Kreiss leap excitedly from his rocky perch and vanish like a terrified rabbit into the cave in the rocks.
"I didn't think--" he was telling himself in wondering disbelief at this cowardice, when Kreiss reappeared. His one hand was white with a rubbery coating that Chet vaguely knew for latex. He was holding a gray, earthy mass, and he threw himself forward to the catapult where it stood idly erect in the wind that beat and whipped at it.
"Help me!" It was Kreiss who ordered, and once more he spoke as if he were conducting only an interesting experiment. "Pull here! Bend it--bend it! Now hold steady; this is metallic sodium, a deposit I found deep in the earth."
The gray mass was in the crude bucket of the machine. Kreiss' knife was ready. He slashed at the vine that he'd the bent sapling, and a gray mass whirled out into the dark; out and down--and the inky waters were in that instant ablaze with fire.
[Illustration: The inky waters were ablaze with fire.]
Fire that threw itself in flaming balls; that broke into many parts and each part, like a living thing, darted crazily about; that leaped into the air to fall again among ape-men who screamed frenziedly in animal terror.
* * * * *
"It unites with water," Kreiss was saying: "a spontaneous liberation and ignition of hydrogen." The white-coated hand had dumped another mass into the primitive engine of war. "Now pull--so--and I cut it!" And the leaping, flashing fires tore furiously in redoubled madness where a shrieking mob of terrified beasts, and one white man among them, drove ashore beyond the end of a barricade.
Chet felt Harkness beside him. "We drove 'em off in back. What the devil is going on here?" Walt was demanding. But Chet was watching the retreat of the blacks straight off and down the shore where the sand was smooth and neither grass nor trees could hinder their wild flight.
"You've got them licked," Harkness was exulting: "and we've cleaned them up on our side. Just came over to see if you needed help."
"We sure would have," said Chet; "more than you could give if it hadn't been for Kreiss."
"We've got 'em licked!" Harkness repeated wonderingly; "we've won!" It was too much to grasp all at once. The victory had been so quick, and he had already given up hope.
The two had clasped hands; they stood so for silent minutes. Chet had been nerved to the point of destroying his companions and himself; the revulsion of feeling that victory brought was more stupefying than the threat of impending defeat.
* * * * *
Staring out over the black waters, he knew only vaguely when Harkness left; a moment later he followed him gropingly around the jagged rocks, while there came to him, blurred by his own mental numbness, a shouted call.... But a moment elapsed before he was aroused, before he knew it for Walt's voice. He recognized the agonized tone and sprang forward into the clearing.
The fire still blazed on the rocky platform above; its uncertain light reached the figure of a running man who was making madly for the opening in the wall. As he ran he screamed over and over, in a voice hoarse and horrible like one seized in the fright of a fearful dream: "Diane! Diane, wait! For God's sake, Diane, don't go!"
And the driven clouds were torn apart for a space to let through a clear golden light. The great lantern of Earth was flashing down through space to light a grassy opening in a jungle of another world, where, stark and rigid, a girl was walking toward the shadow-world beyond, while before her went a black shape, huge and powerful, in whose head were eyes like burning lights, and whose arms were rigidly extended as if to draw the stricken girl on and on.
The running figure overtook them. Chet saw him checked in mid-spring, and Harkness, too, stood rigid as if carved from stone, then followed as did Diane, where the ape-thing led.... From the far side of the clearing, where Schwartzmann's men had gone, came a great shout of laughter that jarred Chet from the stupor that bound him.
"The messenger!" he said aloud. "God help them; it's the messenger--and he's taking them to the pyramid!"
Then the torn clouds closed that the greater darkness might cover those who vanished in the shadowed fringe of a stormy, wind-whipped jungle....
CHAPTER XX
On to the Pyramid
It was like Walt Harkness to rush impetuously after where Diane was being drawn away; but who, under the same circumstances, would have done otherwise? Yet it was like Chet, too, to keep a sane and level head, to check the first wild impulse to dash to their rescue, to realize that he would be throwing himself away by doing it and helping them not at all. It was like Chet to stop and think when thinking was desperately needed, though what it would lead to he could not have told. There were many factors that entered into his calculations.
Half-consciously he had walked to the barricade that he might stare into the blackness beyond. The worst of the storm had passed, and the strong Earth-light forced its way through the thinning clouds in a cold, gray glow. It served to show the great gateway to the jungle, empty and black, until Chet saw more of the man-beasts he had called messengers.
A file of them, stolid, woodenly walking--he could not fail to know them from the ape-men of the tribe. And they moved through the darkness toward the sounds of shouts and laughter.
Chet saw them when they returned; following them were three others. Schwartzmann was not one of them; but the pilot, Max, Chet could distinguish plainly; the other two, he was sure, were the men of Schwartzmann's crew.
And, for each of them, all laughter and shouted jests had escaped. They moved like wooden toys half-come to life. And they, too, vanished where Walt and Diane had gone through the high arch of the jungle's open door.
Chet knew Kreiss was beside him; at a short distance, Towahg, staring above the palisade, buried his unkempt, hairy head in the shelter of his arms. All of Towahg's savage bravery had oozed away at direct sight of the pyramid men; Chet, even through his heavy-hearted dismay, was aware of the courage that must have carried this primitive man to their rescue on that other black night when the pyramid had been about to swallow, them up.
* * * * *
To the pyramid all Chet's thoughts had been tending. There Diane and Harkness were bound; there he, too, must go, though the thought of driving himself into that black maw, through the overpowering stench and down to the pit where some horror of mystery lay waiting, was almost more than his conscious mind could accept. But, with the sight of Towahg and the abject fear that had overwhelmed him, Chet found his own mind calmly determined, though through that cool self-detachment came savage spoken words.
"If poor Towahg could go near that damned place," he reasoned, "am I going to be stopped by anything between heaven and hell?"
And his mind was suddenly at ease with the certainty of the next step he must take. He turned to speak to Kreiss, but paused instead to stare into the dark where shadows that were not the ghosts of clouds were moving. Then his whispered orders came sharply to the scientist and to Towahg.
"Come!" he commanded. "Come quickly; follow me!"
The two were behind him as he found the narrow opening in the barrier's farther side, passed through, and crouched low in the darkness as he ran toward the lake where the shallow water of the shore took no mark of their hurrying feet.
* * * * *
At the end of the lake he stopped. Beside him, Kreiss, weakened by his wound, was panting and gasping; Towahg, moving like a dark shadow, was close behind.
"I saw them," said Kreiss, when he had breath enough for speech, "--more beasts from the pyramid. They were coming for us! But we can go back there after a day or so."
"You can," Chet told him; "Towahg and I are going on."
"Where?" Kreiss demanded.
"To the pyramid."
Chet's reply was brief, and Kreiss' response was equally so. "You're a fool," he said.
"Sure," Chet told him: "I know there's nothing I can do to help them. But I'm going. All I ask is to get one crack at whatever it is that is down in that beastly pit and if I can't do that maybe I can still save Diane and Walt from tortures you and I can't imagine." He touched his pistol suggestively.
"Still I say you are a fool," Kreiss insisted. "They are gone--captured; they will die. That is regrettable, but it is done. Now, besides Herr Schwartzmann who escaped, only we two remain; the savage, he does not count. We two!--and a new world!--and science! Science that remains after these two are gone--after you and I are gone! It is greater than us all.
"But I, staying, shall contribute to the knowledge of men; I shall make discoveries that will bear my name always. This world is my laboratory; I have found deposits such as none has ever seen on Earth.
"Be reasonable, Herr Bullard. The enemy has tracked us down by his superior cleverness. We will go far away now where he never shall find us, you and I. Do not be a fool; do not throw your life away."
* * * * *
Chet Bullard, a figure of helpless, hopeless despair, stood unspeaking while he stared into the black depths of the jungle, and the night wind whipped his tattered clothing about him.
"A fool!" he said at last, and his voice was dull and heavy. "I guess you're right--"
Herr Kreiss interrupted: "Of course I am right--right and reasonable and logical!"
Chet went on as if the other had not spoken:
"If I hadn't been a fool I would have found some way to prevent it; I would have killed that ape-thing when first I saw it; I would have got them free."
He turned slowly to face his companion in the darkness.
"But you were wrong, Kreiss; you forgot a couple of things. You said they found us by their superior cleverness. That's wrong. They found us because you left a trail they could follow. We threw them off once, Towahg and I, but the messenger wouldn't be fooled. Then Schwartzmann and his pack followed the messenger in.
"And you say it is logical that I should quit here, leave Diane and Walt to take whatever is coming; you say I'm a fool to stay with them till the end.
"Well,"--he was speaking very quietly, very simply--"if you are right I'm rather glad that I'm a fool. For you see, Kreiss, they're my friends,
and between friends logic gets knocked all to hell.
"Come on, Towahg!" he called. "Let's see if we can travel this jungle in the night!" He set off toward the fringe of great trees, then let Towahg go ahead to find a trail.
* * * * *
Travel at night through the tangle of creepers was not humanly possible. Even Towahg, after an hour's work, grunted his disgust and curled himself up for the night. And Chet, though he found his mind filled with vain imaginings, was so drained by the day's demands on his nervous energy that he slept through to the rising of the sun.
Then they circled wide of the trail they had taken before; no risk would Chet take of a chance meeting with one of the pyramid apes. And he plagued his brain with vain questions of what he should do when he reached the arena and the pyramid and the unknown something that waited within, until he told himself in desperation: "You're going down, you're going into that damned place; that's all you know for sure."
Whereupon his questioning ceased, and his mind was clear enough to think of giant creepers that barred his way, of streams to be crossed, and to wonder, at the last, when the valley of the pyramid was in sight and whether the others had reached there before him.
Another day's sun was beating straight down into the arena when again it opened before Chet's eyes. And the bleak horror of this place of black and white that had seemed so incredibly unreal under Earth-lit skies was doubly so in the glare of noon.
They entered through the jagged crack that had been their means of escape. An earthquake, one time, had split the stone, and Chet was more than satisfied to avoid the broad entrance where the rocks made a gateway and where hostile eyes might be watching.
* * * * *
He stood for long minutes in the cleft in the rocks where the hard earth of the arena made a floor before him, where the huge steps of ribboned white and black swung out on either hand, and where, directly ahead, in the same hard, contrasting strata, a pyramid lifted itself to finish in a projecting capstone. And now that he faced it he found himself curiously cool.