by Anthology
And somewhere in the confusion of black, shuffling feet the others vanished. No sight of Walt or Diane did the slitted leather give; only a motley crew of blacks who were left, and a wall, high-sprung to a glittering ceiling, and flaming, cold fire that ebbed and flowed till the room's last occupant was gone. Then the flames faded to dense blackness where only fitful images on the retina of Chet's staring eyes flared and waned, and ghostly voices seemed still whispering through the clamoring silence of the room....
They were echoing within his brain and harshly at his taut nerves as he made his slow way toward the passage through which he had come. Despite their terror-filled urging he did not run, but took one silent, cautious step at a time, until, after centuries of waiting, his eyes found a square of light that was blinding; and he knew that he was stumbling through the portal in the top of the pyramid of Vashta--Vashta the All-Wise--unholy preceptor of an inhuman race.
CHAPTER XXII
Sacrifice
"Down in the pyramid! You went down there?" Herr Kreiss forgot even his absorbing experiments to exclaim incredulously at Chet's report.
Guided by Towahg, Chet had returned to Happy Valley. There had been six days and nights to be spent, and he felt that he should tell Kreiss what he had learned.
"Yes," said Chet dully; "yes, I went down."
He was seated on a rock in the enclosure they had built. He raised his deep-sunk, sleepless eyes to stare at the house where he and Walt had worked. There Walt and Diane were to have made their home; Chet found something infinitely pathetic now in the unfinished shelter: its very crudities seemed to cry aloud against the blight that had fallen upon the place.
"And what was there?" Kreiss demanded. "This hypnotic power--was it an attribute of the ape-men themselves? That seems highly improbable. Or was there something else--some other source of the thought waves or radiations of mental force?"
Chet was still answering almost in monosyllables. "Something else," he told Kreiss.
"Ah," exclaimed the scientist, "I should have liked to see them. Such mental attainment! Such control of the great thought-force which with us is so little developed! Mind--pure mentality--carried to that stage of conscious development, would be worthy of our highest admiration. I should like to meet such men."
"They're not men," said Chet; "they're--they're--"
He knew how unable he was to put into words his impression of the unseen things, and he suddenly became voluble with hate.
"God knows what they are!" he exclaimed, "but they're not men. 'Mind', you say; 'mentality!' Well, if those coldly devilish things are an example of what mind can evolve into when there's no decency of soul along with it, then I tell you hell's full of some marvelous minds!"
He sprang abruptly to his feet.
"I've got to get out of here," he said; "I can't stand it. Four more days, and that's the end of it all. I'm going back to the ship. I saw it from up on the divide. Still buried in gas--but I'm going back. If I could just get in there I might do something. There's all our supplies--our storage of detonite; I might do some good work yet!"
* * * * *
He was pacing up and down restlessly where a path had been worn on the grassy knoll, worn by his feet and the pitiful, bruised feet he had seen from his shelter in the pyramid; worn by Walt and Diane--his comrades! And they were helpless; their whole hope lay in him! The thought of his own impotence was maddening. He poured out the story of his experience in the pyramid, as if the telling might give him relief.
Kreiss sat in silence, listening to it all. He broke in at last.
"Wait!" he ordered. "There are some questions I would have answered. You said once that they found us--these devils that you tell of--because of the trail that I left. That is true?"
"Yes," Chet agreed irritably, "but what of it? It's all over now."
"Possibly not," Herr Kreiss demurred; "quite possibly not. The fault, it appears, was mine. Who shall say where the results of that fault shall lead?
"And you say that these thinking creatures are devils, and that they plan to sacrifice your good friends to strange gods; and still the fault leads on." Herr Kreiss, to whom cause and effect were sure guides, seemed meditating upon the strange workings of immutable laws.
"And you say that if you could reach the interior of your ship you might perhaps be of help. Yes, it is so! And the ship is engulfed in a fluid sea, but the sea is of gas. Now in that I am not to blame, and yet--and--yet--they all tie in together at the last; yes!"
"What are you talking about?" demanded Chet Bullard harshly. "It's no use to moralize on who is to blame. If you know anything to do, speak up; if not--"
Herr Kreiss raised his spare frame erect. "I shall do better than that," he stated; "I shall act." And Chet stared curiously after, as the thin figure clambered up on the rocks and vanished into the cave.
* * * * *
He forgot him then and turned to stare moodily across the enclosure that had been the scene of their battle. Kreiss had done good work there; he had scared the savages into a panic fear. Chet was seeing again the scenes of that night when a faint explosion came from the rocks at his side. He looked up to see Herr Kreiss stagger from the cave.
Eyebrows and lashes were gone; his hair was tinged short; but his thick glasses had protected his eyes. He breathed deeply of the outside air as he regarded the remnant of a bladder that once had held a sample of green gas. Then, without a word of explanation, he turned again into the cave where a thin trickle of smoke was issuing.
Ragged and torn, his clothes were held together by bits of vine. There were longer ropes of the same material that made a sling on his shoulders when he reappeared. And, tied in the sling, were bundles; one large, one small, but sagging with weight. Both were bound tightly in wrappings of broad leaves.
"We will go now," Herr Kreiss stated: "there is no time to be lost."
"Go? Go where?" Chet's question echoed his utter bewilderment.
"To the ship! Come, savage!"--he motioned to Towahg--"I did not do well when I made my way alone. You shall lead now."
"He's crazy," Chet told himself half aloud: "his motor's shot and his controls are jammed! Oh, well; what's the difference? I might as well spend the time this way as any. I meant to go back to the old ship once more."
Kreiss' arm still troubled from the wound he had got in the fight, but Chet could not induce him to share his load.
"Es ist mein recht," he grumbled, and added cryptically: "To each man this only is sure--that he must carry his own cross." And Chet, with a shrug, let him have his way.
* * * * *
There was little said on the trip. Chet was as silent and uncommunicative as Kreiss when, for the last time, he paused on the divide to see the green glint from a distant ship, then plunged with the others into a forest as unreal as all this experience now seemed.
And at the last, when the red light of late afternoon ensanguined a wild world, they came to the smoke of Fire Valley, and a thousand fumeroles, little and big, that emitted their flame and gas. And one, at the lower end of the valley had built up a great mound of greasy mud from whose top issued hot billows of green gas. It was here that Kreiss paused and unslung his pack.
"Take this," he told Chet; and the pilot dragged his reluctant eyes from the view of the nearby cylinder enveloped in green clouds. The scientist was handing him the larger of the two packages. It was bulky but light: Chet took it by a loop in one of the vines.
"Careful!" warned Kreiss. "I have worked on it for a month; you see, my equipment was not so good. I thought that the time might come when it would be put to use, only first I must conquer the gas--which I now prepare to do."
"I don't understand," Chet protested.
"You are a Master Pilot of the World?" questioned Kreiss, and Chet nodded.
"And the control on your ship was a modification of the new ball-control mechanism such as is used on the latest of the high-level liners?"
Again Chet nodded.
"The
n, if ever you are so fortunate, Herr Bullard, as to see once more that device on one of those ships, will you examine it carefully? And, stamped on the under side, you will find--"
"The patent marking," said Chet; then stopped short as the light of understanding blazed into his brain.
"Patented," he reflected; "that's what it says," and a wondering comprehension was in his voice: "patented by H. Kreiss, of Austria! You--you are the inventor?"
* * * * *
"I did not speak with entire truth to Herr Schwartzmann," admitted Kreiss, "on that occasion when I told him I could not rebuild the control you had demolished. With your equipment on the ship I could have done a quite creditable job, but even now,"--he pointed to the leaf-wrapped bundle in Chet's hand--"with copper I have hammered from the rocks, and with silver and gold and even iron which I found occurring in a quite novel manner, I have done not so badly."
"This is--this is--" Chet stared at the object in his hand; his tongue could not be brought to speak the words. "But what use? How can I get in? The gas--"
"Cause and effect!" stated Herr Doktor Kreiss of the Institute at Vienna, and once more he seemed addressing a class and taking pleasure in his ability to dispense knowledge. "It is the law of the universe.
"I perform an act. It is a cause--I have invoked the law. And the effects go out like circling waves in an endless ocean of time forever beyond our reach.
"But we can do other acts, produce other causes, and sometimes we can neutralize thereby the effects of the first. I do that now." He picked up the second bundle in its wrapping of leaves; it was heavy for him to manage with his wounded arm. "This is all that I have," he said! "I must place it surely.
"Go down toward the ship," he ordered. "Wait where it is safe. Then when the gas ceases you will have but three minutes. Three minutes!--remember! Lose no time at the port!"
He had reached the base of the hill of mud. He was on the windward side; above him the fumerole was grunting and roaring. And, to Chet, the thin figure, gaunt and ungainly and absurd in its wrappings of dilapidated garments, became somehow tremendous, vaguely symbolic. He could not get it clearly, but there was something there of the cool, reasoning sureness of science itself--an indomitable pressing on toward whatever goal the law might lead one to; but Kreiss was human as well. He stopped once and looked about him.
"A laboratory--this world!" he exclaimed. "Virgin! Untouched!... So much to be learned; so much to be done! And mine would have been the glory and fame of it!"
He turned hesitantly, almost apologetically, toward Chet standing motionless and unspeaking with the wonder of this turn of events.
"Should you be so fortunate as to survive," began Kreiss, "perhaps you would be so kind--my name--I would not want it lost." He straightened abruptly.
"Go!" he ordered. "Get as near as you can!" His feet were climbing steadily up the slippery ascent.
* * * * *
The faintest breath of the gas warned Chet back. Almost infinitely diluted, it still set him choking while the tears streamed down his face. But he worked his way as near the ship as he dared, and he saw through the tears that still blinded his stinging eyes the tall figure of Kreiss as he reached the top.
A table of steaming mud was there, and Kreiss was sinking into it as he struggled forward. At the center was a hot throat where fumes like a breath from hell roared and choked with the strangling of its own gas. The figure writhed as a whirl of green enveloped it, threw itself forward. From one outstretched hand an object fell toward the throat; its leafy wrapping was whipped sharply for an instant by the coughing breath....
And then, where the hot blast had been, and the forming clouds and the erupting mud, was a pillar of fire--a white flame that thundered into the sky.
Straight and clean, like the sword of some guardian angel, it stood erect--a line of dazzling light in a darkening sky. And the fumes of green had vanished at its touch.
But Kreiss! Chet found himself running toward the fumerole. He must save him, drag him back. Then he knew with a certainty that admitted of no question that for Kreiss there was no help: that for this man of science the laws of cause and effect were no longer operative on the plane of Earth. The heat would have killed him, but the enveloping gas must have reached him first. And he had sacrificed himself for what?--that he, Chet, might reach the ship!... Before Chet's eyes was a silvery cylinder whose closed port was plainly marked.
* * * * *
No gas now! No glint of green! The way was clear, and the slim figure of Chet Bullard was checked in its rush toward a mound of mud and the body of a man that lay next to a blasting column of flame; he turned instead to throw himself through the clean air toward the ship that was free of gas.
"Three minutes!" This was what Kreiss had said; this was the allotted time. In three minutes he must reach the ship, force open the long unused port, get inside--!
At one side, across the level lava rock he saw Towahg. The savage was running at top speed. He had thrown away his bow, dropping it lest it impede his flight from this terrifying witchcraft he had seen. There had been a witch-doctor in Towahg's tribe; the savage knew sorcery when he saw it. But never had his witch-doctor changed green gas to a column of fire; and this white sorcerer, Kreiss, powerful as he was, had been struck down by the fire-god before Towahg's eyes. Towahg ran as if the roaring finger of flame might reach after him at any instant.
Chet saw this in a glance--knew the reason for the black's desertion: then lost all thought of him and of Kreiss and even of the waiting ship. For, in the same glance, he saw, springing from behind a lava block, the heavy figure of a man.
Black as any ape, hairy of face, roaring strange oaths, the man threw himself upon Chet! It was Schwartzmann; and, mingled with profane exclamations, were the words: "the ship--und I take it for mineself!" And his heavy body hurled itself down upon the lighter man in the instant that Chet drew his pistol.
But, tearing through Chet's mind, was no rage against this man as an enemy in himself; he thought only of Kreiss' words; "Three minutes! Lose no time at the port!" And now the brave sacrifice! It would be in vain. He twisted himself about, so that his shoulder might receive the human projectile that was crashing upon him.
CHAPTER XXIII
The Might of the "Master"
As with other measures of matters earthly, time is a relative gauge. Nowhere is this more apparent than in those moments of mental stress when time passes in a flash or, conversely, drags each lagging minute into hours of timeless length.
"Three minutes!" The words clanged and reverberated through Chet's brain. And it seemed, as he strained and struggled and was forced backward and yet backward by the weight of his antagonist, that those three minutes had long since passed, and other three's without end.
The enemy's leaping body had been upon him before the detonite pistol was half drawn. And now he fought desperately; he felt only the jar of blows that landed on his half-covered face. There was no sting or pain, only the crashing thud that made strange clamor and confusion in his head. But he ducked and blocked awkwardly with the one arm that held the package Kreiss had given him, while the other hand that gripped the pistol was twisted behind him.
No chance here for clever blocking, no room for quick foot-work; weight was telling, and the weight was all in favor of his big opponent.
Chet knew that possession of the gun was vital. Flashingly it came to him that Schwartzmann had not fired: his pistol, then, was lost, or he was out of ammunition. And now Chet's hand that held the gun with the six precious charges of detonite was fast in the clutch of a huge paw, and the pain of that twisted arm was sending searing flashes to his brain.
[Illustration: With the free hand he shot over a blow.]
A twist of the body, and the pain relaxed. He dropped the leaf-wrapped package to the ground, and, with the free hand, shot over a blow that brought a grunt of pain from Schwartzmann and a gush of blood that smeared the black, hairy face. He took one stiff jolt himself on his
half-averted head that he might counter with another to flatten that crushed and painful nose.
* * * * *
For one brief instant Schwartzmann's free hand was raised protectingly to his face so contorted with rage; for one brief instant, below that big fist, there showed the contour of a jaw; and, with every ounce of weight that Chet could put into the swing, he came up from under in that same instant with a smashing left that connected with the exposed jaw.
The hand that gripped his gun-hand did not let go completely, but Chet felt the steel-hard rigidity of that arm relax, and abruptly he knew that he could beat this man down if he once got clear. He didn't need the gun; he needed only to get both hands free. And, despite the arm that clung and swung with his, he managed to wrench himself into a sideways throw of his whole body at the instant he unclosed his hand. The slim barrel of the detonite pistol described a flashing arc through the clear air and clattered along the lava underneath a big shining surface of metal.
And then, in a breath-taking flash of understanding, Chet knew.
He knew he was beside the ship: he saw the closed port and the self-retracting lever that would open it, and he saw it through clear air where no taint of the green gas was apparent.
He was certain that he had been fighting for an interminable time, yet before him the air was clear. It was impossible, but true; and he threw the half-stunned body of Schwartzmann from him. Then, instead of following it with punishing blows, he sprang toward the port.
* * * * *
With one hand on the lever, he turned to dart a glance toward the column of flame. It was gone! And in its place came green, billowing gas that was coughed and spewed into the air to be caught up in the steady breeze that blew directly from the vent.
Beside him, his antagonist, prone on the lava floor, dragged himself beneath the ship to reach for the gun. Chet paid no heed; his every thought--his whole being, it seemed--was focused upon the lever that turned so slowly, that let fall, at last, a lock whose releasing mechanism clanged loudly through the metal wall.