[Title here]

by Twin Worlds (epub)

  The globes were animate; the professor recognized this at once. And from the wails emerging out of the nearer huts, he realized also that these lighted things were a feared enemy of the inmates. Closer examination of the flying creatures produced the startling discovery that they possessed no wings. Furthermore, their spherical contour was but the illusion of the surrounding brilliance they exuded. Their nucleus might have been globular, but that was more or less indeterminate because of the surrounding spines which grew in every direction, closeby set, giving them a diameter of a yard or more. A slight weaving motion of these spines caused the professor to alter his opinion. They were not spines; they were small tentacles. In fact, these numberless, slim tentacles were the only outward appearance of these creatures. How they maintained their flight was questionable.

  Meanwhile, the wailing from inside the huts was rudely punctuated by a startled shriek of agony, a maddening scream of terror and pain. Out of an aperture came one of the flying monsters dragging with it an equally monstrous creature a bit smaller than itself. For the first time, the machine men saw one of the city’s inhabitants. Its body was somewhat like a solid wheel, a bewildering set of appendages circling the rim. Toward the center its body broadened slightly. Large optics, one on each side of the disk, were at present distended with terror, while the short appendages, hooked and clawed at their extremities, kicked and fought to tear loose from the curled tentacles which gripped so tightly.

  Out of the hut’s oblong windows rushed three more of the strange inhabitants, leaping up and setting upon the blazing terror in an attempt to free their helpless companion. With panic written upon their minds, the professor could not help trying to rescue their comrade from the clutches of the marauder. This thought was uppermost in the metal encased heads of all the machine men, and they acted simultaneously as the disengaged monsters of the air raced down upon the howling creatures below them. One of the glowing spheres set its fiery tentacles upon 60M-64 and was promptly torn to shreds, the innumerable tentacles stripped from a tough, pulpy center which was soon ripped to pieces in its own liquid welter.

  Meanwhile, the rest of the machine men hurried to the aid of the Disci. The professor leaped upward off the ground and seized one of the shining things just as it slowly rose with a screaming, struggling victim. Bringing the luminous creature down, he found it necessary to tear the malign menace into lifeless sections before it would loose its quarry. There were scarcely a dozen of the things, yet in the confusion and their flying around there seemed more of them. They had immediately seized the luckless creatures who had emerged from the protection of their hut, and one of them was making good an escape, rising above the reach of the machine men who leaped high but to no avail. The victim’s despairing screams* grew fainter, and the globe of light dwindled.

  “If we only had the mechanical wings here!” 6W-438 lamented.

  The machine men had killed several of the shining things which flew without wings. They had rescued all the inhabitants of the hut except the one which had been borne aloft out of their reach, and now the remaining raiders arose to join their escaped myrmidon and his quarry. The huts grew dim, and darkness replaced the strange brilliance of the fleeing globes.

  The Zoromes illuminated the scene of recent conflict with their body lights, and as they did so the frightened and stupified citizens scrambled inside their dwelling as if from some new horror.

  “Shall we go back to the ship for our mechanical wings and pursue the shining things?” queried 53S-7, staring up from the apex of his head at the tiny, disappearing points of light which continued their rise steadily upward.

  “There is no use to it,” the professor replied. “Let us wait until dawn when we may perhaps gain the friendship of these Disci and learn more about the night’s affair.”

  It was even as they had hoped. The dawning of a new day dispelled the horrors of the night before, and in the daylight, which streamed up over the mountain tops and later down into the walled city as the sun rose higher, the citizens emerged in timorous curiosity, their fear still evident though partly restrained. In their minds, the machine men perceived a leaning toward trustfulness, and they fanned this with reassurance and allusion to their aid of the previous night.

  Like concave disks, the city’s inhabitants dropped from their strange entrances upon an endless row of appendages. Sometimes they walked with their bodies flat above the ground; then again their movement often characterized the rolling motion like that of a cartwheel. On each side of their disk a large eye peered fearfully at the machine men who found them quite intelligent although their city did not suggest any very large amount of culture or scientific attainment. They were soon persuaded to abandon their soft, smoothly-flowing sounds in trying to make themselves understood in answer to the unmistakable questions radiated upon their minds by the concentrated efforts of the Zoromes. A bit hazy and disjointed were the replies, but the thoughts of the Disci, as the professor had immediately dubbed them for want of a better appellation of reference, were definable, and the Zoromes learned more about the shining things from out of the air, which information, however, was but little.

  Chapter II

  “They are the Eiuks!” the machine men were told, the descriptive sound issuing excitedly from one of the eight quivering mouths in the side of a Disc, “they always come by night―never by day!”

  “And why not by day?”

  “We do not know.”

  “Perhaps they come in the daytime but you cannot see them because their brilliance is not distinguishable by day,” the professor suggested.

  “No,” the spokesman said, wagging his headless body oddly as he replied. “If they came by day, they would seize us and carry us off as they do by night.”

  “Evidently they are entirely nocturnal,” 6W-438 remarked to his metal companions.

  The Oaos come by day as well as by night,” one of the Disci ventured, “but they never harm us, and often they combat the Eiuks.”

  “Who are the Oaos?” the professor inquired.

  “They look much like the Eiuks. They are spherical, but they have no arms. In the night they do not shine.”

  “They come by day?” 744U-21 queried. “That is strange. The Eiuks come at night only.”

  “Oaos come by day and night both,” the machine men were reminded.

  “Then what good is your high wall around the city if these things can fly and enter your city at will?” asked 6W-438.

  “Oh, the wall is to keep us safe from a danger worse than the Eiuks. The Ooaurs from the land of Exhaustion would kill and devour us and destroy our city if they could. They come and pound at our city wall until often it trembles, and we tremble too―in fear.”

  “Do the Ooaurs come by day or by night?”

  “They come any time, but we are thankful that they do not come very often. It has been a long time since they have been here to the city of Ui. The Ooaurs vary in color and size, and their strength is tremendous. They fight among themselves a great deal, for violence and combat of some kind is their chief amusement.”

  “And they come from the Land of Exhaustion? Why do you call it that? Where is it?”

  “It is on the other side of the hill.”

  The Disci creature pointed in the direction of the world’s edge much to the surprise of the machine men who thought his reference to a hill lay in the direction of the mountains.

  “But there is no hill that way,” 744U-21 remonstrated to the surrounding Disci. “The world drops off there.”

  Professor Jameson allowed himself a bit of inward amusement, a condition never experienced by his metal comrades.

  “That is what they told Columbus,” he remarked to 744U-21. “You see, these Disci have never seen their world from afar, always having lived upon it, and they are not aware that it has an edge. To them, the divide is but the crest of a hill. They can walk on either side, you know.”

  “Of course,” 744U-21 agreed. “And the reason they describe the ot
her side as the Land of Exhaustion is because of its greater gravitational attraction. Fourteen thousand miles is the dimensional diameter in the Land of Exhaustion, while here it is but four thousand miles.”

  The truth of 744U-21’s assertions were proved by further questions asked of the Disci.

  “We cannot walk very far beyond the crest of the hill,” the machine men were told, “for we become terribly heavy and get out of breath. We have to lay down and rest often. If we go too far, we cannot get back, and we lay down and die.”

  One of the Disci gave a lurid account of his experience in the Land of Exhaustion. He had fallen exhausted several times returning to his own side of the hill. He had gone too far. The last time he fell he could not rise, and though the top of the hill lay near at hand with relief and recovery beyond, he could not get up and make it, and finally he could not move. His body had grown numb and he was dying when companions from Ui coming to peer over the edge of the hill had rushed down and rescued him.

  “There is little to be wondered at that the creatures who live in the Land of Exhaustion are so strong. It is well that you do have strong walls.”

  “And necessarily high, too. The monsters from the other side of the hill can leap to amazing heights.”

  “Which is quite credible, too,” 6W-438 observed.

  “Tell us,” urged 744U-21. “Do the Eiuks ever venture into the Land of Exhaustion?”

  “Yes―they have, but such occasions are rare. When they did, they were unable to rise again. This, of course, was at night, for the Eiuks never come in the daytime. Our watchers peering over the hill watched them.”

  “Did they die of exhaustion?”

  “No, and it proves that they are stronger than we, for as soon as daylight came they gathered their strength and rose up into the sky and out of sight, even as they do at night after having raided our city.”

  “Strange and inexplicable,” mused Professor Jameson. “We must learn more about the Eiuks from first-hand experience.”

  “What of the Oaos?” asked 744U-21. “Have they ever entered the Land of Exhaustion?”

  “Yes, we have also seen them there. Once they halted a charge of the Ooaurs against our city and chased them far back into their own land. We watched from the hilltop after they had been put to rout.”

  “And the Oaos were not tired and could rise?”

  “We saw them, of course, in the daytime, but we have it handed down from our ancestors that the Oaos are stronger than the Eiuks and can rise out of the Land of Exhaustion anytime, either night or day.”

  “I fail to see where there is any difference in gravitation either by night or day,” said 41C-98.

  “The riddle is probably in the mode of flying employed by the Eiuks and the Oaos,” the professor replied. “There are indeed many things to be explained here.”

  On asking where the Oaos and Euks lived, the Disci answered briefly with a significant gesture and upward rolling of large, staring eyes in the direction of the lofty, towering mountain peaks.

  “Up there.”

  The Disci were curious about the machine men, and though failing to fully understand their mechanical construction and its relation to their organic brains, they quite surprised the machine men by somewhat grasping the explanations regarding the spaceship and the existence of other worlds among the glittering stars. It was unusual for a species no further advanced than the Disci to understand, not to mention believing or being able to conceive of such things. This was but still another of the puzzles confronting the machine men of Zor upon the planet fragment.

  They debated the question of whether they should rise on their mechanical wings and search among the mountains for the lair of the shining, tentacled Eiuks or wait for them to raid the city again.

  6W-438 was eager for exploring a deep, dark cavern in the mountainside which the Disci, who, they now discovered, called themselves the Uum, shunned through superstitious fear. They claimed it to be the pit of the damned and would not venture near it, let alone explore it. Their antipathy toward it was a strange one, possibly inherited, the machine men deduced, along with their many legends.

  At this point, the professor discovered their belief in an afterlife. The Uum claimed that long ago in the age-old past many of their number had been destroyed in the cavern, and that the anguished souls of those who had died still haunted the place, ready to waylay and gather to them the souls of those who entered, to add to their miserable company in the dark, gloomy depths of the mountain.

  On the other hand, the Uum believed that after death and subsequent cremation on their funeral pyres, they would go upon the wings of the smoke to an eternity with their ancestors on the other side of the mountain. Around this strange legend there abounded the belief that in the beginning the Uum had dwelt beyond the mountains in luxury and ease, but that they had done something wrong, or some fearful eatastrophy had driven them out of his veritable Eden and forced them to live among the constant dangers of the Ooaurs and Eiuks in the walled city of Ui which their ancestors had built. On this last portion of the legend, they were uncertain and hazy.

  The Zoromes decided on both searching among the mountains for the Eiuks and exploring the dreaded cavern of the Uum at the same time, dividing their forces into three contingents; the largest body was to remain in Ui with the spaceship. 744U-21 and 41C-98 were to lead a winged party into the towering reaches of the mountain peaks in search of the Eiuks, while the professor and 6W-438 explored the gloomy cave in the mountain along with the remainder of the machine men.

  On metal wings, more than a dozen Zoromes rose into the air and headed up the mountain, keeping several hundred feet from the rugged walls and projecting escarpments. The mechanical wings were capable of upholding their possessors in space as well as in atmosphere, for instead of beating the air they employed a repulsion power against gravity.

  Meanwhile, before the professor and his metal cohorts lay the unknown mysteries of the forbidden cavern. A cursory examination of its orifice just before the machine men had separated on their various errands had revealed a trace of ancient waters.

  “This must once have been a subterranean waterway,” 6W-438 had observed. “This is where the river came out of the mountain.”

  “It was very long ago,” 744U-21 had said, adjusting upon his conical head the temperature equalizer for possible flight into space. “The condition of the rock over which it once flowed discloses this fact, and it is very hard rock, too.”

  “The stream must have either originated on the other side of the mountain, or else from high up in the mountains where it may possibly follow the vent of an extinct volcano.”

  “Perhaps,” 6W-438 had enthused, “this is a tunnel which leads through to the other side of the mountain.”

  “Beware of a labyrinth,” had warned 744U-21. “Remember well how we became lost in endless, intersecting tunnels on another world. Do not again enter such a place.”

  “We shall employ extreme care,” the professor had promised.

  744U-21 then rose to join his winged companions who had disappeared far above. 21MM392 with seven others of the Zoromes then entered the huge opening and walked into the blackness, shining their body lights ahead and to each side.

  The course of the ancient waterway turned and twisted, but the general direction was always the same, the confines narrowing and broadening haphazardly. As they progressed deeper into the mountain, the age-old marks of watery passage became less weathered and more sharply discernible. They were glad to find no diversions from the main channel, though occasionally the tunnel expanded for more than a hundred yards. In these widened portions of their course, the professor sent his metal companions in divided groups to follow the walls until they met at a narrowing of the passage deeper into the heart of the mountain. In this manner, they assured themselves of no division in the passage into which they might confusedly lose themselves on their return. Usually, these broad caverns were characterized by a roof much lower than the res
t of the channel, though in no instance did the machine men find the roof of the tunnel low enough to reach with upthrust tentacles.

  “These caverns are the result of a lower and broadened stratum of softer rock than the strata above and below,” the professor commented. “The dissolution of this stratum was governed largely, however, by the rocks and varying forces of the current.”

  The walls were both smooth and jutted; that is, the projections were not rough or pointed but were polished and rounded. Occasional boulders and potholes marked the floor of the channel, an absence of small stones being noted except those trapped in the potholes. Nowhere did the machine men perceive any danger either to themselves or to the inhabitants of Ui, and this lent strength to the absurdity of the Uum superstition regarding the cavern’s frightful-ness conjured within the fearful imagainations of the Disci.

  Quite without preliminary warning, the machine men came to the passage’s end, or at least they believed so, for they explored the sides and ceiling at this point, as well as the floor, for some radical diversion from the usual gentle meanderings they had found. There was no alternative to the conclusion confronting them: this was the end of the passage. Before them lay an accumulation of rock, loose and boulder-strewn at the edges, hard packed and semi-solid beyond.

  “The ceiling here caved in at some time or other and shut this off,” was 12W-62 suggestion.

  “Do you suppose it closed off the subterranean stream?” queried 377X-80.

  “On the contrary,” 119M-5 interjected. “No cave-in would have halted a stream of sufficient potency to have carved its course out of solid rock. The cave-in occurred long after the river had died away and this channel became dry.”

  “Suppose the river had dwindled to a small stream,” countered 377X-80 for the sake of argument.