[Title here]

by Twin Worlds (epub)

  “We have shut ourselves off in a separate compartment even as you did, 21MM392. We believe that soon the fire-dwellers must die through lack of sustenance.”

  “But what of the music monsters?” the professor queried, trying earnestly to bring his heat ray to bear consistently upon the head of a fire-dweller who sat upon his metal cube while another kicked at his head. “They will die, too.”

  “No―they claim that they can go several days without food, while the fire-dwellers die after more than a day and a half away from their fire country.

  “What made the ship rise?”

  “The fire-dwellers tampered with and broke some of the controls. The ship is rising and drifting. We are a long way from the fire country by now.”

  “We are in space,” added 948D-21. “We just left the boundaries of the outer atmosphere.”

  Instantly, the professor conceived an answer to the problem before him. Winning free of the brutes who were trying to bend his legs, he rushed to the side of the ship nearest the door. He could walk, and he had all of his tentacles. The professor was thankful that these inhabitants of the smoking wastelands were not quite as powerful as the Ooaurs had proved themselves to be. He turned a lever just as the determined creatures made another charge for him. They seemed tireless. A faint hissing, to which they paid no heed, became audible. The fire-dwellers soon began acting strangely. They seemed to weaken and weave deliriously. The professor slipped clear of them, watching them intently and waiting. He slid along the wall, his metal body rasping faintly as one of the stupid beasts charged on wavering feet. Raising a metal foot, the professor shoved him to the floor.

  The faint hissing continued. The air was leaving the compartment, slowly dissipating itself into space above the planet fragment. All three of the fire-dwellers were breathing in labored gasps, their many ventricles swelling and dilating to suck in the precious, rarefied gas which was becoming still rarer. They could hardly move.

  Certain that no longer would the evil, stubborn creatures be capable of a concerted rush upon him, the professor opened the door and stood looking out into the abyss of the stars and reflected sunlight off the planet fragment. A magnificent panorama lay far below, one-half of the broad fragment slowly turning toward the drifting ship, the sunlight creeping up the right-angled side ready to flash simultaneous daylight all over the facet it was gradually approaching. Still above, yet to one side, surrounded by the fiery stars, there shone the jagged moon. The air left much faster through the open door, and the intense cold of space pushed in to replace it.

  The professor lost no more time. Seizing the leg of an inert, stiffening fire-dweller, he dragged the body to the doorway and sent it gyrating off into the gravitational grip of the planet fragment. Another body followed the first on its long plunge into territory it had never known in life. The third body the professor heaved toward the doorway where it struck the threshold and glanced out into nothingness. Immediately, he slammed shut the door, for he had no temperature equalizer. The machine men had removed these on leaving the fire country. They were stored in other parts of the ship.

  The thought struck him that were it not for the music monsters aboard, the machine men could eject all air and heat from the ship and put on the temperature equalizers, instantly killing the many fire-dwellers still on board. There came an afterthought, that, if the circumstances should become too alarming, the music monsters might have to take their chances with the adoption of such a plan, keeping to a single, air-filled compartment.

  “I have disposed of three fire-dwellers,” the professor informed his companions in the distantly removed compartment where they held siege. “How many more are there?”

  “At least fifteen,” 948D-21 replied. “We can hear them moving about the ship. Their attitude seems to be changing. They are becoming confused and scared.”

  “Are they in the control room?”

  “Yes, but we are only waiting until the greater number of them go to other sections of the ship. Arminia says that he and his companions can overcome several of them with our help. We are waiting for the most propitious moment. If we can isolate half of them, we are confident of overcoming the remainder even though they outnumber us.”

  Patiently, the machine men and their peculiarly valuable allies, the music monsters, waited for their chance. Intense mental concentration of the machine men into the weak, muddled minds of the fire-dwellers kept them constantly appraised of the number of the latter in the control room. Curiosity occasionally led the fire-dwellers to other sections of the derelict craft, yet always there remained an overwhelming number in the control room. After the first clash with the machine men, there had been no more damage to the governing mechanism. The brutes were far too bewildered to consider vandalism and too awed to tamper with the already broken controls which they did not understand.

  The music monsters were having a good time. The fluctuating numbers of their enemies in the control room, and the decision to attack with the best odds available, appealed to their gaming nature. Arminia was especially exultant. Fate had oddly twisted the apparent course of events. He had lost on a gamble his chance to ride in the spaceship, yet here he was; but like an evil omen, the fire-dweller’s caricature, turned up on the dice, had immediately cast him into alarming circumstances with many of these enemies.

  The professor waited for the moment when he should hear them ready for the rush on the control room. There was nothing he could do. Only seven fire-dwellers remained in the control room. Three machine men and three music monsters suddenly rushed the dazed and unsuspecting denizens of the volcanic country. Through the minds of his mechanical brethren, Professor Jameson gained a picture of the fray. 454ZQ2 shoved one of the brutes out a doorway and closed the entrance, while his companions closed the remaining entrances. The music monsters swung lustily with wicked hooks. It was soon over.

  Invulnerable to attack, after closing off all chances of help from the rest of the fire-dwellers, the machine men engaged them, while from prearranged plans the three music monsters went around swiftly and cut down the antagonists of the machine men with their sharp hooks. One of the music monsters was seized and crushed by two of the fire-dwellers. His death was avenged six-fold as the rest of the cornered brutes were cut down. Seizing the hook of the dead music monster, 454ZQ2 quickly realized its uselessness in his own unpracticed grasp. For-one thing, it required the peculiar grip of the music monster, and it also required knowledge and skill of where and how to hit. After a few ineffectual rips into the tough hide of a fire-dweller, the machine man threw it down in disgust.

  Six bulky corpses lay on the floor of the control room.

  Eagerly the professor waited for the examination of the controls.

  “They are in bad shape, 21MM392,” was the ultimatum of 29G-75. “There will be the necessity of many repairs to them.”

  “Can the ship be guided?”

  A moment’s pause followed as the machine men in the control room made a few trials. The answer came ominous and disappointing.

  “We have no control over the ship at all. It has ceased to rise. We are being held by the gravity of the planet fragment and shall probably rise no higher.”

  “What are we to do regarding the rest of the fire-dwellers?” queried 948D-21.

  “Now that we have the control room in our possession, we can afford to wait and let them die,” the professor stated.

  “What of Arminia and his companion? There is no food for them here, and besides, after a time, if we are to continue to drift in this manner, the air will have become too noxious for them to breathe.”

  “Food will be the problem,” said the professor. “They will be dead of starvation long before the air in these many chambers becomes unbreathable.”

  “They may have to digress from their vegetable diet when they become sufficiently hungry,” suggested 454ZQ2, his thoughts touching lightly on the six dead fire-dwellers.

  The professor also thought of the remaining survivo
rs of the attacking band that had entered the spaceship.

  “We still have meat on the hoof, too, you know,” he offered jokingly, yet as always his humor escaped the understanding and appreciation of his companions.

  It elicited but a sober reflection from 454ZQ2.

  “When I was a triped on the planet of the double sun, I ate the meat of lesser creatures and enjoyed it.”

  “On my world,” reminisced the professor, “there were savage tribes who ate the meat of their betters and also enjoyed it.”

  “The spaceship may come down,” said 948D-21.

  The machine men debated their situation, occasionally attuning their thoughts to those of the music monsters on some subject of common bond and mutual understanding. Meanwhile, they waited for the fire-dwellers to die. At times they heard them roaming about the spaceship. Never did they try to force the entrances of the control room. The dim-witted creatures of the outdoors did not understand doors any more than they did the walls. To them, an entrance was a hole. Even had they known the use of the doors, however, their combined bulk could not have forced them open.

  The possibilities of their having to subsist on sustenance furnished them by the bodies of the fire-dwellers disgusted the music monsters, yet when their grave future was thoroughly explained to them they became partly reconciled to the prospects of such a diet. Both, however, claimed they must become very ravenous before they would yield to this alternative to starvation. They hated the fire-dwellers as a menu as they hated them as neighbors. There was only one use, perhaps two, which the music monsters had for them: their hides and as a quarry in hunting and war.

  Finally, the steps of the fire-dwellers were silenced. Not until then did the machine men and their two allies go in search of them. Professor Jameson, in hastening to join his companions in the control room, stumbled over one of the fire-dwellers in the passage outside the compartment where he had been waiting. A cursory examination proved the creature to be entirely inanimate. The luckless fire-dwellers were found all over the ship in strange positions, dead. One stood on its feet, sprawled against the wall. Several of them sat on the floor of the supply room―facing each other with spare mechanical legs of the machine men between them, as if even in death they pondered this puzzling, unanswerable enigma. Only one of fourteen fire-dwellers did the machine men find alive, and he was breathing his last when they discovered him.

  The machine men, on the advice of the professor, took the dead fire-dwellers to the nearly airless chamber where he had recently bested three of their enemies, and the remainder of the atmosphere still lingering in the chamber was released. Back in the control room once more, the two music monsters optimistically commenced gambling over the pelts of the twenty fire-dwellers, feeling themselves potentially wealthy. Little did they seem perturbed over the uncertain future they faced, no more anxious than the machine men who were constantly facing such circumstances. Yet the machine men had more concrete basis for their fearlessness. They were not flesh and blood.

  The spaceship drifted on toward one end of the planet fragment, continuing at the same level. The professor estimated that they were fully eighty miles above the planet’s surface, far above the last remnant of outer air. Already, they had floated close enough to the end of the fragment to look down into the cross-section of atmosphere of the end territory.

  “What do you expect will happen when we pass the world’s edge?” 948D-21 queried. “Shall we keep on going straight or turn with the contour of the planet?”

  “We shall turn―of that I am sure,” said the professor. “But at what level we shall continue to cruise above the surface is problematical. The gravity in the two end zones of this great slab is much greater than the attraction of any of the other four facets. It also presents the least amount of surface, although that consists of territory enclosed by four thousand miles on one side and fourteen thousand miles on the other. We have never landed on this end, although we paid a brief visit to the other end; from end to end there is a diameter of twenty-three thousand miles. We shall certainly be drawn closer to the surface than we are now.”

  Appraised of what was to happen, the music monsters were all eyes and interest. Little had they known of the world on which they lived, and what they now saw they scarcely understood. In musical conversation, they remarked on the weirdness of it all, this strangest of all adventures.

  The spaceship kept on past the planet fragment, as if it were destined to float off into space away from the mighty slab, yet expectantly the machine men waited for the right angle shift which they knew would come. They were beyond the cross view of the atmosphere, in a position where they were able to view slantingly the end country of the planet fragment, before the professor noticed any change in their course. There was no right-angle turn such as a vehicle or traveler might have executed on the surface. The initial perception consisted of the illusion that the spaceship had dropped more on a level with the lengthwise facet it was leaving, yet was still continuing away from the strangely formed world. The spaceship slowly described a curve which brought it into the darkened end territory of the irregular mass and settled into the darkness closer to the ground.

  Chapter V

  Sunlight faded out of view beyond the world’s rim they were leaving behind. In impenetrable darkness, except for the stars above them, they coursed above this unexplored territory. Below them, all lay black.

  “At our present rate of speed, how long will it take us to pass this end of the world?” asked 454ZQ2.

  “For some reason or other, our speed of drift has slowed down, and we are settling closer to the surface,” 29G-75 informed them.

  “I expected the latter to occur,” said the professor, “but why should our speed abate?”

  “Something about the nature of the unmanageable controls. They have become affected by the greater gravity in this end zone.”

  “We may fall,” suggested 948D-21 cryptically.

  “We have the gauges to watch. We can only wait and see what happens.”

  “Are they reliable?”

  “They seem to have remained undamaged.”

  All through the darkness, the machine men kept vigil over the gauges, watching the alarming tendency of the uncontrolled ship to slip over planet-ward. Uncertain of the gauges in the darkness where they could see nothing, the machine men occasionally tested space outside to discern possible traces of atmosphere, to see if they were closer to the ground than the gauges showed them to be. Already the gauges showed their position to be slightly more than an elevation of twenty miles, but here in the end territory, the atmosphere lay more compact and dense, the outer limits of the air having a lower altitude due to the intense gravitational attraction.

  The machine men were relieved when a weak but growing dawn supplanted the night and they were able to see where they were. Below them lay a vast panorama of land and water, desert and vegetation, hills, mountains, valleys and plains. The mountains cut across one corner of the facet and were not so high as those seen by the machine men on other portions of the planet fragment. The music monsters were complaining of gnawing hunger, yet were still reluctant about eating their enemies, the fire-dwellers.

  By the time the sun had arisen like a ball of incandescence out of the sea of air beyond the rim, the spaceship had dropped to the alarming altitude of only five miles. No longer were the machine men in doubt. The immense gravity of the planet fragment was drawing them down. What was more, their descent was sufficiently fast to threaten their safety when the spaceship landed.

  “Get out the mechanical wings and the degravitators,” the professor told them. “If we have to abandon ship on the wing, the degravitators will be necessary. Experience down on the other end taught us that.”

  “What about the music monsters?”

  “We may not have to abandon ship. It is only a possibility. If we do, we can wait until the last two miles and carry them with us.”

  “Is there nothing we can do to save the ship?�
�

  “Nothing. We must trust to chance.”

  “It will be long before we can ever repair it and leave this world.”

  “It may be longer before the rest of our number discover our whereabouts,” observed 29G-75 pessimistically. “For all they know, we might have drifted off in space. They will wait for us to return, not knowing that we cannot do so.”

  The mechanical wings and degravitators were donned, and the two music monsters were equipped with the degravitators and given their instructions. The machine men had considered the little space cars carried in the ship, but these were largely dependent on remote control from the ship, and here again the unmanageable condition of the ship’s controls blocked them from an assured avenue of safety. The degravitators were like those the organic Zoromes used on the large planet Dompt of their own system and called gravity nullifiers.

  Closer they fell toward the planet fragment, the machine men anxiously scanning the gauges, the music monsters excited and tense, fully cognizant of the dread circumstances they were facing. Within four miles of the surface above a vegetated plain, the professor noticed a lessening of their downward drop; he attributed it to the denser atmosphere near the ground. Still, the pace was one sufficiently dangerous to their welfare, especially to that of the music monsters.

  With Arminia in his tentacles, the professor stood ready at the door of the spaceship prepared to leap. Behind him stood 948D-21 with the other music monster. 29G-75 and 454ZQ2 had elected to stay until the spaceship was nearly to the ground. At a mile and a half altitude, secure that the music monsters would suffer no harm at this low level, the professor and 948D-21 leaped out of the spaceship. Arminia gave vent to a melody of terror as the professor’s mechanical wings failed of instant action and they plunged like a stone, whirling giddily. But the professor did not bring himself up sharp, for fear of the excessive gravity wrenching

  Arminia from his grasp, and so he decreased their falling speed slowly while clinging tightly to his larger companion.