Quickly he issued orders. Everyone on board was to start in a different direction and search for fifteen minutes. At the end of that time they were to return to the Vulcan, enter the cruiser, move a few miles away, and search again—until they’d find him, or abandon hope. Each would be armed with a rocket pistol in case of an emergency.
Clamping on their helmets, they began their quest—Marcia and her father, Ray Starke, Martin Lyman, M.D., the four members of the crew, including Schneider, and an official from Mars. Slowly they moved about, their eyes fixed intently on the ground.
At the end of fifteen minutes Marcia returned with downcast heart. She had discovered nothing. And her father, she saw, had had no more success.-Nor had the others, already assembled about the cruiser. But suddenly she caught sight of Schneider; and—and he was bearing something in his arms!
Wildly she raced across the rough plain, running, leaping, soaring, and tumbled through the airlock after the pilot. The rest followed hastily; and the door was closed behind them.
They looked anxiously at Larry Damore, lying limply in the pilot’s grasp. He seemed lifeless. His space suit was badly battered, and its legs had been charred and warped by intense heat. Marcia MacDonald repressed a choking sob, and despair crept into her eyes.
Gently Schneider lowered Larry to a pneumatic couch; as gently removed his helmet. As he did so, Dr. Lyman was discarding his own cumbersome space suit; then he removed Larry’s. In the midst of this procedure Marcia brushed past him, slipped her arm under Larry’s head, and looked pleadingly into his white, drawn face. His eyelids flickered open, and he ventured a faint, painful smile.
“Marcia,” he whispered.
Dr. Lyman drew her away. “He needs immediate attention, Miss MacDonald.” He bent over Larry and gave him a quick but thorough examination. “Hmmm,” he mused, “apparently there aren’t any broken bones, at any rate.” He held a stimulant to Larry’s lips.
“No, doctor,” he said slowly, after swallowing the liquor, “I’m rather badly burned about the legs, I believe, and my back seems somewhat bruised—and that’s about all.” He clenched his teeth for an instant to check a spasm of pain, then continued: “When the little projectiles chased me, you see—or maybe you don’t see—I doubled back toward the house to make a stand there. But they were too much for me—I saw I couldn’t make it. Then I got an idea—a wild one—but decided to try it. Jumped for the top of the fuel-gas tank, and reached it safely. The little things followed. When I was sure they were all there, I opened the pressure vent at the top, let some gas escape—and risked everything on one long chance. It took perfect timing—but it worked.
“Jumping backward with all my strength, I aimed at the opening with my pistol and pressed the trigger. The rush of flame caught my legs—and the little projectiles—but the explosion saved me. I felt myself spinning through empty space—then I woke up here.”
He stopped, his face distorted by pain despite his efforts to suppress it. Noting this, the doctor said:
“You’ve said enough, young man. Your injuries aren’t actually dangerous, but you must be suffering terrible pain. I’ll give you something that’ll ease it in a jiffy.”
From his case he drew a hypodermic syringe, a vial of sterilized water, and a bottle of little white tablets. After putting a proper amount of water into the syringe, he added a single tablet, let it dissolve, then returned the plunger to the glass tube. “A little morphine will do the trick,” he smiled.
Marcia stepped forward impulsively, a hand raised in protest; but when she saw Larry’s face, she paused. His expression was queer; it defied analysis. Eagerness was there, and pain—but that was not all.
As Dr. Lyman approached with the instrument poised, Larry stretched forth impatient fingers. “I’ll take it, doc,” he said in a low, vibrant voice.
For endless moments he studied it as it lay in the palm of his hand. There was no sound save the unconsciously heavy breathing of those who watched him. As a demon of pain gripped him, his hand closed—then opened again. And Larry Damore, with great deliberation, pressed the pistol of the syringe and sent the drug hissing through the air.
“I don’t need that stuff,” he said, quiet triumph in his voice, “don’t want it. I’m man enough to stand a little pain, I believe.” He returned the hypodermic to the doctor.
“Get ready for the trip back to Mars—or earth. I can stand it this way!”
“Larry!” Suddenly Marcia awoke from a stunned silence. “Larry!” The single word was a song of joy. An instant later their arms were about each other, and her smiling lips met his in a long, glad kiss.
H.C. MacDonald cleared his throat. “The lad pulled through,” he murmered huskily.
LARRY DAMORE and the Outpost on Ceres—in the annals of the E.V. & M. the two are inseparable. For Larry was the first and only man to be assigned to that lonely little world.
Several months after his safe return to earth, scientists announced the successful construction of an atomic energy motor. This resulted in the abandonment of rocket-propelled ships, and in the installation of ato-motors in all space cruisers. The emergency refueling station was no longer needed.
The projectiles from Vesta? The few that escaped—if any did—must have fled back to their own world. An expedition that visited the asteroid with the intention of destroying its life, returned with its mission unaccomplished. They decided that to blot out the worm-beings would have been an unnecessary cruelty. They were not hostile to their visitors; and because of their minute size, they could hardly constitute a menace to anyone on Earth, Venus, or Mars. They had probably considered the buildings on Ceres to be an encroachment upon their own group of worlds—and had resented it.
Larry Damore? At first they made him an astro-technician, because of his interest in astronomy. But eventually he became a power in commercial space travel—H.C. MacDonald’s assistant. After all, as the son-in-law of the big boss, he deserved some consideration.
THE END
[1] (Note) Isol-glass, the transparent, glass like substance used extensively in the construction of space cruisers and space suits, is one of the major achievements of modern chemical science. It is an alloy—if the word may thus be used—of various transparent elements, which, together. Isolate and cut Off all forms of radiation that are harmful to human life, permitting only the beneficial rays to pass through It. Malleable and extraordinarily tough.
[2] (Note) Later investigation revealed that the little cylinders were the space-flying vessels of Vesta, each outfitted with a crew of six, minute, intelligent, worm- like creatures. These beings lived beneath the surface of the asteroid; they had hollowed out long, winding tunnels within the solid rock; had built strange cities within which to dwell. Using an alloy of aluminum, abundant in their world, they had constructed the metal roof to prevent the escape of the rarefied air they manufactured. This permitted the growth of the plant life upon which the worm things lived.
1939
MUTINEERS OF SPACE
Behind those trail Terrestrials roared a volcano from the sulphur pits, and ruthless slavemasters of Jupiter—while 550,000,000 miles ahead was Max Brodeur, head of Interplanetary Transport Lines, end the vicious racketeer of Uranian slave traffic who had sentenced them to this living hell!
FURTIVELY Alan Sarett peered through the heavy murk of the Jovian prison pit. A cloud of yellow steam writhed upward from the boiling spring at his feet, obscuring everything with a choking, sulphurous veil. He caught a hazy glimpse of Jon Cory, lank and raw-boned, stripped to the waist, toiling steadily on the opposite bank of the pool. Then a shrill, peremptory note came from the throat of the Jovian guard, and a wire-thin tentacle lashed viciously across his naked back, cutting deep. Alan’s face wrinkled like the snout of a snarling dog; and he bent over the bubbling spring, tearing savagely with a long, daw-tipped instrument at the crust of sulphur forming continuously on the lip of the caldron. A heap of the lemon yellow fragments lay behind him.
Through slitted lids he glared up at the mighty figure of the Jovian, hatred burning in his eyes. Damned sluur—he’d pay for that—and soon! They’d planned everything—he and Cory and Parker, and the Uranian, Tull—and before many minutes passed, they’d hear the signal . . . The signal, the roar of the supply ship from Io—and this sluur would boil in the sulphur pool, and they’d be heading for freedom! Freedom—and Max Brodeur!
His ears strained for the first sound of the supply ship’s rockets, a tenseness creeping through him. And even as he labored, he watched the yellow-skinned guard, to be ready when the signal came. Formidable antagonists, these giant brutes with their tremendous muscles. It was no joke for two Terrestrials—or even a half dozen—to attack one of them. Ten feet above the obsidian surface of the Pit this sluur towered, his great, bulbous body supported by three mighty, multi-jointed limbs terminating in immense sucker-discs. His head, if it could be called a head, was merely an elongation of his body; and the bare expanse of flesh was broken only by a single huge eye, faceted like an insect’s, and an enormous, toothless mouth. From the top of his head projected six long, wiry tentacles—and it was these that Alan feared most, for in them lay the strength of spring steel.
Suddenly Sarett stiffened, his fingers fiercely gripping the handle of his sulphur-hook. Far above a faint, penetrating whine cleft the heavy Jovian atmosphere, cutting down through the haze in a steadily mounting roar. The signal! He spun toward his guard—lashed out and up mightily with his hook, aiming at the gaping mouth like a crimson gash in the smooth, yellow face. And the blow landed! Blood, dark and viscous, spurted from a long, ragged wound.
A scream like the wail of a siren burst from the sluur, losing itself in the space ship’s roar, and his tentacles, quivering with pain and wrath, swept toward Sarett. Alan tried to leap back out of reach, but in the terrific gravitational pull of the giant planet he could barely raise his feet from the ground. Coiling cinctures of crushing sinew seized legs, waist, throat, and he was whipped high into the air!
“Cory! Corp!” he gasped, and with a final desperate lunge he buried his sulphur-hook in the top of the Jovian’s head. The clutch of the tentacles tightened convulsively; and Alan felt them sear into quivering flesh, felt the one about his throat grind deeper and deeper, obscuring his sight with a creeping blackness.
Consciousness was only a ghostly thread when he heard a shout rise above the dying roar of the supply ship, and the life-draining grip of the tentacles relaxed! The sluur shook under a hail of thudding blows—and abruptly Alan was hurled to the floor of the Pit. Agony crawled through every nerve; he wrenched the sulphur-laden air into his burning lungs with great, rasping gulps. He knew his mind was spinning toward the black, empty chasms of unconsciousness. and he struggled furiously to keep his senses.
Somehow, he found himself swaying on legs as weak as woven straw. A dozen feet away he saw the Jovian, a horrible monstrosity blotched with slow-flowing blood, crouching on widespread limbs, striving to ward off the gouging slashes of Cory’s weapon. Abruptly he fell forward on the crimson ruin of his face—and a twitching tentacle wound itself around the Terrestrial! A single note of triumph shrilled from the dying monster—and he began to creep toward the boiling pool!
In wide-eyed horror Alan shuffled toward the struggling pair. Though the weakened sluur moved slowly, his own pace seemed slower. Retrieving his fallen sulphur-hook without pausing, he pushed steadily ahead. They were fighting on the very brink of the spring now, Cory desperately striving to free himself. Then Alan reached them—and with a single mighty swing he drove his weapon through the bulging eye deep into the Jovian’s brain!
AS Cory wrenched free, the sluur sagged in death. He teetered on the sulphur-crust for an instant, then slid over the edge—vanished in the depths of the churning expanse.
Panting heavily, the two men faced each other. Cory, angular, homely, six feet tall; Sarett, shorter by six inches, black haired, rather swarthy, a figure of stocky power. Both streaked and splashed with blood, their own and the Jovian’s, from head to sandaled feet. As one their hands shot out, meeting in a strong, wordless clasp.
Cory broke the awkward silence. “A swell push—while it lasted,” he said, grinning broadly. “And now I think we’d better blast off.”
Sarett nodded. “Right. It’ll take Parker and Tull longer to get to the wall, but they’ll probably get rid of their sluur quicker than we did.”
Like men on snow shoes they started across the Pit, sliding their feet over the glass-smooth surface. The muscles of their thighs were corded and rigid as they struggled ahead with laborious haste. Neither spoke; breath was too valuable to be expended in speech. And each was busy with his own thoughts—thoughts awakened by the freedom which seemed almost within reach.
Two months ago they had been brought to Jupiter on the convict ship, Sarett and Cory and Parker. Spacemasters all, in charge of three of the largest ITL cruisers, they had been convicted without trial on a charge of mutiny—convicted by order of Max Brodeur, President of the Interplanetary Transport Lines . . . Mutiny! Sarett’s lip curled bitterly. That was a joke—a damned rotten joke. They had learned too much about the Uranian slave traffic, too much about those thousands of docile yet powerful Elgae being torn from their parent world to slave and die in the Mercutian radium mines. A racket operated by Brodeur himself!
And they’d get Brodeur! He was a big man in interplanetary affairs, a mythical figure of power none of them had ever seen, but they’d find him—and burn him!
“Almost there,” Cory grunted, gesturing through the murk toward a high, gleaming wall directly ahead. It towered almost thirty feet above them, its polished surface sloping inward at a sharp angle, a barrier that no convict had surmounted since the Pit had been created. In moments they stood beneath it, looking back over the way they had come.
They could see nothing—only the eternal fog like a vaporous monster writhing in its lair. A mist that concealed thousands of convict laborers, beings from every inhabited planet in the System. They were toiling beside those seething pools, seeking Jovian sulphur crystals, more valuable than gold since Dr. Martin Quigley’s discovery of their marvelous ability to rejuvenate human life.
Alan glanced at Cory. He was squinting intently into the gloom, waiting. Sarett frowned. He hoped Parker and Tull would make it. They should be here soon—unless they had failed! And if they had failed—either of them—it meant death for the rest, death in a sulphur caldron. For only with the four was escape possible.
Cory spoke without turning his head. “Wonder what it is that Tull plans to spring. You remember—he mentioned it last sleep period. Something to keep the Jovians occupied.”
Sarett shrugged. “I don’t know any more than you do. But it’s bound to be something good, for that Uranian knows things—like every other highborn member of his race. And he’s in this to win.” If anything, Tull’s grievance was greater than their own, for Brodeur’s emissaries had tried to capture him with some of the Elgae; and because he had killed a dozen of his would-be captors, and had escaped, they had sent him here on a faked charge.
Abruptly Cory gripped Alan’s arm, and he held his breath. There was a faint, slithering sound out there in the murk. If it were a Jovian—but it wasn’t. The huge frame of Lief Parker bulked large before them, bloody, unsightly, sliding slowly forward like a swimmer struggling against a powerful undercurrent. He was alone.
A hoarse whisper reached them. “Sarett—Cory—is that you?”
“Yeah,” Cory answered. “Where’s Tull?”
Parker didn’t reply till he joined them at the base of the wall. “He’ll be cornin’,” he said. “We had a little trouble. The slums must’ve suspected somethin’, ’cause two of ’em jumped us. They’re cookin’ now—but it means we’ll have to rush things. Tull is plantin’ his little diversion; and I came ahead since he can travel a lot faster.”
“What is this plan of Tull’s?” Sarett demanded. “Cory and I’ve been wondering.”
>
PARKER grinned with one side of his face, his eye closing in an habitual squint. “Oh, it’s pretty! Pretty! Y’see, back home on Uranus, Tull is a chemist—an’ a damn’ good one. Since he’s been here he’s been workin’ durin’ sleep periods, usin’ some of the dishes they feed us with—an’ he’s finally made an explosive out of the liquid in the pool. Don’t ask me how—but he’s done it. An’ when I left, he was settin’ the charge. It’ll blow the floor all around there into bits, an’ let hell come boilin’ through. An’ while they feed aspirin to that headache, we’ll blast off!”
“Blow up the floor of the Pit!” Incredulously Cory repeated the words. “That’ll be—hell—for the other men around here!”
“It will be hell,” Sarett exclaimed, his dark face hard and grim. He could imagine the shattered shell of obsidian floating in a churning mass of boiling sulphur—Jovians and convicts alike sinking into the scalding flood—could almost hear the curses, the screams . . . Then he spoke again, his voice brittle as the sound of breaking glass. “It’s tough, but we’re not doing it just to escape. We’re going to get Brodeur—if it takes the life of every damned convict in this stinking hole! What’s the difference—a year in this air finishes a man anyway! A quick death is more merciful.”
Cory nodded. “You’re right,” he said stonily.
There was a moment’s silence, broken only by the faint wailing of a distant slum; then Sarett spoke in brusque, businesslike tones. “Do I have it straight? Tull takes the bottom, since he’s heaviest, biggest and strongest. You, Parker, get on Tull’s shoulders; and Cory crawls up on you. Cory braces himself against the wall—and he catches me when Tull throws me up. I reach the top and crawl out. Right?”
“Okay!” Parker snapped. “An’ then you get that supply boat—quick—an’ drop it in here to pick us up.”
Forgotten Fiction Page 48