Loosening the painter, Murray let the launch drift downstream to the tree on which the girl waited. After anchoring the boat to an upthrust limb, he helped her to climb on deck.
“There’s no one on board,” he said carefully. “I’m afraid they’ve been captured—by Indians, probably, and taken upstream. Engine trouble stopped them, I think, but the engine seems to have been repaired. Possibly we can be on their trail in a very few minutes.”
Val Buchanan’s expression was one of determination. She had overcome her recent weakness.
“Natives around here would never bother my father,” she said. “But let that go. We must get to the mine as quickly as possible.”
Murray nodded agreement. Then he jumped into the cockpit and went to work on the engine. He tinkered for a few moments, and suddenly the motor leaped to roaring life. He let it run for a minute, then cut the switch and straightened up.
“We’ll look for weapons and then start.” He gestured toward several lockers. “You start at one end; I’ll take the other.”
The first locker contained nothing of interest. The second brought to light a long brown bottle labeled “Jamaica Rum.” After momentary hesitation, Murray decided it might be useful later on and thrust it into his hip pocket. With his hand on the door of the next closet, he stiffened and turned toward the somber wall of jungle. Through the normal tropical noises, ripped the tortured crash of rending timber and an ominous rumble of distant thunder—metallic thunder, growing louder every minute.
MECHANICALLY Murray moved to Valaire’s side and waited, dreading the sight of whatever might be approaching. Slender fingers seized his arm and clung to it.
The noise mounted rapidly, blotting out the rising bedlam of jungle sounds. The walls of the matted forest shook as though they, too, were afraid. Then directly before them an aisle burst open as great trees crashed and flattened before a thing of nightmare proportions. It rolled up to the river’s edge like some fantastic juggernaut, and hung there poised, as though contemplating the boat. Summoned, perhaps, by the sound of the motor.
Murray drew the girl deeper into the dubious shelter of the engine pit, and for moments his astonished eyes saw with photographic clarity every incredible detail of the towering monster.
It was a glistening purple wheel fully two hundred feet in height, a wheel without a rim. It was metal—purple metal—and each of its numerous spokes was all of a yard thick, terminating in a six-foot umbrella shaped knob. Strangest of all was the hub of the wheel—a huge metal sphere, from opposite sides of which projected a score of tapering tentacular cables. Some were coiled tightly against the face of the sphere; others touched the ground, or coiled around the trunks of trees as though supporting the metal wheel.
Now several tentacles lashed out; and in a breath the launch was enveloped in a web of purple cables that drew it bodily from the muddy water and whipped it up to the spherical hub of the wheel. During the nauseating gyrations, Murray, in a single mad blur of sound and motion, heard Valaire Buchanan scream—saw her hurtling through the air—saw a streak of purple lash out and catch her, saw it whip her back to the face of the gleaming knob—felt himself crash painfully into a niche behind the engine block. In moments he found himself wedged there with Valaire Buchanan dangling limply ten feet above him.
Murray’s ideas were a spinning, chaotic jumble.
“I hope Val hasn’t been injured,” he thought. “What kind of intelligence could build, control a machine like this? Same intelligence that changed the sky. Really in a spot now, and nothing to do about it. This must have been the thing which hit Buchanan and his men.”
Abruptly thought ceased as the great machine started rolling back along the path it had gouged for itself. For one brief moment Murray was aware of a stupefying gyration as sky and jungle merged in a sickening, whirling blur—a roar of deep rolling thunder—then he glimpsed a wrench leaping from nowhere; felt it crash with a flare of blinding light against his skull. Blackness fell with the fading and dying of all sound.
JIM MURRAY came out of the fog of unconsciousness slowly, first aware of a rhythmic, painful throbbing on the top of his head. He opened his eyes to stare blankly at a varnished ceiling above him. Dizzily he sat up, squeezing past something that looked like an engine, and stared around him. Instantly full recollection returned, and with it came uneasiness and a feeling of anxiety for Valaire. Vividly he recalled the purple metal wheel with its knobs and whipping tentacles; and simultaneously he became aware of a delicate violet mist that filled the air about him. Odorless, transparent, undetectable except to sight.
He shrank back against the engine block and remained motionless, listening. Faintly the familiar jungle sounds came to him, faintly, as though far away. With painful caution he raised his head above the edge of the engine pit and looked around.
The launch lay on its side in the midst of the splintered ruins of shacks which had once housed the native crew of the “Diamond Queen.” Fifty feet away he could see the edge of the pit that led into the diamond diggings. He could see a steady violet glow pouring from the crater.
Nowhere was there sign of life. And little wonder, for the ground on every hand bore those unmistakable umbrella-shaped prints pressed deep into the earth . . .
Soundlessly, with caution born of the dread of the unknown, Murray left the shelter of the launch and started across the open. The uncanny quiet seemed to have blotted out every sound except that far-away, muffled hum of the jungle.
STEALTHILY he moved toward the edge of the pit. Every nerve and muscle was strained to hairspring tenseness in his concentration on what might lie within the mine.
As he advanced, he became aware of the strangest sensation—a feeling of reverence, of awe, of worship! With every step the feeling intensified, became more alluring. Striving to fathom this utterly foreign emotion, Murray recalled the brief mention Val had made of something which had seized her in some strange manner as she flew over the mine—like some magnet of the mind . . .
A yard from the edge of the mine he paused, slid flat on his chest and peered over the rim. He gasped, and for several moments could only stare in blank astonishment.
The diamond workings had grown to many times their normal size, cutting deeply into the jungle on the opposite side. Funnel-shaped now, a tremendous ramp spiralled around its inner wall, running from a point across from him to the wide base of the funnel—a ramp created for the use of the gigantic metal wheel, as the deep-cut tracks revealed.
Far below he saw the unearthly Juggernaut standing motionless beside a tremendous mass of unfamiliar apparatus. Purple machinery, like nothing of earth, dominated by two huge glowing tubes that towered above it—tubes that despite their size, seemed as fragile and delicate as frozen violet mist.
Murray’s gaze left the tubes and rested on something even more strange. From the center of the gigantic bowl of purple metal that formed the base of the funnel, rose a globe of pulsing violet radiance. Only a small part of the mass, it seemed to dominate it completely. Murray shook his head; this globe was not part of anything. It was the heart and brain and power of all within the pit. For from it rose that alien light, from it pulsed that overpowering sense of reverence. It seemed alive—was alive—supernally alive, worthy of his worship.
The thought seized him. It pulsed through him in tempo with the throbbing pulsation of the light within the globe. He must go down there, must pay homage to this wondrous entity—must join those others—
Those others? The thought jarred.him to his senses. His lips twisted in a soundless curse. He fixed straining eyes on minute figures covering the floor of the metal bowl all around the sphere of light. Men were there, lying prone, with arms outstretched. Val Buchanan was there—Val, her mind and body subject to this insane worship!
More than men crouched before the alien thing. Beasts! A gigantic boa constrictor motionless beside a great black-furred jungle cat. A tapir crowding a howler monkey. Brightly plumaged birds as one with beasts
and men, in their worship of this being of light.
Brow furrowed with effort, Murray rose slowly from the lip of the abyss and drew back—twenty feet, thirty, fifty, beyond the range of that dreadful reverence.
Mechanically he clambered up over the sloping bow of the launch and dropped soundlessly to the canted deck. He slid into the engine pit and squatted there, scowling savagely. What should he do—what could he do? So much depended on him. He thought of Val Buchanan as he had seen her dangling unconscious in a coiled metal tentacle of the wheel. He thought of her father, of those others down in the pit—and ominously he pictured the possibilities of other multitudes coming under the baleful influence of that alluring light.
What was the Thing? It must be behind all the strange things which had been happening. This ability to create the urge of worship in man and mindless beast—it was a fearful power. Abruptly he shrugged and stood erect.
Somehow the Thing had to be stopped—and it looked as though it was up to him.
He turned to the lockers to continue his search for a weapon which had been interrupted so strangely. In moments he found what he sought, a Winchester automatic, loaded, and with it lay a half box of cartridges. He dumped the ammunition into his pocket, picked up the rifle and examined it carefully. Satisfied, he worked his way silently out of the beached launch. As carefully he crossed the open ground to the edge of the mine.
As before, that awesome feeling of reverence assailed him. Furiously he strove to blot it out, centering every thought on the purpose he had fixed in his mind. He would put a slug in that purple globe if it was the last thing he did.
DROPPING prone on the edge of the pit, he flung the rifle to his shoulder and sighted along the barrel. Amazingly, the sight danced before him, wavering drunkenly. What was wrong with him? Fever? . . . And even as the question formed, he knew. The influence of the Thing down there was becoming too strong. He had to shoot while he could.
Taking uncertain aim, he jerked the trigger. The rifle bucked against his shoulder, and he heard the echoes of the shot reverbrating through the pit.
Silence for the instant that followed—then something like sound that was not exactly sound filled all the purple mist. A vibration that pulsed through every nerve and fibre of Jim Murray’s being. Thoughts drove into his brain, alien thoughts, filled with reproach, yet tinged, it seemed, with fear. The fear—if it existed at all—was gone instantly, and somehow Murray was thinking how mad he had been to consider destroying that beautiful creation. Why, it was godlike—it was a god—a God of Light!
It meant only good to men, had come to this world to lift men from their low level, to make them like gods—Gods of Light. For ages it had been planned—and he had thought to destroy a work that was older than life on Earth.
Murray’s eyes became fixed upon the purple mist that hovered wraithlike before him; his vision seemed suddenly to gain new power. Thoughts that were alien to him, yet seemed to be formed in his own brain, slowly merged with a strange three-dimensional picture growing in the mist like a mirage.
He saw an alien city of metal and crystal and violet radiance, a city beautiful beyond expression. Its buildings were tremendous spheres of glittering crystal in which moved creatures of light. Not all were violet; every color of the spectrum was there, all vying with each other in their incredible beauty. He saw living spheres of light borne from globe to globe by tentacled metal wheels, saw other fantastic machinery whose purpose was not disclosed.
Then the view changed, and he was looking down upon a great plain surrounded by low, rolling hills. At first glance it resembled another crystal city, this one formed of glistening purple metal, globes half buried beneath the surface of the plain. There were thousands of the spheres, spaced at intervals equal to their own size, and filling all the valley.
Almost immediately thought of a city was dispelled by the appearance of an amazing procession moving over one of the hills—a seemingly endless line of rolling, rimless wheels! Each metal giant bore in its tentacles a glowing sphere of light. Violet, green, rose, yellow, blue—a glorious spectacle.
Each of the wheels bore its cargo to one of the metal spheres; a tentacle touched the side of the globe, and its upper half folded back as though on a hinge. Murray caught a glimpse of strange machinery within the lower hemisphere; then the wheel rolled over the edge, placed its burden of living light in the center of the cup on a raised platform—and the metal sphere closed.
Again the scene changed, and Murray saw a vast horde of purple balls rising from the plain, flashing up, up from their parent world, out into space. Saw them spread over all the heavens, fan out, thinning, vanishing in an infinity of star-pricked blackness.
The vision followed one of the glebes, saw it fade out—then fade in again, speeding toward a knot of glowing worlds. To Murray’s mind came the knowledge that it was in distress, must land.
It flashed directly toward a little world, the third from the white-hot central star, a steaming world where nothing lived, where seas boiled, and volcanoes belched incessantly through a crust of hot, noxious mud. Earth as it was uncounted milleniums in the past.
The sphere struck with its speed unchecked, struck and vanished, buried in the prehistoric world.
Again the vision changed. He saw the interior of the space-ship. There was the globe of light, unharmed. At one side pulsed a growing light, a formless something that gradually became a mass of crystalline tubes. As he watched their light dimmed. They glowed faintly, but with steady power, as they would continue to glow for ages to come, fed by energy almost inexhaustible.
NOW the living Light in the globe faded, its throbbing slowed, became quiescent, almost disappeared. A veil of utter blackness like something physical drew about the sphere, cloaking it—and the God of Light slept.
The vision vanished. Jim Murray was again staring into a gossamer veil of violet light.
In his mind thoughts still formed, thoughts of a God of Light that slept while Earth passed through its infancy, its lusty youth, drawing toward maturity. A Light that slept till something—perhaps the pickaxe of a native worker in the Diamond Queen—had disturbed its slumbers.
“I awakened,” a soundless voice seemed to whisper in Murray’s brain, “and when I saw these strange beings like you, I knew that the time had come when my mission should be fulfilled. A time when the life of this world needed the transformation that my race can give, when men should become beings of Light. I have studied your kind, and have learned—much.
“I strove to communicate with my own world, but something in your atmosphere checked the radiations, casting them back.[*] I had to change your sky to permit the message to pass through. And soon, soon others of my race will come, and the transformation will begin.”
The soundless words ended, and Murray became aware of a command, firm, irresistible. He must go down there into the pit and worship! He arose to the command and began to run with a shambling gait around the rim of the pit toward the end of the spiral ramp. His body moved without volition of his, and so moved his mind. Alien thoughts—how repulsive were all things human—how glorious the God of Light. Thoughts of that incredibly beautiful world he had seen—joy at the knowledge that Earth would be like it, a world where monstrosities called men, purely physical and grossly misshapen, could not exist. Visions of the bliss that would be his when he, too, would become a creature of Light. But he must hurry—hurry!
And nothing—nothing must stop him!
The rough terrain, pitted and furrowed by overlapping prints of the great wheel, was a treacherous thing, and treacherously it caught Jim Murray’s feet. He pitched headlong. The fall slammed the breath from his lungs, and it wrenched him free of the hypnosis that had clutched his reason. Beautiful things he had seen—like the drug-born visions of a hop-head—but he did not like ’em!
GROGGILY he scrambled to his feet, his gaze sweeping the ground for the Winchester he had dropped in his fall. That first shot had missed, but he’d make the sec
ond one count. That thing could not take his mind from him again. He scooped up the rifle—and with the force of a blow that accursed vibration seized him—seized him and filled him with loathing for the touch of metal. The feel of the cool, smooth surface made his flesh crawl. He would drop the thing and run—run down into that pit where he could worship the wondrous Light. Run—he must run . . .
With a tremendous effort of will Murray kept the rifle tightly clutched in his hand and refused to move a single step toward the ramp. His thoughts were wildly, desperately, seeking a way out. He could not fight this thing for long. Shakily he forced himself to sit down on the ground—and sat on the rum bottle he had thrust into his hip pocket back on the launch.
The rum! He would pour it down, every drop. He would be hanged if he would be able to walk, much less run, to that triple-cursed ramp.
Dropping the Winchester, he whipped out the bottle, drew the cork—and an inner voice urgently told him the liquid was a horrible concoction, poisonous, loathsome, something to be cast aside. Nauseated, Murray hesitated. Then hesitation vanished as the unmistakable aroma drifted to his nostrils. He would drink.
He tilted the bottle against his lips and poured the rum down. He drank till he thought the lining was gone from his throat, drank till not a drop remained and hell-fire raged in his stomach. Gagging and couching, he squatted there, tears flooding his eyes. He drew in great lungfuls of air and slowly rose to his feet. He was not feeling the effects yet, but he would, shortly. Yes, indeed, he would be feeling it.
HE PICKED up the rifle and strode toward the edge of the pit. He felt the soundless voice urging him to move—toward the ramp. It was quite clear. He must come down into the pit, down there to that purple globe. He must hurry.
Forgotten Fiction Page 62