“Hurry!” he growled belligerently.
“What the blazes is the hurry? I’m coming.”
At the sound of his voice the urging of the Light died as though it realized the hopelessness of coping with his liquor-drugged brain.
He swaggered along the edge of the pit and finally paused on the lip of the ramp looking down upon the purple globe and the wheel, and the huge glowing tubes. It was lovely, he though. Quite lovely. He thought of the marvelous vision he had seen, on the incalculable age of the Light, and he shook his head sadly. It was too bad he was going to smash it. He was going to smash it, all right. He had to, so Valaire and those others down there could get up off their faces. He felt quite godlike about it, swaying there on the edge of the abyss, with everything so small and trivial and far beneath him. And why shouldn’t he feel godlike? The Light had offered to make him a God. He shook his head solemnly. Couldn’t kid him; there was a catch somewhere.
He wondered if they could hear him, those little people.
“Hey!” he yelled, waving the empty bottle above his head. “Hey!”
They did not move; and momentarily he lost interest in them as the bottle slipped from his hand and went spinning out over the pit. He watched it turn end over end, hurtling down, down, dwindling, finally lost to his eye.
Teetering perilously on the brink, he lurched back, tripped over his own feet, and sat down. He grinned a trifle groggily to himself.
“Here we go again, boys,” he announced solemnly.
He was aroused from the armor-like numbness that was creeping over him by sudden activity in the pit. He blinked owlishly to clear the mist from his eyes. The beautiful tubes glowed and dimmed, glowed and dimmed; and to the rise and fall of the violet light the huge wheel started rolling ponderously up the ramp. The familiar metallic thunder ripped through the air. He watched it, nodding wisely to himself. Since he had sidestepped the hypnotic efforts of the globe, it was trying a more direct attack.
With curious and faintly sobered detachment, Murray sprawled at the edge of the ramp and pointed the Winchester at the tubes. Their flickering light reminded him now of a shooting gallery at Coney Island. Three shots for a nickel. When you made a bull’s eye, a bell rang.
Carefully he sighted at the first tube. The glow brightened, and he squeezed the trigger. For a second nothing happened, and he cursed. Then suddenly that particular section of the apparatus vanished for an instant in a searing flash of light that plumed up from the shattered tube to the rim of the pit in an agony of combustion.
Murray rubbed his burning eyes and blinked away the tears that momentarily blinded him. With the explosion, the wheel had faltered on the ramp, but now with the steady rise and fall of light in the other tube, it lurched on, thundering a voiceless threat. As the flashes increased in tempo, it gained speed, its tentacles lashing angrily about it.
“Don’ fire till you see the whites o’ their eyes,” muttered Murray thickly.
He cuddled the stock of the Winchester closer to him and drew a bead on the second great tube, bulking weirdly through the smoke rising from the charred and twisted fragments of its companion.
Again he squeezed the trigger. Again the flaring, anguished leap of purple fire, and then—nothing. Nothing but the violet glow of the God of Light shining through gray smoke-wraiths rolling up from shattered, fusing machinery.
Glumly Murray shook his head. Bull’s eyes, both of ’em—an’ no bells . . .
On the ramp below him the huge wheel rolled drunkenly forward under its own momentum, tilting now to one side, now to the other. Murray watched with one squinting eye as it teetered on the edge. He saw the wildly alarmed pulsations of the globe. Slowly the wheel started retracing its path. It gathered speed as it rolled down the ramp; down, down, its tentacles whipping and trailing helplessly behind it. It struck the wall, rebounded, then leaped out—far out.
IT STRUCK the floor of the pit with earth-shaking force, bounded into the air over the prone worshipers—and landed in the midst of the machinery surrounding the stumps of tubes.
Skidded—spun wildly into the globe of living purple!
One high, ringing note sounded in the bottom of the pit, swelling, rolling out, deep, bell-toned, as though all the chimes on Earth had been struck one mighty blow. The God of Light—died.
Up on the ramp Jim Murray slid gently into the stupor that at last was claiming its own. He smiled happily.
“Bull’s eye,” he murmured. “Bells!”
“Feeling better?”
A crisp, cheerful voice penetrated Jim Murray’s mind as he opened his eyes. He drew himself up on one elbow and peered around with bleary uncertainty. Feeling better? His head was thumping like a native drum and his tongue felt like a slab of freshly smoked Brazilian rubber. Had he ever felt worse? Some hangover! He tried to recall the party . . .
Memory returned in a flood and Murray blinked anxiously toward the sky. It was blue, a vivid, tropical blue. Relieved, he took stock of his surroundings. He was lying on a blanket on the deck of Buchanan’s motor launch, again floating in the muddy waters of the Javary River. Standing over him solicitously were the mine owner and his daughter, Valaire. There was a smile on the girl’s face that did Murray a lot of good.
“Feel like a million,” he grimaced, struggling to his feet. His eyes met those of Val Buchanan. “Well, we made it!” The girl’s expression sobered.
“You made it,” she said.
“And we owe you a lot,” her father added earnestly, struggling with thoughts that could not find expression.
“Nothing to it,” Murray said uncomfortably, looking toward the mine.
Native workers were busy among the ruins of what had been their shacks. From the amount of work they had done, he must have been out for twenty-four or forty-eight hours. There was no sign of the violet glow that had risen from the pit. Turning to Buchanan, he spoke in a voice he tried to make casual.
“Are—things dead down there?” he asked.
“Everything. Nothing there but a few dead animals. When that wheel crashed into the mine and smashed things, the pit turned into a miniature hell. There were men there, and birds and beasts and crawling things that the wheel had captured. The Light had held them powerless—but when the smash came—well, for a while it was pretty bad. Fortunately I was armed, and the animals were thoroughly scared, so we came through it in one piece . . . Nothing down there now but bodies and some very strange metal that may be worth more than diamonds.” Buchanan looked keenly into Murray’s eyes. “Did the Light—do you understand all that was involved in that globe’s being here?”
“Yes,” said Murray, “and I’m hoping that a certain message, if it gets to where it’s going, won’t find any intelligent life to receive it.”
“We can only wait and see.” Buchanan’s manner changed abruptly, a twinkle appearing in. his eyes. “Valaire tells me you were waiting in Remate de Males to see me about a job.”
“That’s correct. I’m an engineer—worked everything from Alaska to the Transvaal. I’d like a chance at Brazilian diamonds—if you really need someone . . .”
“Oh, but we do,” Val interposed warmly. Then she blushed with rosy confusion at her father’s dry chuckle.
Jim Murray met Val Buchanan’s gaze with warm intensity.
“If that’s the case,” he said quietly, “I’ll give it a trial.”
[*] Radio waves are transmitted from sending to receiving stations by reflection from the ionosphere. The ionosphere consists of layers of ionized or electricity-conducting air from 60 to 300 miles above the earth. These layers act as reflectors for radio waves and make transmission possible.
Depending upon the degree of ionization of a layer, there is an upper limit to the frequency which may be reflected. Waves of higher frequencies than this upper limit pass through the ionosphere out into space. The air in these layers is ionized principally by ultra-violet light from the sun. Increase in sunspot activity, accompanied by eruptions in th
e sun, has often caused the complete fadeout of high frequency transmission.
It seems evident that the God of Light was sending out its message on a. prearranged frequency too low to penetrate the ionosphere. Consequently the ionosphere had to be changed, somehow, to permit the passing of the message into space. The secondary result of this change was the violet tinge of the sky.
1948
OUT OF THE SUN
CLINT MORGAN opened his eyes and stared drowsily through the mouth of the little cavern into the purple-black sky of the Peruvian highlands. Dawn was creeping over the eastern mountains like a great gray monster, devouring stars. Clint shivered, half numbed by the frosty cold that seeped through his heavy llama hair poncho, then sat up slowly, stretching, sharp twinges stabbing stiffened muscles.
He glanced into the shadows behind him—and his gaze suddenly froze in Incredulous wonder. Something glowed there at the base of the granite wall—something emerald-green, neon-bright, as steady as a lidless eye! It hadn’t been there the night before—of that he was certain, for he had explored the cave thoroughly.
Rising, fully dressed, he bent over the strange object; and his wonder grew. Roughly circular in form, it was a queerly shaped medallion, adorned with a ray-encircled symbol of the sun. It was metal—metal brilliantly green, and agleam with a light that came from within itself! Glowing as radium glows. It lay in a tiny craterlike cavity, rimmed by a mound of sandy soil—as though something had thrust it up from beneath the surface, heaping the disturbed earth all about it!
Clint’s Angers circled the metal disc—and he almost dropped it in sharp amazement. It was warm! Warm as a coin that had lain for hours in the sunlight. Warm—when the temperature in the cave was well below freezing! Clint frowned thoughtfully, turning the medallion over and over in his hand. Here was something queer. Green metal with warmth of its own! Abruptly he shrugged and thrust it into his pocket He’d have to investigate this—but breakfast came first.
He turned toward the outside; stopped short, staring downward. Another spot of emerald radiance gleamed up at him from its sandy crater. He bent over—saw a tiny, grotesque, semi-human figure. As he straightened with the image in his hand, he caught sight of another point of green light a few feet away. Watching intently, he saw the earth fall away from it as it pushed to the surface, until it lay like the others surrounded by a rim of soil! Thrust—or drawn—from its hiding place of centuries by some inexplicable power!
For timeless minutes Clint stood Just inside the mouth of the cave, watching others of the radiant figures appear. There was something awesome in their silent movement toward the surface—something nerve-prickling in the atmosphere of the cave. Clint’s thoughts sped about aimlessly, wild conjectures striving to explain the phenomenon before him. He could understand the presence of these figures in the cavern: this was doubtless the tomb of an ancient, forgotten Chimu whose treasure had been buried with him. But how explain the green metal? How explain this movement to the surface? It Just didn’t make sense!
Eleven, he counted, when at last there seemed no Indication of others appearing. Somewhat hesitantly he picked them up and stowed them in his saddlebags, lying in the rear of the cave. Then carrying the pack, he strode out into the gray of the dawn.
“Pizarro!” he called. “Hey. Pizarro!”
A dozen yards away a hardy little Peruvian horse pricked up one ear curiously and continued tearing at sparse clumps of yellow-brown ichu grass, the only vegetation which grew In these frost-bitten uplands.
Clint whistled a single shrill note: and the shaggy-coated chusco ambled slowly toward him with both ears erect-Clint grinned. That whistle meant food to the stolid donkey-sized horse. When Clint had bought him from a drunken mozo for three dollars, a year or so earlier, he had been so pitifully thin and bony that he had reminded Clint of the mummified skeleton of Francisco Pizarro in its glass-paneled coffin In Lima. Indeed, the resemblance had seemed so great that he had named him for the butcher boy conquistador. And ever since, the two had been companions in Clint’s endless wandering through the length and breadth or South America. Tropical tramps, both man and horse.
As the little beast thrust his nose Into a sack of native barley, Clint secured a bundle of faggots he had brought up from the lowlands. With the aid of dry ichu grass he built a little fire over which he cooked his breakfast—shredded, leathery, sun-dried beef boiled in water from his canteen, native corn, and strong black coffee.
While he ate, he took stock of his surroundings. He had come upon this shelter after sunset: in the drab gloom of dusk he had seen little of the terrain about him. He had camped in the midst of what evidently had been a village of the Incas, or, more probably, the Chimus, a race more ancient than the Incas. Nothing remained of their carved stone dwellings save an awkward group of crumbling ruins sprawled headlong on a steep slope. A ghost of a trail zigzagged away from the ridge on which he sat, like the trail of some badly wounded creature—down, down, to suddenly mount the steep flank of a round-topped, wooded mountain, and vanish down its opposite slope, falling into the gorge of the Urubamba River, far below. Beyond stretched the shark-toothed cordillera, range upon range, rising pell-mell over each other, as if striving to escape some pursuer. And behind the mountains rose a solid wall of somber cloud, hiding the rising sun behind its vaporous barrier, veiling the world in gray.
Where he was, Clint didn’t exactly know. Somewhere to the south lay the city of Cuzco; and between him and Cuzco were the marvelous ruins of Machu Picchu, an Inca wonder-city he had planned to visit. He knew nothing more definite than that—nor did he care. Ho had lost and found his way a thousand times before.
His thoughts persisted in returning to those enigmatic bits of green metal which had forced themselves so strangely upon his attention. But try as he might, be could offer no explanation for their existence or behavior. They simply mocked ordinary human knowledge.
So engrossed was he in his thoughts that he did not hear the approach of a visitor until a deep voice, dripping a syrupy courtesy, spoke almost In his ears.
“Buenos dias, senor!”
Clint started imperceptibly, then turned, an angry tenseness creeping through him. “Hello!” he said curtly, in English, and waited, his eyes fixed coldly on the fat face of the Spanish American.
“The Senor ees up early!” the Peruvian continued, smiling with a display of brilliant white teeth behind heavy lips. “I awake; I see your fire; I t’ink maybe you Join me at desayuno!”
Despite himself. Clint felt a smile twitching the corners of his mouth. This was a novel way of inviting oneself to breakfast! But the smile died Instantly. No Peruvian would venture this far into the highlands without adequate supplies; nor would he normally appear in the dress of the man before him. He looked as though he had just stepped from his home In Cuzco or Lima, a picture of sartorial perfection! How had be gotten here, looking as he did?
Clint shook his head. “You must join me,” he said politely.
“Como no! Gracias! But eet ees you who mus’ join me!” The other was politely insistent—though not too insistent.
Clint shrugged indifferently; and the Peruvian sat down beside the fire. As they ate, the early caller maintained a steady stream of meaningless chatter, his smile as fixed as the smile of a statue. Among other things, he revealed that his name was Pardo Gozano, and that he lived In Cuzco. Clint confined his comments to monosyllables whenever possible. studying the other. He saw a man in his early forties, inclined toward fatness, his eyes and hair black, the latter parted in the middle. Morgan didn’t like him, of that he was certain. His smile was too obviously false, and his eyes just a trifle too fishlike.
Suddenly, in the midst of a breath-consuming stream of verbose nothingness. Pardo Gozano stopped short, bis gaze fixed incredulously behind Clint. He rose with a muttered exclamation of astonishment and greed, and reached for something on the ground. Clint didn’t turn. He knew what the Peruvian had seen. One of those strange green figures! C
lint studied his face as he returned to the little fire. Greed was there, definitely, despite his efforts to hide it. And greed indicated a knowledge of value!
“I thought I see something, Senor Morgan,” Gozano said apologetically, “but my eyes deceive me . . . Now what were we saying?”
While the one-sided conversation continued, Clint considered this new angle to the mystery. Pardo Gozano knew of the existence of the green metal; knew, perhaps, its nature and value, his company became suddenly more desirable; and Clint began to pay some attention to the conversation.
Where was he bound? Oh—southward, along the backbone of the mountains. What did he want there—if the Senor would pardon his asking? Nothing in particular; only that he had decided to travel In that direction. Por dios. but the Senor was foolish! Nothing lay in that direction but the bleak, lifeless paramos. He had just come from there—and the country was so desolate that the Senor would not even find ichu grass for his chusco! Now, to the north—the direction in which he, Gozano, was bound, there lay tropical valleys; and there was one valley which contained many Inca ruins where, so it was said, treasure might be found. But Clint shook his head. He was headed southward.
“Hagame el favor!” Gozano exclaimed. “Los Norte Americanos—they are so stubborn! But since you mus’ go south, there eea a shorter way which I weel show you—a road leading—”
“Don’t bother!” Clint Interrupted with asperity. “I’m going along the top of the mountains—and nothing can change my mind!”
Gozano’s fixed smile disappeared. His lips sot grimly—and with startling abruptness he produced a very modern and businesslike automatic, and pointed it toward Clint’s broad chest.
“Now Senor Morgan weel change ees mind—no?” He smiled again, a thin sneer.
He arose to his feet, and Clint rose with him. They faced each other over the fire, crouching stiffly—the immaculately dressed Peruvian, of medium height, and fat; and Clint Morgan, six feet tall, a sun-browned athletic giant.
Forgotten Fiction Page 63