The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 02 Read online

  There were red bodies on the bare rock before him. A scaly, scabrous thing was pressing against his upflung hands that he raised above his head--a loathsome touch! A beak that was a needle-pointed tube stabbed his shoulder before he could flinch aside: the quick pain of it was piercingly sharp....

  * * * * *

  Other red horrors dropped from the main mass overhead; he saw Harkness beating at them wildly while he made a shelter of his body above the crouched figure of Diane. Two of them--two incredible, beastly, flying things! He saw them so plainly where they hovered, and Harkness striking at them with a useless, empty gun, while they waited to drive home their lance-like beaks.

  The picture was so plain! His brain was a photographic plate, super-sensitized by the utter horror of the moment. While the red monster stabbed its beak into his shoulder, while he drove home one blow against its parchment body with his empty pistol, while the wild, beating wings lifted the creature again into the air--he saw it all.

  Here were Diane and Harkness! Nearby Schwartzmann was on the ground! His man--the one who had not yet descended with the others--was running stumblingly forward. He was wounded, and the blood was streaming from his back. Chet saw the two monsters hovering above Harkness' head; he saw their thick-lidded eyes--and he saw those eyes as they detected an easier prey.

  The fleeing man was half-stooped in a shambling run. The winged reptile Chet had beaten off joined the other two and they were upon the wounded man in a flurry of red.

  Chet saw him go down and took one involuntary step forward to give him aid--then stopped, transfixed by what he beheld.

  The man was down crouching in terror. Above him the three monstrous things beat each other with their wings; then their long beaks stabbed downward. The man's body was hidden, but through those transparent beaks there mounted swiftly a red stream. Plainly visible, Chet saw that vital current--the living life-blood of a living man--drawn into those beastly bodies; he saw it spread through a network of canals! And he was held rigid with horror until a harsh scream from Harkness reached his brain.

  "The trees!" Harkness was shouting. "The trees! Down, Chet, for God's sake! You can't save him!"

  * * * * *

  Walt was half carrying Diane. Even then Chet was vaguely thankful that their bodies were between the girl and this gruesome sight. And Walt was leaping madly down the lava slope.

  Beyond him, already on the lower level, was the racing figure of Schwartzmann. A whirring flash of red pursued him. Another made a crimson streak through the air toward Walt's back. Chet came with startling abruptness from the frozen rigidity that held him, and he crashed his empty pistol in well-directed aim through the body of the beast. Then he, too, threw himself in great leaps down the slope.

  Kreiss was firing from below; Chet knew dimly that this was checking the attack of the swarm. He saw Walt stagger; saw blood flowing from a slash on the back of his head, and knew that Kreiss had got the monster just in time. He sprang toward the stumbling man and got his arms under the unconscious figure of the girl to help carry the load.

  And now it was Kreiss who was shouting. "The trees! We'll be safe in the trees!" He saw Kreiss drop his pistol and dash headlong for the white trunks of ghostly trees.

  His arm was pierced by a stinging pain; cold eyes, with thick, leathery lids, were staring into Chet's as he cast one horrified glance over his shoulder. Then he crashed against the white trunk of a tree and helped Harkness drag the body of the girl between two twin trunks. He pulled himself to safety in the shelter of the protecting trees, and held weakly to one of them.... And the crimson lace-work of the sap-wood that showed through the white bark was no brighter red than the mark of his blood-stained hands where they clung for support.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Doomed

  The sun was high when they ventured forth. Diane would have come, but the two men would have none of it. They remembered the sight they had seen; they knew what was left of a man's body lying on the rocks above; and they ordered the girl to stay hidden while Kreiss remained with her as a guard.

  There were only the four who lay hidden in the woods; Schwartzmann and Max, with the remaining three men, were gone. Harkness' calls were unanswered, and he ceased the halloo.

  "Better keep quiet," he advised himself and the others. "We are out of ammunition, though they don't know it. And they have got away. They will keep on going, too, and I am not any too well pleased with that. I wanted to put Schwartzmann where I could keep an eye on him.... Oh, well, he isn't very dangerous."

  But Chet Bullard made a few mental and unspoken reservations to that remark. "That boy is always dangerous," he told himself, "and he won't be happy unless he is making trouble. Thank the Lord he hasn't got that gun!"

  He came out cautiously from among the trees, but the red horde was gone. The reptiles' wings had rasped and clashed furiously for a time; they had darted in fiery flashes before the protecting trees: and the fitful breeze had brought gusts of nauseous odors--until a thin haze formed in the higher air and the red things were gone.

  "There will not be any more for a while," said Harkness.

  He pointed toward the fumerole they had seen from the lookout earlier in the day: again it was emitting jets of thin, steamy vapor that did not disappear like steam but floated up above their heads. "The gas has driven them off," he added.

  * * * * *

  The two men climbed slowly up the slope that had been the wave front of molten rock. Chet found his pistol by the path and picked it up.

  "We'll get more ammunition up top," he told Harkness, "and we will toss some down to Kreiss. He can have the extra gun you brought for Schwartzmann, too."

  He stopped suddenly. He had reached the level top of the lava flow. Here was where they had stood when the beasts attacked; where Harkness had dropped the boxes of ammunition and the pistol--and except for a few scattered bodies of unbelievable reptiles and for a stain of blood where his own wound had bled, there was nothing to show where they had been.

  "He got 'em!" Chet exclaimed. "That son-of-a-gun Schwartzmann got the gun and shells. I saw him scrambling around on the rock. I thought he was just scared to death; but no, he wasn't too frightened to grab the gun and the ammunition while one of his own men was being killed. And that's not so good, either!"

  A dozen paces beyond was a huddle of clothing that stirred idly in the breeze. "The poor devil!" exclaimed Chet, and moved over beside the body of the man who had gone down under the red swarm's attack.

  It lay face down. Chet stooped to turn the body over, though he knew there was no hope of life. He stopped with a gasp of dismay.

  Two eyes still stared in horror from a face that was colorless--a drained, ghastly white face! No tint remained to show that this ever had been a living man. More dreadful than the waxen pallor of death, here was a bleached, bloodless flesh that told of the nameless horror that had overwhelmed this man, beaten him down and drained him of every drop of blood.

  "Vampires!" Chet heard Harkness saying in a horrified whisper. "Those beaks that were like tubes! And they--they--" He stopped as if in fear of the words that would tell what they themselves had escaped.

  Chet turned the body to its former position; that dreadful face beneath a pitiless sun was a sight no other eyes should see. "Let's go on to the ship," he said. "We'll get some ammunition, go back and get Diane--"

  * * * * *

  He did not finish the thought. Before him he saw the lifeless body moving; it rolled and shuddered as if life had returned to this thing where no life should be. Chet raised one hand in an unconscious gesture as if to ward off some new horror that the body might disclose. It was a moment before he realized that the rock was shaking beneath his feet, that he was dizzy and that from no great distance a rumbling growl was sounding in his ears.

  The moving body had shaken Chet's mental poise as had the earthquake his physical equilibrium. Harkness had not seen it; he was looking off across the level plateau.

  "Look!" h
e exclaimed; "another vent has opened! See it spout?"

  Some hundred yards distant were clouds of green vapor that rolled into the air. At their base a fountain of mud sputtered and spouted and fell back to build up a cone. The green cloud whirled sluggishly, then was caught by the breeze and began its slow, rolling progress across the flat rock. It was coming their way, rolling down toward the ship, and Chet gripped suddenly at his companion's arm.

  "Come on!" he said! "I'm going away from here, and I'm going now. We'll get Diane and Kreiss: remember what a whiff of gas did to him this morning."

  He was drawing Harkness toward the face of the rock; he wondered at his slowness. Walt seemed fascinated by the oncoming cloud.

  "Wait!" Harkness paused at the top of the descending slope. Chet turned, to look where Harkness was watching.

  The green cloud moved slowly. As he turned to stare it touched the bow of their ship; it flowed slowly, sluggishly, along the sides, and then swept up and over the top. The lookouts of the control room were obscured, and the port from which they had come!

  "Cut off!" breathed Harkness, his voice heavy with hopeless conviction. "We can't get back! And now we're on our own past any doubt!"

  * * * * *

  "It may not last," Chet was urging an hour later, when, with Kreiss and Diane, they stood on high ground to look down on the ship.

  The sparkling sheen of the metal cylinder had changed from silver to pale green. The cloud that enveloped it was not heavy, but it was always the same. Yet still Chet insisted: "It may not last."

  "Sorry to disappoint you," replied Kreiss, "but there is little ground for such a belief." Again he was the professor instructing a class. "These fumeroles, in my opinion, are venting a region far below the surface. It is possible that further seismic disturbances may alter conditions; a rearrangement of the lower rock strata may close existing crevices and open others like this you have seen; but, barring that, I see no reason for thinking that this emission of what appears to be chlorine with other gases may not continue indefinitely."

  Chet looked at Diane. Was it a twinkle that appeared and vanished in her eyes as Herr Professor Kreiss concluded his remarks. She would laugh in the very face of death, Chet realized, but her tone was entirely serious as she offered another suggestion.

  "If this wind should change," she said, "and if it blew the gas in another direction, the ship could be cleared. One of us could go in long enough to switch on the air generators full."

  But now it was Chet who shook his head in a negative. "Remember," he told her, "when we were here before? All of the time while Walt was gone for the ship--how did the wind blow then?"

  "The same as now," she admitted.

  "And it never changed."

  "No,"--slowly--"it never changed."

  * * * * *

  Chet turned to Walt and Kreiss. "That's that," he said shortly. "Any other good ideas in the crowd? Can anyone go through that gas and get to the ship? I'll make a try."

  "Suicide!" was Kreiss' verdict, and Harkness confirmed his words.

  "I saw things that moved up in the trees," he said. "Lord knows what they were; Birds--beasts of some sort! But they were alive till the gas touched them. I saw it drift among the trees when we left, and those things up there came plopping down like ripe apples."

  Diane Delacouer looked up at Harkness with wide, serious eyes. "Then," she shrugged, "we are really--"

  "Castaways," Harkness told her. "We're on our own--off on a desert island--shipwrecked--all that sort of thing! And you might as well know the worst of it; you, too, Kreiss.

  "Our good friend, Schwartzmann, is at large, and he has the pistol and ammunition we brought out from the ship. He is armed, and we are not; he has food, and we have none. And I'll have to admit that I didn't have any breakfast and could use a little right now."

  "There are seven shells left in my pistol," said Diane. She held the weapon out to Harkness; he took it carefully.

  "Seven," he said; "it is all we have. We must kill some animals for food, my dear, but not with these; we must save these for bigger game."

  "But we cannot!" expostulated Kreiss. "To kill game with our bare hands--impossible! We are doomed!"

  And now Chet caught Diane's glance brimming with mirth that was undisguised. Truly, Diane Delacouer would have her laugh in the face of death.

  "Doomed?" she exclaimed. "Not while Chet and I know how to make bows and arrows!... Do you suppose we can find any of their old spears, Chet? They made gorgeous bows, you remember."

  And Chet bowed low in an exaggeration of admiration that was not entirely assumed. "Lead on!" he said. "You are in command. The army is ready to follow."

  CHAPTER IX

  A Premonition

  Fire Valley had been the home of the ape-men. On that earlier journey Walt and Chet had seen them, had fought with the tribe, and had lived for a time in their caves that made dark shadows high on the rock wall. And they knew that the wood the ape-men used for their spears was well suited for bows.

  Back in the caves they found discarded spears and some wood that had been gathered for shafts. Tough, springy, flexible, it was a simple matter for the men to convert these into serviceable weapons. Sinews that the ape-men had torn from great beasts made the bowstrings, and there were other slim shafts that they notched, then sharpened in the fire.

  Yet, to Chet as he worked, came an overwhelming feeling of despondency. To be fashioning crude weapons like these--preparing to defend themselves as best they could from the dangers of this new, raw world! No, it could not be true.... And he knew while he protested that it was all in vain.

  He asked himself a score of times if his impulsive, desperate act had not been a horrible mistake. And he found the same answer always: it was all he could have done. Had he attacked Schwartzmann he would have been killed--and Walt, too! Schwartzmann would have had Diane. Only some such stupefying shock as the effect of the shattered control could have checked Schwartzmann. No, there had been no alternative. And the thing was done. Finally, irrevocably done!

  * * * * *

  Chet walked to the cave-mouth to stare down at the ship below him in the valley. From the fumerole's throat came a steady, rolling cloud of shimmering green; the ship was immersed in it. The voice of Herr Kreiss spoke to him; the scientist, too, had come forward for another look.

  "If it were at the bottom of the sea," he said, "it would be no more inaccessible. It is, in very fact, at the bottom of a sea--a sea of gas. We could penetrate an aqueous medium more easily."

  "And," Chet pondered slowly, "if only I could have returned.... With time--and metal bars--and tools that I could improvise--I might...."

  His voice trailed off. What use now to speculate on what he might have done. The scientist concluded his thought:

  "You might have reconstructed the control--yes, I, too, had thought of that. But now, the gas! No--we must put that out of our minds, unless we would become insane."

  Chet turned back into the black and odorous cave. He saw Harkness who was flexing a bow he was making for Diane; he was showing her how to grip it and let the arrow run free.

  "Towahg was the last one I instructed," Walt was saying; and Chet knew from the deep lines in his face that his attempt at casual talk was for Diane's benefit; "I wonder how long Towahg remembered. He was a grateful little animal."

  "Towahg?" queried Kreiss. "Who is Towahg?"

  "Ape-man," Harkness told him. "Friendly little rascal; he helped us out when we were here before. He saved Diane's life, no question about that. I showed him the use of the bow; jumped him ahead a hundred generations in the art of self-defense."

  "And offense!" was Kreiss' comment. "There are certain drawbacks to arming a potential enemy."

  "Oh, Towahg is all right," Harkness reassured the scientist, "although he may have taught the trick to others of the tribe who are not so friendly."

  "Where are they? In what direction do they live?" Kreiss continued.

  "Want to make a so
cial call?" Chet inquired. "You needn't mind those little formalities up here, Doctor."

  * * * * *

  But in the mental makeup of Herr Doktor Kreiss had been included no trace of humor; he took Chet's remark at face value. And he answered in words that echoed Chet's real thoughts and that took the smile from his lips.

  "But, no," said Herr Kreiss; "it is the contrary that I desire. Here we are; here we stay for the rest of our lives. I would wish those years to be undisturbed. I have no wish to quarrel with what primitive inhabitants this globe may hold. There is much to study, to learn. I shall pass the years so.

  "And now," he questioned, "where is it that we go? Where shall be our home?"

  Chet, too, looked inquiringly at Harkness. "You saw more of this country than I did," he reminded him; "what would you suggest?"

  And, at sight of the serious, troubled eyes of Diane Delacouer, he added:

  "We want a site for a high-grade subdivision, you understand. Something good, something exclusive, where we can keep out the less desirable element. Dianeville must appeal to the people who rate socially."

  At the puzzled look on the scientist's face, Chet caught Diane's glance of unspoken amusement, and knew that his ruse had succeeded: he must not let Diane get too serious. Harkness answered slowly:

  "I saw a valley; I think I can find it again. When Towahg guided me back to the ship, when we were here before, I saw the valley beyond the third range of hills. We go up Fire Valley; follow the stream that comes in from the side--"

  "Water?" Chet questioned.

  "Yes; I saw a lake."

  "Cover? Trees? Not the man-eating ones?"

  "Everything: open ground, hills, woods. It looked good to me then; it will look a lot better now," said Walt enthusiastically.

  "Walk faster," said Chet; "I'm stepping on your heels."

  * * * * *

  They reached the valley floor some distance above the fumerole and the clouds of poison gas; and the march began. The attack of the flying reptiles had taught them the danger of exposure in the open, and they kept close to the trees that fringed the valley.