_The Might of the "Master"_
As with other measures of matters earthly, time is a relative gauge.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in those moments of mental stress
when time passes in a flash or, conversely, drags each lagging minute
into hours of timeless length.
"Three minutes!" The words clanged and reverberated through Chet's
brain. And it seemed, as he strained and struggled and was forced
backward and yet backward by the weight of his antagonist, that those
three minutes had long since passed, and other three's without end.
The enemy's leaping body had been upon him before the detonite pistol
was half drawn. And now he fought desperately; he felt only the jar of
blows that landed on his half-covered face. There was no sting or pain,
only the crashing thud that made strange clamor and confusion in his
head. But he ducked and blocked awkwardly with the one arm that held the
package Kreiss had given him, while the other hand that gripped the
pistol was twisted behind him.
No chance here for clever blocking, no room for quick foot-work; weight
was telling, and the weight was all in favor of his big opponent.
Chet knew that possession of the gun was vital. Flashingly it came to
him that Schwartzmann had not fired: his pistol, then, was lost, or he
was out of ammunition. And now Chet's hand that held the gun with the
six precious charges of detonite was fast in the clutch of a huge paw,
and the pain of that twisted arm was sending searing flashes to his
brain.
[Illustration: _With the free hand he shot over a blow._]
A twist of the body, and the pain relaxed. He dropped the leaf-wrapped
package to the ground, and, with the free hand, shot over a blow that
brought a grunt of pain from Schwartzmann and a gush of blood that
smeared the black, hairy face. He took one stiff jolt himself on his
half-averted head that he might counter with another to flatten that
crushed and painful nose.
* * * * *
For one brief instant Schwartzmann's free hand was raised protectingly
to his face so contorted with rage; for one brief instant, below that
big fist, there showed the contour of a jaw; and, with every ounce of
weight that Chet could put into the swing, he came up from under in that
same instant with a smashing left that connected with the exposed jaw.
The hand that gripped his gun-hand did not let go completely, but Chet
felt the steel-hard rigidity of that arm relax, and abruptly he knew
that he could beat this man down if he once got clear. He didn't need
the gun; he needed only to get both hands free. And, despite the arm
that clung and swung with his, he managed to wrench himself into a
sideways throw of his whole body at the instant he unclosed his hand.
The slim barrel of the detonite pistol described a flashing arc through
the clear air and clattered along the lava underneath a big shining
surface of metal.
And then, in a breath-taking flash of understanding, Chet knew.
He knew he was beside the ship: he saw the closed port and the
self-retracting lever that would open it, and he saw it through clear
air where no taint of the green gas was apparent.
He was certain that he had been fighting for an interminable time, yet
before him the air was clear. It was impossible, but true; and he threw
the half-stunned body of Schwartzmann from him. Then, instead of
following it with punishing blows, he sprang toward the port.
* * * * *
With one hand on the lever, he turned to dart a glance toward the column
of flame. It was gone! And in its place came green, billowing gas that
was coughed and spewed into the air to be caught up in the steady breeze
that blew directly from the vent.
Beside him, his antagonist, prone on the lava floor, dragged himself
beneath the ship to reach for the gun. Chet paid no heed; his every
thought--his whole being, it seemed--was focused upon the lever that
turned so slowly, that let fall, at last, a lock whose releasing
mechanism clanged loudly through the metal wall.
The outer port, a thin door that served only to streamline the opening,
swung open under Chet's hand. And, while he held his breath till his
pumping heart set his whole body to pulsing, he drew himself into the
ship as the green cloud wrapped thickly about. But first he bent to
grasp the knotted vines and leathery leaves that enclosed a bulky
package.
The port closed silently upon its soft-faced gasket; it was gas-tight
when no pressure was applied. And Chet stumbled and reached blindly till
he fell beside the huge inner compression port, while the breath of gas
that had touched him tore with ripping talons at his throat.
More measureless time--whether hours or minutes Chet could never have
told--and he sat upright and tried to believe the utterly incredible
story that his eyes were telling.
A short passage and a control room beyond! It was just as they had left
it; was it days or years before? The shattered control cage was there,
the familiar instrument board, the very bar of metal with which he had
wrought such havoc in that wild moment of demolition; it was all crystal
clear under the flooding light of the nitron illuminator!
* * * * *
Yes, it was true! He, Chet Bullard, was staring wide-eyed at his own
control-room, in his own ship--his and Walt's--and he was alone! The
remembrance of Walt and Diane, and the realization that now, by some
miracle, he might be of help, brought him to his feet.
He sprang toward a lookout where the last light of day was gone and a
monstrous moon shone down upon a world of ghastly green. Yet, through
the gas, every detail of the world outside showed clear; even the giant
fumerole that had been the funeral pyre of a man of science; even the
mound of ashes at its top which the moving air was blowing in dusty
puffs until spouting mud fell back to hide them from sight.
Chet cursed the gas for the dimness that clouded his eyes, and he rubbed
at them savagely as he turned and walked to a side lookout.
Through the riot of impressions of the fight outside the port, he had
known that there was a human body over which he stumbled at times. He
saw it now--the body of Schwartzmann's henchman, killed these long weeks
before but preserved in the ceaseless flow of gas.
But now, sprawled across it, was another and bulkier shape. Sightless
eyes stared upward from a face turned to the cruel gas clouds and the
hideous green moon above. The mouth sagged open in a black, bearded
face, and one hand still clutched a pistol. It would have shattered his
human opponent had the man been given an instant more, but against the
enemy that rolled down and overwhelmed him in billowing clouds no weapon
could prevail. Herr Schwartzmann had fought his last fight.
* * * * *
The package--the last gift of Kreiss--was still securely wrapped. It lay
on the metal floor. Chet stooped to lift it, to work at the knotted
vines and lay off the thick wrappings of fibrous leaves, until he stood
at last, under the white glare of the bubbling nitron bulb, to stare and
stare wordlessly at the cage of metal bars in his hand.
Crude!--yes; no finely polished mechanism, this; no one of the many
connection clips that the other had had, either. But Chet knew he could
solder on the hundreds of wires that made the nervous system of the
control and fed the current to the cage; and Kreiss had believed it
would work!
There was no thought of delay in Chet's mind, no waiting for daylight.
This was the fourth night since he had been in that place of horror,
since, above him in that Stygian pit, an inhuman satanic _something_ had
said: "... the captives ... a sacrifice to Vashta ... on the sixth
night...."
Chet threw off the rags that once had been a trim khaki jacket and went
feverishly to work. And through the time that was left he drove himself
desperately. The hours so few and each hour so short! As he worked with
seemingly countless strands of heavy cables, where each strand must be
traced back and its point of connection determined, he knew how long
each dreadful minute must be for the two captives deep inside the Dark
Moon.
* * * * *
It was as well, perhaps, that Chet did not have the power of distant
sight, that he had no messenger like those from the pyramid who might
have gone down in that place and have sent him by mental television a
picture of what was there. For he would have seen that which could have
lent no clarity of vision to his deep-sunk eyes nor skill to the touch
of fumbling, tired hands.
Walt Harkness, no longer under hypnotic control, stood in a dim-lit room
carved from solid stone; stood, and stared despairingly at the
surrounding walls and at the pair of giant ape-men who guarded the one
doorway. And, clinging to his hand, was a girl; and she, too, had been
released from the invisible bonds. She was speaking:
"No, Walter; we both saw it; it must be true. It was Chet's pistol; he
was there in that horrible place. And I will not give up. He will save
us at the last; I know it! He will save us from the inhuman cruelty of
those terrible things. He shoots straight, Chet does; and he will give
us a bullet apiece from the gun--the last kindly act of a friend. That's
what the signal meant."
"Then why did he wait! Why didn't he do it then?" Walt Harkness had made
the same demand a hundred times.
And Diane answered as always: "I don't know, Walter, I--don't--know."
Chet, cursing insanely at strange machines--equilibrators that
controlled the longitudinal and transverse and rotative stability of the
ship and that refused to take their electrical charge--knew with
horrible certainty that the last night had come. But to the two humans,
in the depths of this world where all knowledge of time was lost, the
knowledge came only when they were dragged by their guards into a
familiar room.
* * * * *
Ape-men were all about; they stared unwinkingly at the captives who
stared back again in an effort to keep their eyes averted from the
monstrous repulsiveness on the platform above them, till their eyes were
drawn to meet the compelling gaze of the "Master" of a lost race.
A something which, at first glance, seemed all head--this was the
"Master." The naked body, so skeleton-thin, was shrunken and distorted;
it was withered and leathery-brown, like the aged parchment of mummified
flesh. It was seated in a resplendent chair, whose radiating handles
were for its carrying; and, above it, the head, so incredibly repulsive,
was made more hideous by its travestied resemblance to human form.
Soft, pulpy and wetly smooth--a ten-foot sac, enclosed in a membrane of
dead gray shot through with flickerings of color that flamed and
died--the whole pulsing mass was supported in a sling of golden cloth.
And, dominating it, in the center of that flabby forehead, a focal point
for the gaze of the horrified observers, was a single glassy and lidless
eye.
Cold, unchanging, entirely expressionless except for the fixed ferocity
that was there, the eye was a yellow disk of hate, where quivering lines
of violet culminated in a central, flaming point; and that point of
living fire swelled prodigiously before their staring eyes. It seemed to
expand, to slowly draw their senses--their very selves--from their
bodies, to plunge them down to annihilation in that fiery pit where a
soundless voice was speaking.
"Slaves! Apes! Take the captives to the great altar rock of Vashta, to
the Holy of Holies. The others you were permitted to slaughter for our
food; hold these two safely. For one shall die slowly for Vashta's
pleasure, and one shall live on for mine. And we would not have them
under our mental control, so guard them well; the offering is more
pleasing to Vashta when the blood in his cup flows from a creature
unbound both in body and mind." And the two helpless humans found
themselves released from the flaming pit that became again but an eye in
the forehead of a loathsome thing.
* * * * *
They were fully conscious of their surroundings as they were herded up
through the pyramid and out into the night, where rough, calloused hands
seized them and dragged them to a smooth table-top of rock that stood
only slightly above the ground before the great rocky pile. Stunned,
waiting dumbly, they saw swarming ape-men clustered like bees on the
lower pyramid face; they saw coverings of stone being removed and a
great recess laid open, while the ape-things dropped in awe before a
grotesque and horrible beast-head carved from a single piece of stone.
The eyes of the beast shone with some cold, hidden light. They seemed
fixed hungrily upon a cup in a distorted hand, and, though the cup was
empty, there was promise of its being filled. For little sluices of
stone sloped from the place where the captives stood, and they ended
above the cup so that the life-blood of a slaughtered creature, or a
sacrificed man, might pour splashingly in, a streaming draught for this
blood-thirsty god.
The arena filled with abominable life. Now, in the dark silence of a
moonless night, the cold stars shone down on a gathering of spectators,
wild and unreal--nameless, spectral horrors of a blood-chilling dream.
The flat capstone of the pyramid was the resting place of the "Master";
his huge head showed pulpy and gray above the glittering gold of the
metal carrying-chair where a misshapen body was seated. Others like him
had poured from the pyramid, carried by thousands of slaves to their
places about the arena.
Monsters of prodigious strength, their forebears must have been, but
this degenerate product of evolutionary forces had lost all firmness of
flesh. Their bodies, sacrificed for the development of the bulbous
heads, were mere appendages, fit only for the propagation of their kind
and for the digestion of human food.
* * * * *
The clean air of night was polluted with abominable odors as it swept
over the exudations of those glistening, pulpy masses. To the two
waiting humans on the great sacrificial stone came a deadening of the
senses, as an executioner, armed with strange torturing instruments,
drew near. But, of the two, one, clinging hopelessly to the other,
abruptly stifled the dry choking sobs in her throat to lift her head in
sharp, listening alertness.
Walt Harkness was speaking in a dead, emotionless tone:
"Chet has failed us; he is probably dead. Good-by, dear--"
But his words were interrupted and smothered by a breathless, strangling
voice. Diane Delacouer, staring with agonized eyes into the night was
calling to him:
"Listen! Oh, listen! It's the ship, Walter! It's the ship! It's not the
wind! I'm not dreaming nor insane!--Chet is coming with the ship!"
It was as well that Chet Bullard could not see the two, could not hear
that voice, trembling and vibrant with an impossible, heart-gripping
hope; and surely it was well that he could not share their emotions
when, for them, the silence became faintly resonant, when the distant,
humming, drumming reverberation grew to a nerve-shattering roar, when
the black night was ripped apart by the passage of a meteor-ship that
shrieked and thundered through the screaming air close above the arena,
while, with the rock beneath them still shuddering from the blasting
voice of that full exhaust, the sky above burst into dazzling flame.
* * * * *
For Chet in that control-room that was darkened that he might see the
world outside--Chet, grim and haggard and stained of face and with
thin-drawn lips that bled unheeded where his teeth had clamped down on
them--Chet Bullard, Master Pilot of the World, had no thought nor
emotion to spare for aught beyond the reach of his hand. He was throwing
his ship at a speed that was sheer suicide over a strange terrain
flashing under and close below.
He overshot the target on the first try. The twin beams of his
searchlights picked up the dazzling black and white of the arena; it was
before him!--under him!--lost far astern in one single instant that was
ended as it began. But his hand, ready on a release key, pressed as he
passed, and the sky behind him turned blazing bright with the cloud of
flare-dust that made white flame as it fell.
Such speed was not meant for close work; nor was a ship expected to hit
dense air with a blast such as this on full. Even through the thick
insulated walls came a terrible scream. Like voices of humans in agony,
the tortured air shrieked its protest while Chet threw on the bow-blast
to check them and slanted slowly, slowly upward in a great loop whose
tremendous size was an indication of the speed and the slow turning that
was all Chet could stand and live through.
* * * * *
He came in more slowly the next time. Floodlights in the under-skin of
the ship were blazing white, and whiter yet were the star-flares that he
dropped one after another. Brighter than the sunlight of the brightest
day this globe had ever seen, the sky, ablaze with dazzling fire, shone
down in vivid splendor to drain every shadow and half-light and leave
only the hard contrast of black and white.
In the nose of the ship was a .50 caliber gun. Chet sprayed the pyramid
top, but it is doubtful if the two below heard the explosions. They must
have seen the whole cap of the mountain of rock vanish as if,
feather-light, it had been snatched up in a gust of wind. But perhaps
they had eyes only for each other and for a glittering, silvery ship
that came crashing toward the place where they stood, that checked
itself on thunderous exhausts; then touched the hard floor of the arena
as softly as the caress of a master hand on the controls.
But from them came no cry nor exclamation of joy; they were dazed, Chet
saw, when he threw open the port. They were walking slowly,
unbelievingly, toward him till Diane faltered. Then Chet leaped forward
to sweep the drooping, ragged figure up into his arms while he hustled
Harkness ahead and closed the port upon them all. But, still haggard and
stern of face, he left the fainting girl to Harkness' care while he
sprang for a ball-control and a firing key that released a hail of
little .50 caliber shells whose touch could plough the earth with the
ripping sword of an avenging god.
And later--a pulverous mass where a huge pyramid had been; smoking rock
in a great oval of shattered crumbling blocks; and, under all the cold
light of the stars, no sign of life but for a screaming, frantic mob of
ape-men, freed and fleeing from the broken bondage of masters now
crushed and dead!
All this Chet's straining, blood-shot eyes saw clearly before his hand
on the firing key relaxed, before he covered his eyes with trembling
hands as realization of their own release rushed overwhelmingly upon
him.
* * * * *
There were supplies of clothing in the ship--jackets, knee-length
trousers, silken blouses, boots, and even snug-fitting, fashionable
caps. Very unlike the ragged wanderers of the mountainous wastes were
the three who stood safely to windward of a spouting fumerole.
Mud, coughed hoarsely from a hot throat, and green, billowing
gas!--there was nothing now to show that here was the scene of a
companion's last moments. With heads bared to the steady breeze that had
been their undoing, they stood silent for long minutes.
Behind them, at a still safer distance, where no chance flicker of a
fire-god's finger might strike him down as it had the white man, a black
figure danced absurdly from foot to foot and indulged in unexpected
gyrations of joy.
For did not Towahg hold in one hand a most marvelous weapon of shining,
keen-edged metal, with a blade that was longer than his two hands? What
member of the tribe had ever seen such an indescribably glorious thing?
And, lacking the words even to propound that question, Towahg spun
himself in still tighter spirals of ecstasy.
Then there was the ax! Not made of stone but fashioned from the same
metal! And besides this a magic thing for which as yet there was not
even a name! It made flashing reflections in the sun; and if one held it
just so, and moved one's head before it, it showed a quite remarkably
attractive face of a man who was more than half ape--though Towahg had
never yet been able to catch that man beyond the magic that the white
men called "mirror."
He was still enthralled in his grotesque posturing when Diane looked
down from the floating ship.
"He'll be the Lord Chief Voodoo Man for the whole tribe," she said, and,
for the first time since they had stood at the fumerole, she managed to
smile. "And now," she asked, "are we off? What comes next?"
* * * * *
Chet's hand was on a metal ball in a crudely constructed cage of metal
bars. He looked at Harkness, and, at the other's almost imperceptible
nod, he moved the ball forward and up.
"We're off!" Harkness agreed. "Off for Earth--home! And it will look
good to us all. We will take up things where we left them when we were
interrupted: there's no Schwartzmann to fear now. We can show our ship
to the world--revolutionize all lines of transportation; and we can
plan--"
He failed to finish the sentence. To his reaching vision there were,
perhaps, more potentialities than he could compass in words.
And Chet Bullard, fingering the triple star on his blouse--the insignia
that had gone with him through all his hopes and despairs--looked out
into space and smiled.
Behind him a brilliant world went slowly dark; it became, after long
watching, a violet ring--then that was gone; the Dark Moon was lost in
the folds of enshrouding night. Ahead was an infinity of black space
where only the distant stars struck sparks of fire in the dark. And
still he smiled, as if, looking into the unplumbed depths, he, too, made
plans. But he moved the little ball within his hand and swung the bow
sights to bear upon a glorious globe--a brilliant, welcome beacon.
"Home it is!" he stated. "We're on our way!"
But there was needed the rising roar from astern that his words might
have meaning; it thundered sonorously its resounding hum in a crescendo
of power that brooked no denial, that threw them out and onward through
the velvet dark.
The End.
End of Project Gutenberg's Brood of the Dark Moon, by Charles Willard Diffin