_Even in this grip of alien horror a man could not
throw away his lifetime goal ... not stand idly by as
endless rows of alabaster shapes, seated in their
chairs of stone, thought-ruled this gargoyle planet
from the dead blackness of deep Mercurian caverns._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories November 1952.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
It was dark in the caves under Mercury. It was hot, and there was no
sound in them but the slow plodding of Trevor's heavy boots.
Trevor had been wandering for a long time, lost in this labyrinth where
no human being had ever gone before. And Trevor was an angry man.
Through no fault or will of his own he was about to die, and he was
not ready to die. Moreover, it seemed a wicked thing to come to his
final moment here in the stifling dark, buried under alien mountains
high as Everest.
He wished now that he had stayed in the valley. Hunger and thirst would
have done for him just the same, but at least he would have died in
the open like a man, and not like a rat trapped in a drain.
Yet there was not really much to choose between them as a decent place
to die. A barren little hell-hole the valley had been, even before the
quake, with nothing to draw a man there except the hope of finding
sun-stones, one or two of which could transform a prospector into a
plutocrat.
Trevor had found no sun-stones. The quake had brought down a whole
mountain wall on his ship, leaving him with a pocket torch, a handful
of food tablets, a canteen of water, and the scant clothing he stood in.
He had looked at the naked rocks, and the little river frothing green
with chemical poisons, and he had gone away into the tunnels, the
ancient blowholes of a cooling planet, gambling that he might find a
way out of the valleys.
Mercury's Twilight Belt is cut into thousands of cliff-locked pockets,
as a honeycomb is cut into cells. There is no way over the mountains,
for the atmosphere is shallow, and the jagged peaks stand up into
airless space. Trevor knew that only one more such pocket lay between
him and the open plains. If he could get to and through that last
pocket, he had thought....
But he knew now that he was not going to make it.
He was stripped to the skin already, in the terrible heat. When the
weight of his miner's boots became too much to drag, he shed them,
padding on over the rough rock with bare feet. He had nothing left now
but the torch. When the light went, his last hope went with it.
After a while it went.
The utter blackness of the grave shut down. Trevor stood still,
listening to the pulse of his own blood in the silence, looking at that
which no man needs a light to see. Then he flung the torch away and
stumbled on, driven to fight still by the terror which was greater than
his weakness.
Twice he struck against the twisting walls, and fell, and struggled up
again. The third time he remained on hands and knees, and crawled.
He crept on, a tiny creature entombed in the bowels of a planet. The
bore grew smaller and smaller, tightening around him. From time to
time he lost consciousness, and it became increasingly painful to
struggle back to an awareness of the heat and the silence and the
pressing rock.
After one of these periods of oblivion he began to hear a dull, steady
thunder. He could no longer crawl. The bore had shrunk to a mere crack,
barely large enough for him to pass through wormlike on his belly. He
sensed now a deep, shuddering vibration in the rock. It grew stronger,
terrifying in that enclosed space. Steam slipped wraithlike into the
smothering air.
The roar and the vibration grew to an unendurable pitch. Trevor was
near to strangling in the steam. He was afraid to go on, but there was
no other way to go. Quite suddenly his hands went out into nothingness.
The rock at the lip of the bore must have been rotten with erosion. It
gave under his weight and pitched him headfirst into a thundering rush
of water that was blistering hot and going somewhere in a great hurry
through the dark.
After that Trevor was not sure of anything. There was the scalding heat
and the struggle to keep his head up and the terrible speed of the
sub-Mercurian river racing on to its destiny. He struck rock several
times, and once he held his breath for a whole eternity until the roof
of the tunnel rose up again.
He was only dimly aware of a long sliding fall downward through a
sudden brightness. It was much cooler. He splashed feebly, because his
brain had not told his body to stop, and the water did not fight him.
His feet and hands struck solid bottom. He floundered on, and presently
the water was gone. He made one attempt to rise. After that he lay
still.
The great mountains leaned away from the Sun. Night came, and with it
violent storm and rain. Trevor did not know it. He slept, and when he
woke the savage dawn was making the high cliffs flame with white light.
Something was screaming above his head.
Aching and leaden still with exhaustion, he roused up and looked about
him.
* * * * *
He sat on a beach of pale grey sand. At his feet were the shallows of a
grey-green lake that filled a stony basin some half-mile in breadth. To
his left the underground river poured out of the cliff face, spreading
into a wide, riffling fan of foam. Off to his right, the water spilled
over the rim of the basin to become a river again somewhere below, and
beyond the rim, veiled in mist and the shadow of a mountain wall, was a
valley.
Behind him, crowding to the edge of the sand, were trees and ferns and
flowers, alien in shape and color but triumphantly alive. And from what
he could see of it, the broad valley was green and riotous with growth.
The water was pure, the air had a good smell, and it came to Trevor
that he had made it. He was going to live a while longer, after all.
Forgetting his weariness, he sprang up, and the thing that had hissed
and screamed above him swooped down and passed the clawed tip of a
leathery wing so close to his face that it nearly gashed him. He
stumbled backward, crying out, and the creature rose in a soaring
spiral and swooped again.
Trevor saw a sort of flying lizard, jet black except for a saffron
belly. He raised his arms to ward it off, but it did not attack him,
and as it swept by he saw something that woke in him amazement, greed,
and a peculiarly unpleasant chill of fear.
Around its neck the lizard-thing wore a golden collar. And set into
the scaly flesh of its head--into the bone itself, it seemed--was a
sun-stone.
There was no mistaking that small vicious flash of radiance. Trevor had
dreamed of sun-stones too long to be misled. He watched the creature
rise again into the steamy sky and shivered, wondering who, or what,
had set that priceless thing into the skull of a flying lizard--and why.
It was the _why_ that bothered him the most. Sun-stones are not mere
adornments for wealthy ladies. They are rare, radioactive crystals,
having a half-life one third greater than radium, and are used
exclusively in the construction of delicate electronic devices dealing
with frequencies above the first octave.
Most of that relatively unexplored super-spectrum was still a mystery.
And the strangely jewelled and collared creature circling above him
filled Trevor with a vast unease.
It was not hunting. It did not wish to kill him. But it made no move to
go away.
From far down the valley, muted by distance to a solemn bell note that
rolled between the cliffs, Trevor heard the booming of a great song.
A sudden desire for concealment sent him in among the trees. He worked
his way along the shore of the lake. Looking up through the branches he
saw the black wings lift and turn, following him.
The lizard was watching him with its bright, sharp eyes. It noted the
path of his movements through the ferns and flowers, as a hawk watches
a rabbit.
He reached the lip of the basin where the water poured over in a
cataract several hundred feet high. Climbing around the shoulder of a
rocky bastion, Trevor had his first clear look at the valley.
Much of it was still vague with mist. But it was broad and deep, with
a sweep of level plain and clumps of forest, locked tight between
the barrier mountains. And as he made out other details, Trevor's
astonishment grew out of all measure.
The land was under cultivation. There were clusters of thatched huts
among the fields, and in the distance was a rock-built city, immense
and unmistakable in the burning haze of dawn.
Trevor crouched there, staring, and the winged lizard swung in lazy
circles, watching, waiting, while he tried to think.
A fertile valley such as this was rare enough in itself. But to find
fields and a city was beyond belief. He had seen the aboriginal
tribes that haunt some of the cliff-locked worlds of the Twilight
Belt--sub-human peoples who live precariously among the bitter rocks
and boiling springs, hunting the great lizards for food. None of this
was ever built by them.
Unless, in this environment, they had advanced beyond the Age of
Stone....
The gong sounded again its deep challenging note. Trevor saw the tiny
figures of mounted men, no larger than ants at that distance, come down
from the city and ride out across the plain.
Relief and joy supplanted speculation in Trevor's mind. He was battered
and starving, lost on an alien world, and anything remotely approaching
the human and the civilized was better luck than he could have dreamed
or prayed for.
Besides, there were sun-stones in this place. He looked hungrily at
the head of the circling watcher, and then began to scramble down the
broken outer face of the bastion.
The black wings slipped silently after him down the sky.
* * * * *
About a hundred feet above the valley floor he came to an overhang.
There was no way past it but to jump. He clung to a bush and let
himself down as far as he could, and then dropped some four or five
yards to a slope of springy turf. The fall knocked the wind out of him,
and as he lay gasping a chill doubt crept into his mind.
He could see the land quite clearly now, the pattern of the fields,
the far-off city. Except for the group of riders, nothing stirred. The
fields, the plain were empty of life, the little villages still as
death. And he saw, swinging lazily above a belt of trees by the river,
a second black-winged shadow, watching.
The trees were not far away. The riders were coming toward them and
him. It seemed to Trevor now that the men were perhaps a party of
hunters, but there was something alarming about the utter disappearance
of all other life. It was as though the gong had been a warning for all
to take cover while the hunt was abroad.
The sharp-eyed lizards were the hounds that went before to find and
flush the game. Glancing up at the ominous sentinel above his own head,
Trevor had a great desire to see what the quarry was that hid in the
belt of trees.
There was no way back to the partial security of the lake basin. The
overhang cut him off from that. The futility of trying to hide was
apparent, but nevertheless he wormed in among some crimson ferns. The
city was at his left. To the right, the fertile plain washed out into a
badland of lava and shattered rock, which narrowed and vanished around
a shoulder of purple basalt. This defile was still in deep shadow.
The riders were still far away. He saw them splash across a ford, toy
figures making little bursts of spray.
The watcher above the trees darted suddenly downward. The quarry was
breaking cover.
Trevor's suspicions crystallized into an ugly certainty. Horror-struck,
he watched the bronzed, half-naked figure of a girl emerge from the
brilliant undergrowth and run like an antelope toward the badland.
The flying lizard rose, swooped, and struck.
The girl flung herself aside. She carried a length of sapling bound
with great thorns, and she lashed out with it at the black brute,
grazed it, and ran on.
The lizard circled and came at her again from behind.
She turned. There was a moment of vicious confusion, in which the
leathery wings enveloped her in a kind of dreadful cloak, and then she
was running again, but less swiftly, and Trevor could see the redness
of blood on her body.
And again the flying demon came.
The thing was trying to herd her, turn her back toward the huntsmen.
But she would not be turned. She beat with her club at the lizard, and
ran, and fell, and ran again. And Trevor knew that she was beaten. The
brute would have the life out of her before she reached the rocks.
Every dictate of prudence told Trevor to stay out of this. Whatever
was going on was obviously the custom of the country, and none of his
business. All he wanted was to get hold of one of these sun-stones and
then find a way out of this valley. That was going to be trouble enough
without taking on any more.
But prudence was swept away in the fury that rose in him as he saw the
hawk swoop down again, with its claws outspread and hungry for the
girl's tormented flesh. He sprang up, shouting to her to fight, to hang
on, and went running full speed down the slope toward her.
She turned upon him a face of such wild, fierce beauty as he had never
seen, the eyes dark and startled and full of a terrible determination.
Then she screamed at him, in his own tongue, "_Look out!_"
He had forgotten his own nemesis. Black wings, claws, the lash of a
scaly tail striking like a whip, and Trevor went down, rolling over
and staining the turf red as he rolled.
From far off he heard the voices of the huntsmen, shrill and strident,
lifted in a wild halloo.