The Forest Aflame
I have a very confused recollection of what happened immediately
afterward. My own actions seem a vague, disordered dream. My bitter
grief at Austen's self-sacrifice was the only thing real to me. I
believe I began carrying rocks from the boulder-strewn slope at the
foot of the cliff, with the idea of securing the rope to them so I
could go down in search for him. But my memory of that is very faint.
The first thing I remember clearly is that I was staggering back to
the shaft with a heavy rock in my arms, when I caught a whiff of
acrid smoke and awoke to the realization that the purple sky was
darkened with drifting clouds, and the air was already heavy with the
suffocating pungent odor of the burning red vegetation. My instinctive
alarm at the thought of fire served to bring me to myself, and I was
suddenly fearful for the safety of Melvar.
I knew that, had the red-hot rocket-ship in which we had crossed the
Silver Sea chanced to fall in the jungle instead of on the barren
hilltop, a conflagration would have spread from it at once. Abruptly
I remembered that the glowing fragments of the one we had wrecked had
fallen in the northern forest. Austen's cabin lay in that direction!
I knew that the red vegetation was peculiarly inflammable, and that
the fire fed on the oxygen of the heavy atmosphere, would advance with
terrible speed.
For a moment, in a panic of indecision, I listened. From the north I
heard the crackling roar of a mighty conflagration. Then my mind was
made up. Any attempt to find Austen and induce him to give up his plan
of self-sacrifice would be terribly uncertain. Melvar was in immediate
danger, and I knew that Austen valued her life above his own. But even
then, I knew in my heart that it was too late, though I would not let
myself believe it. Fire is a pitiless and remorseless enemy.
At a dead run I started up the trail by which we had entered the
clearing. Ever the smoke became thicker and more acrid, while the
crackling roar of the fire rang ever louder in my ears. I ran on
through the ghastly gloom of the scarlet jungle, in mad desperation,
even after hope was gone, until the hot suffocating breath of the
flames was choking me, until the bright lurid curtain of the fire was
spread before my eyes, and the intense heat radiation blistered my
skin. The vast wall of flame swept forward like a voracious demoniac
thing of crimson, implacable, irresistible, overwhelming. It plunged
forward like a rushing tidal wave of red. _Already the fire had passed
the site of the cabin!_
I was suddenly hopeless, and despairing, and very tired. The flames
rushed forward faster, by far, than a human being could force a way
through the jungle. With the knowledge that I had just lost the only
two beings that in all the world of men ever mattered to me, it hardly
seemed worth while to try to save my own life. For a moment I stood
there, about to cast myself into the flames. But it is not the nature
of an animal to die willingly, no matter how slight the promise of life
may be.
When I could endure the heat no longer, when the pain of my blistered
skin, and the outcries of my tortured lungs had grown unsupportable, I
turned and ran toward the clearing again. Behind me, the flames roared
like a lightning express. The fern-like fronds burned explosively, like
gun-cotton. My nostrils and lungs were seared and smarting. The hot
wind dried my skin and left it scorched and cracked. I was blinded by
the smoke. I longed to throw myself down and seek the temporary ecstasy
of a breath of clear air from near the ground, of a cooling plunge into
a muddy pool. The red jungle reeled about me, but I fought my way on,
like a man in a dream.
At last I staggered into the open space. The last of the giant trees
exploded into flames not a score of yards behind me. Sparks rained upon
me. My clothing caught fire. I ran on, fighting at it with my hands.
The jungle back of me roared deafeningly, an angry, surging sea of
lurid red flames, awful, overwhelming, fantastically terrible. Heat
radiation poured across the clearing in a pitiless beam. I struggled on
across the white sand, away from flames that tossed themselves up like
volcano-ridden ranges of scarlet alps, until I reached the shelter of a
great boulder on the slope below the cliff.
I flung myself down behind the rock, gulping down the cool air and
rubbing out the fire in my clothing with my blackened hands. For many
hours I lay there, tortured by thirst and pain. At last I fell into a
light sleep of troubled dreams, in which huge, winged, green ants flew
after me through burning crimson forests and in which I saw the dear
form of Melvar devoured again and again by the flames.
I was awakened, after a time, I know not how long, by a cool wind that
had sprung up from the north. For a moment my mind was lost in blank
wonder, and then came the desolate memory that Melvar and Austen were
lost. In hopeless misery I got weakly to my feet and walked unsteadily
around the boulder until I could look across the clearing.
As I leaned against the rock, gazing eastward, it was a strangely
altered and desolate scene that lay before my eyes. The red forest
was gone. Below me was a region of low rolling hills, black and grim
beneath the lowering, smoky purple sky. The white sand about me stood
out in sharp contrast to the charred and gloomy waste beyond, from
which a few slender wisps of dark smoke were still rising. All life was
gone. It was a dead world. But still the dense purple clouds poured out
of the shafts of the underworld, adding their weight to the dismal sky.
A great homesickness for the world, and my fellow men came over me.
Then I heard a strange humming behind me, and a slight metallic
clatter. I turned around in apathetic curiosity.
* * * * *
A Strange Duel
And I came face to face with a monster so utterly strange and weirdly
terrible that the very shock of it almost unseated my wandering reason.
But so completely had my interests and hopes in life been severed, so
near was I to the great divide of death, that I was past emotion of any
kind. At first I looked on the thing with a curious lack of interest,
as the soul of one newly dead might look with numbed faculties on his
new habitation. But as I looked upon it, an icy current of fear stole
over me like the creeping cold of the north, and clasped me to its
frozen breast. I had met so many horrors that I had begun to think
myself immune to terror. But I had met no such thing as that.
I knew that it was an intelligent, a sentient being. But it was not
human, not a thing of flesh and blood at all. It was a machine!
Or, rather, it was in a machine, for I felt far more of it than I
saw--a will, a cold and alien intellect, a being, malefic, inhuman,
inscrutable. It was a thing that belonged, not in the present earth,
but in the tomb of the unthinkable past, or beyond the wastes of
interstellar space, amid the inconceivable horrors of unknown spheres.
There was a bright, gleaming globe, three feet in diameter, lit
with vivid flowing fires of violet and green. A strange swirling
mist of brilliant points of many colored lights danced madly about
it--a coruscating fog of iridescent fire--moving, flickering, in an
incredible rhythm.
That unearthly thing rested upon a frame of metal. It was the head of a
metallic monster. It was set on an oblong box of white metal, to which
were attached six long-jointed metal limbs. The being stood nine feet
high, at least. It was standing on three of the limbs and holding my
rifle, which I had left where I had been lying, turning it and feeling
of it with a cluster of slender, finger-like tentacles on the end of
the metal arm. It was working the mechanism of the gun, and apparently
looking at it, though it had no eyes that I could see.
Suddenly the gun went off, throwing up the sand between me and the
monster. With a grotesquely half-human attitude of alarmed surprise,
the being dropped the gun and sprang back like a gigantic spider. The
motion freed me from my paralysis of horror, and I started backing
cautiously around the boulder, afraid to run. As I moved it sprang
forward and a slender tube of white metal, in one of the tentacled
hands, was suddenly pointed toward me. As the monster moved, there was
a humming sound from it, and little jets of purple gas hissed from
holes in the sides of the box-like body.
I drew my automatic and fired at the metal tube. I must have made an
unusually fortunate shot, for the object was carried out of the metal
grasp, and fell spinning on the sand. On the instant, I turned and ran
toward another great boulder, as large as a railroad locomotive, that
lay fifty yards to the north. As I ran I heard the clatter and whirring
of the mechanical being. I paused at the edge of the rock and took a
last glimpse back.
The monster was holding the little tube in one of its limbs, and
apparently adjusting it with another. Then it suddenly extended the
thing toward me. I dived behind the rock. And a bright ray of orange
light shot past the boulder--a beam like that which had come from the
being in the door of the rocket-ship. Then I knew that here was an
entity of the same kind as the one I had destroyed that night--one of
the ruling intelligences of the crater, the _Krimlu_.
For several minutes I crouched behind the boulder, expecting the
terrible being to come striding around after me at any instant; but it
did not come, so presently I began to think. Perhaps the things were
not so powerful, or so extremely intelligent after all. I had killed
one, even if it was just by a chance shot in the dark. This one had
seemed surprised and alarmed when the rifle went off, and I supposed
that a being so intelligent as I had at first thought it to be might
have inferred the nature and use of the weapon from its appearance.
And I thought that it must be afraid of me, after my pistol bullet had
knocked its own weapon out of its grip, or it would have followed me
around the boulder. Then I began to wonder what it was going to do.
It evidently intended to strike me with the ray weapon. And not only
did it respect me, but it knew that I stood in deathly fear of it. It
knew that I was trying to escape, so it might reasonably expect me
to leave the unscalable cliff and attempt a break against the open
country. And if I were to do that, I would naturally keep in the
shelter of my own boulder as long as possible. If the monster thought
in that way, the logical thing for it to do would be to creep out of
the upper side of its rock, where I would inevitably come into its
sight by whatever direction I left my breastwork.
Of course there was a frightful risk in taking any action on such a
hypothesis--a greater risk than I realized at the time. If the monster
were less intelligent than I supposed, I might blunder on it; if it
were more intelligent, it might have anticipated my plan--might be
waiting to trap me.
But I crawled out along the upper side of my boulder and peered over a
smaller rock which would serve me as a breastwork, my automatic ready.
I expected to see the creature in my range, and itself intent upon my
other lines of retreat. But it was not there. For a moment I thought I
was doomed, but the orange ray did not strike, and I was forced to the
conclusion that the monster was not in a position for action at all.
For a moment I was tempted to precipitate flight across the clearing,
but I knew that such a move would put me at the mercy of the ray, and
I thought that it might not yet be too late to carry out my original
plan. I lay flat, with the gun trained on the spot where I expected it
to appear. For perhaps fifteen minutes nothing happened; then it proved
that my hypothesis was justified. The weird being suddenly sprang into
view, with the strange weapon grasped in its glittering arm. It seemed
to be looking beyond my boulder. I was lying ready, with the automatic
leveled. It was a matter of the merest instant to aim at the green
sphere and pull the trigger.
The globe was shattered as if it had been made of glass. The glittering
fragments showered off the metal box, while the whole mechanical body
suddenly became very rigid, and fell heavily to the side. A puff of
coruscating green mist floated out of the globe as it broke, and
swiftly dissipated, and the sparkling lights were about the thing no
more. The monster was evidently dead.
For a few moments I hesitated, but I was sure the thing had been
killed, and my curiosity got the better of my fear. I cautiously
approached it. For a moment I marveled at the wonderful workmanship of
the machine and at the cleverness of its design; then I saw something
that made me forget all else. Something beside the crystal shell had
fallen.
The tissue of it was very delicate, and it had been broken by the
fall, so that the body juices were running from it. The brain cavity
of it was very large--perhaps larger than that of a man--covered only
with a thin chitinous shell. The limbs were but thin tentacles, almost
altogether atrophied. In fact, the brain seemed three-fourths of the
total bulk. The body was so badly smashed that I could tell little
about it, but the tiny limbs were covered with chitin, and there were
the rudimentary stumps of fine, tissue-like wings. There were no
visible traces of digestive organs, or of mandibles.
The thing was plainly an insect. From just what species it had sprung
in the long process of evolution in the crater it would be difficult to
say. For several reasons, I believe it was an ant. At any rate, it had
reached about the ultimate stage of evolution. Machines had altogether
replaced bodies of flesh and blood. I believe the thing had been
nourished by the sparkling green vapor, which must have circulated like
blood through the protecting crystal sphere.
It seems incredible to find great intelligence in any form of life
other than human; but science thinks that life and intelligence must
rise and fall in recurring cycles, and that the earth has probably been
ruled by many different forms of life, each of which has been blotted
out by some cataclysm. The _Krimlu_ were a surviving remnant of archaic
ages.