We found our molluscs and struggled back up the sloping path to shallow
water. On the bank I lay and coughed, gasping and struggling to remove
the residual water from my lungs and replace it with air. The transition
back was far worse than entering the water. Nona, who quite evidently
had done it several times before, recovered more quickly than I. As I
lay panting and choking upon our couch, she made up a fire. The two
stones which she rubbed together ignited in a moment—a slow,
sulphurous-looking flame with a little smoke which the slight current of
air through the cave carried away. Then, when the first stones were
burning, she added other stones which glowed like coal.
We ate our meal, and I lay again upon our couch with Nona sitting beside
me.
I was awakened by a sense of burning and smothering. I sat up, coughed,
and twitched at Nona’s hair to arouse her.
The cave was full of smoke. Beside me was what seemed a pit of fire. The
heat from it was intolerable. I flung Nona into the air and followed her
myself with a leap.
Across the cave we stood trembling with fright, regarding the red
monster of fire that had eaten for itself an open pit in the cave-floor.
Nona had forgotten to extinguish the fire of our evening meal. These
rocks were inflammable. The fire had eaten its way downward, as a fire
on your Earth would eat downward into a bed of coal, spreading out
beneath the ground.
Nona and I did not reason it out that way at the time. All we knew was
that the red fire-monster had broken loose, and we were afraid of it.
Blue and red tongues of flame licked up from the mouth of its lair; its
hot, poisonous breath was stifling us even across the cave.
I was inactive only for a moment. Bidding Nona keep away, I tried to
throw dirt into the little crater-mouth.
But the dirt had no effect. I might have extinguished it with water you
say? True, I might, though I think now that the volatile, highly aerated
water would have been of little avail.
I did not try the water. I did not know that water and fire were
traditional enemies. Nor did Nona. How were we to know that, unless we
had chanced to discover it for ourselves, which we had not.
Nona screamed at me and I gave up my futile efforts. The air in the cave
was almost suffocating; and with the instinct that comes to any trapped
animal underground, we scrambled up the passageway to the surface of the
meteor.
* * * * *
It was night, with silver Saturn filling the overhead sky. Trembling, we
stood and watched the cave-mouth from which a visible line of smoke was
now issuing. Our home was down there; the fire-monster had it—and we
could not go down and take it from him.
We never went back to the cave. The meteor’s swift days and nights
passed in rapid succession; and during several of them we stood
helplessly watching.
Presently the fire came to the surface. I realize now that it was eating
its way downward as well as upward until the entire vicinity of the cave
was glowing with molten, burning rocks.
The ground all around the cave-mouth soon fell inward. A seething crater
was exposed where the cave had been—a bottomless pit of lurid, licking
flames with black smoke rolling up from it, and the hissing of steam
below.
We took instant flight, swimming through the air over our tiny world,
until, on its opposite hemisphere we found sanctuary.
There was no evidence of the fire here. We were pleased. We would find
another cave, another river, and build our home anew.
We were both famished. I caught a lizard and we ate it—uncooked, for we
were both afraid to unleash again the monster that had all but overcome
us.
Then we slept; and again, when two of the meteor’s brief days and nights
were passed, and Saturn was sinking below the horizon to give place to
dawning sunlight, we searched for a new cave.
No cave was to be found. But there was water. A river several hundred
yards wide bubbled up from the ground and flowed in a broad shallow
stream toward the horizon. We followed it to a tiny line of hills. Into
a hole in a cliff-face it plunged downward with an impetuous current.
Here we decided to build our home. There were blue rushes along the
river bank. Nona gathered them; she would dry them, plait them into
robes for our couch.
Once I flew back to the fire. I could not get very close to it, for the
air choked me. The fire seemed to be burning itself out. It was dull,
with flickering puffs of flame in the midst of a thick pall of smoke
which hung motionless in the still air.
I returned to Nona.
“The fire-monster is dying,” I said. “But it has eaten our cave.”
* * * * *
I know now what was happening. The fire was being smothered for lack of
fresh air to sustain its combustion. Had there been any wind I do not
doubt but that the entire surface of the meteor would have been
consumed.
An almost equally great danger threatened us, however—and presently we
were made aware of it. The smothering, smouldering fire gave off
steadily a tremendous volume of unconsumed gases. Even without any wind
they diffused themselves throughout the meteor’s atmosphere, it was so
small a world, with so thin a blanket of air about it—an infinitesimal
fraction of the air that envelopes your Earth. Rapidly it became
polluted with poisonous gases from the half-smothered fire—polluted
throughout its entire extent.
For a day we were uneasy. Then we grew frightened. There was little
evidence of smoke—only a blue haze. But the air seemed to choke us. It
was the poisonous breath of the fire-monster come to make us sick.
We tried to go somewhere to escape it. But we were on the opposite side
of the world from it already, and no matter which direction we took,
inevitably we approached it.
Except upward. We tried higher altitudes. The air was purer up there,
but also it was thinner, and we could not live in it for any length of
time. Nor could we sustain ourselves aloft indefinitely—to say nothing
of sleeping and eating.
Once in desperation we tried swimming off the meteor into Space. But the
lack of any breathable air at all soon brought us struggling downward.
That night there was a gentle wind. The breath of the fire-monster swept
up over the horizon and came upon us with a deadly blast. We woke up,
choking. It was daylight, with a small red-yellow sun dim and blurred by
the poisonous haze that enveloped us.
Nona was crying. But suddenly I laughed, triumphantly, for I realized
now that the fire-monster could not harm us.
We were lying at the river bank. I seized Nona in my arms and flung her
headlong downward into the water. And I plunged in after her. The water
here was deep—thirty feet perhaps, as you on Earth would measure it.
With arms flying, we sank like stones to the river bottom.