The Vitomaton
"I love Paula!" cried the Prince. "It happened all at once--when you
said she was gone. Like a burst of light. Yet it must have been growing
for weeks. It was getting so I couldn't work in the lab, unless she was
there. God! It must have been hard for her. I was fighting it; I tried
to hide what I was beginning to feel, tried to treat her as if she were
a man. Now--she's gone!"
Bill looked back to the _Red Rover_, half a mile behind them. She lay
still, burnished silver cylinder on the red sand. He could see Trainor
beside her, still working over the curious little device on the tripod.
All the others had gone aboard. And a score of blue globe-ships,
like little sapphire moons, were circling a few thousand feet above,
drifting around and around, with a slow gliding motion, like buzzards
circling over their carrion-prey.
The Prince had buried his face in his hands, standing in an attitude of
utter dejection.
Bill turned, looked over the red flat sand of the Martian desert.
Far below, leading toward the near horizon, he saw a winding line of
foot-prints, half obliterated by the recent dust-storm. Far away they
vanished below the blue-black sky.
"Her tracks," he said, pointing.
"Tracks!" the Prince looked up, eager, hopeful determination flashing
in his dark eyes. "Then we can follow! It may not be too late!"
He ran toward the edge of the cliff.
Bill clutched his sleeve. "Wait! Think what you're doing, man! We're
fighting to save the world. You can't run off that way! Anyhow, the sun
is low. It is getting cool already. In two minutes after the sun goes
down it will be cold as the devil! You'll die in the desert!"
The Prince tugged away. "Hang the world! If you knew the way I feel
about Paula--Lord, what a fool I've been! To drive her to this!"
Agony was written on his dark face; he bit his thin lip until blood
oozed out and mingled indistinguishably with the red grime on his face.
"Anyhow, the _vitomaton_ is finished. Trainor can use it as well as I.
I've got to find Paula--or die trying."
He started toward the brink of the precipice again. After the
hesitation of a moment, Bill started after him. The Prince turned
suddenly.
"What the devil are you doing here?"
"Well," said Bill, "the _Red Rover_ is not a very attractive haven of
refuge, with all those Martian ships flying around it. And I have come
to think a good deal of Miss Paula. I'd like to help you find her."
"Don't come," said the Prince. "Probably it is death--"
"I'm not exactly an infant. I've been in tight places before, I've even
an idea of what it would be like to die at night in this desert--I
found the bones of a man in the dust today. But I want to go."
The Prince grasped Bill's hand. For a moment a tender smile
of friendship came over the drawn mask of mingled despair and
determination upon his lean face.
Presently the two of them found an inclining ledge that ran down the
face of the red granite cliff, and scrambled along to the flat plain
of acrid dust below. In desperate haste they plodded gasping along,
following the scant traces of Paula's foot-prints that the storm
had left. A hazy red cloud of dust rose about them, stinging their
nostrils. They strangled and gasped for breath in the thin, dusty air.
Sweaty grime covered them with a red crust.
For a mile they followed the trail. Then Paula had left the sand for a
bare ledge of age-worn volcanic rock. The wind had erased what traces
she might have left here. They skirted the edge of the ledge, but no
prints were visible in the sand. The small red eye of the sun was just
above the ocherous western rim of the planet. Their perspiring bodies
shivered under the first chill of the frozen Martian night.
"It's no use," Bill muttered, sitting down on a block of time-worn
granite, and wiping the red mud from his face. "She's probably been
gone for hours. No chance."
"I've got to find her!" the Prince cried, his lean, red-stained face
tense with determination. "I'll circle about a little, and see if I
can't pick up the trail."
Bill sat on the rock. He looked back at the low dark rim of cliffs, a
mile behind, grim and forbidding against the somber, indigo sky. The
crimson, melancholy splendor of the Martian sunset was fading in the
west.
The silver sunship was out of sight behind the cliffs. But he could
see the little blue globes, like spinning moons of sapphire, circling
watchfully above it. They were lower now, some of them not a thousand
feet above the hidden sunship.
Abruptly, one of them was enveloped in a vivid flare of orange light.
Its blue gleam flickering out, and it fell in fragments of twisted
white metal. Bill knew that it had been struck with a rocket torpedo.
The reply was quick and terrible. Slender, dazzling shafts of
incandescent whiteness stabbed down toward the ship, each of them
driving before it a tiny bright spark of purple fire, coruscating,
iridescent.
They were the atomic bombs, Bill knew. A dozen of them must have been
fired, from as many ships. In a few seconds he heard the reports of
their explosions--in the thin, still air, they were mere sharp cracks,
like pistol reports. They exploded below the line of his vision. No
more torpedoes were fired from the unseen sunship. Bill could see
nothing of it; but he was sure that it had been destroyed.
He heard the Prince's shout, thin and high in the rare atmosphere. It
came from a hundred yards beyond him.
"I've found the trail."
Bill got up, trudged across to follow him. The Prince waited,
impatiently, but gasping for breath. Just half of the red disk of the
sun was visible in the indigo sky above the straight horizon, and a
chill breeze blew upon them.
"I guess that ends the chance for the world!" Bill gasped.
"I suppose so. Some fool must have shot that torpedo off, contrary
to orders. The _vitomaton_ might have saved us, if Trainor had had a
chance to use it."
They plodded on through the dust, straining their eyes to follow
the half-obliterated trail in the fading light. It grew colder very
swiftly, for Mars has no such thick blanket atmosphere to hold the heat
of day as has the earth.
Twilight was short. Splendid wings of somber crimson flame hung for a
moment in the west. A brief golden glow shone where it had been. Then
the sky was dark, and the million stars were standing out in cold,
motionless majesty--scintillantly bright, unfeeling watchers of the
drama in the desert.
Bill felt tingling cold envelope his limbs. The sweat and mud upon him
seemed freezing. He saw the white glitter of frost appear suddenly
upon his garments, even upon the red dust. The thin air he breathed
seemed to freeze his lungs. He trembled. His skin became a stiff, numb,
painful garment, hindering his movements. The Prince staggered on ahead
of him, a vague dark shadow in the night, crying out at intervals in a
queer, strained voice.
* * * * *
Bill stopped, looked back, shivering and miserable. "No use to go on,"
he muttered. "No use." He stood still, vainly flapping his numb arms
against his sides. A vivid picture came to him--a naked, staring,
sun-bleached skull, lying in the red dust. "Bones in the dust," he
muttered. "Bones in the dust. Envers' bones. And Paula's. The Prince's.
Mine."
He saw something that made him stare, oblivious of the cold.
The red cliff had become a low dark line, below the star-studded sky.
The score of little cobalt moons were still drifting around and around,
in endless circles, watching, waiting. They were bright among the stars.
A little green cloud came up into view, above the dark rim of the
cliff. A little spinning wisp of greenish vapor. A tiny sphere of
swirling radiance. It shone with the clear lucent green of spring, of
all verdure, of life itself. It spun, and it shone with live green
light.
With inconceivable speed, it darted upward. It struck one of the blue
globes. A sparkling mist of dancing emerald atoms flowed over the azure
sphere, dissolved it, melted it away.
Bill rubbed his eyes. Where the sapphire ship had been was now only a
swirling mass of green mist, a cloud of twinkling emerald particles,
shining with a supernal viridescent radiance that somehow suggested
_life_.
Abruptly as the first tiny wisp of green luminescence had appeared,
this whirling cloud exploded. It burst into scores of tiny globes of
sparkling, vibrant atoms. The green cloud had eaten and grown. Now it
was reproducing itself like a living thing that feeds and grows and
sends off spores.
And each of the little blobs of viridity flew to an azure sphere. It
seemed to Bill as if the blue ships drew them--or as if the green
globules of swirling mist were _alive_, seeking food.
In an instant, each swirling spiral of emerald mist had struck a blue
globe. Vibrant green haze spread over every sphere. And the spheres
melted, faded, vanished in clouds of swirling viridescent vapor.
It all happened very suddenly. It was hardly a second, Bill thought,
after the first of the swirling green blobs had appeared, before the
last of the Martian fliers had become a mass of incandescent mist.
Then, suddenly as they had come, the green spirals vanished. They were
blotted out.
The stars shone cold and brilliant, in many-colored splendor, above the
dark line of the cliffs. The Martian ships were gone.
"The _vitomaton_!" Bill muttered, "The Prince said something about the
_vitomaton_. A new weapon, using the force of life. And the green was
like a living thing, consuming the spheres!"
Suddenly he felt the bitter cold again. He moved, and his garments
were stiff with frost. The cold had numbed his limbs--most of the pain
had gone. He felt a curious lightness, an odd sense of relief, of
freedom--and a delicious, alarming desire for sleep. But leaden pain of
cold still lurked underneath, dull, throbbing.
"Move! Move!" he muttered through cold-stiffened lips. "Move! Keep
warm!"
He stumbled across the dust in the direction the Prince had taken. The
cold tugged at him. His breath froze in swirls of ice. With all his
will he fought the deadly desire for sleep.
He had not gone far when he came upon a dark shape in the night. It was
the Prince, carrying Paula in his arms.
"I found her lying on the sand," he gasped to Bill. "She was awake. She
was glad--forgave me--happy now."
The Prince was exhausted, struggling through the sand, burdened with
the girl in his arms.
"Why go on?" Bill forced the words through his freezing face. "Never
make it. They shot atomic bombs at _Red Rover_. Then something happened
to them. Green light."
"The _vitomaton_!" gasped the Prince. "Vortex of spinning,
disintegrated atoms. Controlled by wireless power. Alive! Consumes all
matter! Disintegrates it into atomic nothingness!"
He staggered on toward the dark line of cliffs, clasping the inert form
of the girl to his body.
"But Paula! I love her. I must carry her to the ship. It is my fault.
We must get to the ship."
* * * * *
Bill struggled along beside him. "Too far!" he muttered. "Miles, in the
night. In the cold. We'll never----"
He stopped, with a thin, rasping cry.
Before him, above the narrow black line of the cliffs, a slender bar
of luminescent silver had shot up into view. It was the slim, tapering
cylinder of the _Red Rover_, with her twelve rear motor rays driving
white and dazzling against the mountain she was leaving. The sunship,
unharmed, driving upward into space!
"My God!" Bill screamed. "Leaving us!" He staggered forward, a pitiful,
trembling figure, encased in stiff, frost-covered garments. He waved
his arms, shouted. It was vain, almost ludicrous.
The Prince had stopped, still holding Paula in his arms.
"They think--Martians got us!" he called in a queer voice. "Stop them!
Fire torpedo--at boulder. They will see!"
Bill heard the gasping voice. He unfastened the heavy tube that he
still carried on his shoulder, leveled it before him. With numb,
trembling fingers, he tried to move the levers. His fingers seemed
frozen; they would not move. Tears burst from his eyes, freezing on his
cheeks. He stood holding the heavy tube in his arms, sobbing like a
baby.
Above them, the slender white cylinder of the _Red Rover_ was driving
out into star-gemmed space, dazzling opalescent rays shooting back at
the dark mountain behind her.
"They go," Bill babbled. "They think we are dead. Have not time to
wait. Go to fight for world."
He collapsed in a trembling heap upon the loose, frosty sand.
The Prince had suddenly laid Paula on the ground, was beside him.
"Lift the rocket," he gasped. "Aim. I will fire."
Bill raised the heavy tube mechanically, sighted through the telescope.
His trembling was so violent that he could hardly hold it upon the
rock. The Prince tried with his fingers to move the lever, in vain.
Then he bent, pressed his chin against it. It slipped, cut a red gash
in his skin. Again he tried, and the whir of the motor responded. He
got his chin upon the little red button, pressed it. The empty shell
drove back, fell from Bill's numbed hands and clattered on the sand.
The torpedo struck with a burst of orange light.
The Prince picked up Paula again, clasped her chilled body to him. Bill
watched the _Red Rover_. Suddenly he voiced a glad, incoherent cry. The
white rays that drove her upward were snapped out. The slim silver ship
swung about, came down on a long swift glide.
In a moment, it seemed, she swept over them, with a searchlight
sweeping the red sand. The white beam found the three. Quickly the ship
dropped beside them. Grotesque figures in vacuum suits leapt from the
air-lock.
In a few seconds they were aboard, in warmth and light. Hot, moist air
hissed into the lock about them, and they could breathe easily again.
The sizzling of the air through the valves was the last impression
of which Bill was conscious, until he found himself waking up in a
comfortable bed, feeling warm and very hungry. Captain Brand was
standing with his blue eyes peering through the door.
"Just looked in to see you as I was going on duty, Bill," he said.
"Doctor Trainor says you're all right now. The Prince and Paula are
too. You were all rather chilled, but nothing was seriously frozen.
Lucky you shot off the rocket. We had given up hope for you--didn't
dare stay.
"Funny change has come over the Prince. He's been up a good while,
sitting by Paula's bed. How's that for the misogynist--the hermit
outlaw of space? Well, come on up to the bridge when you've had some
breakfast. The battle with Mars is going to be fought out in the next
few hours. Ought to be something interesting to see."
Having delivered his broadside of information so fast that the sleepy
Bill could hardly absorb it, the gruff old space-captain withdrew his
head, and went on.
An hour later Bill entered the bridge-room.
Gazing through the vitrolite panels, he saw the familiar aspect of
interplanetary space--hard, brilliant points of many-colored light
scintillating in a silver-dusted void of utter blackness. The flaming,
red-winged sun was small and far distant. Earth was a huge green star,
glowing with indescribably beautiful liquid emerald brilliance; the
moon a silver speck beside it.
The grim red disk of Mars filled a great space in the heavens. Bill
looked for a little blue dot that had been visible upon the red planet
for so long--the tiny azure circle that he had first seen from the
telescope in Trainor's Tower. He found the spot where it should be, on
the upper limb of the planet. But it was gone.
"The thing has left Mars," Captain Brand told him. "It has set out on
its mission of doom to Earth!"
"What is it?"
"It is armored with one of their blue vibratory screens. What hellish
contrivances of war it has in it, and what demoniac millions of
Martians, no one knows. It is enormous, more than a mile in diameter."
"Can we do anything?"
"I hardly see how we can do anything. But we can try. Trainor and the
Prince are coming with their _vitomaton_."
"Say, didn't they shoot their atomic bombs at the ship last night?"
Bill asked. "It was out of sight, but I imagined they had wrecked it."
"One of the lookouts who was late getting back brought down one of
their globes with a rocket. They fired a lot of the purple bombs to
scare us. But I think they meant to take us alive. In the interest of
their science, I suppose. And Dr. Trainor got the _vitomaton_ ready
before they had done anything."
Bill was peering out into the star-strewn ebon gulf. Captain Brand
pointed. He saw a tiny blue globe, swimming among the stars.
"There's the infernal thing! Carrying its cargo of horror to our
earth!"
In a few moments Dr. Trainor, the Prince, and Paula came one by one
up the ladder to the bridge. Trainor carried the tripod; the Prince
brought a little black case which contained the strange vacuum tube
with the cerium electrode, and its various accessories; Paula had a
little calculating machine and a book of mathematical tables.
Trainor and the Prince set up the tripod in the center of the room, and
mounted the little black case upon it. The apparatus looked not very
different from a small camera. Working with cool, brisk efficiency,
Paula began operating the calculating machine, taking numbers from
the book, and calling out the results to the Prince, who was setting
numerous small dials on the apparatus.
Dr. Trainor peered through a compact little telescope which was
evidently an auxiliary part of the apparatus, training the machine
on the tiny blue disk that was the messenger of doom from Mars. From
time to time he called out numbers which seemed to go into Paula's
calculations.
Looking curiously at Paula and the Prince, Bill could see no sign of an
understanding between them. Both seemed absorbed in the problem before
them. They were impersonal as any two collaborating scientists.
At last Dr. Trainor raised his eyes from the little telescope, and
the Prince paused, with his fingers on a tiny switch. The induction
coil, in the circuit of a powerful vitalium generator, was buzzing
monotonously, while purple fire leapt between its terminals. Paula was
still efficiently busy over the little calculating machine, pressing
its keys while the motors whirred inside it.
* * * * *
"We're all ready," Trainor announced, "as soon as Paula finishes the
integration." He turned to Bill and Captain Brand, who were eying the
apparatus with intense interest. "If you will look inside this electron
tube, when the Prince closes the switch, you will see a tiny green
spark come into being. Just at the focus of the rays from the cerium
electrode, inside the vitalium helix grid.
"That green spark is a living thing!"
"It has in it the vital essence. It can consume matter--feed itself. It
can grow. It can divide, reproduce itself. It responds to stimuli--it
obeys the signals we send from this directional beam transmitter." He
tapped an insignificant little drum.
"And it ceases to be, when we cut off the power.
"It is a living thing, that eats. And it is more destructive than
anything else that eats, for it destroys the atoms that it takes into
itself. It resolves them into pure vibratory energy, into free protons
and electrons."
Paula called out another number, in her soft, husky voice. The Prince
swiftly set a last dial, pressed a tiny lever. Bill, peering through
the thin walls of a little electron tube, saw a filament light, saw
the thin cerium disk grow incandescent, apparently under cathode
bombardment. Then he saw a tiny green spark come into being, in a fine
helix of gleaming vitalium wire. For a little time it hung there,
swinging back and forth a little, growing slowly.
Deliberately, one by one, the Prince depressed keys on a black panel
behind the tube. The little green spark wavered. Suddenly it shot
forward, out through the wall of the tube. It swam uncertainly through
the air in the room, growing until it was large as a marble. The Prince
flicked down another key, and it darted out through a vitrolite panel,
towards the blue globe from Mars.
It had cut a little round hole in the transparent crystal, a hole the
size of a man's finger. The matter in it had vanished utterly. And the
little viridescent cloud of curdled light that hung outside had grown
again. It was as large as a man's fist--a tiny, whirling spiral of
vibrant emerald particles.
Air hissed through the little hole, forming a frozen, misty cloud
outside. Captain Brand promptly produced a little disk of soft rubber,
placed it against the opening. Air-pressure held it tight, sealing the
orifice.
The Prince pressed another key, the little swirling green sphere
was whisked away--it vanished. The Prince stood intent, fingers on
the banks of keys, eyes on red pointers that spun dizzily on tiny
dials. Another key clicked down suddenly. He moved a dial, and looked
expectantly out through the vitrolite panel.
Bill saw the green film run suddenly over the tiny blue globe floating
among the stars. The azure sphere seemed to melt away, to dissolve into
sparkling green radiance. In a moment, where the great blue ship had
been, was only a spinning spiral of glistening viridescence.
"Look at Mars!" cried the Prince. "This is a challenge. If they want
peace, they shall have it. If they want war, they shall feel the power
of the _vitomaton_!"
Bill turned dazedly to look at the broad disk of the red planet. It
was not relatively very far away. He could see the glistening white
spot that was the north polar cap, the vast ocherous deserts, the dark
equatorial markings, the green-black lines of the canals. For all the
grimness of its somber, crimson color, it was very brilliant against
the darkness of the spangled void.
An amazing change came swiftly over Mars.
A bluish tinge flowed over orange-red deserts. A thin blue mist seemed
to have come suddenly into the atmosphere of the planet. It darkened,
became abruptly solid. A wall of blue hid the red world. Mars became
a colossal globe. Her surface was as real, as smooth and unbroken, as
that of the ship they had just destroyed.
Mars had become a sphere of polished sapphire.
"A wall of vibration, I suppose," said the Prince. "What a science to
condemn to destruction!"
Huge globes of purple fire--violet spheres large as the ship they had
just destroyed--driven on mighty rays, leapt out from a score of points
on the smooth azure armor that covered a world. With incredible speed,
they converged toward the _Red Rover_.
"Atomic bombs with a vengeance!" cried the Prince. "One of those would
throw the earth out of its orbit, into the sun." He turned briskly to
Paula. "Quick now! Integrations for the planet!"
She sprang to the calculating machine; slim fingers flew over the keys.
Trainor swung his apparatus toward the smooth azure ball that Mars had
become, peered through his telescope, called out a series of numbers to
Paula. Quickly she finished, gave her results to the Prince.
He bent over the banks of keys again.
Bill watched the enormous blue globe of Mars in fascinated horror,
followed the huge, luminescent red-purple atomic bombs, that were
hurtling out toward them, driven on broad white rays.
"An amazing amount of power in those atomic bombs," Dr. Trainor
commented, his mild eyes bright with scientific enthusiasm. "I doubt
that space itself is strong enough to hold up under their explosion. If
they hit us, I imagine it will break down the continuum, blow us out of
the universe altogether, out of space and time!"
Bill was looking at the whirling green spiral that hung where the
Martian flier had been. He saw it move suddenly, dart across the
star-dusted darkness of space. It plunged straight for the blue ball of
Mars, struck it. A viridescent fog ran quickly over the enormous azure
globe.
Mars melted away.
The planet dissolved in a huge, madly spinning cloud of brilliant green
mist that shone with an odd light--with a light of _life_! A world
faded into a nebulous spiral of green. Mars became a spinning cloud of
dust as if of malachite.
A tiny lever flicked over, under the Prince's fingers. And the green
light went out.
Where Mars had been was nothing! The stars shone through, hot and
clear. A machine no larger than a camera had destroyed a world. Bill
was dazed, staggered.
Solemnly, almost sadly, the Prince moved a slender, tanned hand across
his brow. "A terrible thing," he said slowly. "It is a terrible thing
to destroy a world. A world that had been eons in the making, and that
might have changed the history of the cosmos.... But they voted for
war. We had no choice."
He shook his head suddenly, and smiled. "It's all over. The great
mission of my life--completed. Doctor, I want you to pack the
_vitomaton_ very carefully, and lock it up in our best safe, and try to
forget the combination. A great invention. But I hope we never need to
use it again."
Then the Prince of Space did a thing that was amazing to most of his
associates as the destruction of Mars had been. He walked quickly to
Paula Trainor, and put his arms around her. He slowly tilted up her
elfin face, where the golden eyes were laughing now, with a great,
tender light of gladness shining in them. He bent, and kissed her warm
red lips, with a hungry eagerness that was almost boyish.
A happy smile was dancing in his eyes when he looked up at the
astounded Captain Brand and the others.
"Allow me," he said, "to present the Princess of Space!"
Some months later, when Bill was landed on Trainor's Tower, on a visit
from his new home in the City of Space, he found that the destruction
of Mars had created an enormous sensation. Astronomers were manfully
inventing fantastic hypotheses to explain why the red planet had first
turned blue, then green, and finally vanished utterly. The sunships of
the Moon Patrol were still hunting merrily for the Prince of Space.
Since the loss of the _Triton's_ treasure, the reward for his capture
had been increased to twenty-five million eagles.
The End