by Ed Earl Repp
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Spawn of Jupiter,
by Ed Earl Repp
Amazing Stories March 1944
Novelette - 11599 words
There was a strange city below the
surface of this waterless lake—
a city as deadly to enter as it was to leave!
CHAPTER I
Heat waves danced like transparent dervishes over the blistering floor of Death Valley, bringing a steady stream of perspiration to Dave Weston’s blocky face. The young Caltech astro-physicist stood on a rocky promontory of Telescope Peak and swept the burning badlands through powerful binoculars, his lean frame rigid with hope and expectancy.
Dust lay thick on his field boots and clothing, evidence of the laborious climb up the steep slants of the Peak. His leonine head swung slowly as he played the glasses over the weird, deadly beauty of the Valley below him. Worry and anxiety were etched plainly at the sides of his fine mouth. Mysterious, silent, the Valley only mocked back at him, its secrets locked behind the hot, blue haze. For the thousandth time he told himself that his father would never be found alive here. But despite this conviction, each new day saw him high in the burning hills searching for the slightest indication to disprove his belief.
Now the discordant notes of a wheezy harmonica came to him as he probed the badlands with his glasses. It was an oddly carefree sound in the brooding quiet of the desert. But he drew some comfort from it and glanced at
one of his guides, Mac Barwell, who lay in the scant shade of a sage bush, shoulders against red lava bomb as he beat a patched boot in time with his impromptu recital. Beside him, Bill Harrigan, big enough to make two of the withered Mac, and as sad-faced as only a desert rat can be, drew noisily on his corncob pipe, his faded eyes looking off distantly.
But the young scientist was not conscious of either of them. His sun-darkened face creased into bitter lines. Somewhere down there, amid the wild, treacherous beauty of this God-forsaken wilderness of salt flats, craggy peaks, and poisoned waterholes, wandered Charles Weston.
The postmaster at Copper Springs had told Dave that two weeks ago his father, lately retired from California Institute of Technology, where Dave now occupied his chair, had come in with his pack animals and mailed the letter that brought him out here. In the pocket of the lanky scientist’s khaki shirt, the letter seemed to grow heavy with the importance attached to it.
Brief and cryptic, it was typical of Charles Weston:
My dear Dave:
This will be the last time I shall communicate with you by letter. I am returning to camp today to remain indefinitely.
Now for the news. I am certain at last that I have found the trail of the meteorite! Unless the Palomar telescope and spectrographs are very much wrong, millions of dollars in precious metals are within my reach!
That means I will need you immediately.
Come at once to Copper Springs, bringing the portable shortwave set with you. Listen for my signals at nine P. M., March 21, when I shall give you full instructions for reaching me. I’m counting on you, Dave!
Your father.
Dave’s face grew darker. March twenty-first was a week ago. That night and every night since, he had listened. Yet out of the mystery of the desert had come no signal.
Grimly, he lowered the glasses, a deep sigh expanding his chest. Thoughts came crowding through his mind, barbed reminders of the past.
It had been four years ago that the two-hundred-inch telescope at Mount Palomar detected a tiny projectile flying off the surface of Jupiter. That the meteor’s orbit was carrying it toward earth kindled astronomical interest to white heat.
When it struck in Death Valley two years ago, scientists and adventurers came from all over the world to search for it. Spectrographs of the falling meteorite’s trail indicated that quantities of gold, platinum, silver, and other precious metals were abundant in it. But the fierce heat of the valley was like a blow-torch on the luxury-softened searchers. Nearly fifty men. found unmarked graves in the first year of the search.
Even airplanes failed to find the barest trace of a meteor crater. Gradually the search tapered off to less than a score of wanderers. Charles Weston was one of them.
The thought burned like acid in Dave’s mind that his father had joined the other courageous but foolhardy men who had fallen out there. Yet he knew the hopelessness of scouring the wasted valley of death for his father. He could only search for him as he was searching today, holding pack animals, provisions, and his guides in constant readiness, should he pick up a clue by radio or binoculars.
Dave swung back to the trail as Bill Harrigan growled dolefully, “Seven days now we’ve come up here, Dave. Seven days you’ve paid me an’ Mac to hold our burros ready. Reckon it would be dishonest of me not to speak what’s in my mind.”
Dave hooked his thumbs over his belt, squinting almost belligerently at the grizzled old giant. “Well?” he snapped.
Harrigan shoved his hat down on his face and scratched the back of his head. “It’s like this,” he grunted. “I’ve seen dozens of men pack out into the Funerals or the Panamints like your dad did. Some of ’em have come back, some ain’t. But I’ll tell you this. Waitin’ and searchin’s no good. If a man’s gonna come out, he’ll come. If he ain’t, nobody but the buzzards will know where to look.”
Mac Barwell sprang to his feet. Watery blue eyes flashed in the leathery skin of his face. “Why, you cantankerous, pessimistic oaf!” he scourged. “ ‘Course Weston’s coming out. Just because he’s a mite late, you git as longfaced as a sagehen at a mass meetin’ of coyotes.” The old prospector glanced apologetically at Weston. “Bill alius was one to see the darkest side,” he excused.
Harrigan wagged his great head mournfully. “It’s a sort of phee-loso-phy of mine,” he protested, “that if you follow anything far enough, you’ll find it turns out for the worst. Hard-headed common sense, is all.”
“Common sense or not,” Dave ground out, “I’ll keep tramping up here, and listening over that radio, until I’ve got proof my father is dead. You’re getting paid by the day. If you want to back out, do it now.”
Bill Harrigan stood up straight, a hurt look coming over his features. “The money don’t enter into it.” He shook his head. “I jest hate to see a man livin’ on false hope.”
Dave slung the canteen over his shoulder. He faced the pair of them squarely. “I don’t think it is false hope,” he said quietly. “My father has a sort of philosophy too. He thinks that a man with intelligence and courage can lick almost anything . . . including the desert. Wherever he is, I’m willing to bet he’s got water and food. The heat at this time of the year wouldn’t be bad enough to get him, either. Save your sympathy for somebody that needs it, Bill. I don’t think Charles Weston does.”
At the foot of the peak, they got into Dave’s dusty roadster again and headed back for Copper Springs. About five miles out of town they slowed down as a car, parked beside the road, caught their attention. It was empty, and the driver was nowhere in sight.
Then Dave was grinding the car to a stop. Just off the road, a hundred feet ahead, lay the form of a girl!
Dave was the first to reach her. Face down, she lay in a pathetic little huddle against the coarse ground. As he picked her up, something that shone like polished bronze fell from her hand. Almost instantly, then, she awoke.
The scientist had a disturbing, heart-stopping moment of staring into frightened blue eyes. He was conscious of the lightness of her slender body, of the cameo-like perfection of her tanned features. Her lips, parted slightly, revealed glistening white teeth.
“Did you hear it?” she whispered suddenly.
Dave began to wonder if what he’d said about heat prostration was quite correct. “We didn’t hear a thing,” he said seriously. “We were driving by, and—here we are.”
The girl seemed to be in a trance of some sort. She closed her eyes again, and, shaking her head, murmured, “
It was beautiful! Music—I’ve never heard anything like it. It was like the sound of thousands of violins, rising and falling. I heard chimes, and voices, way off . . . they seemed to come from the north.”
Bill Harrigan shot a glance at Mac. He shook his head. “And her so young,” he whispered gruffly.
Abruptly, the girl caught a breath. A blush stained her cheeks as she wriggled out of Dave’s arms. “Oh! I’m sorry!” she gasped. “I guess I was still half-way paralyzed by it. But it was so—”
“—sudden,” Dave nodded. “I know. The heat hits you so fast you don’t know about it until days later. What amazes me is that you came to so quickly.”
“But it wasn’t the heat!” The blonde hair tossed, emphatically. “I’ve been out here every day for weeks. I was looking for bits of glass. I remember reaching for a piece of brown obsidian, I guess it was.”
This time it was Mac Barwell who pursed his lips and glanced at Bill. “Bits of glass,” he repeated sourly. “I’ve found ’em heapin’ up rocks, weighin’ ’em like they was gold. Lady, you just take it quiet-like and we’ll—”
Impatience brushed a frown across the girl’s forehead. “I’m all right,” she argued. “It wasn’t a sunstroke, and I’m perfectly sane. My name is Helen Lodge. My hobby is collecting specimens of that curious blue grass you find out here in the desert.”
She began to seem a little more reasonable to Dave, then. He himself had often admired the delicate shades of blue and rose and amethyst the action of the sun and sand produced in ordinary glass. Old bottles, cut glass vases, tumblers, a hundred things dropped by travelers many years ago, were converted by nature’s magic into items collectors paid high prices for. No stained glass artist had ever produced the softness of tone the desert did; nor had the cause of the transformation been discovered yet.
“When I touched that glass,” the girl was saying, “it all started. The music seemed to engulf me, and I ceased to exist. I felt like a leaf drifting around out in space . . . helpless.”
With a sudden thought, Dave glanced down, remembering the shining thing that had dropped from the girl’s hand when he picked her up. His eyes kindled with eagerness as he saw it lying there. It was an irregular mass of translucent, golden-brown material. It appeared harmless enough, but . . .
As he reached for it, Helen Lodge cried out a warning. “That’s it!” she cried. “That’s the rock I touched!”
But Dave was already standing up with it poised in his palm. And he felt no strange qualms, heard no strange musk. There was suspicion in the fiat gaze that bored into the girl’s face.
“You don’t hear it—?” she asked.
“You don’t feel any different?”
“I feel,” Dave Weston said, “as if I’d just picked up a rather strange-looking rock. That’s all.”
Gingerly Helen Lodge reached for it. She gripped it in her right hand.
And suddenly the two prospectors and Dave were staring in amazement as she quietly slipped to the ground, to lie there unconscious!
CHAPTER II
Out of the Silence
Once more she regained her senses the instant the strange rock was taken from her palm. A feeling of eeriness gripped Dave. Mac and Bill stared like statues. “It’s bad!” Harrigan muttered. “Plumb bad! And you kin bet your pick an’ burro on that!”
Dave helped her up, feeling foolish and guilty. “We’ll take you back in our car, Miss Lodge,” he suggested.
“You’ll do nothing of the sort! I tell you I’m perfectly all right. I’m quite capable of driving home alone and I intend to do it right now. I’ve got a lot of thinking to do about this, tonight.” A quick smile dissolved the sternness from her lips. “Why, who knows—maybe I’m a new Messiah, or something!”
Dave could not repress a smile. “Anyway, I’ll take this rock along and give it a once-over,” he told her.
“You’ll put it in my pocket for me,” she corrected promptly. “Maybe I can’t touch it, but I’ll work on it somehow. Besides, Dr. Kaley can probably help me.”
“Kaley!” The savageness with which the name ripped from Weston’s lips drew every glance.
The girl nodded. “I’m Dr. Brand Kaley’s secretary. You know him?”
“Yes. I’m Dave Weston.” Dave’s jaw thrust out, a smoky sheen clouding his brown eyes.
Then the two bewildered prospectors were watching the look of anger intensify on her face, and they were listening with raised eyebrows to her crackling reply.
“I’ve heard of you, too, Dr. Weston. If I’m not mistaken, you and your father tried to cheat Dr. Kaley out of a fortune not long ago.” She thrust her small fists into the pockets of her jacket. “Thank you for your help,” she snapped.
Before Dave could reply, she had spun about and walked to her car. It roared past them while the trio still stood in awkward surprise.
Dave stared after the retreating cloud of dust. His fists knotted so hard that the knuckles showed white through the brown skin. “So we cheated Kaley, did we?” he muttered. “Why, the dirty swine—!”
Bill Harrigan’s head rocked sorrowfully. “From the minute I laid eyes on her,” he brooded, “I knowed there was trouble comin’. Mark my words, so–—”
Mac fingered his long chin. “If it’s none of my business, say so,” he put narrowly. “But jest what was she drivin’ at?”
Wordlessly, Weston started back to the car. But as the others fell in beside him, he started talking in an explanatory voice.
“I guess you wouldn’t know what a photographic filter is,” he began. “It’s a piece of colored glass that makes it possible to take pictures through fog and other types of haze. One thing they’ve never been able to photograph through is the mist surrounding a few of the planets. Consequently, some of the planets, like Venus, are virtually unknown to us.
“Five years ago my father and Brand Kaley began collaborating on a filter that would cut even heavy cloud layers like that. Two years ago they succeeded. Before Dad knew what was happening, Kaley had patented the invention and put it on the market commercially. He’s made a fortune since then. Every camera hound in the country has one. Kaley’s worth about five hundred thousand now. And Dad—well, he’s still got his teacher’s pension!”
He got in the car and raced the engine into life. And because Mac and Bill were old and wise in the way of men, neither said a word during the ride home.
Dave had set up temporary headquarters in a small adobe house just outside the tiny, three-hundred-population city. At nine o’clock, as he had done every night for a week, he planted himself before the little shortwave set. He switched it on and settled the headphones against his ears.
But this night his thoughts strayed. He kept thinking of Helen Lodge. Just why it meant so much to him that she thought him a would-be swindler, he could not say.
When he let his mind rest on Brand Kaley—bluff, red-faced, military in bearing—his ideas became more definite. Dave’s shoulder muscles bunched at the fascinating thought of finding Kaley alone out on the desert some day. Just the two of them— A lot of old grievances would lose their razor edge when Dave walked back from the reckoning.
It was not particularly surprising to him that Kaley was out here. A scientist and a fortune-hunter himself, Death Valley’s secret must have attracted him irresistibly. A cold sensation stole through his stomach when he asked himself if he could have followed Charles Weston back into the desert that last day—!
Then all at once, his thoughts exploded in wild confusion, as a faint whisper came through the ‘phones!
Instantly Dave was crouching over the receiver. His hand trembled on the controls as he tuned the signal in full force. His lips were dry, his breath rasping. After an eternity it came again—a little island of coherence amid a sea of static—a distant voice, that whispered:
“Dave! Dave, I’m calling you. Do you hear me? It’s . . .”
The voice faded back into nothingness. A sob of desperation choked the scientist.
With the palms of his hands he forced the earphones tight against his head. “Louder, Dad!” he whispered. “I can’t make it out.”
As if in answer, his father’s voice swelled back, the words so distorted that Weston could catch only infrequent phrases.
“—week I’ve tried . . . reach you,” Dave made it out. “This will be . . . final attempt. Terrible danger . . . send more. If you hear . . . listen closely.”
Dave’s whole body was racked with tension. Then he was straining to hear as the voice from the unknown filtered weakly through the wires.
“I have found meteorite. At least, what we believed a meteorite. It lies in a valley you . . . never find. There is wealth untold . . . for taking. But taking means death!
“Do not come here, Dave! This is valley of death. Those who enter must stay. The very air . . . deadly.”
Dave’s reflexes leaped like jerked cords as a loud, singing “spanggg” broke through his father words. Fear bathed his limbs icily.
The voice resumed more distinctly, but this time there was stark terror edging the tones. “They have seen me! I must go back now, for the last time. I hope you have heard, though my batteries are all but dead. David, my last wish is that you shall never try to follow me. Because I mean this so sincerely, I will not tell you where Lost Valley is to be found.
“Before I go, I will try to explain briefly what has happened. Those who live here—”
Crash!
