Collected Tales (Jerry eBooks)

by Leslie F Stone

  We did not depend on our own eyes in this great race through space, but upon our vision screens. Our ship showed in the screen as a green dot while the other patrol ships showed as tiny red dots of light. The 356 was lined up in the center of our screen, but suddenly it disappeared from view. The dark bulk of the satellite hid it from view!

  l But here came the Patrol ship from Satellite IX, streaking into the view of our portholes converging toward the same point as we. Heliographic flashes flared from the side of the newcomer. It would have been impossible to use the radio transmitters without the pirates in the 356 knowing all that passed between us, but with them out of sight behind the moon we could depend upon the light flashes to keep our communications secret.

  Without question Small was expecting us to appear around the side of the satellite. We were certain he had taken a position in space where he could command the moon’s entire horizon, and the minute a ship should appear he would have blotted it out with his guns. At a glance it looked like checkmate for us. True, as soon as the bulldogs appeared on the scene we could have made a rush from all four points of the satellite and take the chance of one or two of the four pushing through his barrage, but we had no desire to lose any more men than we could help.

  Now as the trailing two-man flyers came up we heliographed the plan that Kildaire and the captain of the Satellite IX patrol ship had devised, and the two little ships plunged toward the moon before us. It would be their business to harrow the pirates by dancing around the moon just out of reach of their guns. Thus, we hoped to hold their attention, to fray their nerves by the antics of the flyers. That the pirates might become weary of that mirthless play had to be taken in account, but we hoped that the two smaller patrols could hold their attention until our two larger ships could strike.

  Side by side we darted away from the vicinity of the moon, outward, toward Satellite IX. Of course, the pirates would know of our desertion almost immediately, the dots on their vision plate would tell them, and puzzle them. They would suspect we were up to something, but with the two bulldogs harrowing them, we hoped they would have their hands too full to follow our course after the first half hour. Then, to keep us centered in the cross-hairs of the plates they would have to manipulate it, thus throwing away their chance to watch the bulldogs, and we doubted they would do that.

  Slowly the minutes marched by—thirty, forty, forty-one, forty-two, forty-three! Now we were certain that Small and his men were no longer following our flight, and we did a strange thing. We turned at right angles to our present course, describing a wide arc through the blackness of space. Again a long passage of time, and then we knew that we were in direct line with the dark-side of Satellite VIII, a little more than a million miles from the surface.

  Our vision plates told us all was well. The bulldogs were still holding the fort along the horizon of the satellite while the 356 lay above the moon’s equator, still hoping for a chance to flash one, or both of them, out with their long-distance guns. I could imagine the state of the nerves of the three within that ship. And unless they suspected our presence they would not dare to swing their “Eye” around to learn if anything lay behind them. The road was clear.

  Side by side our two ships fell toward the tiny world. We might have been hanging in space for all the motion we showed, but we could see the dark world gradually grow larger, encompass all space before us, blotting out what stars lay in its field. Now we were within a thousand miles, a second more and only 500 miles separated us. We half expected to see the momentary flash of light that would tell us that the renegades had launched a projectile toward us, but they were thoroughly unaware of our presence with their eyes glued on their own screen, waiting, hoping one of the bulldogs would make a false step and come within firing range along the limb of the moon.

  Now the blacker bulk of the ship came to view against the dark hue of the moon as it seemed to race upon us. Then there was an earth-shaking jar as the magnetic clamps of our two ships, perfectly timed, made contact with the renegade ship. We had captured the 356!

  Not a sound came from the bulldog caught between our sides. Powerless to move, her guns were useless against us; it was just a matter of surrender. We could easily tow the ship between us either to Satellite IX or to Io, but the best policy was to take our prisoners out of the 356 and put her own crew back in her. We switched our transmitter on, addressed the villains, waited for their answer.

  l For a moment there was only silence, then through the transmitter it sounded as if bedlam had been let loose in the 356. We heard a high-pitched scream that was Willa March’s voice, then some heavy cursing, more shrieks and gibberings. A shaken voice that I afterwards recognized as belonging to Jerry Treat broke upon our ears. “For God’s sake get us out of here! Small’s gone raving mad. He’s . . . he’s killing us all . . .” And there came the sound of gun-fire, then silence, a bullet had plowed through the transmitter.

  Bevel, who had heard that awful message, became wild at the thought of the girl in there. We could not act quickly enough for him, but there had to be a moment’s delay while we rigged up an air-tunnel between the airlocks of the 238 and the 356. The lock was clamped from the inside, but when we rapped heavily upon the door we heard hands fumbling there. The door burst open and a body fell at our feet.

  It was Beale, and never have I see a more horrible sight. His face was a bleeding blot of crimson, his clothes were in rags showing flesh that had been ripped away in ribbons. Bevel shoved past him while we dragged the poor devil out of the way. Willing hands picked him up carried him into the 238.

  The sounds from the 356 were terrible, and when we entered it it was in a shambles. In a corner, huddled beside the cracked transmitter was Treat while in a far corner crouched Willa March, her head lolling forward. She was in a dead faint. Her clothing was torn, there was a long scratch down one cheek, and we could see where a barricade of chairs she had piled around herself had been torn down. Bevel must have arrived just as the beast he was fighting had reached the girl.

  Small was quite unrecognizable. He looked as if he had been through a mill. Bevel had dug right into him, as they battled in the center of the room like two brutes. There were no rules. Fists, knees, elbows, feet and heads were used to best advantage. They clawed and bit like two beasts out of the jungle, and it appeared that Small was getting the best of it. He had a thumb jammed into Bevel’s right eye and he was doing his best to gouge it from the socket while with his other hand he was doing his best to break Bevel’s arm. Bevel had a scissors hold about Small’s middle, and his hands pressing against his forehead in an attempt to snap the back-bone.

  It was a question of which would have won, when suddenly Small slumped over, lifeless. Bevel did not seem to realize that it was over until we dragged him from under the dead-weight body of the ex-patrolman. Later, when we went over Small’s dead body we could not understand at first what had happened to him, but Thail brought forth an explanation.

  “It’s the poison of the Jovians. It must have been working through his blood all this time. It reached his brain and he went insane, then it reached a vital center, killed him. That’s how the poison kills. A Lilliputian dies within a few moments of brain-fever, but because of his big size it has taken all this while for the stuff to seep through Small’s big body.”

  When Miss March was aroused from her faint, after she had been carried to the 238, she verified the fact that Small had been acting strangely ever since they had left Jupiter. He had had strange moments when he did not seem to know where he was, what he was doing. He had floored Treat when he had tried to make some suggestion about navigation, and for no reason at all he had turned on Beale and clawed him, until Treat had to come to the rescue. After that he had grown strangely quiet, saying a word to no one, though he sat eyeing the girl in her corner where she squatted, from time to time.

  Then, when we captured the ship he had gone wholly mad, attacked Beale, and all but killed him. Then when Treat spoke through
the transmitter he had shot and killed the man who had been his friend and turned to Miss March. She had managed to hold him off with a chair within a minute of the opening of the air-lock, but Bevel had come through just as his hands had reached, her throat. There were the black and blue prints of his thick fingers on her neck.

  We covered the bodies of Treat and Small with sheets and Blaine took over the 356 while its captain, Dawson, because of his bad leg stayed on the 238 as we headed back toward Io. It was a sober crew that faced the trip to Headquarters. Miss March had been given a sedative and lay in one of the sleeping rooms while Bevel sat beside her holding her hand. Thail and the two scientists who had been rescued from Jupiter were in another room discussing the phenomenon of that world, planning, possibly, another expedition there.

  I sat thinking about Small and about another Gulliver who had discovered six-inch men, he only had lived to tell this tale . . .

  THE END

  [1] Note: The Inner and Outer Planet’s Unions were loosely held together by the Council of the Solar Worlds’ Federation. “Fed” is short for Federation.

  [2] A metal of Venus having a greater tensile strength than steel.

  [3] The thurla battery takes its name from the Martian acid which is used in its manufacture, and which is capable of sustaining a single electrical charge for six thousand hours, although individual storage batteries have been known to last a much longer time, while others have deteriorated much more quickly. Each battery, however, carries a six thousand hour guarantee.

  The Rape of the Solar System

  For some time we have hoped to have one of Miss Leslie Stone’s quite charming stories appear in our magazine. In this tale she deals with Pluto, the recently discovered planet, in its lonely orbit far outside of even Neptune’s path and then she takes us to Mercury, the planet nearest to the sun—but we must not tell the story in advance and we promise our readers a delightful bit of reading.

  NO one can know the thrill and elation that was ours on that adventurous day when Cart Ferris and I stepped within the Plutonian astronomical observatory. Words fail to express our emotions as we stood on that time-cracked floor and gazed, open-mouthed, at the giant telescope that pointed its five hundred foot barrel toward the skies; it was too far beyond our expectations.

  “You know what this means, Jerry?” asked Cart. “Life on Pluto? Gosh, I wish we could meet the guys that built that telescope. Look, the reflector’s easily two thousand feet across! Can you imagine the sights they saw in that!”

  Carefully, as if it were a precious jewel Cart wiped away the encrusted hoar frost that lay upon the giant mirror cracked now and discolored by untold ages. Hoar frost lay over everything of Pluto, gases frozen solid by the terrific pressure and cold. It crunched under our metal encased feet, hid the lineaments of the vast chamber, as it covered the ground outside the observatory, upon which we had accidentally stumbled.

  Certainly, we had not looked for the evidences of a past civilization upon Pluto. But it was here, in all its awesome wonder.

  “Life on Pluto,” mused Cart, “the outpost of the solar system. I wonder if they were men?”

  His words made us thoughtful as we considered the various types of life we had encountered during our years of vagabondage around the system, two foot-loose fellows with a wanderer’s itch. There had been the plant-men of Ganymede, the crawling things that had spawned upon Titan, the blind-bat creatures of Io, the diabolical red snakes of Hyperion. Yes, what type of life had Pluto fostered, that had conceived this monster telescope?

  Bare, except for the great instrument, the room told us nothing. The mechanisms, corroded, frost-covered, that had once controlled the telescope may have responded to any manner of hand, claw or talon. But it was evident that the creatures, who had reared the great machine and had ground that immense mirror, were of great scientific and mental development. Were they men?

  Our answer came sooner than we had dared to hope. Glancing about the chamber I descried the outline of a doorway etched in the hoar frost that cloaked one wall like an arras. Prying and probing with our crowbars we managed to yank open the heavy metal barrier, a heavy door eight feet high with a peculiar arch. Flashing our lights within, we stood peering into the room thus revealed, a small room.

  Something had lived in here at one time, something that had lived and breathed and felt the outside chill, for in the center of the room we saw the remains of a fire! There they were still, the sticks and ashes laid upon the bare stone floor, surmounted by a small stone-hard pot held in position by a tripod.

  Even now I can wonder that these mute evidences had remained through the ponderence of the centuries, but the cold had preserved them, preserved them in nature’s vast refrigerator. True, a light tap would shatter them like brittle glass, but they had withstood time long enough to tell us the sad story of that lonely observatory room.

  Nor were the fire-remains all the room held. Against one wall stood an immense clothes chest, and there was a table, square and heavy upon which stood several odd shaped dishes of some strange uncorrosive metal, beside a beautifully artistic lamp, all encased as everything was here, in hoar frost. And there was a pallet bed, long and narrow, its comforts gone, only its metal frame, gaunt and brittle, standing unoccupied.

  ALL this we saw in the first gleam of light. Cart had gone directly to the table to pick up the dishes in his mailed hand, gingerly. He wiped away the frost carefully, holding up one dish for me to see. “Look at this carving, Jerry. It’s the most . . .”

  But he never finished his thought, for I was suddenly screaming his name, pointing at the thing that had startled me as I turned my flash into the opposite comer of the room.

  It lay sprawled half atop a small curved-top chest, feet caught under it, arms thrown across the chest, head upon one out-stretched arm. Shrouded it was in frozen icicles that threw back our light beams in dozens of unearthly colors, but we could make out the form easily—the lineaments of a man! The last man of Pluto!

  Together, as if in a trance, the pair of us tip-toed to the figure’s side. Yes, tip-toed. Unconsciously, my hand slipped toward my head before I recalled that my hat-holder was enclosed in the helmet of my space-controller.

  “A man,” breathed Cart softly, “genus homo sapiens . . .”

  He got down on a knee and trained the flash upon the figure’s face. It was difficult to determine the form of the features under its covering of frost. “Shall-lll we wi-pe off the fro-st?” I wanted to know, entirely unashamed of my awe.

  Cart, who usually made decisions for both of us, knelt in silence several moments as he studied the body. “Guess it won’t hurt. This fellow’s frozen stiffer than a block of ice. S’funny thing. Must have fallen here and frozen to death . . .”

  “You don’t think it’s a statue, do you?”

  “Hum—might be, at that, but s’funny place to put one, if you ask me. Somehow—I’ve the feeling that it was alive once upon a time. You know, if a man died in a sub-zero temperature, and it kept getting colder and colder there isn’t any reason why he shouldn’t continue to exist like this. You know, back home, they still find mammoths frozen in glaciers, meat fresh, hair in place, and maybe 25,000 to 50,000 years old for all we know. Come on, kid, we’ll take a look . . .”

  It was an eerie job removing the scintillating icicles from that face, a face a little blurred as the flesh had sunk and shrunk through the ages. But blurred though it was, we could not miss the serenity of its beauty, the clean symmetry of the high forehead, the straight sweep of the high bridged nose, the fine molding of the lips, the clean-cut line of the jaw. It was the face of a man of strong purpose, of high intelligence.

  The color of the skin was like old, well-tanned leather, but whether the color was due to its frozen state or was natural, we could not tell, no more than we could guess at the color of the eyes beneath their closed lids, set in sunken sockets. The hair, some of which came away with the frost, was as white as driven snow, as were the cur
ved eyebrows, and the remains of a flowing beard.

  “He was an old man when he died, Jerry, but I wonder why he died here, stretched across this chest instead of in that bed over there? Looks like he was still hale and hearty when he passed out . . .”

  “Maybe he died protecting that chest from someone—or something . . .” I put in, and then realized how silly my words sounded as Cart answered.

  “Sure, and in that case the chest would be gone. I guess, when he felt the end coming, he merely crawled over here—to caress the most precious thing he possessed . . .”

  “HUH? Say, in that case don’t you think we ought to take a peep-see, and find out what was so precious about it?”

  “Sure. Here—give me a hand, see if we can move him . . .”

  Gently, so as not to break the brittle body we partly lifted it. Cart shoved the chest aside, and then, with utmost care, we lowered the body to the floor. However, due to the position in which it had frozen, it could not lay flat, and rather than take a chance that it would crack in two, I got the pot from the fire place, and we put that under the breast and head so that the old fellow remained in the same position in which we found him. Then we turned to the casket.

  It was highly carved, in bold relief. Connoisseurs who go in for that sort of thing have since raved over the workmanship displayed, the beautiful simplicity of its lines, the delicacy of its artistry, but Cart and I were only curious about what it held that could have been so precious to the old man.