by Earl
The first officer nodded almost imperceptibly. Captain Robey turned back to his chart with an expression of disgust. His voice came to them, although they could not see his face. “Afraid to die—the both of you. Fearing that inevitable end of existence that all men fear. I don’t look at death as something to fear. My only concern is that I die in honor, discharging my duty as best I can—a man to the last breath! When it comes is unimportant.”
Chesloe stared at the back of the captain’s head as though striving to pierce into his mind and fathom his peculiar philosophy of life and death. But he gave up in bewilderment.
“That’s your viewpoint!” gasped the little man. “But what about us? What about your men? You can’t follow your own steel code without a thought for others! You must dump cargo! Yes, I overheard your conversation with Sorrel on that; the phone was open. You must dump cargo!”
The captain whirled in livid fury. “Never! We go back to Zarnovillo with full cargo, dead or alive! I am master of this ship!”
“Not a master—an insane tyrant!” screamed Chesloe, his nerves snapping brittlely. “You should be behind bars as a monomaniac, one who thinks he dominates slaves instead of free men. What cold reasoning can stack a cargo against ten human lives!”
The captain’s huge bulk loomed suddenly over the little professor, fist upraised. Chesloe choked but did not flinch. Somehow, there was something of amazement, as well as fury, in the captain’s eyes. Sorrel stepped between, gray eyes level with those of the captain.
“I wouldn’t try that, sir,” said the first officer firmly.
Robey relaxed. “Still for the underdog, eh? First Liska, then him—I suppose next the crew will go woman. Get out, both of you!”
Sorrel half dragged the little professor from the room, and took him aft to the bunk room.
“I’m not afraid,” spluttered Chesloe, sinking to a bunk. “Not afraid to die. But I can’t see anything as unhuman as Robey, willing to sacrifice life so cheaply—to a senseless, meaningless code. Isn’t there anything we can do?”
“About the captain? No. He’s boss with a capital ‘b.’ I have to side with him whatever my personal opinion. But he’s not insane, Chesloe. It’s just his passion for the system whose cold standards he’s followed for forty years. His heart has become cold and hard, tempered by bleak space itself—but I have to admire him!”
“What about the crew?” asked Chesloe. “Do you think all those men will take it so calmly, when they find out?”
“That’s what I wonder,” said Sorrel, his face moody. Without a further word he tumbled himself into a bunk, falling asleep with the hardened ease of the inveterate spaceman. Chesloe laid himself down presently, trying hard to forget the corpse in the corner bunk.
EVERY THREE HOURS a buzzer signal rasped harshly in every part of the ship. It was the relief change. Spacemen slept three hours out of every nine. First Officer Sorrel gulped down his tasteless biscuits, dry but highly nutritious, and made his way forward. As he passed from the officers’ bunk room into the main companionway, he heard a subdued murmur coming from aft, and the sound of clumping shoes. Sorrel whistled to himself and fairly ran toward the captain’s cabin.
He entered precipitately. “Your pardon, sir, but the crew is coming forward!”
Captain Robey made an instinctive movement toward his hip holster. Sorrel noticed with something of a shock that a pistol stock stuck above the leather. Captains armed themselves only in very alarming circumstances. But then, crews came from aft, in a body, only in equally precarious situations.
“Sandy” McQuale was at the head, grim-faced. Behind him was his full complement, seven men. Their faces had a half-abashed, half-determined look. Sandy stepped a little way into the cabin. The men clustered in the doorway.
“Spit it out!” growled the captain without preamble.
“Begging your pardon,” began the Scotch engineer mildly, “for thus intruding in your office——”
“Get to the point,” commanded Robey coldly.
“Well, my men,” continued McQuale, “are getting a bit restless, wondering what is going on forward, and what all is in the wind for us aboard this ship. Plague take it, I assures them again and again it’s simply a little off-course matter, but they want assurance, sir, from your own mouth, begging your, pardon.”
Captain Robey burst out into a roar. “Assurance of what? You men are tending the engines, not cracking your brains about course! That’s my work and Sorrel’s. Your job is to keep your engines going, whether I pilot you to hell and back!”
“Oh, we understand that, sir,” said Sandy calmly. “But this trip being a bit different from the others, my men were sort of wondering if they could find out——”
“We want plain figures on the return course——”
“And whether we have to dump cargo!”
Two voices from among the crew had supplied the words which McQuale had been loath to use.
Robey’s face went red. His eyes glanced accusingly at the first officer. Sorrel whitened in rage and gripped the handrail in back of him fiercely. The captain thought.
“Before you dump cargo,” said Robey, his voice crackling through the tense silence, “you must dump my dead body! Now get back to your jobs, every man of you!”
Something of a growl came from the massed figures. Quite by accident McQuale stumbled forward, pushed off balance by an inadvertent elbow from behind. Like a flash Robey whipped out his pistol, leveled it.
SOMETHING seemed to snap in the laconic Scotchman at the sight of the pistol so coldly aimed at him. “You may as well know, Captain Robey, that my men know we’re short of fuel—mighty short. One of them spoke to Liska before he died; Liska gave him the plain facts. To be brief, captain, it’s dump cargo and——”
“Yes, dump cargo!” came a chorus from behind the engineer.
Robey’s beefy face ran a spectrum of colors and finally became dead-white. A tempestuous rage smeared his features into a mask of devilish fury. Sorrel, at his side, clutched his arm. Robey shook him off fiercely, took a step forward, menacing the men with his pistol.
There was a flurry of movement among the men facing the gun. Long hours of brooding and talking over the grim doom facing them had given rise to desperation. Sandy flung his arms wide, tried to block the forward surge of maddened men. Sorrel’s eyes widened as he saw a smaller figure pushing forward among the men.
In split second action Captain Robey, with a sneer on his face, had aimed. First Officer Sorrel made a useless dive for the gun. A shot rang out, but the bullet that was meant for the mutinous crew lodged itself in another heart.
Professor Chesloe, a stunned surprise on his face, staggered forward. Sorrel caught his falling body. Captain Robey stood with the smoking pistol, bewildered. McQuale and his men remained frozen at the door.
“How—how did this happen?” gasped the captain.
Professor Chesloe straightened in Sorrel’s arms, resisting his effort to carry him away; his pinched face, a deathly white, raised to the captain.
“I’m not afraid to die, captain,” he whispered, a tiny smile twisting his lips. “That’s your code, isn’t it—not to fear death? Just so it comes with honor?”
“Lord!” Robey could say no more.
Chesloe made a strange little whimper, and spoke again: “Not to fear death—with honor—good code—captain——”
He tried bravely to say more, but a welling of blood filled his mouth. Death sealed his eyes and lips. And in that minute between the shot and the little man’s death, some metamorphosis went on in Captain Robey’s mind.
“Yes,” he said, after a long, unbroken silence. “Yes, a good code—but the price——”
A fire seemed to die in Robey’s hard eyes. Presently he said, in a strange tone: “We dump cargo! What cold reasoning——”
He was thinking, of course, of the little professor’s own words. The men at the door coughed, staring at the bowed head of the captain, waiting for definite
orders to toss out the cargo. But Robey had more to say.
“He wasn’t afraid to die, was he? He gave his life for you, men, remember that. It was mutiny from a crew of white-livered cowards, and the bravest man aboard ship had to die. All right, get out! Mr. Sorrel, superintend in the cargo hold. It’s my orders, so you won’t be held for it at port.”
The first officer watched the men file away—both subdued at the death of Chesloe, and overjoyed at the thought of being saved from a ghastly fate. Sorrel had stayed to say something, but the captain frowned forbiddingly, tersely commanding him to go. Down in the hold the crew sweated with a will, packing the sundry boxes and bales in the side locks where a man in a space suit methodically shoved them free of the ship.
Sorrel, in charge of the work, heard the faint shot from forward. He knew, too, what it signified.
The Edison limped into port two weeks later, minus a cargo, captain, pilot, and the lone passenger she had carried leaving Jove Station. Somewhere out in the brooding void floated what had been in her hold, and not far away three gray-shrouded bodies. For it was bad luck, as the crew agreed, to carry back to port any person dying en route.
First Officer Sorrel, protected from stigma by the captain’s official log, absolving him from connection with the release of cargo, stared back into the gloomy space from which he had just come. He had just gone through one tiny chapter in the saga of space travel. He felt that now, more than ever, had the pitiless code of man’s advent into space fastened itself to him.
1936
THE CRYSTAL CURSE
A veritable weird rhapsody in blue is this fascinating story of dual personality and a man who bridged the gulfs between the dimensions of space
l Here is another fascinating weird tale by the two talented Binder brothers, Earl end Otto, who write their delectable stories under the pen name Eando (E. and O.) Binder. This symphony in blues is one of the most striking tales that the brothers Binder have ever hammered out on their typewriter, and we commend it to your attention, knowing that you will enjoy it. The illustration on the opposite page is the work of still a third brother in this talented family: John (“Jack”) Binder.
MY COUSIN, the writer of the following words, died insane—or so say the doctors. I wish I could believe them. In his last conscious moments before he died of thrombosis—insane or not—he whispered to me of a sealed envelope among his personal belongings. The envelope was addressed to me, his closest living relative; the carefully written sheets it contained were excerpts from his diary. My wife points out that for material from a diary, it is oddly bookish—descriptive and full of narrative. She thinks George made it up, a last outcropping of his small success as a writer. She agrees with the hospital diagnosis of his mental condition at the time of death, and long preceding. I wish I could.
* * * * * * *
EXCERPT from the diary of George Borland, dated August 3rd: It has been another of these sultry dog-days, and even now, at close to midnight, the air is still clammy and warm. Well, nothing important happened today. No, nothing of importance except—silly to think of it, but I have had a most strange experience—in a dream. I will put it down, probably to laugh at it sometime in the future.
Came home from the office listless, no doubt because of the humid weather. I had the evening free of any sort of appointment, so I peeled off most of my clothes, turned the radio on and the lights off, and stretched my lanky form over the sofa. In this state of semi-comfort, with but the faintest of breezes from the open window to relieve my sweating body, I lay with a mind as blank as clean sheets of paper. The radio program barely impinged on my laggard senses.
It was the moonlight, streaming in through die open window like a flood of liquid silver, that first attracted me to the sapphire in my watch-fob. Sparkling eerily in the moonlight, it seemed to draw me—to intrigue me. Or maybe it was imagination.
The fob, I suppose, had slipped from my vest pocket when I draped my suit over the back of a chair. The faint breeze tugged at the leather-weave strand to which it was attached, and the motion it imparted to the fob caused the stone to twinkle oddly with shafts of blue and indigo and violet. Then I had it in my hand, unconscious almost of having reached for it, and was peering at it closely. Near to my eye, it seemed, instead of glinting, to be merely glowing, like a tiny patch of sunlit sky. Idly I turned it over in my hand, trying to count its many facets. I gave that up wearily but then noticed, on peering still closer, that there were clusters of almost invisible bubbles immersed in its crystal-clear depths.
Gazing into the lambent heart of the sapphire, I felt my eyes grow heavy. It seemed that I made an effort to tear myself away from the hypnotic influence of the scintillations, and that some power—oh, it’s silly, I know—but it seemed some external power, or will, held my eyes to the stone. . . .
Suddenly I was in a bath of violet-blue fog that shimmered like tinsel, engulfing me completely. I had the sensation of sinking, drifting feather-like, through endless layers of cerulean mists, as though being sucked into the depths of a deep lake. It was rather a pleasant and strange sensation. Strata upon strata of blueness eddied past me, exhibiting every shade and tone of that color there could possibly be. I began to feel the exuberance a bird must feel, circling the vaults of the sky.
Then, with an abruptness that shook my nerves, I found myself lying supine in a place strange to me. There was a redolence of earthiness in my nostrils. By the help of a dim luminescence that seemed to radiate from the solid ceiling of clay and earth, my eyes distinguished the details of this queer place. The chamber was roughly oblong, not more than twenty feet long and but half as wide and deep. One end was blank wall, but the other bore the outline of a doorway.
Jerking myself to a sitting position, I stared about, perplexed. My body lay, or had lain, full length on a bedding of finespun cloth of peculiar texture, which covered a rude wooden cot. Besides this there was no other article of furniture in the chamber except a small three-legged table on which reposed several objects of bone and tinted metal, strangely shaped, and beside them a thick book of crude construction. Dust covered everything and spiders had spun their webs in every corner. But my body was clean and free of dust, and also the big book on the table.
FOR a moment I stared around in amazement; I had the feeling that I knew the place—had seen it before. The sensation passed quickly, and in its stead came a subtle dread. What eery cavern was this? What was the meaning of my presence in it? Tomb-like in its aspect, it chilled my heart. My scalp tingled.
And then in the utter silence I thought I heard echoes of strange voices. The ghostly light from the walls and ceiling seemed to flicker now and then on shadowy forms which had no material substance.
In sudden unreasoning fear, I leaped from the low couch, possessed of but one thought—to get to the open air from this sepulchral underground chamber. I stumbled to the door and beat it frantically with clenched fists, shouting wildly. The reverberations of my own voice thundered in my ears till I was giddy from the noise of it. I leaned against the wall at one side, panting, and again there was a flash—like a twinkle of light in a rolling fog—of a previous memory of my surroundings. Suddenly calm after my panic-stricken outburst, I perceived that the door was equipped with a small handle.
Turning it, and putting my shoulder to the wood, I shoved the ponderous portal wide, to find beyond it an inky blankness. I shuddered in dismay. It looked like no more than the gateway to some vast depth of empty space.
But it offered my only chance to escape the place, and with reckless bravery I plunged into the gloom, feeling my way along one clammy wall. Like a corridor in the heart of a lightless world, it stretched endlessly to my unnumbered footsteps, till over my shoulder the doorway of the chamber I had left dwindled to a tiny ruby glow. How like a horrible nightmare, and yet how vividly undream-like it was!
A cold sweat chilled my forehead as I pictured fancied dangers before me. I stopped now and then, trembling in uncertain terror. Gh
astly echoes of un-namable things from unknown throats seemed to whisper in my tingling ears, as though mocking my futile progress.
HOW long I wandered along this midnight passageway, reeling in mind and body, I do not know; but finally I met a barrier of wood. Eagerly I felt for the outline of the doorway—if door it was—and my hands clutched a handle.
Swinging outward, the heavy door, fully as ponderous as the other had been, brought with its opening a blessed wave of fresh, cool air. I staggered through into a roughly circular chamber from whose one side high up came shafts of bright light. Blinking in the sudden radiance, I ran to where a stairway hewn in stone led upward to the source of the light. In another moment I had parted thick bushes which hid the entrance and stood in the open air.
Panting and shaking, I stared about me. I found myself by the side of a road; overhead hung a pall of leaden blue sky. The horizon was obscured in all directions by a haze similar to early morning mists, but hauntingly different in some respects. The shroud in the sky was uniform, and gave an immediate suggestion of oppression: it seemed to press down, to limit—to be slowly and relentlessly closing in. Something of panic again seized me, and I tried to pierce the azure mists which hemmed me in, for a chance glimpse of something familiar by which to get my bearings.
My immediate vicinity seemed to be entirely meadowland, whose luxuriant grasses covered the ground with a brilliant green carpet. Farther in the distance, half-way around the horizon, were forests, seemingly of the fir variety, as though this were northern land. My eyes dropped to the road near which I stood, and I saw it was paved with crude wooden blocks.
This road wound erratically as my vision followed it, but remained entirely in view, as though ascending. Then I saw, looming ghost-like in the blue pall, a huge castle, not more than a mile away. Although it was obscured in detail, I could distinguish the serrate outline of the great structure, with its many spires, watch-towers, and abutments. It reminded me of medieval castles of Europe I had seen pictured, yet had the same surreptitious, haunting difference that everything else here seemed to have from the normal objects they resembled.
