The Collected Stories

by Earl

  The second stick that landed flung jagged blocks of stone from the nearest building, ramming the ship mercilessly.

  The third stick tore the roof of the next building gapingly open, revealing the golden room in which Ramon had taunted them the day before. Cur wood allowed himself to believe that it had ripped Ramon to bloody shreds.

  The fourth stick struck the huge sun-engine, its explosive force trebled by some fulmination within the quartz globes that released itself with tornadic violence.

  Curwood then thought of himself, and sent the ship upward. At the top of a swift climb, he twisted his head and looked down. A pall of dust had settled over the scene of upflung debris. He could not see what pandemonium reigned below. Then his eyes popped open.

  Something more was happening. The towering eastern wall of the valley, a sheer mass of rock, slowly split from its matrix and hurtled down into the valley. The dynamite blasts had begun a minor geologic cataclysm, through vibration and concussion. Curwood had a confused impression of the rest. He saw the upstanding lip of the valley’s western side also teeter as great cracks appeared in the shuddering rock. A mighty thunder rumbled up from the scene as mountainous masses shifted, trembled, crashed. Curwood could not even hear the powerful roar of his propeller.

  A half hour later, still circling, he gazed down on what looked like a great meteoric crater. His eyes were dazed at what they had witnessed. Innumerable tons of rock and dirt covered what had once been a teeming city. Nothing wrought by the hand of man showed through that jumbled earth-heap. It was unlikely that one single soul had escaped.

  “God!” Curwood whispered to himself. “All those past-century men—Aletha’s people—destroyed! But better so perhaps—”

  An hour later, after parking the plane again and trudging back to the valley’s crest, Tom Curwood approached with bated breath. Who was the one that had been saved of the five—

  His heart almost stopped beating as a tremulous cry came to him. A moment later, enfolding Aletha in his arms, he touched her golden hair wonderingly.

  “Came here looking for gold,” he murmured. “Found it!”

  Then, ashamed of himself for the thought, he strode with her to the top of the slope and looked down into the vast ruin. He started suddenly. Something was moving on the slope, above the level of debris. It was Rand, crawling painfully on hands and knees!

  Curwood ran down to him, picked him up in his strong arms. Rand’s skin was blackened and blistered.

  “I’ll live!” he mumbled. “They must have turned the beam away too soon. . . . Great job you did, Tom—great—” Allan Rand fainted then, in his friend’s arms. Curwood trudged up the slope with his limp body. He and Aletha would nurse him back to life.

  Tom Curwood glanced back once over his shoulder. Valley of Blue Mist was buried forever. Never would the world of man know, or believe—

  [1] The ship used by Rand and Curwood is a Douglas DC-2 Transport. Normally, this ship has a passenger cabin 26′4″ long, 6′3″ high, and 5′6″ wide, fitted with seat accommodations for fourteen passengers. By removing the seats, a marvelous flying laboratory was constructed.

  The ship is powered by two supercharged, geared Wright Cyclone air-cooled engines, each rated at 760 h.p. at 2,100 r.p.m. at 5,800ft. It has a fuel capacity of 510 gallons (U.S.) and 38 gallons of oil. Each motor operates a controllable pitch, three-bladed metal airscrew.

  It has retractable undercarriage, full swivelling tail unit, two oleo shock-absorber units, and two hydraulic brakes.

  Constructed of high-tension strength aluminum alloy, its wing span is 85 ft., its length 16 ft. 3¾ in. and its height 16 ft. ¾ in. Its useful load is 6,152 lbs. and total weight, loaded, 18,560 lbs. Maximum speed 210 m.p.h. cruising speed (at 8000 ft.) 190 m.p.m., landing speed 62 m.p.m., and rate of climb 1,000 ft/min., service ceiling 22,450 ft.—Jane’s All The World’s Aircraft, 1937.

  [2] All through the legends of ancient Atlantis and Lemuria are references to these mysterious ships that apparently used no motors with moving parts, or any known means of propulsion. They were not rocket ships, because the most significant feature of their operation was their complete silence. However, according to the majority of legends, they were powerless to ascend to very great heights, and their ceiling seemed to be in the neighborhood of 600 feet. Thus, the ship of the Ancients in the valley must have been an improvement over the original Atlantean ships.—Ed.

  THE IMPOSSIBLE WORLD

  Vandals of the Void, Dedicated to the Conquest of Nine Planets, Reach Across Infinity with Science-Sped Armadas!

  CHAPTER I

  Saturn’s Satellite

  THE space ship Tycho, of the Planetary Survey Bureau, came down bouncingly on its retractable landing wheels of thick, spongy neo-rubber that even the cold of space could not harden. A blast of the retarding rockets prevented it from rolling too far over jagged, crystalline rooks strewn along the narrow valley between two cliffs, picked as the most promising landing field.

  Pilot Mark Traft cursed. There hadn’t been much choice in the matter, what with the whole blasted satellite as torn up in appearance as a battlefield. It had almost been a matter of closing your eyes and lowering away with your fingers crossed, hoping for the best. Yet he hadn’t done that. He had applied all of his skill as a class-A pilot. The ship came to rest, safely.

  Unhooking the broad seat-straps, he came to his feet and rose to his full height of six-feet-five. He was proportionately as broad-shouldered, with great hands and powerful arms. Muscles bulged beneath his natty uniform.

  Blond-haired, he was a reincarnated Viking in all aspects save one—his face. That, incongruously, had been stamped by Nature in a kindly, good-natured mold, and his complexion was as smoothly fair as a girl’s, much to his secret disgust. Nor had he ever been able to raise a camouflaging mustache or, when he left off shaving for a time, more than a scraggly reddish beard.

  He pressed his face against a flawless port plate of artificial diamond, looking out.

  This was Iapetus, eighth moon of Saturn, revolving at a distance of 2,200,000 miles from its ringed primary. A bitter, isolated little world it obviously was, whose dawn was lit only by the feeble rays of a sun nine hundred million miles away.

  Its atmosphere, he knew, was thin, frigid. Its gloomy surface, as much as he could see of it, was a jumbled, scaly waste of barren mineral plains and some few agelessly frozen lakes. It was a desolate scene; one to chill the eye and heart of a living observer.

  YET Earthmen were about to carry their interplanetary exploits to this wayward member of the Solar System, in the year 2050 A.D., a hundred years after the advent of space travel. There was a thriving colony on Titan, largest moon of Saturn, two million miles away, and a fueling outpost on Rhea. Exploring ships had already touched on Iapetus and noted its rich beds of beryllium ore.

  “Pretty deserted-looking place,” commented Greeley, the co-pilot, also unstrapping himself. He stood six feet, but was dwarfed by the gigantic Traft. He went on, his eyes rather bleak: “Not much of the disease of life, as the poets put it, here. Not even insects!”

  “There’s some plant life—looks like moss,” commented Traft. “Evolution barely got a start here!”

  Back of them, the rest of the ship’s list of ten men were making similar observations. Somehow, the less of life a world displayed, the more inhospitable it appeared. Even a hotbed of horrible monsters would have been preferable to this stony, barren stretch.

  “However, we’ll go out armed,” said Captain Harvey, commander of the expedition.

  As a wise and experienced leader in the Survey Service, he knew that on alien worlds unknown dangers oftentimes lurked just beyond one’s nose.

  “Men”—he addressed the whole group—“you know what we’re here for. Survey of mineral deposits. All previous expeditions, in the past few years, reported extensive beryllium ores. That makes this satellite a sort of treasure-chest.”

  He waved his arms as though indicating mountainou
s heaps of wealth. True, in a sense, for beryllium, forming the lightest and strongest of alloys, had become the most useful metal in that age of interplanetary travel.

  “The Mineral Exploitation Bureau,” he went on, “would have come around to it sooner, except that this satellite is so damnably far out of the way. As it stands, Saturn is the practical outpost of present-day earthly traffic in the Solar System. And Iapetus here, being so remote from the primary, is about the farthest frontier so far achieved. But now that Titan and Rhea have good fueling stations and docks for ore freighters, Iapetus is ripe for the plucking. Man is bringing another world to his doorstep!”

  HE glanced around, knowing that all the men felt the inner glow that comes to the explorer who realizes he is the first of a cavalcade of settlers, workers and builders, who will come later on.

  “For the survey work,” the captain went on, “you are all under the orders of Hugh Benning, our mineralogist. And now we’ll get into vac-suits and venture out. All except Traft and Greeley. You two will remain within the ship, as guard.”

  The rest of the men struggled into their vac-suits of neo-rubber. The two pilots helped them clamp the neck fittings of their helmets and clipped oxygen bottles to their belts.

  “By the way, Captain Harvey,” Hugh Benning said, “this atmosphere has always been reported breathable, by other expeditions. Cold and thin, of course, but fresh and pleasant. No harmful effects after an hour.”

  “I know,” the captain nodded. “We’ll try it later, but only after a volunteer has breathed it for fifteen minutes before the rest do. Get that, men? Keep your helmets closed until I give the word!”

  Finally the eight vac-suited figures clumped out with their lead-weighted shoes and the air-lock hissed shut behind them. Traft and Greeley watched half enviously as their companions wandered about outside, enjoying the feeling of freedom, after the cramped quarters of the cabin. That was always a thrill to space voyagers.

  A few minutes later Benning, evidently having volunteered to try the air, was seen to unfasten the slit covering that allowed the outside air to reach his lungs. His suit promptly deflated, as the outside pressure was greatly lower. He turned off his oxygen bottle, subsisting entirely by the satellite’s atmosphere. A normal man, avoiding exertion, could breathe such stratosphere-thin air for a limited period of time without ill effects.

  “Bet that air has a bite to it,” Traft shivered, glancing at the thermo-scale that showed the outside temperature at minus 102 degrees. The overhead, midget sun did little to dispel such cold. “But of course he has the nose tube warming coils taking most of the chill out.”

  “Lucky guy!” sighed Greeley. “Bottled air always tastes so stale after a few hours.”

  A click sounded in the stillness of the ship. Traft was training a small, compact camera—a marvel of perfection that took colored pictures under almost any conditions—out of the port, snapping the outside scenery.

  “A candid camera fiend, if there ever was one,” Greeley said, grinning. “The breed hasn’t died out in a hundred years.”

  “It’s a great hobby,” said Traft simply. “I have pictures taken on ten worlds, and I’m proud of the collection.”

  The group outside strode to the top of a low hillock overlooking the surrounding territory. Benning kneeled suddenly, grabbing up handsful of coarse soil to peer at it closely. He seemed startled and was evidently telling the others what a fortune in ore lay at hand.

  “It’s a wonder private interests haven’t been here,” Traft reflected aloud, “to sneak away a few million dollars’ worth, as they did on Callisto. Remember that case, some years ago? They got away with a fortune in radium ore before Government exploitation moved in.”

  Captain Harvey’s deep voice issued startlingly from the radio speaker, kept open and tuned to his helmet radio.

  “TRAFT,” called the captain, “we are making our way to the nearest cliff, at the right. Benning suggests the richest deposits may be there. We are all breathing the air now. Very sweet and fresh. Keep the radio open.”

  “Aye, sir!” said Traft.

  Then he and Greeley, from the aft port, watched the party move toward the sharp, upflung cliff to the right from the ship’s nose. They could make out the cliff’s details easily, no more than a quarter-mile away. At the base of it showed the black, uneven cut-out of a natural cave leading into the solid rock. Anemic sunlight failed to penetrate within its depths.

  The exploring party had seen the cave, too. They were approaching it, with the curiosity that all men have for the mysterious. Guns up in instinctive wariness, they clambered to its mouth and peered in. Benning climbed to a flat, overhanging lip for a closer look.

  To the two watching pilots there was no thought of danger. A deserted world, uninhabited by inimical life-forms, could offer little uncertainty. Their stay on Iapetus promised to be as routine and safe as on the more well known planets.

  And then it came!

  They saw the men out there stagger drunkenly, then start to stumble toward the ship, fumbling at their open visors. Their movements were stiff, awkward.

  “Something’s happened!” gasped Greeley in startled alarm.

  Traft, moving with tigerish swiftness for all of his size, was already at the radio, shouting info it.

  “Captain Harvey! What’s wrong? What—”

  “Something—freezing—choking us!” came back the captain’s hoarse tones. And more weakly: “Gas—cold—in the air! Traft, Greeley—help!”

  The voice died away in a strangling moan. The men were dropping now, one after another, bouncing like rubber balls in the light gravity. They twisted convulsively. Traft and Greeley glanced at one another for an instant of horrified wonder.

  “Vac-suits!” roared Traft, whirling to the rear supply compartment.

  They fairly dived into their vac-suits, snapped the oxygen valves, and entered the lock. They plunged from it a moment later and bounded for the fallen men. Exerting full muscular effort in the reduced gravity, they were able to cover the quarter-mile in less than a minute. The fallen men were lying still now, with eyes closed behind their visors.

  Traft knelt at the side of Captain Harvey and quickly unstrapped his leaden shoe weights. He did the same for another, then picked up the limp bodies, one under each arm. He was still able to run faster than he could have on Earth, carrying nothing but his own weight. Greeley followed with two more of the stricken men.

  They made another hurried trip, but Greeley came back with only one man. Inside the cabin he hastily unfastened his visor. “Benning is missing!” he shouted at Traft. “He must have fallen into the cave mouth!”

  Traft nodded grimly, grabbed up a hand flash and dashed out again. Greeley wriggled out of his vac-suit and began stripping the others.

  TRAFT returned in a few minutes, his face strained. “Benning is lost!” he announced with a note of finality. “That cave is a monstrous place, full of pits that haven’t any visible bottom.” He shrugged, not with indifference, but with hopelessness.

  “Good Lord!” groaned the co-pilot. But he was staring numbly at the bodies of the rescued men. “They aren’t even breathing! They’re d—” He gulped, unable to bring the word out.

  “Not necessarily!” snapped Traft, though his eyes held the daze of shock. “They were exposed only a short time to whatever was in the air. People don’t die so suddenly, even when their hearts stop beating and their lungs collapse. They found that out back in the Twentieth Century. We’ve got to hurry, though. Slip an oxygen mask over their faces and pump their diaphragms like you would for a drowned person. Come on, we’ve got work to do.”

  They labored like slaves at this, changing from one limp form to another, hoping to revive them all. But no signs of returning life rewarded them. No color came to the faces that seemed drained of all blood. The clammy fingers of fear gripped their hearts.

  Gradually the hopelessness of it stole into their minds, but they doggedly continued their efforts, unwill
ing to admit defeat. Several hours later, dog-weary and with aching muscles, they stared at one another pantingly.

  “They’re dead!” Greeley declared, shudderingly. His voice held a grating edge from frayed nerves.

  Traft looked haggard. But his eyes were puzzled. He raised the arm of one of the limp forms. Then he released it. The arm dropped back loosely.

  “No rigor mortis!” he whispered hoarsely.

  “What do you mean?” gasped Greeley.

  The giant pilot sprang up. “This is a case for the Extra-Terra Bio-Institute!” Sudden resolve flared in his eyes. “The sooner we get there, the better. We’ll refuel at Titan and head for Earth.”

  “What good will that do?” moaned Greeley. “It’ll take at least four or five days to get there. By that time they’ll be dead for sure, if they aren’t already.”

  “Maybe they aren’t—and won’t be!”

  Traft stared down at the bodies queerly, trying to tell himself he was mad for the thought. Yet his pulses hammered with an insistent hope that he might be right. He leaped for the pilot seat.

  As Iapetus receded from their thundering rockets Traft set a course for the tiny disc of Titan near the sweeping curve of Saturn’s rings. He found it easier to stare out at the star-peppered firmament than back at the seven still figures strapped in their bunks. And the thought of Benning, lying broken at the bottom of some measureless pit—

  The big pilot had not led a particularly tranquil life, in his adventurous calling, but this disastrous episode numbed him to the core. Especially the mystery of it. What strange gas had suddenly appeared in Iapetus’ atmosphere? Did it spell some strange menace, natural or—otherwise?

  Traft shuddered a little. Somehow, it struck him as full of sinister promise, this amazing event.

  CHAPTER II

  The Institute of Bio-Magic