Beneath Strange Stars

by Ralph E. Vaughan

  “Ah,” Rollo breathed, nodding sagely. “Treasure. Of course, there must be treasure. And Bell?”

  “As your wife pointed out earlier, John Bell is known, for better or worse, as ‘the occult detective’,” Challenger said. “He has not been as open as the others, either during the voyage across the aether or during the hazardous journey to attain the limits of the lost city, but I believe it is for him more of a spiritual quest.”

  “Indeed?”

  “His criminal investigations are explorations into the occult, but invariably all he finds are the tricks devised by villains or the misunderstandings of the gullible,” Challenger explained. “But, like the writer Conan Doyle…”

  “I know the man somewhat, first-rate storyteller, second-rate imagination,” Rollo interjected. “Historical romances, mostly.

  “…Bell believes in communication with the dead and fairy photographs and all that rot,” Challenger finished.

  “I take it you are no believer in the supernatural, Professor.”

  Challenger’s lips tightened into a hard smile and he shook his great shaggy head. “I find the world of the five senses enough of a puzzle, and I am in no hurry to contact the realm of the spirits, should it actually exist.”

  Rollo nodded in agreement. “Absolutely no hurry at all. We encounter that undiscovered country from which bourn no traveller returns all too soon as it is.”

  Challenger lifted his arm and gestured ahead. “The Shining Mountains!”

  A smear of grey and white rose in the distance, swiftly attaining prominence, quickly resolving into a range of gleaming mountains, the peaks of which were lost in the swirling canopy of clouds.

  “Perhaps we should retire to the bridge, Professor,” Rollo suggested. “You can give your instructions directly as we approach. I have never visited the Shining Mountains personally, but according to Conklin’s Atlas, they can be treacherous.”

  “Quite,” Challenger said grimly. “As I can personally attest.”

  The bridge of the Astronef reminded Challenger of a luxurious private steam yacht with gleaming brass fittings, walls of mahogany panelling and dials protected by lenses of perfectly cut crystal. The main difference, however, was a large screen set into a copper frame and which showed shifting views of the space around them. It was by this device that Murgatroyd was able to detect the missiles launched by the bellicose German colonists while the Astronef occupied their claimed airspace.

  “It is called a televisor.” Rollo explained, noting Challenger’s fascination with the device. “An invention based on the effect of light waves as transmitted by the aether…it can pierce atmospheric conditions which would render normal observation methods useless, just as the aether conducts communication signals into areas where electromagnetic waves cannot penetrate. As with sound signals, the transmission of images is instantaneous. It was how we spied you through the Venusian canopy.”

  “Amazing, but…”

  “But what, Professor?” Zaidie asked.

  Challenger shook his great shaggy head and uttered a short derisive snort of a laugh. “At times, I feel just as much a living fossil as those antediluvian beasts I discovered in Maple White Land, living in primeval isolation upon that plateau lost to time in the South American wilderness. Man, by dint of ingenuity and daring, has created an empire of iron and steam, where clockwork differential engines seem upon the verge of conscious thought and we ply the aether between the planets in ships the ancients – nay, even men of a generation ago – would have termed magic. I fear we may be moving forward too swiftly. I look at where we are, how far we have come, and I ask myself, where do we go from here?”

  “And yet,” Zaidie observed, “here you are on Venus, more than twenty million miles from Earth.”

  Challenger smiled wanly. “As you say, here I am.”

  “We have reached the foothills of the Shining Mountains,” Murgatroyd reported.

  Challenger stood to one side of the man while Rollo stood on the other.

  “Ten degrees to port, please,” Challenger requested. “Toward that outcropping.”

  “Yes, sir, I see it.”

  They climbed into the vastness of those rugged peaks which were sacred to the Venusian races, and which had thus far escaped exploration and exploitation by the colonial powers of Earth.

  Challenger glanced to Rollo. “When we attained the Shining Mountains, we had the good fortune that our ship came to rest not far from our goal. When we sight the craft, we’ll be…ah, yes, please slow and start descending.”

  “That is your vessel, sir?”

  “Indeed it is.”

  “Let us take a closer look,” Rollo said, adjusting the televisor. “After we see if the area is safe, we can land close by and…that is a very…odd…design, Professor.”

  “Mr Cavor was the designer and builder of the Albatross,” Challenger told his listeners. Seeing the sudden rise of eyebrows, he added: “Perhaps that particular name is not the best choice with which to christen any vessel, but it was Cavor’s choice, and not a one of us was about to confess before the others to having a superstitious nature.”

  He looked at the faceted spherical ship hard against a smashed outcropping, half buried in the hard Venusian soil. Its hull was crumpled in places, fissured here and there with jagged rents.

  “The landing actually was not as bad as it might appear.”

  “It appears quite bad, Professor,” Rollo observed.

  “Aye, I suppose it was,” Challenger admitted.

  Zaidie marvelled: “It’s a wonder all of you walked away from such a…landing.”

  “Blake and I carried out Cavor and Bell,” Challenger said. “Bell is all right, but Cavor has a bit of a limp.” He paused and looked again at the broken Albatross, which was growing larger in the televisor as the Astronef settled from the heights. “Perhaps it was as bad as it looks.”

  Challenger quitted the bridge and went to stand upon the prow walkway, hands gripping the railing, leaning forward a bit as he scanned the area for signs of hostile inhabitants. The Albatross looked small and lonely, a far cry from the magnificence it seemed to possess in the confines of Cavor’s country workshop when they learned it could traverse the aether between the planets faster than any craft of government design, and without engaging any of the tedious bureaucracy that was as much an anchor on a vibrant empire as it was on the human spirit.

  “Well, you did make it to Venus, Professor Challenger, and you did stand in a city never before beheld by human beings,” Rollo said, placing a hand on the naturalist’s shoulder. “Nothing in this world is guaranteed safe, and we are much the better for that.”

  “Yes,” Challenger agreed, “Yes, we are.”

  “I thought perhaps you might like to have these, Professor,” Zaidie remarked, approaching with a rifle in one hand and a gun belt in the other. “Unless, of course, you would again care to challenge the reptilian race of Venus to another donnybrook.”

  Challenger grinned. “Not anytime soon.”

  “There is no sign of any hostile elements,” Rollo said. “Murgatroyd is going to set us down as close to the other ship as possible, then lift off to maintain watch.”

  Challenger frowned in confusion.

  “We do not trust those blasted Huns one bit!” Rollo exclaimed. “I doubt they have any desire to get more of what we gave them now that we have passed out of their sphere of influence, but one can just never tell with those dam…those blasted sausage-eaters! They would dearly love to catch our ship on the ground.”

  “When we require Murgatroyd’s return,” Zaidie said, “we shall fire a Very pistol.”

  Challenger buckled on the gun belt and checked the repeating rifle for ammunition. Rollo also carried a rifle and had revolvers at his hips, while Zaidie was armed with two revolvers and one of the energy weapons which had proven so effective against the sea beast previously. Between the three of them they had plenty of ammunition. Challenger slung across his back the rucksack th
at contained the strange idol which the rogue lizard creatures of Shamballa seemed to hold in such awe, and with which he hoped to barter for the freedom of his comrades.

  They stepped from the walkway to the ground, and the Astronef immediately lifted away.

  All was silent.

  Though they were thousands of feet above sea level, high upon the slopes of the Shining Mountains, it was still very hot. On Venus, unlike Earth, the higher one rose above sea level the hotter it became, the clouds above being superheated by the nearness of the Sun, but the atmosphere was just as sluggish as at sea level, very thick, almost soupy to the neophyte traveller. Fortunately for Challenger, even though this was his first trip to the veiled planet and he had not had much time to acclimate to conditions, he was in perfect physical shape.

  As they approached the hull of the Albatross, a lizard man armed with knife and spear suddenly lunged at them from its hiding place within one of the gashes in the ship, uttering a hissing scream. Rollo raised his rifle, but before he could fire Challenger crashed a massive fist into its ferocious head. The scaly warrior dropped like a sack of rocks.

  “Well done, Professor!” Rollo enthused.

  “I did not want a shot to give us away at this early juncture,” Challenger explained. “Besides, they may not be human, but neither are they entirely bestial. Wouldn’t be right to kill the blighter for being true to his nature. Humane, you know.”

  “And we can question the beast,” Zaidie added.

  “Question it?”

  Challenger was astounded at the suggestion. During his sojourn in Shamballa and in the swamplands he had heard nothing from the creatures but grunts, hisses and snaps. He had assumed, of course, that they could communicate amongst themselves, if only because all creatures understand the ways of their own kind, but he figured that if they did possess a true language, it would be totally unfathomable to the human mind.

  “Oh indeed!” Zaidie assured him. “I have made a study of their kind, their culture and their language. Very surprising results.”

  “My Zaidie is quite as sharp as she is beautiful,” Rollo said. “She is her father’s daughter, and he was one of the most brilliant men I have ever had the pleasure to meet.” He paused and let the ghost of a smile tug at a corner of his mouth. “Even if he is an American.”

  “Oh, Rollo!”

  The captive was coming around. He started to leap up, but Challenger held him down with a boot. The savage ferocity which had etched its features was replaced by worry, then fear. Zaidie uttered a long string of sounds which Challenger would have sworn could not come from a human throat; after a moment of silence, the lizard warrior answered. A dialogue ensued between human and reptilian for several minutes, then Zaidie turned to her companions.

  “I have promised we will not kill it.”

  “Of course not,” Rollo said, slightly shocked. “It would hardly be sporting. We will restrain it.”

  “As you surmised, Professor, this fellow’s people occupied Shamballa centuries before, after what he called the ‘Great Revolt,’ some sort of slave uprising,” Zaidie said. “They consider themselves the masters of Shamballa, and you and your party as trespassers.”

  “We are explorers,” Challenger countered.

  “Even those seeking treasure?”

  “Yes, even them,” Challenger replied. “Knowledge is the greatest treasure.”

  “Your friends have not been harmed, yet,” Zaidie said. “There is evidently an argument whether they should be thrown to their deaths from the highest temple, burned at the stake, or simply eaten at a holy feast..”

  “Savages!” Challenger thundered, glaring balefully at their cringing captive. “Then, I cannot claim he is much worse than some of the blighters I encountered in South America.

  They trussed up and gagged the reptilian, then continued on, Challenger in the lead.

  The three humans moved away from the crashed ship, toward an area of heavy vegetation. A hidden trail took them higher into the rugged reaches of the Shining Mountains. They emerged from the mountainside jungle into a area protected by a canopy of branches and backed by a sheer stone wall broken only by a wide jagged fissure.

  “The entrance,” Challenger said softly. “It was not guarded when we first came upon it, but it may be now.”

  Then they saw reptilian creatures, some obviously guards, but others wearing the sort of saffron robes Challenger had seen in the lamasteries of Tibet. These, then, were the heirs to the mysteries and secrets of Shamballa, those who had driven the primal humanoid Shamballans out of their natal city and across space to seek refuge on Earth.

  A sound behind the trio alarmed them.

  Before they could do anything, though, they were surrounded.

  The guards started to rush the strangers, but humans menaced them with their superior weapons.

  The priestly reptiles approached. Despite their alien form and their outlandish garb, Challenger sensed an aura of dignity, even wisdom. Though these beings were obviously of the same race he had battled in the steaming swamps of Venus, they were yet totally different.

  Encouraged by the cessation of overt aggression, Rollo said: “Let them know why we have come, my dear.”

  She nodded and did her best to explain to the impassive beings the nature and purpose of their journey to Shamballa.

  “We understand your concerns,” one of the robed beings said in slow and halting Tibetan, which Challenger understood from his travels along the roof of the world. “We have not harmed your…the strangers such as yourself.”

  “We’ve come to secure their release,” Challenger said; and he translated for his two friends. “Please take us to where they are being held.”

  “Will you relinquish your weapons?”

  “I think we should hold onto them for the moment,” Challenger said, after translating the request for his friends.

  “As you wish,” the reptile said, sounding a little disappointed and weary. “Come this way, all of you. You shall not be harmed.”

  As they passed through the fissure and into the subterranean city, Challenger saw the creature they had assumed safely bound back at the crash site of the Albatross, and understood why the reptiles of Shamballa had been ready for them.

  “Speedy little lizard,” Challenger muttered, pointing him out to the others. “Must have bit through his ropes somehow and scabbered all the way to get here before us.”

  But Rollo and Zaidie scarcely heard their friend. They were enthralled by the magnificent carvings and massive edifices that rose around them.

  Stalactites and stalagmites had been carved into anthropomorphic shapes hundreds of feet tall, and while the statues had originally been shaped to portray beings very like the current spiritual rulers of Tibet (but not entirely since the humanoid branch still found on Venus, though decadent, is not identical to the Earth’s strain of homo sapiens), they had been reshaped over long centuries to possess reptilian features; what was perhaps even more surprising to the visitors from Earth was that the modifications had been effected with a hand just as artistically deft as those of the original artisans.

  Challenger marvelled at the scene that confronted him for the second time, the original from which the numinous landscape of Tibet had been copied. With the ceiling of the vast cavern beyond sight and only vaguely lit by luminous fungi, he could have easily believed he was in primeval Tibet before the coming of Western eyes, beneath strange skies and stranger stars.

  In time, they entered a chamber, and Challenger noted with excitement that it was the same maze of rooms in which he had discovered the paintings that had caused him to separate from his companions at the time of their capture. And the sense of amazement he felt then settled upon him again with no less impact. Here, depicted in vibrant colours undiminished by centuries of millennia, was a solar system known only through ancient religions and myths – great Saturn (Chronos to the Greeks) held ascendancy over the planets now claimed by the suzerainty of the Sun: Earth,
Venus and Mars orbiting the ringed planet before being abducted by the passage of a celestial invader, a comet called Marduk by the Mesopotamians and Set by the Egyptians. The revolutionary nature of the solar system depicted was no less amazing than that the outer worlds were depicted at all, for in human memory Venus had never been without its cloud canopy – the Sun was barely discernable from only the highest cloud-piercing peaks, to those with breathing gear, and the stars not at all.

  The party departed the astronomical chambers and embarked upon a long passage beneath false stars toward a temple of fantastical proportions.

  There, Challenger was reunited with his companions.

  “I say, Challenger, we are quite pleased to see you,” Cavor said. “Things seemed to be getting a bit sticky for us.”

  “We were getting a little worried, old man,” John Bell said.

  “We never thought for a moment you had ducked out on us,” Blake said. He paused, and for an instant the tan he had acquired while sailing the myriad seas of Earth deepened a bit. “Well, maybe for a moment, but just a moment.”

  “A wee moment,” Cavor admitted.

  Introductions were made and Challenger was updated on the events that had transpired after his flight from the city to the swamplands. They had not been mistreated by their captors, but they had been mostly isolated, visited only twice by the reptilian priest whose Tibetan was understood only by John Bell, who had studied the language during his occult sojourn in the realm of the lamas years earlier.

  “He seemed a good chap, for a lizard,” Bell said. “We had several long talks, the High Lama of Shamballa and myself. Finally, after searching so long for true occult wisdom, it’s almost a jape that I should find it in a priestly lizard on the planet Venus. I shall miss the old boy, but the others getting were a bit hungry-eyed, if you take my meaning.”

  “Bunch of damned bloody wogs!” Blake explained.

  Challenger turned toward their guide: “We came to parlay for the freedom of my friends.”

  “Parlay?”