by Don Wilcox
Jaazel scurried into the picture, hailed him sharply. “What’s the idea?”
“Come here,” Brubbazein retorted. “Something occurred to me. See how the arrows on this lever point. Just opposite from the direction of our passages. Did you find a label on your entrance?”
“No,” said Jaazel. There was angry suspicion in his glare. “What are you driving at?”
“I think that young traitor switched tunnels on us. He was just clever enough to try to send me up to your capital and you up to mine!”
Brubbazein held his bold front against the other’s scornful look.
“So you thought of it, too,” said Jaazel. He was sure Brubbazein had snatched at this straw only to appear innocent of any designs on the lever, but there was something in the idea. Yes, on second thought that’s the very thing the scoundrel would do. “I was about to call you to say the same thing. We’d better think this thing over.”
They sat down again and began to reason out which tunnel was which.
Twenty-five miles above them the electric mole at length emerged from a leisurely ascent, and Sondra and Arden emerged.
Everyone in the Lower Terminal was crowded around televisors, but President Marbl hurried to greet them and congratulate them. The light in his face was glorious to see.
“Has anything happened?” Arden demanded. “Did they set off the volcano?”
He was relieved to know it hadn’t been touched. “Did they ever fight?” Sondra asked.
Again the beaming President shook his head. “No such luck. They talked and pondered about the tunnels until they were almost chummy before they finally parted.”
“Then they’ve gone!” Arden’s eyes gleamed with eagerness. “Did they take their own tunnels—or each other’s?”
“Their own.”
A sickening disappointment showed in Arden’s face, but only for a moment,
“It’s all right,” said the President. “In fact it couldn’t be better, for the radios from both capitals announce that popular revolutions are on in full swing. The people of both nations have overthrown their dictatorships with lightning swiftness, and there’s a nice little mob waiting at the top of each tunnel for any dictator that shows his face.”
Before either Sondra or Arden could catch a breath to speak, the President added, “You two will have to take a week off to read your telegrams. They’re rolling in by the thousands from all over the world.”
[1] A theory of war other than that of complete, annihilation is the theory of abrasion, by which the opponents strive to exhaust or discourage each other through slow but ceaseless wear “and” tear.
[2] The electric mole was what Arden called his subterranean drill, so named because it bored through the earth and left an open path for future travel. At slow speeds it could eat its way through rock, projecting a battery of augers that acted upon stone like a buzz-saw upon pulp. Moreover, it contained refining mechanisms that instantly digested the crumbs of its labor, paved its circular tunnel with rifled walls of unbreakable crystal that facilitated future travel, and disintegrated the residue of its diggings. Once it had formed a tunnel, it could spiral through at good speeds, like a gigantic bullet through a rifled tube.
SLAVE RAIDERS FROM MERCURY
First published in Amazing Stories, June 1940
Lester Allison and June O’Neil found they faced more than death on Mercury; the Rite of the Floating Chop.
CHAPTER I
“This way, ladies and gentlemen!” shouted the sideshow barker, pounding on a tomtom. “Open to the public for the first time. The greatest mystery attraction ever offered for fifty cents. A rocket ship from the outside world!”
A few customers paid and passed through. Above the brightly painted canvas fence, the huge black chrysalisshaped hull gleamed in the midday sun. Lester Allison gazed. He dropped the wisp of foxtail grass from his teeth and edged toward the front of the crowd.
“Step right up, you handsome farmer boys,” the barker sang out, with one eye on Allison. “It’s brand new.
There’s no fake about it. It was found last week in a wheat field and this carnival bought it for your entertainment. Come one, come all, only fifty cents!” Lester Allison yelled up at the speaker, “Who was in it when they found it?”
“Not a soul, my boy, not a soul!”
“Then how’d it find its way to the earth?”
“Ah, there’s the mystery! An empty ship from an outside world, and not a foot-track around it. Come in and get the whole story!”
Lester Allison looked around for someone to take in with him, but saw no one he knew. However, he gave a second look to the pretty girl who brushed past his shoulder.
The girl gave a quick anxious glance back through the crowd; apparently she was trying to get away from someone. She bolted through the canvas gateway without stopping to pay.
“Hold on, lady!” The barker made a pass at her.
“Here,” said Lester Allison, slapping down a dollar. “For two.”
“Thanks so much,” the girl breathed a moment later. Lester Allison followed her through the open airlocks into the black ship.
“The luck’s all mine,” he said. “Mine,” said the girl, “if he doesn’t follow me in—that is,” she talked excitedly, “I’m running away—from home.”
They pushed through the cluster of spectators within the ship.
“You oughtn’t to wear such a bright yellow dress if you’re trying to make a getaway. It caught my eye first thing—it and the yellow hat and your black hair and—”
At a curious smile from the girl Allison concluded he’d better not catalog any more of the items about her appearance that had attracted him. Nevertheless his gaze lingered on her pretty face.
“Pretty young to be running away, aren’t you?”
Suddenly her dark eyes were intent on the door.
“Oh—” she began distressedly.
A slender young man came in and looked about furtively. The moment he spied the girl, he marched back to her.
“All right for you, June O’Neil,” he said in a surly voice. “Your dad said come home. He meant it, too. He’s sober and he’s mad.”
June O’Neil refused to speak. The young man tried to take her arm. She jerked away and scrunched down in her seat in the ship. He sat down beside her.
“Big-hearted of you,” he said sarcastically, “to make me pay fifty cents to come in here and get you.”
“You haven’t got me,” said the girl. “Oh, no? Don’t make me laugh!”
“Listen, Ted Tyndall!” The girl’s voice was low but every word was packed with fury, and the flash of her dark eyes gave Lester Allison a quickened heartbeat.
“I’m not coming home. That’s final. I’ve had all of home and drunken fathers and quarrelsome boy friends that I can stand!”
“Zat so?” Ted Tyndall mocked. Then his eyes took in Lester Allison, who stood, an easy six feet of country-bred manhood, at the other side of June’s chair.
“Who’s that?”
“I don’t know,” said June O’Neil quietly.
“I’m Lester Allison.” The words were accompanied by a genial smile which met with an expressionless stare from Ted Tyndall.
The sideshow barker stepped inside the rocket ship and rapped for attention.
“Ladies and gentlemen—(The group was mostly men; there chanced to be only one other lady besides June O’Neil.) “You are now in the main cabin of a mystery space ship whose secrets not only baffle science, they even baffle me. Mystery Number One: no controls are visible. Mystery Number Two: as I walk to the front of the cabin, the airlocks automatically close.”
With a swish the doors folded, to become an imperceptible part of the black metal walls.
Ted Tyndall grumbled to the girl, “Now see what you’ve done. I’m stuck here for a lecture.”
By this time most of the eighteen or twenty spectators were seated in the deep-cushioned chairs. Lester Allison started toward a seat as the
carnival man continued.
“Mystery Number Three: the black metal of this ship is unlike anything found on this earth—”
Brum-brrr-row-wrr—wham!
Lester Allison awakened with the vague feeling that the universe had jumped a cog.
That dull aching roar—most of it seemed to be in his head. Some of it came through the wall that cramped his shoulder. He was too groggy to open his eyes. What a clamor of voices! That woman’s unrelenting scream—again and again and again. Men shouting and wrangling and fighting. And, near at hand, the voice of that pretty girl, June O’Neil, her low-spoken words fraught with terror. Lester Allison opened his eyes.
“He’s alive, didn’t I tell you?” the girl gasped.
Ted Tyndall’s only response was, “Get me out of here! What the hell—”
“But he’s hurt! He might be dying!” The girl’s hands tugged at Allison’s shoulders.
“Let him rot!” Ted Tyndall fairly screamed. “Get me back to the ground!”
Lester Allison took a deep breath and rolled onto his elbows and knees.
“I’m all right,” he mumbled. “A little stunned. That sudden fall—”
His words were lost against the continual screaming. He staggered to his feet. He saw June O’Neil’s frightened, imploring face, heard her say,
“No one knows why we took off. No one knows what to do.”
Allison’s attention turned to the distant sun blazing out of a black sky. It shot through the front cabin window, illuminated the frantic figures chasing through the aisles of the space ship. Some stood at the windows paralyzed with fear; some were fighting. Allison moved up the aisle toward the fight. Three or four enraged men had closed in on the carnival barker.
“You trapped us, you lousy—”
“I did not!”
“Get us back to Earth or we’ll kill you!”
“What’s the game, you crazy—”
“I tell you I didn’t—” the barker protested.
“This knife means business!”
The sun flashed from the open pocket-knife. The carnival man backed into a corner.
“Don’t be a fool!” Allison snapped as he pushed through to the chief threatener. “Don’t—”
He caught the wrist that held the weapon, bore down with severe strength, and faced the threatener. “Take it easy, friend.”
“Take it easy! This fellow coaxed us in, didn’t he? And locked the doors and—” The struggling man’s grip relaxed as Allison’s steel fingers tightened. The knife dropped.
“Let it lay!” Allison snapped. “And don’t be simple. That carnival guy’s no space pilot. He’s not that smart!” Eyes turned toward the barker, whose jaw dropped with a comical effect. One of the threateners snorted, another chuckled, and the situation eased.
“Besides,” Allison went on, “where are the controls? There aren’t any. Say—how the heck does this darn thing operate, anyway?”
Naturally no one on board could answer that question. Lester Allison calmly picked up the pocket-knife, folded it and slipped it into the owner’s jacket.
“Hey—where do you think we’re heading for?” another passenger spoke up.
Allison glanced out the window. “Either Mercury or Venus, near as I can judge. But probably Mercury, because we seem to be heading pretty close toward the sun—an’ Mercury’s the planet nearest the sun.”
“Mercury!” the sideshow barker puffed. “And I only charged you fifty cents. Am I a dope!”
Ted Tyndall made his voice heard. “All right, smart fellow, if you know all the answers, turn us back.”
Lester Allison’s eyes roved along the walls hopefully. He wondered whether the adjoining rooms might contain the answer. However, some of the men who had had time to explore shook their heads.
“We’ve searched high and low,” said a one-armed man. “There’s food and water and sanitary facilities, but nothing that looks like a control lever.”
“Then we’re in for a space jaunt,” Allison muttered. “We may as well stop howling and make up our minds to it.”
The other lady passenger, who had become hysterical, stopped crying for a moment, and then burst out afresh.
Ted Tyndall yowled, “You mean we can’t get home tonight?”
“No, dear,” the carnival barker mocked, mopping his forehead. “Better drop a note to mamma.”
“Shut up, you damned—”
“Sit down!” Allison cracked the command, and Tyndall obeyed. “We’ve had enough roughhouse. Whatever we’re in for, we may as well have order.”
“You’re elected to keep it,” said the carnival barker.
Whether or not the barker meant it for a taunt, Lester Allison took it as a challenge. He looked from one to another of his fellow passengers.
An odd assortment, surely. A fat unshaved tramp, a one-armed man, a poorly dressed Negro, a bewildered old man who was deaf, several men who might have been machinists or farmers or white collar workers.
“You’re elected,” another of the men echoed.
In that moment Lester Allison forgot he was only twenty-three years old and that most of those years had gone into handling stubborn mules and running farm machinery. His eyes turned toward the woman who stood at the rear window, crying hysterically.
“Does anyone here know that woman?” he asked. No one did. He walked back to her. “Lady, we’re going to put you in a room by yourself until you get quiet.”
Immediately the terrified crying ceased. Quiet reigned. From that moment Lester Allison’s authority was established. Whatever unknown destiny awaited the ship, for the present he was its master.
CHAPTER II
Inhabited Chasms
Mercury grew like a crescentshaped cloud bearing down upon the nose of the space ship. By this time the sun was far to the side. Lester Allison watched and wondered how soon the ship would cut its speed. A queer feeling, being tossed through the universe at the whims of—well, of what?
The men hovered close about Allison. No one talked. Everything had been talked out. Now there was nothing left but to wait and watch their common fate unfold.
Through Lester Allison’s mind surged the memories of recent hours. The hysterical woman’s shocking suicide . . . the bottle of deadly poison . . . the erratic note that proved she had been frightened crazy . . .
Allison had taken the bottle and hid it within his pocketbook for safe keeping. As soon as the dead body had been given a space burial, via the disposal chute, Allison had diverted the passengers’ morbid thoughts as best he could.
Games had proved the best way. He had had the men make some bean shooters—bean shooting had been a favorite sport in his own boyhood—and he had organized a bean shooting tournament, good for several hours. But as the planet Mercury grew larger, the contestants’ nerves became less steady, and the games had petered out.
Once when most of the passengers were asleep, June O’Neil had come to Allison at the front window to help him keep watch. That hour had burned deep in his memory.
“You aren’t a bit scared, are you?” he had said.
“I haven’t been since you took over. Whatever may come to us, there’s nothing we can do now.”
Then the girl had laughed in a quiet confidential way.
“Really, it’s almost funny. All these men try to help me keep my courage up, and I think they’re worse scared than I am.”
Allison had smiled at that, and his eyes must have looked at her long and intently. For he had never before in his life been so impressed by a girl’s spirit, nor so stirred by a girl’s beauty. To change the subject he had said: “Is the boy friend still sulking? Don’t worry, he’ll come out of it.”
June O’Neil had blushed with resentment.
“He’s not my boy friend!”
Now her words still echoed in Allison’s mind as the girl stood silently beside him. Ted Tyndall was at the other side of her, and silent passengers were all around. The great unfathomable mass of Mercury gre
w closer, half lighted, half shadowed. They were headed toward the line that divided the misty white foam from the dark.
“Stormy over there,” said Allison, pointing.
“I could do with a storm,” grunted the carnival barker. Anything to break the monotony . . .
“We’re gonna crash! We’re gonna crash!” Ted Tyndall gasped the words over and over.
The purring ship plummeted down—down—through the clouds, through layers of blackness and brown twilight and gray fog. Down between banks of mountains, down—
“We’re headed for that abyss!”
“Which abyss, Allison?”
They watched in awe as the vast crevasses among the mountains gaped larger. The whole landscape was stitched with ragged gashes. Now they recalled their previous discussions about Mercury. How the planet always kept the same face to the sun. How hot it would be—and what the effects of the uneven heating might have.
“See any signs of civilization, Allison?” someone asked.
The answer was obvious. On the surface, there wasn’t any sign of life.
Was it at all possible that somewhere within those jagged depths there was a mind that contrived to direct their course so skilfully? Down into a funnel of pitch blackness they slowly coasted. Interminably down, like a car on an endless grade. When at last their eyes saw light again, it was artificial light—the dull red of flares reflected from red rock walls.
They stopped.
The airlocks opened. A puff of warm air blew in. Heavy atmosphere was tinged with odors that were at once mellow and pungent. Allison sniffed and took a deep breath. He felt puffy enough to float, the air was so buoyant and the gravity so light.
He led the way out, cautiously at first; then, at the sound of friendly human voices, he dropped all restraints. His passengers filed out after him, bounding and leaping and striding, curious at the sensation of new power in their feet and legs.
They were greeted by a volley of welcomes that figuratively brought them back to earth. Welcomes shouted in good American slang—a puzzling thing, for they had conjured up all manner of perilous beasts and boiling cauldrons in their private nightmares.
