by Don Wilcox
“You mean they’re coming in here?” Champlin demanded.
For the first time the Summiteer at the periscope dared to turn around.
“Like a flood!” he answered.
Champlin didn’t see the periscope man come out of his booth, for he was busy putting the finishing touches to the other three Summiteers. By swift manipulations he succeeded in locking them in the big cage.
Then he whirled to see the remaining Summiteer lunge toward him like a mad beast. Off guard with his gun, he crouched low. The plunging form spilled over him. They rolled into a savage dogfight. Bluish gas puffed over them like heat waves.
Footsteps clattered along the balcony floor. Summiteers and uniformed swordsmen were flooding in. The clatter turned into a thundering roar.
The shouting voices, if they echoed out to the hillside throngs, bore no resemblance to prayers to the Purple Fury. They were cursings and growlings of consternation that might have been calculated to disillusion the most faithful of worshipers.
“What the hell happened to the Fury?” Ivan Scorpledge’s enraged voice boomed out of one of the private prayer caves. “Out of my way, dammit! What the devil—”
The uproar sounding out of the blackened hilltop was too much for the ruling classes. Shocked out of their superstitious reverence, they advanced on the hot, smoky Shrine leaving their torches behind. They crowded close, peered down for sacred glimpses of the mysterious inner world. A terrific upsurge of live gas assailed their nostrils.
A few of them glimpsed the rapidly filling balcony; some saw two dead Disps sprawling from the side of an inflated rubber boat; some saw a strange-looking steel cage with Summiteers tearing at the bars. From the most revealing angle they caught sight of the muscular figure of Wayne Champlin, fighting like mad.
The Summiteer who had grappled with him went down under a blow from the butt of his pistol. Champlin bounded up, pushed his long hair out of his eyes. His Disp’s uniform was in shreds. The escaping gas poured out at him. Already the wild cry of “No fire! Hold your guns!” was cried through the dome. Champlin choked for breath.
He sprang back to the controls of the electric-powered cage, swung it around in a wide circular sweep, crushed the first two Disps who advanced on him with upraised swords. From the other side of the balcony they rushed. The cage swung back to cut them off. But one of them plunged through.
Champlin hurled his pistol and missed. His hand patched up the corn knife. Small chance it would have against the broadswords of the Disps!
“Let me have him! He’s my dish!” The loud bellow came from Captain Scorpledge of the Disps, halfway across the balcony.
The swordsman who hovered within reach of Champlin was momentarily disconcerted by the commanding voice of his superior. In that split second Champlin struck. His com knife gashed halfway through the Disp’s throat. The victim fell in a shower of blood. He spilled against the railing, and his sword flew from his hand.
“Look out for the girl!” The warning came from Clay Malcinder, and no one within hearing misinterpreted his cry. He was going to see her sacrifice through, one way or another. “Get her up from there!” Malcinder roared.
No one was close enough to the controls which regulated the net. For the moment the command was unheeded. Scorpledge’s roar took precedence.
“I’ll take him! I’ll take him!”
The crowded balcony made way. Puffing and barking at the gas, murder blazing from his eyes, the burly captain of the Disps stormed toward the sweating, tattered young Champlin.
“When he gets you,” the taunting voice of Clay Malcinder called from across the balcony, “you’ll think you’re in hell!”
It was an easy threat to make. Everyone knew that Scorpledge and his sword were invincible. The gas thickened in every rocky alcove and pocket and crevice in the upper half of the cavern. Onlookers began to crowd out through the prayer tunnels for air. And why not? Scorpledge had things under control.
But what might happen when sword and com knife clashed? Would that accumulated gas respond to sparks?
A clang of steel put that uneasiness to rest. Scorpledge bore down on Champlin with his long flashing weapon. Three lightning strokes shot out. Champlin caught them on his blunt blade. He slipped in a fast one—low but fast. Scorpledge smeared a hand against his hip. The hand came up bloody.
“You damned upstart!” he roared. “I took your parents and let you go free. I should have known better than to let a rebel live!”
His sword clipped Champlin’s knuckles. Champlin backed away gradually, staying close to the rail.
Scorpledge grinned evilly. He reveled in his advantage.
“Damn you, I’m glad I let you live! I’m going to enjoy stabbing your eyes out and chopping your lips into your mouth and—”
An unexpected cough cut the big man’s speech short. He started to back away from the stream of gas. Wayne Champlin, holding his own breath, had led him into it deliberately.
That was Champlin’s moment, and he threw himself into it with every ounce of his power. The corn knife dashed deep into Scorpledge’s ribs. Click!
Champlin jerked back—but not with a whole knife. In his hand was the handle and a poor stump of a blade.
The hulking captain fell, bellowing with pain. His sword slipped from his hands. He clutched at the chunk of blade stuck fast in his ribs.
On the instant another Disp rushed in with sword upraised. The sword descended—through gas-filled space. Champlin, with the nimbleness and daring of a trapped squirrel, threw himself over the balcony railing.
Summiteers, Disps and numerous other Higher-ups whose curiosity had swept them into these sacred precincts, saw that sensational jump. They saw Champlin’s fingers extend, slip past the side of the net—missing by inches!—then catching hold, as it seemed, by the last threads!
The net, already low with the weight of Elsa, sprang lower from its elastic suspension, bounced upward again, dipped down. At the second dip, Champlin succeeded in ripping the mooring cords with the stub of a knife to which he had clung.
Forty feet or more down to the water they dropped, Champlin and Elsa, striking the surface of blackness with a resounding splash.
CHAPTER X
Dreams Come True
“This way!” Wayne Champlin breathed as they came bounding up.
“Coming!” A hint of a quick eager smile touched the girl’s face. Death racing after her—and a smile! What a girl!
Spotlights were on them from overhead. Above the uproar of shouting, Clay Malcinder’s voice piped crisp orders. Already a boat was being lowered. Malcinder and two others were aboard it. Once they got down to the water level, there should be no danger from the gas. Malcinder fingered his gun. The boat slipped down swiftly.
“Under!” Champlin gasped. The girl seized his foot and, linked together, they sped through the blackness beneath the surface. Up again, Champlin turned for a last possible glance at the balcony before rounding a barrier.
Straight back of them Malcinder’s boat was being unhitched for action. But it was the sight one hundred feet higher up that froze Champlin’s attention. On the edge of the balcony lay Ivan Scorpledge, apparently forgotten—but not dead! The blazing lights revealed his arm in motion, his hand taking aim with a gleaming pistol.
In the last minute of his vicious life, Scorpledge intended to beat Clay Malcinder to the prize!
“Under!”
Champlin’s order was swallowed up. As if a burning meteor had plummeted straight down through the Shrine the great cavern suddenly went white with a terrific burst of fire. The explosion flared like an angry volcano. It roared faith a thunderous ear-beating boom-oommm-baloom-thud-thud-thud—Crack-err rack! Splash! The angry splashing opened up into a ripping, pounding roar that was like a tidal wave from the depths of an inferno.
Nobody heard Scorpledge’s gunfire that touched the gas off. Nobody knew whether his bullet struck its mark or missed. Much less did anyone know what happened to Wayne
Champlin and the girl, for they had swum out of sight.
All that anyone knew in that moment was that death had struck. There was no time to know more. Thoughts and lives and purposes were incinerated with hellish fire and crushed under a hail of stones. Down went the balcony, the machines, the dead Shrine. Down went the hilltop and all the people in it and on it. Down into the deadly inferno of falling earth and scorching flame!
Halfway down the hillside the Grubbers watched, aghast. They fled from the terrific heat, back toward their own level. Scores of Higher-ups who had not been close enough to be caught joined them in the flight to safety.
Then they stopped and watched, and the dim glow of scattered purple blazes lighted their horror-stricken countenances.
The explosion was over. The fires burned quietly. The terrified voices had stilled. The roar of waves and winds from within the earth diminished.
Now most of the sounds came from the island’s shoreline where, under a bright moon, the rush of water was to be seen flooding out of little caverns.
Before the dazzled eyes of the Grubbers, two moonlighted figures clambered up out of the slushing waters. They were half drowned, they were battered and bruised and half naked; but they were not ghosts. They had battled the floods and fought their way through Jake Douzel’s narrow passage to freedom.
“Champ and the girl!”
Wayne Champlin and Elsa had escaped alive and whole.
The glad tidings spread over the island like a battle-cry of victory. Champlin and Elsa were conducted to one of the Grubbers’ shanties, where they lay down in utter exhaustion. Not until dawn did they rouse themselves to join the Grubbers in examining the ruins of the hilltop.
The weird night had passed, and with it the horrors of death, the fears and terrors of a downtrodden people. The Purple Fury had been exploded from a living monster to a dead myth!
“The hilltop!” Elsa gasped, her eyes incredulous. “What—where is it? What’s happened?”
Against the white sky she and Champlin saw the new outline. The pointed cone was gone; instead there was a wide craterlike pit of stones. From within the irregular broken lips of the vast cave-in, soft purple flames glowed, and thin lines of smoke rose idly.
They joined the Grubbers further up the hillside. Most of the Summiteers’ mansions were in ruin; the food storehouse was gutted. The headquarters of the Disps had also fallen.
Only one Summiteer did Elsa see who had escaped with his life—the elder Malcinder. And—Clay Malcinder’s father was quite mad.
Like a personification of unshakable faith, the gaunt old hypocrite was now a shattered mystic. Like a dazed automaton he knelt at his place of worship, which had curiously escaped the cave-in. His mansion was gone, his Shrine was gone, the monster he prayed to was certainly dead; still he knelt on the white slab of stone and waited, waited for the familiar whisper he had always paid obeisance to when he was sane.
Elsa crowded close within Champlin’s arm.
“I’ve been wondering, since we came out last night,” she said apprehensively. “Is there any danger that Clay Malcinder might still be alive somewhere down under us? Is there any danger he might find his way out—”
Champlin shook his head. The arrogant scion of the Malcinders had been squarely beneath the center of the cave-in.
“He lies forever under his precious Shrine,” said Champlin, and his white teeth gleamed in a smile that was good to see.
Something was going on at the edge of the ruins. Several Grubbers drew a form up to the surface by ropes. The form wriggled and turned out to be Shorty Joe Sanburn, very much alive. His comrades had let him down to pick up a trophy, something he had stolen out of the altar walls before the ceremony, and had lost in his retreat down the hillside.
“I found the demon!” Shorty Joe laughed. “I’ll show him to you, Champ, if you’ll promise not to use him on us when you get to be our leader—or hadn’t you heard?”
Shorty Joe’s prize proved to be a small but powerful stereopticon projector containing a single slide—an intricate painting of a demon with hungry red lips and reaching hands.
“Here’s what we saw on the screen of smoke,” Shorty Joe grinned. “No wonder a knife went through him!” Champlin’s blue eyes were triumphant. But there was pain in them too, the memory of the frightful oppression now lifted from his people.
He said slowly, “It has been a horrible experience for us all. But it will never rise from its ashes to plague us again. For all time, this blight has been wiped from the earth.”
Shorty Joe came forward then. He put his hand around his friend’s shoulder and punched him playfully in the jaw. Champlin snapped out of his somber mood and punched back.
“Ouch!” Shorty Joe wailed. “Let up, will you? Do you think I’m a big bruiser like yourself?”
Everybody broke into laughter at that. And Shorty Joe, remembering he had a message to deliver, became suddenly serious.
“The people want you to stay and lead them,” he said earnestly. “Even the Higher-ups that escaped the fate are looking to a new life. You and Elsa could give us the guidance we need.” Champlin caught his breath sharply. “But Elsa—”
“Wants to stay,” the girl broke in, placing her hand on her sweetheart’s broad shoulder. She smiled at Champlin. Then the two of them looked up, to see that the Grubbers were standing anxiously close by, watching to learn what their decision would be.
For a dramatic moment tears filled Elsa’s eyes as she gestured toward the patient faces about her—the faces that now glowed with the simple strength of Wayne Champlin’s own vision.
“These,” said Elsa softly, “are my people, too.”
[1] Natural gas is known to escape from the earth in caves, and in certain locales of the earth in exactly this manner, and can be lit. The Purple Fury is thus only a natural gas well which flows continually, and was ignited by the priests and used as a means of gaining their power through superstition and fear. This is not an unknown phenomenon, and indeed, is quite common in our own Southwest. Yellowstone Park has many such gas fumaroles.
[2] The Summiteers, by means of their special laboratory apparatus within the Shrine’s dome, had found a method of permanent suspended animation. Doubtless this method was a scientific improvement on early 20th century embalming practices. The Russians are the best known practitioners of this art today, the embalmed remains of Nikolai Lenin having lain in state in Moscow since the death of the Russian revolutionary leader in 1924. Use of human bodies for surgical dissection—dead bodies, of course—goes back for hundreds of years. But vivisection—the cutting up of living bodies—has always been confined to animals such as rabbits and dogs, and it is a practice long bitterly fought by humane societies. Ruthless surgeons, however, would doubtless feel no qualms in cutting up living animals.
THE VOYAGE THAT LASTED 600 YEARS
First published in Amazing Stories, October 1940
CHAPTER I
They gave us a gala send-off, the kind that keeps your heart bobbing up at your tonsils.
“It’s a long, long way to the Milky Way!” the voices sang out. The band thundered the chorus over and over. The golden trumpaphones blasted our eardrums wide open. Thousands of people clapped their hands in time.
There were thirty-three of us—that is, there was supposed to be. As it turned out, there were thirty-five.
We were a dazzling parade of red, white and blue uniforms. We marched up the gangplank by couples, every couple a man and wife, every couple young and strong, for the selection had been rigid.
Captain Sperry and his wife and I—I being the odd man—brought up the rear. Reporters and cameramen swarmed at our heels. The microphones stopped us. The band and the crowd hushed.
“This is Captain Sperry telling you good-by” the amplified voice boomed. “In behalf of the thirty-three, I thank you for your grand farewell. We’ll remember this hour as our last contact with our beloved Earth.”
The crowd held its breath. Th
e mighty import of our mission struck through every heart.
“We go forth into space to live—and to die,” the captain said gravely. “But our children’s children, born in space and reared in the light of our vision, will carry on our great purpose. And in centuries to come, your children’s children may set forth for the Robinello planets, knowing that you will find an American colony already planted there.”
The captain gestured good-by and the multitude responded with a thunderous cheer. Nothing so daring as a six-century nonstop flight had ever been undertaken before.
An announcer nabbed me by the sleeve and barked into the microphone, “And now one final word from Professor Gregory Grimstone, the one man who is supposed to live down through the six centuries of this historic flight and see the journey through to the end.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I choked, and the echo of my swallow blobbed back at me from distant walls, “as Keeper of the Traditions, I give you my word that the S.S. Flashaway shall carry your civilization through to the end, unsoiled and unblemished!”
A cheer stimulated me and I drew a deep breath for a burst of oratory. But Captain Sperry pulled at my other sleeve.
“That’s all. We’re set to slide out in two minutes.”
The reporters scurried down the gangplank and made a center rush through the crowd. The band struck up. Motors roared sullenly.
One lone reporter who had missed out on the interviews blitzkrieged up and caught me by the coattail.
“Hold it, Butch. Just a coupla words so I can whip up a column of froth for the Star—Well, I’ll be damned! If it ain’t’ Crackdown’ Grimstone!”
