by Don Wilcox
She stopped short and hid back of a pyramid of fuel drums. She could see Sondra and Randall across the room. They were looking back, disturbed by the sound of her footsteps.
Now they were going on. What would they do? Why was Sondra speaking of a curtain falling? The Old Lady wondered. Did Prince Randall realize how much she had sacrificed, leaving her glamorous career before the footlights to become an humble servant in his palace—all in quest of a beautiful dream?
With what remarkable grace she had borne her burden, the Old Lady thought.
“Why are they talking of death? Of the curtain falling? That rascally prince is giving her riddles—no, he seems deadly serious. Deep down, he’s haunted by an awful fear of what may happen. He almost wishes she would back out and not go through with it. Or does he?”
The Old Lady heard his words, “I am wishing you luck.”
Then she saw that they were going to kiss, and so she settled back in hiding and closed her eyes so as not to intrude upon their private moment. But the kiss lasted, and she did look, in spite of herself, and their old frame filled with a deep breath of days long gone.
Now she saw Sondra standing, waiting as if for death. She saw Randall walk to the cable and hang a weight on the hook. Machines began to roll slowly. Something was going to happen . . . Brighter, brighter, brighter . . . the glare . . . the sparkle of stones . . . Now quiet . . . deathly silent . . . The smell of heat . . . the sudden noise of crackling sparks . . .
An explosion! A universe full of fire out of the nose of that big stubby cannon!
The girl fell slowly.
Stones showered down from the hollowed-out ceiling. Stones and the dust of stones, puffing like smoke. Down over her prone body. She lay there, covered with the whiteness of it.
The prince was still holding his ears, but now he raised his head a little. He shifted his position and watched, half crouched on the flat stone, his chin resting in his hands. The Old Lady saw that he was mumbling something to himself. Perhaps counting.
The cloud of dust spread until it was a thin fog throughout the cavern. All the machines had stopped. The cable hook returned to its original position. The weighted bucket dropped to the ground and lay there on its side, still clogged full of rocks. The dust made it a blur of gray.
Now the Old Lady saw that the girl was breathing perceptibly. Randall sprang up and ran over to her. She raised her arm. She was looking up, brushing the dust from her face. “Randall!” she breathed.
He caught her hand. “It’s all right, dear. It’s all over. You’ve come through!”
CHAPTER VIII
If Muggs Were Only King—
Muggs the chauffer lost no time in reporting his position to the king. The little two-way radio set in the car took care of that.
“Yes, your majesty, I’m all alone right now. The Old Lady just left me. We’re at some kind of tunnel and she’s gone right in . . . Yes, she’s right on their heels, but I couldn’t say what they’re up to . . . Anyway, you’ve got nothing to worry about. I’ve got them surrounded.”
“Surrounded—how?” came Levaggo’s impatient bark.
“By a mountain. A great big mountain. It’s as big as—”
“Never mind. Exactly where are they?”
“Down in it. Looks to me like the tunnel leads ’way down, like a mine. It’s an awful good chance for me to get them on the way out. I can shake a few stones down on ’em. It’ll look like an accident.”
“No, none of that, Muggs,” the king called back savagely. “The people would know. We can’t take any more such chances. There’s only one thing to do. Let them go ahead. But follow them. Watch them. See what they do. There’ll be some sort of laboratory. Maybe a chemical plant. I doubt if the Old Lady herself knows just what. Anyway they’re going to try to work some sort of transformation on the girl-”
“What’s that?”
“I can’t take time to explain. The point is, you’ve got to see it happen. And they mustn’t see you.”
“Yes. Then what?”
“Then you’ve got to go through the same thing. Do you understand?” Muggs gulped. “You mean I’ve got to go through a transformation?”
“That’s the only way. I’ll tell you why. When the prince and Sondra come back, they think they’ll win the right to be king and queen on the grounds of having some special talent—a trick to escape death in a way that other human beings can’t.”
“That’s wonderful,” Muggs said tactlessly. He was about to add the comment that if they could escape death, they should be made king and queen. But the light of the king’s idea began to burst on him. “Oh, you mean if I get transformed the same way—”
“Then you’ll be able to do whatever they do. I wish I were there myself—” Muggs was suddenly on fire with the idea. “You mean I might even be able to walk through knifeblades and things?”
“That’s exactly the point. We’ll cut the ground right from under Prince
Randall’s feet.”
Muggs began to expand, psychologically speaking, into something he had never dreamed of being. “If I can walk through knifeblades, what’s to prevent me from getting to be king? What’s to prevent folks from saying, ‘Muggs, we like you, and you can defy death. You be king awhile!’ How about that, Levaggo?”
The king’s voice came back in a frozen reprimand. “Address me as Your Majesty, you lout.”
“Sure, your majesty, I forgot,” said Muggs. He was studying his own reflection in the glass dial of the radio, trying to imagine how he would look in a king’s turban or a jeweled crown. “But do I have to call you Your Majesty? Look, if I turned out to be the king, your majesty, you could just call me Muggs—”
“Stop your driveling. You’ll be rewarded soon enough if you get in on this trick. Yes, you’ll be—never mind.” There was a curious note of cruelty in the king’s short laugh. “Get on with your duty, Muggs. When you come back we’ll work together and everything will be fine.”
The chauffeur felt a strange elation as he strode into the tunnel. The farther he went, the more his enthusiasm ran away with him. The king, he reflected, was many miles away. Many, many miles. And had no idea how to reach this tunnel. If there was magic here for the taking—
“I’ve been a chauffeur long enough!” Muggs exclaimed. “Why don’t I—why shouldn’t I—hm-m-m. I might be. I could be—and if I was, I’d tell them what was what. My friends could just call me Muggs, none of this Your Majesty stuff. H-m-m-m. If I was king, he’d have to listen to me. Then my orders would be the good ones, and
I wouldn’t have to obey any of his.”
He turned this over in his mind with a purpose, a moment later, when he discovered some bags of explosives tucked away in a corner of the passageway.
“Now there you are,” he thought. “Dynamite. If I were king, I would say, Capture those trouble makers. Get them while the getting’s good. Then, once I said it, that’s what would happen and there’d be no argument about it.”
He considered what should be done. He weighed a sack of explosives in his hands.
“But I’m not the king,” he said. “I’d better hike on to that laboratory.”
Some minutes later, just as he came within view of the immense subterranean room, a terrific explosion blew him off his feet. The walls fairly rocked with the deafening blast. Echoes rolled back and forth through the tunnels for what seemed minutes.
Muggs could see that Sondra, far across the room, had fallen. Apparently she was dead. And apparently her friend the prince was too much stunned to do anything about it. The Old Lady must be hiding around somewhere, too, Muggs thought. Personally he didn’t care to concern himself with their misfortunes. He had some ideas of his own.
“So the king thinks I should go through that, does he? Who is he, to do my thinking for me? I’ve got a brain of my own, and my ideas about this business are better than his. Because I’m here, and he’s not.” Muggs doubled his fists. “I know this for sure. What happened to
that servant girl is not going to happen to me.”
As soon as he was sure his footsteps wouldn’t be heard, he broke into a run and ran most of the way back. He stopped when he came to the bags of explosives. With his long arms he was able to carry several bags—able and willing.
The explosion he set off at the mouth of the tunnel was not loud, and he doubted whether it echoed down through the maze to the three persons in the laboratory. But it was an effective explosion. A few thousand tons of rock came smashing down. When the dust cleared, he saw there was simply no longer an entrance. There was nothing but mountainside. The laboratory was sealed over.
“That’s what I’d do if I was the king,” Muggs said to himself. Then he jumped in his car and sped away, wondering what had best be said to Levaggo.
CHAPTER IX
Atomic Immunity
Never in all her years had the Old Lady seen anything like this. It fairly made white hair curl. The dust was clearing a little, and her sharp old eyes, crossed though they were, managed to take in every detail.
“I knew I would be all right,” Sondra was saying.
“You’re one in a million, Sondra,” the prince said. “Now trust me just once more, and then you’ll know you have nothing to fear.”
He climbed a stairway to the platform halfway up the side of the giant machine. A machine gun was there in the corner, mounted for guard duty. He aimed it at Sondra, and bullets prayed a path along the wall behind her. The path would have perforated her body, but she was immune now. She had acquired an “atomic immunity” that would be hers for life. Bullets had no power to hurt or mar her flesh as they passed through her body. She was smiling up at him confidently.
The Old Lady watched and began to understand.
He next turned the spray of machine gun bullets on the small blue airplane at one side of the big room. He was testing, the Old Lady realized, to make sure that it too possessed this strange quality of immunity, from some previous treatment. No bullet holes appeared in the fuselage.
“We gave it the cannon blast more than ten years ago,” Randall said to Sondra after he had silenced the gun. “We always kept it here for emergencies.”
“We?” Sondra asked.
“My father and I.” Randall hurried down the stairs to her. He brushed the dust from her clothes as he explained. “Before my father’s death, he was well on his way to discovering many uses of atomic power that are still unknown. It will take me years to dig through the studies he has left for me. But I can’t think of a happier or more useful way to spend my life. However, we’ve no time to talk of that now. In an emergency like this, we’d better take the plane.”
“You’re right. The Old Lady mustn’t be kept waiting.”
The Old Lady, listening to every word, sat down smiling to herself with pleasurable contemplation. “Bless their hearts, they’re going to get there before I grow impatient. They’re so refreshing. I wouldn’t have missed spying on them for anything.”
She might not admit to herself that she had come along because she had been so frightened over this experiment. She had watched Sondra all through these years, knowing that this day would have to come. For she had memorized all of those secret documents before the late Randello had ever sealed them in the vault.
“The girl who will dare to share these bold experiments in atomic transformation, who shall be the choice of my son Randall, shall be his queen, and he shall be king from that day . . .
And that was to be today, and at last she had seen with her own eyes the transformation blast. Now she was seeing one more evidence of its marvelous effects. The plane.
The motors roared, the little blue plane raced out onto the floor. It lifted. It plunged straight for the rock wall on the other side of the room. It began to circle. One wing cut into the wall, but there was no ripping of wing or spraying of stone. Nor was there the slightest loss of speed. The plane plunged on as if the wall were not there. In another second it was gone, leaving no visible trail behind it.
“Through solid stone!” the Old Lady gasped. “The miracles of atomic immunity!”
Suddenly she came out of her daze and found herself still sitting beside a pyramid of fuel drums deep in the laboratory cavern. “Ugh! What about me? Why didn’t I go along? Here I sit like I’d been struck by lightning. I’ll be late!”
She hobbled toward the tunnel road. Her feet were sore but she felt compelled to run. She cursed herself for being so absent-minded. “It can’t be that I’m getting old!”
Now she would have to puff all the way back through the long tunnel—but, no! There was the jeep.
The engine had a good rhythm, and all the long way up the zigzag trail she kept repeating to herself, in time with the bounces, “I’m in luck. I’ve got a jeep. I’m in luck. I’ve got a jeep.”
But when she reached what should have been the exit to fresh air and blue sky she discovered that she was no longer in luck. What had happened? The way was blocked. Closed. Sealed. An avalanche had come this way. A man-made avalanche? What could she do? “It can’t be that I’m getting old,” she muttered stubbornly, and climbed out and began throwing stones in all directions.
She unfastened a shovel from the side of the jeep and tried digging with all her furious strength. “My poor white hair will be black. I’m getting black in the face, too. This will never do.”
No, it might take a day’s work to reach daylight. Back at the palace they might scheme to give her up for lost, the same as Sebastian was lost. Then, with a free hand on those documents in the Vault, there would be no deed too evil for King Levaggo to attempt.
“They’ve got me! They’ve got me!” she muttered angrily. “If there was only a magic lamp to rub . . . Or a magic rope to pull . . . Or a cable? . . . With a hook, maybe, and a bucket of rocks. Ughhh!”
All at once the Old Lady was scared, and for the first time in many many years she wanted to scream.
“Bah! You’re too old to scream!” she told herself. “Stop acting like a baby. Get back in the jeep and drive like hell. Something’s got to give.”
CHAPTER X
Guards, Mounted and Demounted
In the palace study, amid the crisscrossed trees of the wall paper, the king and his chauffeur, Muggs, engaged in a warm conference. Muggs was talking fast, but not quite fast enough. He had sped home from the mountain trails like a good boy, and was doing his best to stick to the story he had rehearsed all the way.
“So that’s how it is. They’re gone. They won’t be back.”
The king growled. “I don’t get it. Where did they go?”
“It’s like I said, they went poof! Nearly busted my ear drums. You never heard such an explosion.”
“So they went poof. Are you sure it wasn’t bang?”
Muggs nodded quickly. “That’s right, your majesty, it was bang: It was bang and poof both at the same time.”
“What about the Old Lady?”
“Same poof!”
“Where are their bodies?”
“No bodies left. Honest, I thought the whole mountain was going to shake down.”
“Well, that’s going to make things devilishly complicated, with no bodies. We’ve got to have some proof.” The king scowled and pulled at the points of his double-pointed black beard.
“I guess maybe you’ll want to give me a promotion,” said Muggs hopefully. The build-up he’d practiced didn’t seem to have been timed to the king’s darkening mood.
“Don’t be in a hurry. First you’ll have to take me there, so I can see the scene for myself.”
Muggs shifted his feet uncomfortably. “I don’t know whether I could ever find my way back, your majesty. I doubt it. It was an awful strange road.”
“Such talk! Get the car ready. The crowd’s wasting in the Arena, and I’ve got to know what’s what before I face them. We’ll go at once and trace down that poof to be sure . . . What are you scringing about?” The king seized him by the shoulders. “Are you lying to me? What’s th
e matter?”
“I just remembered, I left the motor running.” Muggs bowed as briefly as the law would allow and ran out before the king could stop him. It was high time, he had suddenly decided, for him to take himself for a ride. The royal wrath was about to descend in full fury.
The car responded to Muggs’ touch. He swung around the circular drive, shot across one corner of the wide palace lawn, and headed straight for the nearest open gate.
Clang!
The big steel-barred gate swung closed.
Muggs brakes screeched, but too late. Crash! The royal bumper and. radiator gave a left hook and an uppercut to the steel bars and went into a clinch.
“Muggs!” the gatekeeper yelled. “Have you gone crazy? You better go back and square things with the king. The way he rung that emergency bell, he must be mad. What’d you do to him? He’s alerted the palace guard.”
“Help me out of here! Muggs yelled, trying furiously to disentangle his limousine from the steel bars. Then—“What’s that roar?”
“It’s a plane. Look out! It’s coming right at us. Duck!”
The small blue plane roared down from the air without warning. It was headed straight for the steel gate. To crash? The gatekeeper and Muggs dived for the grass. Then they stared. The plane shot straight through the upper half of the gate and the high steel fence.
It shot through without so much as denting a steel bar or ripping a wing. It simply went through. It landed intact on the palace lawn.
The only visible damage occurred to the mounted guards, marching in formation around the palace grounds. The plane almost got them. Sixteen horses were thrown into a panic and half the riders were thrown into the grass.
