by Don Wilcox
“You saved him on purpose!” the older brother snarled. “Muddi had every right to kill him! You’ve betrayed us.”
“Don’t draw that knife at me! I’m your father.”
“You killed mother. Now you get it.”
“I didn’t kill her. You know it.”
“Well, she thinks you did.”
“Don’t. Don’t. I’ll haunt you!” The father’s deep guttural words were punctuated by a painful, choking “Awwk!” Verena glanced back to see him falling with the knife in his throat. He was dissolving—and then reappearing—in flame!
Phil and Verena ran along the inside of the cave until they found an upward passage. They emerged from the short narrow tunnel to find themselves on the first shelf. Muddi stood in their path. But Muddi had apparently forgotten them. He was staring at the two figures in flame at the mouth of the cave.
Verena saw. The old haggle-toothed fire woman had come back. The fire in the cave had brought her. She might have stopped to gloat over the full blaze of someone’s treasured wood-pile. Or she might have seized the kettle and set it up and boiled the soup. But she was much too busy, trying to hold her own in a slugging match.
For the stern tight-lipped old father had turned to flame, too, and at last he dared to fight back.
The fiery fists swished through the air, the sticks of wood scattered like leaves in the wind. Another pile of wood was ignited, and then the two figures leaped back and forth, from cave to kettle to cave, leaping and striking and biting and kicking. The fury was something to see. The brothers and their wives backed away, scolding and cursing to see their wood supplies going up in smoke.
Phil and Verena pushed their way past Muddi. He offered no resistance. Alone, he was lost.
“There’s a spiral path, if we can find it,” Phil said. “By the way, see what I picked up for a souvenir when we passed that dolt.”
It was. Muddi’s knife. A few steps farther on, Verena found the souvenir she wanted—the pistol with her name engraved in the handle, lying in the path.
“Hurry!” he said. “Those brothers know this path. We don’t. We’ve got miles of this spiralling before we’re out, and the gravity’s all in their favor.”
But upon reaching the shelf, they again stopped to look down on the battle.
“It’s a mysterious planet,” said Verena. “People don’t really die. They just turn to fire.”
“Just a little different from turning to dust,” Phil observed philosophically. “Bodies that turn to dust enrich the soil, they say. Those that turn to fire come back to offer heat and food.”
“She’s about to get the best of him, Phil,” Verena gasped. “What do you think will happen? Can she choke him when he’s already dead? Or how can either one be harmed?”
“I don’t know. Let me borrow your pistol,” said Phil. He took careful aim and shot. “Now what?”
The old lady of flames was hit. She recoiled.
“She’s rolling up into a ball,” Verena cried. “She’s floating up, like a balloon. Here she comes—”
Like the balls of fire they had seen rolling along the sandflats, the round fiery apparition, upon reaching the surface, rolled away and out of sight.
“There you have it—death in this strange land is just as mysterious as death anywhere,” Phil declared. “In some lands—dust. In others—fire. In both, the dead serve the living. I think, however, that that bullet was not misspent. The old lady of fire beat a quick retreat and left her husband in command. She’ll probably never know what happened.”
“If she doesn’t come back, what will these pit-folk do for food?”
“It’s my guess,” said Phil, “that they’ll either knuckle down to their father or there’ll be an empty kettle in the pit.”
They hurried along the concealed path that spiralled upward through the jagged walls. Whenever their way led through tunnels they realized that they were not yet out of danger. The angry brothers might decide to pursue. But when they emerged on a shelf half way up, they looked down to see that the pit-family was still being held at bay by the flaming arms of the old man.
“He was kind to us from the start,” Verena said. “I don’t think he ever intended that Muddi should marry me . . . And he saved your life, Phil. That’s why they killed him. But there are so many things I don’t understand, Phil. Tell me—”
“Sit down and get your breath,” he said. “We both need a moment’s rest, after fighting this gravity. And I’ve something very important to say, Verena.”
He slipped an arm around her waist.
“You’re going to thank me for rescuing you,” she said knowingly. “You needn’t. We both knew I’d be needed on this expedition.”
“Lucky for me,” said Phil, “that there was only one vote against your coming. Two would have cooked your chances.”
“Cooked, indeed,” Verena laughed. “That red-faced cook may deny voting against me after he hears about this.”
His arm tightened around her waist, and he spoke quietly. “That’s what I wanted to tell you, Verena. It wasn’t the cook who tried to blackmail you. It was me.”
“Phil!”
“Yes, Verena.”
“Then you didn’t want me to come!”
“I wanted you to live. And I knew this expedition would be a bout with death. I had heard about these mysterious fireballs. The captain tried to call them illusions, because no one understood them. But now we know, and we’re no longer afraid . . . Are we?
. . . Are we, Verena?”
As he took her close in his arms, she smiled. “I wouldn’t exactly care to have one creep up beside me,” she said.
“We’ll be all right in a few minutes, dear,” Phil comforted. “Do you know what that roar was that sounded above this pit? It was the expedition’s space ship. It’s waiting up there for us. I saw it go over.”
Her eyes widened in amazement. “How did they know where to come?”
“By the map I drew. Do you know how I sent it back to you in the first place?”
“I thought a vulture might have—” Verena hesitated.
“The flames took it,” Phil declared. “And that’s exactly how it traveled back the second time.”
“Then the burning old lady did us a favor too?”
“No, it was the member of our party who went mad from sunstroke and died a few days ago. He turned to flame, too. He appeared over the kettle once when they started to beat me to death. I’ve a suspicion he’s been helping all along. In fact—” Phil gulped. “What did you say about not wanting one to creep up beside you? Don’t look now—”
It was a bright ball of flame, moving up the path toward them. It stopped a few feet away and slowly molded into the shape of the old man. The flames of his throat were marked by the knife gash. He spoke slowly and with dignity.
“And so, according to the agreements which I have stated, you two are to be bound together—”
THE OCEAN DEN OF MERCURY
First published in Amazing Stories, June 1948
What was the secret of the underground ocean of Mercury? Who were its hidden inhabitants?
CHAPTER I
We knew that there were human beings somewhere in this region of Mercury, for my brother had relayed that information to us shortly before he passed out of the picture.
“If you come this way, George,” he had written, “follow the crow’s-foot canyons till you find the underground sea. The crimson sea, they call it. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m about to descend. They say it is inhabited by a mysterious tribe of human beings who originally came from the earth. If so, I am about to discover the answer to our grandfather’s dream. Give David and Uncle Willard my greetings. Wish me luck.—Ken.”
After several weeks of exploring with the aid of native scouts, we had at last found what must have been the “crow’s-foot canyons.” We delayed for several hours while one of those terrific Mercury storms spent itself. Torrents of warm rain spilled down through the narrow mo
untain crevasses. We were a dispirited party, waiting there under an overhanging ledge, wondering what adventure might await us.
My cousin David wrote a few lines to his wife and the scout assured us he would take the letter back to one of the Mercury spaceports. David, sour-faced and humorless at twenty-three, already wished he had stayed at home. He lacked his father’s spirit of adventure. Uncle Willard was bristling with eagerness to proceed.
When we descended the last of three or four miles of water-cut channels, we came into view of an inlet of the “Crimson Sea.” At first glance it appeared to be a lake of rich red liquid. But this was an illusion from the light. The walls were of radiant rock, and their brightness cast a baleful red color over the waters.
At once we saw streaks of darkness moving through the smooth red surface, and David exclaimed, “Swimmers!” At that moment, although we didn’t know it, we were about to become a part of the community life of the water-dwellers.
“I hope all of you can swim,” Uncle Willard said more severely than he had said it before. All the way down through the mountains he had impressed us with his creed for getting along with strangers. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” was his motto.
One of the three men who had composed our crew on Uncle Willard’s private spaceship spoke up, “We must have walked nearly ten miles since we hid our ship.” This was Jim Sutton. He wore a pedometer and kept close watch on the mounting figures. He stopped.
“Can you swim, Sutton?” Uncle Willard asked.
Sutton had paused to check and he might not have heard. When he caught up he began giving us figures on the approximate foot-pounds of energy required for six men of average weight, lightened by the lesser gravity of Mercury, to descend through four miles of canyons, whose angle of descent averaged so many degrees—
“Can you swim, Sutton?” my Uncle Willard broke in sharply.
“A little.”
“Can you swim a mile?”
“Oh, no. Not with all the plunder I’m carrying, plus the weight of this pedometer.”
“Without any surplus weight, could you swim a quarter of a mile?”
“On the earth—no. Here on Mercury—well, I should do much better. But these clothes are pretty heavy.”
“Take them off,” Uncle Willard said. He was already starting to undress. “We’ll make a cache here for our clothes and supplies.”
We stripped down to our trunks. Uncle Willard preferred that I stay with the goods while he and the others made a first cautious survey of the ocean den.
Jim followed the others a few yards, then I saw Uncle Willard shake his head and motion Jim that he had just as well go on back.
We crawled up on a rock only ten feet above the water’s edge. Jim was shuddering.
“Cold?” I asked.
“Warm,” he said. “If I’m shivering it’s cause I’m scared. I dreamed last night that I ran into death in just such a place as this.”
“Your imagination’s working overtime. Watch the goods. I’m going to try the water.”
Warm? I should say.
Red? Not at all. It seemed to be, when you’d come up in a certain light and seen the liquid dripping off your arm. But it was all a stage effect, you might say. A trick of nature. A little further out, I rounded the perpendicular shaft of stone around which Uncle Willard and the other three men had disappeared. Now I got a glimpse of that wider cavern from which a lot of the reflected light was coming.
It was only a limited view, as I later learned, but it was a breath-taker! I might have been looking into the biggest cathedral in the world, with all of its walls and ceilings glowing with a soft radiance. Its floor was water. And its people swam through the floor easily and quickly, passing each other as they went about their business.
I saw a few tubes that rose out of the surface like huge glass test tubes. These were partially filled, so that the persons who rested within them were at a somewhat higher level than those who swam the surface of the regular sea.
Uncle Willard, David, and the two crewmen now split up, each to swim off in a different direction. Presently they had disappeared around some of the projecting columns of stone. My eye tried to follow the maze of waterways, and I suddenly realized that any newcomer could get himself lost in these channels without trying. And how could you know you weren’t trespassing on private property? It would be just like Uncle Willard, always bold and over-adventurous, to swim smack into trouble before he knew his grounds.
This danger must have occurred to my cousin David, for a moment later he reappeared, floundering around, looking for the shortest way back to home base.
“Hay-ay! Father! Where are you?” I gulped. That was a fool thing to do, I thought. When you start out to trespass on someone’s property, you don’t go around yelling. I did a speedy crawl. Jim Sutton was right about swimming being easy in this light gravity. A few long strokes and I was close enough to draw David’s attention.
“Pipe down!” I whispered over the liquid surface. The red-crested waves seemed to carry my voice along.
“Hi, George. Oh, gollies, I thought I was off the deep end.”
“Quiet, will you? Don’t forget we’re foreigners.”
“I’m hurt,” David said, swimming toward me. “A hundred spikes shot into my leg. I can’t swim.”
For a casualty, he was making plenty of splash. We went for the nearest shore that would accommodate us and climbed up on a flat rock. I could see that something very peculiar had happened. David’s calf was stuck full of the biggest thorns I ever saw. Live thorns—wiggling.
They were a little larger than pencils. That’s what they looked like—three or four dozen black pencils—flexible enough to vibrate—with their points stuck tight in David’s flesh.
“They’re fish,” I said, not that my remark gave David any comfort. I pulled three of them out and David gave such a yowl of pain that I paused, waiting for him to grit his teeth. “You must have run into a whole school of them.”
“They ran into me,” David groaned. “I’ll bet they’re poison.”
“They’re not poison,” came a feminine voice from over our heads.
A girl was looking down on us from a shelf of rock ten or twelve feet overhead. I would have sworn she was smiling sweetly with not enough mischief in her manner to disturb anyone. But David must have seen her in a different light. He gave her an awful scowl, and he nudged me.
“Let’s move. We didn’t ask for company.”
“They’re not poison,” the girl repeated. Her wet hair hung tight over her shoulders, but you couldn’t help noticing that she was pretty and golden and plump. What she wore for a bathing suit must have been woven of seaweed and shells, and it seemed just right on her—a graceful, natural costume through which her pretty golden skin showed bright. It was better than any breathless moment in a technicolor movie.
“Those are water hornets,” she said, climbing down over the rock. “If you want to remove them, come over to the warm fountain. That’s the easiest way.”
I don’t think David cared for her offer of help, but I didn’t give him a chance to refuse. I practically pushed him along over the rocks. We followed her up through a zigzag trail, with deep blue lights barely showing the way. All the while those wiggling black hornets were sticking in David’s flesh like so many fish-hooks, and he was doing plenty of whimpering. I didn’t blame him.
When we came to the source of the low hiss of falling water, the blue light illuminated a waterfall, and mist from the steam came up and filled our eyes. The pool under the fall was as hot a bath as David could stand. But it worked. The moment he dipped his leg in the pool, those ornery black water hornets went limp and fell away. Later, when we examined his injuries in the brighter light, the spots didn’t look too serious. “See,” the girl said. “No bleeding. The warm water heals everything—everything except a broken heart, they say.” She gave a little laugh. Then, “My, you are a sober one. I don’t know where you come from, but you must be
long to a very fierce tribe.”
David wasn’t quite equal to the situation. He couldn’t return a smile for a smile. So I tried to fill in for him. I thanked the girl and told her to go on about her business and not to pay any attention to us. We were wanderers who had come down into these ravines out of curiosity. We wouldn’t be making anyone any trouble.
This sufficed. She returned to her overhead rock. A soft, friendly smile lighted her face as she waved us goodbye. Then we were out of her sight and David turned to me fiercely.
“Now we’re in for it. Father will raise the very devil with us for this. What was she doing there, anyway? Spying on us?”
“She was drying her hair. Pretty hair, too. Or did you notice?”
“I noticed that you talked too much. By now she’s running home as fast as she can, to tell the tribe they’re about to be invaded.”
“They’re going to know sooner or later,” I said. “But I think you’re wrong about her. She liked you, my boy. She tried to be friends.”
“Cut it out.”
“Does your injured leg feel better? Did you thank her? You weren’t even civil.”
David caught my arm and pointed back to the water. She was swimming across the inlet toward a point about a hundred yards distant.
“See. She’s on her way to tell someone. Father won’t like that. We can’t spill the beans until Dad says so.”
“The beans are spilled,” I said. “You and the hornets spilled them, and the girl is doing the natural thing. She’s going to spread the news.”
“Then do something!”
“Me? What should I do?” I flung back at him. After all he held a higher rank in this little party than I, being two years my senior and being a son of our chosen leader, Uncle Willard Pemberton.
“Go get her. Head her off. Drown her, damn it. What do we care, just so we don’t let her go and ruin our expedition.”
The quickest way to ruin our expedition, I thought, would have been for me to follow David’s rash suggestions. But I forgave him, in a measure, realizing he was homesick and sour. For on my part, I had thought the girl charming enough to bear further acquaintance.
