The Arthur Leo Zagat Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur Leo Zagat

  Those far-spreading wings would sweep around as the center checked, and the Asafrican craft would be caught in an enfilading fire. Fu-Kong and his gang were doomed! Peculiar how calmly they were taking it. Eastern fatalism, he supposed.

  Eastern fatalism, hell! Memory fanged him! Thomas had just told of the incredible speed at Fu-Kong’s command. The spy master was not trapped, far from it. He could get away at will. Why was he hanging here motionless, watching those oncoming flyers, a sardonic smile tingeing his yellow face?

  Nearer and nearer the lights came. The dim shapes of the army rocket-planes showed, phantomlike. The central ship dipped, minutely, and the long line began to expand. The motley crew of the spy ship clustered behind their leader in the bow.

  “Near enough.” Fu-Kong’s voice rang like a sentence of doom. A long pencil of orange light shot out from his vessel, wavered, impinged on the nearest plane. The flyer flared red, then dazzling white, at the tip of the beam. Then—there was nothing there. The death ray moved on to the next in line.

  All along that far-flung line a coruscation of green swept, as the indomitable fighters shot out their futile answer. Lethal enough, those rays, but their range was far short. Another plane was caught in the orange beam and vanished! Another! But the squadron came on, their mile-long fire-tails lashing them through the night.

  If one, only one, could get near enough to spear the Asafrican craft with its beam! Taking that one desperate chance the birdmen rushed into the face of destruction, never faltering, never wavering, as ship by ship the orange scythe reaped its deadly harvest. Only ten ships were left of the score that had first appeared, only nine—and still the green rays were miles short of their mark.

  Minutes passed that were long as eternity. Eight of the intrepid attackers remained, then seven. But now the stabbing darts of emerald death were almost reaching their mark. A little more—only a little more. Suddenly the floor vibrated and Atkins heard the muted thunder of the craft’s rocket blasts. The spy ship was moving at last.

  Fu-Kong would escape—that was unavoidable. The terrific speed of his strange vessel could never be matched by the combination plane-and-rocket-craft of the Americans. But at least the pitiful handful remaining would escape the holocaust. Seeing the futility of their courageous attempt they would return to their base, perhaps effectuate plans for a countrywide encircling movement that might in the long run bring the yellow ship down. No—Atkins’ mouth twisted in a soundless oath—the Oriental had no intention of permitting that.

  The distance between the spy-craft and the nearest attacker did not increase. The Asiatic was keeping just beyond the range of the green rays—was taking toll on the American aviators with false hope while the merciless orange beam flared out, mowing the velvet night with destruction.

  Chapter IV

  The Dragon Of Hung-Chen

  Out of the twenty flyers who had soared to the attack a bare six still charged on. They were insane! They couldn’t win—

  But couldn’t they? Atkins stifled a gasp, was taut with sudden hope. Five of the squadron’s remnant had startlingly changed their tactics. They were zigzagging, were darting left and right, up and down, in what seemed a last panicky attempt to evade the Asiatic’s ray.

  Senseless, it seemed—but there was one ship that had left the group. Its green ray was doused, only the pin-point red of its tail-flame betrayed its course to Atkins. He flung out his soul in a wordless prayer that neither Fu-Kong nor his aides would notice that stealthy climb.

  Steadily the squadron leader mounted till the scarlet dot that marked him out was touching the upper margin of the view-screen. Ten thousand feet below, his comrades flitted about in their macabre dance, cheating the orange death again and again by breathless inches. The attention of the enemy crew was concentrated on those darting shapes, on their darting, ineffective rays.

  Atkins’ eyes flicked back to the lone flyer. He saw the sudden crimson burst, saw the downward curve of its flaring wake as a terrific swoop began, saw the green ray dart out ahead, spearhead of the diving hawk. Down and down and down, adding the pull of Earth to his own driving blasts, the avenger plunged in one last, magnificent effort to catch the destroyer unaware; zipping faster and faster until even in that tenuous air the steel plane-body glowed dull red with the friction of its unleashed speed.

  A minute’s grace—sixty unobserved seconds of that lightning slant—and it would snip the yellow menace from the skies.

  “Look—Fu-Kong—look!” It was Mingai who yelped the alarm. The orange ray swept up. Jammed. By luck—by the luck with which the gods award the greatly daring—the down-darting American had found the one vulnerable angle of the spy ship. Green flame licked out hungrily, but Fu-Kong’s hand was light-quick in its flash to the throttle lever. His ship lurched—jerked aside in the last possible moment of safety.

  The American was under, now, right under the spy-craft. But the dragon ship was driving ahead. In an eye-blink Fu-Kong would be able to bring his death ray to bear on the daring flyer! Don Atkins flung heavily across the floor by the sudden jerk, saw, not quite three feet above him, a gleaming copper handle—the valve at which Mingai had twisted just before the take-off.

  Legs lashed, arms bound, sweat pouring from his lined brow, eyes bulging from their sockets, by sheer power of stomach and trunk muscles alone he swung his torso from the floor. His head came level with that handle. His teeth clamped around it. Corded sinews stood out on his neck as he drove the valve lever down. Suddenly he was snatched loose by a lurch of the craft, and his preposterously twisted body crashed down.

  But that very lurch told him of success! It was the main fuel-valve! He had cut off the rocket-tube’s supply! In an instant, now, the vessel would be caught in the ray-beam of the pilot below. Atkins tensed to meet the green flash that would mean oblivion for Fu-Kong and his myrmidons—and for Bart Thomas and himself.

  It never came! A shrill, high-pitched oath, footsteps running toward him, pulled open his eyes. Fu-Kong was bending over him, face livid with wrath, ray-gun rising for the coupe de grâce. Behind him Li-San came up, a strange glow between his slant lids. Atkins’ eyes flicked past the couple. In this final moment of life he must know what had happened, why his intended sacrifice had failed.

  A blue electric veil, shimmering and sparking in a cerulean network of tiny lightning, curved all across the view-screen. Beyond it the misty shapes of the attacking aircraft spat their green beams. The emerald death rays spattered harmlessly on the ionic curtain, and were quenched. From within, the orange ray thrust futilely against the hollow, defensive sphere of force.

  This Atkins saw in a single, flashing glance. Then he was staring up at the enraged Oriental, was waiting in a timeless void for the blue spurt that would sear thought and consciousness and life itself from his despairing brain.

  “Wait, Master!” Li-San snatched at Fu-Kong’s hand, swerved it aside from its aim. “Wait! That way is too easy for the pale-skinned dog. Let me and Mingai take care of him. We have a debt to pay for what he did to us in the wood!”

  In the other’s slitted eyes a glint of satisfaction showed.

  “I had my doubts of you, Li-San. Twice you have shown deplorable softness in your tasks. This I like much better. You may have your wish. But take him below—I have much to do and do not wish to be disturbed.”

  Atkins’ skin crawled. Death he could face calmly—but that which the fanatic gleam in Li-San’s saffron mask promised made him a coward.

  “Fu-Kong,” he croaked, barely able to force the words through his constricted throat. “Don’t give me to him! Kill me yourself. That would be clean and honest.” But the Oriental was walking away.

  They took him down through the trapdoor, carried him down, flung him heavily on the plates in the narrow space between the entrance hatch and the curving inner shell.

  “Untie him, Mingai.” There was an undercurrent of eager excitement in Li-San’s tones. Even in the face of what was to come, Atkins wondered at
the gratuitous cruelty of the Oriental mind. Mingai stooped to him, fumbled at his lashings. As they fell away, the American leaped up to make a fight of it. Hopeless, of course, Li-San had his ray-gun poised for action. Better to go out that way than to suffer the planned revenge of the sadistic duo. Now—

  “Hands up, Mingai! Quick!” The virulent threat in Li-San’s voice made the low command seem a crashing shout. Mingai straightened. His arms flew above a saffron face from which amazement and horror had stripped its habitual mask. Li-San was braced on spread feet, his ray-gun thrust before him. His countenance was alight with a strange flame, and his eyes snapped menace. “One whimper from you and I flash!”

  There was an instant of stunned silence. Then Li-San spoke again.

  “Here, you American! Grab those ropes. Tie him up and gag him. Quick, man!”

  Dazed by the sudden turn, Atkins obeyed. What lay behind this sudden act on the Asiatic’s part? Had he suffered a sudden change of heart—He recalled, in the wood, Li-San trying to argue Mingai out of his determination to search the tree in which he was hiding. He recalled Li-San’s intervention with Fu-Kong a moment ago that had certainly saved his life—

  His task was finished—Mingai tightly bound, and a strip from his own tunic jammed none too gently into his mouth. Before Atkins could voice his questions there was a sudden dull roar which shook the vessel.

  “He’s getting under way again,” Li-San barked. “We’ve no time to lose.” He plucked Mingai’s ray-gun from his belt, thrust it into the American’s hand. “Come on!” He was flitting silently up the ladder, Atkins, perforce, after him.

  THEY were just beneath the rivet-studded trap. Li-San lifted the lid, slowly, till a narrow crack of brighter light showed along its edge. Atkins managed to crush in alongside of him on the narrow step, and together they peered through the slit.

  The blue defensive sphere was gone and the attacking ships had vanished. But something else showed in the sky; a long, slim, torpedo-like object that sped straight for the spy ship. From its nose a white light flickered in a rapid series of dots and dashes. Atkins felt an electric quiver of tenseness run through the yellow man against whose body his own was crushed.

  A strange pattern formed itself in the American’s mind as he crouched there, waiting for he knew not what. That oncoming shape had the very form of the rocket-stratocars used by the Silver Eagle. Yet this was no messenger, waylaid as Thomas had been. He had signaled to Fu-Kong. Why had the spy-craft waited here, chancing the fight with the American planes, when it might have been away and gone with only the slightest effort? What was it that glowed from Li-San’s eyes, that shook him with an ague of eagerness?

  Nearer came the speeding rocket, and nearer still, until it passed out of sight at the lower edge of the view-screen. The larger craft lurched, and lurched again. Fu-Kong thrust at his levers, there was a hiss of rushing air. Then a buzzer shrilled.

  “He’s picking up the stratocar,” Li-San whispered. “Get ready.”

  “All right, Na-Garri,” Fu-Kong called. “The air in the entrance lock is at normal pressure. Open up.”

  The black bent to a ring in the center of the floor, and pulled on it. A round manhole lid came away. A head appeared, and a squat, broad body followed it.

  Straight black hair, tiny black eyes almost hidden by high cheekbones, broad flat nose over thick, red lips—this was a Tatar face, a throwback to the Mongol hordes that in the Thirteenth Century ruled half the then-known world by force of arms. From that stocky figure emanated an aura of power, of dominance. Unbounded ambition, lust for power, savage cruelty, were stamped on the round, flaccid countenance.

  Li-San clutched Atkins’ arm, his fingers sinking into the flesh.

  “It’s Hung-Chen! Come himself to receive Fu-Kong’s reports. Tomorrow the attack.” Atkins understood why the spymaster had been unable to flee. He had had to wait here for his chief—no way to change the course of the stratocar once it had started.

  The huge black bowed low. The Hindu joined him in humble obeisance. The haughty Fu-Kong came away from his controls, abject servility in every line of his tall body. The Mongol spoke sharply, and there was a rapid exchange in a shrill, high-piping tongue.

  “Now!” The snapped word from Li-San galvanized Atkins into action. He thrust upon the hatch, leaped. Clang! The yellow men swung to the sound of the falling trapdoor, saw two apparitions spring into view, ray-guns at the ready.

  “Throw up your hands! Up with them!” Atkins’ shout drove through the chamber. “Up, or we wipe you out!” Li-San’s eyes were blazing pits of wrath. Na-Garri’s simian arms went ceiling-ward, the Hindu’s, Hung-Chen’s. Fu-Kong ripped out a virulent, “Traitor!” at Li-San and snatched at the cylinder in his belt.

  “S-s-s-s-s!” Blue lightning hissed from Atkins’ weapon. A blackened corpse crumpled slowly to the floor. “Any more?” His voice was thick with fury. But the remaining three stood statue-like. “We surrender,” came the voice of the captured overlord. “Don’t flash.”

  * * * *

  Their captives tightly bound, the two—Don Atkins, the American, and Li-San, the Chinese, turned to one another. Atkins’ hand went out to the other, then hesitated—drew back. Li-San straightened.

  “No,” he answered the question in the American’s eyes, “I am not a traitor to my own people. Here,” his hand tapped his own breast, “there are two loyalties—one to the race among whom I was born, among whom I have lived my life and have my friends, the other to the race of my ancestors. War between them was unthinkable to me.” He glanced down at Hung-Chen, bound and glowering, looked up again, a wistful smile hovering on his saffron face. “Now there will be no war. I’m sorry I couldn’t save the squadron of planes. I had to wait until he arrived, you see. And it was too dangerous before to attempt to capture the ship.”

  “You joined their rotten gang, risked death and worse, to defeat their plans—to save your own people, and mine, from the horrors of war!” Atkins exclaimed. “By God, Li-San, you are a man!”

  Yellow hand and white met and clasped.

  “Hey, you fellows,” came Bart Thomas’ weak voice from the floor. “When you get time you might take three or four of these ropes off me and get me something to wear. You’ll get all the handshaking you want when we get back to New York.”

  THE CAVERN OF THE SHINING POOL

  CHAPTER I

  The Ether Eddy

  I jerked down the result-lever of my Merton Calculator, and the rattle of its gears was loud in the deserted reaches of Flight Control Headquarters. The flight-graph imprinted itself on the space-chart, the thin red line that would guide the newly launched Phobos on her maiden voyage to Venus. I glanced through the transparent quartz wall at her tremendous bulk, vague on the vast tarmac of New York’s Spaceship Terminus in the brooding dark of 3 a.m. The graph line I had just traced jogged erratically, a million and a half miles out, detouring the Phobos’ course a hundred thousand miles. That hump was why I was here, alone in the crystal hive. At midnight the message had pulsed in on the infra-red ray from the domed air-cell on the Moon where gaunt men ceaselessly scan the skies that Trade may ply unhampered between Earth and her sister planets.

  In their electelscopes a far-flung shimmer had appeared across the blackness of space and they had leaped to send warning of the one unconquered menace that harried the spaceways. An ether eddy!

  Sometimes I thought the old memories drowned, the thirty-year long agony ended, that had wiped out for me forever the thrill of space flight, the transcendent joy of leaping from this wrinkled ball of ours and hurtling, godlike, among the stars. Then that word, that damned word that had stripped the winged rocket from my tunic and made of me a half alive juggler of charts and figures, would strike my ears. The years would fade and I would be in hell again.

  As now. I saw Jay again, my brother, too poignantly real across the span of three decades. I saw the wide-shouldered, thick-legged bulk of him, a strand of yellow hair straggling over his brow, hi
s broad-planed face flushed with the excitement of his first command. I felt my hand crushed in his own as I wished him the immemorial “Happy landing.”

  The Luna’s hatch shut him from my sight. The great craft blasted-off from Earth. Tile scene shifted. In tortured imagining I bent over an electelscope view field, pride pulsing in my veins as I watched the long, clean arc of his flight. He had learned my teaching well, the bantling. He would push me hard for my laurels as ace of Earth’s space fleet.

  Then there was that black shimmer across the firmament’s spangled black. The Luna plunged straight into it—and vanished!

  There—where a moment ago she had been, even in her tininess, majestic as a symbol of man’s conquest of unimaginable distances, unrealizable cold—there the inscrutable panoply of the stars stared horror at me and only a faint trail of rocket gas, glowing and fading in the vacancy, showed that the Luna had ever been.

  In the madness that took me, I ripped the insignia of my craft from my blouse and swore that never again should I leave Earth’s atmosphere. I kept that oath, but my great need drew me back to this place where the space ships, in ever increasing numbers, leaped for the stars.

  Here, while I moldered in the dull routine of my clerk’s job, I could watch the swaggering youngsters who wore the winged rocket and pretend to myself that perhaps the next craft to land would bring Jay back to me. Here I had grown old…

  The little hairs prickled on the nape of my neck. The silence about me was eerie, the shadows played tricks on my overwrought nerves. Somehow I felt that I was not alone. And I was afraid.

  A furtive sound whispered behind me. My eyes flicked the desk for a weapon, found none. I forced my swivel chair around, every nerve protesting.

  A tall figure stood in the dimness near the door, black-cloaked, shapeless. Beneath its black hood was the pale oval of a face out of which eyes glittered, catlike, in some vagrant gleam. The figure was motionless, and all the more menacing because of its immobility. I thought of the lead-capsuled radium in the strong room beyond my desk, the pellets that multiplied tenfold the power of the oxy-hydrogen mixture in the fuel tanks. Five million solar dollars would not replace them. But what thief would dare the photroncells’ spray of death that guarded the treasure?