Between Worlds

by Garret Smith

  But our first glimpse of the mysterious new creatures indicated that their dwelling-place was the deep sea. If they did but confine themselves to that element we might well be enabled to occupy this new world in harmony with them, for the land and air were quite sufficient for our purposes.

  But presently we were disabused of even this hope. It happened some thirty sleeps after the disappearance of the queen when we were out in a body exploring the slope of the high wooded ridge that led back from the shore. We had become weary and had paused on a flat table-rock overlooking the sea to partake of luncheon.

  Then out on the still air came a cry, a feeble “halloo” coming apparently from only a little way up the slope.

  We started up in surprise, and instinctively began to take account of our company to see if by chance anyone had strayed on ahead and become lost in the forest. But all of our party were present.

  Again came the “Halloo” a little nearer seemingly, but a bit more uncertain in quality.

  A half dozen of us picked up our spears and started forward in the direction of the sound.

  Scarcely twenty paces on, in another and smaller clearing, we came upon its source. Crawling painfully forward on hands and knees was something that was undeniably of the human form, but the most wretched sample of the species that ever I laid eyes on, excepting perhaps the blind savages of the Land of Light.

  The creature was evidently suffering from ill-use or exposure or both. His strange, almost skin-tight blue garments were torn and spotted with mud and bloodstains. His head was crowned with short hair that looked as though he were in the habit of having it sheared, a practice unheard of in Venus. But stranger yet to us, this hair was almost jet black in color.

  What perhaps to our eyes at that time gave him his most brutal touch was that his hair was not confined to the top of his head but grew in stiff, coarse bristles over, all the lower part of his face, lengthening out his upper lip till it formed a ludicrous thatch above his mouth. No hair had ever grown on human face in Venus and this first view of a beard greatly amazed and disgusted us.

  The large mouth with its tusklike teeth and the heavy jaw reminded us repulsively of the eyeless men of the Land of Night.

  But this man had eyes, his only redeeming feature, beautiful brown orbs, such color as I had never seen in mortal head, and with expression suggesting, despite the other brutal aspect of his face, refinement and intelligence.

  I called him a man, though at that time we had not the slightest notion whether he were male or female.

  He was more sturdily built than the men of Venus, but much shorter, being I should say, a scant two paces high and reaching barely to the shoulders of the shortest of us.

  He beheld us, on the other hand, with amazement apparently as great as our own. I could well understand, if this were a typical specimen of the people of this new planet, that our appearance must have been as strange to him as was his to us.

  But while his keen, brown eyes expressed bewilderment and curiosity, they showed no trace of fear, nor did they betray any evidence of malice or ferocity. On seeing us he had simply raised both hands in the air and emitted a string of harsh sounds, both sign and sounds being unintelligible.

  So thoroughly harmless and peaceful did he appear, and at the same time so evidently in need of aid that we gladly bore him back to our bivouac, though at the same time we kept a sharp lookout for ambush or other form of treachery.

  He ate ravenously of our food, though with a wry and puzzled face at the first taste, an expression he made haste to conceal. We were interested to note, too, that his manner of eating, though differing from ours, had none of the beastliness which we had learned to expect of a savage.

  AFTER he had eaten, we bore him back to the shore and aboard the ship, where one of our party who was a physician bathed and dressed his wounds, which proved superficial, and left him to sleep.

  With the next light he was up and about, apparently well on the way toward recovery.

  During his convalescence, I was detailed to bear him company, with the end in view that I discover some key to his speech. Thus we hoped to obtain knowledge of the new world in which we were destined to live and of the strange race of men who dwelt there.

  You may well imagine my task was a difficult one. I quickly discovered that there was absolutely nothing in common between our method of speech and his. But he was quick in intelligence and evidently as eager as I to open up means of communication.

  So, little by little, by pointing at common objects and getting him to name them in his language and by long and earnest practice with, his painful twisting of tongue, I began slowly to acquire a vocabulary which I, in turn, passed on to the others.

  At length the time came when we could begin to ask him questions intelligently and in a measure understand his answers.

  And the things we learned so passed beyond our powers of belief that for a long time we feared he was making game of us by weaving fanciful tales from his imagination. But I am free to confess that he entertained the same theory toward the story of our wanderings between worlds.

  All that he told, however, later proved true. In fact, he was able, as he went along, to offer certain proofs that gradually gained him credit for truthfulness, but convinced us that here in this new world of change we were about to meet with stranger experiences than had ever yet befallen us.

  I will not weary the reader with the slow and painful process by which we gleaned our information from him. When I say that among the first things he told us was that this new planet on which we had landed was called Earth, and that this was in the late summer of your year 1914, I need not reiterate what is familiar to every school boy and girl of you.

  That this was a world holding not one but many races, speaking not one but many tongues, that these races were waging bloody war involving wholesale murder made a tale that it was difficult for a son of changeless, peaceful Venus to comprehend Further, it dampened all our ardor for settling in this unthinkably barbarous world.

  Our informant, it seemed, was from a land called England, and the tongue he was teaching us was the English language. The original impression we had made as to his intelligence was correct. He had been a graduate student of astronomy at one of his country’s great universities when the war broke out, and had enlisted in England’s navy.

  The island on which we found ourselves was an uninhabited bit of land in the Pacific Ocean which his country’s chief enemies, the Germans, had made use of as a secret naval base for their boats that traveled under water. His ship had been sunk by one of them and he had been brought to this spot as prisoner.

  As they were landing, however, he had managed to escape to the woods, where he had nearly perished from his wounds and lack of food. At length, driven by desperation, he was crawling back to the coast to give himself up when he had heard our strange voices and supposing us barbaric natives of these seas had chosen surrender to us rather than a return to the Germans.

  The naval base of these barbarians, it seems, was hidden in a bay on the other side of the ridge which we were mounting, and we would presently have stumbled upon it unawares and been made captives.

  At his mention of the German submarine boats, Hunter perceived that here was a possible explanation of the mysterious wrecking of our vessel and the disappearance of the queen. I told the Englishman of these incidents.

  “Undoubtedly,” he affirmed. “Your ship was wrecked by one of their torpedoes. Those brutes don’t stop to identify a vessel. You were nearing their secret base. That was enough. I wonder they haven’t before now attacked you on land. Possibly, not being able to understand your strange appearance, they fear a trap. They are cowards at heart. As for your unfortunate lady, evidently a submarine was studying your part off shore. A German submarine captain could never resist the temptation to kidnap a beautiful woman.”

  HE TOLD us tales of the treatment these people had accorded helpless people, accounts that made us faint with horror.


  But, to digress for a moment from this distressing subject of the queen’s fate, not all of the information our English guest gave us had to do with this bewildering and terrible Earth. Strange as it may seem, this son of Earth who had never left his native planet was able to tell us news of the planet from which we-came, the world which for the first time we learned to call, in his English tongue, Venus. And that news, once we were convinced of its truth, filled us with new hope just at the moment when his dark picture of Earth had plunged us into the blackest despair.

  It was some time before we could convince him that we had actually come from another planet. Not till he studied carefully our ship and its contents and found there many things he knew did not exist on Earth, was he convinced. Further, he admitted that we ourselves resembled no known race on Earth. As a final proof, Hunter demonstrated the flying apparatus of his ship.

  When we described our planet in detail, the course we had taken, and the apparent time our journey had consumed, he at length identified it as Venus.

  We were most at cross purposes, however, when we told him that our world had caught fire after we started and calmly pointed out the flaming orb above us as the planet in which we had formerly lived. One of us had made this statement at the outset and he had misunderstood our meaning.

  But when it finally dawned on him what we meant, and we had again described the moment when we had first seen our world apparently aflame, he laughed long and loud, a rudeness for which he apologized profusely after his mirth would allow speech.

  Imagine our incredulous surprise when he told us that our lately despised but now beloved Venus was Intact and had never been touched by flames. Our joy when this was proven to us was unbounded.

  But he convinced us at length that what we had mistaken for Venus aflame was really a great world called the Sun, thousands of times larger than Venus and Earth together, which had always been aflame, and was the source of light and heat for all the worlds that revolved around it, including Venus and Earth.

  So in language fit for babes, as we were in this new knowledge, he explained the great mystery of the source of light and heat which had ever baffled our sages. At length we understood the meaning of our Land of Light and Land of Darkness, and learned of the changing light and seasons of Earth.

  It seems that our delusion that we had seen Venus burning had been a very simple one. We had left Venus as it was in transit, that is passing directly between the Sun and Earth, we had started from the dark side of Venus, the Sun, which we had never seen or imagined existing, hidden behind our planet as long as we were close to its surface.

  But there had come a moment when we reached such a distance from Venus that the planet could no longer hide the great sun behind it. So the flaming rays had shone out around our world and made it appear ablaze. From then on we had seen our old home only as a glimpse of a dark spot on the Sun.

  As final proof the astronomer at sunrise the next morning pointed out the bright star we had already seen near that flaming orb at dawn.

  “Behold your lost world!” he had exclaimed simply.

  Choking with emotion, we watched it until its light faded in the glare of the rising sun. Then Hunter broke the silence.

  “We will go back!” he exclaimed.

  In our hearts every man of us fervently echoed his resolve.

  “But first,” he added, “we must rescue the queen from those barbarians.”

  WHEN Hunter made the statement that he purposed to rescue the queen if she were yet alive, we listened with grave misgivings. Once we would have mentally convicted him of madness. But we had seen our intrepid and resourceful leader make good too many strange resolves to be ready any longer to condemn him offhand.

  Our friend the Englishman, however, seemed convinced that Hunter’s hardships and dangers and disappointments had unsettled his reason.

  As tactfully as possible he set forth the difficulties in the way of carrying out any such design. Hunter listened gravely, and stored away this information for future use. But it left his purpose unshaken.

  One of your Earth proverbs declares that “fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” I would not seem to characterize our leader as a fool. But his outlook on life was a simple and direct one. Stupendous as had been his undertakings and his titanic battles with strange forces, the elements of these conflicts had after all been few and offering little complication.

  He proposed now, if necessary, to hew his way to the very heart of great, iron-ringed Germany and snatch this lone maiden from the Kaiser’s millions of armed barbarians. And his plan of action was the same simple and direct one with which he had sailed across the formidable Land of Night. Had he been able to grasp the idea of the innumerable and complicated difficulties with which his way would teem, he might have hesitated, sought out devious methods, and failed.

  But he was blind to all this. It sometimes happens in a world accustomed to meeting complications with more complications, that the very audacity of a simple soul wins by sheer surprise of directness. And on this basis Hunter unwittingly proceeded with strange results.

  It was not till he explained to the Englishman the nature and potency of his anesthetic preparation by which in an instant he could make any number of men powerless, and had demonstrated its power, that our guest was ready to consider our leader’s dream of a madman.

  When he was convinced that we possessed a weapon of marvelous power his enthusiasm knew no bounds. It seemed that the men of Earth possessed poisonous gases with which they slaughtered each other in battle, and crude anesthetics which I judged were closely allied to these gases, but were used for the strangely contradictory purpose of ameliorating the sufferings of friend and foe alike. Such was one of the many paradoxes of this strange Earth.

  But a gas like ours, that rendered a foe powerless without injuring him, was unheard of. He at once insisted that Hunter come to England and manufacture this article in unlimited quantities for his country, declaring that both could realize enormous fortunes thereby.

  But to Hunter such a proposal was unthinkable. In the first place, to a native of Venus this talk of a fortune had no meaning. In the second place, we had no desire to take sides in this war, all parties to it at that time seeming to us equally barbarous. He deemed it politic, however, to give the Englishman no decisive refusal.

  Hunter’s plan was to take a picked group of us armed with anesthetic sprayers and under the Englishman’s guidance, surprise the German base in the night, overcome and make them all prisoners. He hoped to find the queen there and make a quick end of our Earth sojourn. To this, our guest, now no longer skeptical, consented.

  So there came a cloudy night when the stars were hidden and that other bright world, the Moon, with which we had lately made acquaintance was not in evidence.

  In darkness as dense as ever held us enthralled in the Land of Night, we followed our guide, single file, up the long ridge and down a steep, winding path on the other side, into what he told us was a deep, narrow gulf at the head of which, screened by trees, was the German base.

  The descent occupied the greater part of the night. We had to feel our way, inch by inch, over the unfamiliar trail. A misstep, our guide warned us, meant a possible fall over the precipice, or, at the least, a sound that would inevitably warn the foe of our approach.

  The first faint glow of dawn had just begun to tinge the sky overhead when we reached sea level at the head of the gulf and spread out around the area in which, our guide declared, were the masked wharves and barracks of the base.

  We had so far met no sentry. The Englishman explained that the Germans guarded this base mainly by a submarine which constantly patrolled around the island, thus making any approach by sea or air impossible. The only other detached outpost was in the lookout station hidden in a tree-top at the summit of the ridge opposite, to the one we had descended. He could be dealt with later.

  The only sentries we would have to cope with immediately, therefore, would be t
hose stationed on the docks and about the barracks. Hunter counted on overcoming them with vapor from a distance before an alarm could be sounded.

  AS we came to a halt ready for action, we could make out, through the fringe of trees, the dim shadow of low buildings. Fortunately for our purpose there was no wind, save a gentle land current that bore down through the gulf and out to sea in just the right direction to carry our vapor effectively.

  it had been agreed beforehand that when all was in readiness the Englishman would whistle softly in imitation of one of the familiar birds of the region. Now we waited breathlessly for the call.

  At last it came, each of us discharged his anesthetic sprayer, and after counting ten, as directed, advanced on the buildings.

  A few steps ahead I stumbled against a figure leaning against a tree. He made no move, and I knew by the alien feel of his garments that it was one of the barbarians overcome by our vapor.

  By the time I had bound this man’s hands securely, so smoothly had our plans worked out that the attack was over, and crowned with complete success. While we were locating and binding the sentry, Hunter, accompanied by the Englishman, entered the barracks and overcame the sleeping men within, some two hundred of them. Then the lights were turned on, and before the first of our victims recovered consciousness we had them all securely manacled.

  Two of the submarine boats lay by the dock, but cautious investigation showed that there was no one aboard either of them save the single sentry on each of their decks, who, like the rest, were now thoroughly secured.

  But this overwhelming of the base itself, simple and complete as it had proven, did not finish our task. There remained the sentry in the lookout tree at the top of the ridge and the patrol boat that might at this very moment be heading into the base.

  We, therefore, wasted no time over our present captives, but gagged as well as bound them so that no sentry might give untimely warning to their compatriots with whom we must still cope.