“Going with me, Bob?” he asked.
“No,” said Bob, “I’m going to stay here and wait for the police ships from Radium City. They ought to be here any minute now. From what Hart told me just now we’re sitting right on top of a keg of dynol and I’ll feel a lot safer when the police get here.”
“You want to go, Doc?” asked Angus.
“Nope,” said Doc. “This has been an exciting day and I feel all tuckered out. But I’m a happy man. This news about the Genziks has justified my faith in old Jake. They laughed at him back on Earth when he said the Genziks were the old Atlanteans. And now it sure looks like they were.”
“All right, then,” said Angus. “But you boys are missing a lot of fun.”
Plodding through the ankle-deep red mud Angus started down the road.
“Still a regular old war-horse,” observed Doc. “From what I have heard he sure was an old hell-hound in his day. He damn near stopped all traffic between Mars and Earth thirty years ago. Had the whole Interplanetary Police force on his trail at times. But he had a good ship and he always showed them a clean pair of heels. Old-timers claim he could make a spaceship turn on a dime.”
“Let’s go back to the station,” suggested Bob. “You and Sandy can finish that game of checkers while we’re waiting for the police ships.”
“O. K.,” said Doc.
From far up the road came a hail from Angus.
“Ship coming in,” he yelled.
They stood stock-still, waiting. From the east, faintly, they heard the roar of rocket tubes.
“Right close down,” Angus yelled to them.
Again came the blasting of the tubes, nearer this time.
“That isn’t any police ship,” said Bob.
“And it isn’t a transport, either,” declared Doc.
The tubes roared again, and over the eastern horizon the watchers saw the reddish glare of the explosion through the blanketing clouds.
Then the blast seemed to be almost over them and, far up, dimmed by the heavy cloud layer, they saw the angry belching of the rockets.
The ship circled to the west, turned back, stabbing away with short blasts.
“They’re coming in,” said Bob.
The ship dropped down, heading for the landing field. It was a beautiful ship, gleaming, silvery even in the dimness of approaching twilight.
“Never saw one like that before,” said Doc.
Only a few hundred feet up it rushed over the town, swung in for the field.
Suddenly a tongue of red flame leaped out from the bow of the ship, a flame that smashed against the radio station and wiped it out in a furnace blast of terrific heat.
A scorching wave of heat swept over Bob and Doc, heat that stifled them, seemed to sear their eyeballs. As if someone had suddenly opened the door of a white-hot fire box.
The ship swooped over the field, swung in a wide arc, heading back toward the town.
“Run,” Bob shouted to Doc. “Into the jungle! It’s the Genziks! They’re going to blast the town!”
But Doc did not run. Instead he caught Bob by the sleeve and pointed out on the field.
“Look at Angus,” he shouted. “What’s the damn fool up to now?”
Angus was running across the field, jerking out his flame pistol as he ran, straight toward the Venus Land ship.
“My Lord,” breathed Bob. “He’s going to fight them singlehanded.”
“Angus,” shouted Doc, “come back here. You can’t do that. You haven’t a chance. That ship’s not armed.”
But Angus apparently did not hear.
They saw him reach the ship and blast the door lock with a single shot from the pistol. With bare hands he wrenched the red-hot door open and disappeared within the ship.
“The old fool’s crazy mad,” said Doc. “Sandy was in the station and he’s dead now. Angus thought the world of that boy. Had a right to.”
The Genzik ship was coming back, bearing down on the town. It swept over the landing field and once again from its bow reached out the tongue of flame. A building went up in a puff of flashing fire. Another and another. As the ship zoomed up it left behind it a line of death and destruction, the entire east side of the street burned to the ground, a blackened ruin, with a few steel girders still glowing.
The street was alive with screaming humanity. Running, terrified human beings, some seeking shelter in the jungle, others running aimlessly, a few standing as if paralyzed, gazing up into the clouds.
From the landing field came a roar and the Venus Land ship shot upward with terrific speed to disappear in the heavy clouds.
The Genzik ship was circling, blasting away with short explosions, jockeying into position to strike at the row of buildings on the west side of the street.
“Maybe we better take to the jungle,” suggested Doc.
Bob nodded. “There won’t be much left of New Chicago after those fellows get through,” he said. “They’ll blast the town and then they’ll sweep the farms. They’ll turn this one little section into a desert. After they are through there won’t be any polka-dot weed or anything else left.”
“Angus is up there,” said Doc.
“But he won’t be able to do a thing. He has nothing to fight with,” protested Bob.
The Genzik ship was headed back toward the town. Through the clouds the two in the road could see its silvery bulk.
Swiftly Doc and Bob sprinted toward the jungle, but at its edge they halted and looked back as a series of deafening explosions seemed to shake the ground beneath their feet.
The Genzik ship was nearing the edge of the town, but above it, bearing down upon it, with tubes wide open, came a black ship—the Venus Land ship guided by the hand of an old dare-devil of space, a man old-timers said could turn a spaceship on a dime.
Like a flaming meteor the black ship speared downward, the world a-tremble with the roaring of its tubes.
Then the rocket blast was drowned out as the sky was lighted with a mushrooming blaze of white light and the very jungle rocked to the detonations of a violent explosion.
For a split second Bob saw the two ships locked together, surrounded by a corona of eye-searing blue-white flame as the fuel tanks exploded at the impact.
Trailing a column of fire, the ships dropped like a plummet and thudded into the jungle.
“By Heaven,” said Doc, “he did it. And he died the way he always wanted to, with his hands on space controls.”
“You know,” said Doc, “I’ve regained my confidence. I’m not going to let any of those high-powered New York medics high-hat me. I got what I’m going to say all figured out. I am going to say, ‘Gentlemen: I am very pleased to be here—’”
“Sure,” said Bob, “you got that much figured out, but what are you going to say after that?”
“Say,” said Doc, “I got that all figured out, too.”
“Listen, Doc,” warned Bob, “you pipe down. It’s time for us to get on board. There’s a rule against letting drunks aboard and if you don’t straighten up they’ll make you wait until the next ship.”
Together the two moved toward the huge ship that rested, ready for the takeoff, on the New Chicago field.
Bob, with one foot on the gangplank, turned when he heard his name shouted.
Across the field ran Zeke, his arms waving, the flame pistol holster flapping against his thigh.
“Wait a minute,” he shouted. “Wait a minute, Bob.”
Bob waited.
At the foot of the gangplank Zeke gripped his hand.
“Remember that skink I was telling you about?” he asked. “The one that took to living in my wood pile?”
Bob nodded.
“He dang near tantalized me to death for months,” Zeke said. “I laid for him, but I never could get him.”
“So I suppose you finally did get him,” Bob said.
“Hell, no,” said Zeke. “This morning he had pups!”
Mutiny on Mercury
As far as I can tell from the author’s journals, Clifford Simak wrote this story in 1930, making it perhaps his very first. But since it was initially rejected by Astounding Science Fiction, and then by Wonder Stories, Miracle Science and Fantasy Stories, and Argosy All-Story Weekly, it was not the first of his stories to appear in print. (Wonder Stories ultimately accepted and published it in 1932.)
As might be expected, “Mutiny on Mercury” is a crude first attempt at writing. It is also, as might be expected from its era, violent and displays elements clearly derivative of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars series. And there’s plenty of room for argument about its implications. …
—dww
Tom Clark stared at the sword he held in his hand. It should have been in a museum, for it was a rare specimen. The steel was bright and the hilt was an example of workmanship in which the ancients had excelled.
It had been centuries since a sword had been used in battle. But on this day, in the atmosphere plant which supplied oxygen to the great quartz dome on the twilight belt of the planet Mercury, a naked blade had leaped and flashed, a weapon again. It was no longer a relic doomed to be regarded with curiosity by a race that had forgotten its use.
The blade had belonged to Ben Jacobs, an heirloom which had been handed down, in the name of sentiment, from father to son, for many generations. Undoubtedly it was worth a small fortune, for the museums of the Earth held only a few such weapons. But now Ben Jacobs lay in a heap on the floor of the plant, struck down by a burly Selenite.
To Jacobs the sword had been a symbol. He had carried it from the Earth to this forsaken planet, where the only evidence of life was ten huge domes of quartz set over as many mines, owned and operated completely by the Universal Ore Mining Company.
Only twenty-four hours ago he had told Tom the story of the sword. Now Jacobs lay motionless on the floor and the ancient blade was dyed with the blood of vanquished foemen.
Gently Tom lowered the point of the sword to the floor and gazed upon his handiwork. Before him lay three bodies. One was that of a Martian, a yellow-skinned, eight-limbed body, the skin covered with hideous warts. The grinning head, almost severed from the trunk, boasted three eyes, two in the same position as those of a Terrestrial, the other on the top of the hairless head. The mouth was large, as was also the nose, with the ears almost twice as large as those of an Earth man.
The other two bodies were those of Selenites, the gigantic Moon men with their small heads, their abnormally developed torsos and correspondingly large, powerful arms and their small, but singularly powerful legs, built on the same lines as those of a kangaroo.
Tom lifted the sword again and ran his fingers along its edge. They came away red and sticky.
He laughed grimly. The sword, ancient weapon as it may have been, had another tale added to the long list which had started, said legends, in the year 1815, in the Napoleonic Wars. For century upon century the blade had been regarded as a heirloom, a thing of sentiment. On this day, however, it had come again into its own. It had leaped and flashed, bitten deeply into flesh and bone, drunk blood.
Stepping over the body of one of the Selenites, Tom made his way to the side of the prostrate figure of Ben Jacobs. He had seen Jacobs felled like an ox by the huge fist of one of the now dead Selenites, but there was a chance the man still lived.
Kneeling on the floor, he placed his ear to the breast of the prone body. There was not so much as a flutter of the heart. Tom turned his attention to Jacobs’ head and what he found there convinced him the brilliant young scientist, who had been in charge of the atmosphere plant, was no longer alive.
Tom stood up and gazed about the death-ridden room. It presented a spectacle of ordered complexity with its many dials, tubes, pipes, valve controls, motors and the huge central control board. A silence, which was only accentuated by the steady hum of the machinery, assailed him and he suddenly realized he was the only Terrestrial alive at Shaft Number Nine.
Outside there might still lurk a few of the Selenites and possibly a few Martians, but they would be few. The only machine gun at the station, spitting out over 150 atomic pellets every minute, had wrought havoc among the mutineers before a stone, thrown by one of the Selenites, had bowled over McGregor, the radio operator. The latter, who had been taken unawares by the outbreak, had been unable to reach his post to send out an S.O.S.; and had philosophically, and entirely in keeping with his Scotch blood, done the next best thing by unlimbering the gun and turning it against the mob of howling miners who were destroying the radio station.
If McGregor had been at his desk, as his duty required him to be, instead of playing a few hands of cards with old Andy Schwartz, the head engineer, word of the uprising and an appeal for help would have been sent out at once. Failing in this, he had at least saved the mine and costly apparatus from immediate destruction, by the simple process of reducing the number of hands for the performance of the pending destruction.
The uprising had been a complete surprise, coming just as the second shift was coming out of the shaft and the third shift ready to go down. The miners in Shift Number One, evidently by a pre-arranged signal, had come storming forth from their quarters as soon as the attack was launched.
Evidently the captains underground had been neatly disposed of, for there had been no warning anything was amiss. The first indication of trouble came when the men had come up without the captains. Even before questions could be asked concerning the absent Terrestrials, the blow had been struck.
“It’s those damn Martians,” Hal Eaton, young time keeper, only six weeks from the Earth, had screamed as a huge Selenite struck him down with a blow of his mighty pick.
Tom, jerking his atomic pistol from its holster, knew that what young Eaton had just screamed was true. The Martians were the trouble-makers and the traitors of the solar system. Once an insolent people, who had regarded themselves as the most advanced in culture and erudition in the universe, they still, even after hundreds of years, resented the bondage in which it had been necessary to place them to curb their diabolic cunning and haughty egotism. They were forever forming secret societies, always cooking up local revolutions. Where there was trouble, one would usually find a scheming Martian.
Tom leveled the pistol at the mob of Selenites rushing at him and pressed the trigger. There was a sharp, spiteful spat. The leading Moon man disappeared in a puff of white dust, his upraised shovel clattering to the ground.
Rapidly the pistol spat and the charge broke. Even the ape-brained Selenites, who seldom knew fear, could not stand in front of that pistol which caused one of their number to evaporate into thin air every time it spoke.
From all over the compound came the sound of firing and the pounding of many feet on the hard packed earth. There were no other sounds. It was uncanny, the way these dumb, ox-like Selenites attacked, silently, ponderously, armed only with their mining tools, or lacking these, with bare hands.
From somewhere near the atmosphere plant came a rapid “pit-pat,” a sound not unlike the tramp of rain across a tin roof. Someone had unlimbered the machine gun. Lucky thing! Lulled into a false sense of security by the apparent orderliness of the station, the former superintendent, a soft fool who had no business holding such a position, had ordered the gun stored away as a thing for which there would be no further need. He had lasted six months and had been transferred back to Earth, at his own request. Too bad he couldn’t have stayed to taste the fruits of his asinine management.
A stone whizzed past Tom’s head. The Moon men were returning. They had retreated as far as the rock pile. From around the corner of the pile they came, each carrying an armful of missiles, heaving them as they ran.
Tom jerked up his arm, leveling his gun. Be
fore he could press the trigger a rock, flung with considerable strength, caught him flush on the elbow. The gun clattered to the baked earth.
As he dived to retrieve it, another stone struck him in the ribs and toppled him sidewise. Stones pattered all about him and as he struggled to his knees he was again bowled over.
The Moon men were almost upon him. They were rotten throwers, or they would have bagged him for good and all. They couldn’t keep on making only casual hits, however. Eventually one would connect with his head and it would be lights out. For a fleeting moment, he hoped one would finish him before the lousy beggars reached him.
“Lie low, I’ll clean the devils out.”
Tom twisted his head as the spiteful rattle of the machine gun broke loose.
In front of the atmosphere plant, old McGregor, his white hair looking like a lion’s mane, his shirt ripped to shreds, his teeth working savagely on an oversized quid of tobacco, squatted behind the gun. It seemed to quiver with the excitement of the moment as it spat out blasting death.
Over Tom’s head the pellets whispered their death song and behind him he knew the charging Selenites were being blown into clouds of white ash.
Slowly he started to worm his way toward McGregor, keeping his head low, for he did not wish to intercept one of the lethal pellets.
The patter of the gun and the whisper of the speeding bullets ceased.
“All right, lad,” cried old McGregor and Tom, leaping to his feet, rushed forward, forgetting his pistol, which lay where it had fallen.
When he was only a matter of a few feet from the old man, who was disengaging a magazine preparatory to slipping another into place, a Martian, followed by two Selenites rushed around the corner of the atmosphere plant.
Before Tom could warn his friend, one of the Selenites hurled a stone, which caught McGregor flush on the temple.
The old man slowly slid from his seat on the gun. The Martian and the two Selenites raced for the door of the atmosphere plant.
Grotto of the Dancing Deer Page 18
