Twin of the Amazon

by John Russell Fearn

He arrived fifteen minutes later, to find the Amazon strolling about the Ultra’s hangar, waiting for him.

  “So far, Vi, you’ve been lucky,” he commented. “As far as the police are concerned, I mean. Seen the news?—or heard it?”

  “Been too busy,” she responded. “How are things?”

  “The police are closing in; be here any minute. You were seen last night by the staffs at several of the places you called at—’specially Downing Street—but apparently the police have been checking up on all reports before taking action. You’re too important a public figure to arrest without absolute proof.”

  “The sooner we get on the move, the better,” the Amazon decided, and touched the switch which opened the two halves of the hangar roof. “In you get, Howard.”

  He nodded and climbed through the air-lock into the control room. When the Amazon had followed him and closed the self-sealing door she found him gazing in bewildered admiration at the image seated on the wall couch.

  “It’s uncanny!” he declared. “It makes a waxwork model look like the work of an amateur!”

  The Amazon smiled as she settled herself in the powerfully sprung control chair.

  “I have the idea,” she replied, “that I’m going to need that lady before I’m finished....” She snapped switches, and the power motors hummed. “You ready, Howard? Nothing more wanted?”

  “Lead on,” he assented, bracing himself for what he knew would be the strain of the initial take-off.

  The Amazon’s golden head nodded briefly, and she moved the power lever into its first notch. The transmitted atomic force from the plant into the Ultra’s rocket-tubes set it rising with easy smoothness into the midday sunlight. Kerrigan looked below and grinned to himself, as he had a momentary vision of several motor-cars and a party of men outside the grounds of the Amazon’s home.

  “Just in time!” he exclaimed. “The police have arrived!” The girl looked too and laughed to herself, then as she put on speed the gathering men, the house itself, the surrounding landscape, all faded into remoteness. The light and shade of the terrain became merged into one common blur, and this, too, shrank to a relief map of the British Isles. And so, finally, the whole world, circular, was spread below as at 2,000 miles an hour the Ultra flashed upwards into the stratosphere—and beyond it into the deep, incredible. black of space itself.

  The Amazon studied the instruments for a while, set the course for Mars—as yet visible only as a red point a vast distance away in the void—and then put in the automatic pilot. This done, she rose from the control chair and went over to join Kerrigan as he lounged in one of the softly sprung chairs, the metal plates in the control-room floor being energized to give an earth-normal gravity.

  “We’ll accelerate all the way,” the Amazon announced, sitting down and relaxing. “As near as I can estimate the trip should take us about twelve hours....”

  Kerrigan nodded absently, and for a while gazed out on to the desolations of space, the stars blazing with steely, unclouded brilliance, the sun an unbearable effulgence with the prominences licking about his edges.

  “I just can’t understand,” he said at length, “why it is that Martian life shouldn’t register on your instruments. There is such life—that’s beyond doubt—and surely life of any kind must have a vibratory rate, upon which basis your instrument works?”

  “That’s puzzled me a good deal, too,” the Amazon confessed, “but I think I have the answer now—and it lies in that mysterious metal which we’ve called Element 96. It has the quality of blocking all radiations absolutely, just as certain thicknesses of lead will block even the ultra-short cosmic rays. In other words, if the Martians were underground—as I believe they are—and their habitat is shielded by roofs of this 96 metal, as again is possible in order to protect them from the ravages of the iron-eaters, it would mean that their life-radiations would not penetrate the metal to affect my instruments, any more than Earth’s X-ray telescopes are able to penetrate into Mars, which has resulted in the belief that Mars is dead. Actually, I believe Mars’ underworld is teeming with life, and of a high order, with Element 96 to protect it.”

  “But you said you thought you felt eyes watching you,” Kerrigan pointed out. “What’s the answer to that one?”

  “The answer,” the Amazon responded, “is mental. Ninety-six will block all known radiations, but I don’t believe thought-radiations, with their inconceivably short wavelength, can be included. My mind is exceptionally receptive to telepathy, remember, and I think it was read whilst I was on Mars, and during the process I sensed that it was, hence my conviction that eyes, or something, were watching me. In fact,” she added, thinking, “I am convinced that it must have been read, otherwise the Martians would never have gone to such trouble to upset our plans for colonization. For some reason they want to prevent us annexing Mars, and to that end they seek to destroy our civilization and, for good measure, want us to destroy ourselves.”

  “That,” Kerrigan mused, “does seem to be about the size of it.” He gazed through the front port on the distant baleful glow which was Mars. “We’ll soon know...”

  CHAPTER V

  The Amazon’s calculation of twelve hours to cross the forty-million-mile gulf to Mars proved to be exactly correct, and at the end of the allotted period, somewhat wearied with the constant physical strain of incessant acceleration in free space, she cut off the power of the rear rocket-jets and transferred it to the frontal rockets so that their recoil-exhaust would act as a constant brake as the gigantic mass of Mars filled all space ahead.

  The speed of the Ultra commencing to slow down, the Amazon and Kerrigan looked down in silence on the red planet, noting details all too familiar from earthly maps of the planet, particularly the strange criss-crossing lines so often referred to by the misnomer of “canals”.

  “As you can see, there isn’t a trace of surface life,” the girl commented; “so the only alternative is underground. Presumably the surface cities and civilizations were totally destroyed by the iron-eaters, and to escape below was the only possible means of sanctuary.... Once we have landed I’m going to try some ‘bait’ and see what happens.”

  Kerrigan nodded, and though he wondered what the girl meant, he did not ask any questions. He stood waiting as she manipulated the controls and, some fifteen minutes later, she brought the Ultra down to the surface of the rust-red wilderness in a gigantic fountain of dust. Slowly it settled, and the hum of the power-plant ceased.

  The trip was over. Outside there was only the everlasting desert lighted by the somewhat absurd sun sinking low towards the Martian evening.

  “Here we go,” the Amazon murmured. “Now let’s see what happens.” She opened the air-lock and then spoke sharply to her double, who had been seated motionless throughout the journey. Immediately the double rose and, I following out orders, took a gun from her belt into her right hand, stepped outside, and began to walk with difficulty in the red dust and lesser gravity. The Amazon shut the airlock door again, and then joined Kerrigan at the port in watching her duplicate walking steadily away.

  “If I don’t talk much it’s because I have to concentrate on her,” the Amazon said. “If I can manage it I want to fool these Martians into thinking that that image is myself. If I can only get a glimpse of them, see what they look like, I’ll be better able to judge what we’re up against.”

  Kerrigan said nothing, and continued looking out of the port.

  Operating entirely under her creator’s thought-waves, Amazon 2 paused now and again and looked about her, scooped up some of the red dust and let it stream through her fingers, generally behaving indeed as though she were assessing her surroundings to the last detail. For perhaps half an hour she kept moving about, creating the perfect illusion of an explorer—then Kerrigan gave the Amazon a quick nudge.

  “Look!” he breathed. “ ’Planes!”

  The Amazon looked up sharply into the pallid evening sky. From the west, like a small flock of birds, fly
ing-machines were sweeping into view with tremendous velocity. They seemed only large enough to accommodate perhaps two normal-sized people, and, viewed from earth-standards, the ’planes were not particularly fantastic. They were similar to the flying-wings common in terrestrial aircraft, but controlled, perhaps because of the lesser gravity, with an ease and deftness never achieved by an earthly pilot.

  Swooping and gliding, like seagulls riding a gale, they hovered over Amazon 2 as, under orders, she stared up at them—then they began to settle around her. Kerrigan and the Amazon watched intently through the unbreakable multiplex glass of the port, anxious for their first glimpse of the long-legendary Martians.

  Shortly they were rewarded. From each machine two people emerged, perfectly recognizable as men, though they were broader in the shoulders and far taller than an average Earth man. They stood at least seven feet, and were attired in costumes of toga-like design reminiscent of the days of ancient Greece.

  “Exit time-worn theories concerning the Martians,” Kerrigan murmured, grinning. “They’ve been depicted as pop-eyed monsters, barrel-chested baroques, nine-foot-high spindly travesties of Earth folk.... Instead, they’re just like extra tall Earthlings. Pretty good-looking too, what I can see of them.”

  ‘Highly intelligent, beyond doubt,” the Amazon agreed, studying the lofty foreheads and clear-cut features of the distant group of men as they crowded round her image. “As for their development, I did not expect anything particularly outlandish. Mars’ only difference from Earth is her lesser gravity, otherwise in her heyday she was just like our own world—an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, similar density of atmosphere, and so on. The gravity is evidently the cause of the greater height and bigger, heavier bone structure—”

  “Say,” Kerrigan interrupted, “I may be wrong, but I’m getting the impression that those Martians aren’t being fooled by our image after all—”

  The Amazon said nothing, but a worried look had come to her face. Each man had suddenly ceased to have any interest in the duplicate Amazon as she stood in their midst. Instead they were studying the Ultra, pointing to it, and talking among themselves meanwhile. Then, in a body, they began moving towards it.

  “We’d better move,” the Amazon decided, diving to the switchboard. “I thought they’d take my double into captivity, which would have left me with the chance to explore at leisure. As it is...”

  She snapped the switch giving power to the atom-plant, but at almost the same moment it sighed and died. Puzzled, she tried a subsidiary power load, but still nothing happened. “What goes on?” Kerrigan asked sharply.

  “Power’s dead,” she replied. “I don’t know why—Or do I?” She broke off, and nodded to a pale indigo beam projecting from one of the assembled fliers. It was pointing straight towards the Ultra, enveloping it.

  “That does it!” Kerrigan muttered.

  “Yes—negative energy of sorts,” the Amazon admitted, and gave a sigh. “I encountered a similar pleasant device at the South Pole. It kills my power-plant completely by short-circuiting it.”

  She stopped speaking and looked at Kerrigan grimly as there was a muffled hammering through the dense thickness of the air-lock’s cover.

  “We don’t have to open it,” Kerrigan said. “And you’ve got all the weapons necessary right here to wipe these lice off the face of the—of Mars.”

  “But the weapons wouldn’t work with the power cut off, and we did come here to try and find out what’s going on,” the Amazon responded, getting up from the control chair. "There’s nothing else for it; I’d better open up.”

  Kerrigan drew his gun from his belt and waited as the Amazon spun the screws on the heavy operculum’s sheath, finally opening the lock by pushing it outwards on its hinges. In silence she stood looking at the group of men standing in the desert outside.

  At close quarters the difference in the Martians from Earthlings was more noticeable. Their foreheads were unusually bulbous and over-developed; their rich black hair was so dark it seemed nearly purple. Each man was oddly alike in appearance—straight-nosed, pointed-chinned, with thinly austere lips and large eyes of tawny yellow. To herself the Amazon decided that the largeness of the eyes was probably the result of evolution throughout many generations spent in artificial light.

  Kerrigan, watching narrowly, still waited. Big man though he was, he felt, and looked, small beside these seven-foot giants with their vastly broad shoulders. The top of the Amazon’s blonde head scarcely reached the chest of the leading man as he contemplated her, hesitated, and then spoke.

  He had a soft, liquid voice, extremely rapid and fascinating to listen to—and extraordinarily enough he spoke English, though in a somewhat clipped, mechanical fashion.

  “Miss Violet Ray Brant, I assume, visiting this world for the second time?” he enquired.

  “Yes, I am Violet Ray Brant,” the girl assented, in some wonder. “I suppose you read as much from my mind?”

  “Exactly, even as we read from your mind that you were intending to use an image of yourself as bait for us. A most brilliant twin, Miss Brant. You are to be congratulated....” The Martian paused, his thin, cruel lips giving the slightest of smiles. “I am Thraxal,” he explained, “the First Elect of Hurganfol—or as you would term it in your language, I am the equivalent of the President of a particular country. At the moment you are in the zone of Hurganfol.”

  “You, too, are to be congratulated upon your mastery of the English language,” the Amazon commented.

  He gave a little bow of acknowledgement.

  “It is a simple language to learn, Miss Brant. We learned it from those few Earthlings whom we brought back here for—er—surgical alterations.” And before the Amazon could question him the Martian added, “Apparently there is a good deal to discuss, and it may well be done in comfort. Come with us, please, both of you.”

  The girl hesitated, and Kerrigan cocked his gun. Thraxal glanced from one to the other and gave his slow, inexorable smile.

  “Miss Brant, you are a woman of considerable intelligence —intelligence enough surely to perceive that you cannot resist successfully with this space machine of yours indefinitely out of action?”

  The Amazon did not hesitate any longer. She glanced at Kerrigan.

  “Put your gun away, Howard,” she instructed. “I long since learned it is never any use exerting yourself when the odds are heavily against you.”

  Thraxal and his retinue of followers stood aside as the girl stepped out into the ankle-deep red dust with Kerrigan behind her. Controlling their movements as best they could in the slight gravity, they obeyed orders and finally settled in the small ’plane indicated by the Martian. It was roomier ih an it appeared from the outside, taking the Amazon, her double, Kerrigan, and Thraxal with ease. The Martian closed the cabin door, touched a button on the switch-panel, and with amazing ease and lightness the machine lifted and swept over the desert with ever-mounting speed, leaving behind the motionless Ultra catching the last dying rays of the setting sun.

  The Amazon glanced at her wrist, to which was strapped a small compass. The needle was swinging, drawn by the magnetized metal—independent of all power-failures—in the hull of the Ultra. It was her one means of ever finding her way back to the space-ship as long as it—or she— existed.

  Since Thraxal did not volunteer any information, she, too, remained silent, glancing either at Kerrigan’s troubled face or else the view of the accompanying fliers keeping pace with this leading machine. Then her interest deepened as, after covering some fifty miles of unbroken waste, there loomed ahead in the sunset a black line scarring the redness from horizon to horizon.

  “A Martian ‘canal’, or I’m crazy,” Kerrigan muttered.

  The Amazon nodded silent agreement, and her surprise and Kerrigan’s was complete when the machine finally hovered over the black line, and it proved to be an immense, mechanically made cleft going down for an indeterminate depth—into which the ’plane began to sink gently, fol
lowed by the others. The daylight faded as the machine dropped: searchlight beams lighted the profundities below.

  “Odd, is it not,” Thraxal commented, “how one can jump to the wrong conclusion? As I understand it, your Earth astronomers have assumed that these criss-crossing lines on the face of our world are canals, carrying water from the Poles? They are not: they are specially made clefts giving us entrance and egress to our underworld, and providing a constant ventilation right through the planet...

  The Amazon did not comment, but her expression showed how surprised she was at this obvious explanation of an age-old mystery. She continued watching intently as the machine finally floated down into a brilliantly lighted underworld and, as the other machines followed, a mighty metal lip closed like an eyelid overhead, sealing all means of entry or exit.

  “I don’t like the look of that,” Kerrigan whispered; then he gave a start at the view spread ahead as the machine still continued to slowly descend.

  The Martian underworld was so colossal that it staggered the imagination. Occupying as it did the entire internal core of the planet, it gave the impression of horizonless distances with a sky of total black, which, as the Amazon had for some time suspected, was a metal of some kind, probably Element 96.

  It was an underworld lighted by two hovering globes of force like twin suns, balanced by some mysterious means so that they hung in mid-air and poured their radiance and warmth on an agglomeration of buildings, roads, parks, terraces, and vistas. There was all the ordered layout of a mighty city down here, every possible evidence of tremendous scientific skill and a race which was evidently very much alive.

  “A dead world, eh?” Kerrigan asked dryly, as the machine sank down at last to the brilliant green of a parklike space at the back of a towering, many-windowed building. “This would make some of our hide-bound astronomers change their minds!”

  The Amazon nodded, her violet eyes watching men and women moving along the vistas in the distance. They were easy in their movements, the women considerably less tall than the men, but even so, few of them could have been less than six feet.