The John Russell Fearn Science Fiction Megapack

by John Russell Fearn

  Venus became even larger, shining silver white with her cloud canopy. Then she filled all space. The vast armada al­tered position to sweep horizontally to the Venusian surface, plunged below the dense cloud belts…

  Both Cassell and Moss caught their breath at the vision below.

  In the main, the planet was steamy and hot, ridged with ti­tanic mountains, but wherever there was solid land were squat, powerful cities breathing the very soul of scientific power. Everything was orderly, well planned. Here and there Venusians were moving along the specially designed tracks, but as they caught sight of the first of the ships, they started to run.

  “We’ve caught them by surprise all right,” Moss breathed, hands clamped on the window frame. “That’s just what we wanted. They showed neither Mars nor Earth any quarter, and by Heaven they’ll get none from us…”

  He swung around, snapped on the microphone.

  “Release all weapons on all cities!” he barked out. “Leave no building standing and no Venusian alive!”

  Then he swung back to the deadliest of the ship’s instru­ments—the disrupter, wheeled it around so that the sights were in line with the specially devised opening in the vessel’s casing.

  “O.K.,” he snapped out to Grant. “Follow out Cassell’s or­ders from now on. He’ll direct the course…”

  He closed the switches and the power leapt into the instru­ment. As his merciless eyes glared through the sights at the first of the great buildings below, his mind went back suddenly over twenty years on a stormbound island, of a world con­vulsed with a war that mankind, left to itself, could have diverted. Millions of lives drowned in blood… To appease Maralok!

  He fired the gun. His action was enough—the fleet followed suit. The Martians, unable to understand his orders over the radio did at least understand this. They struck too—without question or mercy. The air became thick with blast rays; vicious acid sprayers rained corrosives down on the now thousands of Venusians scurrying in the streets below.

  Too late they forced their own fleet into action. Gallantly though their numbers fought, there were not enough of them to combat the numbers that their own avarice had literally brought into being.

  Time and again, Earth and Martian ships hurtled back and forth like silver shuttles over the city, tearing out huge pieces of the buildings with their weapons, blasting the very ground from under the feet of the would-be conquerors, burying them under up-belched tons of rock and earth. Smoke rose in clouds—smoke, dust and debris as entire buildings lifted from their foundations and then rained back on the decimated occupants.

  Without a single pause, the twin armadas raced time and time again around the Venusian globe, omitted no city, spared no single spot of inhabited land. They exhausted their acids and supplies of bombs; they burned out their gun firing points, they seized up their smoking hot disrupters… But by that time, the Venusian landscape was a haze of drifting smoke from end to end.

  There was nothing—nothing but a shambles lying in steamy, sickly heat…

  Weak from strain, perspiration rolling down his face, Moss straightened his aching back. Wearily he gave the signal.

  “Enough! Return home! Our work’s finished…”

  He made a motion to Grant at the switchboard—then in a sudden rush the whole reaction caught up on him. He col­lapsed his length on the floor…

  He returned to consciousness to find Cassell bending over him, discovered that he was lying on the emergency bed.

  Cassell smiled faintly. “You’re all right now,” he murmured. “Just the strain, that’s all. But boy, did you wipe ’em up! I don’t think a single stone is left lying on another on all Venus… We’re on the way back now—and from now on it’s got to be our job to reconstruct. My job, anyway.”

  “You can have it,” Moss said, sitting up and rubbing his head. “I’ve done my whack—but if you want anything mil­itary, call on me. Incidentally, what are you going to do when we arrive back? How do we finish up? Live like children…”

  “No.” Cassell shook his head. “You and I are adults, old man—and so are several of the men we have trained. In time though, we’ll all be childish unless we take measures to stop it. We can do it by wearing light helmets of mijutin. If we always wear them, we will never slip into childhood. The others can choose… Maybe it’s only fair they have childishness again.

  “With the knowledge that we have we can rebuild the world anew. The people will obey us; we’ve become endeared as Gods to their hearts. We’ll eliminate all causes of discord and create a perfect planet. We’ll make a deal with Mars too, and get their assistance. Mars and Earth will go hand in hand after this…

  “But for this ideal, there will be a price,” Cassell finished slowly. “To become the masters we shall have to forfeit a chance of childish, carefree abandon and, more important, the gift of eternal life… But if we live our life span and leave a happy world for the others, does it matter so much? They may learn in time, for the atmosphere will thicken until there will be no more Eternals. Then they must choose for them­selves, either use or destroy what we shall build up.

  “For us—either peace and progress, or stagnation and eternity. Which?”

  “You know me,” Moss grinned. “Life eternal hasn’t got much fascination for me, anyway. I’m with you in building a vast new empire…”

  He held out his powerful hand. With a smile, Cassell seized it, gripped it tightly. At the control board Grant Felbury started to whistle his favorite nursery rhyme…

  THE JEWELS FROM THE MOON

  The huge fortune in gems that Bull Cassel finds on Luna undergoes a strange transformation in the atmosphere of Earth—a change that unlocks the past and brings forth a threatening horde that should have perished ages ago!

  CHAPTER I

  The Gems That Melted

  Bulton—‘Bull’— Cassell, exile from Earth, stared out grimly into the gulf of space through the observation window of his lone flyer. For ten weary years he had wandered this hell-fired cosmos, driven to it by an extradi­tion order—sent into space as a wanderer for a crime he had never committed… Now at last he could return—and with good effect! Money could buy anything in the ultra-modern world of 2714—even vengeance for his frame-up. That was what he was counting on.

  A faintly cynical smile twisted the corners of his big, powerful mouth at the thought; his ugly, ruggedly hewn face lighted with anticipation. Ahead lay the moon, source of the wealth which he alone knew about. Lunar caverns… Rare gems… His thoughts went back swiftly to that day ten years ago when an ac­cident had forced him to land on the moon. That was when he had found them.

  “Guess it won’t be long now!” he murmured reflectively, and turning from the window, he sat before the controls and disconnected the robot steering mechanism.

  His eyes fixed on the instruments, he drove the short, powerful little space-vessel downwards in a long arc, curving towards the moon’s brilliantly argent surface. He need­ed no experience in the art of landing on the satellite; struggles with the varied gravities of Jupiter and Mercury had given him judgment of uncanny accuracy.

  Ten minutes later, he landed five miles west of the lunar Appenines and sat for a while gazing out into the sun-drenched lunar surface, rag­ing at a temperature of 212° Fahrenheit. In the main, his atten­tion was directed towards the lofty peaks of the Appenines. In the base of one of them was the cleft leading downwards to the cavern he had so fortuitously discovered. At length, he beheld it and a broad grin wid­ened his face.

  “Money, huh?” He spat eloquent­ly on the metal floor. “Guess those money-grubbin’ swines of Earth’ll get all the gems their safes can hold before I’m through with ’em! This is going to be my turn! I owe you plenty, John Masterson, and the ac­count’s goin’ to be paid in full!”

  A momentary bitterness crossed his face as he remembered the cold, ruthless engineer responsible for his frame-up—then with a shrug he turned aside and scrambled into his heavily armored spa
cesuit.

  Ten minutes later he was walking the ashy, scorching surface of the satellite, heading towards the range. Inside his suit the heat rose stiflingly and set the sweat pouring from his great, massively muscled body. He was thankful for the black, un-diffused shadow of the cleft when at last he gained it.

  For a while he stood motionless, accustoming his eyes to the ebon gloom after the blinding glare of the sun—then at length he looked down at the rocky defile leading inward to the moon’s unexplored caverns—unexplored except by him. Luna was classed as a derelict by all spatial navigators.

  With careful footsteps, judg­ing as best he could against the sixth of earthly gravity, he trav­eled downwards, keen gray eyes studying every inch of the route. Presently he was forced to use his helmet torch. Its brilliant beam shone on dusty white pumice-like rock, aridly brittle moon-stuff, the same in these lunar tunnels as on the alternately scorched and frozen surface.

  Tunnel after tunnel he followed, searching for and finding the un­disturbed directional marks he had scored over ten years before. They led him at last to an immense cavern nearly three hundred feet under­ground, an unexpected and natural bubble in the strange, riddled mass of the moon.

  Through his helmet glass, his face was a study in blank awe as he gazed upon a solid wall of scintillat­ing gems, their facets catching the glare of his helmet lamp. Vermilion, green, saffron, purest violet—colors beyond spectral comprehension—stabbed outward in bars of bewil­dering loveliness from the stones’ lustrous depths.

  He stepped forward, breathing hard, and stared closely at them. Even his ironly unsentimental heart was stirred for a moment by a sense of things transcendentally beautiful. Then the conviction evaporated and he was ruggedly himself again.

  “Stones that’ll make diamonds look like shore shingle,” he breathed, “Untold millions in value, and only I know about it! Will this knock their ears off back on Earth!”

  He speculated briefly on how the gems had ever gotten into such a strange place, then finding no solu­tion, he shrugged his massive shoul­ders and set to work with his flame pistol. Ten minutes of steady burn­ing work blasted a clean track around a six-inch square block of the stones. The rest was easy. He pried the block out, found it com­fortably heavy in the slight lunar gravitation, then looked at the wall that was left.

  Just plain pumice rock. The jewels must be sticking to it like barnacles to a boat. Again brief wonderment touched him, then with another shrug, he thrust the gems under his arm and retraced his steps to the blinding surface. Thirty minutes later he was back in his machine.

  Beyond another glance at the stones, he paid them no further at­tention. The possibility of them cracking or becoming defaced through warmth after the eternal cold of the moon’s interior led him to put them in his storage refrigerator—then, satisfied that an in­calculable fortune was within his grasp, he turned the bullet nose of his vessel towards the giant green globe hanging low over the ragged horizon…

  Night had fallen when he reached Earth. The stratosphere police let him through, and down on the space grounds outside Great New York, his papers were found to be in order. His exile time limit had expired. He was free to roam the gigantic straddling enormity that had taken the place of the plain New York he had once known.

  Once through the inquiry barriers, he debated briefly. It was too late tonight to have the bulge under his leather coat valued. Only thing to do was to head for Rocket Ike’s place over on the east side. He’d be able to drink and sleep safely for the night.

  Immediately, he bent his steps in that direction, finding his way with some difficulty in the changed sur­roundings. Ten years ago Rocket Ike, the tough one-eyed ex-rocket man, had kept a questionable space-drifter’s abode in the city’s most squalid region—and, to Bull’s de­light, he found the place still there with Ike himself apparently not a day older.

  Bull wasted no time and gave away no secrets. The small sum of money he possessed was sufficient to guarantee him a room for the night. Rocket Ike was affable enough in his coarse, un-effusive way—readily showed Bull to a shoddy little pri­vate bedroom at the rear of the place when he had at last made an end of his drinking.

  Bull grinned twistedly as he found himself alone. Once he had securely locked the door and removed his deadly flame pistol from his waist-belt, he pulled out the uncomfortable bulge from under his coat. The coarse quilt of the bed seemed a crudely worthless setting for the livid block of varicolored fire he tossed upon it.

  “A few more hours and you’ll be a fortune, my beauty!” he chuckled, tossing his massive body down be­side it and relaxing with a sigh of relief. “And woe betide the guy that tries to get in this room tonight!”

  He clamped his hairy paw over his flame pistol and gave himself up to thought. The sounds of the harbor drifted to him through the slightly open window. He had no intention of sleeping—but before long, the sweet security of Earth, its absolute solidity, lulled him into slumber…

  The noisy sounds of the den below began to quiet; rocket men and space-drifters—Venusians, Martians and Earthlings—rabble of the solar fron­tiers, drifted out into the dark, miasmic shadows. The main floodlights dimmed in the mighty metropolis, the solid bulk of raging power quieted into a brooding, beacon-studded mon­ster awaiting the dawn. Great New York slept, and so did Bull Cassell.

  * * * *

  Rocket Ike made no attempt to enter his guest’s room. He had reason to remember only too well that Bull had a deadly aim and a fierce temper…but he did wonder vaguely about that bulge under the leather coat. Still, it was none of his business. No use risking his reputa­tion and perhaps his life to satisfy a curiosity.

  Three o’clock came and Bull Cassell still lay like a log in the gloom, the light having automatically shut itself off at one a.m.

  But beside him something strange was happening to the jewel block! Had he been awake, he would have stared in stupefied amazement.

  Each jewel, and there were about forty in all, was undergoing an astounding metamorphosis, losing its vivid flaring coloring and becoming milky and opalescent, oddly curdled. The glory of the radiations had gone; instead it was clear that the gems, whatever their nature, were now in­fused with a mystic form of inner life.

  For an hour, the strangeness went on—for two hours—and at the end of that time the whole jewel block had divided itself into forty distinct slushy segments, no longer gem-like, but doughy. There was another long pause, then with the faintest sogging sound, something emerged from one of the side jewels—a figure of incredible minuteness, no more than an inch long, but none the less flaw­lessly patterned in the style of an earthly man, wearing minute gar­ments that covered him from head to foot!

  He stood for a time in the gloom, apparently attuning his eyes to the light of the turning beacon atop one of the nearer edifices overlooking the harbor. As though satisfied with what he saw, he finally turned to the pasty mess beside him and became active, pulling the viscid substance with little hands until he had freed more living beings like himself.

  One after another they emerged, some men, some women, making hardly any impression on the quilt and certainly not in the least disturb­ing the heavily sleeping man. When at last the forty of them had emerged from their incredible prison, they turned, scrambled down the bed leg, and made for the open window.

  Without a sound, they passed to the sill outside and lowered them­selves to a telegraph wire. Mysteriously, their purpose unknown, they divided up in parties and vanished in the night—microscopic, perfectly dressed men and women, the major­ity of them classically good-looking… And Bull still slept…

  CHAPTER II

  Unseen Power

  Bull Cassell became a raving maniac of fury when he awoke and found nothing left of his jewels except a sticky mess giving off an odor like rotten eggs. He jumped from the bed like an unwound spring, flame gun in hand, and charged to the saloon be­low. Rocket Ike was there, mopping the floor in readiness for opening.

&n
bsp; “You blasted rocket-firing swab!” Bull roared furiously, seizing him by the shoulder. “You couldn’t get the damned jewels so you turned a flame gun on ’em to stop me doing it, huh? I’ll show you whether you’ll get away with a cheap trick like that!”

  Ike’s one eye slitted viciously. “What in hell are you yammerin’ about, Bull? I never knew you had any jewels, and even if I did—”

  “Be damned to that for a tale!” Bull’s tuft of short cut black hair seemed to stand up with the impotency of his fury. “You knew all the time! The door wasn’t open, but the window was! Well, there was a for­tune in them gems and I’m going to take pay for you melting ’em! Stand up and take what’s comin’ to you!”

  His paw clamped down on his flame gun, but he wasn’t quite quick enough in leveling it. With a vicious twirl, the powerful Ike twisted him­self free and brought around his soaking-wet mop with terrific power. It struck Bull clean in the face and sent him reeling backwards with a string of oaths. His gun went off and the flame neatly bisected a row of liquor bottles and mirror behind the bar.

  Before he could recover himself, the mop jabbed viciously again and again, struck him in the throat and made his head throb with pain—then fell to his stomach and winded him. He dropped his gun helplessly. Then before he could collect his wits, Ike clutched him by the collar and swung him across the saloon. With a slith­ering crash he collapsed helplessly in the dirty road outside.

  “Come back if you dare!” Ike warned him ominously, the gun held ready in his hand. “Lucky I got my pay from you last night. Get outa here and don’t come back!”

  Bull got to his feet, searing exple­tives rolling from his lips; then grad­ually a certain sense of coolness took possession of his outraged senses. After all, no man would surely melt a fortune in gems when he could just as easily have stolen them! Besides, Rocket Ike had no grudges to square. The thing didn’t make sense. That thought sobered Bull up a bit and sent him mooching along the harbour side, bullet head bent in thought.