The Space Opera Megapack: 20 Modern and Classic Science Fiction Tales

by John W. Campbell

  So it now seemed to be from Elza to me. Georg, out of bed now beside me, urged me to greater efforts of concentration, that I might understand what message Elza was sending.

  “Elza! Elza dear! Where are you? What is it?”

  I murmured the words to myself as with all my power, I thought them over and over, flinging out the thoughts like radio waves into the night. Mysterious vibrations! In an instant, from here—everywhere in the universe. Who knows their character? Their speed? The speed of light a laggard perhaps beside the flash of a thought! Waves of my thoughts, speeding through the night, with only one receiving station in all the universe! Would Elza’s brain capture them?

  “Elza dear! Where are you? What is it?”

  “Jac! Danger! Jac! Danger!”

  It was very clear. The words rang in my head. But always only those two. And then at last—it may have been an hour later—other words:

  “Death! The black cloud of death! You can see it coming! See it coming! Death! To you Jac! To all of you in the city!”

  We rushed to the casement. The broad lagoon before the palace lay like a mirror tinted red and purple. Beyond it, palms and the outlines of houses lay dark against the star-strewn sky.

  But out there, over the city, in the distance a dark patch obscured the stars. We watched it breathless. A dark patch which soon took shape. A cloud! A black cloud—unnatural of aspect somehow—a rolling, lowlying black cloud. Growing larger; spreading out sidewise; sweeping toward the city on a wind which had not reached us.

  “Jac! Jac dear! Danger! Death to all the city!”

  Elza’s words were still beating in my brain. Soundless words of terror and warning!

  “Death, Jac! Death to all the city! The black cloud of death!”

  CHAPTER XXVII

  Tarrano the Man

  “Wake up, Lady Elza.”

  A silence. His hand touched her white shoulder. “Wake up, Lady Elza. It is I—Tarrano.”

  Elza opened her eyes, struggling to confused wakefulness. The white walls of her sleeping room in Tarrano’s palace of the City of Ice were stained with the dim red radiance of her night light. She opened her eyes to meet Tarrano’s inscrutable face as he bent over her couch; became conscious of his low, insistent, “Wake up, Lady Elza;” and his fingers half caressing the filmy scarf that covered her shoulders.

  Terror flooded Elza; that time she had always feared, had come. Yet she had the presence of mind to smile, drawing away from him and sitting up, with the fur bed-covering pulled to her chin.

  “Tarrano? Why—”

  He straightened, and into his expression came apology.

  “I frightened you, Lady Elza? I’m sorry. I would not do that for all the worlds.”

  Her terror receded. The old Tarrano over whom she still held sway. She summoned a look of haughty questioning.

  “You are bold, Tarrano—”

  His gesture was deprecating; he seated himself on the edge of her couch. She saw now that he was fully dressed and armed with a belt of many instruments.

  At this time Elza had been in the City of Ice for a considerable period. Irksome, worried days of semi-imprisonment; and through them, Tarrano’s attitude toward her was unchanged. She saw little of him; he seemed very busy, though to what end, and what his activities, she could not learn.

  Within the palace, half as guard, half as maid-servant, Tara was generally Elza’s only companion. And then, one evening when Tara’s smouldering jealousy broke forth in Tarrano’s presence and Elza uttered an involuntary cry of fear, Tara was summarily removed.

  Elza was left practically alone; until at length came this night when invading the privacy of her sleeping room, Tarrano awakened her. He sat now upon the edge of her couch.

  “I have a confession to make to you, Lady Elza.” He smiled slightly. “As you know, there is no one else in our habitable universe to whom I would speak thus frankly.”

  “I am honored, Tarrano. But here, at this hour of sleep—”

  He waved away the words. “I have asked your pardon for that. My confession—as once before, Lady Elza, I come to you most humbly, confessing that my affairs are not going as I would like. You do not know, of course, that Mars—”

  “I know nothing,” she interrupted. “You have kept me from the news-mirrors, if indeed there are any here—”

  “Mars revolted against me,” he went on imperturbably. “The Little People are again in control. Fools! They do not realize, those governors of Mars, that their public ultimately will demand this Everlasting Life of mine—the Brende secret—”

  She frowned. “No one knows better than you, Tarrano, that my father’s secret does not bestow immortality. To cure disease, in a measure—”

  He checked her; his smile was ironical. “You and I know that, Lady Elza. We know that on this plane we would not want everlasting life if we could have it. But the public does not know that—let us not discuss it. I was telling you—confessing to you—I have lost Mars. Temporarily, of course. Meanwhile, I have been preparing to invade the Earth.” His gesture was expansive. “I have been planning, from here in the Cold Country, to send armies to your Earth.”

  He paused an instant. “I think now I shall wait until the next opposition—we are far from Earth now, but all in good time we shall be closer.… Strange is it not, that I should like to tell you my plans?”

  She did not answer; she watched his smile fading into a look of grimness. “In the Great City, here on Venus, they are getting ready to attack me. Did you know that?”

  “No,” she said.

  “You supposed they were? Your brother, and that Jac Hallen?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you hoped they were, of course?”

  “Yes,” she repeated.

  He frowned. “You are disconcertingly frank, Lady Elza. Well, let me tell you this—it would come to nothing. The Rhaals are with them—all the resources of the Central State are to be thrown against me. Yet it will come to nothing.”

  Her heart leaped. Tarrano was making his last stand. Beyond the logical sense of his words, she could see it in his eyes. He knew he was making his last stand. He knew too that she was now aware of it; and that behind the confidence of his words—that was the confession he was making.

  Tarrano’s last stand! There seemed to her then something illogically pathetic in it all. This man of genius—so short a time ago all but the Emperor of three worlds. And now, with them slipping from his grasp, reduced to this last stronghold in the bleak fastnesses of the Cold Country, awaiting the inevitable attack upon him. Something pathetic.…

  “I’m sorry, Tarrano.”

  As though mirrored from her own expression, a wistful look had come to him. Her words drove it away.

  “Sorry? There is nothing to be sorry about. Their attack will come to nothing…yet—” He stopped short, and then as though deciding to say what he had begun, he added:

  “Yet, Lady Elza, I am no fool to discard possibilities. I may be defeated.” He laughed harshly. “To what depths has Tarrano fallen that he can voice such a possibility!”

  He leaned toward her and into his tone came a greater earnestness than she ever heard in it before.

  “Lady Elza, if they should be successful, they would not capture me—for I would die fighting. You understand that, don’t you?”

  She met his eyes; the gleam in them held her. Forgetful of herself, she had allowed the fur to drop from her: she sat bolt upright, the dim red light tinting the scarf that lay like gossamer around her white shoulders. His hand came out and touched her arm, slipped up to her shoulder and rested there, but she did not feel it.

  “I will die fighting,” he repeated. “You understand that?”

  “Yes,” she breathed.

  “And you would be sorry?”

  “Oh—”

  “Would you?”

  “Yes, I—”

  He did not relax. His eyes burned her: but deep in them she saw that quality of wistfulness, of plead
ing.

  “You, my Elza, they would rescue—unless I killed you.”

  She did not move, but within her was a shudder.

  “You know I would kill you, my Elza, rather than give you up?”

  “Yes,” she murmured.

  “I—wonder. Sometimes I think I would.” Suddenly he cast aside all restraint. “Oh, my Elza—that we should have to plan such things as these! You, sitting there—you are so beautiful! Your eyes—limpid pools with terror lurking in them when I would have them misty with love! My Elza—”

  The woman in her responded. A wave of color flooded her throat and face. But she drew away from him.

  “My Elza! Can you not tell me that even in defeat I may be victorious? It is you more than all else that I desire.”

  Without warning his arms were around her, holding her fiercely to him, his face close to hers.

  “Elza! With you, defeat would be victory. And with you—now—if you would but say the word—together we will surmount every obstacle.—”

  He was kissing her, bending back her head, and his grip upon her shoulder was bruising the flesh. No longer Tarrano, Conqueror of the universe, just Tarrano the man. Terror surged within Elza’s heart.

  “Tarrano!”

  “Elza dear—my Elza—”

  “Tarrano!” She fought with him. “Tarrano, do you dare—I tell you—”

  The frightened pleading of a woman at bay. And then abruptly he cast her off. His laugh was grim.

  “What a fool I am! Tarrano the weakling!” He leaped from the couch and began pacing the room. “Tarrano the weakling! To what depths has Tarrano fallen!”

  He stopped before her. “I ask your pardon, Lady Elza. This has been madness. Forget my words—all madness.”

  His tone was crisp. “Human weakness to which I did not realize I was so prone made me talk like a fool. Desire you above the conquest of the universe? Absurd! Lies that men whisper into women’s ears! All lies!”

  Was he telling the real truth now? Or was this a mood of recrimination? Bitterness that his love was scorned. Again his gaze held her, but in it now she could see nothing but a cruel inflexible purpose.

  “Tarrano in defeat! That is impossible, Lady Elza. You will very shortly realize that, for I am going to show you how, single-handed, I can make it impossible. Show you with your own eyes. It was my purpose in coming to waken you—my purpose, when your beauty led me into weakness incredible.… Get up, Lady Elza.”

  She stared. With folded arms he stood emotionless regarding her.

  “Get up, I tell you. Put on those garments you wore when we arrived. We are going travelling again.”

  He stood waiting; and beneath his gaze she shrank back, drawing the fur rug over her.

  A smile of contempt parted his lips. “You hesitate? You think I am still a weakling? You over-rate your beauty, Lady Elza.… Make haste, I command you. We must start very soon.”

  She summoned her voice. “Start? Where? What are you—”

  “No questions, Lady Elza. Not now. Make haste—”

  He jerked from her the fur covering, flung it across the room, and with the same gesture turned away impersonally. Trembling, she rose from the couch and donned the garments he had indicated, while he stood brooding by the window, gazing through its transparent pane at the glistening frozen city which was all that remained of his empire.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  Thing in the Forest

  “All in good time, Lady Elza, you will know where we are.”

  Alone, unnoticed, they had departed from the City of Ice on a small flying platform similar to the one they had used before. The night had passed; day, with a new warmth to the sun, came again. Flying low, with Tarrano in a grim, moody silence, and Elza staring downward.

  The aural lights were overhead when at the last Tarrano brought the platform to rest. A thick, luxuriant forest. Huge trees with rope-like roots and heavy vines. Others with leaves like the ears of an elephant. And the ground hidden by almost impenetrable underbrush.

  They had landed in a tiny glade beside a dank marsh of water, where ferns shoulder high were embanked. It was dark, the stars and the tints of the auroral lights were barely distinguishable through the mass of foliage overhead. Elza gazed around her fearsomely. The air was heavy, oppressive. Redolent with the perfume of wild flowers and the smell of mouldering, steaming soil.

  “All in good time. Lady Elza,” Tarrano repeated. “You will know where we are presently; we are closer to human habitation than you would think.”

  Elza’s heart pounded. As they were descending she had noticed a glow of light in the sky ahead. As though by intuition now, she seemed to realize that they were not far from the Great City. Her thoughts leaped to me—Jac Hallen—there in Maida’s palace. Tarrano’s grim, sinister purpose was as yet unknown to her. But she guessed that in it, danger impended for me—for all of us in the Great City.

  “Jac! Danger! Jac! Danger!”

  Her thoughts instinctively reiterated the two words uppermost in her mind. And I think that it was just about then when they awakened me.

  Leaving the vehicle, Tarrano commanded Elza to follow him; and he began picking his way through the jungle. A light was in his hand; it penetrated but a short distance. A quivering beam of yellow light; then Elza saw that upon occasion, as Tarrano’s finger slid a lever, the beam narrowed, intensified to a bright lavender. And now where it struck, the vegetation withered. Blackened, sometimes burst into tiny flame, and parted thus before them as they advanced.

  The jungle was silent; yet, as Elza listened, beneath the crackle of the burning twigs she could hear the tiny myriad voices of insect life. Startled voices as the heat of Tarrano’s beam struck them. Rustling leaves; breaking twigs; things scurrying and sliding away, unseen in the darkness.

  Once or twice a crashing—some monster disturbed in his rest plunging away. Again, a slithering bulk of something, undulating its path through the thickets. All unseen. Save once. Looking upward, Elza caught a gleam of green eyes overhead. A triangle of three baleful spots of phosphorescent green. Her murmur of fright caused Tarrano to glance upward. His lavender, beam, grown suddenly larger, swung there with a hiss. Falling from above came a pink body. A bloated body, square, with squat, twisted legs; a thing larger than a man. A grotesque naked monstrosity almost in human form. A travesty—gruesome mockery of mankind. A face, three-eyed…

  The thing lay writhing in the underbrush, mouthing, mumbling and then screaming—the shrill scream of death agony. And the horrible smell of burning flesh as Tarrano’s light played upon it…

  “Come away, Lady Elza. I’m sorry. I had hoped to avoid an affair such as this.”

  Sickened, shuddering, Elza clung close to Tarrano as he led her onward.

  An hour or more; and now Elza could see in the distance the lights of the Great City.

  “Jac! Danger! Jac! Danger!”

  The idea of thought-transference had come to her. With all the power of her mind she was thinking her warning to me, praying that it might reach me.

  “Single-handed, Lady Elza. You shall see now how, single-handed, I make impossible any attack upon Tarrano.”

  In her abstraction Elza had almost forgotten herself and Tarrano; his voice reached her—his voice grim and with a gloating, sinister triumph in it. He was bending to the ground. Elza saw that they had come to an open space—an eminence rising above the forest. Underfoot was a stony soil; in places, bare black rock with an outcropping of red, like the cinnabar from which on Earth we melt the Heavy-metal.23

  Tarrano faced her. “Nature, my Lady Elza, is fair to my purpose. I knew I would find some such deposit as this.” He turned his face to one side attentively, and darted his light—harmlessly yellow now—to where a lone tree showed its great leaves beginning to waver in a night breeze.

  “Nature is with us! See there, my Elza! A wind is coming—a wind from us to—them!”

  The breeze grew—a breeze blowing directly over the forest to wh
ere in the distance the lights of the Great City showed plainly. Tarrano added:

  “I had thought to create the wind.” He tapped his belt. “Create the wind to carry our onslaught. But you see, it is unnecessary. Nature is kind, and far more efficacious than our man-made devices.”

  “Jac! Danger!” She stood there in the breeze, watching Tarrano—his purpose as yet no more than guessed—praying that I might receive her warning.

  Tarrano selected his spot—a tiny little cone of rock no bigger than his thumb. He beckoned Elza.

  “Stand close, and watch. You shall see how from the merest spark, a conflagration may ensue.”

  The cylinder in his hand darted forth a needle-like shaft—a light of intense purple. It touched the tiny cone of rock, and he held it there.

  “A moment. Be patient, my Elza.”

  The point of rock seemed presently to melt. Like a tiny volcano, at their feet, lava from it was flowing down. A little stream of melted rock, viscous, bubbling a trifle; red at the edges, white within, and with wisps of smoke curling up from it.

  Elza stared with the fascination of horror, for now tiny tongues of flame were licking about. Blue tongues, licking the air, vanishing into wisps of black smoke.

  Tarrano snapped off his ray. But the tongues of flame stayed alive. Spreading slowly, soundlessly, their heat now melting the ground.

  A breath of the smoke touched Elza’s face. Pungent, acrid. It stopped her breathing. She choked, coughed heavily to expel it.

  “Come away, Lady Elza. Let us watch from a safer distance.”

  He led her from the hillock, up the wind to where at the edge of the forest they stood gazing.

  The blue fire had spread over a distance of several feet. A sluggish, boiling, bubbling area of flame. Tongues now the height of a man. And from them, rolling upward, a heavy black cloud—deadly fumes thick, blacker than the night, spreading out, welling forward over the forest toward the Great City slumbering in its falsely peaceful security.

  At last Elza knew. Stood there, cold, shuddering, thinking with all the power of her mind and being: