“What is it?”
“Insecticide,” Ric grinned. “More potent than DDT. Those outlines Starr made out furnished the clews. It should do it.”
“Won’t they get out the kitchen door?”
“Uh-uh. I sealed it up proper. It and the window.”
The door between the rooms slammed shut but not before half a dozen bombs had got through. Ric slammed the shutters too. They waited.
“If it doesn’t kill them it’ll put them to sleep for hours. Basically, from Starr’s dossiers on the Kiriki, they have all the vulnerable points of our grasshoppers. And fire will destroy them utterly. I’m afraid we can’t take chances, so this cabin will have to go. Match?”
* * * *
They watched it burn down to the last slab of stilted-up planking. Max stared down at the two small charred remainders of the Kiriki advance guard and shuddered.
On the road back to New York, Max said: “Do you think they’ll try it again?”
“The Kiriki? Not for a while. Like you said, they dislike war. They like it the easy way.”
“Propaganda. Invasion of minds. Well, two can play at that. We’ll keep Orion going—only we’ll print the real story. We’ll make men detest and despise the Kiriki so that any feelers they send down will send them hopping to the furthest end of space. Maybe we can get somebody started on that telepathic wave interrupter of yours, too. So if they do land we can cut them off from each other. We’ll work on this reverse propaganda hard.”
Max jerked his eyes back on the road and put his foot on the gas hard. Sure he would work, work to save his sanity, too.
It wasn’t going to be easy to forget a lost dream—a dream that had lived and breathed and promised a lifetime of patterned contentment. It would take a lot of mental welding to hold back the horror of that kiss.
But he would try.
RAINBOW JADE, by Gardner E. Fox
Originally published in Weird Tales, September 1949.
The bell clanged again. Shevlin heard its vibrating peal clearly in the crisp mountain air, two thousand feet above the sun-baked Taklamakan Desert. Its notes stirred tinkling echoes from snow-capped peaks and the fir-sheathed slopes of Tokosun Gorge. His brown face tightened, listening.
Very faintly, the gong was answered by a distant baying. There were animals here that responded to the call of that gong. Not dogs, not wolves. But something so like them, and yet so—unlike—that Shevlin shuddered.
He kicked the big Karasher stallion to full gallop. The sun was a scarlet hump on the horizon, and he wanted to get off this flat stretch before the moon came up from the Gobi. He touched the walnut handles of his Army revolver for reassurance.
Shevlin was an adventurer. He admitted it, when any of his friends accused him. He told them, “I’m out for what I can get. I’m big and I’m strong. I like the feel of a horse under me, and the smell of mountain air. I can’t afford that kind of thing unless I work at it. So I go out and get things for people. Things in out-of-the-way places. Maybe even things that don’t exist. Sometimes I chase legends.” His gray eyes lighted when he talked like that. His friends knew he was remembering some piece of tissue-thin blue porcelain he had brought out of a bandit’s lair, for a millionaire; or perhaps the emerald that once had been in an emperor’s swordhilt, an emerald now gracing a woman’s finger in San Francisco.
When news of Pearl Harbor filtered across the Himalayas, Shevlin had stolen a horse and ridden a thousand miles to join Chennault. And when the surrender was completed on the deck of the Missouri, he threw his uniform into a trashbin and joined a nomad caravan headed for Paochi. He had met Talbot in Paochi, over a gin swizzle.
Talbot showed him a broken chip of yellow jade. The man’s eyes, already unnaturally bright with fever, blazed as he looked down at the translucent stone.
“Nothing like it anywhere, old man. Positively priceless. Found it back inside, around the Sin-kiang section. Rainbow jade. That’s what it is.” At Shevlin’s polite stare, Talbot chuckled. “’S what I call it, you know. Deuced rainbow left it with Confucius after he’d finished that hiao-king book.”
Talbot coughed, convulsing. He apologized, and added, “Go in back there for more of it myself if the flesh weren’t so weak. Got a mind to, anyhow. Not that I need the stuff. More pounds’n I know what to do with, thanks to the pater. I say, Shevlin! You, do work like this. Finding stuff an’ things. Take a commission from me, old boy. What d’you say? Fifty pounds a month and a share-and-share split if you find the yellow stuff. Eh?”
He had agreed. Why not?
And, in Kashgar, after six months of fruitless search, he found Chi Ling.
She was leaning against the painted post of a temple, cool in thin shirt and riding breeches and boots. She was not white, nor Kirghiz, Uzbek or Tatar. Her lips were red and full, her hair black as the Ou-ni-yao vases. Her body was bigger than the Chinese, her breasts more full. She was the loveliest thing Shevlin had ever seen, but it wasn’t her beauty that took his eye.
It was the yellow jade amulet in the form of a crescent hanging about her throat. It matched the piece Talbot had shown him in Paochi. It was so transparent he could see the fabric of her blouse beneath it.
“Where did you get it?” he asked her. “I’ll, buy it from you. Just tell me how much you want. I’ll buy information, too. Where’d—”
He got that far when she slapped him.
She turned her back and walked, away; but not before, deep down in the black pools of her eyes, he had seen that she was afraid; deadly afraid.
Shevlin followed her for two weeks before she spoke to him. One night he saw her coming out of the bazaar. There, was a big man with her, a man with a hooked nose and the sharp, bright eye of an eagle.
He was wrapped in a dirty sheepskin, but he wore it with the ease and grace of an emperor.
Shevlin said, “Look, my name’s Shevlin. The jade now. I’ll pay you—”
The girl whispered harshly, “You want the jade, yes? You will pay for it? With two horses?”
Shevlin said, “Look, my name’s Shevlin.
The girl put out a pale white hand, touched his briefly. Her flesh tingled against his.
Shevlin scowled. He had never bothered with women, except for an occasional Eurasian or White Russian émigré on the coast. Now this girl, with electric fingers and a face that was exquisite under Kashgar moonlight—
“Not money,” she told him. “Horses. You must buy them.”
Shevlin chuckled, and the girl stiffened. Political refugees of one sort of another! The frontier towns abounded with them. Then he shrugged. It was none of his affair. The jade was what he hunted. He said, “I’ll have horses. Two fleet mares. With food and water canteens. Now—tell me your name.”
She looked at him as a man for the first time. Shevlin let her study the brown planes of his face, the wide, thin mouth, the level gray eyes with the white scar above the left where a snow leopard on Amne Machin almost clawed it out. The scars on his leg and arm that the leopard had engraved tingled faintly as her eyes met his. He grinned, “Well, what about it? Do I get to know your name?”
She shook her head and touched the amulet. “No, that was not part of our bargain. Only the amulet. It will be yours,” When he came back, thirty minutes later, she had the yellow jade in her palm and her black hair was tucked up in a knot on her shapely head. She would ride swiftly, he thought. Somehow, he knew she was a good horsewoman.
She dropped the jade piece into his hand, swung up into the saddle. She looked down at him, laughing softly. “My name is—Chi Ling.” And then she was off in a clatter of hooves on the cobblestoned street.
Shevlin ran around the corner where his Karasher roan was jingling its bit impatiently, and mounted. He followed them easily. They made good targets in the moonlight.
He trailed them from a distance, across the alkali plains
between Kashgar and Tihwa, into the valley of Ili and beyond, past wind-eroded ruins and bleached skeletons of men and horses. For more than four hundred miles he followed. He lost them in the Celestial Mountains, the first night he heard the bell, and the animals baying.
* * * *
He sat in the light of his little campfire and checked his guns, an Army .45 and a Winchester .30.30. The wind came out of the firs, fragrant and cold. Shevlin drew his big cloth cape around his shoulders, looked up at the stars. The baying was very close, now. At times he could have sworn he heard a sniffling, at not too great a distance.
Shevlin reached for the rifle, took it across his knees. Something was moving in the little copse at the bottom of the hill where he was camped. It was big as a lion, judging from its shadow. And yet the head was that of a dog. A queer mixture. Shevlin thought of the Dogs of Fo that guarded the Chin temples.
Clannng, clannng, clannng.…
The bell was very near, alive and vibrant. It was somewhere up above him, hidden in one of the caves that dotted the mountains, where the Buddhists had placed their magnificent murals.
Shevlin came to his feet, swearing in amazement. The animals were in the clear now, bright in moonlight, coming for him. Dogs of Fo! Huge, tawny in color, mouths slavering, that deep bay erupting from their throats.
He fired coolly. The highpowered rifle was as accurate as his skill and experience could make it. A dog—he had no other thought for it—dropped. Another fell, crawled on toward him, dying. A third leaped high in the air, crashed on a rock.
Then the others were on him. There was no room to wield a rifle, no time to draw the Colt. He went back with white fangs and a red mouth gaping for his face.…
Clannng—clannng! Clannng—Clannng clannng!
The bell was fierce, now. Loud and pealing! Ordering, commanding; the dogs fell away, sniffed at him, tongues, lolling. Their real eyes shone green and brilliant in the darkness. The bell clanged again, louder and faster. Summoning! The dogs wheeled, trotted off.
Shevlin drew a deep breath, put his back against a rock and wriggled to his feet. His left arm was gashed and bloody; His cheek was furrowed.
“A minute more, and there wouldn’t have been anything to save. But thanks anyhow,” he muttered to the bell. He winced as his left arm throbbed. He had a medicine kit somewhere in his pack. He staggered toward it, knelt down.
“I think I can do it much better.”
She stood in a pool of silver light between two giant firs. No longer wore the shirt and riding breeches; instead, a silken sari clung to her, of scarlet and green and yellow splashes that overlapped to form a weird, alien pattern. Her long black hair was bound in a startling coiffure with tiny hair horns protruding from her temple. Her sloe eyes stared at him out of the lovely creamy mask of her face.
Chi Ling-moved gracefully. She strode freely, yet as easily as if she skimmed the grasstops.
She knelt, removed a yellow jade jar from the linked girdle. From the jar her long fingers cupped a fragrant balsam; applied it to the wounds with gentle strokes. It stung at first, then soothed.
Shevlin said, “Where did you get-the gown? It isn’t silk or linen. It looks metallic.”
“The Shang-ti gave it to me. They have many unusual things.”
“Shang-ti? The heavenly ones. Never heard of them.”
“You will. They ordered that I bring you to them. I had to plead for your life. They do not like—strangers. That is why they loose the kalfi here. The animals who nearly killed you. They brought them with them when they came.”
Shevlin frowned. “You speak of them as if they came from…where do they come from?”
Chi Ling slid her eyes sideways at him. Her red lips quirked. Mischievously she lifted a finger, pointed starward. “From up there. From the stars.”
Shevlin snorted, laughed. The pain was lessening. He grinned, “If they gave you that salve, I’m half convinced already…if they come from the stars, where’s their space ship?”
Chi Ling laughed. “Space ships! Space ships are only for humans. The others, the shang-ti they do not need ships. They are different. They have been here a long time. Many centuries. Only a very few suspect. The Lama in Tibet, a scholar like Charles Fort, a student or two who knows why Cambodia became a ghost city, why Ming-oi was abandoned overnight…but they cannot prove.”
Shevlin stared into the glowing embers of his dying fire. He had read Fort, that collector of incredible and impossible news notices: lights seen on the moon, dark objects crossing the sun, tiny coffins found in Scotland, shadows cast by unseen bodies in the sky, huge glowing wheels plunging into oceans and later rising from them toward the sky.
He chuckled. “And flying discs over the States, and an aviator chasing a strange thing…absolutely white except for a streamer of red that appeared to be revolving before his ship disintegrated over Kentucky!”
Chi Ling eyed him warily. He reassured her, “Just something I was thinking about, in regard to Fort. But you—how come you’re so friendly with these shang-ti?”
“I’ve been bred to serve them. My family for generations has been with them as they move from place to place, waiting. In their time here on Earth while they waited, they have dwelt in many places. Easter Island. Cambodia. Ming-oi. They have waited for such a long time. Soon now, they will be ready.”
“Ready? For what?”
“They will tell you if they want you to know. Come! We must go to them. I’ve stayed away too long already.”
Shevlin reached out, caught her wrist, “Suppose I don’t play it that way? Suppose…”
She shook her head at him. She said, “You will. The kalfi are still out there. If they come again, the gong may not call them off.”
Shevlin heard the sniffling, the panting. He shuddered and let her go. The girl arose calmly, brushing at her soft robe. Her black eyes smiled at him.
* * * *
He had heard of the Caverns in the Celestial Mountains from a warrior who had ridden with Ma Chung-ying. The Buddhists had sprawled their murals on rock walls in the domed hills, inside caves that stretched back into darkness. The soldier told him that a few men had explored one cave and—had not come out.
Chi Ling took him up a tier of steps cut in the limestone, through a low-portaled cave into gray dimness. Her hand in his as guide, she led him through a series of interlinked caverns that broadened onto a smooth ramp. The ramp twisted and spiraled gently downward.
There was no door, as such. One moment they stepped off the ramp into a dim grayness—
The next moment there was light and color and movement all around them. It was as if scales had been lifted from his eyes. Shevlin swore softly, staring.
There were giant caverns, many of them extending as far as he could see. Each was different. The one he was walking through with Chi Ling a swaying gracefulness ahead of him, was purple-walled, and floored with great plants and fungoid growths, giant creepers that lifted tangled vines and bronzine leaves toward the groined ceiling far above. It was a jungle of red and yellow and blue, of metallic bronzes and harsh silvers, of gold and amethyst and emerald…
The next cave was a liquid pool in whose depths queer transparencies flitted, where huge black bodies darted between trunks of coiled and rounded coral. On a slim path of stone, Chi Ling pattered between rippling waters. Shevlin followed, eying crystalline anemones and the mad coloring of fire sponge and golden corals…
Under the arch of the third cavern, Shevlin cried out.
Chi Ling turned, nodding. “A museum of sorts.”
There were many races and men in the transparent, bio-plastic cases. A Roman in cuirass and greaves. A half-naked Egyptian. A Tartar of the Mongol tribes; encased on the wooden saddle of his shaggy-pony, arrow notched to bowstring. A Polynesian, in white-feathered cape, stepping into a long canoe. On the far side Shevlin made out a Persian
in chain-mail, scimitar dangling from his brown hand. Beyond him, a Crusader, red cross on his white surtout.
They went through, that cavern, into one where statues and wooden carvings rioted against a backdrop of bright wall murals.
Chi Ling was hurrying. Shevlin caught no more, than a glimpse of the, following chambers…
“Here,” whispered Chi Ling. “Here now is the cavern of the shang-ti!”
Her warm hand squeezed his; then she was thrusting aside an iridescent curtain, stepping onto a polished black floor of basalt. This hall was larger than the others. Its walls seemed carved from mahogany, smoothed and polished with oil until they glittered. Tiny glowing ovals swirled and danced in the air currents high above, shedding a pale bluish-white light that was almost daylight.
And on the tier of ebony blocks, vivid white against the black—Shang-ti!
A solid, shimmering cube of brilliance. Eight feet in height, coruscating light against the darkness, revolving pinpoints of light within it, a hard core of glittering, blinding opalescence at its heart. Awesome, strange, and—
Cold!
Something deep inside him told him he had never known such cold. The white was the frosty of a Siberian snow-field, the glitter the shimmering feet of ice that rims the Alaskan glaciers. The movement inside the cube was the fantastic swirl of cosmic snows, the imponderable, frozen sluggishness of the glacier. It moved and looped and shifted in the cube, that living cold. Moved—and was still.
Chi Ling pressed his hand with cool fingers. He went with her across the basalt floor to the ebony steps.
Chi Ling whispered: “Wait!”
She went up the steps, wide-eyed; arms, open to the cube. Shevlin cried out, “Be careful! That thing must be cold as—”
The cube whirled, rotated; lifted and danced in the air with bright coruscations. Swept down on Chi Ling. Wrapped and enveloped her in the opalescent garment of white hoar-frost. Faintly there was the eerie tinkle, as if ice prong touched ice-blade. A musical arpeggio, swirling up and up with cold perfection of tone—
The Alien MEGAPACK® Page 33
