by Talbot Mundy
“Without you?” Jeff asked. “Sure thing.”
Henri de la Fontaine Coq reached forward and touched Grim’s knee.
“Get me some of that stuff! Drunk, I am insuperable. Then together we will scr-r-ag him. Afterwards—”
Jeff’s scowl and growl silenced him. Grim continued:
“I have passed my word to Dorje to give him all the aid I can until he has reduced his babus, as he calls them, to submission. He would have destroyed us otherwise. While you fellows were asleep, he and I had it out. We dickered to a showdown. I’m to help him, on condition that he does no sort of injury to any of you, including Baltis, while the contract lasts. It terminates the moment he has licked his own gang. Then we make a new deal — or none — whichever suits both or either of us.”
“Can you trust him?” Jeff asked.
“No. But he can trust me, and he knows it. If his gang succeeded in deposing him they’d scough him and there’d be about a hundred of ’em free to play hell with the world. And they’d do it. They’d be infinitely worse than he is. They’d quarrel among themselves undoubtedly, but in the process they’d wreck civilization — just as the war-lords are wrecking China. Dorje intends, of course, to scough me — all of us as soon as he has dealt with his rebels. He knows I know that. But he considers we’ll be easy victims, whereas his own gang at the moment are like Caesar’s friends, at one and the same time treacherous and indispensable. They’re indispensable because he has divided up responsibility between them. None of them knows all his secrets; each of them, however, knows at least one secret. And they’re jealous of each other — which is probably the only reason why they haven’t killed him long ago. They damaged his other airship recently — although he says they deny it — in order to restrict his movements; and he caught and killed a dozen of them who were trying to damage this one.”
“How does it work?” demanded Henri de la Fontaine Coq. “It is as unexciting as a houseboat. There is no uncertainty. What moves it?”
“I don’t half understand it,” Grim answered, “but it follows the earth’s magnetic currents, which are as intricate and differentiated as the web spun by a spider. There are main currents, and all sorts of diagonal and cross- currents, with what he calls dead places between them where there is no current at all. When they strike one of those places they have to rise or fall until the wind takes them into a current again.”
“What makes it rise?”
“I don’t understand that either. He says, antigravity. In other words — mind you, I quote him, this is not my own opinion; I haven’t one — any force, of whatever kind, can be converted and reversed, although its motion can’t be made to cease. There is a substance in those tubes — so he says — that in some way reverses the centripetal pull of gravity. The tubes lift, and the hull pulls downward; they determine the elevation by adjusting the proportion between the upward and downward pull.”
“What steers it?”
“He explained that, too, but I can’t grasp it. That circular tube in some way sets up a resistance against which they can straighten the ship with the wheel.”
Henri de la Fontaine Coq emerged out of his mask. He became excited — earnest. His eyes, normally so scornful and superior to the thrill of even his own emotions, actually blazed:
“We could go to the moon! To the planets! Let us do that! Let us steal this thing and do it!”
Grim smiled. “We have five — ten — possibly fifteen minutes in which to talk sense before my faculties take charge of me and I become a sort of automatic and impersonal engine. I can feel this soma working. What it does is to release the inhibitions; or perhaps I should say it paralyzes them. Whatever real character a man has, takes charge. Jeff, I want a promise from you.”
“There’s nothing you would ask me that I wouldn’t do,” said Jeff. “What is it?”
“Dorje has kept himself drunk on the stuff since he first learned how to make it from the Atlantean formula. He has reached the stage where it doesn’t work the way it used to. It releases the devil in him; but it has even burned the devil, so that he isn’t as keen-edged as he used to be. But you can see what it releases.”
“Well?” said Jeff. “What of it?” He looked scared. It is not in the least agreeable to see a strong man frightened.
Grim broke the ice abruptly: “If I act up badly, kill me.”
“Damn your eyes, I knew you were heeled with a barbed hook!”
“I would do the same for you,” said Grim. “I wouldn’t let you do dirt. Hurry up, Jeff; this stuff’s gaining on me!”
“All right, it’s a promise. Dammit, Jim — you make demands on friendship.”
“I know who my friends are. Listen: you see that big chest in Dorje’s compartment — not the one he takes his bottles from — the big one?”
“Yes. What’s in it?”
“Vasantasena.”
“Dead?”
“No. Living. He intends to fill her up with soma. And he says she loves him.”
“That is true,” said Baltis. “In her heart she loves him, though with her brain she hates. But men know nothing about women — nothing.”
Grim continued: “Therefore, drunk with soma, she will sacrifice herself to save his day for him.”
“She will act exactly as her heart impels her,” said Chullunder Ghose. “That is what soma does to people.”
“All women do that anyhow,” said Baltis.
Grim glanced at her, and continued: “But Vasantasena has refused to taste the stuff. She knows its potency.”
“And she wishes to hate him. Why not? All Dorje’s women wish to hate him.” Baltis was in a mood for revelation of her own experience, but Jeff scowled and growled and she checked herself.
Grim continued: “So he has her locked in there until it suits him to use force to make her drink the stuff.”
“He is using it now,” said Jeff.
Two men had come forward from the stern compartment. They were opening the chest. Dorje had the big, pearl-colored bottle in his hand. One of the men reached down into the chest and dragged Vasantasena upright, back toward us. Dorje showed her the bottle. He spoke — I saw his lips move. Vasantasena reached out for the bottle, and I think she meant to snatch and break it: but Dorje and his two men also thought so. One of them seized her head and bent it back. The other wrapped the corners of her sari on his thumbs and thrust his thumbs between her jaws. Then Dorje poured the stuff into her open mouth and, with his own left hand, so pressed the muscles of her throat that she was obliged to swallow. He poured in lots of it. She lay down.
“Have I talked rot?” Grim asked. “I feel as if I were coming out from laughing gas. By Gad, though—”
“What?” Jeff asked him.
“Nothing.” Then after a moment: “I can understand now how this ship works. I can see—”
He paused again. Henri de la Fontaine Coq opened his mouth — hesitated — spoke:
“Then tell me how it works. I will go to the moon!”
“You may go to the devil,” said Grim, “when I have finished this job. Meanwhile, you will do what I tell you or take the consequences.”
“I will go to the moon,” he repeated. “I wonder that Dorje never did it. Or — perhaps — did he?”
Baltis crossed the floor and sat beside him: “Henri, I go with you!”
For a while the two talked French in low tones, very rapidly. Grim stared into infinity. The ship pitched like a barrel on a big sea in a gale.
CHAPTER 40. “Wreck his bug’s nest. Him we kill last.”
Catastrophes come suddenly like tidal waves and leave us wondering what happened and how we survived. Presently we begin to invent an explanation, and before long we have convinced ourselves. That is one reason why all history is such a mess of inconsistencies, and why I hesitate to give my version of what took place that night in Northern Tibet. I don’t know all, or nearly all that happened; and things happened so swiftly that it is difficult to distinguish between act
ual memory, deduction and sheer guesswork.
I went to a window. Baltis volunteered the information that we had left Chak-sam and the Tsangpo River leagues away behind us and beneath us. We were flying low and it was sunset, with a howling wind lashing the anger of Koko Nor. No need to ask what lake that was. There is no other body of water that it possibly could have been. We were flying slightly to the westward of it; I could see the desolate salt marshes and wastes of sterile desert left by the ever-shrinking inland sea. There were clouds of wild-fowl settling for the night. Not a human being. Not a human habitation. Loneliness — dreariness — and the depressing twilight grey that only swamp-land knows.
Something Grim said — though the actual words escaped me — was so startling that I suddenly realized what state my nerves were in. And I was no exception; we had all jumped when he spoke to us. Jeff was ashen colored under the sunburn. Baltis looked like painted porcelain, because the rouge on cheeks and lips was too red for the blanched skin. Chullunder Ghose was too air-sick to look anything but haggard. Henri de la Fontaine Coq had assumed an air of truculence without effectually hiding fear; and all of us, except him, were suffering from the swift change of elevation. Grim, it seemed to me, was undergoing mental torture, as if he fought within himself for courage to face something much more terrible than death. He spoke again:
“The hell is, I remember human values. However, here goes.”
He went aft into Dorje’s compartment. Dorje took one glance at him and grew afraid. He stood up, pushing himself off the tank with both hands, and they two faced each other. Scared — dreading what might happen, and entirely ignorant of what weapons Dorje might have, or what his men’s attitude was toward Grim and the rest of us, Jeff and I followed, with Chullunder Ghose close at our heels and all three of us doing our best to seem casual. We were in time to hear the end of Grim’s speech:
“So don’t try treachery; for I can see the color of your thought. The bargain is: I’m your ally until your babus are at heel or helpless. Where is the stuff?”
He stopped and took the soma bottle from the box — passed it to Jeff, not taking his eyes off Dorje.
“Jeff, give that to Crosby. Crosby, up the ladder there’s a hatch. You’ll find a port-light facing aft. Unfasten it, and throw that bottle out. Then fasten it again. If the man at the top makes trouble, Jeff will take him by the legs and brain him against the bulkhead.”
I obeyed in a hurry. The big, stinking Turkoman who kept the lookout in the streamlined conning tower refused to make room for me and I needed both hands, one for the bottle, which was heavy, and one for the ladder. But Jeff reached for his foot and twisted it until he yelled. Then he crowded himself against the framework, so that I had room to struggle up beside him. The front was rather like the windshield of a car, only sloping backward at a sharper angle. At the sides and the rear there were square ports. I undid eight thumb-screws of a rear port and threw out the bottle, which fell, I believe, into Koko Nor, since we were passing at that moment, at an elevation of a thousand feet or so, above an arm of the lake that sprawled into the marshland like a river estuary. Our actual elevation above sea-level, I suppose, was fifteen or sixteen thousand feet.
Then I sat on the uncomfortable metal seat beside the Turkoman, who resented it but offered no resistance beyond crowding me with his elbow. There was no attempt whatever at comfort in that airship; probably its builders took their cue from the gruesome wilderness around them — raw — cold — gale-swept. Comfort, in a land like that, was probably as productive of a feeling of guilt as Gregorian music would be in a Scots kirk.
On a ledge in front of us, too far away to rest our elbows on it, just at the foot of the sloping window, were three crudely constructed switches something like those on an electric surface car; but they were apparently not in use just then; the man at the wheel beneath us did the steering; the man beside me apparently signalled him by striking one heel or the other against the sides of the ladder. But there was very little steering needed; it was quite possible to imagine that we were flowing, against the wind, in the stream of one of the earth’s magnetic currents. Perhaps my ignorance of what magnetic currents are, and how they function, made it all the easier to imagine.
Straight ahead of us, fifteen or twenty miles away, there was a group of low hills, hardly more than dunes, that might have been islands when Koko Nor was vastly wider than it is now. In the weird, wild quarter-light that follows sunset at that altitude they resembled the bones of a monster. Wind had cut them until spine-like hummocks lay along their summit. To the eastward they were higher, as if the monster’s head lay pillowed on a low hill. And where the monster’s eye might be there was one blue light — as blue as those they use on the underground tracks in the New York railroad stations.
By the movement of the pools and shadow clumps of marsh-grass beneath us I guessed our speed at eighty miles an hour, against that wind, until the Turkoman beside me spoke abruptly to the man beneath us. Then we slowed down to about half that speed, which enormously reduced the pitching, although the sideways roll continued. It was growing darker and the stars looked so big that nothing — absolutely nothing anywhere seemed real. It was like a dreadful dream that grew more dreadful as we approached those low hills. A baleful sheen of cold blue light appeared above them — dim — like a luminous mist; and yet there was no mist; there was too much wind for mist to concentrate and stay in one spot, and there was not a trace of moisture on the outside of the window. On the inside, moisture from our breath began to freeze and cloud the window, but the Turkoman growled to the man at the controls and in a moment I could feel heat rising. He leaned forward and wiped the window with a sour-smelling cloth.
There was no light in the airship. Down below me I could hear Grim’s voice, and then Jeff’s. Once I thought I heard Vasantasena, and then Dorje’s metallic voice, but there was no sound from the others. I could not see down into the dark compartment, and it was impossible to hear what was said, partly because of the swishing of the liquid ballast. Grim would shout if he needed me. I decided to stay where I was — fascinated. It was like a dream of death — a ferry-load of souls and stinking Charon at the helm. Ahead lay Limbo — cold, pale, mysterious. We were heading straight toward the motionless blue light that seemed so like a pupil of a monster’s eye. It grew bigger, but not brighter. We appeared to aim ourselves straight at it. The man beside me struck both heels against the ladder and I heard a lever clank. They had shut off power. For a moment the wind checked and veered us, but the man beside me took a switch in each hand and we began to move ahead again. No pitching now whatever, and a lot less roll than formerly. The blue light seemed to race toward us, and it kept growing bigger and bigger. The Turkoman thrust both switches forward to their limit and then seized the third one; he seemed able to control our speed with that exactly as he pleased. We slowed almost to a snail’s pace. I believed then, and I still believe it, that our nose was being drawn toward a magnet that formed the mooring; I think the first two switches kept us straight, and that the third one increased or diminished the pull of the magnetic current on the airship’s nose. The wind ceased. We were in the lee of a big shed, creeping into it, and the light came from a ball of what looked like metal at the far end. I could see men on platforms made of undressed stone and packed earth, but before we passed into the shed I got one glimpse, to right and left of our surroundings.
Such a glimpse as that is no basis for an accurate description. It was almost more confusing than if I had seen nothing at all. A nightmare would be just as easy to recall from memory — a nightmare of gloomy walls and fortresses, enclosed within a rampart of alluvial mud, illuminated by pale blue light that streamed through doors and windows, throwing monstrous shadows against beehive mounds of mud and masonry that looked like black breasts burning; but the flame within them, glimpsed through slot-like openings at the bottom, seemed to give no heat.
We slid into the shed. The airship’s nose made contact with the blue-lit ba
ll. The man beside me closed two switches and left the third one opened to the limit. There was a clanging of metal as the men on the platforms began opening the doorways in the ship’s sides — both sides this time; and they were swift — it was hardly a minute before light poured in along with icy air; and before I could reach the ladder-foot they were already dragging out the chest in which Vasantasena had lain imprisoned. Grim was already outside. Dorje was out ahead of him; I saw him talking to a small man in a bearskin overcoat, who had a snub nose and a graceless Cockney accent — caught about a dozen words:
“Hi saye e’s sick! I tell yer, sick ain’t ‘alf of it. ‘E’s craizy!”
We — Jeff, Baltis, Henri de la Fontaine Coq, myself — were herded by the airship’s crew and driven out on to the platform. There were thirty men there, as grimy as stevedores, coated in half-dressed leather to which dirt clung like soot on cobwebs. Some of them — the broader-hipped ones — possibly were women; one of those, struck in the face by a man’s fist, stumbled backward and fell between the airship and the platform. She, if a woman she was, lay moaning like an animal, but no one took any notice of her. Presently I saw Vasantasena standing in a shadow beside Grim, who was talking to her; but she seemed to be trying to hear what Dorje and the bearskin-Cockney man were saying:
“Sick, I tell yer! And the gang’s all sick o’ dilly-dallyin’. They’ve got the irritator goin’ full blast. And now the messages ain’t workin’. No news — and they saye you done it. Taike my tip, guv’nor, and get ter ‘ell out of ‘ere afore they maike an end of yer!”
Then Dorje beckoned and one of the airship’s crew ran swiftly. He seized the Cockney from behind, set a knee against his spine and jerked his head back. I was unable to see what weapon the Cockney used, but he struck behind him as he almost turned a back-spring, fell and lay still. I suppose his neck was broken. His assailant swayed and fell on top of him. I saw the Cockney’s hand twitch. Dorje also saw it. He beckoned Grim.
