A tall, lean, sallow man was sitting exhausted in the pilot’s seat of the black flyer. His right arm was crimsoned from a wound in his shoulder, and blood spurted in little frothy jets from a second wound in his neck. Teddy’s fire had been better directed than he knew. As he entered with pistol ready, the sallow man raised his head erect by a tremendous effort. A hooked nose, a merciless mouth, and blazing eyes filled Teddy with repulsion. The sallow man stared at him superciliously.
“I am Wladislaw Varrhus, dictator of all the earth,” he said in a metallic voice. “I command—I—command.”
Speech failed him. His head dropped and he fell limply from the cushioned seat
CHAPTER XI.
Teddy felt the fallen man’s breast, but he was not breathing. In any event there was nothing that could have been done for him. An artery had been cut by a splinter of the one-pounder shell that had smashed the roof, and he had bled quietly to death, only trying desperately to land and get assistance before he died. The sight of Teddy and Davis sprinting toward him with drawn pistols had been too much for his hatred, however, and he had fired his automatic at them even as he was dying. Teddy found Davis lying on the ground with a bullet in his hip.
“I’m all right, Gerrod.” said Davis cheerfully when Teddy went to him. “Just see if there are any more chaps in these houses before you bother with me.”
Teddy explored the place thoroughly. There were many signs of human occupancy, but no one save Varrhus himself had been there when they landed. He returned to Davis to find him weakly trying to improvise a pad to stop the bleeding. Teddy lifted him and carried him to the house that seemed to be most used. In a little while Davis was quite comfortable and contented. He lit a cigarette and calmly began to read one of the newspapers that littered the place, while Teddy continued his explorations.
The landing field was a small one, no more than a hundred and fifty yards long by seventy-five wide. At one end was an unpretentious but comfortable dwelling, in one of whose rooms Davis was at that moment resting. At the other end a shed evidently formed the hangar for the black flyer. Along the sides of the enclosure were long sheds, some of them empty, some containing supplies of various sorts. Half a dozen cold bombs, complete except for the mysterious treatment of their surface that gave them their strange property, lay on the floor of one of the sheds along the sides. Another shed, long disused, had provided quarters for workmen. Teddy found the single exit that led from the enclosure. It opened on the wide hillside and afforded a view of miles without a sign of human habitation. The remnant of a wheel track that had obviously not been traveled for months led away from the door. Along that primitive road the materials for building the enclosure and the black flyer had evidently been brought. Teddy went back to Davis.
“Gerrod,” said Davis amiably, “I’m a fake. I’d lost quite some blood, you know, and I was pretty weak, but while you were gone I saw a small black bottle on a shelf over there, and I managed to crawl over to it. Wherever we are, prohibition hasn’t struck in, and I took just enough to feel all right again. I believe I can drive back. It wasn’t more than a two-hour drive anyway, was it?”
“Between two and three,” said Teddy, smiling. “We were making terrific speed, though. We’re probably in Newfoundland somewhere.”
“Or Iceland. To tell the truth, I’m quite indifferent. Suppose you help me out to the machine again.”
“I want to see what I can find in the laboratory first,” said Teddy.
The laboratory was of the smallest. Whatever experiments had been necessary to perfect the cold bombs and the black flyer had been made elsewhere. Teddy found a number of notebooks, which he took. He found many chemicals, some in considerable quantities, in receptacles about the laboratory, but no clew to the mysterious process that had enabled Varrhus to threaten the world’s security. He left Varrhus where he lay. Both he and Davis confidently expected to return and investigate thoroughly both the cold bombs and the black flyer. Davis, especially, was anxious to examine that strange machine in detail, but his wound was painful and he wished to have it properly dressed. Besides this, the whole world was waiting anxiously to learn its fate, whether Varrhus’ ambitious plans were to be frustrated or whether it would have to put its neck beneath the heel of the mad dictator.
Teddy lifted Davis in the machine, and after some difficulty they started off. Davis circled above the small clearing until it was tiny beneath them.
“Course is southwest,” he remarked to Teddy. “We’ll notice where we land and then a northeast course will bring us back here again or nearly.”
“Right,” said Teddy abstractedly. His mind leaped ahead to the moment when he would see Evelyn again. He had seen her just before starting for Noman’s Reef and she had seemed pale and anxious. He was not sure, but he hoped he was right in believing that she was more anxious than she would have been had she looked on him merely as a friend or comrade.
The biplane sped over the sea across which it had flown in such desperate haste that morning. Davis was weak, but for straightaway flying modern machines need but little attention. The new inherently stable aeroplanes are so safe that an amateur could pilot one in mid-flight. And Davis had taken a small quantity of stimulant to supplement his strength. At that, however, his endurance was severely taxed before he flattened out and taxied across the landing field on Staten Island. Mechanics rushed out to greet him and help him from the machine.
“Varrhus is dead and the black flyer is smashed,” said Davis cheerfully, and incontinently fainted.
Teddy made a hasty report to the commandant of the forts and rushed to New York. The second cold bomb had exploded that morning and the city was panic-stricken, but as his taxicab sped uptown the extras began to appear announcing the removal of the menace to the world. The frightened crowds changed to happy, cheering ones. If Teddy’s identity had been suspected as he passed swiftly through the streets, he would never have gotten through. He would have been dragged from the motorcar to be cheered and re-cheered. As it was, he made his way quickly to Evelyn’s home.
He sprang up the steps and burst open the door, not waiting for the servant to open it. As he rushed into the hall, Evelyn came into it through an open door. She saw him, and her face was suffused with joy.
“You’re safe!” she cried joyfully, and burst into happy tears.
Teddy took her quite naturally into his arms and held her there a moment. She sobbed quietly on his shoulder for a second, clinging to him, then pushed him away and stared at him while a hot flush overspread her face.
“Oh!” she exclaimed in a rush of shame. “I—I——” She turned and ran away. Teddy caught her.
“What’s the matter?” he demanded. Her cheeks were still crimson.
“I—I kissed you,” she said desperately, “and you—you hadn’t said—”
Teddy laughed happily. “I hadn’t said I loved you? Well, if that’s all that’s bothering you, just listen.” And Teddy said it several times.
Davis was up and about in less than a week. His wound had been of little importance, and with a crutch which he took pride in using with dexterity he was able to move around almost as well as ever. He came over to tea with Evelyn one afternoon. Teddy was there, too, of course. Davis was boyishly showing off how well he could move about. Teddy watched him critically.
“That’s all right, Davis,” he said in a paternal tone, “but you want to get rid of that instrument as soon as you can.”
“What for?” demanded Davis, deftly swinging himself into a chair.
“We’re waiting for you to get well,” explained Teddy, with a smile at Evelyn. “It isn’t considered good form to have a groomsman who’s a cripple.”
“Groomsman? Who? What? You two?” Davis stared from one to the other.
Teddy nodded, and Evelyn turned slightly pink. Davis turned to Teddy.
“They tell me you and I are to be impressively decorated for smashing Varrhus,” he
complained, “and there’ll be moving pictures taken of it and shown everywhere. I want to be a touching picture, all wounded up, you know, when that happens. A girl threw me over about six months ago and she likes the movies. When she sees me beautifully mangled and being kissed by bearded people who pin medals on me she’ll be sorry. Mayn’t I wear a crutch until then?”
Teddy laughed, and Evelyn smiled affectionately at Davis.
“If it’s like that, of course,” said Evelyn, “we’ll wait. But Teddy’s in an awful hurry.”
“I would be, too, in his place,” said Davis promptly. He assumed an expression of extreme reluctance. “Well, I suppose I’ll have to get well.”
Teddy shamelessly squeezed Evelyn’s hand, and she as shamelessly squeezed back.
“There are compensations for having to wait,” said Teddy generously, “provided, of course, it isn’t too long.”
Davis looked at them and his eyes twinkled.
“Well, then, in that case—” He started for the rear of the house.
“Where are you going?”
Davis looked over his “shoulder with a grin.
“You people compensate each other for waiting,” he said amiably. “I’m going to go out in the laboratory and kiss the galvanometer.”
THE MAD PLANET (1920)
In All His lifetime of perhaps twenty years, it had never occurred to Burl to wonder what his grandfather had thought about his surroundings. The grandfather had come to an untimely end in a rather unpleasant fashion which Burl remembered vaguely as a succession of screams coming more and more faintly to his ears while he was being carried away at the top speed of which his mother was capable.
Burl had rarely or never thought of the old gentleman since. Surely he had never wondered in the abstract of what his great grandfather thought, and most surely of all, there never entered his head such a purely hypothetical question as the one of what his many-times-great-grandfather—say of the year 1920—would have thought of the scene in which Burl found himself.
He was treading cautiously over a brownish carpet of fungus growth, creeping furtively toward the stream which he knew by the generic title of “water.” It was the only water he knew. Towering far above his head, three man-heights high, great toadstools hid the grayish sky from his sight. Clinging to the foot-thick stalks of the toadstools were still other fungi, parasites upon the growth that had once been parasites themselves.
Burl himself was a slender young man wearing a single garment twisted about his waist, made from the wing-fabric of a great moth the members of his tribe had slain as it emerged from its cocoon. His skin was fair, without a trace of sunburn. In all his lifetime he had never seen the sun, though the sky was rarely hidden from view save by the giant fungi which, with monster cabbages, were the only growing things he knew. Clouds usually spread overhead, and when they did not, the perpetual haze made the sun but an indefinitely brighter part of the sky, never a sharply edged ball of fire. Fantastic mosses, misshapen fungus growths, colossal molds and yeasts, were the essential parts of the landscape through which he moved.
Once as he had dodged through the forest of huge toadstools, his shoulder touched a cream-colored stalk, giving the whole fungus a tiny shock. Instantly, from the umbrella-like mass of pulp overhead, a fine and impalpable powder fell upon him like snow. It was the season when the toadstools sent out their spores, or seeds, and they had been dropped upon him at the first sign of disturbance.
Furtive as he was, he paused to brush them from his head and hair. They were deadly poison, as he knew well.
Burl would have been a curious sight to a man of the twentieth century. His skin was pink, like that of a child, and there was but little hair upon his body. Even that on top of his head was soft and downy. His chest was larger than his forefathers’ had been, and his ears seemed almost capable of independent movement, to catch threatening sounds from any direction. His eyes, large and blue, possessed pupils which could dilate to extreme size, allowing him to see in almost complete darkness.
He was the result of the thirty thousand years’ attempt of the human race to adapt itself to the change that had begun in the latter half of the twentieth century.
At about that time, civilization had been high, and apparently secure. Mankind had reached a permanent agreement among itself, and all men had equal opportunities to education and leisure. Machinery did most of the labor of the world, and men were only required to supervise its operation. All men were well-fed, all men were well-educated, and it seemed that until the end of time the earth would be the abode of a community of comfortable human beings, pursuing their studies and diversions, their illusions and their truths. Peace, quietness, privacy, freedom were universal.
Then, just when men were congratulating themselves that the Golden Age had come again, it was observed that the planet seemed ill at ease. Fissures opened slowly in the crust, and carbonic acid gas—the carbon dioxide of chemists—began to pour out into the atmosphere. That gas had long been known to be present in the air, and was considered necessary to plant life. Most of the plants of the world took the gas and absorbed its carbon into themselves, releasing the oxygen for use again.
Scientists had calculated that a great deal of the earth’s increased fertility was due to the larger quantities of carbon dioxide released by the activities of man in burning his coal and petroleum. Because of those views, for some years no great alarm was caused by the continuous exhalation from the world’s interior.
Constantly, however, the volume increased. New fissures constantly opened, each one adding a new source of carbon dioxide, and each one pouring into the already laden atmosphere more of the gas—beneficent in small quantities, but as the world learned, deadly in large ones.
The percentage of the heavy, vapor-like gas increased. The whole body of the air became heavier through its admixture. It absorbed more moisture and became more humid. Rainfall increased. Climates grew warmer. Vegetation became more luxuriant—but the air gradually became less exhilarating.
Soon the health of mankind began to be affected. Accustomed through long ages to breathe air rich in oxygen and poor in carbon dioxide, men suffered. Only those who lived on high plateaus or on tall mountaintops remained unaffected. The plants of the earth, though nourished and increasing in size beyond those ever seen before, were unable to dispose of the continually increasing flood of carbon dioxide.
* * * *
By the middle of the twenty-first century it was generally recognized that a new carboniferous period was about to take place, when the earth’s atmosphere would be thick and humid, unbreathable by man, when giant grasses and ferns would form the only vegetation.
When the twenty-first century drew to a close the whole human race began to revert to conditions closely approximating savagery. The low-lands were unbearable. Thick jungles of rank growth covered the ground. The air was depressing and enervating. Men could live there, but it was a sickly, fever-ridden existence. The whole population of the earth desired the high lands and as the low country became more unbearable, men forgot their two centuries of peace.
They fought destructively, each for a bit of land where he might live and breathe. Then men began to die, men who had persisted in remaining near sea-level. They could not live in the poisonous air. The danger zone crept up as the earth-fissures tirelessly poured out their steady streams of foul gas. Soon men could not live within five hundred feet of sea level. The low-lands went uncultivated, and became jungles of a thickness comparable only to those of the first carboniferous period.
Then men died of sheer inanition at a thousand feet. The plateaus and mountaintops were crowded with folk struggling for a foothold and food beyond the invisible menace that crept up, and up—
These things did not take place in one year, or in ten. Not in one generation, but in several. Between the time when the chemists of the International Geophysical Institute announced that the proportion of carbon dioxide in the air had increased from .04 per ce
nt to .1 per cent and the time when at sea-level six per cent of the atmosphere was the deadly gas, more than two hundred years intervened.
Coming gradually, as it did, the poisonous effects of the deadly stuff increased with insidious slowness. First the lassitude, then the heaviness of brain, then the weakness of body. Mankind ceased to grow in numbers. After a long period, the race had fallen to a fraction of its former size. There was room in plenty on the mountaintops—but the danger-level continued to creep up.
There was but one solution. The human body would have to inure itself to the poison, or it was doomed to extinction. It finally developed a toleration for the gas that had wiped out race after race and nation after nation, but at a terrible cost. Lungs increased in size to secure the oxygen on which life depended, but the poison, inhaled at every breath, left the few survivors sickly and filled with a perpetual weariness. Their minds lacked the energy to cope with new problems or transmit the knowledge which in one degree or another, they possessed.
And after thirty thousand years, Burl, a direct descendant of the first president of the Universal Republic, crept through a forest of toadstools and fungus growths. He was ignorant of fire, or metals, of the uses of stone and wood. A single garment covered him. His language was a scanty group of a few hundred labial sounds, conveying no abstractions and few concrete things.
He was ignorant of the uses of wood. There was no wood in the scanty territory furtively inhabited by his tribe. With the increase in heat and humidity the trees had begun to die out. Those of northern climes went first, the oaks, the cedars, the maples. Then the pines—the beeches went early—the cypresses, and finally even the forests of the jungles vanished. Only grasses and reeds, bamboos and their kin, were able to flourish in the new, steaming atmosphere. The thick jungles gave place to dense thickets of grasses and ferns, now become treeferns again.
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 13
