“Probably they’re getting some more stuff, or else they—” Val shook himself. “What’s the use?” he asked bitterly. “We’ve no time to look into it anyway. Let’s get busy.”
Between them they set about hauling the cases back into the cavern, stacked the long sticks of high powered explosive under the spot they had attacked with ray batteries. It took them an hour to make all the necessary fittings and connections, complete with fuses. The wire to the latter they paid out as they backed from the cavern. They took it with them to the elevator cradle and gradually unwound it from its drum as they rose upward to the higher levels once more.
Once they arrived there, they solved the mystery of Sparks and Morton. Both of them lay motionless, face down near the storage camps. They were dead, holes burned in their chests and faces.
“More photo-electrics hidden somewhere,” Townshend muttered. “If we ever get out of this dump alive I’ll be surprised.”
He made a final contact.
“Ready?” he asked, gripping the raised plunger rod.
Cliff caught his arm.
“Wait a minute! I just thought of something. Supposing we blow up the globe? What happens to all that stored potential energy? It won’t travel to Earth—so, just where?”
“Can’t you guess?” Townshend grinned almost ghoulishly.
“You mean,” Val said, “that it will radiate to all parts of Mars and that we’re sunk....”
“Just that. Either us—or Earth. We can take our pick—maybe. Considering we had fifty men twelve hours or so ago, and there are only three of us left now, it doesn’t take imagination to see where we go. Just the same, Cliff, you’re the boss. Do I—?”
“Far as I’m concerned, ram in that plunger,” Cliff replied grimly.
“Shoot!” Val’s eyes watched the rod with a steady glitter.
Townshend rammed the plunger home. All three of them stood motionless and sweating as a titanic concussion blasted from the depths. The floor rocked under their feet; hot air came gushing up the chasm from the elevator shaft. The walk groaned and rocked under expanding forces, and the floor ceased to be.
Cliff felt himself flung into space, went reeling through darkness with the shouts of Townshend and Val ringing in his ears. He landed with a force that knocked all the breath out of his body—but he was unhurt. The lesser gravity had saved him from mortal injury, and chance had thrown him on top of the subsidence instead of underneath it. He lay still in an abyss of dark, quivering, listening.
There was only one sound. Tick—tock. Tick—tock.
Then it had failed. The mechanism was still working! Scrambling to his feet, Cliff pulled his torch from his belt and tested it gingerly. It flickered for a moment, then steadied. He flashed the beam round on an incredible vision of chaos. The explosion had blown the roof out of the cavern, buried several of the smaller balls under a mountain of debris. Equipment, particularly the rubbish magnetizers that had been on the upper levels, had tumbled down here, undamaged thanks to their massively strong casings. Of Townshend and Val there was no sign. They were somewhere amidst all this with the life crushed out of them.
Cliff’s gaze swung to the giant ball. It was smoky black from the explosion, but otherwise untouched and unbudged.
The solemn ticking was like a knife to Cliff’s nerves. He looked round him desperately, trying to imagine how much time there was left. Now the x-ray machines had been smashed in the upheaval, he had no means of seeing where the indicator had reached.
With a thud he sat down, trying frantically to think of a last possible way. His own life didn’t matter now: it was Earth that counted, with its millions of unsuspecting souls. In the gloom and the dark of those moments the mechanism was his only company.
Tick—tock. Tick—tock. And each move bringing nearer the consummation of a posthumous plot to destroy and avenge.
CHAPTER 6: ALONE
WITH TICKING DEATH
Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
As Cliff sat there, each swing of the giant pendulum grew more inexorable, its ticking growing in the utter silence of a dead planet’s interior until it became a thundering vibration that pounded in his ears like the measured tread of Death himself.
Tick-tock! Tick-tock! TICK-TOCK!
Cliff leaped to his feet, his brain reeling.
“No!” he shouted. “By the gods, no!”
Furiously he rushed at the giant ball, beat against it with his fists as though the physical contact would relieve the terrific pressure that was building up inside him; a pressure that bade fair to equal the awful potentiality that was stored up in that sphere of destruction. He backed away with a sob, fingers bleeding, and tore his ray gun from his holster.
He held it on the ball until its charge was exhausted; then he hurled the useless tool at it.
The gun rang against the immutable metal, clattered away into the shadows of the cavern.
Silence fell again, except for the sound of the pendulum, measured, undisturbed, grimly purposeful.
TICK-TOCK! TICK-TOCK!
Cliff stared about, through the gloom.
“Science,” he muttered. “An incredible, diabolical silence. These Martians knew too much.”
He moved about among the tumbled rubbish of the explosion, braving the possibility of still further hidden devices of sudden death stabbing burning horror down upon him from the darkness.
“Thousands, maybe millions of years ago they all died,” he went on through clenched teeth, “but they are still here, in spirit, brooding, gloating, like these infernal balls, over the death that is their power to call down. But they won’t succeed in their damned plan! No, by God, they won’t!”
He stared about, a bit wildly.
“Somewhere among all these damned machines must be one that can be turned against that ball; one that’ll open it.... Funny if their great science didn’t have that power. They hollowed out the balls in the first place, molded others. Maybe....”
Grimly he searched, prying about in the debris that lay upon the floor, examining each ball that he found, pushing and shoving at each machine he encountered.
But nowhere did he find anything that resembled a tool or weapon or force that would answer his purpose. All of it, it seemed, was for one purpose—to guard the great ball against him, rather than to destroy it, and to kill all who entered the cavern.
As he stumbled on in growing terror and realization of his utter helplessness to stop the diabolic swing of that giant pendulum, no sudden death lashed out at him.
He shook a fist into the emptiness.
“At least we did that!” he shouted. “We wrecked your infernal control apparatus that operated these murdering rays and traps!”
Tick-tock. Tick-tock. TICK-TOCK.
Cliff’s brain seemed to pulsate in rhythm with the booming noise of the pendulum. It began to permeate his whole body, become the beat of his very heart superseding its natural rhythm, slowing his very life processes to its own deadly pace.
He stumbled on.
Then, suddenly, he came to a rigid halt, his eyes fixed on a looming figure in the gloom. A human form, it seemed—a living form.
“Who’s that?” Cliff croaked. “Who’s there...?”
Suddenly he rushed forward, incredulous hope flooding into his icy brain.
“Val!” he shouted. “You escaped the landslide....”
His voice froze in his throat.
It wasn’t Val. It was a statue; a metal figure, tall as a man, but not like a man. It wasn’t a human figure at all.
He stared with amazement and a growing sense of eerie horror at it.
“My God!” he gasped. “It’s a statue of a Martian!”
He approached gingerly, and looked at it closely.
The figure was that of a spindly-legged, pipe-stem armed, and barrel-torsoed creature, with a large head and popping eyes. It stood with one large splay hand over what was evidently a three-dimensional representation of the solar system. Cliff
recognized the planets, and even saw an extra planet where he knew the asteroid belt now to be.
From the small ball that indicated Mars, a thin band of gray anilum ran to the tenth planet. And from Mars another ran to Earth.
Cliff’s face suffused suddenly with rage.
“So that’s it!” he shouted. “You murdering devils have done this damned trick once before. You’ve already smashed up one planet, and now, even after you’re dead, you plan to smash up another—out of a long-forgotten revenge!”
For a moment Cliff went berserk, and he charged upon the ugly figure of the Martian and hurled it to the metal floor with almost superhuman effort.
The statue fell with a crash, and to Cliff’s utter amazement, it shattered into bits.
“It’s not anilum!” he muttered in an awed voice. “It smashed like...like—”
He knelt and examined the shattered figure, and from the debris of it picked up a small whitish piece of bone. As he fingered it wonderingly, it crumbled in his hand, becoming a fine, whitish powder that drifted to the floor.
“Bone!” he exclaimed. “This wasn’t a statue, it was the last Martian himself, perfectly preserved here in his own death-trap! And he was standing there gloating, even as death came to him, over the vengeance that he had planned for a race that was not yet born!”
Cliff kicked out suddenly with his foot, sending the fragments of the mummy skittering along the floor in all directions. He was sobbing with pure fury after a moment, and then he turned and stumbled away from the horror that he had discovered.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock. TICK-TOCK. TICK-TOCK!
Interminably, on and on, the horrible ticking reverberated through the cavern, and Cliff fled from it, his hands over his ears.
“I can’t stop it!” he moaned. “Not a thing I can do. Here I am, helpless, while that awful voltage prepares to launch itself at the Earth.”
He sat down suddenly on a jagged piece of rock and sobbed like a baby. The reaction of his fear and terror and horror had finally set in. For some moments his frame shook with emotion, then gradually he quieted, and a grim look came to his face.
He sat for some time staring into the darkness; then he rose once more to his feet and strode determinedly back toward the big ball and the invulnerably protected pendulum.
“There must be a way,” he whispered. “No science can be absolutely foolproof. There’s a way that any slightly clever engineer ought to be able to stop a simple pendulum from swinging. And I’ll find that way! I’ll find it before it’s too late....”
But as he stared at the huge ball, he knew that he was indulging in wishful thinking. Perhaps there was a way, but it would take more than the few hours he had left to find it.
Just how much time did he have? He glanced at his watch and cursed. He had smashed it sometime during his wanderings through the cavern. As its hands stood now, he had only seven hours left when the watch was broken.
He had somewhere between two and five hours left.
“That’s too indefinite,” he muttered apprehensively. “Even if I do find a way, maybe I won’t have time to finish doing it.”
He began a careful search over every inch of the ball, even pulling up debris so he could get on top of it. Once he fell, sliding from the smooth ball, but he w» able to rise once more to his feet, although he could scarcely stand on a twisted ankle. After that he crawled about on his hands and knees, inspecting the base of the ball, and trying to find an inlet cable that be could short-circuit.
There was nothing.
Despair seized him once more and he sat thinking.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock....
He began to fancy that he heard whispering in the darkness about him and started and peered around searching for the author of the voice. But he could see no one.
“There’s a way, Cliff,” came a muted voice, seemingly from far away. “There’s a waaayyy.”
Cliff was on his feet, trembling.
“Townshend!” he exclaimed. “Oh my God, I’m going mad!”
His own voice echoed back to him from the distant readies of the cavern.
Townshend...going mad...Townshend...mad...going...oh my God....”
Cliff forgot his injured ankle and began to run, then cried out sharply as it gave beneath him, and he tumbled to the floor once more.
He sat up with an effort, and groaned.
All about him he seemed to hear whisperings, and he trembled violently. He got out his flash, and lit it, sending its bright beam casting about the cavern into every cranny of it, searching for the author of the voices that tortured him.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
For a time, in his growing madness, Cliff had become aware of the ticking of the pendulum, but now it beat back upon his consciousness like the blows of a giant hammer.
He screamed.
“I’ve got to stop it!” he shouted.
And the echoes shouted back,
“Stop it”—Stop it!—STOP IT!”
They become a thundering clamor of many voices, then died away.
Sobered by the tumult, Cliff became quiet, and his eyes cleared. Deliberately he swung the light about the cave.
“Yes,” he muttered to himself. “You’re right....”
The beam from the flash caught a ball of anilum high overhead.
“Maybe that was the one that killed Richardson,” said Cliff. A look of rage passed over his face. He sent the beam questing on. Down the walls of the cave, to the floor, littered with debris.
Then on to the giant ball, and beside it to—
The magnetizers!
Then slowly an idea began to form in Cliff’s tortured mind. His idle torch beam was focused quite unintentionally upon the massive bulk of the three magnetizers that had fallen from above in the explosion that had left him the sole survivor.
“X-rays passed through that ball...,” he muttered. “Other radiations passed through because Townshend measured them on instruments.... In that case, suppose I—?”
He jumped to his feet and raced over to the nearest magnetizer. Putting his shoulder against it he shoved and heaved with all his power. It stirred a little, finally righted itself. He stood back, panting, thanking Providence for the lesser attraction that had made his Herculean feat possible.
Without pause, perspiration streaming down his face and limbs, he shoved and heaved and levered the second machine into position, and then did the same with the third.
He was working to the last possible throw of the dice. If other radiations could pass through the globe from inside to outside, then the process could be reversed. Magnetism streaming from the giant horseshoes of the machines, trained on the pendulum inside the ball, should stop its swinging!
If that could be done, the machine would be powerless. True, something might happen to the potential energy that would be released, but at least it wouldn’t hit the Earth, Cliff slammed home the generating switches on the first machine and listened intently. Over the drone of the dynamo the pendulum made a noticeable waver. It was obviously disturbed.
There was a definite irregularity. Cursing himself for a fool for not having thought of the thing before, he closed the switches on the second and third machines. The tripled stream of magnetism had an instant effect.
Cliff lived centuries in those seconds.
The pendulum gave a sharp, strident click, there was a long interval, then a solemn—tick.
Tick—Tock. Tick— Silence.
Dead silence expanding into seconds—minutes! It was a silence of infinity itself here in the bowels of Mars. But the pendulum had ceased to swing. The magnetism had counterweighted it. Cliff wanted to scream, to shout, to tell a planet forty million miles away that it was safe. But he had no way.
Thoughts flashed through his anguished mind. Trapped down here, valves shut, comrades gone, radio smashed—
He became tense. Strange noises were in the giant ball. Curious whirring noises. He stared at it in fascination as
it turned a bright, glowing white. It became whiter and he felt his skin blister with radiations.
A million pains stabbed through his eyes, slashed and tortured his body so that he dropped in gasping death at the foot of the defeated monster....
He never saw nor heard the globe as it exploded with colossal violence to release the energy it had so long stored up.
But they saw it on Earth, and felt it—as the Earth reeled from a sudden gravitational change. The report that flashed round the world was ironic and coldly official to say the least of it.
“Severe Martian explosion has caused the planet to suffer almost complete disintegration. Remaining parts in state of collapse. Feared anilum Expedition wiped out. The men engaged in same probably contacted an old volcanic seam. Rescue party leaving immediately.
“Earth Bureau of Official Information.”
THE MENTAL ULTIMATE
I have not long to live, nor has any man since time began looked forward so eagerly toward death—not as a means by which to escape an incurable disease or an irrational boredom of life, but to break free of the bonds of human intelligence! Strange? Perhaps you will not think so if you ever find this story. I know my thoughts will register every detail on the machine I have left far behind me on the world of Earth—somewhere in space, somewhere in time—
My name is Nathan Bryant and I was born in the year 1997. I can remember that my peculiar gift first came to my notice when I was ten years old. I have recollections of puzzled parents, of a busy home in New York, of my extraordinary career at school wherein I mastered the most difficult subject in a quarter of the time allowed. Then, at eighteen, I found myself thrown on my own resources by the death of my parents in an automobile accident.
The world did not frighten me. I knew more about it than most men of wide experience. Business, sociology, religion, science, little known researches—all these things spread out before me like a vast map of information. I could have followed any of them as a career and made a sublime success of it.
Some people called my mind “photographic.” Others called me a “mental phenomenon” and urged that I take up a stage career. What they said did not interest me. I knew I was the master of whatever I turned my mind to. But at that age I did not fully appreciate how powerful was the gift I possess.
Rule of the Brains Page 11
