Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  "This world of yours will be my world," he heard Zitlan boast, "and the spoils from it will add to my riches. This one here," he continued, indicating Stanton, "has offered to show me where all of the treasures of the earth may be found. And, as a reward, he will return to Lodore with me and there be elevated to a high position."

  * * * * *

  That, then, was why Stanton was not under guard like the rest of them.

  "Our good friend, Stanton," said Lazarre, "seems to have become something of a Judas."

  "And let his name be forever cursed, like the name of Judas," said Dirk.

  "Silence!" thundered the Lodorian. "I, Zitlan, am speaking." He paused a moment. "When I garner up the treasures of this world in the way of precious stones and metals I also shall gather more priceless loot in the way of women. And then, having taken all that I desire, I will lay waste to this earth so that those who survive will fear the name of Zitlan and will grovel before him like a god when once again he appears to them."

  While Zitlan had been speaking, Dirk had been studying the opponents with whom he soon had to clash.

  The two Lodorians who were standing guard over himself and his companions were close to his left side. Zitlan was directly in front of him, and there were seven of his minions clustered behind him.

  Again Dirk glanced at the great dial of the clock, and he saw that it was seven minutes of four.

  The moment had come to act if action was to prove of any avail.

  "I will--"

  But the words of Zitlan were interrupted by Dirk, who suddenly made a mighty sweep with his left arm and knocked the deadly tubes from the hands of Anteucan and Huazibar. Startled by the assault, they went reeling backward. At almost the same instant Dirk leaped forward and, seizing Zitlan, hurled him among those Lodorians who had been massed behind him. Then he threw himself violently into the tangled mass, his fists driving in and out with deadly strength!

  * * * * *

  Out of the corner of one eye he saw Inga pass the melee and dart swiftly to the corner of the terrace. Instead of passing around to the landing stage, however, she lingered there and watched the combat.

  Dirk, as he fought, became conscious that Steinholt and Fragoni were at his side, battling with him against his enemies. He saw, too, that Stanton had retired to the far end of the terrace and that he was watching the struggle with frightened eyes.

  "We must reach the plane and get away," gasped Dirk. "In another three minutes--"

  He felled a Lodorian who, having lost his tube, was about to grapple with him. He saw Steinholt send another one of their opponents reeling backward.

  "Fragoni!" he exclaimed. "The plane! Get in with Inga! We will come!"

  Even as he spoke his fists were flailing back and forth between each one of his staccato commands.

  He saw beneath him a hand reaching toward a tube, and he kicked the instrument of death. It hurtled over in the direction of Stanton and landed close to his feet. Stanton might have picked it up and been in possession of the means of aiding his old friends or his new allies. But he shrunk away, panic-stricken, from the thing that lay so close to his reach.

  A Lodorian leaped upon Dirk's back in an effort to bring him to the ground, but he stooped swiftly forward and his assailant was catapulted over his head into those who were in front of him.

  * * * * *

  He caught a flash of the contorted face of Zitlan flying through the air, and saw him land with a crash on the terrace, and lie there writhing in pain.

  "Steinholt, Lazarre!" he said convulsively. "We've got to strike once more! And then--run!"

  He plunged into their enemies with every bit of energy that he had left, and saw two of them toppling down. Then, like a flash, he turned to Lazarre, who was trying to fight off three of the Lodorians. Seizing one of them by the waist, Dirk hurled him backward and he disposed of another one in the same manner. His sheer desperation seemed to have given him unbounded strength and power.

  Lazarre sent his third opponent down with a blow under the chin and then, with Dirk at his side, they turned to the assistance of Steinholt.

  With one mad rush they crashed into a group of Lodorians and sent them reeling away like so many nine-pins.

  "Now! To the plane!" exclaimed Dirk, taking to his heels across the terrace. Steinholt and Lazarre followed after him and, turning the corner, they saw that the ship was in place and that Fragoni was anxiously waiting by the door of the cabin. Inga, Dirk knew, already was inside and safe. He stood aside while Steinholt and Lazarre leaped in. During the momentary wait he caught a glimpse of the great clock. It was one minute to four. Dirk jumping into the plane and switched on the helicopter without even waiting to close the cabin door.

  * * * * *

  The ship shot skyward like a rocket. When it reached an altitude of thirty-five hundred feet, he turned it north and raced at top speed in that direction.

  It was miles away from the palace of Fragoni in less than thirty seconds. Dirk then stopped the plane and held it poised in the air with the helicopter.

  The skies were turgid and black and the massed clouds, reflecting the lights of the great city below them, were permeated with an ugly, feverish, red glow.

  From where they were hanging in midair, the occupants of the plane could plainly see the sparkling palace of Fragoni towering high up into the darkness of the night.

  The lights of the magnificent mansion were reflected far out into the Sound where, looming in the golden ripples, lay the sinister monster from the terrible depths of unfathomable space.

  Dirk took a watch from his pocket and, after glancing at it, he hastily replaced it.

  "Two seconds more," he said, "and--"

  * * * * *

  A sharp and dazzling bolt of greenish fire came hurling suddenly out of the west and, with a thunderous concussion, seemed to fasten itself on the crest of Fragoni's palace.

  It trembled and quivered, as if endowed with some uncanny life and power, as it remained there against the darkness, throwing a weird, green tinge over the water and up into the skies.

  Blue waves of light could be seen pulsing and racing along the terrible beam and there, where it had fastened itself, they seemed to disappear in the vast and crumbling structure.

  For four seconds that destructive streak of light, one end of which was lost back in the mists that concealed Manhattan, tore at the proud pile.

  And, as the stone crumbled and the steelite fused under the mighty assault, an ominous roar swept through the night. The air was so violently agitated that the plane, miles away, tossed up and down like a tiny boat on a stormy sea.

  Then suddenly the bolt was gone, but its livid image still burned in the eyes of those who had been watching it.

  Once more, it came hurling out of the west and, like the fang of some great and deadly serpent, darted into the monster that lay in the waters of the Sound.

  Dirk and his companions could see plainly, by the light of the bolt itself, that it had crashed into the well from which the Lodorians first had appeared, and that it was beating and hammering its way into the very vitals of the craft.

  * * * * *

  Dazzling, blinding fire seemed to pour from the aperture through which the bolt had passed. The clamor that arose was deafening.

  Then again the streak of fires was withdrawn, leaving the night intensely black until, in a moment more, it came thundering out of the west again and, with an impact that made the land and the sea and the very heavens tremble, hurled its way into the depths of the doomed leviathan.

  Twice again it fell, a fiery scimitar out of the darkness, and twice again it careened at the vitals of the stricken monster.

  Then, after the assault was over, the ship still floated on the surface of the Sound and its shell, as far as Dirk and the others could judge, still was unscathed.

  "We will soon know our fate," remarked Steinholt calmly. "If that didn't kill those beasts we might as well give up our ghosts."

  "I'
ll drop the plane a little lower and a little nearer to the ship," said Dirk. "I don't believe that any life is surviving in that thing."

  "My beautiful palace is nothing but dust," sighed Fragoni, mournfully. "And all my beautiful treasures, too."

  "And that beautiful Zitlan," Lazarre reminded him, "and his beautiful boy friends, they are all dust too, thank God!"

  "It was a queer fate that Stanton met," suggested Dirk. "He thought that he would save his life by going over to our enemies, and, instead of that, he lost it."

  * * * * *

  "Poor Stanton," said Steinholt. "He was born that way, I suppose, and I, for one, am ready to forgive and forget him. And now," continued the Teuton, "I hope that we didn't do too much damage to that little boat of the Lodorians. If we could get just a little peep at the inside of it we might learn the secret of its contrivance. And then, my friends, we could do a little journeying ourselves."

  "Have you any theory regarding it?" asked Fragoni.

  "Teuxical intimated that it rode the magnetic currents which, of course, flow through all the suns and planets in the universe," replied Steinholt. "We have been working along that line ourselves, of course, and it probably won't be very long anyway before we have the solution of interplanetary travel."

  "Those Lodorians would have solved it for us if it hadn't been for that artificial lightning," said Lazarre. "That's powerful stuff, Steinholt."

  "Yes, with that three-thousand-foot Worldwide Tower to hurl it from," agreed Steinholt, "we can get fair range with it. If the Lodorians hadn't left the well of their ship open, though, the lightning wouldn't have done us much good. I was afraid, too, for a time, that we might have trouble in welding that automatic wireless circuit box to the bottom of the ship."

  Dirk, in the meantime, had brought the plane down to within a half-mile of the leviathan, and he was holding it poised there.

  "It seems to me," he said, after scrutinizing the monster for a couple of minutes, "that it is moving in the water. It is!" he exclaimed. "Steinholt! Look!"

  * * * * *

  Only a comparatively short time had elapsed since the last bolt of lightning had vanished back into the darkness.

  "It is still rocking with the force of the shock that we gave it," asserted Steinholt. "You would be rocking, too, if you had been tickled by a bolt like that one."

  "It is rising, I tell you!" said Dirk. "The front end of it is slowly getting higher in the water!"

  "You're right, Dirk," said Fragoni, excitement straining his voice. "Look! It just dropped back into the water!"

  Then, as they watched, the movements of the leviathan became more and more agitated, until it was churning up the waves around it like a wounded and agonized monster of the sea.

  Suddenly the front end tilted upward and the monster rose clear of the water. It shot straight up into the air at a speed so terrific that they could scarcely follow it.

  "It's gone!" gasped Fragoni. "Those brainless, mindless automatons must have survived!"

  "No," remarked Steinholt thoughtfully. "I don't believe that there is any life left on that thing. No one had closed the well when it rose, and it would mean death to go out into space with the ship in that condition."

  "Then what made it go up?" demanded Lazarre. "Can the damn thing run itself, Steinholt?"

  "I imagine," recalled the Teuton, "that our bolts killed every living thing that was on the craft but that, at the same time, they set the mechanism of the monster into action. Ah," he moaned, "but that is too bad. We could have learned much by an examination of the interior of that liner of the air."

  * * * * *

  A cry from Inga startled them and they saw that she was looking skyward, with terror in her eyes.

  They followed her gaze and there, streaking through the black clouds, they saw a long trail of white fire.

  "It's that thing!" exclaimed Fragoni. "I tell you that those upon it still live and that they are about to wreak vengeance upon us."

  "No," said Steinholt positively. "You are wrong, Fragoni. What is happening may be almost as disastrous, though," he admitted. "That leviathan is in its death agonies; it is a metal monster gone mad, and none can say what will happen before it expires."

  "The place for us," asserted Dirk hurriedly, "is in the Worldwide Tower. There we can keep track of what is transpiring and try to decide what to do."

  The others agreed with him and, seeking the westward level of flight, he sped the plane in the direction of the mammoth pyramid from which the news of the world was broadcast.

  They reached the vast structure in a few minutes, and, after dropping the plane on a landing stage, they went into the operating room.

  Here they learned quickly that the craft of the Lodorians was doing incalculable damage, and that it was throwing the population of the world into an unprecedented panic.

  It was, apparently, following an erratic, uncertain orbit that took it far out into space and then back quite close to the surface of the earth again.

  * * * * *

  It had passed through the very heart of Chicago within a few yards of the ground, and it had cut and burned a swath more than a mile wide through the buildings of that metropolis.

  Other cities in America had felt the devastating effects of its irresistible and molten heat and, within a short time, thousands of people had been slain by it.

  Time and again, from the terrace of the great tower, Dirk and his companions saw the skies above them light up as that terrible, blazing, projectile which, uncontrolled, went hurtling on its way through the night.

  For three hours it careened on its mad course and hysteria reigned throughout the cities of the whole civilized world.

  But then a report came from a rocket-liner that had left Berlin en route for San Francisco.

  "Either a great meteor or that leviathan of the Lodorians just swept down past us in mid-Atlantic and plunged into the sea. Apparently it has exploded, for it has thrown a great column of water for miles up into the air. We are stopping and standing by, although the heat is intense and clouds of steam are rising from the sea."

  As the minutes passed by after the report from the rocket-ship had been received, the disappearance from the sky of the flaming craft from space seemed to confirm the belief that it had been swallowed by the ocean. This was accepted as a certainty by eight o'clock in the morning.

  "Ah," sighed Steinholt, "if only it had crashed on land somewhere. If there only was enough of it left for us to--"

  "Enough of any damn contraption of that kind," swore Lazarre fervently, "is altogether too much. I hope, for one, that its fragments are scattered so far that we never can put them together again."

  * * * * *

  Dirk and Inga leaned against one of the parapets that evening on a gardened terrace of his own great mansion in Manhattan.

  Their little party had gone there after leaving the Worldwide Tower in the morning.

  After resting during the day, Lazarre and Fragoni were somewhere together, discussing the plans for a new palace to take the place of the one that was destroyed so that Zitlan and his minions might die in its ruins.

  Steinholt, elsewhere, was delving into oceanography and submarine engineering, in an attempt to learn whether or not it would be feasible to fish for the remains of the lost ship of Lodore.

  "It seems like a dream, doesn't it, Dirk?" the girl remarked. "It is difficult to believe that we actually have seen and talked with people from some far-away world."

  Together they looked up into the crystalline skies, where mazes of shining stars gave testimony to the countless worlds which were wheeling around them.

  "And just to think, Dirk," Inga continued proudly, "that it was you who saved this world and all of its people from that horrible Zitlan and his horde."

  "I saved you," he told her gravely and tenderly, "and that somehow means more to me than saving all of this world and all of the other worlds which are rolling through the uncharted ways of time and space."

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  Contents

  THE PROFESSIONAL APPROACH

  by Leonard Lockhard

  "Sometimes," said Helix Spardleton, Esquire, "a patent case gets away from you. As the attorney in the case, you never quite see it the same as everybody else. You stand isolated and alone, unable to persuade the Patent Examiners, the Board, the courts, possibly even the inventor, to accept your view of the case. Nothing you do or say matches anyone else's thinking, and you begin to wonder what's the matter with everyone."

  I nodded. This was my favorite time of day. It was early evening in Washington, D.C., and my boss, Helix Spardleton, patent attorney extraordinary, was relaxing. His feet were up on one corner of his desk, his cigar was in the Contemplation Position, and the smoke curled slowly toward the ceiling. His office was a good room in which to relax. It was filled with fine, old well-scratched furniture, and the walls were lined with books, and there was the comfortable picture of Justice Holmes on the wall looking down with rare approval on what he saw. Susan, our secretary, had made the last coffee of the day, and had kicked off her shoes the better to enjoy it. The three of us just sat in the deepening dusk, and talked. We didn't even turn on a light. It was a shame I wasn't paying close attention to Mr. Spardleton.

  I said, "Yes, I know what you mean about other people's not seeing things the same way you do. I've seen something like it at work with some of my friends just before they get married. They think their brides are just about the most beautiful women in the world, when they are really quite homely--wouldn't even hold a candle to our Susan here."

  Mr. Spardleton looked at me and then at Susan, and Susan looked at him and then at me in that sober wide-eyed way she has, and then they looked at each other and smiled. I guess they realized that I had said something pretty funny.

  Mr. Spardleton said, "I understand why you think of the situation in terms of brides, but I always think of it in terms of a proud father who sees nothing but perfection in his newborn son."

  "Yes," I said, "that's a good way to put it, too."