“What first, now?” queried the man, when they were satisfied. “I’ve been thinking of about fifteen hundred separate things to tackle, each one more important than all the others put together. How are we going to begin again? That’s the question!”
She drew from her warm bosom the golden cylinder and chain.
“Before we make any move at all,” she answered, “I think we ought to see what’s in this record—if it is a record. Don’t you?”
“By Jove, you’re right! Shall I open it for you?”
But already the massively chased top lay unscrewed in her hand. Within the cylinder a parchment roll appeared.
A moment later she had spread it on her knee, taking care not to tear the ancient, crackling skin whereon faint lines of writing showed.
Stern bent forward, eager and breathless. The girl, too, gazed with anxious eyes at the dim script, all but illegible with age and wear.
“You’re right, Allan,” said she. “This is some kind of record, some direction as to the final history of the few survivors after the great catastrophe. Oh! Look, Allan—it’s fading already in the sunlight. Quick, read it quick, or we shall lose it all!”
Only too true. The dim lines, perhaps fifteen hundred years old, certainly never exposed to sunlight since more than a thousand, were already growing weaker; and the parchment, too, seemed crumbling into dust. Its edges, where her fingers held it, already were breaking away into a fine, impalpable powder.
“Quick, Allan! Quick!”
Together they read the clumsy scrawl, their eyes leaping along the lines, striving to grasp the meaning ere it were too late.
TO ANY WHO AT ANY TIME MAY EVER REVISIT THE UPPER WORLD: Be it known that two records have been left covering our history from the time of the cataclysm in 1920 till we entered the Chasm in 1957. One is in the Great Cave in Medicine Bow Range, Colorado, near the ruins of Dexter. Exact location, 106 degrees, 11 minutes, 3 seconds west; 40 degrees, 22 minutes, 6 seconds north. Record is in left, or northern branch of Cave, 327 yards from mouth, on south wall, 4 feet 6 inches from floor. The other—
“Where? Where?” cried Beatrice. A portion of the record was gone; it had crumbled even as they read.
“Easy does it, girl! Don’t get excited,” Allan cautioned, but his face was pale and his hand trembled as he sought to steady and protect the parchment from the breeze.
Together they pieced out a few of the remaining words, for now the writing was but a pale blur, momently becoming dimmer and more dim.
... Cathedral on ... known as Storm King ... River ... crypt under ... this was agreed on ... never returned but may possibly ... signed by us on this 12th day ...
They could read no more, for now the record was but a disintegrating shell in the girl’s hands, and even as they looked the last of the writing vanished, as breath evaporates from a window-pane.
Allan whirled toward the fire, snatched out a still-glowing stick, and in the sand traced figures.
“Quick! What was that? 106-11-3, West—Forty—”
“Forty, 22, north,” she prompted.
“How many seconds? You remember?”
“No.” Slowly she shook her head. “Five, wasn’t it?”
Eagerly he peered at the record, but every trace was gone.
“Well, no matter about the seconds,” he judged. “I’ll enter these data on our diary, in the Pauillac, anyhow. We can remember the ruins of Dexter and Medicine Bow Range; also the cathedral on Storm King. Put the fragments of the parchment back into the case, Beta. Maybe we can yet preserve them, and by some chemical means or other bring out the writing again. As it is, I guess we’ve got the most important facts; enough to go on, at any rate.”
She replaced the crumbled record in the golden cylinder and once more screwed on the cap. Allan got up and walked to the aeroplane, where, among their scanty effects, was the brief diary and set of notes he had been keeping since the great battle with the Lanskaarn.
Writing on his fish-skin tablets, with his bone stylus, dipped in his little stone jar of cuttle-fish ink, he carefully recorded the geographical location. Then he went back to Beatrice, who still sat in the midmorning sunlight by the fire, very beautiful and dear to him.
“If we can find those records, we’ll have made a long step toward solving the problem of how to handle the Folk. They aren’t exactly what one would call an amenable tribe, at best. We need their history, even the little of it that the records must contain, for surely there must be names and events in them of great value in our work of trying to bring these people to the surface and recivilize them.”
“Well, what’s to hinder our getting the records now?” she asked seriously, with wonder in her gray and level gaze.
“That, for one thing!”
He gestured at the Abyss.
“It’s a good six or seven hundred miles wide, and we already know how deep it is. I don’t think we want to risk trying to cross it again and running out of fuel en route! Volplaning down to the village is quite a different proposition from a straight-away flight across!”
She sat pensive a moment.
“There must be some way around,” said she at last. “Otherwise a party of survivors couldn’t have set out for Storm King on the Hudson to deposit a set of records there!”
“That’s so, too. But—remember? ‘Never returned.’ I figure it this way: A party of the survivors probably started for New York, exploring. The big, concrete cathedral on Storm King—it was new in 1916, you remember—was known the country over as the most massive piece of architecture this side of the pyramids. They must have planned to leave one set of records there, in case the east, too, was devastated. Well—”
“Do you suppose they succeeded?”
“No telling. At any rate, there’s a chance of it. And as for this Rocky Mountain cache, that’s manifestly out of the question, for now.”
“So then?” she queried eagerly.
“So then our job is to strike for Storm King. Incidentally we can revisit Hope Villa, our bungalow on the banks of the Hudson. It’s been a year since we left it, almost—ten months, at any rate. Gad! What marvels and miracles have happened since then, Beta—what perils, what escapes! Wouldn’t you like to see our little nest again? We could rest up and plan and strengthen ourselves for the greater tasks ahead. And then—”
He paused, a change upon his face, his eyes lighting with a sudden glow. She saw and understood; and her breast rose with sudden keen emotion.
“You mean,” whispered she, “in our own home?”
“Where better?”
She paled as, kneeling beside her, he flung a powerful arm about her, and pulled her to him, breathing heavily.
“Don’t! Don’t!” she forbade. “No, no, Allan—there’s so much work to do—you mustn’t!”
To her a vision rose of dream-children—strong sons and daughters yet unborn. Their eyes seemed smiling, their fingers closing on hers. Cloudlike, yet very real, they beckoned her, and in her stirred the call of motherhood—of life to be. Her heart-strings echoed to that harmony; it seemed already as though a tiny head, downy—soft, was nestling in her bosom, while eager lips quested, quested.
“No, Allan! No!”
Almost fiercely she flung him back and stood up.
“Come!” said she. “Let us start at once. Nothing remains for us to do here. Let us go—home!”
An hour later the Pauillac spiralled far aloft, above the edge of the Abyss, then swept into its eastward tangent, and in swift, droning flight rushed toward the longed-for place of dreams, of rest, of love.
Before them stretched infinities of labor and tremendous struggle; but for a little space they knew they now were free for this, the consummation of their dreams, of all their hopes, their happiness, their joy.
CHAPTER III
CATASTROPHE!
Toward five o’clock next afternoon, from the swooping back of the air-dragon they sighted a far blue ribbon winding among wooded heights, and knew H
udson once more lay before them.
The girl’s heart leaped for joy at thought of once again seeing Hope Villa, the beach, the garden, the sun-dial—all the thousand and one little happy and pleasant things that, made by them in the heart of the vast wilderness, had brought them such intimate and unforgetable delight.
“There it is, Allan!” cried she, pointing. “There’s the river again. We’ll soon be home now—home again!”
He smiled and nodded, watchful at the wheel, and swung the biplane a little to southward, in the direction where he judged the bungalow must lie.
Weary they both were, yet full of life and strength. The trip from the chasm had been tedious, merely a long succession of hours in the rushing air, with unbroken forest, hills, lakes, rivers, and ever more forest steadily rolling away to westward like a vast carpet a thousand feet below.
No sign of man, no life, no gap in nature’s all-embracing sway. Even the occasional heap of ruins marking the grave of some forgotten city served only to intensify the old half-terror they had felt, when flying for the first time, at thought of the tremendous desolation of the world.
The shining plain of Lake Erie had served the first day as a landmark to keep them true to their course.
That night they had stopped at the ruins of Buffalo, where they had camped in the open, and where next morning Stern had fully replenished his fuel-tanks with the usual supplies of alcohol from the débris of two or three large drug-stores.
From Buffalo eastward, over almost the same course along which the hurricane of ten months ago had driven them, battling at random with the gale, they steered by the compass. Toward midmorning they saw a thin line of smoke arising in the far north, answered by still another on the hills beyond, but to these signs they gave no heed.
Already they had seen and scorned them during their first stay at the bungalow. They felt that nothing more was to be seriously feared from such survivors of the Horde as had escaped the great Battle of the Tower—a year and a half previously.
“Those chaps won’t bother us again; I’m sure of that!” said Allan, nodding toward the smoke-columns that rose, lazily blue, on the horizon. “The scare we threw into them in Madison Forest will last them one while!”
Still in this confident, defiant mood it was that they sighted the river again and watched it rapidly broaden as the Pauillac, in a long series of flat arcs, spurned the June air and whirled them onward toward their goal.
Nearer the Hudson drew, and nearer still; and now its untroubled azure, calm save for a few cat’s-paws of breeze that idled on the surface, stretched almost beneath them in their rapid flight.
“We’re still a little too far north, I see,” the man judged, and swept the biplane round to southward.
The ruins of Newburgh lay presently upon their right. Soon after the crumbled walls of West Point’s pride slid past in silence, save for the chatter of the engines, the whirling roar of the propeller-blades’ vast energy.
No boat now vexed the flood. Upon its bosom neither steam nor sail now plowed a furrow. Along the banks no speeding train flung its smoke-pennant to the wind. Primeval silence, universal calm, wrapped all things.
Beatrice shuddered slightly. Now that they were nearing “home” the desolation seemed more appalling.
“Oh, Allan, is it possible all this will ever be peopled again—alive?”
“Certain to be! Once we get those records and begin transplanting the Merucaans, the rest will be only a matter of time!”
She made no answer, but in her eyes shone pride that he could know such visions, have such faith.
Already they recognized the ruins of Nyack, and beyond them the point in the river behind which, they knew, lay Hope Villa, nestling in its gardens, its little sphere of cultivation hewn from the very heart of the dense wilderness.
Allan slackened speed, crossed to the eastern bank, and jockeyed for a safe landing.
The point slipped backward and away. There, right ahead, they caught a glimpse of the long white beach where they had fished and bathed and built their boat-house, and whence in their little yawl they had ten months before started on their trip of exploration—a trip destined to end so strangely in the Abyss.
“Home! Home!” cried Beta, the quick tears starting to her lids. “Oh, home again!”
Already the great plane was swooping downward toward the beach, hardly a mile away, when a harsh shout escaped the man.
“Look! Canoes! My God—what—”
As the drive of the Pauillac opened up the concave of the sand and brought its whole length to view, Stern and the girl suddenly became aware of trouble.
There, strung along the beach irregularly, they all at once made out ten, twenty, thirty boats. Still afar, they could see these were the same rough bancas such as they had seen after the battle—bancas in one of which they two had escaped up-river!
“Boats! The Horde again!”
Even as he shouted a tiny, black, misshapen little figure ran crouching out onto the sand. Another followed and a third, and now a dozen showed there, very distinct and hideous, upon the white crescent.
Stern’s heart went sick within him A terrible rage welled up—a hate such as he had never believed possible to feel.
Wild imprecations struggled to be voiced. He snapped his lips together in a thin line, his eyes narrowed, and his face went gray.
“The infernal little beasts!” he gritted. “Tried to trap us in the tower—cut our boat loose afterward—and now invading us! Don’t know when they’re licked, the swine!”
Beatrice had lost her color now. Milk-white her face was; her eyes grew wide with terror; she strove to speak, but could not.
Her hand went out in a wild, repelling gesture, as though by the very power of her love for home she could protect it now against the incursion of these foul, distorted, inhuman little monsters.
Stern acted quickly. He had been about to cut off power and coast for the beach; but now he veered suddenly to eastward again, rotated the rising-plane, and brought the Pauillac up at a sharp tilt. Banking, he advanced the spark a notch; the engine shrilled a half-tone higher, and with increased speed the aero lifted them bravely in a long and rising swoop.
He snatched his automatic from its holster on his hip and as the plane swept past the beach, down-stream, let fly a spatter of steel jacketed souvenirs at the fast-thickening pack on the sand.
Far up to the girl and him, half heard through the clatter of the motors, they sensed a thin, defiant, barbarous yell—a yapping chorus, bestial and horrible.
Again Stern fired.
He could see quick spurts of water jet up along the edge of the sand, and one of the creatures fell, but this was only a chance shot.
At that distance, firing from a swift-skimming plane, he knew he could do no execution, and with a curse slid the pistol back again into its place.
“Oh, for a dirigible and a few Pulverite bombs, same as we had in the tower!” he wished. “I’d clean the blighters out mighty quick!”
But now Beatrice was pointing, with a cry of dismay, down, away at the bungalow itself, which had for a moment become visible at the far end of the clearing as the Pauillac scudded past.
Even as Stern thought: “Odd, but they’re not afraid of us—a flying-machine means nothing to them, does not terrify them as it would human savages. They’re too debased even to feel fear!”—even as this thought crossed his brain he, too, saw the terrible thing that the girl had cried out at sight of.
“My God!” he shouted. “This—this is too much!”
All about the bungalow, their home, the scene of such happy hours, so many dreams and hopes, such heart-enthralling labors, hundreds of the Horde were swarming.
Like vicious parasites attacking prey, they overran the garden, the grounds, even the house itself.
As in a flash, Stern knew all his work of months must be undone—the fruit-trees he had rescued from the forest be cut down or broken, the bulbs and roots in the garden uptorn, even
the hedges and fences trampled flat.
Worse still, the bungalow was being destroyed! Rather, its contents, since the concrete walls defied the venomous troop.
They knew, at any rate, the use of fire, and not so swiftly skimmed the Pauillac as to prevent both Stern and Beatrice seeing a thin but ominous thread of smoke out-curling on the June air from one of the living-room windows.
With an imprecation of unutterable hate and rage, yet impotent to stay the ravishment of Hope Villa, Stern brought the machine round in a long spiral.
For a moment the wild, suicidal idea possessed him to land on the beach, after all, and charge the little slate-blue devils who had evidently piled all the furnishings together in the bungalow and were now burning them.
He longed for slaughter now; he lusted blood—the blood of the Anthropoid pack which from the beginning had hung upon his flank and been as a thorn unto his flesh.
He seemed to feel the joy of rushing them, an automatic in each hand spitting death, just as he had mown down the Lanskaarn in the Battle of the Wall, down below in the Abyss. Even though he knew the inevitable ends poisoned spear-thrust, a wound with one of those terribly envenomed arrows—he felt no fear.
Revenge! If he could only feel its sweetness, death had no terrors.
Common sense instantly sobered him and dispelled these vain ideas. The bungalow, after all, was not vital to his future or the girl’s. Barring the set of encyclopedias on metal plates, everything else could be replaced with sufficient labor. Only a madman would risk a fight with such a Horde in company with a woman.
Not now were he and Beatrice entrenched in a strong tower, with terrible explosives. Now they were in the open, armed only with revolvers. For the present there was no redress.
“Beta,” cried he, “we’re up against it this time for fair—and we can’t hit back!”
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