The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 02

by Anthology

  * * * * *

  She answered now in a voice whose very quietness belied her brave words.

  "Any time--any place!" she told Walt. "And--and the farther we go the better!"

  "Quite right," Harkness agreed. "I am satisfied that there is something there we can never combat. We don't know what it is, and God help anyone who ever finds out. How about it, Chet? And you, too, Kreiss? Do you agree that there is no use in staying here and trying to fight it out?"

  "I do not agree," the scientist objected. "My work, my experiments I have collected! Would you have me abandon them? Must we run in fear because an anthropoid ape has come into this clearing? And, if there are more, we have our barricade; our weapons are crude, but effective, and I might add to them with some ideas of my own should occasion demand."

  "Listen!" Chet commanded. "That anthropoid ape is nothing to be afraid of: you're right on that. But he came from the pyramid, Kreiss, and there's something there that knows every foot of ground that messenger went over. There's something in that pyramid that can send more ape-men, that can come itself, for all that I know, and that can knock us cold in half a second.

  "It's found us. One arrow went straight, thank God! It has given us a stay of execution. But is that damnable thing in the pyramid going to let it go at that? You know the answer as well as I do. It has probably sent twenty more of those messengers who are on their way this minute, I am telling you; and we've got two days at the most before they get here."

  Kreiss still protested. "But my work--"

  "Is ended!" snapped Chet. "Stay if you want to; you'll never finish your work. The rest of us will leave in the morning. Towahg will be back here to-night.

  "Nothing much to get together," he told Harkness. "I'll see to it; you stay with Diane."

  * * * * *

  Their bows, a store of extra bone-tipped arrows, and food: as Chet had said there was not much to prepare for their flight. They had spent many hours in arrow making: there were bundles of them stored away in readiness for an attack, and Chet looked at them with regret, but knew they must travel fast and light.

  Out of his rocky "laboratory" Kreiss came at dusk to tramp slowly and moodily down to the shelters.

  "I shall leave when you do," he told Chet. "Perhaps we can find some place, some corner of this world, where we can live in peace. But I had hoped, I had thought--"

  "Yes?" Chet queried. "What did you have on your mind?"

  "The gas," the scientist replied. "I was working with a rubber latex. I had thought to make a mask, improvise an air-pump and send one of us through the green gas to reach the ship. And there was more that I hoped to do; but, as you say, my work is ended."

  "Bully for you," said Chet admiringly; "the old bean keeps right on working all the time. Well, you may do it yet; we may come back to the ship. Who can tell? But just now I am more anxious about Towahg. Right now, when we need him the most, he fails to show up."

  The ape-man was seldom seen by day, but always he came back before nightfall; his chunky figure was a familiar sight as he slipped soundlessly from the jungle where the shadows of approaching night lay first. But now Chet watched in vain at the arched entrance to the leafy tangle. He even ventured, after dark, within the jungle's edge and called and hallooed without response. And this night the hours dragged by where Chet lay awake, watching and listening for some sign of their guide.

  * * * * *

  Then dawn, and golden arrows of light that drove the morning mist in lazy whirls above the surface of the lake. But no silent shadow-form came from among the distant trees. And without Towahg--!

  "Might as well stay here and take it standing," was Chet's verdict, and Harkness nodded assent.

  "Not a chance," he agreed. "We might make our way through the forest after a fashion, but we would be slow doing it, and the brutes would be after us, of course."

  They made all possible preparations to withstand a siege. Chet, after a careful, listening reconnaissance, went into the jungle with bow and arrows, and he came back with three of the beasts he had called Moon-pigs. Other trips, with Kreiss as an assistant, resulted in a great heap of fruit that they placed carefully in the shade of a hut. Water they had in unlimited supply.

  How they would stand off an enemy who fought only with the terrible gleam of their eyes no one of them could have said. But they all worked, and Diane helped, too, to place extra bows at points where they might be needed and to put handfuls of arrows at the firing platforms spaced at regular intervals along the barricade.

  Chet smiled sardonically as he saw Herr Kreiss laboring mightily and alone to rig a catapult that could be turned to face in all directions. But he helped to bring in a supply of round stones from a distance down the shore, though the picture of this medieval weapon being effective against those broadsides of mental force was not one his mind could easily paint.

  * * * * *

  And then Towahg came! Not the silent, swiftly-leaping figure that moved on muscles like coiled steel springs! This was another Towahg who dragged a bruised body through the grass until Harkness and Chet reached him and helped him to the barricade.

  "Gr-r-ranga!" he growled. It was the sound he had made before when he had seen or had tried to tell them of the ape-men. "Gr-r-ranga! Gr-r-ranga!" He pointed about him as if to say: "There!--and there!--and there!"

  "Yes, yes!" Chet assured him. "We understand: you met up with a pack of them."

  Whereupon Towahg, with his monkey mimicry, gave a convincing demonstration of himself being seized and beaten: and the tooth-marks on nearly every inch of his body gave proof of the rough reception he had encountered.

  Then he showed himself escaping, running, swinging through trees, till he came to the camp. And now he raised his bruised body to a standing position and motioned them toward the forest.

  "Gr-r-ranga come!" he warned them, and repeated it over again, while his face wrinkled in fear that told plainly of the danger he had seen.

  Chet glanced at Harkness and knew his own gaze was as disconsolate as his companion's. "He's met up with them," he admitted, "though, for the life of me, I can't see how he ever got away if it was a crowd of messenger-apes who could petrify him with one look. There's something strange about that, but whatever it is, here's our guide in no shape to travel."

  * * * * *

  Towahg was growling and grimacing in an earnest effort to communicate some idea. His few words and the full power of his mimicry had been used to urge them on, to warn them that they must flee for their lives, but it seemed he had something else to tell. Suddenly he leaped into his grotesque dance, though his wounds must have made it an agonizing effort, but his joy in the thought that had come to him was too great to take quietly. He knew how to tell Chet!

  And with a protruded stomach he marched before them as a well-fed German might walk, and he stroked at an imaginary beard in reproduction of an act that was habitual with one they had known.

  "Schwartzmann?" asked Chet. He had used the name before when he and Towahg had led their enemy's "army" off the trail. "You have seen Schwartzmann?"

  And Towahg leaped and capered with delight. "Szhwarr!" he growled in an effort to pronounce the name; "Szhwarr come!"

  Chet made a wild leap for their bows and supplies.

  "Come on!" he shouted. "That's the answer. It isn't the ones from the pyramid; they're coming later. It's Schwartzmann and his bunch of apes. They've followed the messenger, they're on their way, and, in spite of his being all chewed up, Towahg can travel faster than that crowd. He'll guide us out of this yet!"

  * * * * *

  He was thrusting bundles of supplies--food, arrows, bows--into the eager hands of the others, while Towahg alternately licked his wounds and danced about with excitement. Diane's voice broke in upon the tense haste and bustle of the moment. She spoke quietly--her tone was flat, almost emotionless--yet there was a quality that made Chet drop what he was holding and reach for a bow.

  "We can't go," Diane was saying; "we c
an't go. Poor Towahg! He couldn't tell us how close they were on his trail; he hurried us all he could."

  Chet saw her hand raised; he followed with his eyes the finger that pointed toward the jungle, and he saw as had Diane the flick of moving leaves where black faces showed silently for an instant and then vanished. They were up in the trees--lower--down on the ground. There were scores upon scores of the ape-men spying upon them, watching every move that they made.

  And suddenly, across the open ground, where the high-flung branches made the great arch that they called the entrance, a ragged figure appeared. The figure of a man whose torn clothes fluttered in the breeze, whose face was black with an unkempt beard, whose thick hand waved to motion other scarecrow figures to him, and who laughed, loudly and derisively that the three quiet men and the girl on the knoll might hear.

  "Guten tag, meine Herrschaften," Schwartzmann called loudly, "meine sehr geehrten Herrschaften! You must not be so exclusive. Many guten friends haff I here with me. I haff been looking forward to this time when they would meet you."

  CHAPTER XIX

  "One for Each of Us"

  For men who had come from a world where wars and warfare were things of the past, Chet, and Harkness had done effective work in preparing a defense. The knoll made a height of land that any military man would have chosen to defend, and the top of the gentle slope was protected by the barricade.

  On each side of the inverted U that ended at the water's edge an opening had been left, where they passed in and out. But even here the wall had been doubled and carried past itself: no place was left for an easy assault, and on the open end the water was their protection.

  Within the barricade, at about the center, the top of the knoll showed an outcrop of rocks that rose high enough to be exposed to fire from outside, but their little shelters were on nearly level ground at the base of the rocks. The whole enclosure was some thirty feet in width and perhaps a hundred feet long. Plenty to protect in case of an attack, as Chet had remarked, but it could not have been much smaller and have done its work effectively.

  There was no one of the four white persons but gave unspoken thanks for the barricade of sharp stakes, and even Towahg, although his fangs were bared in an animal snarl at the sound of Schwartzmann's voice, must have been glad to keep his bruised body out of sight behind the sheltering wall.

  No one of them replied to Schwartzmann's taunt. Harkness wrinkled his eyes to stare through the bright sunlight and see the pistol in the man's belt.

  "He still has it," he said, half to himself: "he's got the gun. I was rather hoping something might have happened to it. Just one gun; but he has plenty of ammunition--"

  "And we haven't--" It was Chet, now, who seemed thinking aloud. "But, I wonder--can we bluff him a bit?"

  * * * * *

  He dropped behind the barricade and crawled into one of the huts to come out with three extra pistols clutched in his hand. Empty, of course, but they had brought them with them with some faint hope that some day the ship might be reached and ammunition secured. Chet handed one to Diane and another to Kreiss; the third weapon he stuck in his own belt where it would show plainly. Harkness was already armed.

  "Now let's get up where they can see us," was Chet's answer to their wondering looks; "let's show off our armament. How can he know how much ammunition we have left? For that matter, he may be getting a little short of shells himself, and he won't know that his solitary pistol is the thing we are most afraid of."

  "Good," Harkness agreed; "we will play a little good old-fashioned poker with the gentleman, but don't overdo it, just casually let him see the guns."

  Schwartzmann, far across the open ground, must have seen them as plainly as they saw him as they climbed the little hummock of rocks. He could not fail to note the pistols in the men's belts, nor overlook the significance of the weapon that gleamed brightly in the pilot's hand. Chet saw him return his pistol to his belt as he backed slowly into the shadows, and he knew that Schwartzmann had no wish for an exchange of shots, even at long range, with so many guns against him. But from their slight elevation he saw something else.

  The grass was trampled flat all about their enclosure, but, beyond, it stood half the height of a man; it was a sea of rippling green where the light wind brushed across it. And throughout that sea that intervened between them and the jungle Chet saw other ripples forming, little quiverings of shaken stalks that came here and there until the whole expanse seemed trembling.

  "Down--and get ready for trouble!" he ordered crisply, then added as he sprang for his own long bow: "Their commanding officer doesn't want to mix it with us--not just yet--but the rest are coming, and there's a million of them, it looks like."

  * * * * *

  The apes broke cover with all the suddenness of a covey of quail, but they charged like wild, hungry beasts that have sighted prey. Only the long spears in their bunchy fists and the shorter throwing spears that came through the air marked them as primitive men.

  The standing grass at the end of the clearing beyond their barricade was abruptly black with naked bodies. To Chet, that charging horde was a formless dark wave that came rolling up toward them; then, as suddenly as the black wave had appeared, it ceased to be a mere mass and Chet saw individual units. A black-haired one was springing in advance. The man behind the barricade heard the twang of his bow as if it were a sound from afar off; but he saw the arrow projecting from a barrel-shaped chest, and the ape-man tottering over.

  He loosed his arrows as rapidly as he could draw the bow; he knew that others were shooting too. Where naked feet were stumbling over prostrate bodies the black wave broke in confusion and came on unsteadily into the hail of winged barbs.

  But the wave rushed on and up to the barricade in a scattering of shrieking, leaping ape-man, and Chet spared a second for unspoken thanks for the height of the barrier. A full six feet it stood from the ground, and the ends that had been burned, then pointed with a crude ax, were aimed outward. Inside the enclosure Chet had wanted to throw up a bench or mound of earth on which they could stand to fire above the high barrier, but lack of tools had prevented them. Instead they had laid cribbing of short poles at intervals and on each of these had built a platform of branches.

  * * * * *

  Close to the barricade of poles and vines, these platforms enabled the defenders to shield themselves from thrown spears and rise as they wished to fire out and down into the mob. But with the rush of a score or more of the man-beasts to the barricade itself, Chet suddenly knew that they were vulnerable to an attack with long lances.

  A leaping body was hanging on the barrier; huge hands tore and clawed at the inner side for a grip. From the platform where Diane stood came an arrow at the same instant Chet shot. One matched the other for accuracy, and the clawing figure fell limply from sight. But there were others--and a lance tipped with the jagged fin, needle-sharp, of a poison fish was thrusting wickedly toward Diane.

  This time Harkness' arrow did the work, but Chet ordered a retreat. Above the pandemonium of snarling growls, he shouted.

  "Back to the rocks, Walt," he ordered; "you and Diane! Quick! The rest of us will hold 'em till you are ready. Then you keep 'em off until we come!" And the two obeyed the cool, crisp voice that was interrupted only when its owner, with the others, had to duck quickly to avoid a barrage of spears.

  * * * * *

  Kreiss was wounded. Chet found him dropped beside his firing platform working methodically to extract the broad blade of a spear from his shoulder where it was embedded.

  Chet's first thought was of poison, and he shouted for Towahg. But the savage only looked once at the spear, seized it and with one quick jerk drew the weapon from the wound; then, when the blood flowed freely, he motioned to Chet that the man was all right.

  The savage wadded a handful of leaves into a ball and pressed it against the wound, and Chet improvised a first-aid bandage from Kreiss' ragged blouse before they put him from sight in one of the shelters a
nd ran to rejoin Harkness and Diane on the rocks.

  But the first wave was spent. There were no more snarling, white-toothed faces above the barricade, and in the open space beyond were shambling forms that hid themselves in the long grass while others dragged themselves to the same concealment or lay limply inert on the open, sunlit ground.

  And within the enclosure one solitary ape-man forgot his bruised body while he stamped up and down or whirled absurdly in a dance that expressed his joy in victory.

  "Better come down," said Chet. "Schwartzmann might take a shot at you, although I think we are out of pistol range. We're lucky that isn't a service gun he's got, but come down anyway, and we'll see what's next. This time we've had the breaks, but there's more coming. Schwartzmann isn't through."

  But Schwartzmann was through for the day; Chet was mistaken in expecting a second assault so soon. He posted Towahg as sentry, and, with Diane and Harkness, threw himself before the door-flap of the shelter where Kreiss had been hidden, and was now sitting up, his arm in a sling.

  "Either you're a 'mighty hard man to kill,'" he told Kreiss, "or else Towahg is a powerful medicine man."

  "I am still in the fight," the scientist assured him. "I can't do any more work with bow and arrow, but I can keep the rest of you supplied."

  "We'll need you," Chet assured him grimly.

  * * * * *

  They ate in silence as the afternoon drew on toward evening.

  Back by their little fire, with Towahg on guard, Chet shot an appreciative glance at a white disk in the southern sky. "Still getting the breaks," he exulted. "The moon is up; it will give us some light after sunset, and later the Earth will rise and light things up around here in good shape."

  That white disk turned golden as the sun vanished where mountainous clouds loomed blackly far across the jungle-clad hills. Then the quick night blanketed everything, and the golden moon made black the fringe of forest trees while it sent long lines of light through their waving, sinuous branches, to cast moving shadows that seemed strangely alive on the open ground. Muffled by the jungle-sea that absorbed the sound waves, faint grumblings came to them, and at a quiver of light in the blackness where the clouds had been, Harkness turned to Chet.