Then and Now : A Collection of SF

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  When his task was finished he sat down in the reddish dust of the floor and leaned back against the rough wall. A little light seeped in to him from the mine’s entrance.

  “They ought to get some sense back into their domes here,” he reflected. “Not much of the waves can get into this hole. But I’ll have to watch them or they may try to pull something funny yet.”

  In the world without, the sun had risen. High overhead the purple meteor hurtled. It was dimmer now, still the potent force of evil that emanated from it was undiminished. Just beyond the hill of the mine a silvery something streaked upward, leaving a train of incandescence behind it. It dwindled rapidly, became a tiny speck in the blue sky, and vanished.

  CHAPTER IV

  The Mystery of the Mine

  McLENNAN waited until the even breathing of his charges told him that their unconsciousness had changed to normal slumber, then, wearied by days of constant experimentation and the strenuous events of the past few hours, and feeling perfectly secure in the buried mine, he too fell asleep.

  It was some hours before McLennan awoke. He stared about, at first a bit puzzled by his unaccustomed surroundings. He saw the rusty brown walls, dim-lit, and the forms of his companions, still sleeping soundly. Everything was as it had been before, yet he had a vague, poorly defined idea that some unusual, perhaps sinister, occurrence had aroused him. What was it? He struggled to remember his impressions of that hazy moment of awakening. A flash of light? A moving shape? He could not be sure. Perhaps it would be best to investigate.

  He hurried to the entrance of the mine. There was nothing in sight to confirm any suspicions he may have had—only the river with the late afternoon sun glinting goldenly on its ripples, and the shadows the dwarfed oak trees cast on the hillside. Satisfied that he had merely dreamed a vagrant dream brought on by a touch of nerves, Mac promptly dismissed from his mind, the illusive feeling that all was not well, and returned to his companions.

  Sandhurst was standing up when he entered the side gallery. As Mac had expected, his superior was his old self again. The few hours of sleep had refreshed him, and the compulsion ray, which could not penetrate here, had left no serious effects on his naturally healthy and rugged constitution.

  He had recognized his surroundings immediately, for, as a boy he had often visited the old mine. As it was easy to guess what Mac had done, no explanation for his being there now was necessary.

  Sandhurst grasped the hand of his friend for a hearty hand-shake. “Splendid work, old man,” he said, “and a heap of thanks for the wallop!”

  But the practical McLennan brushed the compliments aside. “You ain’t bad yourself,” he said dryly. “Let’s hear where you got all those marks of heroism.” Chuckling amusedly he indicated Sandhurst’s bandaged hands.

  Sandhurst recounted his adventures briefly; then it was Mac’s turn. He had pushed back his hood of metal fabric.

  “After you left us,” he said, “I put the boys to work making this outfit I’ve got on. This morning I hauled out the old bus just to take a look around the country to see what’s happening. Same everywhere. There ain’t hardly any sane people left in the world since that meteor came last night. They’re digging pits in Dunnfield and Elm Grove too. The one at Dunnfield ain’t much more than half as big as the one at Ishbel, and the cone of girders is just about finished. I’ve been trying to figure out what those things are for.

  “The boys were going to have some more of those wire overalls finished tonight, and I was going to sneak over to Ishbel and see if I could pick you up. But those bottled funny faces tackled me and—well, the Gold Bug is a washout. What are we gonna do now, Chief?” There was a rueful smile on McLennan’s red face.

  “If we can reach the laboratory we still have a chance of accomplishing something, Mac,” Sandhurst told him. “You have seen enough of the invaders, and what they have done, to know that they are already masters of the earth. Unless we can find a way to defeat them it will mean eternal servitude for the human race, or extinction if the invaders will it. However, if we could somehow manage to destroy their wave projector, their power would be broken. The least we can do is try. You can go to the laboratory, or, if you don’t mind changing clothes with me, I’ll go, and bring back several extra suits of armor. Then we can return with the kids, and commence working on our apparatus.”

  “I’ll start out when it gets dark,” said Mac. “Doing cross-country stuff now would be too much like a caterpillar promenading through an ant hill. I might as well take a little preliminary look-around though.”

  Sandhurst walked with him to the mine entrance. Before he left his superior Mac handed him his canteen. “Be back in a few minutes,” he said over his shoulder as he sauntered down toward the river.

  The sound of Sandhurst’s return along the passage aroused the youth. He arose to a sitting posture and glanced wonderingly about. It took him several minutes to recognize the scientist in the shadowy grotto, fogged as his mind still was, by sleep.

  “Fay— Where’s Fay?” When he located her small form huddled in the dust he raised her in his arms and kissed her wan cheeks impulsively. She gave a faint gasp as she awakened. Then there were low whispers.

  Sandhurst looked away. He was smiling half amusedly, half tenderly. Wonderful, silly thing—young love; yet he knew that it was far more wonderful than silly. Years ago he too had felt its touch; then a sterner goddess had claimed him, and, with the iron goad of ambition, had driven him on to fame.

  He did not look back at them again until he heard Vance calling his name. They were standing. The girl was still very weak from the ordeal of the night before. If it had not been for the supporting arm of the youth, her tottering limbs would have given way under her. Nevertheless she smiled faintly.

  “Mr. Sandhurst, I want you to meet Miss Fay Gatewood, my fiancée.”

  A TRIFLE awed perhaps, at meeting so great a celebrity, she gave the scientist her hand. It was swollen under the bandages which Mac had wound about it after he had carried her to the mine.

  Explanations were in order, and Fay kept Sandhurst busy with her questions: Where were they? Who had brought them there? What were they going to do now? What had happened to everybody?

  Sandhurst did his best to make intelligent answers, and to reassure her. It gratified him very much to see that her spirits were rising. She smiled quite gaily, and her big dark eyes were once again full of expression and life—not dull and staring. If he had thought her beautiful when he had first seen her aboard the truck, she seemed more so now in spite of the mud and dirt that smeared her face and clothing. Yet it was a child-like beauty.

  Fay told how the compulsion waves had come upon them. “You see, when I am at school I stay with my aunt,” she said. “Vance was with me last night, and Auntie had just stepped out for a few minutes. We had finished our chemistry problems, for we often do them together. Vance was at the piano, playing, and I was just dreaming. Everything seemed so peaceful and secure that any misfortune—even a little one, just couldn’t happen.

  “Then came the blue star. We saw it and were admiring it, without ever imagining that it could be dangerous. All of a sudden they must have turned on some strange force up there. It took hold of us like a flash. I was terribly frightened, but I couldn’t move and I couldn’t even scream. Then something made us go out doors and climb into the truck.” The girl’s dark eyes widened at the memory of that fearful moment when the spell had dropped.

  Fifteen minutes had passed. Mac would be back from his reconnoitering pretty soon. Sandhurst remembered that Fay had not yet seen his assistant, or the fantastic and slightly fearsome attire he wore.

  “If a man dressed in a wire armor and hood comes in here, Miss Gatewood,” he chuckled, “don’t mistake him for an imp of Satan, because it will be Douglas McLennan, the fellow who is to blame for our being as safe as we are.”

  It was only several minutes later that Mac appeared. He was walking down the passage on tiptoe, and he looked
back often, as though he feared that someone or something behind him would detect his presence. Sandhurst sensed trouble. He silenced his companions with a gesture.

  Mac paused at his superior’s side, and stood facing the entrance of the passage. A muffled whisper came out of his wire hood:

  “There’s light flickering farther in the mine, Mert. I saw them when I came in, and, I guess I ducked in here just in time. They’re purple lights like those bottled devils give off. They were coming my way. Let’s watch!”

  The four stood huddled together, their eyes riveted on the small section of the outer passage which they could see. Presently a faint violet glow began to spread itself over the rough floor. It grew in intensity. A luminous globe, bearing the weird form of an invader floated into view and passed out of sight toward the entrance of the mine. Another followed it, and another. Sandhurst counted fourteen in all. For the space of many heartbeats after the last of them had departed the four adventurers neither moved nor spoke.

  It was Sandhurst who first found his voice. “They probably have a station of some kind in the back of the mine,” he whispered hoarsely.

  An intense desire to examine and study things belonging to a civilization so totally different from his own, had taken possession of him. With McLennan at his side, and the students following, he moved stealthily down the passageway. At the juncture with the main tunnel he paused and peered into the darkness. Everything seemed quite normal.

  Motioning to Fay and Vance to remain where they were, he and Mac went to the mouth of the gallery. The sun was setting. High in the air to the west was a group of specks—the invaders who had just taken their departure. Momentarily they grew smaller, for they were hurrying away rapidly, seeming bent on attending to some urgent mission.

  Sandhurst and McLennan looked at each other. Both had the same idea in mind. The Chief of Murgatroyd Laboratory could sense the broad grin hidden behind Mac’s mask.

  “Well, are we going to do it?” he inquired, knowing perfectly well what the answer would be.

  McLennan’s enthusiasm was unmistakable. “Are we? Say—any time we’d let a chance like this go by!”

  Sandhurst brushed aside any misgivings he may have had. Danger was all about them now anyway; besides the adventure he and his assistant were contemplating might actually have valuable results.

  “Okay, Mac, old man, we'll be on our way then!” he said briskly.

  “Mac and I are going on a tour of investigation up the passage,” he told his young friends, in answer to the inquiring looks on their faces. “Remain here unless we call you.”

  The two scientists crept along the gallery, penetrating farther and farther into the bowels of the mine. The girl and the youth gazed after them until they had disappeared into the darkness.

  A faint smile flickered on Vance’s lips. “Fine chaps, both of them,” he whispered. The girl nodded.

  DOUGLAS McLENNAN and Merton Sandhurst stumbled through the thickening gloom for several hundred feet, without encountering anything more interesting than dust, debris of antiquated mining machinery, and a few bats which the invaders had not yet succeeded in scaring away. Somewhere a cricket chirped stridently.

  Mac was in the lead, carrying a heavy automatic. It was he who got the first look up a branching tunnel, from the farther end of which proceeded a weird rosy glow.

  He uttered a whispered exclamation of satisfaction and surprise. “Have a look, Chief. This is the place, and there ain’t any mistake!”

  Sandhurst craned his neck. He saw what looked like a laboratory improvised by beings from millions of years in the future. There was a cone of wire wickerwork in the center of the passage; from this proceeded the ruddy light. Around the walls were arranged many odd mechanisms. Conspicuous among the other appointments of the place was a long cigar-shaped affair of glassy material.

  The men did not immediately detect the presence of any living creature. It was only after they had lost their first wonder at what they beheld, and had begun to go over the details, that Sandhurst noticed the bulbous, spindly-limbed thing that worked with calm deliberation over an amazingly complicated device at one side of the passage. Mac saw the creature too. They made a careful survey for others, but there seemed to be only this lone guard. What luck!

  “Sit tight, Chief,” said McLennan, and there was a grim note even in his faint whisper, “I’m going to pot this fellow.”

  On all fours he edged closer to the region of the rosy light. Thus he made his way to within fifty feet of the unsuspecting monstrosity. His armor of dull metal gave back no reflection in the dim glow, and otherwise he was as soundless and inconspicuous as a vagrant shadow.

  His pistol arm came up. With cool precision he placed the muzzle of the weapon in line with the pulpy body of the invader. The report re-echoed ponderously along dusty walls.

  “Got him, Chief! Come along!” Mac shouted.

  Caring no more for stealth, they darted through the acrid haze of burnt powder toward their victim.

  And then, they received the surprise of their lives. As soon as Mac, who was in the lead, entered the glowing, ruddy aura of the cone in the center of the laboratory, his feet left solid ground and, like a man suddenly gifted with wings, he shot slantingly upward. With a grunt of consternation he rebounded from the farther wall, and sprawled ludicrously amid a tangle of wires and glass.

  “Scottie!”

  Sandhurst had managed to check himself in time to avoid a similar experience.

  “Oh, don’t worry about me,” McLennan assured him, as he picked himself slowly from the debris of a strange machine. “I’m okay.” He had pushed back his hood so that he could wipe the beads of sudden perspiration from his forehead, and the red face thus revealed was a picture of disgust and ludicrous self-contempt.

  Sandhurst was approaching closer to investigate the cause of the phenomenal occurrence when Mac warned him.

  “Take it easy, Mert. The bottled monkey-faces got some kind of a dowrangle rigged up here to cut gravity down to almost nothing, and like a hiccupping fool I ran right into its field!”

  Taking careful steps Sandhurst entered the laboratory. Mac was right about the gravity. It wasn't more than one-sixth normal strength. “I feel like an over-grown fairy,” Sandhurst chuckled.

  “But don’t lose your head over your ethereal qualities, or you’re liable to resemble a pan of raw hamburger,” Mac remarked dryly. “I’ve got a bump over my ear as big as a cannon ball, and it’s bloody!”

  Before inspecting the wonders about them, they deemed it best to attend to the invader, who, though mortally wounded, was still alive and conscious. Sandhurst scrutinized minutely the creature’s spidery limbs and its fleshy ovoid body. The latter was covered with what appeared to be an artificial shell of glass. This, he surmised, was to protect it from the pressure of the dense earthly atmosphere. The shell was punctured and cracked now, where the bullet had penetrated it, and the bright red fluid that was oozing from the wound beneath the opening, gave evidence of the high haemoglobin content of the invader’s blood. Probably he had come from a place where the air was very rare.

  The creature’s six pairs of limbs, which twitched and trembled spasmodically now, were each fitted with a bundle of thread-like tentacles, fine and pink, like the stamens and filaments of a flower. The body, which expanded and contracted in labored breathing, was slowly turning livid.

  The scientists examined with particular interest the face of the creature, its peculiar proboscis-like mouth set deep in the fleshy folds of its body, the countless seamed wrinkles and the light down of hair that covered the pink skin. It was a hideous visage, on which it seemed that some evil entity had left its stamp.

  CHAPTER V

  The Siege

  SANDHURST reached out his hand as if he intended to touch the invader. With a peculiar hissing cry, the thing made a feeble attempt to spring at him. The act seemed totally animal, and evoked revulsion—it reminded Sandhurst of an angry snapping turtle he had
once trapped. Yet there was nothing that hinted of the beast in the great dark eyes of the creature. There was intelligence there, perhaps more than human, and a smoldering hatred deeper and more everlasting than the blackness of hell.

  Borrowing Mac’s gun Sandhurst put an end to the mortal existence of this weird horror, who, with his fellows had planned and carried out the conquest of the world.

  “We’d better call the kids to come and have a ‘looksee,’ ” Mac advised.

  But there was no need for doing so, for they were already coming down the tunnel. A timely warning saved them from a mishap similar to the one McLennan had recently experienced.

  The party proceeded to explore the laboratory. The thing which naturally received their first attention was the conical framework at the center of the passage. Beneath the wire canopy was a shallow container of white enamel which resembled a huge saucer. In it, an opalescent fluid bubbled and seethed like boiling oil, and crackling darts of red flame played and interplayed between it and the wickerwork of wires and webby cables above. For a long time they stared at the machine, fascinated by the evilly gorgeous light that emanated from it.

  Half sensing the purpose of the apparatus, Sandhurst touched the small wheel that rose on a thin spindle from a squat metal hemisphere near its base. Gingerly, he turned it a trifle. In response to his act, the boiling liquid lost some of its activity, and the rosy flame decreased in brilliance. Sandhurst gave the wheel another turn; the fire died down to an embered glow. But there was a more interesting result. Gravity was again exerting almost its normal earthly pull.