The Red World of Polaris
I
As he studied the slowly changing configuration of the stars in the huge reflectors of his ether-ship the Alcyone, Captain Volmar was now seized by a memory of his younger years, when he had been first officer of a trans-Atlantic liner. He recalled the broken mists and unclouded icy sapphire of nights when he had watched the pole-star from the vessel’s bridge. For now, amid the scattered flecks of light that formed the rearranged and scarce identifiable constellations, a single flaming point had began to emerge beyond the rest and was taking on the proportions of a remote sun; and this point, as he knew from his astronomical chart, was Polaris.
His thin face, sharpened by the fires and rigors of well-nigh sacerdotal consecration to an ideal, was lit as with a reflection of the approaching orb. He watched it with the thrill of a mystic devotee as well as the eager curiosity of a scientist; and felt a renewal of all his pristine ardors, together with an actual sense of consummation. The terrestrial nights which he remembered so vividly, here in the everlasting night of space, had been marked by the inception of that unearthly vaulting ambition which had led years later to his first intersidereal voyage and then to his present project of circumnavigating the known universe. In those earlier times he had looked to Polaris as a far-off, unattainable goal; it had been the symbol of his dreams, the lodestar of his aspirations; and now he was nearing it, after more than a decade of cosmic voyaging among the illimitable systems.
To Jasper, the first mate of the Alcyone, to Roverton the second mate, to the five members of the crew, Polaris was only one of a myriad array of suns; and they regarded it with no more than the quotidian interest accorded to the others. Jasper was guiding the controls of the Alcyone; and without express comment he turned to Volmar and asked for instructions:
“We shall pass Polaris in about four hours, sir. Shall we keep the straight course, to the left?”
“No—steer to the right. I want to take a look at Polaris. Also, there may be a planetary system; and if so, I’m curious to see it.” The dry, formal voice betrayed no evidence of Volmar’s internal eagerness.
“Yes, sir.” Nothing more was said, as Jasper turned the heavy steering-rod of neo-manganese steel, and the vessel responded with inconceivable lightness, leaping through tremendous gulfs in the mere changing of its course, at more than the speed of any cosmical vibration.
Burning with preternatural whiteness in the black ether, Polaris broadened hour by hour to a huge incandescent disk. Soon the flames of its corona were visible, soaring in the face of the measureless night; and, falling through the crystalline ports of the ether-ship, its rays mingled weirdly with the violet-tinged illumination of the electric bulbs, and cast their supermundane gleams on the pale faces of Volmar and his crew.
Volmar, peering ahead with aquiline keenness, was the first to see the planets. Three of them were now discernible, one quite close to Polaris, at a distance comparable to that of Mercury from our sun; and the others travelling in more remote and widely divergent orbits. The inner world was very small; and the voyagers soon saw that it could be no more than a desert of torrid stone, of continental sands and gauntly rising mountains, with no trace of water or vegetation anywhere. The second world, as the Alcyone neared it, was found to differ little from the first; and Volmar and his men gave it merely a casual inspection, for all their interest was now centered on the third and outmost world, in its aphelion on the farther side of Polaris.
This world, even as seen from afar, was plainly remarkable. It glowed with a deep red that was both sullen and fulgurant, in opposition to the livid grey of the other two; and since it revolved in a far-ulterior orbit, at a distance where the reflected light of Polaris should be proportionately feeble, the brilliance of its ruddy luster was mysterious and difficult to explain.
Volmar and his crew watched it in a fascinated silence, as the ether-ship drove on and the strange planet became an ever-swelling globe. Its mystery grew with its apparent bulk, for there were no geographical or geological markings, no indications of seas or sea-beds, of mountains or hills, of valleys or elevations or depressions of any kind. It was an unbroken expanse of glowing red that dazzled the eyes and left an after-image of changing colors. It was somehow suggestive of heated metal, and also gave the impression of an artificial rather than a natural body.
The space-voyagers had approached many planets in their journeying; they had even landed on a number; and they knew the limitless variations of planetary development. They had found worlds that were shrouded with mist or snow, with clouds or ice, or were belted with auroral flames or seas of burning bitumen. They had found ocean-covered worlds where gigantic algae towered like forests above incalculable leagues of water; they had seen others that were riven from pole to pole with typhonian fissures and chasms, where etiolated fungi large as hillocks grew in the sunless river-bottoms; they had seen still others that were lob-sided with their burden of colossal mountains. But they had never before encountered a world that in any way resembled this.
“What do you make of it, Captain?” queried Jasper.
“I don’t know.” Volmar’s slow, deliberate voice was frankly puzzled. “Fly nearer—as near as you can.”
The Alcyone dipped in a long spiral descent toward the monotonous ball that was now directly beneath. Soon it hung above the gleaming surface at an elevation of less than a mile. The red world was larger than Mars, though it lacked the dimensions of the Earth or Venus. But as far as the eye could see its horizons were perfectly smooth and level, and its plains were like a sheet of some luminous and deeply tinted copperish metal. The eyes of Volmar and his men were almost blinded with its glare. However, their approach to the weird orb had not occasioned any rise in the temperature of the space-vessel’s interior; so evidently the first impression of glowing heat was erroneous.
“Still nearer—but be careful. We don’t know what it is, or what properties it may possess.”
The Alcyone descended until it almost skimmed the ruddy plain. Now it could be seen that the surface was apparently made of innumerable tiny darting sparks and coruscations, interweaving like a dance of fiery atoms at a speed which the eye could hardly follow.
“It must be some new form of matter,” suggested Roverton. “It looks like a million quintrillions of red-hot filings chasing each other in a field of magnetic force.”
“Perhaps.” Volmar was studying the strange surface intently; and it seemed to him that directly below the vessel the gyrations of the dazzling particles were becoming slower, and that many of them disappeared and did not return to visibility. Then, with incredible suddenness, a deep and yawning pit revealed itself below the Alcyone, forming a circular shaft in the unknown substance. At the same time the ether-ship pitched violently downward, though Jasper had not moved the clutch that should have held it perfectly level and motionless in space. It sank dizzily into the shaft, as if all the gears and engines and levitative mechanisms had become utterly powerless. Jasper switched on the full force of the electromagnetic turbines, and sought to reverse the descent, but all in vain. The vessel shook and trembled as though it were fighting some irresistible power that drew it nadir-ward; but it continued to fall at an undiminished rate between the red walls of the shaft. A second more, and it plunged into a vast open space, where a world of glaring light, of kaleidoscopically various forms and colors, leapt up to meet it like a reeling and ever-broadening mosaic.
II
The transition from the outer sky to this internal gulf beneath the glowing red surface had occupied merely a few moments; and only men of supreme nervous alertness and presence of mind could have adjusted themselves in any degree to a situation so extraordinary. Jasper still strove to arrest the Alcyone’s descent, while the others watched with a swift cognizance of all apparent detail the world toward which they were falling with headlong velocity. Then, turning from it to gaze upward, they saw that the unknown fiery substance was arched above them from horizon to horizon like the cope of some unnatural metallic heaven. The sudden shaft that had formed to admit them was no longer visible; and the vault presented an unbroken expanse, pouring down a blinding, fulgurating luster, though no sun was now discernible.
The vessel was helpless in the grip of the mysterious ultragravitational force that still dragged it downward. The roar of the fulminating engines, the response of the tightened brakes and the drawn levers, all served to attest that the machinery was in perfect order, and was struggling against a power such as never before had been encountered. Volmar and his crew resigned themselves to the seemingly inevitable crash; and all the events of their intersidereal voyage were marshalled before them in a crowded flash that was virtually simultaneous with the thought-image of its disastrous end.
However, they were still able to note with astronomic interest the unknown world that surged toward them in geometric mazes of widening forms and spreading zones of color. There were belts that suggested water, there were others that gave the impression of a many-tinted vegetation, and still others denotive of a mineraloid character, like immense plots of ground with pavements of silver and cinnabar and lapis lazuli. And at intervals of many leagues on the great plain, colossal architectural piles upreared themselves to the zenith; and each separate edifice was vaster far than any terrene city.
The ether-ship was falling directly upon one of these piles, whose level diamond-shaped roof was outstretched below in multiform and labyrinthine patterns of a hundred hues, like parterres and flower-beds. The headlong descent began to slacken gently at an elevation of three or four miles, the vessel drifted down with a buoyant ease, it landed and was brought to rest as skillfully and adroitly as if Jasper himself had guided it.
Volmar and his men peered through the ports on a scene that was no less unbelievable than indescribable. They had come down on a vacant space at the center of the diamond roof, which reached away for a half-mile in every direction, and was seemingly made of some mineral substance unknown to terrene geology—a highly metallic stone with striations of black and yellow and bluish green. The roof was laid out like a garden with concentric rows of bizarre plants, all of which were either set in basins of fretted stone or were standing rootlessly on the bare pavement; and was crowded with living and moving creatures no less bizarre than the plants, who began immediately to collect around the Alcyone.
Volmar was almost startled out of his habitual ascetic reserve as he studied these beings; and the others exclaimed with frank amazement. The beings resembled a multitude of forms and types; and all of them were either clothed in shards of metal or else possessed bodies that were radically different in their biological composition from any that the vessel’s crew had ever seen. They glittered and shone in the glaring light with a myriad hues and lusters redoubled by the intricate irregular facets into which their surfaces were divided. The commonest type among them was perhaps five feet tall, with a perfectly spherical head which was joined without a neck to a triangular body that radiated on each side, from a common center, four limbs that evidently served as both arms and legs since all of them were used alternately or simultaneously in locomotion and also in prehension. This type had a single cyclopean eye like a burning ruby in the middle of its silver face; and above the rounded dome of its head there were several glossy black antennae with vermicular segments, all terminating in tiny concave disks; and a short proboscis ending in a double mouth issued from the jointure of head and shoulders. There were other types, and certain unique individuals, varying monstrously in size and shape, and in the number or arrangement of their limbs and sense organs. But all of them gave the impression of artificial shells, of masks and armors, as if the entities that actuated them were unknowably domiciled within.
“Talk about robots!” cried Roverton. “Did you ever see anything like them? Look at those copper joints that are as flexible as the joints of an acrobat. Look at those fingers or toes with seven flanges that can bend in any direction.”
Two-score of the multifarious entities had grouped themselves around the vessel and were examining it with their single or manifold eyes. Behind the fixed inhuman expression of their metal masks, in the movements of their cunningly constructed limbs, the curiosity of an incomprehensibly alien people somehow made itself felt. And the orchestral chattering of their voices, with notes that were resonant as drums, or shrill as clarions, or sweet as lute-strings, could be heard through the sound-valves of the Alcyone. They came nearer and touched the sides of the vessel as if to determine the material of which it was made; and some of them climbed the ladder to the man-hole and inspected it closely. After a little these latter descended and seemed to be holding a serious debate with the others, as if to decide a moot point or a course of action, while all of them continued to watch the Alcyone.
Now the crowd drew back and a number departed, to return in a few minutes bearing among them an instrument whose use defied conjecture. It was a large tripod of some antimony-type substance, supporting a revolving globe of the same material, from which issued a long, slender tube with a flaring mouth. The tube was levelled at the vessel’s man-hole; and when a lever at the side of the tripod was pressed, a thin stream of ghostly yellow light emerged from the mouth and played upon the neo-vitriolene of the man-hole’s lid. Then, as if in response to the electrical mechanism by which it was operated, the lid unscrewed; and likewise the inner door of the ether-ship, giving on the compartment where Volmar and his crew were gathered, flew open to the same mysterious agency.
III
An atmosphere of humid warmth, laden as with hot-house odors of an ultra-tropical flora, flooded the vessel’s interior. Obviously there were strange elements, non-terrestrial gases in this air, for Volmar and his men began immediately to gasp for breath, and to experience a peculiar giddiness and lightheadedness. Volmar pressed the button which should have closed the outer and inner doors; but the mechanism refused to work, as if the batteries had gone dead or their force had somehow been nullified or paralyzed.
“Quick! The respirative masks and air-tanks!” cried Volmar with a voice that fought the asphyxiating elements. These masks, covering the entire head and connected by a tube with a tank that was strapped to the shoulders, had been carried along for use in landing on alien worlds where the air might prove unfit for human respiration.
The apparatus was quickly donned, and none too soon; for one of the men fainted, and the others had to fasten his mask. All of them felt an instantaneous relief from the symptoms of vertigo and difficult breathing.
The act of putting on the masks had no sooner been completed, when a number of the weird multiform entities invaded the vessel one by one and surrounded Volmar and his crew. They gibbered among themselves with their instrument-like voices, they eyed the men with the unchanging glare of their single or triple or quadruple eyes, which offered the appearance of many-angled and diverse-tinted gems; they inspected and fingered the machinery and the furniture, and showed in many ways the investigative spirit which is the invariable mark of the scientist.
“Of all the burglarious entries!” exclaimed Jasper. “No earthly safe-cracker could compete with these beings.”
All the men stood irresolute, wondering as to the best mode of procedure, and the motives and dispositions of their visitors. The invaders gave no sign of hostile or unfriendly intentions; but in every motion of their metal flanges, every silver or bronze or iron tone of their voices, a spirit beyond the range of human sensation or understanding was manifest. They were plainly intelligent; but their exterior was that of highly organized and subtly animated machinery; and it was impossible to conceive them as possessing the motives, interests, or desires of normal biological forms.
With perspicacious immediacy they had singled out Volmar as the leader of the expedition, for they were now addressing him in tones vaguely suggestive of invitation. Then, one by one, they left the compartment, walking backward with perfect surety toward the man-hole, and making signs that Volmar and his companions should follow them.
“I believe they are asking us to be their guests,” Roverton observed.
There was a brief discussion as to the best course of action.
“These people,” said Volmar, “are plainly the masters of forces which we are perhaps not even fitted to understand. For some unknowable purpose, they have captured us; and any effort to escape would be fruitless, since the Alcyone is held as firmly as though it were anchored with a thousand chains and cables, doubtless by some magnetic ray. It would be more judicious not to antagonize our captors in any way, but to assent voluntarily to whatever they wish. I vote that we accept their invitation.”
The others agreed that Volmar had summarized the situation and its potentialities very wisely and succinctly. They might as well yield without the ineffectual folly of resistance. And in spite of the humiliating and mystifying manner in which their vessel had been trapped, in spite of their ignorance regarding the intentions of these odd people, they were full of excited curiosity and were eager to see more of this remarkable world, which differed so uniquely from all others that they had hitherto examined.
Descending the vessel’s steel ladder, they found that the throng had dispersed, leaving only a mere half-dozen of the beings with globular heads and triangular bodies, who were manifestly a reception committee. With elaborate genuflections that were like those of marionettes, these beings led the way through the fantastic roof-garden, with its winding spaces and pathways of stone, and semi-circular rows of indescribable plants and trees, toward a sort of open cupola that was visible about a hundred yards away.
The cupola was supported by pillars carven with anaglyphs of a character so unusual that it was impossible to know whether they were miniature bas-reliefs, picture-writings, or phonetic symbols. Within, there were two large circular pits in the floor, which seemed to descend to the very base of the building. Their walls were perpendicular, with no sign of rungs or stairs or machinery of the elevator type. To the surprise and consternation of the earth-men, two of their guides stepped into the nearest pit as casually as if the descent were no more than a pace; and instead of falling headlong, they floated gently down with a feather-like movement utterly incongruous in view of their corporeal structure. The others made signs to the men that they should follow; and when the earthlings hesitated, another of them entered the pit and was wafted downward.
“Well,” said Volmar, “if they can do it, I guess it is safe for us also. There must be a current of some gravity-negating force in the shaft.”
He stepped over the circular verge, and felt as if he were being born on invisible cushions that sank slowly down between the walls of the shaft. His crew followed, and after them came the remaining three of the delegation of guides.
The shaft descended for a well-nigh incalculable distance, far greater than the height of any terrestrial building. At regular intervals there were landings that gave on the various innumerable stories of the edifice; and there were glimpses of unending rows of titan columns in rooms that seemed to stretch without walls till they terminated in far-off balconies; and there were smaller rooms whose construction displayed an unfamiliar geometry, where scores and hundreds of the metal-sharded people were engaged in tasks of an unsurmisable nature by the light from glowing spheres of ever-shifting iridescent colors that hung in mid-air without chains or brackets. Also, there were glimpses of the second shaft, in which people were continually ascending, and from which they could step on any of the landings as if by a mere effort of will.
Roverton and Jasper were side by side in the pit, behind Volmar.
“This is certainly a superior kind of elevator system,” remarked Jasper, “I’d give something to know the secret of its operation.”
“From all indications,” rejoined Roverton, “we have struck a world whose mechanical knowledge and masterdom of natural forces make our scientific accomplishments look like simple arithmetic beside algebra and trigonometry.”
After several minutes of that feather-like descent, which was accompanied by the sensation of an almost total loss of bodily weight, the earthlings reached the ground floor of the edifice. Here, in a mile-long hall with ceilings of tremendous height, the three preceding guides awaited them; and they were joined in a few moments by the others.
Now they were led along vistas of quadrangular columns more enormous than dolomites, through which there poured a saffron light of unbearable brilliance, emanating from the end of the hall. They passed many doors and intersecting halls, open or shut, and equally mysterious in what they concealed or revealed. Then, through a semi-circular portal, they entered a chamber of more moderate size, with septagonal walls. This chamber was the source of the light, which streamed from a huge globe suspended in mid-air. Beneath the globe, on a lofty tripodal chair of some electrum-like substance with alternate gleams of gold and silver, there sat a being who differed from the rest in the vaster dimensions of his bright orbicular head, which seemed to overweigh his wedge-shaped body like a full moon ensconced on a semi-lune. This entity turned his one eye, which resembled a great fiery carbuncle, on the earth-men; and addressed their guides in a voice of flute-like sweetness and modulation. One of the delegation left the room forthwith, and returned with a singular instrument, scarcely comparable in its form to anything used on earth, with many lenses of a transparent material arranged behind each other in a frame of spiral rods and arabesque filaments. This instrument was now fastened by a large circlet to the forehead of the being who sat upon the tripodal chair.
The being lifted one of his many-jointed limbs, and pointed at the bare, windowless wall of the room, which gleamed in the saffron light like a polished surface of reflecting mineral. There, as the men gazed, a picture suddenly sprang into life, as if from the slide of a magic lantern, and filled the entire opposite face of the wall. It was a picture of the red world as the voyagers had beheld it hanging in space on their first approach. Above the world there hovered a tiny glimmering speck; and as the great orb grew larger, till only a portion of its surface was depicted on the wall, it could be seen that the speck was the Alcyone, which descended till it almost touched the glowing plain. Then this picture disappeared abruptly, to be succeeded by a view of the roof of the Babel-like building on which the Alcyone had been drawn down. Here, with an optical instrument which resembled a periscope, one of the metal-sharded entities was peering at the red vault, which now seemed to become diaphanous, revealing the ether-ship beyond in space.
“Good Lord!” said Roverton in an awed voice. “That was how they saw us coming. That optical instrument must have been a sort of long-range X-ray apparatus.”
Even as he spoke, the picture faded. An enormous chamber was now disclosed, in which stood a labyrinthine mechanism of shining cubes and lozenges ramifying from a tall central cone of black, lusterless metal. The roof of the chamber became transparent, revealing the diaphanous vault of the heavens and the vessel itself once more as it still hung in outer ether. A dozen of the globe-headed people were grouped around the mechanism and were adjusting certain of its parts. Then one of them pulled a spiral lever, and a beam of some indescribable color, visible only for a moment, shot upward from the cone until it reached the space-vessel and curved around it like a grappling-hook. Then the Alcyone was seen to descend through a clear shaft in the vault, and was drawn down to the roof of the building in which the cone-mechanism was located.
“Well, that’s plain enough,” commented Volmar. “He—or it—is showing us how we were captured. The cone-machine must be the generator of some force that is infinitely more powerful than gravitation, though probably akin to it. Amazing—but the pictures themselves are even more astounding, for they must be thought-images rendered visible by the lens-apparatus attached to that creature’s forehead. Who ever dreamed of a moving-picture machine capable of using the mind itself for a film?”
Other views now succeeded the one of the space-vessel’s capture. They were plainly meant to depict the manner of hospitality which would be shown to the earthlings during their sojourn on the red planet: for the figures of Volmar and his crew were conspicuous in all of them, and were represented in the act of visiting many of the Babelian towers and viewing all sorts of mechanical wonders and marvellous plant or animal forms as they travelled throughout the world with their compulsory hosts. They were afterwards to remember and recognize many of these scenes. In one of them, a prodigious open shaft in the ground was shown, with people ascending and descending by thousands; and the impression was somehow conveyed that the shaft penetrated the entire diameter of the world, perhaps from pole to pole; and that those who sank into it at one end would arise to the surface at the other. Hundreds of titan towers, which apparently took the place of cities on the red world, were also shown; and the realm-wide agricultural fields, botanical gardens of forest-like extent, and breeding-pens of inconceivably monstrous animals, were likewise flashed on the wall together with many interior glimpses of the life led by this unique race.
Then, in rapid alternation, came another series of scenes that were plainly historical, and which seemed to unfold the chronicles of the red world from remotest time. The beings who were shown in the first of them were not sharded in metal; though they displayed forms that were recognizably similar, with all the features of the globe-headed type, they possessed a more usual integument of hairless animal skin. The world in which they lived was vaulted with a greenish sky, in which the sun Polaris burned like any other solar luminary. It was a fertile and flourishing world; and the long epochs of its evolution, and the evolution of its peoples, were rapidly hinted in brief flashes. Anon, a period of racial and planetary decadence was denoted; the seas dried up, the fertile zones were blotched with ever-spreading deserts, the atmosphere became cloudless and rarified and almost irrespirable; and the people themselves grew senescent, they no longer reproduced their kind, and were dying one by one. But among them were scientists who had attained a well-nigh supreme knowledge of natural laws and a mastery of many forces both familiar and obscure. These scientists gathered in conclave to determine some method of racial salvation; and the result of their conference, as shown in the next pictures, was beyond conception or belief. Several bodies, duplicating in every detail the physical formation of the race, were constructed of various metals. The minutest cells and nerves were somehow reproduced; and only the brain-space in the heads was left vacant. Then some of the scientists submitted to an unusual operation: their brains were removed and transferred to the metal heads, where they swam in a bath of some ruddy fluid that must have had elixir-like properties; for after an interval the artificial bodies moved and arose to their feet; and were manifestly controlled and animated by the living brains within them. Then more bodies were made; some of aberrant or whimsical types, according to the taste of their future occupants; and others of the dying race underwent the same operation; till within an incredibly short length of time all of them had discarded their perishable anatomies of flesh and were inhabiting corporeal forms that were virtually indestructible. The red fluid, which was replaced at certain intervals, preserved and nourished their brains till they grew wise with an accumulated knowledge of out-lived aeons. Invention progressed with colossal paces; and machines of many types and sizes were builded for the use and control of every cosmic or planetary power, from refracted and magnified rays to the force released by exploding atoms. Towers were reared from heaps of desert sand by some of these machines, which could integrate and organize the molecules of matter in any desired pattern; and plants and animals were artificially created by a chemical duplication of the processes of life. There was no limit to the scientific genius of this people, who, in their metal bodies, retained no needs and passions other than those which were wholly intellectual. By a series of enormous magnetic engines, situated in every longitude of their world at regular intervals, they even enclosed their entire planet with a vault of metallic atoms in a zone of super-electric force, which served to insulate it from the encroaching cold of space, and also to conserve the remnants of the atmosphere, which was now gradually enriched and renewed by the addition of the necessary elements in gaseous form.
Thus, in short flashes, a pictorial account of the planet and its history was presented to the earthlings. They were dumbfounded by such revelations; and their amazement grew with every scene. The unearthliness of the things and events, of the alien peoples and epochs shadowed forth, was beyond the most extravagant vagaries of imagination.
The long display of images came to an end; and the lens-apparatus was removed from the brow of its user, who then vacated his chair. Volmar was motioned to come forward and seat himself on the tripod. Then, by a contraction of its circlet, which was formed in a series of regulable segments, the machine was fitted to his forehead.
Volmar concentrated on various ideas which he wished to express; but the results were unsatisfactory. The pictures that formed on the wall were too dim and shapeless and chaotic to be intelligible. Obviously his brain was not powerful enough in its thought-vibrations to effect the desired visualization. And when the apparatus was tried by Roverton, Jasper, and the others, the resultant images were equally negligible and disappointing.
IV
The being with the vast moon-like head made a gesture of dismissal; and the earth-men were now conducted by their guides along another hall which led to the exterior of the building.
The scene outside was overwhelmingly strange, and offered little resemblance in any detail to earthly landscapes or to those of other planets which the Alcyone’s crew had visited. Around the looming edifice with its innumerable stories and terrace-like balconies, there stretched a winding space of open pavement bordered with a park of vegetable growths that were no less variegated than extraordinary. Most of them, it was probable, were the synthetic creations of the metal-bodied beings; for they presented only a vague and distant likeness to the simpler flora that Volmar and his men had seen shadowed forth in the earlier historical tableau. They testified to a limitless horticultural ingenuity, with an inclination toward the grotesque, the ornate, and the recherché. Some of them seemed to imitate in their stems, foliage, and blossoms the forms of novel animals, birds, and insects; others had apparently derived their inspiration from the crystallizations of unthinkably elaborate minerals; others resembled structures of coral flowering with many-chaliced shells; and some were suggestive of outlandish sculptures and arabesques, of the mad and demon-wrought vagaries of unimaginable art. There were titan fungi which bore an architectural resemblance in their cinnabar or malachite or azurite tiers, to pagodas and ziggurats. There were cacti that offered the appearance of immense and complicated machines. Most of the plants were not associable even in a superficial degree to any mundane genus. Some were rooted in an ashen-blue soil; but others were rootless, and wherever allowed, they had spread to the pavements and were sprawling or standing about as if they might creep or stalk away at any moment. They gleamed with unearthly textures, and colors denotive of a transidereal spectrum, in the sultry and shadowless effulgence that flamed upon them from horizon to zenith on all sides.
The senses of the earthlings reeled in this blaze of inundating torrential light, this delirious riot of ultramundane form and supersolar iridescence. Their nerves were exasperated and then stunned by the continual impact of sensations which the human system was never meant to sustain. The vegetation seemed to dance like a sabbat of demons and witches; and the building they had left, and the further edifices that overtowered the plain, all staggered in drunken unison before their eyes as the metal guides conducted them along the pavement; and they heard as in a doubtful nightmare the voices of these beings, who were pointing out and apparently naming one object after another, in an effort to begin some sort of linguistic tuition. It was difficult to reduce their tones to a phonetic basis and to approximate them with the human vocal chords, but, by careful attention and tireless experiment, Volmar and the others were able to achieve a partial articulation and a remote likeness to some of the words and syllables. In pointing to themselves the beings uttered many times a vocable which sounded like tloong, which was plainly the generic name of their species. And they repeatedly called the earthlings ongar, which doubtless meant something like “alien” or “outsider.” In this way, a few words were approximately mastered, and the rudiments of a sort of communication were established. But, under the nervous tax that the earth-men suffered, the attempt to hear, comprehend, and reproduce the sounds correctly was a further addition to the nightmare tension and feeling of unbearable delirium.
Many of the metal people were passing to and fro; the scene was one of perpetual activity; and certain air-vessels of novel types were continually embarking or disembarking their passengers on the pavement about the edifice, or upon the roof of its atlantean balconies. These vehicles were flat discs or oblong platforms of varying size, some of them large as the decks of ocean liners, which sailed through the air at any required speed with no visible enginery or ascertainable mode of levitation or locomotion.
After a large portion of the park had been inspected, one of the air-vessels was chartered by the guides, who motioned Volmar and his crew to accompany them. A lever was pressed, and the huge machine arose with unbelievable buoyancy, and floated through the cloudless, glaring atmosphere toward a horizon remotely dentilated with prodigious towers. The platform flew at no great elevation, apparently in order that the earth-men might view the topographical details of the landscapes above which they were journeying. But the speed which the air-vessel attained, and the ease, comfort, and lack of atmospheric resistance, was most amazing.
The scene below shifted and changed with a kaleidoscopic rapidity. Everything, even to the wide spaces of uncultivated and wholly barren soil or stone, was marked by a perfectly symmetrical arrangement of squares, diamonds, ovals, triangles, and other geometric forms, like tessellations in a mosaic floor of transtellar giants. There were canals that ran in straight lines or systematic meanderings, from lakes and seas of an artificial regularity. And even certain jungles in which the primitive plant forms of the red world were recognized by the earthlings as they passed, were laid out within metes and bounds like vast botanical gardens.
They were skimming the very top branches of one of these jungles, when a singular incident occurred. Though the air was utterly still and windless, a small area of the foliage below was oddly agitated as the platform neared it. Trees crashed down, there was a wild tossing of leaves and branches; and then, with fearful expedition, the foliage began to disappear and was interspersed with formless crawling masses of a loathsome livid grey mottled with black and red. Soon, in a spreading tract of devastation, these masses had devoured and supplanted all the vegetation, and were steadily increasing in size and number.
Volmar and his men were astounded by the living masses, and also by the actions of their conductors, who had brought the platform to a full halt in mid-air as soon as they sighted the area of tossing foliage. Then, as the monstrous crawling creatures began to replace the obliterated jungle with their swelling and multiplying bulks, the earth-men heard a clangorous gong-like sound of intolerable acuity which was being emitted from the concave disks on the cerebral antennae of their guides. The sound was connotive of alarm and warning, and doubtless had a vibratory range like that of radio; for a few minutes later, as if in response, a score of air-vessels appeared from all sides and gathered above the spreading patch of devastation. All of them were crowded with Tloongs, and carried weapons emitting visible or invisible rays of deadly potency, which were turned upon the growing masses, causing them to dissolve one by one like vapor.
As if for the edification of the earth-men, their guides flew lower still, where the monsters could be studied in detail ere all of them were wiped out by the lethal rays. They possessed no visible organs except the round, sucker-like mouths with which they were entirely covered; their substance was extremely elastic and without any rudiments of a bony framework; and they took from minute to minute a multitude of forms, turning themselves into gibbous globes, or lengthening like serpents, or developing numerous projections like the trunks of elephants, or flattening themselves along the ground in horrible mats. They were ineffably weird and hideous, their vitality was more than sinister, and their activity was supremely terrifying. Their innumerable mouths dripped continually with a colorless semi-viscid fluid; and the plants to which they applied themselves seemed literally to melt away beneath the assiduous suckers.
These organisms were impossible to classify; for, apart from their animal traits, there was something about them which suggested a swift-growing fungi. It would seem that they propagated themselves by means of a spore which developed with infernal celerity; for even when most of them were seemingly blotted out of existence, new organisms began to spring up. It was seen that the ray-weapons could achieve only a temporary victory; for time after time, when the infested area had been wholly cleared to all appearance, another horde of monstrosities would leap to life.
More of the air-ships appeared, and the Tloongs on some of them began to drop a sort of vegetable pulp which was eagerly devoured by the organisms. It must have contained a virulent poison; for the masses withered and blackened immediately, and lay dead without renewing themselves in their former manner. It was now seen that they had emerged from a large hole in the ground beneath the jungle; the last of them was slain as it crawled forth; and the hole was carefully sealed by means of atom-integrators which filled it with an adamantine material.
The legion of air-vehicles now dispersed, and the conductors of the earth-men resumed their journey. Soon the platform approached a building larger than any that Volmar and his crew had yet beheld, and landed on a midway terrace higher above the ground than any skyscraper. From this the men were led through numberless doors and unending corridors to an immense room at the heart of the edifice.
Here, on a high seat of some dazzling crystalline mineral wrought with arabesques that suggested the signs of an unfamiliar transcendental algebra, a being was enthroned who bore upon the gigantic orb of his head a superimposed sphere which afforded the sole illumination of the room. He held in one of his members a cone-shaped object which was probably a vessel of some Polarian chemical use; and other vessels, having a vague, fantastic likeness to retorts and cupels and test-tubes, were arranged beside his throne on lofty tables.
Making gestures of profound obeisance, the guides addressed this being with a long and curiously modulated form of salutation in which the word koum was repeated several times. Volmar and his men surmised that this term was perhaps equivalent to “king” or ‘‘emperor.”
In a voice more musical than a finely keyed and chorded dulcimer, the seated being began to question the guides, and a long dialogue ensued. The earthlings were thrilled by the celestial tones, and awed by the gaze of this entity, behind whose many-faceted diamond eye they felt the workings of a colossal brain embued with incalculable knowledge and illimitable power. And they were somehow conscious that a decision was being made concerning themselves, and that their ultimate fate was now in process of determination. And when, at the close of the conversation, the throned being uttered after a significant pause a sentence of terrible and thrilling melody, they knew with a sense of esoteric fear and marvel that their fate was sealed, though what that fate might be they could not even conjecture.
The sentence had probably included, or implied, their dismissal. They were led back through the eternal corridors to the balcony where the flying platform had been left, and were then borne through mid-air above the retrograde horizons to the roof of that edifice on which the Alcyone had been drawn down. Here they were suffered to re-enter the space-vessel, and were even permitted to close the man-hole. The guides then departed; and though a throng of the metal people passed continuously about the Alcyone, or paused to stare and confer among themselves regarding it, the earthlings were not disturbed for several hours.
V
They were extremely glad to be back in the Alcyone; for their peregrinations in the red world had consumed the major part of a day; and they were hungry and thirsty, and were more than fatigued by their novel experiences and sensations. No food had been offered to them; and it was likely enough that no substances edible by human beings were to be found on the red planet.
“Perhaps,” said Volmar, “the Tloongs realize our need of rest and nourishment, and have brought us back to the spaceship for that reason. But I don’t think that they are going to let us depart in a hurry; something tells me that the Koum, or whatever they call him, has other intentions regarding us.”
There was much discussion anent the unique wonders and prodigies they had witnessed. The corporeal organization of the Tloongs and their virtual immortality, their mechanical and biological masterdom, and their amazing racial and planetary history, were enough to stagger not only the human reason but also the human imagination. Then too, there was the Tloongs’ disposition toward the crew of the space-flier, the meaning of their capture and detention, and their conjectural destiny—all of which were problems that defied solution.
Time passed in this manner; till the throng of metal-bodied beings around the flier began to disperse. Soon all of them had vanished from sight in the cupolas covering the shafts of ascent and descent. Then, abruptly as the going out of a lamp, the light faded from the ruddy sky and darkness fell upon the world. In half an hour, however, the vaulting luminescence returned as suddenly as it had departed; and some of the Tloongs re-appeared on the roof shortly afterwards. It was learned later that the half-hour of darkness was artificially induced by the use of a black ray which occluded the light; and that this time of occultation was the space required for sleep by the people of the red world.
After eating, and after the discussion that accompanied and followed the meal, the earthlings snatched a few hours of much needed slumber. When they awoke, another delegation of the Tloongs was standing outside the space-flier and was evidently trying to attract the attention of the occupants with flashes of light projected through the ports from some sort of ray-apparatus. These flashes, they realized, had served to awaken them. This time, doubtless through consideration for the respiratory needs of the earth-men, the Tloongs had not opened the man-hole. But it was obvious that they wished their visitors to come forth again, so, donning their masks and air-tanks, Volmar and his crew complied with the signalled request.
Their conductors took them on an air-platform to another of the great Babelian-piles, lying at a considerable distance on the shore of a bright purple sea whose environing cliffs were like builded walls. Indeed, it was afterwards learned that they were really such, and that the waters of the sea had been created, or at least replenished, by means of a chemical process.
The building on which they now landed, and through whose various apartments they were systematically conducted, was plainly a scientific laboratory. Hundreds of the Tloongs, with the aid of unsolvably strange and recondite machinery, were engaged in all manner of mystifying labors or experiments, many of which seemed to involve the creation of protoplasm and its development into numberlessly varied forms. The earthlings shuddered at the masses of pulsing life which crawled or lumbered in crystalline cages. Some were without limbs or verifiable organs, and others were extravagantly equipped with a myriad eyes, ears, mouths, members, and sense-organs whose use was not to be apprehended by any being with so limited a range of sensation as man.
In another section, the earth-men saw for the first time certain bodies preserved in a clear solution, which they recognized from the historic thought-pictures they had previously seen, as being the original plasmic bodies of some of the Tloongs. Later, they found out that most of these people had retained their own physical envelopes, and kept them about their households even as others might keep statues or family portraits. But some had been donated to the laboratories, where they were held as specimens for study, and were used as reference in repairing any of the metal organs and members which might have suffered damage. Tloongs engaged in such labors of restoration were to be seen toiling like plastic surgeons; and ever and anon a new subject for their ministrations entered, displaying injuries of mysterious origin, which occurred oftener about the head than any other part, and were like the ravages of some corroding acid. Also, new frames were being made for those who had tired of the old ones; and new heads of enormous capacity for brains that had outgrown their former tenements.
Here Volmar and his crew underwent one of the strangest of all their experiences in the red world. They were led before certain of the beings in this section of the laboratory, who forth with made an incredibly minute examination of their bodily structure. These beings differed from most of the Tloongs in that they possessed two sets of eyes. One of the sets was dull and lifeless during the first half of the examination but lit up with a blinding luster when all the external parts had been examined closely. Numerous life-size drawings and diagrams of each man were made on huge sheets of a parchment-like material; and when the drawings began to reveal every bone, muscle, nerve, and internal organ, it was clear that the second set of eyes owned by the examiners was similar or superior to the X-ray in its visual powers. It was a weird ordeal, and the men felt as if they were being dissected. They surmised that the Tloongs were merely gratifying their biologic curiosity regarding the formation of beings who differed so basically from themselves. The true reason was beyond the wildest dreams and maddest theorizings of the earth-men.
After the examination was completed and the drawings were all made and filed away in special cabinets, the men were shown through other parts of the laboratory, where they saw the chemical genesis of new plant-growths, and the minerals that grew visibly beneath rays designed to promote the integration of the required atomic patterns. Their guides continued, as on the previous day, to instruct them in the language by naming every object and class of person encountered; and in this way their vocabulary was materially enriched, despite the difficulty of simulating the flute-like or horn-like intonations of the Tloongs.
After this tour of inspection, the earthlings were taken back to the Alcyone once more, and were permitted another term in which to eat, sleep, and otherwise recuperate. Every day, during the weeks that followed, they were conducted on other tours, some of which were quite extensive and were made possible in one diurnal period only by the use of passenger-bearing projectiles drawn by magnetic force through underground tubes. They were even shot through the great shaft which penetrated the world, and saw the multiform wonders of the antipodes. They soon formed a general idea of the conditions of life among the Tloongs, and, after weeks of linguistic study, were able to converse in a limited manner with their hosts.
These people, they found, were exempt from all the ordinary biological needs and desires. In their pre-metallic stage, they had respired, eaten, drunk and propagated themselves in a fashion not so widely dissimilar to that of other animal types. But now they needed nothing more in the way of nourishment than the mysterious ruby-colored fluid in which their brains floated; and through which they could seemingly convey the impulse of any desired action to their metal members, and could receive most if not all of the sense-impressions transmittable by physical nerves. Indeed, it appeared that some of them were the owners of faculties which implied a radio-like extension of hearing, sight, and tactility.
Their lives were devoted wholly to invention and research. The infinite grotesqueries which they devised and created, the vast gardens and forests which they tended, the animal monstrosities which they bred in prodigious numbers, were seemingly a source of both intellectual and aesthetic gratification. They had a written literature which was mainly concerned with problems of science and algebra; and also a pictorial art which was used for the representation of historical scenes and events, and the making of anatomical designs. They possessed musical instruments, many of which were played by invisible force-waves; but all their compositions were meant to express mathematical or even astronomical symbolisms, rather than any melody or harmony appreciable by human ears.
The machines they had builded were inexhaustibly diverse and ingenious. Their astronomical instruments, as well as others resembling microscopes, were based on a principle of television. Their air-vehicles were run and levitated by means of magnetic dynamos similar to those by which the vault of metallic atoms was maintained about the planet. By the use of the same principle, they could move their towers from place to place at will, or could transport entire mountains and huge masses of soil or stone. They had harnessed the few remaining volcanoes as a source of power, and also for aesthetic displays, like a sort of fire-works. All the elements were under their control; and the rare storms of rain or snow, and other meteoric phenomena, were induced only for spectacles.
It would seem, from the knowledge and supremacy they had attained, that their existence should have been free of anything in the way of trouble, danger, or disease. Such, however, was not altogether the case. Some of them, of later years, notably the eldest and most learned among their savants, had been seized by a strange form of madness—a madness which did not affect their general powers, but was marked by anti-social impulses and actions. In particular, the inventive experiments of these beings had assumed an absolute license from which the Tloongs had heretofore refrained. Certain rapidly multiplying forms of animal, plant, or even mineral life devised by the madmen, had been loosed upon the red world at various times; and had taxed the ingenuity of their confreres ere a means of retardation and destruction could be devised. None of these menaces, however, had defied eventual control; till one of the most revered and fertile-minded of the Tloongs had himself gone insane, and had created a new type of monster, half-vegetable, half-animal, which multiplied with more celerity than any other; and had turned some specimens of it loose in the inner caverns of the red planet, where it had increased to a countless horde ere it was discovered by the fellow-savants of the mad experimentalist. The monster, by reason of its odd physical organization, was supremely difficult to destroy; for, even if blasted into a million pieces, the fragments would reunite; and any single atom, if not resolved into its constituent electrons and protons, could become in time the center of a new organism. Also, it was omnivorous to a phenomenal degree, and would devour even stone and metal, eating its way through the surface of the world from the caverns that had been sealed by molecular walls as soon as its presence was known. It was continually escaping in some new spot, often in unpeopled areas, where it would muster by hundreds and thousands and invade the cultivated portions, devouring everything that fell in its way. The Tloongs who came to the laboratories with damaged bodies or members, had all sustained their injuries in conflict with this monster, which was called the Murm. It preferred their brains to any other food, and would attack the Tloongs with unparalleled ferocity. Several had been borne down and utterly destroyed by its onslaughts. The only thing that could combat the Murm was a rare element, extremely difficult and expensive to prepare, which acted like a fatal poison when eaten by the monster. It was impossible to make a sufficient amount of the element at any one time; and therefore the red world was suffering more and more from the outbreaks of the cavern-imprisoned creatures.
VI
The earthlings learned that these malign organisms were the same which they had seen in the botanical jungle on their way to the tower inhabited by the Koum. It was not long before they witnessed other battles between the Tloongs and the rampant organisms; and they were told of more which occurred daily in different zones of the red world. On one occasion the tower of the Koum was invaded throughout its underground vaults; and some of the Murms had almost reached the royal presence before they were destroyed. The increasing number of such outbreaks was a source of serious worry to the Tloongs. Some of the invasions, occurring in remote uninhabited areas, had gained so much headway that it was impossible to annihilate all the monstrosities; and certain tracts were now virtually abandoned to them, apart from a cordon of air-vessels to prevent or at least delay their further incursions by feeding them with the lethal element, which was commonly enclosed in vegetable pulp and dropped from above. Also, their ravages in the planet’s interior were beginning to offer new and baffling problems. They were breaking through into the great shaft that ran from pole to pole, and were often found floating in the currents of levitational force. Casualties had occurred from their attacks on vessels and individuals travelling in the shaft. And, worst of all, the extent of their ramifications and self propagation was not determinable. But since their life-habit was one of perpetual feeding and pullulation, it was surmised that the underground burrows must be growing more and more extensive. Several earthquakes, which were rare things in the red planet, had recently been noted, and were attributed by savants to the condition of internal erosion caused by the Murms. It was feared that some atlantean cataclysm would eventuate sooner or later. And in the meanwhile, nothing could be done except to fight, and sometimes annihilate, the organisms who had tunneled their way to the surface. These, however, were believed to be less than a fraction of the teeming hordes who had not yet seen the light; and who, in time, would leave nothing of the planet but a gutted shell. The minds of all the metal beings, wise with the garnered lore of outlived cycles, were bent upon the problem of controlling this menace; and it was hoped that some new and efficacious method might eventually be discovered.
Volmar and his crew, however, saw comparatively little of the monstrous menace. They were taken on more tours of inspection; they saw the terraced mountains which rose till they nearly touched the coruscating vault; they saw the seas and lakes whose waters were of sundry predetermined hues, ranging from nacarat yellow to richest violet. And they saw the building of a new Babelian edifice, by means of integrators that organized the desert sand in ever-lifting walls and floors, like Ilion rising to the music of Apollo.
Why the Tloongs should detain the Alcyone’s crew, and go to so much trouble in familiarizing them with all the conditions of life on the red planet, was still a mystery. The care that was taken in exhibiting all the natural phenomena and mechanical wonders, was indeed remarkable. Also, the attitude of this people was beyond analysis: it could not be known whether they respected or despised their visitors, whether they were friendly or unfriendly at heart. Their gestures, their words, their courtesies toward the strangers, though testifying to an enormous heritage of erudite and highly evolved civilization, were soulless and cryptic as those of a machine. Their precise feelings, their ultimate intentions, remained an enigma.
One day, following the half-hour of artificial darkness, a new delegation of the Tloongs, comprising several of the four-eyed surgeon type, appeared before the Alcyone. On being admitted, they announced in their musical metallic voices, with many formal genuflections, that the Koum had sent them to conduct the strangers on a special journey. As usual, nothing was said regarding the objective of the journey.
Expecting another series of ultra-terrestrial scenes and marvels, the earthlings issued from the space-flier with their guides. They mounted an air-platform, and were taken to the laboratory they had once before visited, on the cliffs above a bright purple sea. Here, in the section where they had been examined so minutely, where drawings of all their organs and members had been made, an unbelievable sight awaited them. Several of the Tloong workman were just putting the final touches to a standing row of metallic bodies which duplicated in every detail, even to the respirative masks, the clothed bodies of Volmar and his men! These, it was evident, had been constructed from the drawings.
The earth-men stared in stupefaction at the metal replicas of their physical selves; and a thought which they hardly dared to formulate arose in their minds.
“Well,” said Roverton, trying to banish the thought, “the Tloongs are certainly the prize manufacturers of mannikins. Those things are so devilishly lifelike that one expects them to move or speak.”
“No terrestrial sculptor could do more,” agreed Volmar. Then he added slowly: “I wonder what the idea is. Probably they want to retain, along with their drawings, a plastic representation of our appearance.”
“Well, I hope it’s only that,” said Roverton softly.
Before the discussion could be continued, the leader of the Tloong delegation, a large-headed being with a physiognomy of recherché fantasticality, began to address the earthlings. They could understand no more than half of his speech, which seemed to be couched in a highly technical jargon, comparable to that employed by medical men. But this half was enough to fill them with horror. The Koum (said the Tloong) had decreed that incorruptible metal bodies should be made for the visitors, that their brains should be transferred to these bodies, and that they should remain permanently in the red world. In time, it was hoped, by virtue of their ensuing immortality and long contact with the supremely civilized people of this world, they might develop into beings of a high order of intelligence. Through motives of benignity, as well as curiosity regarding the biological result, the Koum had decided upon this experiment when he first beheld the earthlings; and the operation was to be performed as soon as the Koum should make his appearance to watch and supervise it.
As he ended his address, the Tloong pointed to a huge slab of ebon stone at one side of the room. Several surgeons, all equipped with formidable knives and saws, were standing beside it. It was obvious that the men were expected to lie down upon the slab and await the ministrations of these beings.
Volmar, who had learned to speak the language more fully and articulately than the others, began to expostulate, and tried to explain that he and his men preferred to inhabit their own fleshly bodies, no matter how frail, corruptible and faulty they might be. They appreciated (he went on) the extraordinary thoughtfulness of the Koum, and the trouble to which the Tloongs had gone in designing these indestructible metallic doppelgangers. But nevertheless this signal honor and proof of consideration must be regretfully declined.
The Tloongs, it was evident, were greatly puzzled. After some deliberation, their leader said that such a refusal was quite unheard-of and unthinkable, and that the will of the Koum must be obeyed without demur. The reluctance of the earth-men, he added, could be due only to their immature and imperfect mental development; it was sheer folly, and could not be permitted by the wise and benevolent people of the red world. If necessary, the operation would be performed by force. And when their benighted brains were free from the trammels of perishable matter, the earthlings would come to realize the kindness that had been shown them.
“Of all the pickles!” exclaimed Roverton. “Are we going to submit to this?”
“No.” said Volmar quietly, as he drew his automatic, and motioned the others to follow suit. All of them obeyed; and each man covered one of the surgeons with the muzzle of his gun. The Tloongs had seen these weapons before, but had given them only a cursory and perhaps rather contemptuous inspection; and Volmar and his crew had carried them at all times.
As the surgeons paused, doubtful of the meaning of this action and uncertain of the course of action to take, the Koum entered with a body-guard of cyclopean-headed beings chosen from among the most renowned savants of the red world. At the sight of the levelled automatics, and the hesitating surgeons, he uttered a few words of inquiry. Then, learning of the earthlings’ refusal, he eyed Volmar and the others with a contemplative stare such as a god might turn upon a group of rebellious insects.
“Proceed,” he commanded the surgeons.
Bearing in their metal members fuming censer-like vessels filled with a powerful anesthetic drug, the surgeons approached the earth-men. Their cold, mechanical movements, their two sets of eyes that were all burning with a fiery phosphorescence, betrayed no emotion whatever. One of them stepped up to Volmar, and holding his vaporing vessel close to the Captain’s face, reached for the fastenings of the respirative mask.
A moment more, and the mask would have been torn away, and Volmar would have been forced to inhale the anesthetic fumes of censer. But thrusting his automatic into one of the surgeon’s glowing eyes, Volmar pulled the trigger. There was a crash as of splintered crystal, louder and higher than the weapon’s report, and the surgeon staggered back and fell motionless to the floor. A red fluid, brighter and thinner than blood, oozed from his shattered eye, bearing fragments of mineral together with clotted shreds of a greyish-green substance that must have been his brain.
The other surgeons hesitated when they saw their companion fall. The Koum, however, strode forward with no sign or fear of dubiety, lifting a long tubular instrument with three mouths, which he aimed at Volmar, who, in turn, had covered the great diamond eye of the Koum with his automatic. What would have happened next is doubtful; but at this moment there occurred a singular interruption, in the form of a high, strident, ever-mounting clangor which seemed to come from all sides and to fill the whole edifice with its disquieting vibration. It came from certain gongs at the heart of the building, which were operable from any planetary distance by force-waves. At this sound, which was clearly an alarm, and had a plainly understood import, the Koum and all the other Tloongs appeared to forget their designs on the earthlings, and rushed toward the outer galleries and balconies, uttering a babel of shrill, disordered cries. From certain words that they were able to distinguish, Volmar and his men inferred that a tremendous outbreak of the subterranean organisms had taken place, and that there had been more than one serious cataclysm due to the continued underground erosion.
Unheeded by any of the Tloongs, who had been thrown into a veritable pandemonium, the earth-men sought their way toward the terrace-like balcony on which they had alighted from the air-platform.
“If we can seize the platform,” said Volmar, “we may have a chance of ultimate escape. By the way, who knows anything about the mechanism of the platform?”
“Lead me to it,” returned Jasper. “I’ve seen how they run those vessels; and I’m sure I could operate one of them.”
VII
The corridors through which they passed were interminable; and a wild and swiftly-growing confusion prevailed everywhere. The whole building was full of dissonant clangors and outcries. The gongs of alarm continued to ring, punctuating the pandemonium with their intolerable stridors; and ever and anon, above the voices of the Tloongs, there was the crash of some falling table or overturned retort or other chemical vessel. Some of the glowing air-suspended spheres by which the rooms and corridors were lit had gone out, or had fallen to the floor, where they burned fiercely, and seemed to ignite the very stone with a gradually spreading flame. The Tloongs were seemingly paralyzed by panic; and they ran to and fro in an aimless, frenzied manner, as if they had forgotten all the lore and wisdom of aeonian life.
As the earthlings neared the balcony, they heard a roar that drowned all other noises—a roar that was like the continual detonation of inestimable tons of some high explosive. It came from the direction of the purple sea. The building began to tremble with the vibration of the sound, and also with what was unmistakably a terrific earthquake. Rents appeared in the floors and ceilings, the pillars twisted like reeds, the walls reeled in a convulsion that never ceased but became more and more violent. The floor of the last corridors was pitching downward at a perilous degree, when Volmar and his men rushed through them and reached the balcony.
Here they beheld an appalling sight. The sea below had disappeared, leaving a rent and fissured bottom of bare, slimy stone at a vertiginous depth. And all the cliffs were riven in tremendous chasms extending through the landscape as far as the eye could see, to the very horizon; and from out the chasms a horde of monsters was pouring endlessly, bubbling up from the depths of the planet in noisome and irrepressible ebullition, to overflow the sea-bottom, to climb up the cliffs, to inundate the plain and to surround the laboratory and the other edifices of the red world. As Volmar and his men looked down from the slanting verge, they saw the seething of the loathly shapeless organisms far below, where they had formed a solid mass about the base of the huge tower.
Many of the Tloongs were rushing up and down; and only a small minority seemed to have enough presence of mind to man the various air-platforms that stood about the balcony. The others were gazing stupidly, or with loud violin-like wails, on the ruin of their world. Luckily the platform used by the earth-men and their conductors was still in its place. Unhindered by any of the Tloongs, the men ran toward it, mounted it, and Jasper seized the lever by which the mechanism worked.
Even as he pulled the lever, another throng of the metal beings entered the balcony, pursued by a horde of swarming monsters, some of which must have penetrated the building from caverns below its nether vaults. The Koum was among the throng, and was grappling in a death-struggle with three of the organisms, who had fastened upon him with their multiple mouths. Others of the Tloongs went down beneath similar assaults as they reached the open air; and a medley of metallic moans and shrieks from inner rooms and hallways testified to the downfall of hundreds more.
One of the monsters had wrapped itself around the Koum’s enormous head, and had muffled his whole face from sight. He staggered blindly, and fell in a mad convulsion of clattering limbs; and his fall loosened one of the monster’s folds for an instant, revealing a large irregular hole that had been eaten in his forehead. A rill of ruby liquid was gushing forth and a mass of bluish and deeply convoluted brain-matter was projecting from the hole beneath the suction of the organism, whose multiple mouths were dripping with dissolved metal as well as the sustenance it had drawn from within. Then, as the Koum lay still, the fold returned, covering his entire head like a massive caul, and was re-applied to its frightful labor.
All this had happened in a few moments, while the platform was rising from the balcony. The helpless disorder of the Tloongs, and the diabolical speed and expedition shown by their assailants, were like something beheld in an evil delirium, and were strangely unreal at the time. Afterwards, the men were to recall the sight with profound terror, and were often to awake sweating from dreams in which its unexampled horrors were repeated.
The platform soared in air with a growing momentum, as the throng of metal beings reached the tilting edge in their mortal combat. Some of the Tloongs went hurtling into space with their formless and multiform adversaries from the pressure of the mêlée behind them; and it could now be seen that the shaken building had slanted like a falling column. As the platform rose to a level with its roof beneath Jaspers’ guidance, the great tower assumed an even sharper list; and then, with a detonation that was like a million peals of never-ending thunder, it plunged from the high cliff into the sea-drained abyss. The platform was nearly caught by its toppling verge, and was tossed like a feather in the maelstrom of gulfward-rushing air engendered by its fall. It was all that Jasper could do to right the vessel and steer it free from that atmospheric torrent.
The platform retrieved the level it had momentarily lost, only to plunge amid an elemental chaos. There were sudden hurricanes that began in mid-air, there were tornadoes that swooped from above or surged from beneath to buffet the vessel as it flew athwart the riven and reeling plain that was still shaken by incessant seismic throes. All the forces of nature, as well as the buildings and mechanisms of the Tloongs, were being thrown into catastrophic disorder, as the monster-eaten soil collapsed or was upheaved over hemispheric areas. The Murms were teeming everywhere, the plain was mottled with their spreading armies, and every new fissure vomited forth its boiling hordes. Other vessels, laden with Tloongs, were passed by the earth-men; but few of them were making any effort to fight the organisms. Their crews were apparently so demoralized with terror that they could not even guide the platforms in the mounting tempests; and many vessels pitched to the ground, where they were instantly overrun and buried from sight by the avid monsters, mad for the metal-sharded brains that they esteemed above any other delicacy. To see those creatures sucking forth the cerebral matter of the Tloongs like meat from a shell-fish, was enough to sicken the earth-men for life.
Jasper steered as directly as he could toward the far-off edifice on which the Alcyone was held captive. It was a voyage through an aerial bedlam, through an ever-rising frenzy of elements with planetary paroxysms of doom and destruction. The earth-men saw the downfall of more Babelian towers, and others that soared in air and careened away toward the tossing and rolling horizons when their magnetic engines went wild beneath the assault of the escalading organisms. There were realm-wide areas that had fallen in, leaving unfathomable pits; there were new chasms that seemed to divide the entire topography of the planet or even descend to its core; there were water-spouts and volcanoes that aspired in typhonian columns of flame and vapor to the ruddy vault; there were thick clouds of an ebon blackness that gathered in mid-air with legerdemainic speed, and lightnings that netted or sheeted the whole welkin with violescent fire; there were brief intervals of sudden darkness, and momentary brightenings of the red vault to an insupportable candescence.
Somehow, beneath the skillful hand of Jasper, the platform held its course through all this elementary pandemonium. It was flung back and forth in the instantaneous hurricanes, it was tossed from level to level of the wild and shrieking air, it was mantled with cimmerian night and shrouded with electric fire. There were queer alternations of temperature; there were zones of insufferable heat through which the vessel passed to an absolute etheric or trans-arctic zero that would have turned the earth-men into statues of ice if it had lasted for more than a moment. The sound-phenomena that accompanied and followed all these cataclysmic manifestations were equally stupendous: the thunder of winds and lightning was mingled with, and surmounted by, the roar of widening rifts and chasms and the falling towers and wrecked or deranged machinery of the Tloongs. There were brazen clangors that climbed above the storm like the trumpet-calls of some demonian army in disaster; there were dull thuddings and pulsations of subterrene mechanisms that gave an unceasing ground-note to the whole infernal symphony; and from out the air on every side, there came the ringing of frantic gongs and the desperate moaning and wailing of the Tloongs, doubtless conveyed on disordered force-waves from widely remote areas, to add an overtone of supernatural terror.
At length the platform neared its destination. The tower on which the Alcyone was held began to heave from a horizon that was notched and serried with fissures. Soon it could be seen that the tower was pitching dangerously, and that its downfall was imminent. A great crack was broadening in its lower stories, and the plain around it was tossing like a sea, when Jasper landed the platform beside the space-vessel. Tloongs were running aimlessly about the roof; and some of them were battling with organisms who had already climbed the innumerable tiers of rooms and galleries to seek them out. But to all this the earthlings paid no heed, as they sprang from the platform and mounted one by one the steel ladder of the ether-ship.
Volmar came last; and he had no sooner closed the man-hole, when the building’s roof began to tilt like the prow of a sinking ship.
“Quick! We must start the engines!” Volmar cried.
A half-minute of utmost dubiety and anxiety followed, as Jasper set the machinery going and seized the steering-rod. If the ship were still thralled by the magnetic attraction that had drawn it down, they would plunge to destruction with the tower and its people. But if the force were broken, they might escape.
To the supreme relief of the earth-men, the Alcyone rose with a familiar lightness, and lifted above the tower. Even as it rose, the entire plain beneath appeared to collapse, as if the red world had caved in upon its hollow center, leaving a gulf that was hundreds of miles wide, and from which there issued a sound that was like the thunder of stricken planets. The Alcyone was tossed in an irresistable vortex of roaring and warring elements; and then, from the heavens above, there fell an inundating wave of darkness that was not darkness, but rather a red cloud of unknown origin and nature. The cloud enveloped the ether-ship, it clung to the ports till it blinded them, and the men within could see nothing. Then, in a flash of unhoped-for illumination, they were free from the red darkness and were lifting into the cold light of Polaris. There was no longer any sign of the ruddy vault; and looking back at the planet they had left, they saw that the red cloud was settling down on its cloven and pitted surface. Its ruinous mountains and towers were beginning to re-emerge; and among them a dull and lifeless dust of dark copper was swirling in twisted columns, was dancing like a million devils, to fall at last in a universal shroud on the dying world.