Kitabı oku: «Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930», sayfa 5

CHAPTER VII

Unspoken Love

Unspoken love! I think if I had yielded to the impulse of my heart, I would have poured out all those protestations of a lover’s ecstasy, incongruous here upon this starlit public deck, to a girl I hardly knew. I think, too, she might have received them with a tender acquiescence. The starlight was mirrored in her dark eyes. Misty eyes, with great reaches of unfathomable space in their depths. Yet I felt their tenderness.

Unfathomable strangeness of love! Who am I to write of it, with all the poets of all the ages striving to express the unexpressible? A bond, strangely fashioned by nature, between me and this little dark-haired Earth beauty. As though marked by the stars we were destined to be lovers…

Thus ran the romance of my unspoken thoughts. But I was sitting quietly in the deck chair, striving to regard her gentle beauty impersonally. And saying:

“But Miss Prince, why are you and your brother going to Ferrok-Shahn? His business–”

Even as I voiced it, I hated myself for such a question. So nimble is the human mind that mingled with my rhapsodies of love was my need for information of George Prince…

“Oh,” she said, “this is pleasure, not business, for George.” It seemed to me that a shadow crossed her expressive face. But it was gone in an instant, and she smiled. “We have always wanted to travel. We are alone in the world, you know–our parents died when we were children.”

I filled in her pause. “You will like Mars–so many interesting things to see.”

She nodded. “Yes, I understand so. Our Earth is so much the same all over, cast all in one mould.”

“But a hundred or two hundred years ago it was not, Miss Prince. I have read how the picturesque Orient, differing from–well, Great-New York, or London, for instance–”

“Transportation did that,” she interrupted eagerly. “Made everything the same–the people all look alike–dress alike.”

We discussed it. She had an alert, eager mind, childlike with its curiosity, yet strangely matured. And her manner was naïvely earnest. Yet this was no clinging vine, this little Anita Prince. There was a firmness, a hint of masculine strength in her chin, and in her manner.

“If I were a man, what wonders I could achieve in this marvelous age!” Her sense of humor made her laugh at herself. “Easy for a girl to say that,” she added.

“You have greater wonders to achieve, Miss Prince,” I said impulsively.

“Yes? What are they?” She had a very frank and level gaze, devoid of coquetry.

My heart was pounding. “The wonders of the next generation. A little son, cast in your own gentle image–”

What madness, this clumsy brash talk! I choked it off.

But she took no offense. The dark rose-petals of her cheeks were mantled deeper red, but she laughed.

“That is true.” She turned abruptly serious. “I should not laugh. The wonders of the next generation–conquering humans marching on…” Her voice trailed away. My hand went to her arm. Strange tingling something which poets call love! It burned and surged from my trembling fingers into the flesh of her forearm.

The starlight glowed in her eyes. She seemed to be gazing, not at the silver-lit deck, but away into distant reaches of the future. And she murmured:

“A little son, cast in my own gentle image. But with the strength of his father…”

Our moment. Just a breathless moment given us as we sat there with my hand burning her arm, as though we both might be seeing ourselves joined in a new individual–a little son, cast in his mother’s gentle image and with the strength of his father. Our moment, and then it was over. A step sounded. I sat back. The giant gray figure of Miko came past, his great cloak swaying, with his clanking sword-ornament beneath it. His bullet head, with its close-clipped hair, was hatless. He gazed at us, swaggered past, and turned the deck corner.

Our moment was gone. Anita said conventionally, “It has been pleasant to talk with you, Mr. Haljan.”

“But we’ll have many more,” I said. “Ten days–”

“You think we’ll reach Ferrok-Shahn on schedule?”

“Yes. I think so… As I was saying, Miss Prince, you’ll enjoy Mars. A strange, aggressively forward-looking people.”

An oppression seemed on her. She stirred in her chair.

“Yes, they are,” she said vaguely. “My brother and I know many Martians in Great-New York.” She checked herself abruptly. Was she sorry she had said that? It seemed so.

Miko was coming back. He stopped this time before us.

“Your brother would see you, Anita. He sent me to bring you to his room.”

The glance he shot me had a touch of insolence. I stood up, and he towered a head over me.

Anita said, “Oh yes. I’ll come.”

I bowed. “I will see you again, Miss Prince. I thank you for a pleasant half-hour.”

The Martian led her away. Her little figure was like a child with a giant. It seemed, as they passed the length of the deck with me staring after them, that he took her arm roughly. And that she shrank from him in fear.

And they did not go inside. As though to show me that he had merely taken her from me, he stopped at a distant deck window and stood talking to her. Once he picked her up as one would pick up a child to show it some distant object through the window.

“A little son with the strength of his father…” Her words echoed in my mind. Was Anita afraid of this Martian’s wooing? Yet held to him by some power he might have over her brother? The vagrant thought struck me.

Was it that?

CHAPTER VIII

A Scream in the Night

We kept, on the Planetara, always the time and routine of our port of departure. The rest of that afternoon and evening were a blank of confusion to me. Anita’s words; the touch of my hand upon her arm; that vast realm of what might be for us, like a glimpse of a magic land of happiness which I had seen in her eyes, and perhaps she had seen in mine–all this surged within me.

I wandered about the vessel. I was not hungry. I did not go to the dining salon for dinner. I carried Johnson food and water to his cage; and sat, with my heat-cylinder upon him, listening to his threats of what would happen when he could complain to the Line’s higher officials.

But what was Johnson doing carrying a plan of the ship’s control rooms in his pockets? And worse: How had he dared open Snap’s box in the helio-room and abstract the code pass-words for this voyage? Without them we would be an outlawed vessel, subject to arrest if any patrol hailed us. Had Johnson been planning to sell those pass-words to Miko? I thought so. I tried to get the confession out of him, but could not.

I had a brief consultation with Captain Carter. He was genuinely apprehensive now. The Planetara carried no long-range guns, and very few side-arms. A half-dozen of the heat-ray hand projectors; a few old-fashioned weapons of explosion-rifles and automatic revolvers. And hand projectors with the new Benson curve-light. We had models of this for curved vision, so that one might see around a corner, so to speak. And with them, we could project the heat-ray in a curve as well.

The weapons were all in Carter’s chart-room, save the few we officers always carried. Carter was apprehensive, but of what he could not say. He had not thought that our plan to stop at the Moon for treasure could affect this outward voyage. Any danger would be upon the way back, when the Planetara would be adequately guarded with long-range electronic guns, and manned with police-soldiers.

But now we were practically defenseless…

I had a moment with Venza, but she had nothing new to communicate to me.

And for half an hour I chatted with George Prince. He seemed a gay, pleasant young man. I could almost have fancied I liked him. Or was it because he was Anita’s brother? He told me how he looked forward to traveling with her on Mars. No, he had never been there before, he said.

He had a measure of Anita’s earnest naïve personality. Or was he a very clever scoundrel, with irony lurking in his soft voice, and a chuckle that he could so befool me?

“We’ll talk again, Haljan. You interest me–I’ve enjoyed it.”

He sauntered away from me, joining the saturnine Ob Hahn, with whom presently I heard him discussing religion.

The arrest of Johnson had caused considerable comment among the passengers. A few had seen me drag him forward to the cage. The incident had been the subject of passenger discussion all afternoon. Captain Carter had posted a notice to the effect that Johnson’s accounts had been found in serious error, and that Dr. Frank for this voyage would act in his stead.

It was near midnight when Snap and I closed and sealed the helio-room and started for the chart-room, where we were to meet with Captain Carter and the other officers. The passengers had nearly all retired. A game was in progress in the smoking room, but the deck was almost deserted.

Snap and I were passing along one of the interior corridors. The stateroom doors, with the illumined names of the passengers, were all closed. The metal grid of the floor echoed our footsteps. Snap was in advance of me. His body suddenly rose in the air. He went like a balloon to the ceiling, struck it gently, and all in a heap came floating down and landed on the floor!

“What in the infernal!–”

He was laughing as he picked himself up. But it was a brief laugh. We knew what had happened: the artificial gravity-controls in the base of the ship, which by magnetic force gave us normality aboard, were being tampered with! For just this instant, this particular small section of this corridor had been cut off. The slight bulk of the Planetara, floating in space, had no appreciable gravity pull on Snap’s body, and the impulse of his step as he came to the unmagnetized area of the corridor had thrown him to the ceiling. The area was normal now. Snap and I tested it gingerly.

He gripped me. “That never went wrong by accident, Gregg! Someone down there–”

We rushed to the nearest descending ladder. In the deserted lower room the bank of dials stood neglected. A score of dials and switches were here, governing the magnetism of different areas of the ship. There should have been a night operator, but he was gone.

Then we saw him lying nearby, sprawled face down on the floor! In the silence and dim lurid glow of the fluorescent tubes, we stood holding our breaths, peering and listening. No one here.

The guard was not dead. He lay unconscious from a blow on the head. A brawny fellow. We had him revived in a few moments. A broadcast flash of the call-buzz brought Dr. Frank in haste from the chart-room.

“What’s the matter?”

We pointed at the unconscious man. “Someone was here,” I said hastily. “Experimenting with the magnetic switches. Evidently unfamiliar with them–pulling one or another to test their workings and so see the reactions on the dials.”

We told him what had happened to Snap in the upper corridor.

Dr. Frank revived the guard in a moment. He was no worse off for the episode, save a lump on his head, and a nasty headache.

But he had little to tell us. He had heard a step. Saw nothing–and then had been struck on the head, by some invisible assailant.

We left him nursing his head, sitting belligerent at his post. Armed now with my heat-ray cylinder which I loaned him.

“Strange doings this voyage,” he told us. “All the crew knows it–all been talkin’ about it. I stick it out now, but when we get back home I’m done with this star travelin’. I belong on the sea anyway. A good old freighter is all right for me.”

We hurried back to the upper level. We would indeed have to plan something at this chart-room conference. This was the first tangible attack our adversaries had made.

We were on the passenger deck headed for the chart-room when all three of us stopped short, frozen with horror. Through the silent passenger quarters a scream rang out! A girl’s shuddering, gasping scream. Terror in it. Horror. Or a scream of agony. In the silence of the dully vibrating ship it was utterly horrible. It lasted an instant–a single long scream; then was abruptly stilled.

And with blood pounding my temples and rushing like ice through my veins, I recognized it.

Anita!

CHAPTER IX

The Murder in A 22

“Good God, what was that?” Dr. Frank’s face had gone white in the starlight. Snap stood like a statue of horror.

The deck here was patched as always, silver radiance from the deck ports. The empty deck chairs stood about. The scream was stilled, but now we heard a commotion inside–the rasp of opening cabin doors; questions from frightened passengers; the scurry of feet.

I found my voice. “Anita! Anita Prince!”

“Come on!” shouted Snap. “Was it the Prince girl? I thought so too! In her stateroom, A 22!” He was dashing for the lounge archway.

Dr. Frank and I followed. I realized that we passed the deck door and window of A 22. But they were dark, and evidently sealed on the inside. The dim lounge was in a turmoil; passengers standing at their cabin doors. I heard Sir Arthur Coniston:

“I say, what was that?”

“Over there,” said another man. “Come back inside, Martha.” He shoved his wife back. “Mr. Haljan!” He plucked at me as I went past.

I shouted, “Go back to your rooms! We want order here–keep back!”

We came to the twin doors of A 22 and A 20. Both were closed. Dr. Frank was in advance of Snap and me. He paused at the sound of Captain Carter’s voice behind us.

“Was it from in there? Wait a moment!”

Carter dashed up; he had a large heat-ray projector in his hand. He shoved us aside. “Let me in first. Is the door sealed? Gregg, keep those passengers back!”

The door was not sealed. Carter burst into the room. I heard him gasp, “Good God!”

Snap and I shoved back three or four crowding passengers, and in that instant Dr. Frank had been in the room and out again.

“There’s been an accident! Get back, Gregg! Snap, help him keep the crowd away.” He shoved me forcibly.

From within, Carter was shouting, “Keep them out! Where are you, Frank? Come back here! Send a flash for Balch–I want Balch!”

Dr. Frank went back into the room and banged the cabin door upon Snap and me. I was unarmed–I had loaned my cylinder to the guard in the lower corridor. Weapon in hand, Snap forced the panic-stricken passengers back to their rooms.

“It’s all right! An accident! Miss Prince is hurt.”

Snap reassured them glibly; but he knew no more about it than I. Moa, with a night-robe drawn tight around her thin, tall figure, edged up to me.

“What has happened, Set Haljan?”

I gazed around for her brother Miko, but did not see him.

“An accident,” I said shortly. “Go back to your room. Captain’s orders.”

She eyed me and then retreated. Snap was threatening everybody with his cylinder. Balch dashed up. “What in the hell? Where’s Carter?”

“In there.” I pounded on A 22. It opened cautiously. I could see only Carter, but I heard the murmuring voice of Dr. Frank through the interior connecting door to A 20.

The captain rasped, “Get out, Haljan! Oh, is that you, Balch? Come in.” He admitted the older officer and slammed the door again upon me. And immediately reopened it.

“Gregg, keep the passengers quiet. Tell them everything’s all right. Miss Prince got frightened, that’s all. Then go up to the turret. Tell Blackstone what’s happened.”

“But I don’t know what’s happened,” I protested miserably.

Carter was grim and white. He whispered, “I think it may turn out to be murder, Gregg! No, not dead yet–Dr. Frank is trying–Don’t stand there like an ass, man! Get to the turret! Verify our trajectory–no–wait–”

The captain was almost incoherent. “Wait a minute, I don’t mean that! Tell Snap to watch his helio-room. Gregg, you and Blackstone stay in the chart-room. Arm yourselves and guard our weapons. By God, this murderer, whoever he is–”

I stammered, “If–if she dies–will you flash us word?”

He stared at me strangely. “I’ll be there presently, Gregg.”

He slammed the door upon me.

I followed his orders, but it was like a dream of horror. The turmoil of the ship gradually quieted. Snap went to the helio-room; Blackstone and I sat in the tiny steel chart-room. How much time passed, I do not know. I was confused. Anita hurt! She might die… Murdered… But why? By whom? Had George Prince been in his own room when the attack came? I thought now I recalled hearing the low murmur of his voice in there with Dr. Frank and Carter.

Where was Miko? It stabbed at me. I had not seen him among the passengers in the lounge.

Carter came into the chart-room. “Gregg, you get to bed–you look like a ghost!”

“But–”

“She’s not dead–she may live. Dr. Frank and her brother are with her. They’re doing all they can.” He told us what had happened. Anita and George Prince had both been asleep, each in their respective rooms. Someone unknown had opened Anita’s corridor door.

“Wasn’t it sealed?” I demanded.

“Yes. But the intruder opened it.”

“Burst it? I didn’t think it was broken.”

“It wasn’t broken. The assailant opened it somehow, and assaulted Miss Prince–shot her in the chest with a heat-ray. Her left lung.”

“She is conscious?” Balch demanded.

“Yes. But she did not see who did it. Nor did Prince. Her scream awakened him, but the intruder evidently fled out the corridor door of A 22, the way he entered.”

I stood weak and shaken at the chart-room entrance. “A little son, cast in the gentle image of his mother. But with the strength of his father…” But Anita–dying, perhaps; and all my dreams were fading into a memory of what might have been.

“You go to bed, Gregg–we don’t need you.”

I was glad enough to get away. I would lie down for an hour, and then go to Anita’s stateroom. I’d demand that Dr. Frank let me see her, if only for a moment.

I went to the stern deck-space where my cubby was located. My mind was confused, but some instinct within me made me verify the seals of my door and window. They were intact. I entered cautiously, switched on the dimmer of the tube-lights, and searched the room. It had only a bunk, my tiny desk, a chair and clothes robe.

There was no evidence of any intruder here. I set my door and window alarm. Then I audiphoned to the helio-room.

“Snap?”

“Yes.”

I told him about Anita. Carter cut in on us from the chart-room. “Stop that, you fools!”

We cut off. Fully dressed, I flung myself on my bed. Anita might die…

I must have fallen into a tortured sleep. I was awakened by the sound of my alarm buzzer. Someone was tampering with my door! Then the buzzer ceased; the marauder outside must have found a way of silencing it. But it had done its work–awakened me.

I had switched off the light; my cubby was Stygian dark. A heat-cylinder was in the bunk-bracket over my head; I searched for it, pried it loose softly.

I was fully awake. Alert. I could hear a faint sizzling–someone outside trying to unseal the door. In the darkness, cylinder in hand, I crept from the bunk. Crouched at the door. This time I would capture or kill this night prowler.

The sizzling was faintly audible. My door-seal was breaking. Upon impulse I reached for the door, jerked it open.

No one there! The starlit segment of deck was empty. But I had leaped, and I struck a solid body, crouching in the doorway. A giant man. Miko!

His electronized metallic robe burned my hands. I lunged against him–I was almost as surprised as he. I shot, but the stab of heat evidently missed him.

The shock of my encounter close-circuited his robe; he materialized in the starlight. A brief, savage encounter. He struck the weapon from my hand. He had dropped his hydrogen torch, and tried to grip me. But I twisted away from his hold.

“So it’s you!”

“Be quiet, Gregg Haljan! I only want to talk.”

Without warning, a stab of radiance shot from a weapon in his hand. It caught me. Ran like ice through my veins. Seized and numbed my limbs.

I fell helpless to the deck. Nerves and muscles paralyzed. My tongue was thick and inert. I could not speak, nor move. But I could see Miko bending over me. And hear him:

“I don’t want to kill you, Haljan. We need you.”

He gathered me up like a bundle in his huge arms; carried me swiftly across the deserted deck.

Snap’s helio-room in the network under the dome was diagonally overhead. A white actinic light shot from it–caught us, bathed us. Snap had been awake; had heard the slight commotion of our encounter.

His voice rang shrilly: “Stop! I’ll shoot!” His warning siren rang out to arouse the ship. His spotlight clung to us.

Miko ran with me a few steps. Then he cursed and dropped me, fled away. I fell like a sack of carbide to the deck. My senses faded into blackness…

“He’s all right now.”

I was in the chart-room, with Captain Carter, Snap and Dr. Frank bending over me. The surgeon said,

“Can you speak now, Gregg?”

I tried it. My tongue was thick, but it would move. “Yes.”

I was soon revived. I sat up, with Dr. Frank vigorously rubbing me.

“I’m all right.” I told them what had happened.

Captain Carter said abruptly, “Yes, we know that. And it was Miko also who killed Anita Prince. She told us before she died.”

“Died!..” I leaped to my feet. “She … died…”

“Yes, Gregg. An hour ago, Miko got into her stateroom and tried to force his love on her. She repulsed him–he killed her.”

It struck me blank. And then with a rush came the thought, “He says Miko killed her…”

I heard myself stammering, “Why–why we must get him!” I gathered my wits; a surge of hate swept me; a wild desire for vengeance.

“Why, by God, where is he? Why don’t you go get him? I’ll get him–I’ll kill him, I tell you!”

“Easy, Gregg!” Dr. Frank gripped me.

The captain said gently, “We know how you feel, Gregg. She told us before she died.”

“I’ll bring him in here to you! But I’ll kill him, I tell you!”

“No you won’t, lad. You’re hysterical now. We don’t want him killed, not attacked even. Not yet. We’ll explain later.”

They sat me down, calming me.

Anita dead. The door of the shining garden was closed. A brief glimpse, given to me and to her of what might have been. And now she was dead…