Atomic - Chapter 2: The Other Peril

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Chapter two of a tomic by Henry Cutner. This LibriVox
recording is in the public domain. Chapter two, The Other Peril.
Some one was shaking me. I sat up, dizzily, meeting
a stare that I recognized only after what seemed infinities
of slow waking Davidson, his pink face frightened, shook me again.

(00:22):
What happened? What was it? Jim? Are you all right?
Wake up? Jim? What was it? I let him help
me to my feet. The room began to study around me,
but it reeled sharply again when I saw what lay
before the ticker, the tape looping down about him, face
down on the floor, blood still crawling from the bullet
hole in his back. Williams never saw who got him.

(00:44):
It must have been the same flash that blinded me.
I felt my cheek for the powder burn that must
have scorched it. As the unseen killer fire passed my face.
I only felt numbness. I was numb all over, even
my brain. But one thing had to be settled. In
a hurt. How much time had elapsed? Had that deadly
message gone out while I lay here helpless? I made

(01:06):
it to the ticker in two unsteady strides. The tape
that looped the fallen Williams still bore its dangerous message.
Whoever fired past my cheek had fired for another reason
then than this message, of course, for how could any
one else have known its importance? There was a bewildering
mystery here, but I had no time to think about it.

(01:26):
I tore off the tape, crumpled it into my pocket.
I flipped the ticker switch and sent a reverse message
out as fast as my shaking hand could operate the machine. Fitzgerald, Urgent, Urgent,
meet me at Ring Post twenty seven a m. Leaving headquarters.
Now do nothing until I arrived. Urgent, signed j Owen.
Davidson watched me round eyed as I vised for a helicopter.

(01:49):
He put out his hand as I turned toward the door.
I forced myself to stop and think. Well, I said,
He didn't speak. He only glanced at Williams's body on
the floor. No, I said, I didn't kill him, but
I might have if that had turned out to be
the only way. There's trouble at the lake. I hesitated.
You were there, too, Dave, Do you know what I mean?

(02:12):
I wasn't quite sure what I was trying to find out.
I waited for his answer, you're the boss was out,
he said, Still, it wasn't any mutation that did this.
It was a bullet. You've got to know who shot him, Jim.
I don't though I blanked out something. My mind whirled
and then studied again. With a sudden idea, I put

(02:33):
a hand to my forehead, dizzy with trying to remember
things still close to me. Maybe something like a mutation
had a part in it. At that, I conceded, maybe
we're not alone in wanting to keep the lake quiet.
I wonder could something from the ring have blanked me
out deliberately so I wouldn't see Williams as killed. But
there wasn't time to follow even that speculation through, I

(02:55):
said impatiently. The point is, Dave, one man's death doesn't
mean a thing. Right now. I've stopped, unable to go on.
I didn't need to. What do you want me to do?
Davidson asked? That was better. I knew I could depend
on him, and I might need someone dependable very soon.
Take over here, I said, I'm going to see Fitzgerald
and listen, Dave, this is urgent. Hold any messages Fitzgerald's

(03:18):
sense any understand check, he said. His eyes were still
asking questions as I went out. Neither of us could
answer them. Yet the desolation spun past below me, after
math of the three hour war, ruined buildings, ruined fields,
ruined woods. Far off, I could catch a pale gleam
of water beyond the seething edge of the Ring. I'd

(03:41):
been en route long enough to make some sort of
order in my mind, but I hadn't done it. Evidently
more than time would be required to open the closed
doors in my brain. I had been in the Ring
to day. I had seen something, or learned something there,
and whatever I learned had been of such vital and
terrible import that memory of it was wipe from Davidson's
mind in mine until the hour came for action. I

(04:02):
didn't know what hour, or what action, but I knew
with a deep certainty that when the time for decision came,
I would not falter. Along with the terror and the
blackness in my mind went that one abiding knowledge upon
which all my actions now were based. I could trust
that instinct. Fitzgerald's coptor was waiting. I could see his
lead suited figure, tiny and far below, pacing up and

(04:24):
down impatiently. As I dropped toward him, My coptor settled
lightly earthward, and for a moment another thought crossed my mind.
Williams a man murdered, A man I knew and had
worked with, a man I liked. That should have affected
me much more deeply than it did. I knew why
it hadn't. Williams's death was unimportant, completely trivial, in the

(04:45):
face of the other peril that loomed namelessly at all,
its invisible menace, like a shrouded ghost rising from the
lake beyond us. Fitzgerald was a big blonde man with
blue eyes and a scar puckering his forehead, souvenir of
our last battle with mutated Marmosa in the Atlanta Ring.
His transmitter disc vibrated tintely as I got out of

(05:08):
the copter. Hello, Chief, you got my second message? No,
what was it? More funny stuff? He gestured toward the
ring in the lake. This time signs of life. I
can't make anything out of it. I drew a deep
breath of relief. Davidson would have stopped that message. It
was up to me now to find a way to
keep Fitzdarrow, quiet, we'll take a look at the lake.

(05:29):
Then I said, what's your report? Well, he shifted uneasily
from one foot to the other, glancing at me through
his face plate, as if he didn't quite expect me
to believe him. It's a funny place, that lake. I
got the impression was well watching me. I know it
sounds silly, but I have to tell you it could
be important, I suppose. And then when I was making

(05:50):
a second turn over the water, I saw something in
the lake. He paused. People, he added, after a moment,
what kind of people? I They weren't human. How do
you know they weren't wearing lead suits? He said, simply,
glad of a chance to pin his story down with facts.
I figured they were either not human or else insane.

(06:13):
They heard my ship and they went into the lake swimming.
They walked in right under the water, and they stayed there.
What did they look like? I didn't get a close look,
he said evasively, his eyes troubled as they avoided mine.
I was aware of a strange, mounting excitement that swelled
in my throat until I could hardly speak. I jerked

(06:34):
my head toward the lake, come on, I said. There
lay the blue water, moving gently in the breeze. The cliffs,
like folded curtains rose beyond it. There was no sign
of life in sight. As we crossed the bare pitted rocks.
Fitzjod eyed me askance as we clumped toward the water
in our heavy lead lined boots. I knew he expected
doubt from me, but I knew also that he had

(06:55):
told the truth. The last memory of danger sent its
premonitory shadows through my mind, and I believe dimly that
I too had seen those aquatic people sometime in that
immediate past, which had been expunged from my brain. We
were half way across the rocks, our Geiger counters clicking
noisy warning of the death in the air all around us,
when the first of the lake people rose up before

(07:17):
us from behind a ledge of rock. He was a
perfectly normal looking man, except that he stood there in
khaki trousers and shirt sleeves, rolled up in the bath
of potent destruction, which was the very air of the ring.
He looked at us with a blankness impossible to describe,
and yet with a strangely avid interest in his eyes.
When we were half a dozen paces away. He raised

(07:39):
his arm, and, without changing expression, in a voice totally
without inflection, he said, go back. He said, go back,
get away from here. Now it was all returning to me.
I knew why he looked so strange, why he spoke
so flatly, Why that interest watched us from his eyes.

(08:01):
I didn't know. The knowledge brushed the edges of my awareness,
and withdrew. I stumbled forward. Fitzgerald beside me, excited and eager,
calling out a question to the man. He made no answer.
He took one last look at us, blank intent, impersonal,
his eyes as blue as the water in the lake,
and then he dropped straight downward, without stooping, without seeming

(08:21):
to move a muscle, he vanished behind the knee high
ledge of rock. We reached it together, shouldering one another
in our eagerness. We bent over the ledge. The man
had disappeared, leaving no sign behind him, nothing but a
little hollow in the rock where he had stood, a
hollow no bigger than a saucer in which blue water swayed.
We stood there, half stunned, for the time it took

(08:43):
the water to gurgle downward and vanish in the hole,
and surge up again twice from some action of subterranean waters.
Memory was battering at the closed doors of my mind.
I knew the answer, I knew it well, but the
door stayed shut. The time to remember was not yet.
They were watching us from the edge of the water.

(09:05):
By the time we had come withinhaling distance. One by
one we saw them wade up from the blue depths
and take their stand in the edge of the water,
ankle deep rivulets running from their hair and clothing. Drowned
men and women watching us. They weren't drowned, of course.
They looked perfectly healthy, and there was more intelligence and
animation in their faces than had looked at us from

(09:26):
the vanished man of the ledge. These were real people.
The other had not been. I thought that much must
be evident, even to Fitzgerald, though it was a subterranean
knowledge running through my mind that told me so. Wait,
Jim Fitzgerald said, suddenly catching my elbow. I don't like em.
Stand back, who was watching the silent people in the water.

(09:48):
I let him stop me. Now that I was here,
I wasn't certain what came next. The terrible urgency still
rang its alarm in the closed room of my brain.
But until I could gain entry into that room, I
wouldn't know what was expected of me. Fitzgerald waved to
the people in the water, a beckoning gesture. They stared
at us. Then they turned and talked briefly, together, glancing

(10:10):
at us over their shoulders. Finally, one of the women
came up out of the lake and picked her way
towards us over the lava like rock. She had long
fair hair, sleeped back from her face by the water
and hanging like pale kelp across her shoulders. Her blue
dress clung to her over a beautiful stupple body, water
spattering from the dripping cloth and the dripping hair. As

(10:31):
she came belatedly, I remembered that crashed airliner in its
vanished people. Were these the passengers and crew? I thought
they were? But what had induced them against all reason
to come this far into the deadly air of the
ring the lake? Up to that point the thing was possible,
but it was sheer madness from the moment I imagined

(10:52):
them entering the water the lake. Then? Was there something
inexplicably strange and compelling about the lake itself that had
drawn them in and sent them out again? Like this? Alive, unharmed,
in the singing air that made our counters clatter. I
looked out over the waters for an answer, and and
I got my answer, or part of it. For out

(11:13):
there on the rippling blue surface, a shadow moved, a long,
coiling shadow, cast not from above, but from below. Deep
down in the lake, something was stirring. I strained my eyes,
and in the sealed deeps of my mind, terror and
exultation moved in answer to that coiling darkness. I knew it,
I recognized it. I the recognition passed. The vast shadow

(11:38):
moved lazily, monstrously, moved and coiled and drew itself in
under the cliffs. Slowly it disappeared, coil by coil, shadow
by shadow. I turned. The fair haired woman was standing
before us, gazing into our faces with a remote, impersonal curiosity.
It was as if she had never seen another human

(11:59):
cres before and found us interesting, but disassociated no species
that might share relationship with her. You're from the liner,
I asked, my voice, reverberating in my own ears inside
the helmet. We we can take you back. I let
the words die. They meant nothing to her, They meant
no more than the clatter of our belt counters, or

(12:20):
the patter of drops around her on the rocks. Jim
Fitzgerald's voice buzzed in my earphones. Jim, we've got to
take her back with us. She's out of her head.
They all are, don't you see. We've got to save them. How,
I tried to sound practical. We haven't got room. There's
a full liner load here. We can take this one.

(12:42):
He reached out and took her arm gently. She let him,
her eyes turning that remote and personal gaze upon his face.
It's probably too late, he said, looking at her with compassion.
But we can't leave her here, can we. I was
watching his hand on her arm, and a thought came
to me out of nowhere, a fact that seemed to
slip through the closed doors in my mind as they

(13:03):
opened a tiny crack. This girl was flesh and blood.
A hand closed on her arm met firm resistance. But
I knew that if I had touched that first man,
my hand would have closed over the smooth instability of water.
I looked at the girl's face, where a passing breeze
brushed it, and a shiver went down my back, for

(13:24):
it was a warm breeze drying her hair and cheek
where it blew, and I saw a dark, wrinkled desiccation
wherever dryness touched her skin. The sleek, fair hair lost
its silkiness and turned brown and brittle. The satiny cheek darkened, furrowed.
I knew if she left the lake she would die,
but it didn't matter. I knew there was no danger

(13:45):
either way. Danger to what from what? No use asking
myself that yet the door would open in its own time.
I took her other arm between us. She went docilely
toward the waiting coptor's saying nothing. I don't think Fitzjo
noticed what that drying breeze was doing to her until
we were nearly at the edge of the ring. By
then it was too late to take her back, even

(14:07):
if he had understood what the trouble was. I heard
Fitzgerald catch his breath, but he said nothing, and neither
did I. We lifted her into his copter. I took
off behind him, and the visors were silent between our
ships as we flew back toward base. What could we
have said to each other? Then? End of Chapter two
read by Elsie Selwyn