September 1, 2025 • 48 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Salvage in Space by Jack Williamson. His planet was the
smallest in the Soldar system and the loneliest fat Allan
was thinking as he straightened wearily in the huge, bulging,
inflated fabric of his Osprey space armor. Walking awkwardly in
the magnetic boots that held him to the black mass
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of meteoric iron. He mounted a projection and stood motionless,
staring moodily away through the vision panels of his bulky
helmet into the dark mystery of the void. His welding
arc dangled at his belt, the electrode still glowing red.
He had just finished securing to this slowly accumulated mass
of iron, his most recent find, a meteorite the size
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of his head. Five perilous weeks he had labored to
collect this rugged lump of metal, a jagged mass some
ten feet in diameter, composed of hundreds of fragments that
he had captured and welded together. His luck had not
been good. His findings had been heartbreakingly small. The spectrum
flash analysis had revealed that the contents of the precious
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metals was disappointingly minute. The meteor or asteroid belt between
the orbits of Mars and Jupiter is mined by such
adventurers as that Allen for the platinum, iridium, and osmium
that all meteoric irons contain in small quantities. The meteor
swarms are supposed by some astronomers to be fragments of
a disrupted planet, which, according to Bode's law, should occupy
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this space. On the other side of this tiny sphere
of hard won treasure, his Milan atomic rocket was sputtering
spurts of hot blue flame jetting from its exhaust. A
simple mechanism bolted to the first sizeable fragment he had captured.
It drove the iron ball through space like a ship,
through the magnetic soles of his insulated boots that could
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feel the vibration of the iron mass beneath the rocket's
regular thrust. The magazine of uranite fuel capsules was nearly empty. Now,
he reflected, he would soon have to turn back toward Mars.
Turned back, But how could he with so slender a
reward for his efforts. Meteor mining is expensive. There was
his bill at millen and Helion, Mars for urinite and supplies,
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and the unpaid last installment on his osprey suit. How
could he outfit himself again if he returned with no
more metal than this? There were men who averaged a
thousand tons of iron a month. Why couldn't fortune smile
on him? He knew men who had made fabulous strikes,
who had captured whole planetoids of rich metal. And he
knew weary, white haired men who braved the perils of
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vacuum in absolute cold and bullet swift meteors for hard years,
who still hoped. But sometime fortune had to smile. And
then the picture came to him, a tower of white
metal among the low red hills near Helion, A slim,
graceful tower of argent, rising in a fragrant garden of
flowering Martian shrubs purple and saffron, and a girl waiting
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at the silver door, A trim, slender girl in white,
with blue eyes and hair richly brown. Thad had seen
the white tower many times on his holiday tramps through
the hills about Helion. He had even dares to ask
if it could be bought, to find that its price
was an amount that he might not amass in many
years at his perilous profession. But the girl in white
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was yet only a glorious dream. The strangeness of interplanetary
space and the somber mystery of it pressed upon him
like an illimitable and deserted ocean. The Sun was a
tiny white disc on his right, hanging between rosy coronal wings.
His native Earth a bright greenish point suspended in the
dark gulf below it. Mars nearer, smaller, a little ochre
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speck above the shrunken sun above him, Below him, in
all directions was vastness, blackness, emptiness, ebon infinity, sprinkled with
far cold stars. Thad was alone, utterly alone. No man
was visible in all the supernal vastness of space, and
no work of man save the few tools of his
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daring trade and the glittering little rocket bolted to the
black iron behind him. It was terrible to think that
the nearest human being must be tens of millions of
miles away. On his first trips, the loneliness had been terrible, unendurable.
Now he was becoming accustomed to it. At least he
no longer feared that he was going mad. But sometimes
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Sad shook himself and spoke aloud, his voice ringing hollow
in his huge metal helmet. Brace up, old top in
good company when you're by yourself, as Dad used to say,
be back in Helion in a week or so. Anyhow,
look up Dan and Chuck and the rest of the
crowd again at Comet's place. What price a friendly boxing
match with Mason, or an evening at the Televith Theater.
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Fresh air instead of this stale synthetic stuff, real food
in place of these tasteless concentrates. A hot bath instead
of greasing yourself too dull out here life, He broke
off set jaw. No use thinking about such things only
made it worse. Besides, how did he know that a
worrying meteor wasn't going to flash him out? Before he
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got back? He drew his right arm out of the
bulging sleeve of his suit into its ample interior, found
a cigarette in an inside pocket and lighted it. The
smoke swirled about in the helmet, drawn swiftly into the
air filters. Darn clever, these suits, he murmured, Food, smokes,
water generator, all where you can reach them, And darned
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expensive too. I'd better be looking for pay metal. He
clamored to a better position, stood peering out into space,
searching for the tiny gleam of sunlight on a meteoric
fragment that might be worth capturing for its content of
precious metals. For an hour, he scanned the black star
strewn gulf as the sputtering rocket continued to drive him forward.
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There she glows, he cried suddenly, and grinned. Before him
was a tiny, glowing fleck that moved among the unchanging stars.
He stared at it intensely, breathing faster in the helmet always.
He thrilled to see such a moving gleam. What a
treasure it promised. At first sight, it was impossible to
determine size, or distance, or rate of motion. It might
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be ten thousand tons of rich metal, a fortune. It
would more probably prove to be a tiny stony mass,
not worth capturing. It might even be large and valuable,
but moving so rapidly that he could not overtake it
with the power of the diminutive millin rocket. He studied
the tiny speck intently with practiced eye as the minutes passed.
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An untrained eye would never have seen it at all
among the flaming hosts of stars. Skillfully, he judged from
its apparent rate of motion and its slow increase in brilliance,
its size and distance from him must be a fair size,
he spoke aloud, at length a hundred tons, I'll bet
my helmet. But scooting along pretty fast, stretched the little
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old rocket to run it down. He clamored back to
the rocket, changed the angle of the flaming exhaust to
drive him directly across the path of the eye object ahead.
Filled the magazine again with the little pellets of urinite,
which were fed automatically into the combustion chamber and increased
the firing rate. The trailing blue flame reached farther backward
from the incandescent orifice of the exhaust, the vibration of
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the metal sphere increased. Thad left the sputtering rocket and
went back where he could see the object before him.
It was nearer, now, rushing obliquely across his path. Would
he be in time to capture it as it passed,
or would it hurtle by ahead of him and vanish
in the limitless darkness of space Before his feeble rocket
could check the momentum of his ball of metal. He
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peered at it as it drew closer. Its surface seemed
oddly bright, silvery, not the dull black of meteoric iron.
And it was larger, more distant than he thought at first.
In form too, it seemed curiously regular, ellipsoid. It was
no jagged mass of metal. His hopes sank rose again immediately.
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Even if it were not the mass of rich metal
for which he had prayed, it might be something as
valuable and more interesting. He returned to the rocket, adjusted
the angle of the nozzle again, and advanced the firing
time slightly, even at the risk of a ruinous explosion.
When he returned to where he could see the hurtling
object before him, he saw that it was a ship,
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a tapering, silver green rocket flyer. Once more his dreams
were dashed. The officers of interplanetary liners lose no love
upon the meteor miners, claiming that their collected masses of metal,
almost helpless, always underpowered, are menaces to navigation. Thad could
expect nothing from the ship save a heliographed warning to
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keep clear. But how came a rocket flyer? Here? In
the perilous swarms of the meteor belt, many a vessel
had been destroyed by collision with an asteroid in the
days before charted lanes were cleared of drifting metal. The
lanes more frequently used between Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury
were of course far inside the orbits of the asteroids,
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and the few ships returning to Jupiter's moons avoided them
by crossing millions of miles above their plane. Could it
be that legendary green ship said once to have mysteriously appeared,
sliced up and drawn within her hull several of the
primitive ships of that day, and then disappeared forever after
in the remote wastes of space. Absurd, of course. He
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dismissed the idle fancy and examined the ship still more closely.
Then he saw that it was turning end over end,
very slowly. That meant that the gyros were stopped, that
it was helpless, drifting, disabled, powerless to avoid hurling meteoric stones.
Had it blundered unawares into the belt of swarms, been
struck before the danger was realized. Was it a derelict
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with all dead upon it? Either the ship's machinery was
completely wrecked that new or there was no one on watch.
For the controls of a modern rocket flyer are so
simple and so nearly automatic that a single man at
the bridge can keep a vacu upon her course. It
might be he thought that a meteorite had ripped open
the hull, allowing the air to escape so quickly that
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the entire crew had been asphyxiated before any repairs could
be made. But that seemed unlikely, since the ship must
have been divided into several compartments by air tight bulkheads.
Could the vessel have been deserted for some reason. The
crew might have mutinied and left her in the life tubes.
She might have been robbed by pirates and set a drift.
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But with the space lanes policed as they were, piracy
and successful mutiny were rare. Thad saw that the flyer's
navigation lights were out. He found the heliographic signal mirror
at his side, sighted it upon the ship, and worked
the mirror rapidly. He waited, repeated the call. There was
no response. The vessel was plainly a derelict. Could he
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board her and take her to Mars? By law, it
was his duty to attempt to aid any helpless ship,
or at least try to save any endangered lives on her,
and the salvage award if the ship should be deserted,
and he could bring her safe to port. Would be
half her value. No mean prize, that half the value
of a ship and cargo, more than he was apt
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to earning years of mining the meteor belt. With new anxiety,
he measured the relative motion of the gleaming ship. It
was going to pass ahead of him, and very soon.
No more time for speculation. It was still uncertain whether
it would come near enough so that he could get
a line to it. Rapidly, he unslung from his belt
the apparatus he used to capture meteors, a powerful electromagnet
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with a thin, strong wire fastened to it, to be
hurled from a helix gun. He set the drum on
which the wire was wound upon the metal at his feet,
fastened it with its magnetic anchor, wondering if it would
stand the terrific strain when the wire tightened. Raising the
helix to his shoulder, he trained it upon a point
well ahead of the rushing flier, and stood waiting for
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the exact moment to press the lever. The slender spindle
of the ship was only a mile away. Now bright
and sunlight, he could see no break in her polished hull.
Save for the dark rows of circular ports, she was
not by any means completely wrecked. He read the black
letters of her name read Dragon. The name of her
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home port below was in smaller letters, but in a
moment he made them out San Francisco. The ship then
came from Earth, from the very city where Thad was born.
The gleaming hull was near, now only a few hundred
yards away. Passing aiming well ahead of her to allow
for her motion, Thad pressed the key that hurled the
magnet from the helix. It flung away from him, the
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wire screaming from the reel behind it. Thad's massive metal
swung on past the ship. As he returned to the
rocket and stopped its clattering explosions, he watched the tiny
black speck of the magnet. It vanished from sight in
the darkness of space, appeared again against the white, burnished
hull of the rocket ship. For a painful instant, he
thought he had missed. Then he saw that the magnet
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was fast to the side of the flore near the stern.
The line tightened. Soon the strain would come upon it
as it checked the momentum of the mass of iron.
He set the friction brake. Thad flung himself flat, grasped
the wire above the reel. Even if the mass of
iron tore itself free, he could hold to the wire
and himself reach the ship. He flung past the deserted vessel.
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Behind it, his lump of iron swung like a pebble
in a sling. A cloud of smoke burst from the
burned lining of the friction brake in the reel. Then
the wire was all out. There was a sudden jerk,
and the hard gathered sphere of metal was gone, snapped
off into space. Thad clung desperately to the wire, muscles cracking, tortured,
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arms almost drawn from their sockets. Fear flashed over his mind.
What if the wire broke and left him floating helpless
in space? It held, though, to his relief, he was
trailing behind the ship. Eagerly, he seized the handle of
the reel began to wind up the mile and a
half of thin wire. Half an hour later, suited figure
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bumped gently against the shining hull of the rocket. He
got to his feet and gazed backward into the starry gulf,
where his sphere of iron had long since vanished. Somebody
is going to find himself a nice chunk of metal,
all welded together and equipped for rocket navigation. He murmured,
as for me, well, I've simply got to run this
tub to Mars. He walked over the smooth, refulgent hull,
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held to it by magnetic soles. Nowhere was it broken,
though he found scars where small meteoric particles had scratched
the brilliant polish. So no meteor had wrecked the ship.
What then was the matter? Soon he would know. The
Red Dragon was not large one hundred and thirty feet long,
fat estimated, with a beam of twenty five feet, but
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her trim lines bespoke, designed, recent and good. The double
ring of black projecting rockets at the stern told of
unusual speed. A pretty piece of salvage, he reflected. If
he could land her on Mars, half the value of
such a ship, unharmed and safe in port, would be
a larger sum than he dared to put in figures,
and he must take her in. Now that he had
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lost his own rocket. He found the life tubes, six
of them, slender, silvery cylinders, lying secure in their niches,
three along each side of the flier. None was missing,
so the crew had not willingly deserted the ship. He
approached the main air lock at the center of the hull,
behind the projecting dome of the bridge. It was closed.
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A glance at the dials told him there was full
air pressure within it. It had then last been used
to enter the rocket, not leave it. Thad opened the
exhaust valve, let the air hiss from the chamber of
the lock. The huge door swung open in response to
his hand upon the wheel, and he entered the cylindrical chamber.
In a moment, the door was closed behind him. Air
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was hissing into the lock again. He started to open
the face plate of his helmet, longing for a breath
of air that did not smell of sweat and stale
tobacco smoke, as that in his suit always did, despite
the best chemical purifiers. Then he hesitated, perhaps some deadly
gas from the combustion chambers. Thad opened the inner valve
and came upon the upper deck of the vessel. A
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floor ran the full length of the ship, broken with
hatches and companion ways that gave to the rocket rooms,
cargo holds, and quarters for crew and passengers. Below. There
was an enclosed ladder that led to bridge and navigating
rooms in the dome. Above the hull formed an arched
roof over it. The deck was deserted, lit only by
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three dim blue globes hanging from the curved roof. All
seemed in order, the fire fighting equipment hanging on the walls,
and the huge metal patches and welding equipment for repairing
brakes in the hall. Everything was clean, bright with polish
or new paint, and all was very still. The silence
held a vague, brooding threat that frightened, that made him
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wish for a moment that he was back upon his
rugged ball of metal. But he banished his and strode
down the deck midway of it. He found a dark
stain upon the clean metal, the black of long dried blood,
a few tattered scraps of cloth beside it, no more
than bloody rags, and a heavy meat cleaver, half hidden
beneath a bit of darkened fabric. Mute record of tragedy.
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Thad strove to read it. Had a man fought here
and been killed, it must have been a struggle of
peculiar violence, to judge by the dark spattered stains and
the indescribable condition of the remnants of clothing. But what
had he fought another man or some thing? And what
had become a victor and vanquished? He walked on down
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the deck. The torturing silence was broken by the abrupt
patter of quick, little footsteps behind him. He turned quickly nervously,
with a hand going instinctively to his welding arc, which
he knew would make a fairly effective weapon. It was
merely a dog, a little dog, a yellow, nondescript, pathetically
delighted dog with a sharp, eager bark. It leaped up
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at Thad, pawing at his armor and licking it, standing
on its hind legs and reaching toward the visor of
his helmet. It was very thin, as if from long starvation.
Both ears were ragged and bloody, and there was a long,
unhealed scratch across the shoulder, somewhat inflamed, but not a
serious wound. The bright, eager eyes were alight with joy,
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but Thad thought he saw fear in them, and even
through the stiff fabric of the osprey suit, he felt
that the dog was trembling. Suddenly, with a low whine,
it shrank close to his side, and another sound reached
Thad's ears, A cry weird and harrowing, beyond telling, A
scream so thin and so high that it roughened his skin,
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so keenly shrill that it tortured his nerves, A sound
of that peculiar frequency that is more agonizing than any
bodily pain. When silence came again, Thad was standing with
his back against the wall, the welding arc in his hand.
His face was cold with sweat, and a queer chill
pricked up and down his spine. The yellow dog crouched
whimpering against his legs. Ominous threatening stillness filled the ship again,
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disturbed only by the whimpers and frightened growls of the dog.
Trying to calm his overwrought nerves, Thad listened, strained his ears.
He could hear nothing, and he had no idea from
which direction the terrifying sound had come. A strange cry.
Thad knew it had been borne in no human throat,
nor in the throat of any animal. He knew it
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had carried an alien note that overcame him with instinctive
fear and horror. What had voiced it was the ship
haunted by some dread entity. For many minutes, Thad stood
upon the deck, waiting, tensely, grasping the welding tool. But
the nerve shattering scream did not come again, nor any
other sound. The yellow dog seemed half to forget its fear.
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It leaped up at his face again with another short,
little bark. The air must be good, he thought, if
the dog could live in it. He unscrewed the face
plate of his helmet and lifted it. The air that
struck his face was cool and clean. He breathed deeply, gratefully,
and at first he did not notice the strange odor
upon it, a curious, unpleasant scent, earthly, almost fetid, unfamiliar.
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The dog kept leaping up, whining. Hungry boy, Thad whispered.
He fumbled in the bulky inside pockets of his suit,
found a slab of concentrated food, and tossed it out
through the opened panel. The dog sprang upon it, wolfed
it eagerly, and came back to his side. Thad said
at once about exploring the ship. First, he ascended the
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ladder to the bridge. A metal dome covered it, studded
with transparent ports, charts and instruments. Were in order, and
the room was vacant, heavy with the fatal silence of
the ship. Thad had no expert's knowledge of the Flyer's mechanism,
but he had studied interplanetary navigation to qualify for his
license to carry masses of metal under rocket power through
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the space lanes and into planetary atmospheres. Sure he could
manage the ship if its mechanism were in good order,
though he was uncertain of his ability to make any
considerable repairs. To his relief, a scrutiny of the dials
revealed nothing wrong. He started the gyro motors, got the
great wheels to spinning, and thus stopped the slow end
over end turning of the Flyer. Then he went to
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the rocket controls, warmed three of the tubes, and set
them to firing. The vessel answered readily to her helm.
In a few minutes he had the red fleck of
Mars over the bow. Yes, I can run her all right,
he announced to the dog, which had followed him up
the steps, keeping close to his feet. Don't worry, old boy,
We'll be eating a juicy beef steak together in a
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week at Comet's place in Helion, down by the canal,
not much style, but the eats. And now we're going
to do a little detective work and find out what
made that disagreeable noise and what happened to all your
fellow astronauts. Better find out before it happens to us.
He shut off the rockets and climbed down from the
bridge again. When Thad started down the companionway to the
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officer's quarters in the central one of the five main
compartments of the ship, the dog kept close to his legs, growling, trembling,
hackles lifted. Sensing the animal's terror, pitying it for the
naked fear in its eyes, Thad wondered what dramas of
horror it might have seen. The cabins of the navigator, calculator,
chief technician, and first officer were empty and forbidding with
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the ominous silence of the ship. They were neatly in order,
and the berths had been made since they were used,
but there was a large blood stain, black and circular,
on the floor of the calculator's room. The captain's cabin
held evidence of a violent struggle. The door had been
broken in its fragments, with pieces of broken furniture, books,
covers from the berth and three service pistols were scattered
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about in indescribable confusion, all stained with blood. Among the
frightful debris, Thad found several scraps of clothing of dissimilar fabrics.
The guns were empty. Attempting to reconstruct the acts action
of the tragedy from those grim clues, he imagined that
the five officers, aware of some peril, had gathered here,
fought and died. The dog refused to enter the room.
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It stood at the door, looking anxiously after him, trembling
and whimpering pitifully. Several times it sniffed the air and
drew back, snarling. Thad thought that the unpleasant, earthly odor
he had noticed upon opening the face plate of his
helmet was stronger here. After a few minutes of searching
through the wildly disordered room, he found the ship's log
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or its remains. Many pages had been torn from the book,
and the remainder, soaked with blood, formed a stiff black mass.
Only one legible entry did he find that on a
page torn from the book, which somehow had escaped destruction,
dated five months before, It gave the position of the
vessel and her bearings. She was then just outside Jupiter's
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orbit earthward bound, and concluded with a remark of sinister implications.
Another man gone this morning, Sims, assistant technician, a fine workman.
Odeine swears he heard something moving on the deck. Cook
thinks some of the doctor's stuffed monstrosities have come to life. Ridiculous,
of course, but what is one to think pondering the
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significance of those few lines that climbed back to the deck.
Was the ship haunted by some weird death that had
seized the crew manned by man mysteriously? That was the
obvious implication. And if the flyer had been still outside
Jupiter's orbit when those words were written, it must have
been weeks before the end, a lurking invisible death the
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scream he had heard. He descended into the forecastle and
came upon another such silent record of frightful carnage as
he had found in the captain's cabin, dried blood, scraps
of cloth, knives and other weapons. A fearful question was
beginning to obsess him. What had become of the bodies
of those who must have died in these conflicts? He
dared not think the answer, gripping the welding arc that
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approached the after hatch, giving to the the cargo hold.
Trepidation almost overpowered him, but he was determined to find
the sinister menace of the ship before it found him.
The dog whimpered, hung back, and finally deserted him, contributing
nothing to his peace of mind. The hold proved to
be dark, an indefinite black space, oppressive with the terrible
silence of the flier, the air within it bore still
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more strongly. The unpleasant fetter sad hesitated on the steps.
The hold was not inviting, but at the thought that
he must sleep unguarded while taking the Flier to Mars,
his resolution returned the uncertainty the constant fear would be unendurable.
He climbed on down, feeling for the light button. He
found it. As his feet touched the floor, blue light
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flooded the hold. It was filled with monstrous things, colossal
creatures such as nothing that ever lived upon the earth,
like nothing known in the jungles of Venus or the
deserts of Mars, or anything that has been found upon
Jupiter's moons. They were monsters remotely resembling insects or crustaceans,
but as large as horses or elephants. Creatures up reared
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upon strange limbs, armed with hideously fanged jaws, cruel talons,
frightful saw toothed snouts, and glittering scales, red and yellow
and green. They leered at him with phosphorescent eyes, yellow
and purple. They cast grotesquely gigantic shadows in the blue light.
A cold shock of horror started along thad spine at
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the sight of those incredible nightmare things. Automatically, he flung
up the welding tool, flicking over the lever with his
thumb so that violet electric flame played about the electrode.
Then he saw the crowding, hideous things were motionless, that
they stood upon wooden pedestals, that many of them were
supported upon metal bars. They were dead, mounted, collected specimens
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of some alien life. Grinning wanly and consciously of a
weakness in the knees, He muttered, the sure will filled
the museum if everybody gets the kick out of them
that I did a little too realistic eyes, I'd say,
guess these are the stuffed monstrosities mentioned in the page
out of the log No wonder the cook was afraid
of them. Some of them do look hellishly alive. He
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started across the hold, shrinking involuntarily from the armored enormities
that seemed crouching to spring at him, motionless eyes staring
so at the end of the long space, he found
the treasure glittering in the blue light. It looked unreal, incredible,
a dazzling dream. He stopped among the fearful things that
seemed gathered as if to guard it, and stared with
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wide eyes through the open face plate of his helmet.
He saw neat stacks of gold ingots, new freshly smelted
bars of silver white iridium, of argent platinum, of blue
white osmium, many of them thousands of pounds that knew.
He trembled at the thought of their value, almost beyond calculation.
Then he saw the coffer lying beyond the piled gleaming ingots,
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a huge box eight feet long, made of some crystal
that glittered with snowy wine whiteness, filled with sparkling iridescent gleams,
and inlaid with strange designs, apparently in vermilion enamel. With
a little cry He ran toward the chest, moving awkwardly
in the loose, deflated fabric of the osprey suit. Beside
the coffer. On the floor of the hold was literally
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a mountain of flame blazing gems, heaped as if they
had been carelessly dumped from it. Cut diamonds, incredibly gigantic
monster emeralds, sapphires, rubies, and strange stones that Thad didn't recognize.
And Thad gasped with horror when he looked at the
designs of the vermilion inlay in the white, gleaming crystal,
weird forms, shapes of creatures somewhat like gigantic spiders, and
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more unlike them, demonic things, wickedly fanged jaws, slavering, executed
with masterly skill that made them seem living menacing secretly gloating.
Thad stared at them for long minutes, fascinated, almost hypnotically.
Three times he approached the chest to lift the lid
and find what it held, and three times the unutterable
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horror of those crimson images thrust him back, shuddering. Nothing
but pictures, he muttered hoarsely. A fourth time he advanced,
trembling and seized the lid of the coffer, heavy, massive,
It was fashioned also of glistening white crystal, and inlaid
in crimson with weirdly hideous figures. Great hinges of white platinum.
Held it on the farther side. It was fastened with
(29:24):
a simple heavy hasp of the precious metal. Hands quivering,
Thad snapped back the hasp, lifted the lid. New treasure
in the chest would not have surprised him. He was
prepared to meet dazzling wonders of gems or priceless metal.
Nor would he have been astonished at some weird creature
such as one of those whose likenesses were inlaid in
the crystal. But what he saw made him drop the
(29:46):
massive lid. A woman lay in the chest, motionless in white.
In a moment, he raised the lid again, examined the
still form more closely. The woman had been young, The
features were regular, good to look upon. The eyes were closed.
The white face appeared very peaceful. Save for the extreme
cadaverous pallor. There was no mark of death. With a
(30:08):
fancy that the body might be miraculously living sleeping, Thad
thrust an arm out through the open panel of his
suit and touched a slender, bare white arm. It was stiff,
very cold. The still pallid face was framed in fine
brown hair. The fair small hands were crossed upon the
breast over the simple white garment. A queer ache came
(30:30):
into his heart. Something made him think of a white
tower in the red hills near Helion, and a girl
waiting in its fragrant garden of saffron and purple, a
girl like this. The body lay upon a bed of
blazing jewels. It appeared, that thought, as if the pile
of gems upon the floor had been hastily scraped from
the coffer to make room for the quiet form. He
(30:51):
wondered how long it had lain there. It looked as
if it might have been living but minutes before some preservative.
His thought was broken by a sound that rang from
the open hatchway on the deck above, the furious barking
and yelping of the dog. Abruptly, that was silent, and
in its place came the uncanny and terrifying scream that
(31:12):
Thad had heard once before on this flier of mystery,
a shriek so keen and shrill that it seemed to
tear out his nerves by their roots. The voice of
the haunter of the ship. When Thad came back upon
the deck, the dog was still barking nervously. He saw
the animal forward almost at the bow, hackles, raised tail
between its legs. It was slinking backward, barking sharply as
(31:36):
if to call for aid. Apparently it was retreating from
something between Thad and itself. But Thad, searching the dimly
lit deck, could see no source of alarm, nor could
the structures upon it have shut any large object from
his view. It's all right, Thad called, intending to reassure
the frightened animal, but finding his voice queerly dry coming
(31:57):
on the double, old man, don't worry. The dog had
reached the end of the deck. It stopped yelping, but
snarled and whined, as if in terror. It began darting
back and forth, moving exactly as if something were slowly
closing in upon it, trapping it in the corner. But
Thad could see nothing. Then it made a wild dash
back toward Thad, darting along the wall as if to
(32:19):
run past an unseen enemy. Thad thought he heard quick,
rasping footsteps then that were not those of the dog,
and something seemed to catch the dog in mid air.
As it leaped, it was hurled howling to the deck.
For a moment, it struggled furiously, as if an invisible
claw had pinned it down. Then it escaped and fled
whimpering to Thad's side. He saw a new wound across
(32:41):
its hips, three long, parallel scratches from which fresh red
blood was trickling. Regular scraping sounds came from the end
of the deck, where no moving thing was to be seen,
sounds such as might be made by the walking of
feet with unsheathed claws. Something was coming back toward Thad.
Something It was invisible. Terror seized him with the knowledge
(33:03):
he had nerved himself to face desperate men or a
savage animal, but an invisible being that could creep upon
him and strike unseen. It was incredible, Yet he had
seen the dog knock down and the bleeding wound it
had received. His heart paused, then beat very quickly. For
the moment, he thought only blindly of escape. He knew
only an overpowering desire to hide, to conceal himself from
(33:26):
the invisible thing. Had it been possible, he might have
tried to leave the flier Beside him was one of
the companionways amidships, giving access to a compartment of the
vessel that he had not explored. He turned leaped down
the steps, with the terrified dog at his heels. Below,
he found himself in a short haul, dimly lighted, several
metal doors opening from it. He tried one at random.
(33:49):
It gave He sprang through, let the dog follow, closed,
and locked it. Trying to listen, He leaned weakly against
the door, the rushing of his breath swift and regular,
the loud hammer of his studding heart, the dog's low whines,
then unmistakable scraping sounds outside, the scratching of claws that
knew invisible claws. He stood there, bracing the door with
(34:12):
the weight of his body, holding the welding arc ready
in his hand. Several times the hinges creaked and he
felt a heavy pressure against the panels, But at last
the scratching sounds ceased. He relaxed. The monster had withdrawn,
at least for a time, when he had time to think,
the invisibility of the thing was not so incredible. The
mounted creatures he had seen in the hold were evidence
(34:33):
that the flier had visited some unknown planet where weird
life reigned. It was not beyond reason that such a
planet should be inhabited by beings invisible to human sight.
Human vision, as he knew, utilizes only a tiny fraction
of the spectrum. The creature must be largely transparent to
visible light, as human flesh is radio lucent to hard
(34:53):
X rays. Quite possibly it could be seen by infrared
or ultraviolet light. Evidently it was visible enough to the
dog's eyes with their different range of sensitivity. Pushing the
subject from his mind, he turned to survey the room
into which he had burst. It had apparently been occupied
by a woman. A frail blue silk dress and more
intimate items of feminine wearing apparel were hanging above the berth.
(35:17):
Two pairs of delicate black slippers stood neatly below it.
Across from him was a dressing table with a large
mirror above it. Combs, pins jars of cosmetic cluttered it,
and Thad saw upon it a little leather bound book,
locked stamped on the back diary. He crossed the room
and picked up the little book, which smelt faintly of jasmine.
(35:38):
Momentary shame overcame him at thus stealing the secrets of
an unknown girl. Necessity, however, left him no choice but
to seize any chance of learning more of this ship
of mystery and her invisible haunter. He broke the flimsy fastening.
Linda Cross was the name written on the fly leaf
in a firm, clear feminine hand. On the next page
(35:58):
was the photograph in color of a girl, the brown
haired girl whose body that had discovered in the crystal
coffer in the hold. Her eyes, he saw, had been blue.
He thought she looked very lovely, like the waiting girl
in his old dream of the Silver Tower in the
Red Hills by Helion. The diary, it appeared, had not
been kept very devotedly. Most of the pages were blank.
(36:21):
One of the first entries, dated a year and a
half before, told of a party that Linda had attended
in San Francisco, and of her refusal to dance with
a certain man referred to as Benny, because he had
been unpleasantly insistent about wanting to marry her. It ended,
Dad said tonight that we are going off in the
Dragon again, all the way to Uranus. If the new
(36:41):
fuel works as he expects. What a lark to explore
a few new worlds of our own, Dad says, one
of Uranus's moons is as large as mercury, and Benny
won't be proposing again soon. Turning on Thad found other
scattered entries, some of them dealing with the preparation for
the voyage, the start from San Franciosis and a huge
(37:01):
bunch of flowers from Benny. The long months of the
trip through space, out past the orbit of Mars, above
the meteor belt, across Jupiter's orbit, beyond the track of Saturn,
which was the farthest point that rocket explorers had previously reached,
and on to Uranus, where they could not land because
of the unstable surface. The remainder of the entries that
(37:21):
found less frequent, shorter, bearing the mark of excitement landing
upon Titania, the third and largest satellite of Uranus. Unearthly
forests sheltering strange and monstrous life, the hunting of weird
creatures and mounting them for museum specimens. Then the discovery
of a ruined city whose remains indicated that it had
been built by a lost race of intelligent spider like things.
(37:44):
The finding of a temple whose walls were of precious
metals containing a crystal chest filled with wondrous gems, the
smelting of the metal into convenient ingots, and the transfer
of the treasure to the hold. The first sinister note
there entered the diary. Some of the men say, we
shouldn't have disturbed the temple, think it will bring us
bad luck. Rubbish, of course. But one man did vanish
(38:08):
while they were smelting the gold, poor mister Tom James.
I suppose he ventured away from the rest and something
caught him. The few entries that followed were shorter and
showed increasing nervous tension. They recorded the departure from Titania,
made almost as soon as the treasure was loaded. The
last was made several weeks later. A dozen men had
(38:29):
vanished from the crew, leaving only gouts of blood to
hint the manner of their going. The last entry ran
Dad says, I'm to stay in here to day, old dear.
He's afraid the thing will get me. Whatever it is,
it's really serious. Two men taken from their berths last
night and not a trace. Some of them think it's
a curse on the treasure. One of them swears he
(38:51):
saw Dad's stuffed specimens moving about in the hold. Some
terrible thing must have slipped aboard the flier out of
the jungle. That's what Dad in the captain think, Queer.
They can't find it. They searched all over well. Musing
and regretful, Thad turned back for another look at the
smiling girl in the photograph. What a tragedy her death
(39:12):
had been. Reading the diary had made him like her,
her balance and humor, her quiet affection for Dad, the
calm courage with which she seemed to have faced the creeping,
lurking death that darkened the ship with its unescapable shadow.
How had her body come to be in the coffer,
he wondered, When all the others were gone. It had
shown no marks of violence. She must have died of fear. No,
(39:36):
her face had seemed too calm and peaceful for that.
Had she chosen easy death by some poison rather than
that other dreadful fate. Had her body been put in
the chest to protect it and the poison arrested decomposition.
Thad was still studying the picture thoughtfully and sadly when
the dog, which had been silent, suddenly growled again and
(39:56):
retreated from the door toward the corner. Of the room.
The invisible monster had returned. Thad heard its claws scratching
across the door again, and he heard another dreadful sound,
not the long, shrill scream that had so grated on
his nerves before, but a short, sharp coughing or barking,
a series of shrill, indescribable notes that could have been
(40:18):
made by no beast he knew. The decision to open
the door cossed a huge effort on Thad's will. Four
hours he had waited, thinking desperately, and the thing outside
of the door had waited as patiently, scratching upon it
from time to time, uttering those dreadful, shrill, coughing cries.
Sooner or later he would have to face the monster.
(40:39):
Even if he could escape from the room and avoid
it for a time, he would have to meet it
in the end, and it might creep upon him while
he slept. To be sure, the issue of the combat
was extremely doubtful. The monster apparently had succeeded in killing
every man upon the flier, even though some of them
had been armed. It must be large and very ferocious.
(40:59):
But Thad was not without hope. He still wore his
osprey suit, the heavy fabric made of metal wires impregnated
with a tough elastic composition should afford considerable protection against
the thing. The welding arc intended to fuse refractive meteoric
iron would be no mean weapon at close quarters, and
the quarters would be close if only he could find
(41:21):
some way to make the thing visible. Paint or something
of the kind would stick to its skin. His eyes
searching the room caught the jar of face powder on
the dressing table, dash that over it. It ought to
stick enough to make the outline visible. So, at last,
holding the powder ready in one hand, he waited until
a time when the pressure upon the door had just relaxed,
(41:42):
and he knew the monster was waiting outside. Swiftly he
opened the door. Thad had partially overcome the instinctive horror
that the unseen being first aroused in him, but it
returned in a sickening wave when he heard the short, shrill,
coughing cries hideously eager that greeted the opening of the door,
and the quick rasping of naked claws upon the floor
(42:04):
sounds from nothingness. He flung the powder. At the sound.
A form of weird horror materialized before him. Still half invisible,
half outlined with the white film of adhering powder. Gigantic
and hideous claws that seemed to reach out of empty
air the side of a huge, scaly body, a yawning,
dripping jaw. For a moment that could see great hooked
(42:28):
fangs in that jaw. Then they vanished, as if an
unseen tongue had licked the powder from them, dissolving it
in fluids which made it invisible. That unearthly, half seen
shape leaped at him. He was carried backward into the room,
hurled to the floor. Claws were rasping upon the tough
fabric of his suit. His arm was seized crushingly in
(42:48):
half visible jaws. Desperately he clung to the welding tool.
The heated electrode was driven toward his body. He fought
to keep it away. He knew that it would burn
through even the insulated fabric of his A claw ripped
savagely at his side. He heard the sharp, rending sound
as the tough fabric of his suit was torn, and
felt a thin pencil of pain drawn along his body
(43:10):
where the claw cut his skin. Suddenly, the suit was
full of the earthly fetter of the monster's body. Nauseatingly intense,
Thad gasped, tried to hold his breath, and thrust upward
hard with the incandescent electrode. He felt warm blood trickling
from the wound. A numbing blow struck his arm. The
welding tool was carried from his hand flung to the
(43:31):
other side of the room. It clattered to the floor,
and then a heavy weight came upon his chest, forcing
the breath from his lungs. The monster stood upon his
body and clawed at him. Thad squirmed furiously. He kicked
out with his feet, encountering a great, hard body. Futilely,
he beat and thrust with his arms against the pillar
like limb. His body was being mauled bruised beneath the
(43:52):
thick fabric. He heard it tear again along his right thigh,
but he felt no pain and thought the claws had
not reached the skin. It was the yellow dog that
gave him the chance to recover the weapon. The animal
had been running back and forth in the opposite end
of the room, fairly howling in excitement and terror. Now
with the mad carriage of desperation, it leaped recklessly at
the monster. A mighty, dimly seen claw caught it, hurled
(44:16):
it back across the room. It lay still broken, whimpering.
For a moment. The thing had lifted its weight from
Thad's body, and Thad slipped quickly from beneath it, flung
himself across the room, snatched up the welding tool. In
an instant, the creature was upon him again, but he
met it with the incandescent electrode. He was crouched in
a corner now where it could come at him from
(44:36):
only one direction. Its claws still slashed at him ferociously,
but he was able to cling to the weapon and
meet each onslaught with hot metal. Gradually its mad attacks weakened.
Then one of his blind thrusting blows seemed to burn
into a vital organ. A terrible, choking, strangling sound came
from the air, and he heard the thrashing struggles of
wild convulsions. At last all was quiet. He trotted the
(45:00):
thing again and again bought electrode, and it did not move.
It was dead. The creature's body was so heavy that
Thad had to return to the bridge and shut off
the current in the gravity plates along the keel before
he could move it. He dragged it to the lock
through which he had entered the Flier and consigned it
to space. Five days later, Thad brought the Red Dragon
(45:21):
into the atmosphere of Mars. A puzzled pilot came aboard
in response to his signals and docked the flier safely
at Helion. Thad went down into the hold again with
the astonished port authorities, who had come aboard to inspect
the vessel. Again. He passed among the grotesque and outrageous
monsters in the hold, leading the gasping officers while they
(45:41):
marveled at the treasure. He lifted the weirdly embellished lid
of the coffer of white crystal and looked once more
upon the still form of the girl within it. Pity
stirred him. An ache came to his throat. Linda Cross,
so quiet and cold and white and yet so lovely.
How terrible her last days of life must have been,
with dooms shadowing the vessel, and with the men vanishing
(46:04):
mysteriously one by one, terrible until she had sought the
security of death. Strangely, Thad felt no great elation at
the thought that half the incalculable treasure about him was
now safely his own as the award of salvage. If
only the girl were still living, he felt a poignantly
keen desire to hear her voice. Thad found the note
(46:26):
when they started to lift her from the chest, a
hasty scrawl that lay beneath her head among glittering gems.
This woman is not dead. Please have her given skilled
medical attention as soon as possible. She lies in a
state of suspended animation, induced by the injection of fifty
minims of zirinel. She is my daughter, Linda Cross, and
(46:48):
my sole heir. I entreat the finders of this to
have care given her, and to keep in trust for
her such part of the treasure on this ship as
may remain after the payment of salvage or other claims.
Some time she will wake, perhaps in a year, perhaps
in a hundred. The purity of my drugs is uncertain,
and the injection was made hastily, so I do not
(47:08):
know the exact time that must elapse. If this is found,
it will be because the lurking thing upon the ship
has destroyed me and all of my men. Please do
not fail me, Signed Leverington Cross. Thad bought the white
tower of his dreams, slim and graceful in its Martian
garden of saffron and purple, among the low Ochre hills
(47:29):
beside Helion. He carried the sleeping girl through the silver
door where the girl of his dreams had waited, and
set the coffer in a great vaulted chamber. Many times
each day he came into the room where she lay,
to look into her pallid face and feel her cold wrist.
He kept a nurse in attendance, and had a physician
called daily. A long Martian year went by. Looking in
(47:52):
his mirror, one day, Thad saw little wrinkles about his eyes.
He realized that the nervous strain and anxiety of waiting
was aging him, and it might be a hundred years,
he remembered, before Linda Cross came from beneath the drug's influence.
He wondered if he should grow old and infirm while
Linda lay still young and beautiful and unchanged in her sleep,
if she might awake after long years and see in
(48:15):
him only a feeble old man. And he knew that
he would not be sorry he had waited, even if
he should die before she revived. On the next day,
the nurse called him into the room where Linda lay.
He was bending over her when she opened her eyes.
They were blue, glorious. A long time she looked up
at him, first in fearful wonder, then with confidence and
(48:37):
dawning understanding, and at last she smiled. And of Salvage
in Space by Jack Williamson
Salvage in Space by Jack Williamson. His planet was the
smallest in the Soldar system and the loneliest fat Allan
was thinking as he straightened wearily in the huge, bulging,
inflated fabric of his Osprey space armor. Walking awkwardly in
the magnetic boots that held him to the black mass
(00:21):
of meteoric iron. He mounted a projection and stood motionless,
staring moodily away through the vision panels of his bulky
helmet into the dark mystery of the void. His welding
arc dangled at his belt, the electrode still glowing red.
He had just finished securing to this slowly accumulated mass
of iron, his most recent find, a meteorite the size
(00:42):
of his head. Five perilous weeks he had labored to
collect this rugged lump of metal, a jagged mass some
ten feet in diameter, composed of hundreds of fragments that
he had captured and welded together. His luck had not
been good. His findings had been heartbreakingly small. The spectrum
flash analysis had revealed that the contents of the precious
(01:02):
metals was disappointingly minute. The meteor or asteroid belt between
the orbits of Mars and Jupiter is mined by such
adventurers as that Allen for the platinum, iridium, and osmium
that all meteoric irons contain in small quantities. The meteor
swarms are supposed by some astronomers to be fragments of
a disrupted planet, which, according to Bode's law, should occupy
(01:25):
this space. On the other side of this tiny sphere
of hard won treasure, his Milan atomic rocket was sputtering
spurts of hot blue flame jetting from its exhaust. A
simple mechanism bolted to the first sizeable fragment he had captured.
It drove the iron ball through space like a ship,
through the magnetic soles of his insulated boots that could
(01:46):
feel the vibration of the iron mass beneath the rocket's
regular thrust. The magazine of uranite fuel capsules was nearly empty. Now,
he reflected, he would soon have to turn back toward Mars.
Turned back, But how could he with so slender a
reward for his efforts. Meteor mining is expensive. There was
his bill at millen and Helion, Mars for urinite and supplies,
(02:10):
and the unpaid last installment on his osprey suit. How
could he outfit himself again if he returned with no
more metal than this? There were men who averaged a
thousand tons of iron a month. Why couldn't fortune smile
on him? He knew men who had made fabulous strikes,
who had captured whole planetoids of rich metal. And he
knew weary, white haired men who braved the perils of
(02:33):
vacuum in absolute cold and bullet swift meteors for hard years,
who still hoped. But sometime fortune had to smile. And
then the picture came to him, a tower of white
metal among the low red hills near Helion, A slim,
graceful tower of argent, rising in a fragrant garden of
flowering Martian shrubs purple and saffron, and a girl waiting
(02:57):
at the silver door, A trim, slender girl in white,
with blue eyes and hair richly brown. Thad had seen
the white tower many times on his holiday tramps through
the hills about Helion. He had even dares to ask
if it could be bought, to find that its price
was an amount that he might not amass in many
years at his perilous profession. But the girl in white
(03:18):
was yet only a glorious dream. The strangeness of interplanetary
space and the somber mystery of it pressed upon him
like an illimitable and deserted ocean. The Sun was a
tiny white disc on his right, hanging between rosy coronal wings.
His native Earth a bright greenish point suspended in the
dark gulf below it. Mars nearer, smaller, a little ochre
(03:41):
speck above the shrunken sun above him, Below him, in
all directions was vastness, blackness, emptiness, ebon infinity, sprinkled with
far cold stars. Thad was alone, utterly alone. No man
was visible in all the supernal vastness of space, and
no work of man save the few tools of his
(04:02):
daring trade and the glittering little rocket bolted to the
black iron behind him. It was terrible to think that
the nearest human being must be tens of millions of
miles away. On his first trips, the loneliness had been terrible, unendurable.
Now he was becoming accustomed to it. At least he
no longer feared that he was going mad. But sometimes
(04:24):
Sad shook himself and spoke aloud, his voice ringing hollow
in his huge metal helmet. Brace up, old top in
good company when you're by yourself, as Dad used to say,
be back in Helion in a week or so. Anyhow,
look up Dan and Chuck and the rest of the
crowd again at Comet's place. What price a friendly boxing
match with Mason, or an evening at the Televith Theater.
(04:46):
Fresh air instead of this stale synthetic stuff, real food
in place of these tasteless concentrates. A hot bath instead
of greasing yourself too dull out here life, He broke
off set jaw. No use thinking about such things only
made it worse. Besides, how did he know that a
worrying meteor wasn't going to flash him out? Before he
(05:08):
got back? He drew his right arm out of the
bulging sleeve of his suit into its ample interior, found
a cigarette in an inside pocket and lighted it. The
smoke swirled about in the helmet, drawn swiftly into the
air filters. Darn clever, these suits, he murmured, Food, smokes,
water generator, all where you can reach them, And darned
(05:29):
expensive too. I'd better be looking for pay metal. He
clamored to a better position, stood peering out into space,
searching for the tiny gleam of sunlight on a meteoric
fragment that might be worth capturing for its content of
precious metals. For an hour, he scanned the black star
strewn gulf as the sputtering rocket continued to drive him forward.
(05:49):
There she glows, he cried suddenly, and grinned. Before him
was a tiny, glowing fleck that moved among the unchanging stars.
He stared at it intensely, breathing faster in the helmet always.
He thrilled to see such a moving gleam. What a
treasure it promised. At first sight, it was impossible to
determine size, or distance, or rate of motion. It might
(06:10):
be ten thousand tons of rich metal, a fortune. It
would more probably prove to be a tiny stony mass,
not worth capturing. It might even be large and valuable,
but moving so rapidly that he could not overtake it
with the power of the diminutive millin rocket. He studied
the tiny speck intently with practiced eye as the minutes passed.
(06:31):
An untrained eye would never have seen it at all
among the flaming hosts of stars. Skillfully, he judged from
its apparent rate of motion and its slow increase in brilliance,
its size and distance from him must be a fair size,
he spoke aloud, at length a hundred tons, I'll bet
my helmet. But scooting along pretty fast, stretched the little
(06:52):
old rocket to run it down. He clamored back to
the rocket, changed the angle of the flaming exhaust to
drive him directly across the path of the eye object ahead.
Filled the magazine again with the little pellets of urinite,
which were fed automatically into the combustion chamber and increased
the firing rate. The trailing blue flame reached farther backward
from the incandescent orifice of the exhaust, the vibration of
(07:15):
the metal sphere increased. Thad left the sputtering rocket and
went back where he could see the object before him.
It was nearer, now, rushing obliquely across his path. Would
he be in time to capture it as it passed,
or would it hurtle by ahead of him and vanish
in the limitless darkness of space Before his feeble rocket
could check the momentum of his ball of metal. He
(07:37):
peered at it as it drew closer. Its surface seemed
oddly bright, silvery, not the dull black of meteoric iron.
And it was larger, more distant than he thought at first.
In form too, it seemed curiously regular, ellipsoid. It was
no jagged mass of metal. His hopes sank rose again immediately.
(07:59):
Even if it were not the mass of rich metal
for which he had prayed, it might be something as
valuable and more interesting. He returned to the rocket, adjusted
the angle of the nozzle again, and advanced the firing
time slightly, even at the risk of a ruinous explosion.
When he returned to where he could see the hurtling
object before him, he saw that it was a ship,
(08:19):
a tapering, silver green rocket flyer. Once more his dreams
were dashed. The officers of interplanetary liners lose no love
upon the meteor miners, claiming that their collected masses of metal,
almost helpless, always underpowered, are menaces to navigation. Thad could
expect nothing from the ship save a heliographed warning to
(08:39):
keep clear. But how came a rocket flyer? Here? In
the perilous swarms of the meteor belt, many a vessel
had been destroyed by collision with an asteroid in the
days before charted lanes were cleared of drifting metal. The
lanes more frequently used between Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury
were of course far inside the orbits of the asteroids,
(09:01):
and the few ships returning to Jupiter's moons avoided them
by crossing millions of miles above their plane. Could it
be that legendary green ship said once to have mysteriously appeared,
sliced up and drawn within her hull several of the
primitive ships of that day, and then disappeared forever after
in the remote wastes of space. Absurd, of course. He
(09:22):
dismissed the idle fancy and examined the ship still more closely.
Then he saw that it was turning end over end,
very slowly. That meant that the gyros were stopped, that
it was helpless, drifting, disabled, powerless to avoid hurling meteoric stones.
Had it blundered unawares into the belt of swarms, been
struck before the danger was realized. Was it a derelict
(09:45):
with all dead upon it? Either the ship's machinery was
completely wrecked that new or there was no one on watch.
For the controls of a modern rocket flyer are so
simple and so nearly automatic that a single man at
the bridge can keep a vacu upon her course. It
might be he thought that a meteorite had ripped open
the hull, allowing the air to escape so quickly that
(10:07):
the entire crew had been asphyxiated before any repairs could
be made. But that seemed unlikely, since the ship must
have been divided into several compartments by air tight bulkheads.
Could the vessel have been deserted for some reason. The
crew might have mutinied and left her in the life tubes.
She might have been robbed by pirates and set a drift.
(10:27):
But with the space lanes policed as they were, piracy
and successful mutiny were rare. Thad saw that the flyer's
navigation lights were out. He found the heliographic signal mirror
at his side, sighted it upon the ship, and worked
the mirror rapidly. He waited, repeated the call. There was
no response. The vessel was plainly a derelict. Could he
(10:50):
board her and take her to Mars? By law, it
was his duty to attempt to aid any helpless ship,
or at least try to save any endangered lives on her,
and the salvage award if the ship should be deserted,
and he could bring her safe to port. Would be
half her value. No mean prize, that half the value
of a ship and cargo, more than he was apt
(11:10):
to earning years of mining the meteor belt. With new anxiety,
he measured the relative motion of the gleaming ship. It
was going to pass ahead of him, and very soon.
No more time for speculation. It was still uncertain whether
it would come near enough so that he could get
a line to it. Rapidly, he unslung from his belt
the apparatus he used to capture meteors, a powerful electromagnet
(11:33):
with a thin, strong wire fastened to it, to be
hurled from a helix gun. He set the drum on
which the wire was wound upon the metal at his feet,
fastened it with its magnetic anchor, wondering if it would
stand the terrific strain when the wire tightened. Raising the
helix to his shoulder, he trained it upon a point
well ahead of the rushing flier, and stood waiting for
(11:53):
the exact moment to press the lever. The slender spindle
of the ship was only a mile away. Now bright
and sunlight, he could see no break in her polished hull.
Save for the dark rows of circular ports, she was
not by any means completely wrecked. He read the black
letters of her name read Dragon. The name of her
(12:14):
home port below was in smaller letters, but in a
moment he made them out San Francisco. The ship then
came from Earth, from the very city where Thad was born.
The gleaming hull was near, now only a few hundred
yards away. Passing aiming well ahead of her to allow
for her motion, Thad pressed the key that hurled the
magnet from the helix. It flung away from him, the
(12:36):
wire screaming from the reel behind it. Thad's massive metal
swung on past the ship. As he returned to the
rocket and stopped its clattering explosions, he watched the tiny
black speck of the magnet. It vanished from sight in
the darkness of space, appeared again against the white, burnished
hull of the rocket ship. For a painful instant, he
thought he had missed. Then he saw that the magnet
(12:58):
was fast to the side of the flore near the stern.
The line tightened. Soon the strain would come upon it
as it checked the momentum of the mass of iron.
He set the friction brake. Thad flung himself flat, grasped
the wire above the reel. Even if the mass of
iron tore itself free, he could hold to the wire
and himself reach the ship. He flung past the deserted vessel.
(13:20):
Behind it, his lump of iron swung like a pebble
in a sling. A cloud of smoke burst from the
burned lining of the friction brake in the reel. Then
the wire was all out. There was a sudden jerk,
and the hard gathered sphere of metal was gone, snapped
off into space. Thad clung desperately to the wire, muscles cracking, tortured,
(13:40):
arms almost drawn from their sockets. Fear flashed over his mind.
What if the wire broke and left him floating helpless
in space? It held, though, to his relief, he was
trailing behind the ship. Eagerly, he seized the handle of
the reel began to wind up the mile and a
half of thin wire. Half an hour later, suited figure
(14:01):
bumped gently against the shining hull of the rocket. He
got to his feet and gazed backward into the starry gulf,
where his sphere of iron had long since vanished. Somebody
is going to find himself a nice chunk of metal,
all welded together and equipped for rocket navigation. He murmured,
as for me, well, I've simply got to run this
tub to Mars. He walked over the smooth, refulgent hull,
(14:25):
held to it by magnetic soles. Nowhere was it broken,
though he found scars where small meteoric particles had scratched
the brilliant polish. So no meteor had wrecked the ship.
What then was the matter? Soon he would know. The
Red Dragon was not large one hundred and thirty feet long,
fat estimated, with a beam of twenty five feet, but
(14:47):
her trim lines bespoke, designed, recent and good. The double
ring of black projecting rockets at the stern told of
unusual speed. A pretty piece of salvage, he reflected. If
he could land her on Mars, half the value of
such a ship, unharmed and safe in port, would be
a larger sum than he dared to put in figures,
and he must take her in. Now that he had
(15:08):
lost his own rocket. He found the life tubes, six
of them, slender, silvery cylinders, lying secure in their niches,
three along each side of the flier. None was missing,
so the crew had not willingly deserted the ship. He
approached the main air lock at the center of the hull,
behind the projecting dome of the bridge. It was closed.
(15:30):
A glance at the dials told him there was full
air pressure within it. It had then last been used
to enter the rocket, not leave it. Thad opened the
exhaust valve, let the air hiss from the chamber of
the lock. The huge door swung open in response to
his hand upon the wheel, and he entered the cylindrical chamber.
In a moment, the door was closed behind him. Air
(15:50):
was hissing into the lock again. He started to open
the face plate of his helmet, longing for a breath
of air that did not smell of sweat and stale
tobacco smoke, as that in his suit always did, despite
the best chemical purifiers. Then he hesitated, perhaps some deadly
gas from the combustion chambers. Thad opened the inner valve
and came upon the upper deck of the vessel. A
(16:12):
floor ran the full length of the ship, broken with
hatches and companion ways that gave to the rocket rooms,
cargo holds, and quarters for crew and passengers. Below. There
was an enclosed ladder that led to bridge and navigating
rooms in the dome. Above the hull formed an arched
roof over it. The deck was deserted, lit only by
(16:33):
three dim blue globes hanging from the curved roof. All
seemed in order, the fire fighting equipment hanging on the walls,
and the huge metal patches and welding equipment for repairing
brakes in the hall. Everything was clean, bright with polish
or new paint, and all was very still. The silence
held a vague, brooding threat that frightened, that made him
(16:55):
wish for a moment that he was back upon his
rugged ball of metal. But he banished his and strode
down the deck midway of it. He found a dark
stain upon the clean metal, the black of long dried blood,
a few tattered scraps of cloth beside it, no more
than bloody rags, and a heavy meat cleaver, half hidden
beneath a bit of darkened fabric. Mute record of tragedy.
(17:19):
Thad strove to read it. Had a man fought here
and been killed, it must have been a struggle of
peculiar violence, to judge by the dark spattered stains and
the indescribable condition of the remnants of clothing. But what
had he fought another man or some thing? And what
had become a victor and vanquished? He walked on down
(17:40):
the deck. The torturing silence was broken by the abrupt
patter of quick, little footsteps behind him. He turned quickly nervously,
with a hand going instinctively to his welding arc, which
he knew would make a fairly effective weapon. It was
merely a dog, a little dog, a yellow, nondescript, pathetically
delighted dog with a sharp, eager bark. It leaped up
(18:01):
at Thad, pawing at his armor and licking it, standing
on its hind legs and reaching toward the visor of
his helmet. It was very thin, as if from long starvation.
Both ears were ragged and bloody, and there was a long,
unhealed scratch across the shoulder, somewhat inflamed, but not a
serious wound. The bright, eager eyes were alight with joy,
(18:22):
but Thad thought he saw fear in them, and even
through the stiff fabric of the osprey suit, he felt
that the dog was trembling. Suddenly, with a low whine,
it shrank close to his side, and another sound reached
Thad's ears, A cry weird and harrowing, beyond telling, A
scream so thin and so high that it roughened his skin,
(18:42):
so keenly shrill that it tortured his nerves, A sound
of that peculiar frequency that is more agonizing than any
bodily pain. When silence came again, Thad was standing with
his back against the wall, the welding arc in his hand.
His face was cold with sweat, and a queer chill
pricked up and down his spine. The yellow dog crouched
whimpering against his legs. Ominous threatening stillness filled the ship again,
(19:08):
disturbed only by the whimpers and frightened growls of the dog.
Trying to calm his overwrought nerves, Thad listened, strained his ears.
He could hear nothing, and he had no idea from
which direction the terrifying sound had come. A strange cry.
Thad knew it had been borne in no human throat,
nor in the throat of any animal. He knew it
(19:29):
had carried an alien note that overcame him with instinctive
fear and horror. What had voiced it was the ship
haunted by some dread entity. For many minutes, Thad stood
upon the deck, waiting, tensely, grasping the welding tool. But
the nerve shattering scream did not come again, nor any
other sound. The yellow dog seemed half to forget its fear.
(19:51):
It leaped up at his face again with another short,
little bark. The air must be good, he thought, if
the dog could live in it. He unscrewed the face
plate of his helmet and lifted it. The air that
struck his face was cool and clean. He breathed deeply, gratefully,
and at first he did not notice the strange odor
upon it, a curious, unpleasant scent, earthly, almost fetid, unfamiliar.
(20:15):
The dog kept leaping up, whining. Hungry boy, Thad whispered.
He fumbled in the bulky inside pockets of his suit,
found a slab of concentrated food, and tossed it out
through the opened panel. The dog sprang upon it, wolfed
it eagerly, and came back to his side. Thad said
at once about exploring the ship. First, he ascended the
(20:36):
ladder to the bridge. A metal dome covered it, studded
with transparent ports, charts and instruments. Were in order, and
the room was vacant, heavy with the fatal silence of
the ship. Thad had no expert's knowledge of the Flyer's mechanism,
but he had studied interplanetary navigation to qualify for his
license to carry masses of metal under rocket power through
(20:56):
the space lanes and into planetary atmospheres. Sure he could
manage the ship if its mechanism were in good order,
though he was uncertain of his ability to make any
considerable repairs. To his relief, a scrutiny of the dials
revealed nothing wrong. He started the gyro motors, got the
great wheels to spinning, and thus stopped the slow end
over end turning of the Flyer. Then he went to
(21:19):
the rocket controls, warmed three of the tubes, and set
them to firing. The vessel answered readily to her helm.
In a few minutes he had the red fleck of
Mars over the bow. Yes, I can run her all right,
he announced to the dog, which had followed him up
the steps, keeping close to his feet. Don't worry, old boy,
We'll be eating a juicy beef steak together in a
(21:39):
week at Comet's place in Helion, down by the canal,
not much style, but the eats. And now we're going
to do a little detective work and find out what
made that disagreeable noise and what happened to all your
fellow astronauts. Better find out before it happens to us.
He shut off the rockets and climbed down from the
bridge again. When Thad started down the companionway to the
(22:02):
officer's quarters in the central one of the five main
compartments of the ship, the dog kept close to his legs, growling, trembling,
hackles lifted. Sensing the animal's terror, pitying it for the
naked fear in its eyes, Thad wondered what dramas of
horror it might have seen. The cabins of the navigator, calculator,
chief technician, and first officer were empty and forbidding with
(22:24):
the ominous silence of the ship. They were neatly in order,
and the berths had been made since they were used,
but there was a large blood stain, black and circular,
on the floor of the calculator's room. The captain's cabin
held evidence of a violent struggle. The door had been
broken in its fragments, with pieces of broken furniture, books,
covers from the berth and three service pistols were scattered
(22:47):
about in indescribable confusion, all stained with blood. Among the
frightful debris, Thad found several scraps of clothing of dissimilar fabrics.
The guns were empty. Attempting to reconstruct the acts action
of the tragedy from those grim clues, he imagined that
the five officers, aware of some peril, had gathered here,
fought and died. The dog refused to enter the room.
(23:10):
It stood at the door, looking anxiously after him, trembling
and whimpering pitifully. Several times it sniffed the air and
drew back, snarling. Thad thought that the unpleasant, earthly odor
he had noticed upon opening the face plate of his
helmet was stronger here. After a few minutes of searching
through the wildly disordered room, he found the ship's log
(23:30):
or its remains. Many pages had been torn from the book,
and the remainder, soaked with blood, formed a stiff black mass.
Only one legible entry did he find that on a
page torn from the book, which somehow had escaped destruction,
dated five months before, It gave the position of the
vessel and her bearings. She was then just outside Jupiter's
(23:51):
orbit earthward bound, and concluded with a remark of sinister implications.
Another man gone this morning, Sims, assistant technician, a fine workman.
Odeine swears he heard something moving on the deck. Cook
thinks some of the doctor's stuffed monstrosities have come to life. Ridiculous,
of course, but what is one to think pondering the
(24:13):
significance of those few lines that climbed back to the deck.
Was the ship haunted by some weird death that had
seized the crew manned by man mysteriously? That was the
obvious implication. And if the flyer had been still outside
Jupiter's orbit when those words were written, it must have
been weeks before the end, a lurking invisible death the
(24:34):
scream he had heard. He descended into the forecastle and
came upon another such silent record of frightful carnage as
he had found in the captain's cabin, dried blood, scraps
of cloth, knives and other weapons. A fearful question was
beginning to obsess him. What had become of the bodies
of those who must have died in these conflicts? He
dared not think the answer, gripping the welding arc that
(24:58):
approached the after hatch, giving to the the cargo hold.
Trepidation almost overpowered him, but he was determined to find
the sinister menace of the ship before it found him.
The dog whimpered, hung back, and finally deserted him, contributing
nothing to his peace of mind. The hold proved to
be dark, an indefinite black space, oppressive with the terrible
silence of the flier, the air within it bore still
(25:21):
more strongly. The unpleasant fetter sad hesitated on the steps.
The hold was not inviting, but at the thought that
he must sleep unguarded while taking the Flier to Mars,
his resolution returned the uncertainty the constant fear would be unendurable.
He climbed on down, feeling for the light button. He
found it. As his feet touched the floor, blue light
(25:43):
flooded the hold. It was filled with monstrous things, colossal
creatures such as nothing that ever lived upon the earth,
like nothing known in the jungles of Venus or the
deserts of Mars, or anything that has been found upon
Jupiter's moons. They were monsters remotely resembling insects or crustaceans,
but as large as horses or elephants. Creatures up reared
(26:06):
upon strange limbs, armed with hideously fanged jaws, cruel talons,
frightful saw toothed snouts, and glittering scales, red and yellow
and green. They leered at him with phosphorescent eyes, yellow
and purple. They cast grotesquely gigantic shadows in the blue light.
A cold shock of horror started along thad spine at
(26:26):
the sight of those incredible nightmare things. Automatically, he flung
up the welding tool, flicking over the lever with his
thumb so that violet electric flame played about the electrode.
Then he saw the crowding, hideous things were motionless, that
they stood upon wooden pedestals, that many of them were
supported upon metal bars. They were dead, mounted, collected specimens
(26:48):
of some alien life. Grinning wanly and consciously of a
weakness in the knees, He muttered, the sure will filled
the museum if everybody gets the kick out of them
that I did a little too realistic eyes, I'd say,
guess these are the stuffed monstrosities mentioned in the page
out of the log No wonder the cook was afraid
of them. Some of them do look hellishly alive. He
(27:10):
started across the hold, shrinking involuntarily from the armored enormities
that seemed crouching to spring at him, motionless eyes staring
so at the end of the long space, he found
the treasure glittering in the blue light. It looked unreal, incredible,
a dazzling dream. He stopped among the fearful things that
seemed gathered as if to guard it, and stared with
(27:32):
wide eyes through the open face plate of his helmet.
He saw neat stacks of gold ingots, new freshly smelted
bars of silver white iridium, of argent platinum, of blue
white osmium, many of them thousands of pounds that knew.
He trembled at the thought of their value, almost beyond calculation.
Then he saw the coffer lying beyond the piled gleaming ingots,
(27:55):
a huge box eight feet long, made of some crystal
that glittered with snowy wine whiteness, filled with sparkling iridescent gleams,
and inlaid with strange designs, apparently in vermilion enamel. With
a little cry He ran toward the chest, moving awkwardly
in the loose, deflated fabric of the osprey suit. Beside
the coffer. On the floor of the hold was literally
(28:16):
a mountain of flame blazing gems, heaped as if they
had been carelessly dumped from it. Cut diamonds, incredibly gigantic
monster emeralds, sapphires, rubies, and strange stones that Thad didn't recognize.
And Thad gasped with horror when he looked at the
designs of the vermilion inlay in the white, gleaming crystal,
weird forms, shapes of creatures somewhat like gigantic spiders, and
(28:40):
more unlike them, demonic things, wickedly fanged jaws, slavering, executed
with masterly skill that made them seem living menacing secretly gloating.
Thad stared at them for long minutes, fascinated, almost hypnotically.
Three times he approached the chest to lift the lid
and find what it held, and three times the unutterable
(29:02):
horror of those crimson images thrust him back, shuddering. Nothing
but pictures, he muttered hoarsely. A fourth time he advanced,
trembling and seized the lid of the coffer, heavy, massive,
It was fashioned also of glistening white crystal, and inlaid
in crimson with weirdly hideous figures. Great hinges of white platinum.
Held it on the farther side. It was fastened with
(29:24):
a simple heavy hasp of the precious metal. Hands quivering,
Thad snapped back the hasp, lifted the lid. New treasure
in the chest would not have surprised him. He was
prepared to meet dazzling wonders of gems or priceless metal.
Nor would he have been astonished at some weird creature
such as one of those whose likenesses were inlaid in
the crystal. But what he saw made him drop the
(29:46):
massive lid. A woman lay in the chest, motionless in white.
In a moment, he raised the lid again, examined the
still form more closely. The woman had been young, The
features were regular, good to look upon. The eyes were closed.
The white face appeared very peaceful. Save for the extreme
cadaverous pallor. There was no mark of death. With a
(30:08):
fancy that the body might be miraculously living sleeping, Thad
thrust an arm out through the open panel of his
suit and touched a slender, bare white arm. It was stiff,
very cold. The still pallid face was framed in fine
brown hair. The fair small hands were crossed upon the
breast over the simple white garment. A queer ache came
(30:30):
into his heart. Something made him think of a white
tower in the red hills near Helion, and a girl
waiting in its fragrant garden of saffron and purple, a
girl like this. The body lay upon a bed of
blazing jewels. It appeared, that thought, as if the pile
of gems upon the floor had been hastily scraped from
the coffer to make room for the quiet form. He
(30:51):
wondered how long it had lain there. It looked as
if it might have been living but minutes before some preservative.
His thought was broken by a sound that rang from
the open hatchway on the deck above, the furious barking
and yelping of the dog. Abruptly, that was silent, and
in its place came the uncanny and terrifying scream that
(31:12):
Thad had heard once before on this flier of mystery,
a shriek so keen and shrill that it seemed to
tear out his nerves by their roots. The voice of
the haunter of the ship. When Thad came back upon
the deck, the dog was still barking nervously. He saw
the animal forward almost at the bow, hackles, raised tail
between its legs. It was slinking backward, barking sharply as
(31:36):
if to call for aid. Apparently it was retreating from
something between Thad and itself. But Thad, searching the dimly
lit deck, could see no source of alarm, nor could
the structures upon it have shut any large object from
his view. It's all right, Thad called, intending to reassure
the frightened animal, but finding his voice queerly dry coming
(31:57):
on the double, old man, don't worry. The dog had
reached the end of the deck. It stopped yelping, but
snarled and whined, as if in terror. It began darting
back and forth, moving exactly as if something were slowly
closing in upon it, trapping it in the corner. But
Thad could see nothing. Then it made a wild dash
back toward Thad, darting along the wall as if to
(32:19):
run past an unseen enemy. Thad thought he heard quick,
rasping footsteps then that were not those of the dog,
and something seemed to catch the dog in mid air.
As it leaped, it was hurled howling to the deck.
For a moment, it struggled furiously, as if an invisible
claw had pinned it down. Then it escaped and fled
whimpering to Thad's side. He saw a new wound across
(32:41):
its hips, three long, parallel scratches from which fresh red
blood was trickling. Regular scraping sounds came from the end
of the deck, where no moving thing was to be seen,
sounds such as might be made by the walking of
feet with unsheathed claws. Something was coming back toward Thad.
Something It was invisible. Terror seized him with the knowledge
(33:03):
he had nerved himself to face desperate men or a
savage animal, but an invisible being that could creep upon
him and strike unseen. It was incredible, Yet he had
seen the dog knock down and the bleeding wound it
had received. His heart paused, then beat very quickly. For
the moment, he thought only blindly of escape. He knew
only an overpowering desire to hide, to conceal himself from
(33:26):
the invisible thing. Had it been possible, he might have
tried to leave the flier Beside him was one of
the companionways amidships, giving access to a compartment of the
vessel that he had not explored. He turned leaped down
the steps, with the terrified dog at his heels. Below,
he found himself in a short haul, dimly lighted, several
metal doors opening from it. He tried one at random.
(33:49):
It gave He sprang through, let the dog follow, closed,
and locked it. Trying to listen, He leaned weakly against
the door, the rushing of his breath swift and regular,
the loud hammer of his studding heart, the dog's low whines,
then unmistakable scraping sounds outside, the scratching of claws that
knew invisible claws. He stood there, bracing the door with
(34:12):
the weight of his body, holding the welding arc ready
in his hand. Several times the hinges creaked and he
felt a heavy pressure against the panels, But at last
the scratching sounds ceased. He relaxed. The monster had withdrawn,
at least for a time, when he had time to think,
the invisibility of the thing was not so incredible. The
mounted creatures he had seen in the hold were evidence
(34:33):
that the flier had visited some unknown planet where weird
life reigned. It was not beyond reason that such a
planet should be inhabited by beings invisible to human sight.
Human vision, as he knew, utilizes only a tiny fraction
of the spectrum. The creature must be largely transparent to
visible light, as human flesh is radio lucent to hard
(34:53):
X rays. Quite possibly it could be seen by infrared
or ultraviolet light. Evidently it was visible enough to the
dog's eyes with their different range of sensitivity. Pushing the
subject from his mind, he turned to survey the room
into which he had burst. It had apparently been occupied
by a woman. A frail blue silk dress and more
intimate items of feminine wearing apparel were hanging above the berth.
(35:17):
Two pairs of delicate black slippers stood neatly below it.
Across from him was a dressing table with a large
mirror above it. Combs, pins jars of cosmetic cluttered it,
and Thad saw upon it a little leather bound book,
locked stamped on the back diary. He crossed the room
and picked up the little book, which smelt faintly of jasmine.
(35:38):
Momentary shame overcame him at thus stealing the secrets of
an unknown girl. Necessity, however, left him no choice but
to seize any chance of learning more of this ship
of mystery and her invisible haunter. He broke the flimsy fastening.
Linda Cross was the name written on the fly leaf
in a firm, clear feminine hand. On the next page
(35:58):
was the photograph in color of a girl, the brown
haired girl whose body that had discovered in the crystal
coffer in the hold. Her eyes, he saw, had been blue.
He thought she looked very lovely, like the waiting girl
in his old dream of the Silver Tower in the
Red Hills by Helion. The diary, it appeared, had not
been kept very devotedly. Most of the pages were blank.
(36:21):
One of the first entries, dated a year and a
half before, told of a party that Linda had attended
in San Francisco, and of her refusal to dance with
a certain man referred to as Benny, because he had
been unpleasantly insistent about wanting to marry her. It ended,
Dad said tonight that we are going off in the
Dragon again, all the way to Uranus. If the new
(36:41):
fuel works as he expects. What a lark to explore
a few new worlds of our own, Dad says, one
of Uranus's moons is as large as mercury, and Benny
won't be proposing again soon. Turning on Thad found other
scattered entries, some of them dealing with the preparation for
the voyage, the start from San Franciosis and a huge
(37:01):
bunch of flowers from Benny. The long months of the
trip through space, out past the orbit of Mars, above
the meteor belt, across Jupiter's orbit, beyond the track of Saturn,
which was the farthest point that rocket explorers had previously reached,
and on to Uranus, where they could not land because
of the unstable surface. The remainder of the entries that
(37:21):
found less frequent, shorter, bearing the mark of excitement landing
upon Titania, the third and largest satellite of Uranus. Unearthly
forests sheltering strange and monstrous life, the hunting of weird
creatures and mounting them for museum specimens. Then the discovery
of a ruined city whose remains indicated that it had
been built by a lost race of intelligent spider like things.
(37:44):
The finding of a temple whose walls were of precious
metals containing a crystal chest filled with wondrous gems, the
smelting of the metal into convenient ingots, and the transfer
of the treasure to the hold. The first sinister note
there entered the diary. Some of the men say, we
shouldn't have disturbed the temple, think it will bring us
bad luck. Rubbish, of course. But one man did vanish
(38:08):
while they were smelting the gold, poor mister Tom James.
I suppose he ventured away from the rest and something
caught him. The few entries that followed were shorter and
showed increasing nervous tension. They recorded the departure from Titania,
made almost as soon as the treasure was loaded. The
last was made several weeks later. A dozen men had
(38:29):
vanished from the crew, leaving only gouts of blood to
hint the manner of their going. The last entry ran
Dad says, I'm to stay in here to day, old dear.
He's afraid the thing will get me. Whatever it is,
it's really serious. Two men taken from their berths last
night and not a trace. Some of them think it's
a curse on the treasure. One of them swears he
(38:51):
saw Dad's stuffed specimens moving about in the hold. Some
terrible thing must have slipped aboard the flier out of
the jungle. That's what Dad in the captain think, Queer.
They can't find it. They searched all over well. Musing
and regretful, Thad turned back for another look at the
smiling girl in the photograph. What a tragedy her death
(39:12):
had been. Reading the diary had made him like her,
her balance and humor, her quiet affection for Dad, the
calm courage with which she seemed to have faced the creeping,
lurking death that darkened the ship with its unescapable shadow.
How had her body come to be in the coffer,
he wondered, When all the others were gone. It had
shown no marks of violence. She must have died of fear. No,
(39:36):
her face had seemed too calm and peaceful for that.
Had she chosen easy death by some poison rather than
that other dreadful fate. Had her body been put in
the chest to protect it and the poison arrested decomposition.
Thad was still studying the picture thoughtfully and sadly when
the dog, which had been silent, suddenly growled again and
(39:56):
retreated from the door toward the corner. Of the room.
The invisible monster had returned. Thad heard its claws scratching
across the door again, and he heard another dreadful sound,
not the long, shrill scream that had so grated on
his nerves before, but a short, sharp coughing or barking,
a series of shrill, indescribable notes that could have been
(40:18):
made by no beast he knew. The decision to open
the door cossed a huge effort on Thad's will. Four
hours he had waited, thinking desperately, and the thing outside
of the door had waited as patiently, scratching upon it
from time to time, uttering those dreadful, shrill, coughing cries.
Sooner or later he would have to face the monster.
(40:39):
Even if he could escape from the room and avoid
it for a time, he would have to meet it
in the end, and it might creep upon him while
he slept. To be sure, the issue of the combat
was extremely doubtful. The monster apparently had succeeded in killing
every man upon the flier, even though some of them
had been armed. It must be large and very ferocious.
(40:59):
But Thad was not without hope. He still wore his
osprey suit, the heavy fabric made of metal wires impregnated
with a tough elastic composition should afford considerable protection against
the thing. The welding arc intended to fuse refractive meteoric
iron would be no mean weapon at close quarters, and
the quarters would be close if only he could find
(41:21):
some way to make the thing visible. Paint or something
of the kind would stick to its skin. His eyes
searching the room caught the jar of face powder on
the dressing table, dash that over it. It ought to
stick enough to make the outline visible. So, at last,
holding the powder ready in one hand, he waited until
a time when the pressure upon the door had just relaxed,
(41:42):
and he knew the monster was waiting outside. Swiftly he
opened the door. Thad had partially overcome the instinctive horror
that the unseen being first aroused in him, but it
returned in a sickening wave when he heard the short, shrill,
coughing cries hideously eager that greeted the opening of the door,
and the quick rasping of naked claws upon the floor
(42:04):
sounds from nothingness. He flung the powder. At the sound.
A form of weird horror materialized before him. Still half invisible,
half outlined with the white film of adhering powder. Gigantic
and hideous claws that seemed to reach out of empty
air the side of a huge, scaly body, a yawning,
dripping jaw. For a moment that could see great hooked
(42:28):
fangs in that jaw. Then they vanished, as if an
unseen tongue had licked the powder from them, dissolving it
in fluids which made it invisible. That unearthly, half seen
shape leaped at him. He was carried backward into the room,
hurled to the floor. Claws were rasping upon the tough
fabric of his suit. His arm was seized crushingly in
(42:48):
half visible jaws. Desperately he clung to the welding tool.
The heated electrode was driven toward his body. He fought
to keep it away. He knew that it would burn
through even the insulated fabric of his A claw ripped
savagely at his side. He heard the sharp, rending sound
as the tough fabric of his suit was torn, and
felt a thin pencil of pain drawn along his body
(43:10):
where the claw cut his skin. Suddenly, the suit was
full of the earthly fetter of the monster's body. Nauseatingly intense,
Thad gasped, tried to hold his breath, and thrust upward
hard with the incandescent electrode. He felt warm blood trickling
from the wound. A numbing blow struck his arm. The
welding tool was carried from his hand flung to the
(43:31):
other side of the room. It clattered to the floor,
and then a heavy weight came upon his chest, forcing
the breath from his lungs. The monster stood upon his
body and clawed at him. Thad squirmed furiously. He kicked
out with his feet, encountering a great, hard body. Futilely,
he beat and thrust with his arms against the pillar
like limb. His body was being mauled bruised beneath the
(43:52):
thick fabric. He heard it tear again along his right thigh,
but he felt no pain and thought the claws had
not reached the skin. It was the yellow dog that
gave him the chance to recover the weapon. The animal
had been running back and forth in the opposite end
of the room, fairly howling in excitement and terror. Now
with the mad carriage of desperation, it leaped recklessly at
the monster. A mighty, dimly seen claw caught it, hurled
(44:16):
it back across the room. It lay still broken, whimpering.
For a moment. The thing had lifted its weight from
Thad's body, and Thad slipped quickly from beneath it, flung
himself across the room, snatched up the welding tool. In
an instant, the creature was upon him again, but he
met it with the incandescent electrode. He was crouched in
a corner now where it could come at him from
(44:36):
only one direction. Its claws still slashed at him ferociously,
but he was able to cling to the weapon and
meet each onslaught with hot metal. Gradually its mad attacks weakened.
Then one of his blind thrusting blows seemed to burn
into a vital organ. A terrible, choking, strangling sound came
from the air, and he heard the thrashing struggles of
wild convulsions. At last all was quiet. He trotted the
(45:00):
thing again and again bought electrode, and it did not move.
It was dead. The creature's body was so heavy that
Thad had to return to the bridge and shut off
the current in the gravity plates along the keel before
he could move it. He dragged it to the lock
through which he had entered the Flier and consigned it
to space. Five days later, Thad brought the Red Dragon
(45:21):
into the atmosphere of Mars. A puzzled pilot came aboard
in response to his signals and docked the flier safely
at Helion. Thad went down into the hold again with
the astonished port authorities, who had come aboard to inspect
the vessel. Again. He passed among the grotesque and outrageous
monsters in the hold, leading the gasping officers while they
(45:41):
marveled at the treasure. He lifted the weirdly embellished lid
of the coffer of white crystal and looked once more
upon the still form of the girl within it. Pity
stirred him. An ache came to his throat. Linda Cross,
so quiet and cold and white and yet so lovely.
How terrible her last days of life must have been,
with dooms shadowing the vessel, and with the men vanishing
(46:04):
mysteriously one by one, terrible until she had sought the
security of death. Strangely, Thad felt no great elation at
the thought that half the incalculable treasure about him was
now safely his own as the award of salvage. If
only the girl were still living, he felt a poignantly
keen desire to hear her voice. Thad found the note
(46:26):
when they started to lift her from the chest, a
hasty scrawl that lay beneath her head among glittering gems.
This woman is not dead. Please have her given skilled
medical attention as soon as possible. She lies in a
state of suspended animation, induced by the injection of fifty
minims of zirinel. She is my daughter, Linda Cross, and
(46:48):
my sole heir. I entreat the finders of this to
have care given her, and to keep in trust for
her such part of the treasure on this ship as
may remain after the payment of salvage or other claims.
Some time she will wake, perhaps in a year, perhaps
in a hundred. The purity of my drugs is uncertain,
and the injection was made hastily, so I do not
(47:08):
know the exact time that must elapse. If this is found,
it will be because the lurking thing upon the ship
has destroyed me and all of my men. Please do
not fail me, Signed Leverington Cross. Thad bought the white
tower of his dreams, slim and graceful in its Martian
garden of saffron and purple, among the low Ochre hills
(47:29):
beside Helion. He carried the sleeping girl through the silver
door where the girl of his dreams had waited, and
set the coffer in a great vaulted chamber. Many times
each day he came into the room where she lay,
to look into her pallid face and feel her cold wrist.
He kept a nurse in attendance, and had a physician
called daily. A long Martian year went by. Looking in
(47:52):
his mirror, one day, Thad saw little wrinkles about his eyes.
He realized that the nervous strain and anxiety of waiting
was aging him, and it might be a hundred years,
he remembered, before Linda Cross came from beneath the drug's influence.
He wondered if he should grow old and infirm while
Linda lay still young and beautiful and unchanged in her sleep,
if she might awake after long years and see in
(48:15):
him only a feeble old man. And he knew that
he would not be sorry he had waited, even if
he should die before she revived. On the next day,
the nurse called him into the room where Linda lay.
He was bending over her when she opened her eyes.
They were blue, glorious. A long time she looked up
at him, first in fearful wonder, then with confidence and
(48:37):
dawning understanding, and at last she smiled. And of Salvage
in Space by Jack Williamson
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