The Finding of Haldgren Read online

  CHAPTER V

  _"And I've Brought You to This!"_

  The master pilot, when he stepped forth upon that weird globe which wasthe Moon, found himself plunged into a spectral world. Even from withinthe air-tight suit, through whose helmet-glass he peered, he sensed, ashe had not when inside the ship, the vast desolation, the frozenemptiness of this rocky waste.

  His suit of woven metal was lined throughout with heavy fabric ofinsuline fibers, that strange product brought from the jungle heat ofthe upper Amazon to keep out the bitter cold of this frozen world. Hisship was felted with the same material between its double walls; withoutit there would have been no resisting the cold of these interstellarreaches.

  But, despite the padding within his suit, he felt the numbing cold ofthis dead world strike through. And the bleak and frigid barrenness thatmet his gaze was so implacably hostile to any living thing as to bring ashudder of more than physical cold.

  No warming sun, as yet, reflected from the rocks. About him was theblackness of a fire-formed lithosphere, whose lighter veining andoccasional ashy fields were made ghostly in the earthlight.

  One slow, all-seeing glance at this!--one moment of wondering amazementwhen he tilted his head far back that he might look up to the mouth ofthe crater and see, in a dead-black sky, the great crescent of earth--avast, incredible moon peeping over the serrate edge. Then, as if theinterval of time since leaving the ship had been measured in hoursinstead of brief seconds, he remembered the flashing lights that hadsignaled from below.

  * * * * *

  His first step carried him, slipping and sprawling awkwardly, across arocky slope white with the rime of carbon dioxide frost. He came to hisfeet and turned once to wave toward the ship where he knew Spud O'Malleymust be watching from a lookout. Then, moving cautiously, to learn thegage of his own strength in this world of diminished weights, he starteddown.

  Rough going, Chet found; the wall of this great throat had not hardenedwithout showing signs of its tortured coughing. But Chet learned tojudge distance, and he found that a fifty-foot chasm was a trifle to becrossed in one leap; huge boulders, whose molten sides had frozen asthey ran and dripped, could be surmounted by the spring of his legmuscles that could throw him incredibly through the air. And always hewent downward toward the place where the lights had flashed.

  They came once more. He had descended a thousand feet, he wasestimating, when the black igneous rocks blazed blindingly with areflected light like that of a thousand suns.

  Another hundred feet below, down a precipitous slope, was a broad tableof rock. He saw it in the instant before he threw one metal-clad armacross the eye-piece of his helmet to shut out the glare. And he saw, inthat fraction of a second, a moving figure, another like himself, cladin an armored suit whose curves and fine-woven mesh caught the light ina million of sparkling flames.

  It was Haldgren, he told himself; and there was something that camechokingly into his throat at the thought. That lonely figure--one tinydot of life on a bleak and lifeless stage! It was pitiful, this undyingeffort to signal, to let his own world know that he still lived.

  * * * * *

  Chet did not put it into coherent words, but there was an overwhelmingemotion that was part pity and part pride. He was suddenly glad andthankful to belong to a race of men who could carry on like this--whonever said die. And, as the glare winked out, he threw himselfrecklessly down that last slope and brought up in a huddle at the feetof the one who had started back in affright. There was one metal-casedhand that went in a helpless gesture to the throat; the figure, allsilvery white in the dim Earth-glow, staggered back against a wall ofrock; only by inches did it miss a fall from the precipice edge wherethe rock platform ended.

  From the floor, where his fall had flung him in awkward posture, Chetsaw this; saw it and marveled vaguely. What picture he had formed ofHaldgren--what he had expected of him--he could not have told. Certainlyit was not this slenderly youthful figure, nor this reaction that wasmore of fright than startled amazement. And the voice! Surely he hadheard an involuntary, half-stifled scream!

  He came slowly to his feet. And he was wondering now if his deductionshad been wrong. He had been to sure that the sender of those messageswas an Earth-man; he had been so certain of finding Haldgren.

  * * * * *

  Slowly he crossed the table of rock toward the waiting figure; gently heextended his hands, palms upward, in a gesture of peaceful promise.Whoever, whatever this was--this Moon-being who had signaled and indoing so had happened upon the letters that had a definite meaning ofEarth--Chet knew he must not frighten him. One outstretched hand touchedthe metal that cased an arm; moved upward to the headpiece, asclose-fitting as his own; tilted it that the light of Earth might shinewithin and show him what manner of being he had found.

  And Chet, who had seen strange creatures on that Dark Moon where he andHarkness had explored, was prepared, despite the suit so like his own,to see some weird being of this newer world. But for what the soft lightof that distant Earth disclosed he was entirely unprepared.

  Eyes, blue and lovely as an azure sea but wide with terror and dismay;eyes that showed plainly a consternation of unbelief that changedslowly, as the blue eyes stared into Chet's gray ones, until they weresuddenly misty with tears; and the figure sagged and would have droppedat his feet had he not caught it in his arms.

  He heard his own voice exclaiming in wonderment: "A girl! One of our ownkind! Out here! On the Moon!"

  And another voice, sweetly tremulous, replied:

  "Oh, it's true--it's true! You have come! You read my call! Oh, I hardlydared hope--"

  Then the thrilling ecstasy of happiness in the voice gave place toaccents of dismay as some horror of fear swept in upon her.

  "And I've brought you to this! You will be lost! Quick! Climb for yourlife! I will come after. Quick! Quick!"

  * * * * *

  There was agony in the voice now, and the figure wrenched itself fromChet's arms to point one slender hand upward in frantic urging, whileyet the head turned that the eyes might look backward as if some dangerthreatened from below.

  "I've got a ship," Chet assured her. "God knows who you are or how yougot here, but it's all right now. We'll leave."

  He had regained his grip upon one of those slender hands and waspreparing to swing her up to the top of an incredibly high rock. Herscream checked him and sent his one free hand to the detonite pistol athis waist.

  "Behind you!" she cried. "Look back! They have come out!"

  The crater-pit behind and below them was black with the inky blacknessof smooth, fire-formed rock. Its many facets were smooth and polished;they made mirrors, many of them, for the earthlight reflected from thecrater mouth. They served to diffuse this dim light and throw it againupon the monstrous blacknesses that were swarming from below.

  "Men!" thought Chef in one instant of half-comprehension. Then, as hesaw the chalk-white bodies, the dead and flabby whiteness of their facesfrom which red eyes stared, he revised his estimate; here was nothinghuman.

  The pistol was in his hand, but as yet he had not fired. Only the terrorin the girl's voice had told him that these were enemies; he waited fora closer view or for some direct attack, and needed to wait but amoment.

  Only an instant after he had seen, the chalk-white bodies clusteredbelow were in motion. They came leaping up the smooth expanses of rock,and they were obscured at times as if by black curtains that were drawnacross their bodies. Then they would flash out again in dead-whitenakedness.

  * * * * *

  It was uncanny. Chet had a feeling that they were wrapping themselves inblack invisibility. Only when a score of the white things threwthemselves out into space did he know the truth.

  Out and upward they sprang, to soar above Chet's head and land on theslope above. All escape was cut off now; but it was not this th
oughtthat held Chet motionless for that moment of horror. It was the glimpsehe had had against the light of the crater mouth of beating, flailingwings that whipped the thin air above him; of curved claws; and of long,horrible tails that might have belonged to giant rats. And the demoniaccries that the thin air brought him were no more suggestive of devilsunleashed than were the leathery wings and the fleshy tails of thebeasts.

  Yet it was not this alone that stunned the mind of the master pilot, butthe horrible incongruity, of this monstrous inhumanness allied with thehuman form of their bodies. And throughout he observed, with a curioussense of detachment, the furious beating of the wings, almost useless inthe thin air, and the expansion and contraction of sac-like membranes oneach side of the necks which he took to be auxiliary lungs.

  * * * * *

  It was the girl's action that brought Chet to his senses. She movedslowly across the smooth table of rock toward the three or four beastswho had gained its level. Her head was bowed in utter dejection; Chetsensed it as plainly as if she had spoken. She held out her handshelplessly toward the creatures--and in that instant Chet's pistolspoke.

  Tiny shells, those of a detonite pistol, and the grain of explosive inthe tip of each bullet is microscopic. But no body, human or inhuman, beit made of flesh, can withstand the shattering concussion of thatexploding shell.

  The beasts beside that figure, slenderly girlish even in its metalsheath, fell into the pit beyond; their screams rang horribly as theyfell. There were others who took their places, and they, too, vanishedunder the smashing shots.

  And then, after timeless moments of waiting, while the only sound wasthe half-audible voice of the girl who sobbed: "Now you are surely lost.They will kill you--you should not have fired--I should never havebrought you here"--there came the familiar thunder of a ship's exhausts.

  Down from above, a black shadow came silently crashing; a blaze of lightterrific in its brilliance brought an exclamation to Chet's lips andhope to his heart.

  "Spud! You old fool, you're coming to get us!"

  But the words ended with an avalanche of bodies that threw themselvesdown the black slope. There were others coming from below, leaping fromthe stones. The ledge was filled with them.

  Chet was firing blindly as he felt himself borne down--felt long fingersthat ripped, then closed about his throat and jammed the metal of hissuit in chokingly. He heard the beating of giant wings about him; felthimself half-carried and half-thrown toward a floor of rock far below.

  There was an opening that loomed blackly in that floor; one glimpse ofhis surroundings Chet had before the press of bodies closed him in. Theywere forcing the shining, silvery figure of a girl into that blackopening--dropping her! Then he felt himself hurled into the same void,while above him a ship of space thundered vainly from her great exhaustsas if roaring in rage at her own futility.