Brood of the Dark Moon
face, and one hand still clutched a pistol. It would have shattered his
human opponent had the man been given an instant more, but against the
enemy that rolled down and overwhelmed him in billowing clouds no weapon
could prevail. Herr Schwartzmann had fought his last fight.
* * * * *
The package--the last gift of Kreiss--was still securely wrapped. It lay
on the metal floor. Chet stooped to lift it, to work at the knotted
vines and lay off the thick wrappings of fibrous leaves, until he stood
at last, under the white glare of the bubbling nitron bulb, to stare and
stare wordlessly at the cage of metal bars in his hand.
Crude!--yes; no finely polished mechanism, this; no one of the many
connection clips that the other had had, either. But Chet knew he could
solder on the hundreds of wires that made the nervous system of the
control and fed the current to the cage; and Kreiss had believed it
would work!
There was no thought of delay in Chet's mind, no waiting for daylight.
This was the fourth night since he had been in that place of horror,
since, above him in that Stygian pit, an inhuman satanic _something_ had
said: "... the captives ... a sacrifice to Vashta ... on the sixth
night...."
Chet threw off the rags that once had been a trim khaki jacket and went
feverishly to work. And through the time that was left he drove himself
desperately. The hours so few and each hour so short! As he worked with
seemingly countless strands of heavy cables, where each strand must be
traced back and its point of connection determined, he knew how long
each dreadful minute must be for the two captives deep inside the Dark
Moon.
* * * * *
It was as well, perhaps, that Chet did not have the power of distant
sight, that he had no messenger like those from the pyramid who might
have gone down in that place and have sent him by mental television a
picture of what was there. For he would have seen that which could have
lent no clarity of vision to his deep-sunk eyes nor skill to the touch
of fumbling, tired hands.
Walt Harkness, no longer under hypnotic control, stood in a dim-lit room
carved from solid stone; stood, and stared despairingly at the
surrounding walls and at the pair of giant ape-men who guarded the one
doorway. And, clinging to his hand, was a girl; and she, too, had been
released from the invisible bonds. She was speaking:
"No, Walter; we both saw it; it must be true. It was Chet's pistol; he
was there in that horrible place. And I will not give up. He will save
us at the last; I know it! He will save us from the inhuman cruelty of
those terrible things. He shoots straight, Chet does; and he will give
us a bullet apiece from the gun--the last kindly act of a friend. That's
what the signal meant."
"Then why did he wait! Why didn't he do it then?" Walt Harkness had made
the same demand a hundred times.
And Diane answered as always: "I don't know, Walter, I--don't--know."
Chet, cursing insanely at strange machines--equilibrators that
controlled the longitudinal and transverse and rotative stability of the
ship and that refused to take their electrical charge--knew with
horrible certainty that the last night had come. But to the two humans,
in the depths of this world where all knowledge of time was lost, the
knowledge came only when they were dragged by their guards into a
familiar room.
* * * * *
Ape-men were all about; they stared unwinkingly at the captives who
stared back again in an effort to keep their eyes averted from the
monstrous repulsiveness on the platform above them, till their eyes were
drawn to meet the compelling gaze of the "Master" of a lost race.
A something which, at first glance, seemed all head--this was the
"Master." The naked body, so skeleton-thin, was shrunken and distorted;
it was withered and leathery-brown, like the aged parchment of mummified
flesh. It was seated in a resplendent chair, whose radiating handles
were for its carrying; and, above it, the head, so incredibly repulsive,
was made more hideous by its travestied resemblance to human form.
Soft, pulpy and wetly smooth--a ten-foot sac, enclosed in a membrane of
dead gray shot through with flickerings of color that flamed and
died--the whole pulsing mass was supported in a sling of golden cloth.
And, dominating it, in the center of that flabby forehead, a focal point
for the gaze of the horrified observers, was a single glassy and lidless
eye.
Cold, unchanging, entirely expressionless except for the fixed ferocity
that was there, the eye was a yellow disk of hate, where quivering lines
of violet culminated in a central, flaming point; and that point of
living fire swelled prodigiously before their staring eyes. It seemed to
expand, to slowly draw their senses--their very selves--from their
bodies, to plunge them down to annihilation in that fiery pit where a
soundless voice was speaking.
"Slaves! Apes! Take the captives to the great altar rock of Vashta, to
the Holy of Holies. The others you were permitted to slaughter for our
food; hold these two safely. For one shall die slowly for Vashta's
pleasure, and one shall live on for mine. And we would not have them
under our mental control, so guard them well; the offering is more
pleasing to Vashta when the blood in his cup flows from a creature
unbound both in body and mind." And the two helpless humans found
themselves released from the flaming pit that became again but an eye in
the forehead of a loathsome thing.
* * * * *
They were fully conscious of their surroundings as they were herded up
through the pyramid and out into the night, where rough, calloused hands
seized them and dragged them to a smooth table-top of rock that stood
only slightly above the ground before the great rocky pile. Stunned,
waiting dumbly, they saw swarming ape-men clustered like bees on the
lower pyramid face; they saw coverings of stone being removed and a
great recess laid open, while the ape-things dropped in awe before a
grotesque and horrible beast-head carved from a single piece of stone.
The eyes of the beast shone with some cold, hidden light. They seemed
fixed hungrily upon a cup in a distorted hand, and, though the cup was
empty, there was promise of its being filled. For little sluices of
stone sloped from the place where the captives stood, and they ended
above the cup so that the life-blood of a slaughtered creature, or a
sacrificed man, might pour splashingly in, a streaming draught for this
blood-thirsty god.
The arena filled with abominable life. Now, in the dark silence of a
moonless night, the cold stars shone down on a gathering of spectators,
wild and unreal--nameless, spectral horrors of a blood-chilling dream.
The flat capstone of the pyramid was the resting place of the "Master";
his huge head showed pulpy and gray above the glittering gold of the
metal carrying-chair where a misshapen body was seated. Others like him
had poured from the pyramid, carried by thousands of slaves to their
places about the arena.
Monsters of prodigious strength, their forebears must have been, but
this degenerate product of evolutionary forces had lost all firmness of
flesh. Their bodies, sacrificed for the development of the bulbous
heads, were mere appendages, fit only for the propagation of their kind
and for the digestion of human food.
* * * * *
The clean air of night was polluted with abominable odors as it swept
over the exudations of those glistening, pulpy masses. To the two
waiting humans on the great sacrificial stone came a deadening of the
senses, as an executioner, armed with strange torturing instruments,
drew near. But, of the two, one, clinging hopelessly to the other,
abruptly stifled the dry choking sobs in her throat to lift her head in
sharp, listening alertness.
Walt Harkness was speaking in a dead, emotionless tone:
"Chet has failed us; he is probably dead. Good-by, dear--"
But his words were interrupted and smothered by a breathless, strangling
voice. Diane Delacouer, staring with agonized eyes into the night was
calling to him:
"Listen! Oh, listen! It's the ship, Walter! It's the ship! It's not the
wind! I'm not dreaming nor insane!--Chet is coming with the ship!"
It was as well that Chet Bullard could not see the two, could not hear
that voice, trembling and vibrant with an impossible, heart-gripping
hope; and surely it was well that he could not share their emotions
when, for them, the silence became faintly resonant, when the distant,
humming, drumming reverberation grew to a nerve-shattering roar, when
the black night was ripped apart by the passage of a meteor-ship that
shrieked and thundered through the screaming air close above the arena,
while, with the rock beneath them still shuddering from the blasting
voice of that full exhaust, the sky above burst into dazzling flame.
* * * * *
For Chet in that control-room that was darkened that he might see the
world outside--Chet, grim and haggard and stained of face and with
thin-drawn lips that bled unheeded where his teeth had clamped down on
them--Chet Bullard, Master Pilot of the World, had no thought nor
emotion to spare for aught beyond the reach of his hand. He was throwing
his ship at a speed that was sheer suicide over a strange terrain
flashing under and close below.
He overshot the target on the first try. The twin beams of his
searchlights picked up the dazzling black and white of the arena; it was
before him!--under him!--lost far astern in one single instant that was
ended as it began. But his hand, ready on a release key, pressed as he
passed, and the sky behind him turned blazing bright with the cloud of
flare-dust that made white flame as it fell.
Such speed was not meant for close work; nor was a ship expected to hit
dense air with a blast such as this on full. Even through the thick
insulated walls came a terrible scream. Like voices of humans in agony,
the tortured air shrieked its protest while Chet threw on the bow-blast
to check them and slanted slowly, slowly upward in a great loop whose
tremendous size was an indication of the speed and the slow turning that
was all Chet could stand and live through.
* * * * *
He came in more slowly the next time. Floodlights in the under-skin of
the ship were blazing white, and whiter yet were the star-flares that he
dropped one after another. Brighter than the sunlight of the brightest
day this globe had ever seen, the sky, ablaze with dazzling fire, shone
down in vivid splendor to drain every shadow and half-light and leave
only the hard contrast of black and white.
In the nose of the ship was a .50 caliber gun. Chet sprayed the pyramid
top, but it is doubtful if the two below heard the explosions. They must
have seen the whole cap of the mountain of rock vanish as if,
feather-light, it had been snatched up in a gust of wind. But perhaps
they had eyes only for each other and for a glittering, silvery ship
that came crashing toward the place where they stood, that checked
itself on thunderous exhausts; then touched the hard floor of the arena
as softly as the caress of a master hand on the controls.
But from them came no cry nor exclamation of joy; they were dazed, Chet
saw, when he threw open the port. They were walking slowly,
unbelievingly, toward him till Diane faltered. Then Chet leaped forward
to sweep the drooping, ragged figure up into his arms while he hustled
Harkness ahead and closed the port upon them all. But, still haggard and
stern of face, he left the fainting girl to Harkness' care while he