The moon era
I squirmed desperately, but I was unable to twist about to get in a
position to strike.
Then the Mother was gliding toward me. Blue crest erect upon her golden
head, eager light of battle flashing in her violet eyes. From her
smooth, tawny sides the mantles were stiffly outstretched. And they
were almost scarlet with the flashing lights that played through them.
My momentary despair vanished; I felt that she was invincible.
She almost reached me. And then rose upon her glossy coils, and gazed
at the brain in the transparent dome of the machine that held me, her
membranes still alight.
Abruptly the machine released me; its metal limbs were relaxed,
motionless.
My encrimsoned copper mace rose and descended once more, and the
machine fell with a clatter upon its side.
"My mental energy is greater than that of the Eternal One," the Mother
piped in calm explanation. "I was able to interfere with its neural
processes to cause paralysis." She looked about us suddenly.
"But smash the delicate parts of this machine that brought us here. So
that if we have the good fortune to escape, they cannot soon bring us
back. I know it is the only one they have, and it does not look as if
it could be quickly repaired."
* * * * *
My club was busy again. Delicate coils were battered beneath it.
Complex prisms and mirrors and lenses shattered. Delicate wires and
grids in crystal shells, which must have been electron tubes, destroyed.
The three machines we had wrecked had been the only ones near. But a
score or more of others were soon approaching across the metal-paved
court, producing buzzing sounds as if of anger and excitement. Some of
them were near before my work was done.
Too many of them to battle. We must attempt an escape.
I stooped, picked up the Mother's warm, downy body, and ran across the
platform, toward the ring of approaching machine-beings. Near them, I
leaped, as high and as far as I could.
The spring carried me over them, and a good many yards beyond. In a
moment I was in the middle of a worn pavement of metal. The street,
almost empty of the machines, ran between ancient and ugly buildings,
toward a lofty wall of some material black and brilliant as obsidian.
I hastened desperately toward the wall, moving with great leaps. The
Eternal Ones followed in humming, clattering confusion, falling swiftly
behind.
They had been taken quite by surprise, of course. And, as the Mother
had said, dependence upon the machine had not developed in them the
ability to respond quickly to emergencies.
As we later discovered, some of the machines could travel much faster
than could we. But, as I have remarked, the things were not of a
standard design, all differing. And none of those behind us happened to
be of the fastest type.
I do not doubt that they could easily have destroyed us, as we fled.
But their object would have been defeated. They wanted the Mother alive.
We reached the shining black wall well ahead of our pursuers. Its
surface was smooth and perpendicular; it was fully as high as the cliff
up which I had leaped with the Mother. And there was no projecting
ledge to save us if I fell short.
I paused, dropping the heavy mace.
"You could toss me up," the Mother suggested. "Then leap."
There was no time for delay. She coiled quickly up into a golden
sphere. I hurled her upward, like a football. She vanished over the top
of the wall. I lifted the mace, threw it up, and to one side, so it
would not strike her.
The Eternal Ones were close behind. A mob-like group of grotesque
machines. Buzzing angrily. One of them flung some missile. There was
a crashing explosion against the black wall, a flare of green light.
I realized the danger of being separated from the Mother, even as I
leaped.
My spring carried me completely over the wall, which was only some five
or six feet thick.
I descended into a luxuriant tangle of the green creepers. Foot-thick
stems covered the ground in an unbroken network, feathery leaves rising
from them higher than my head. I fell on my side in the delicate
foliage, struggled quickly to my feet. The green fronds cut off my view
in all directions, though I could see the top of the black wall above.
Before I struck the ground I had glimpsed a vast green plain lying
away eastward to the horizon. In the north was a distant line of red
mountains. The city of the Eternal Ones lay westward.
I saw nothing of the Mother; I could not, in truth, see a dozen feet
through the exotic jungle.
"This way," her cautious whistling tones reached me in a moment. "Here
is your weapon."
I broke through the masses of delicate fronds in the direction of the
sound, found the Mother unharmed, coiled in a golden circle beside the
copper bar. She glided silently away; I picked up the bar and followed
as rapidly and quietly as I could.
Once I looked back, when we passed a narrow open space, and saw a
little group of the Eternal Ones standing upon the black wall. They
must have been looking after us, but I do not suppose they saw us.
For the rest of the day--it was early afternoon when we escaped--and
all night when the jungle was weird and silvery in the earth light, and
until late on the following day, we hastened on. We did not stop except
to drink and bathe at a little stream, and to scrape the sweet white
powder from a few of the great argent flowers we passed. We ate as we
moved. The jungle of creepers was unbroken; we were always hidden in
the luxuriant, delicate foliage.
At first I had been sure we would be followed. But as the hours passed
and there was no sign of pursuit, my spirits rose. I doubted now that
the Eternal Ones could follow the trail swiftly enough to overtake us.
But I still carried the copper mace.
The Mother was less optimistic than I.
"I know they are following," she told me. "I feel them. But we may lose
them. If they cannot repair the machine which you wrecked--and I am
sure they cannot do it soon."
We had approached a rocky slope, and the Mother found a little cave,
beneath an overhanging ledge, in which we rested. Totally exhausted, I
threw myself down, and slept like a dead man.
It was early on the next morning when the Mother woke me. She lay
coiled at the entrance of the cave, the frail mantles stiffened and
flushed a little with rosy light, violet eyes grave and watchful.
"The Eternal Ones follow," she piped. "They are yet far-off. But we
must go on."
CHAPTER VIII
An Earth Man Fights
Climbing to the top of the rocky slope, we came out upon a vast
plateau, covered with green moss. The level surface was broken here and
there by low hills; but no other vegetation was in view before us. At a
distance, the plain resembled a weird desert covered with green snow.
It took six days to cross the moss-grown table-land. We finished the
white powder we had carried with us on the fourth day; and we found no
water on the fifth or sixth. Though, of course, those days were of only
eighteen hours each, we were in a sorry plight when we descended into
a valley green with the creepers, watered with a crystal stream whose
water seemed the sweetest I had ever tasted.
We ate and rested for two nights and a day, before we went on--though
the Mother insisted that the Eternal Ones still followed.
Then, for seventeen days, we followed down the stream, which was
joined by countless tributaries until it became a majestic river. On
the seventeenth day, the river flowed into a still greater one, which
came down a valley many miles wide, covered with yellow thorn-brush
and green creepers, and infested with thousands of the purple
balloon-creatures, which I had learned to avoid by keeping to the green
jungle, where they could not throw their webs with accuracy.
We swam the river, and continued down the eastern bank--it was flowing
generally south. Five days later we came in view of a triple peak I
well remembered.
Next morning we left the jungle, and climbed up to the little
moss-carpeted plateau where I had left the machine. I had feared that
it somehow would be gone, or wrecked. But it lay just as I had left it
on the day after I landed on the moon. Bright, polished, window-studded
wall of armor, between two projecting plates of gleaming copper.
We reached the door, the Mother gliding beside me.
Trembling with a great eagerness, I turned the knob and opened it.
Everything was in order, just as I had left it. The oxygen cylinders,
the batteries, the food refrigerator, the central control table, with
the chart lying upon it.
In a week--if the mechanism worked as I hoped it would--I should be
back upon the earth. Back on Long Island. Ready to report to my uncle,
and collect the first payment of my fifty thousand a year.
Still standing on the narrow deck outside the door, I looked down at
the Mother.
She was coiled at my feet. The blue plume upon her golden head seemed
to droop. The white mantles were limp, dragging. Her violet eyes,
staring up at me, somehow seemed wistful and sad.
Abruptly an ache sprang into my heart, and my eyes dimmed, so that the
bright golden image of her swam before me. I had hardly realized what
her companionship had come to mean to me, in our long days together.
Strange as her body was, the Mother had come to be almost human in my
thoughts. Loyal, courageous, kind--a comrade.
"You must go with me," I stammered, in a voice gone oddly husky. "Don't
know whether the machine will ever get back to earth or not. But at
least it will carry us out of reach of the Eternal Ones."
For the first time, the musical pipings of the Mother seemed broken and
uneven, as if with emotion.
"No. We have been together long, Adventurer. And parting is not easy.
But I have a great work. The seed of my kind is in me, and it must not
die. The Eternal Ones are near. But I will not give up the battle until
I am dead."
Abruptly she lifted her tawny length beside me. The limp, pallid
mantles were suddenly bright and strong again. They seized my hands
in a grasp convulsively tight. The Mother gazed up at my face, for a
little time, with deep violet eyes--earnest and lonely and wistful,
with the tragedy of her race in them.
Then she dropped, and glided swiftly away.
I looked after her with misty eyes, until she was half across the
plateau. On her way to the sea, to find a home for the new race she was
to rear. With a leaden heart, and an aching constriction in my throat,
I climbed through the oval door, into the machine, and fastened it.
But I did not approach the control table. I stood at the little round
windows, watching the Mother gliding away, across the carpet of moss.
Going ahead alone ... the last of her race....
Then I looked in the other direction, and saw the Eternal Ones. She
had said the machines were near. I saw five of them. They were moving
swiftly across the plateau, the way we had come.
Five grotesque machines. Their bright metal cases were larger than
those of the ones we had encountered in the city. And their limbs
were longer. They stalked like moving towers of metal, each upon four
jointed stilts. And long, flail-like limbs dangled from the case of
each. Crystal domes crowned them, sparkling in the sunlight--covering,
I knew, the feeble gray brains that controlled them. The Eternal Ones.
Almost at the edge of the plateau they were when I first saw them. I
had time easily to finish sealing the door, to close the valve through
which I had let out the excess air upon landing, and to drive up
through the moon's atmosphere, toward the white planet.