The End of the Story (36 page)

readiness; and he and the men loyal to him had armed themselves furtively in preparation, while the others had made their attack bare-handed, man to man. All of the mutineers were wounded, though not seriously, before they could be subdued; and blood dripped from their wounds on the floor of the flier, as they stood before Volmar.

Albert Adams, Chester Deming and James Roverton were the names of the mutineers. Adams and Deming were quite young, and Roverton was now verging upon early middle-age. Their very presence in Volmar’s crew was proof of intellectual ability and prime physical fitness, for all had been subjected to examinations of the most rigorous and prolonged order. A high knowledge of mathematics, chemistry, physics, astronomy and other branches of science had been required, as well as a mastery of mechanics; and perfect sight, hearing, equilibrium and a flawless constitution were likewise requisite. Also, it goes without saying that they belonged to a most active, adventurous type: for no ordinary men would even have volunteered for such a project as Volmar’s. Innumerable voyages had already been made to the moon and the nearer planets; but, previous to this, aside from the one trip made to Alpha Centauri by the Allan Farquar expedition, no one had dared the outer deep and the constellations.

Volmar and the three who had remained faithful to him were all of the same breed: men of religious, well-nigh inhuman devotion to an idea, scientists to whom nothing mattered apart from science, who were capable of martyrizing themselves and others if by so doing they could prove a theory or make a discovery. And in Volmar himself there was a spirit of mad adventure, a desire to tread where no man had been before; the cold flame of an imperial lust for unexplored immensitude. The mutineers were more human; and the years of bleak confinement in the space-flier, among the terrific pits of infinity, remote from all that is life to normal beings, had broken down their morale in the end. Few, perhaps, could have endured it as long as they.

“Another thing,” the chill voice of Volmar went on: “I shall put you off without weapons, provisions or oxygen-tanks. You will have to shift for yourselves—and of course, the chances are that the atmosphere, if there is any, will prove unfit for human respiration. Jasper will now proceed to truss you up, so that there won’t be any more foolishness.”

Alton Jasper, a well-known astronomer, who was first mate of the flier, stepped forward and bound the hands of the mutineers behind them with rope. Then they were locked in a lower apartment of the vessel, above the man-hole that gave entrance and egress. This apartment was insulated from all the rest; and the man-hole could be opened from the higher rooms by means of an electrical device. There the mutineers lay in absolute darkness, except when someone entered with a meager allotment of food and drink.

Aeons seemed to pass, and the three men abandoned all efforts to keep a reckoning of time. They spoke little, for there was nothing to speak of but

failure and despair and the dreadful unknown fate ahead of them. Sometimes one of them, particularly Roverton, would gallantly try to crack a jest; but the laughter that answered the jest was the last flare of a courage tried almost beyond human endurance.

One day, they heard the voice of Volmar addressing them through the speaking-tube. It was far-off and high and thin, like a voice from some sidereal altitude.

“We are now approaching Delta Andromedae,” the voice announced.“It has a planetary system, for two worlds have already been sighted. We shall make a landing, and put you off on the nearest one, in about two hours.”

The mutineers felt a sense of comparative relief. Anything, even sudden death from the inhalation of some irrespirable atmosphere, would be better than the long confinement. Stoically, like condemned criminals, they prepared themselves for the fatal plunge into the unknown.

The black minutes ebbed away, and then the electric lights were turned on. The door opened, and Jasper came in. He removed the bonds of the three men in silence; then he retired, and the door was locked upon them for the last time.

They were aware, somehow, that the flier had slackened its speed. They tried to stand up, with their stiffened limbs, and found it hard to maintain their equilibrium, for they had long been habituated to a rate of movement far beyond that of any cosmic body. Then they were aware that the vessel had stopped: there was a sudden jolt that flung them against the wall, and a cessation of the engines’ eternal drone.The silence was very strange, for the throbbing of the great electro-magnetic motors had long been as familiar to them as the beating of their own blood, and as little to be noticed.

The man-hole opened with a harsh, metallic screech, and there was a faint glimmering of bluish-green light from without. Then there came a gust of acrid air, and a waft of indescribable smells that were unlike anything on earth. The mutineers heard the voice of Volmar once more:

“Out with you—and make it quick. I’ve no more time to waste on rubbish.”

Holding his breath, Roverton approached the man-hole, crawled through, and climbed down the steel ladder that ran along the outer side of the flier. The others followed him in turn. They could see little, for apparently it was night in the new world on which they were being landed. They seemed to hang over an indefinite abyss with no bottom, but on reaching the end of the ladder, they found solid ground beneath their feet. The air, though sharp and unpleasant to the nostrils, was apparently breathable. They took a few careful steps, keeping close together, on a surface that was smooth and level to their tread. While they were trying to adjust their senses to the dim surrounding, they saw the vague bulk of the flier begin to move, and then heard the prodigious roar of its ascent to the skies.

II

“Marooned!” said Roverton, with a short laugh.“Well, there’s one safe bet—we’re the first mutineers who have ever been put off in Andromeda. I vote that we make the most of the experience. The air hasn’t killed us yet, so evidently it contains a proportion of hydrogen and oxygen not too dissimilar to that of the earth’s atmosphere. And, with such air, there is a good chance of finding plant-life, or even animal-life, of types that will afford edible substances.”

The three men peered about, straining their eyes in an effort to penetrate the blue-green darkness. None of them was unimaginative; and they felt the thrill of an eeriness beyond all parallel, an overpowering strangeness that preyed upon their nerves with a million intimations of unrevealed and formless things never before conceived by man. Their situation was unthinkably desolate; but behind the desolation there seemed to lurk the multitudinous and multiform teeming of unearthly life. However, they could see nothing tangible, except some vague unmoving masses that resembled large boulders. The air was a little chill, and its acrid character became more noticeable, in unison with a peculiar darkness. The skies above were faint and vaporous, with a few stars glowing dully in their depths. Some of the stars were momentarily obscured and then disclosed, as if there were some movement or change in the occluding medium. Everywhere there was the sense of abysmal and immeasurable distance; and the mutineers were conscious of an odd, terrific vertigo, as if the horizontal spaces on all sides might draw them in like some unfathomable gulf.

Roverton stepped forward toward one of the boulder-like masses, taking careful note of the gravitational pull exerted by the ground. He was not quite sure, but thought that he experienced a sense of weight, of difficulty in locomotion, slightly beyond that which is felt on our earth.

“I think this world is a little larger or heavier than our own,” he announced. The others followed him, and were aware of like sensations. They stopped uncertainly, wondering what was to be done next.

“I suppose the sun will rise some time,” observed Deming. “Delta Andromedae is a sizable affair, and seemingly the warmth it affords is comparable to that of our sun. Doubtless it will yield a similar illumination. In the meanwhile we might as well sit down and wait, if this is a bona fide boulder.”

He seated himself on the dark mass, which was almost circular in form and was perhaps eight feet in diameter by three in height, with a gently rounded top. The others followed suit. The object seemed to be covered with a sort of thick, shaggy, resilient moss, very resilient and comfortable.

“This is luxury,” exclaimed Roverton.“I’d like to take a nap.” Neither he nor any of the others, however, was in any state to permit of slumber. All were ungovernably excited by the novelty of their position, and were aware of a

terrible disquietude, a wild nervousness due to the shock of being plunged among alien atmospheric and geologic forces, the magnetic emanations of a soil untrod by human foot. Of this soil itself they could determine nothing, except that it was moist and was apparently devoid of grass or plant-forms.

They waited. The darkness was like the slow oozing of a cold, glaucous eternity. The mutineers carried watches, which perforce had run down during their period of incarceration. They wound and set these watches going, and struck a match occasionally to note the passage of time—a proceeding which struck them all with its absurdity, since there was no means of knowing whether or not the twenty-four hours of the terrestrial day would correspond in any manner to the diurnal period of this new world.

Hours dragged on. They talked with sporadic and feverish loquacity, in an effort to fight down the nervousness of which all were uncontrollably conscious. Strong and mature men though they were, they felt at times like children alone in the dark, with a horde of monstrous unknown terrors pressing about them. When silence fell, the unformulable weirdness and horror of the environing gloom seemed to draw closer; and they dared not be still for very long. The hush of the dim heavens and the dimmer ground was oppressive with unimaginable menace. Once, they heard a far-off sound, like the whirring and jarring of a rusty crank. It soon ceased, and was not repeated; but at long intervals there were sharp, tiny stridulations, like those of insects, which appeared to come from the nearer distance. They were so high and harsh that the teeth of the three men were actually set on edge by them.

Suddenly, they all perceived that the darkness was beginning to lighten. A chill glimmering crept along the ground, and the boulder-like masses defined themselves more clearly. The light was very peculiar, for it appeared to emanate from the soil and to tremble upward in visible waves like those of heat. It was faintly iridescent, like the nimbus of a cloudy moon; and, gathering strength, it soon became comparable to earthly moonlight in its illuminative power. Beneath it, the soil displayed a greenish-grey color and a consistency resembling half-dried clay. The sides of the boulder-forms were plainly lit, though their tops remained in shadow. The moss-like substance covering them was of a purple hue, and was very long and coarse and hairy.

The mutineers were greatly puzzled by the light.

“Is it some sort of radio-activity?” queried Roverton. “Is it phosphorescence? Is it due to some luminous micro-organism—a kind of noctilucae?”

He stooped down and peered closely at the trembling waves of iridescence. He gave an exclamation. The light, as it rose, seemed to be full of infinitesimal motes, which hovered about a foot from the ground at their highest flight. They poured unceasingly to this level in teeming millions.

“Animaculae of some unknown kind,” decided Roverton.“Evidently their bodies are highly luminescent—one could almost read a book by this light.” He took out his watch and found that the figures were clearly distinguishable.

After awhile the weird luminosity began to subside, and ebbed along the soil as it had come. The re-established darkness, however, was not of long duration. Soon the landscape declared its outlines again; and this time the illumination came in a normal manner, like the twilight of a misty dawn. A plain with barely perceptible undulations, and having scores of the boulder-forms scattered about it, was now visible for some distance, till it was lost among the streamers of curling vapor that rose all around. A sluggish, leaden-colored stream ran through the plain, about two hundred feet from where Roverton and his fellows were sitting, and vanished in the mist.

Soon the vapors, hueless at first, were tinged with deepening colors, pink and saffron and heliotrope and purple as if an aurora were rising behind them. There was a brightening in the center of this prismatic display; and it was surmised that the solar body, Delta Andromedae, had now ascended above the horizon. The air grew rapidly warmer.

Seeing the nearby stream, the men all realized that they were excessively thirsty. Of course, the water might not be drinkable; but they decided to chance it.

The fluid was peculiarly thick, milky and opaque. The taste was a trifle brackish; but nevertheless, it allayed their thirst; and they felt no immediate ill-effects.

“Now for breakfast, if we can find it,” said Roverton.“We lack nothing but food-stuffs, utensils and fuel.”

“I can’t see that we’ll find any by staying where we are,” observed Adams.“Of all the desolate holes! Let’s go.”

A discussion arose as to which direction they should take. They all sat down again on one of the mossy purple masses, to decide the momentous problem. The landscape was equally barren and dreary on all sides; but at last they agreed to follow the flowing of the leaden stream, which ran toward the auroral display. They were about to rise, when the boulder-form on which they were sitting seemed to heave upward suddenly. Adams found himself sprawling on the ground, but the other two were quick enough to save themselves from a like fate. Startled, they leapt away; and turning back, they saw that the great mass had opened, as if cloven through the center, revealing an immense hollow lined with a whitish material that resembled the interior of an animal’s stomach. The material trembled incessantly, and a glutinous liquid welled from within it, like saliva or digestive fluid.

“Christ!” ejaculated Roverton.“Who ever dreamt of anything like that? Is it plant, animal, or both?”