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- Herausgeber: Edizioni Savine
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
Strange adventures on other worlds – The universe of future centuries
Space-Wolf - (Planet Stories Summer 1941)
The Star-Master – (Planet Stories Summer 1942)
Monster of the Asteroid – (Planet Stories Winter 1941)
Gods of Space – (Planet Stories Spring 1942)
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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PLANET STORIES
Collection no. 2
by
RAY CUMMINGS
From Planet Stories Summer 1941
SPACE-WOLF
Solo Morgan laid his small portable spectroscope on the rock and sat down beside it to rest. He was panting, breathless from the climb up to these precipitous heights, even though the gravity here on Titan was less than that of Earth. It was night. The pallid little Sun had swiftly set behind a distant line of jagged mountain peaks. At the other horizon Saturn was rising, a monstrous glowing ball with a foreshortened segment of the rings spreading in a great iridescent flame of pale prismatic color across half the sky.
From here, Solo Morgan could just see the tiny blob of his one-man space-ship where he had left it down in the hollow. "He travels fastest who travels alone," had always been Solo Morgan's motto. But now at the age of twenty-eight, a big, rangy, handsome fellow with curly, crisp brown hair, it seemed to Morgan that he was somewhat a failure. So far he had failed to strike it rich; and a single big strike had always been what he was after. He set his jaw grimly as he thought of it. Well, now was the time. There was a lode of Zolonite here on this moon of Saturn. The spectroscopic evidence of it had been faint, yet unmistakable. Doubtless it was a single, small concentration; Zolonite perhaps in an almost pure state. Immensely more valuable than radium; more valuable, than any other radioactive substance known to earth.
Morgan stood up, rested, to continue his climb. By all that he had been able to determine from the faint spectroscopic bands, and the intensity registers which he had so carefully used in that circling flight around the bleak, uninhabited satellite, the Zolonite deposit must be somewhere in this neighborhood. The radiometer had seemed to indicate gathering strength as he climbed. Perhaps it would be beyond this next rise, where now he could see a ragged plateau thick with a lush, fantastic blue-gray vegetation.
He started forward; and suddenly from nearby there was a sharp crack, an explosive report with a stab of yellow-red flame that mingled with the iridescent sheen of Saturn's glow. And there was a ping, a tanging whistle past his head with a thud against one of the nearby rocks where a leaden pellet flattened itself and dropped beside him.
An old-fashioned bullet! Morgan dropped to the rocks, into a shadow from which in a moment he cautiously raised his head. There was nothing to be seen, except that from a distant clump a little spiral of smoke was rising. What in the devil was this? Titan, so far as anyone knew, was uninhabited. For a second it had flashed to Morgan that it might be a band of space-pirates who had followed him here.
But an old-fashioned bullet-projector! Modern space-pirates would laugh at such a thing! They had nothing but the most modern electronic flash-guns, as Morgan himself in several classes could well testify. Explosive bullet-projectors were museum pieces now. Yet here was one on Titan, handled by somebody, trying to drill him!
Thoughts are instant things. Morgan was flat in the rock hollow. And as he cautiously raised his head there came another crack. The bullet thudded into the metal of his tri-cornered hat, knocking it off. Too close for comfort. His flash-cylinder was in his hand. He sent a bolt sizzling against the distant rocks. It hit nothing but the rocks; but now, abruptly to one side of where he had struck, he saw a flutter—a blue-white drape fluttering in the iridescent light. And in the silence there was a frightened, startled cry. A girl's voice! In that second she had dropped back into the rock-clump. But Morgan had seen her; a white-limbed girl clad in blue drapes, with dark hair flowing down over her shoulders.
Amazement was on Morgan's rugged bronzed face. But his grim lips twitched into a vague, startled smile. Holding the metal hat-brim, he raised the hat. A bullet thudded into it. Her aim was certainly too good to trifle with! Cautiously he stared out over the glowing iridescent rocks. There was no sign of movement; no sound save the distant reverberations of the girl's last shot. Morgan quietly discarded his equipment; his cylinders of synthetic food, water, the radiometer and the big insulated leaden cylinder in which he hoped to take home the Zolonite-concentrate. Thus unburdened he hitched himself back into a deeper hollow. Then he stood half erect, with his gun clipped to his belt, tensing his leg muscles for a jump. She might be able to wing him in the air during the arc of his leap, but he doubted it.
There was a rock-ledge some thirty feet away over a little chasm. The crouching Morgan eyed it, took a few running, crouching steps, straightened and leaped. His body sailed in a great flattened arc over the chasm. There was another startled exclamation from the girl; another explosive report, but the bullet went wide. Morgan, chuckling, landed in a heap on the ledge, behind a little line of intervening rocks. He could stand erect here, unseen by the girl. The line of rocks extended diagonally toward her. Morgan ducked along behind them. He ran perhaps a hundred feet, crouched down again where there was a break in his rocky shield.
He could see her plainly now. She was a huddled blob with a long-barreled bullet-gun resting in a rock crevice as she peered out at the line of rocks behind which his leap had carried him. He was much nearer to her now; not over twenty feet. And he cautiously peered, more amazed than ever. The pearly, glowing sheen of the Saturn-light glistened on her skin. Her oval face, framed by her flowing black hair, was set and grim, but he could see that it was a beautiful face.
"What the devil," Morgan muttered to himself. He had clipped his gun to his broad leather belt. Still grimly smiling, he picked up a huge chunk of the porous gray-black Titan rock and heaved it. The rock sailed over the girl; fell with a clatter behind her. It made her give another startled cry as she aimed toward the sound.
And simultaneously, Morgan leaped again—with a bound that carried him back over the gully, and landed him almost at the girl's side. She screamed, tried to struggle to her feet, with the gun jerking around. But Morgan gripped the barrel.
"Easy," he murmured. "Don't get excited; I won't hurt you." He thought that his tone, if perhaps not his words, would quiet her. And then she gasped,
"You—you let me alone!"
She spoke English! Morgan was beyond being amazed at anything now. He snatched the rusty old gun from her and tossed it away. She stood docile within his grip, terrified, but defiant. She was younger than he had thought, not over sixteen or seventeen probably. Her single, blue-gray garment, he could see now, was tattered, frayed. It had the look of a fabric fragile with age. It fell from her pink-white shoulders to her thighs. A crudely fashioned animal-skin belt girdled her slender waist. Leather thongs crossed her breast, modeling the dress, and her long black hair lay there in a tangle. Her feet were bare, with toughened soles from long walking on these jagged rocks.
"Let me alone," she was muttering. She stood swaying backward in his grip, her dark eyes watchful, alert. He could not miss now the wildness upon her, a weird mixture of savagery and civilization. She looked as though she were figuring only how she could kill him.
"Well," he said, "I don't get this at all. What's your name?"
"Nada," she gasped.
"Nothing else? You speak English so you're from Earth. Now how in the devil—"
She suddenly twitched away from him, but he caught her and again she stood panting.
"Now listen, take it easy," he said. He drew her down to the rock, and sat beside her, still holding her. "So your name's Nada? Well, Nada, let's talk about this. But first, the main idea is, I'm not going to hurt you, an' I damn' sure won't let you kill me. Get the idea?"
"Yes. I understand."
"Well, in a nutshell, I'm Morgan—Solo Morgan. Here alone. You might want to call me Tom; that was my original name. I'm here looking for a precious metal. I hope I find it, because it'll make me rich back on earth. And the last thing I did expect to find, here on this God-forsaken little satellite, was a pretty girl like you."
It somewhat startled Solo Morgan that his heart seemed beating faster as he stared at her and felt her resisting arms within his grip. An interest in the opposite sex had never been one of his failings. It was completely contrary to his theory that he travels fastest who travels alone.
But this somehow was different, startlingly different. "That's my story," he finished. "Now it's your turn."
Normally, Solo Morgan always had been alert, under all circumstances, to possible danger. But he was absorbed now. He hadn't noticed the faint sound of flapping wings behind him, nor noticed the weird-looking bird-shape which passed over his head, and vanished as it dropped down into a rock-clump a hundred feet away.
But Nada saw it. Her gaze, like the gaze of a trapped animal, was darting around the iridescent darkness. Her hearing, far keener than Morgan's, heard a faint cawing call, as though a parrot were chattering.
She tensed in Morgan's grip. "Stop it," he said. "You can't get away from me. What other name have you got besides Nada?"
"Nada Livingston. I was from Nairobi."
He stared. The name was vaguely familiar. "Dr. Carter Livingston?" he murmured.
"Yes. That was my father."
Morgan remembered now. He had been a boy of ten or eleven when the name of Dr. Carter Livingston had been notorious all over the world. He was a cracked old scientist living in East Africa. As Morgan remembered it, Carter Livingston had had some theory that the wild animals of earth should be protected from the cruelty of man. He wanted laws that no animals should be hunted. Then he had gone to Africa, with new theories that animals were only different forms of humans; undeveloped, untaught, but with a latent ability for learning which no human had yet recognized. Then there were rumors that in the African jungle, Carter Livingston and his young wife had established a trained-animal zoo. Wild tales. Parrots, with their pseudo-human vocal cords, not only chattering English words, but putting a childish but human intelligence into them. Apes that could mouth human words, and think human thoughts. Then Livingston's wife had died, leaving him an infant daughter. There had been some incidents of violence—Livingston's trained apes accused of raiding a nearby Masai village, and killing some of the black children whose fathers had been hunting wild animals in the neighborhood. Livingston had denied the thing as fantastic. But the British authorities had descended upon his animal-colony and cleaned it out. In a rage, Livingston, with his infant daughter, had disappeared.
Morgan had been murmuring the story. "That was your father?" he said.
"Yes. We came here. He died just a little while ago."
Morgan drew in his breath. "And now you're living alone here on Titan?"
"Alone? Why—"
He heard the flapping wings this time. Startled, his hands dropped from the girl's shoulders as he turned around. A great birdlike shape was fluttering past overhead; a blue thing like a big flamingo. A grotesque bird. Its body seemed feathered, but its huge wings were naked membrane, pointed like a bat's. Its head was round, with a little glistening skull and a great hawked nose.
"Caw—caw—coming, Nada—coming, Nada."
In that second Morgan sucked in his breath at the gruesome, chattering cry. Just a monstrous parrot? It seemed more than that. It darted down, swooping on as though it were about to attack. Then it suddenly darted up, dropped back of a nearby rock.
"Coming—help—Nada—"
Its eerie cackled words still sounded. Morgan had snatched out his flash gun. Nada was clutching at him now.
"Don't!" she murmured. "That's my friend. You—you must not."
Hairy shapes abruptly were materializing from the rocks behind Morgan. He heard a low whining bark; whirled to see a monstrous, shaggy, red-haired animal coming at him. It suggested an ape, yet was unlike one. A large body on two long shaggy legs, with long, dangling arms. A bushy tail, wildly swishing. A round head, with the shaggy red hair dangling over its face where eyes were shining and a mouth was growling.
Morgan's gun flashed. But with a cry Nada had knocked up his arm. The bolt went sizzling into the air, with its tiny crack of thunder rolling in muffled reverberations out through the shining night. He had no chance to fire again. The shaggy, oncoming thing pounced. Morgan was aware only that behind it there were others like it. The shaggy body knocked him backward. From its padded paws, fingers like claws came out—bluish fingers like the hands of an ape, clutching at his throat, strangling him. Then he heard the whizz of a thrown chunk of rock. It cracked on his skull so that all the shining darkness burst into a roaring glare of light in his head. Then the light swiftly faded as he sank into the soundless abyss of unconsciousness.
"You're better now?"
He was vaguely aware that cool water was running down his face from his hair and that Nada's voice was softly murmuring to him.
"You are better now? Don't die. Tamo is sorry that he hit you."
His eyelids had fluttered up. He knew now that she was sponging a wound in his scalp. And all he could see was a blurred interior, and the blurred blob of Nada bending over him. Then her outline clarified. He was lying on something soft, and she was sitting beside him.
"All right," he murmured. He grinned. "That was some crack somebody or something gave me."
Her face lighted with relief. "One of my goths," she said. "He's sorry.... No, you lie quiet now." He was trying to struggle up on one elbow, but she shoved him back. Beside him there was a cracked old china wash basin. The water in it with which she was sponging his head was red with his blood.
"Guess I'm all right now," he muttered. His hand went to his belt. His gun was gone.
"Just lie quiet. You'll be all right in a few minutes."
He was weak and dizzy; his body bathed in cold sweat. For another minute he closed his eyes and she went on silently sponging his head. He remembered now, vaguely, that he had been conscious enough to realize that he had been dragged here by the weird red-haired animals. It had evidently not been far. Dimly he seemed to recall that they had plunged underground, where there were phosphorescent rocks to light up the subterranean passages with an eerie glow.
He opened his eyes again. He could see that phosphorescent glow through the window-openings here. He was in a room—a little grotto with tattered, faded fabric drapes on its walls, a rug on its floor. And two or three pieces of weird-looking, old-fashioned earth-style furniture.
Presently he was sitting up. "I'm all right," he declared. "Thanks, Nada." His hand went to his head. "I guess it's stopped bleeding."
"Yes. I think so." She was gazing at him with interest now, and Morgan realized he was the only man she had ever seen, except her father. Her bosom rose and fell under the bodice of her tattered dress with her emotion.
Morgan understood that faded, old-fashioned earth-dress now. They had been her mother's clothes. And he understood the furnishings. He saw now that a bookcase in a corner of the cave-room contained half a dozen shelves of books. And on a rickety table stood a small portable sewing machine; a hoop with embroidery; needles and thread and a garment in process of mending.
Her little world. Solo Morgan gazed around him, from where he lay on a camp cot, and was astonished at the thoughts he was thinking and the emotion he was feeling.
"Tell me about yourself," he said gently. "This is your home, eh?"
