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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 62321 ***
+
+                          The Flame Breathers
+
+                            By RAY CUMMINGS
+
+              Vulcan was a doom-world. One expedition had
+             mysteriously disappeared, and now another was
+           following in its path--searching for the unknown
+             menace that stalked Vulcan's shadowed gorges.
+
+           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
+                      Planet Stories March 1943.
+         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
+         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
+
+
+I write this narrative, not with the idea of contributing any
+additional scientific data to the discovery of Vulcan, but to put upon
+the record the real facts of our truly-amazing space voyage.
+
+The newscasters have hailed me as a modern Columbus. Surely I would not
+want to appear ungracious, unappreciative of all the applause that
+has been heaped upon me. But I do not deserve it. I did my job for my
+employers. The Society sent me to make a landing upon Vulcan--if the
+little planet existed. I found that it does exist; it was exactly where
+I was told it ought to be. I carried out my instructions, returned and
+made my report. There is no great heroism in that.
+
+So I am writing the facts of what happened. Just a bald, factual
+account, without the imaginative trimmings. The real hero of the
+discovery of Vulcan was young Jan Holden. He did his job--did it
+well--and he did something just a little extra.
+
+I'm Bob Grant, which of course you have guessed by now. Peter
+Torrence--the third member of our party--is in the Federal Prison up
+the Hudson. I had to turn him in.
+
+We were given one of the smaller types of the Bentley--T-44--an alumite
+cylindrical hull, double-shelled, with the Erentz pressure-current
+circulating in it. It was a modern, well-equipped little spaceship.
+In its thirty-foot length of double-decked interior we three were
+entirely comfortable.... The voyage, past the orbit of Venus and
+then Mercury as we headed directly for the Sun--using the Sun's full
+attraction--was amazingly swift and devoid of incident beyond normal
+space-flight routine. Much of our time was spent in the little forward
+control turrent--the "green-house," where below, above and to the sides
+the great glittering abyss of the firmament is spread out in all its
+amazing glory.
+
+Vulcan, if it existed, would be almost directly behind the Sun now.
+We had no possible chance of sighting it, we knew, even when, heading
+inward, we cut the orbit of Mercury. Torrence, almost from the start of
+the trip, figured we should follow into the attraction of Mercury which
+was then far to one side.
+
+"From that angle we'll see Vulcan just that much sooner," he argued.
+
+"They told me to head straight in, to twenty-nine million miles," I
+said. "And that's what I'm doing--obeying orders."
+
+I held our plotted course. Torrence never ceased grumbling about it,
+and I must admit there was a lot of sense in his argument. He is a big
+fellow--burly, heavy-set and about my own height, which is six feet
+one. He had close-clipped hair and a square, heavy face. He's just
+turned thirty, I understand. That's five years older than I--and I was
+in charge. Perhaps that irked him. He is unquestionably a headstrong
+fellow; self-confident. But he obeyed orders, though with grumbling.
+And as a mechanical technician--no one could do better. He knew the
+technical workings of the little ship inside out.
+
+"We follow orders?" young Jan Holden said. "And when we reach
+twenty-nine million miles from the Sun--then we're on our own?"
+
+"Yes," I agreed.
+
+"Then, when we head off to round the Sun, if Vulcan is where they think
+it is we ought to sight it in a few days?"
+
+"I certainly hope so, Jan."
+
+"I wonder if it's inhabited. I wish it would be." His dark eyes were
+shining. His thin cheeks, usually pale, were flushed with excitement.
+He was just eighteen--only a month past the legal minimum age for
+Interplanetary employment. A slim, romantic-looking boy, he was willing
+and eager to help in every way. A good cook, expert in handling his
+cramped quarters and preparing the many synthetic foods with which we
+were equipped.
+
+"You hope it's inhabited, Jan?" I asked.
+
+"I sure do."
+
+I grinned at him. "Well, if it is, you'll be disappointed to find I'll
+be doing my best to keep away from whatever living creatures are there.
+That's a job for a larger expedition than ours."
+
+"Yes, I suppose it is."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Jan often sat with me through our long vigils up there in the
+green-house. Sometimes he wouldn't speak for an hour--just sitting
+there dreaming. Sometimes he would talk of the ill-fated Roberts and
+King Expedition--the only exploratory flight which ever had headed in
+this close to the Sun. That was five years ago. Roberts and King, with
+a crew of eight, had never been heard from since.
+
+"I just think they found Vulcan," Jan said once, out of one of his long
+silences.
+
+"They were told to return after a routine landing," Torrence put in.
+
+"Well then, suppose they crashed their ship," Jan said. "Suppose they
+can't get back--"
+
+"What we ought to do is sight Vulcan, round it and go home," Torrence
+said. "To the devil with orders to land. I'd go back and tell them that
+in my judgment--"
+
+"We'll land," I said. "Determine gravity--meteorological
+conditions--secure samples of soil, vegetation--what-nots--you know the
+specifications, Torrence."
+
+If indeed there was any Vulcan. If a landing upon what might be a fiery
+surface were physically possible....
+
+Another day passed. And then another and another. We were all three
+tense, expectant. There was little apparent motion in the great starry
+cyclorama spread around us--just the slow dwindling of Earth and Venus,
+the monstrous Sun shifting slowly to the right with the starfield
+behind it progressively becoming visible.
+
+"We're chasing a phantom," Torrence said, on the fourth day, with
+the Sun now almost abreast of us and some twenty-four million miles
+distant. "This damned heat! They sent us out for a salary that's a mere
+pittance--and give us inadequate equipment. No wonder there's been no
+exploration so close in here."
+
+Bathed in the full, direct Sun-rays our interior air had heated into a
+torrid swelter. Stripped to the waist, with the sweat glistening on us,
+we sat in the shrouded green-house.... And then at last I saw Vulcan! A
+little round, lead-colored blur. Just a dot, but in a few hours it was
+clear of the intervening Sun. No question of its identity. Vulcan. The
+new world.
+
+"We did it!" Jan murmured. "Oh, we did it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was a busy time, for me especially, those next ninety-six hours.
+I was soon enabled to calculate, at least roughly, that Vulcan was a
+world of some eight hundred miles diameter, with an orbit approximately
+eighteen million miles from the Sun.
+
+"It has an atmosphere?" Jan murmured anxiously.
+
+"Yes, I think so." We kept away from the Sun for a time; and then at
+last we were able to head directly for Vulcan.
+
+The atmosphere presently was visible. No need for us to use the
+pressure-suits. I envisaged at first that upon such a little world
+gravity would be very slight. But now the heavy, metallic quality of
+its rock-surface was apparent. A world, doubtless much denser than
+igneous Earth.
+
+It was my plan to land on the side away from the Sun.
+
+We rounded Vulcan at some two million miles out. The clouds were
+fairly dense in many places; sluggish, slow-moving. There were fires
+on the Sun side--a temperature there which would make it certainly
+uninhabitable to any creatures resembling humans....
+
+It was the ninth day after the sighting of Vulcan that quite by chance
+I discovered its _allurite_. We were now fairly close over the dark
+hemisphere, with the Sun occulted behind it. At a thousand miles of
+altitude, we were dropping slowly down upon the spreading dark disc
+which now occupied most of our lower firmament. I had been making a
+series of routine spectro-color-graphs to file with my reports.
+
+Jan heard my muttered exclamation and came crowding to gaze over my
+shoulder at the dripping little color spectrograph.
+
+"What is it, Bob? Something important?"
+
+"That bond-line there--see it? That's a metal on Vulcan--shining of its
+own light--radioactive type-A."
+
+That much, I could determine. Then Jan and I looked it up in the
+Hughson list of Identified Spectrae. It was _allurite_.
+
+"That's valuable?" Torrence murmured. "Pure _allurite_--"
+
+I laughed. "It certainly would be, if we could find any sizable
+deposits here. On Earth, it takes some seventeen tons of the very
+richest _allurium_ to get maybe a grain of pure _allurite_. We'll take
+a look around, try and get a sample of the ore here. If it pans out
+rich enough, they can send a well-equipped mining expedition."
+
+"We ought to get a bonus for this," Torrence said. "If you don't tell
+'em so, I will."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The descent upon Vulcan took another twenty-four hours. Then at last we
+had passed through a cloud-bank and, at some twenty thousand feet, the
+new world stretched dark and bleak beneath us. It certainly looked--to
+Jan's intense disappointment--wholly uninhabited. It was a tumbled,
+rocky landscape, barren and forbidding. Beneath us there were black
+ravines and canyons, little jagged peaks and hill-top spires, some of
+them sharp as needle-points. Off at one of the distant horizons the
+tiered land, rising up, stretched into the foothills of serrated ranks
+of mountain peaks which loomed over the jagged dark horizon line.
+
+A great metal desert here. In the fitful starlight, and the mellow
+light of little crescent Mercury which hung over the mountains like a
+falling, new moon, the metallic quality of the rock was obvious--sleek,
+bronzed metal ore, in places polished by erosion so that it shone
+mirror-like. In other places it was mottled with a greenish cast.
+
+"Well," Jan murmured, "not very hospitable-looking, is it? Don't you
+suppose there's any moisture, or any vegetation?"
+
+There was no sign of any living creatures beneath us as we drifted
+diagonally downward. But presently, at lower altitude, I could see
+gleaming pools of water in the rock-hollows. The remains of a rainstorm
+here. Then we saw what looked like a great fissure--an open scar
+rifted in a glistening, polished metallic plateau. Grey-black steam
+was rising, condensing in the humid night-air. The hidden fires of
+the bowels of the little planet seemed close at this one point. As
+we stared, a red glow for a moment tinged the steam with a red and
+greenish reflection of some subterranean glare, far down.
+
+Nothing but metal desert. But presently, as we slid forward, no more
+than a few thousand feet above the rocky surface now, Jan murmured
+suddenly,
+
+"Look off there. Like a little oasis, isn't it?"
+
+There was a patch of what seemed to be rocky soil. Just a few hundred
+acres in extent, set in a cup-like depression with little buttes and
+needle-spires and the strewn boulders of the metal waste surrounding
+it. A clump of tangled vegetation covered it--a fantastic miniature
+jungle of interlaced, queerly shaped little trees, solid with air-vines
+and pods and clumps of monstrous, vivid-colored flowers. It was an
+amazing contrast to the bleakness of the bronze desert.
+
+"Well, that's more like it," Jan exclaimed. "Not all desert, Bob. See
+that?"
+
+Torrence, with his usual efficient practicality, had been busy
+getting our landing equipment in order. He paused beside me in the
+green-house, where I sat at the rocket-stream controls which now were
+in operation for this atmospheric flight.
+
+"Where you figure on landing?" he asked. "Somewhere about here? You
+want to locate that _allurite_?"
+
+"Yes," I agreed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is not altogether safe, handling even so small a space-flight ship
+as ours, in atmosphere at low altitudes. Especially over unknown
+terrain. It seemed my best course now to make the landing here, secure
+my rock-samples and make my routine observations. I did not need
+Torrence to tell me that we were not equipped for extensive exploration
+of an unknown world. A trip on foot of perhaps a day or two, using the
+spaceship as a base, would suffice for my records.
+
+"There's a better chance of finding sizable deposits of allurium here
+than anywhere else?" Torrence suggested. "Don't you think so?"
+
+With that, too, I agreed. He prepared us for a night and a few meals of
+camping--a huge pack for himself, which with a grin he declared himself
+amply able to carry; a smaller one for Jan; and my instruments and
+electro-mining drills for me.
+
+We dropped down within an hour or two, landing with a circular swing
+into a dim, cauldron-like depression of the desert where the polished
+ground was nearly level and free of boulders.
+
+That was a thrill to me--my first step into the new world--even though
+I have experienced it several times before. Laden with our packs, we
+opened the lower-exit pressure porte. The night air, under heavier
+pressure than we were maintaining inside, oozed in with a little
+hiss--moist, queer-smelling air. It seemed at first heavy, oppressive.
+The acrid smell of chemicals was in it.
+
+The night-temperature was hot--sultry as a summer tropic night on
+Earth. With the interior gravity shut off as we opened the porte, at
+once I felt a sense of lightness. But it was not extreme. Despite
+Vulcan's small size, its great density gives it a gravity comparable to
+Earth's.
+
+In a little group we stood on the rocky ground with a dark, immense
+heavy silence around us--a silence that you could seem to hear--and
+yet a silence which seemed pregnant with the mystery of the
+unknown. Somehow it made me suddenly think of weapons. Besides our
+utility-knives, we each had a small, short-range electro-flash gun. I
+saw that Torrence had his in his hand.
+
+"Put it away," I said. "There's nothing here."
+
+With a grin, he shoved it back into his belt. "Which way?" he demanded.
+"What will the ore of _allurium_ look like? Green and red spots in
+sand-colored streaks of rock, that Hughson book says."
+
+I figured that I could recognize it, though I am far from a skilled
+geologist. Certainly I agreed with Torrence that our most important
+job was to find some sizable lodes of _allurium_, measure its probable
+extent, and take average samples of it back with us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We climbed out of the little cauldron. In the tumbled darkness we
+picked our way among the crags. An Earth-mile, then another. Little
+Jan, like an eager hound was generally ahead of us, with his tiny
+search-glare sweeping the jagged rocks. We crossed a narrow winding
+canyon, inspected a slashed cliff-face. It was arduous going. Despite
+the sense of lightness and our tropic black-drill clothes of short
+trousers, thin jackets and shirts, we were panting, bathed in sweat
+within an hour. Silently, Torrence plodded at my side. It was my
+first trip with him; and I could see he did not altogether trust my
+efficiency.
+
+"You can find the way back to the ship?" he demanded once. "To get lost
+in a place like this--"
+
+I had marked it; little twin spires above the cauldron. They were
+visible now, looming against the dark sky behind us.
+
+I showed him. "I saw them," he said. "I could lead us back. My idea is,
+if we cover about ten miles and then camp--"
+
+A cry from Jan interrupted us. He was standing on a little ridge of
+rock like a bronze metal wave frozen into solidity. Against the deep
+purple sky his slim figure was a silhouette of solid black. He was
+staring off into the distance; his arm waved with a gesture as he
+called to us.
+
+"Something off there! Something lying on the rocks--come look!"
+
+We ran to join him. About a quarter mile distant there was a broad
+gully. A dark blob was visible lying at the bottom of it--a sizable
+blob, something forty or fifty feet long. We picked our way there;
+climbed down into the ragged, thirty-foot ravine. It was a spaceship
+lying here--with its sleek alumite hull resting on its side with one of
+its rocket-stream fins bent and smashed under it.
+
+"The Roberts-King ship," Torrence exclaimed. "So they got here. Cracked
+up in the landing."
+
+There seemed no doubt of it. This was unquestionably the Roberts-King
+vehicle--an older version of our own vessel. We stood staring at it
+blankly--at its little bow pressure port which was wide open, a narrow
+rectangle with the interior blackness behind it.
+
+Then I saw that here on the rocks near the doorway, a litter of tools
+and mechanisms were strewn; and a section of one of the gravity plates
+which had been disconnected and brought out here.
+
+"Trying to repair it," I said to the silently staring, awed Torrence.
+"Five years ago. Now what do you suppose--"
+
+A startled cry from Jan interrupted me.
+
+The body was lying on the rocks, just beyond the bow of the ship. It
+was Jonathan Roberts--stocky, middle-aged leader of the expedition.
+Clad in a strange costume of thin brown material, seemingly animal
+skin, he lay crumpled. I had never met him, but from his published
+portraits I could recognize him at once. In the starlight here his dead
+face with staring eyes goggled up at us.
+
+"Why--why--" Torrence gasped. "Five years--"
+
+There was no great look of decay about the body. Roberts had died
+here, certainly not five years ago. I was bending down over the body;
+I shoved at one of the shoulders and turned it over. Stricken Jan,
+Torrence and I stared numbed. A thin bronze sliver of metal--fin-tipped
+like a metal arrow--was buried in Roberts' back!
+
+Again the alert Jan was gazing at the dim, fantastic night-scene around
+us. Abruptly his hand gripped my arm as he gasped,
+
+"Why--good Lord--what's that? Over there--"
+
+In the blackness down the gully, perhaps a hundred feet from us, a
+little spiral of fire had appeared. A tiny wisp of red-green flame. It
+seemed to hover in the air a few feet above the rocky gully floor. Like
+a phantom wraith of fire, it silently leaped and twisted.
+
+"My God--it's coming toward us!" Torrence suddenly gasped.
+
+In the darkness the silent wisp of fire had swayed sidewise, and then
+came along the edge of the gully, a disembodied conflagration in
+mid-air, as though wafted by a rush of wind we could not feel.
+
+
+                                  II
+
+For a moment of startled horror we stood motionless. The floating
+little flame seemed bounding now, just over the rocks. Bounding?
+Abruptly I seemed to see a dark shape of solidity under it--something
+almost, but not quite invisible in the blackness. A tangible thing? A
+creature--burning? Thoughts are instant things. I recall that in that
+second, I had the impression of a four-legged thing like a huge dog,
+bounding toward us over the rocks. The flame in which it was enveloped,
+had spread--it was a blob of flame, but solidity was there.
+
+All in a second. My little electro-gun was in my hand. And then from
+beside me, Torrence fired--his flash with a whining sizzle splitting
+the blackness of the gully with its pencil-point of hurled electrons.
+His hasty aim quite evidently was wild. I saw the little splash of
+colored sparks where his charge hit the rocks. Too high.
+
+My gun was leveled. But in that split-second, the oncoming blob of
+fire abruptly had been extinguished. There was only the faint blurred
+suggestion of the dog-like thing. It had stopped short, and then
+suddenly was retreating. My shot, and Jan's, followed it. In another
+few seconds there was no possibility of hitting it. Silently it had
+vanished. There was only the black silent gully around us, with the
+blurred crags standing like menacing dark ghosts.
+
+My instinct then, I must admit, was for us to retreat at once to our
+ship. In the heavy empty silence we stood blankly gazing at each other.
+Torrence was grim; Jan was shaking with excitement and the fear all of
+us felt.
+
+"You heard that whistle?" I murmured.
+
+"I heard it," Jan exclaimed. "Something--somebody--human--" There were
+weird, hostile inhabitants on Vulcan--no question of that now! And
+here was Roberts' body with a metal sliver of arrow in its back, mute
+evidence of what we were facing. And already our presence here had been
+discovered. I stared around at the rocky darkness, every blurred crag
+now seeming to mask some unknown menace.
+
+"That whistle," Torrence murmured, "calling off that flaming
+thing--started at our shots. Something is around here, watching us now,
+undoubtedly."
+
+The yawning dark doorway of the wrecked spaceship was near us.
+Something seemed lying just beyond its threshold.
+
+"You two stay here," I told Torrence and Jan. "Don't let them surprise
+us again. We'll have to get back to our ship--"
+
+The port doorway led into a little pressure chamber. On its dark
+sloping floor, as the wrecked ship lay askew, I stood with my
+flashlight illumining so ghastly a scene that my blood chilled in my
+veins. It was a bloody shambles of horror. For a moment I gazed; and
+as I turned away, sickened, I found Jan at my elbow. He too, had been
+staring. He clutched at me, white and shaken, and I turned away my
+light.
+
+"The rest of them," he murmured.
+
+"Yes. Looks that way. All of them--"
+
+The bodies were strewn, clothing and flesh ripped apart so that here
+were only the bones of men, with pulpy crimson--
+
+"No humans did that, Jan."
+
+"No," he shuddered. "That Thing in flames that came at us--"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+His words died in his throat. Outside there was a scream--a shrill,
+eerie human cry. The high-pitched scream of a woman! Gun in hand, with
+Jan close behind me, I ran outside. The dimness of the rocky gully
+seemed empty. The cry had died away.
+
+"Torrence! You Torrence--what in the devil--"
+
+My low vehement words wafted away. There was no Torrence. Cautiously I
+ran around the bow of the wrecked ship, gazed down its other side.
+
+"Torrence--Torrence--"
+
+The nearby rocks seemed to echo back my words, mocking me.
+
+"Why--why--" Jan gasped, "I left him right out here. He was just
+standing, looking down at Roberts' body with the arrow in it. I just
+thought I'd go inside with you for a minute."
+
+I pulled him down to the ground. We crouched, close against the side of
+the ship. "That scream," I whispered, "wasn't far away. A few hundred
+feet down the gully."
+
+"It sounded like a girl. It did, didn't it? Bob, if they got Torrence
+that quickly--an arrow in him--"
+
+I peered, tense. The rock shadows were all motionless. In the heavy
+blank silence there was only my startled breathing, and Jan's; and the
+thumping of my own heart against my ribs. Had this weird enemy gotten
+Torrence so swiftly, so silently? Something not human, that had so
+quickly seized him and dragged him away? Or one of those metal arrows
+in his back, so that his body was lying around here somewhere, masked
+by the darkness. Jan and I had certainly not been inside the ship more
+than a minute or two--
+
+A sharp clattering ping against the alumite side of the wrecked ship
+struck away my thoughts. A metal arrow! It bent against the hull-plate
+and dropped almost beside me! The still-hidden sniper had seen us, that
+was evident, for the arrow had whizzed only a foot or so over our heads.
+
+"Jan--lower--"
+
+We almost flattened ourselves against the bulge of the hull, with a
+little pile of boulders in front of us. My gun was leveled, but there
+was nothing to shoot at. Then from diagonally across the gully again
+there came a sharp human cry! A girl's voice? It was soft this time, a
+bursting little cry, half suppressed.
+
+Thoughts are instant things. I was aware of the cry and with it there
+was another whizz. Another arrow. This one was wider of the mark; it
+hit far to one side of us, up near the bow of the ship.
+
+"Jan! Wait!" His little flash gun was up in the crevice of the rocks
+in front of us. In another second he would have fired. I saw his
+target--two dim blobs across the gully. For just that second they were
+visible as they rose up out of a hollow. A man; and the slighter
+figure with him seemed that of a girl. Her hair, glistening like spun
+metal in the dim light, hung over her shoulders.
+
+The two figures were struggling. There was the sound of the girl's low
+cry, and a grunt from the man.... My low admonition stopped Jan from
+firing and in another second the shapes across the gully had vanished.
+
+"That girl," I murmured. "She tried to keep him from killing us. Seemed
+that way, don't you think?"
+
+"Well--"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We waited. From across the gully there was no sound. I could see now
+that there was a little ridge in the broken, littered gully floor,
+behind which the two figures had vanished. A lateral depression was
+there, with the ragged, broken cliff-wall some ten feet behind it.
+
+"Do you suppose there's only one of them?" Jan whispered. "One man--and
+that girl--"
+
+"And that--that Thing in flames--"
+
+There was no sign of the animal-like creature. For another moment we
+crouched tense, peering, listening. A loose stone the size of my fist
+was here beside us. I picked it up. It was weirdly heavy for its size.
+Then I flung it out into the gully to the right of us. It fell with a
+clatter.
+
+Our enemy was there all right. An arrow whizzed in the darkness and
+struck near where the stone had fallen.
+
+Jan laughed with contempt. "Dumb enough--that fellow. Bob, listen,
+we've got flash-guns. That fellow with no brains--and just with
+arrows--"
+
+True enough. "You stay here," I whispered.
+
+"What's the idea?"
+
+"You wait a couple of minutes. Then throw another stone off to the
+right--about the same place. Understand?"
+
+"No, I don't."
+
+"Well, you do it, anyhow."
+
+There seemed a line of shadow to the left of us, a shadow which
+extended well out into the gully. The ground dropped down in that
+area--a slope strewn with crags, broken with little crevices. Crouching
+low, I crept to the bow of the ship, to the left away from Jan; sank
+down, waited. There was no sound; evidently I had not been seen. I
+started again, picking my way down the slope.
+
+A minute. I was well out into the gully now, ten feet or so down, so
+that I could not see the wrecked ship where Jan was crouching. From
+here the opposite cliff-wall showed dark and ragged. Occasionally it
+yawned with openings, like little cave-mouths. The place where the
+figures had been crouching should be visible from here. The broken,
+lower side of the little ridge behind which they had dropped was in
+view to me now. It was dark with shadow, but there seemed nothing there.
+
+Slowly, cautiously, I crossed the gully. Two minutes since I had left
+Jan? I melted down beside a rock, almost at the edge of the cliff-wall.
+And then, out in the gully, far to the right, I heard the stone clatter
+as Jan threw it.
+
+There was no answering arrow-shot this time.... One can be very
+incautious, usually at just the wrong moment. I recall that I stood
+up to see better, though I flattened myself against a boulder. And
+suddenly, close behind me, I was aware of a padding, thudding rhythmic
+sound on the rocks. I whirled. I had only a second's vision of a dark
+bounding animal shape coming at me. My sizzling little flash went under
+it as it rose in one of its bounding leaps.
+
+I had no time to fire another shot. Frantically I pulled the
+trigger-lever, but the gun's voltage had not yet rebuilt to firing
+pressure. Futilely I flung the gun into the creature's face as it bore
+down upon me.
+
+The impact of the dark oblong body knocked me backward so that I fell
+with it sprawling, snarling upon me. In the chaos of my mind there was
+only the dim realization of a heavy body as big as my own; spindly
+legs, like the legs of a huge dog. There seemed six or eight legs,
+scrambling on me.
+
+Wildly I fought to heave it off. There was a face--a ring of glaring
+green eyes; fang-like jaws of a long pointed snout which opened,
+snarling with a gibbering, gruesome cry. I shoved my left forearm into
+the jaws as they came at my face. They closed upon my arm, ripping,
+tearing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But somehow I was aware that I had lunged to my feet. And the Thing
+reared up with me. It was a Thing almost as heavy as myself. My left
+arm had come loose from its jaws and as its scrambling weight pressed
+me I went down again. A Thing of rubber? It seemed boneless, the shape
+of it bending as I seized it. A gruesomely yielding body. My flailing
+blows bounded back from it. Then I knew that I was gripping it by the
+head, twisting it. The snarling, snapping jaws suddenly opened wide
+with a scream--a scream that faded into a mouthing gibber, and in my
+grip the Thing went limp. I cast it away and it sank to the rocks,
+quivering.
+
+For an instant I stood panting, trembling with nausea sickening me.
+On my hands the flesh of the weird antagonist was sticking like
+viscous, gluey rubber. Hot and clinging. Hot? I stared at my hands
+in the dimness. For a second I thought it was phosphorescence. Then
+yellow-green wisps of flame were rising from my hands. Frantically I
+plunged them into my jacket pockets. The tiny flames were extinguished.
+I stripped off my jacket, flung it away and it lay with a little smoke
+rising from it where the weird stuff was trying again to burst into
+flame.
+
+The skin of my hands was seared, but the contact with the flames had
+been only momentary and the burns were not severe. It had all happened
+in a minute or two. I recall that I was standing trembling, staring
+at the yawning mouth of a cave entrance which was nearby in the
+cliff-face. A movement in there? A moving blob? Then I was aware that
+there was a light behind me. Off across the gully there was a blob of
+light-fire. A red-green blob, swirling, scrambling. And the sound of a
+distant, gibbering snarl....
+
+The singing whizz of an arrow past my head made me turn again. My human
+adversary! I saw him now. He was coming at a run from the mouth of the
+cave--a wide-shouldered, grotesquely-shaped man with a brown hairy
+garment draped upon him. He swayed like a gorilla on thick bent legs.
+In one hand he held what seemed an arrow-sling. In the other he carried
+a long narrow segment of rock, swinging it like a club. He was no more
+than ten feet from me. In the dimness I could see his huge round head
+with tangled, matted blank hair. As I whirled to meet him, his voice
+was a bellow of guttural roar, like an animal bellowing to intimidate
+its enemy.
+
+I turned, jumped sidewise. And abruptly from a rock-shadow another
+shape rose up! Slim, small white body, brown-draped with long, gleaming
+tawny hair. The girl! Her voice gasped,
+
+"You run! He kill you! In here--this way--"
+
+The bellowing savage had turned heavily in his rush and was charging
+us. In her terror and confusion the girl gripped me, shoving me toward
+the cave. As we ran I flung an arm around her, lifting her up. She
+weighed hardly more than a child. Then we were in the blackness of a
+tunnel-passage. I set her down.
+
+"Lie down. Be quiet," I whispered vehemently. She understood me; she
+crouched back against the side wall. There seemed a little light here,
+a glow which I realized was inherent to the rocks, like a vague, faint
+phosphorescence. But it was brighter outside. The charging savage had
+evidently paused at the entrance. As I stared now, his bulky figure
+loomed there, grotesque silhouette. Then doubtless he saw me. With
+another bellow he came charging in.
+
+I stood waiting, like a Toreador, in front of a heavily charging bull.
+It was something like that, for as he rushed me, swinging his club and
+plunging with lowered head of matted hair, nimbly I jumped aside. I had
+seized a rock half as big as my head. He had no time to turn and poise
+himself as I jumped on him, crashing the rock at the side of his broad
+ugly face as he straightened and swung around.
+
+Ghastly blow. His face smashed in as the rock seemed to go into it.
+For a second his hulking body stood balanced upon the crooked legs and
+broad flat bare feet. Gruesome dead thing with the face and top of the
+head gone, it balanced on legs suddenly turned rigid. Then it toppled
+forward and thudded against the passage wall, sliding sidewise to the
+ground where it lay motionless.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the phosphorescent dimness, I dropped beside the girl. She was
+panting with terror, shuddering, with her hands before her face.
+
+"It's all right," I murmured. "Or at least, maybe it isn't all right
+with you, but he's dead, anyway."
+
+Utterly incongruous, the delicately formed bronze-white girl--and that
+hulking, grotesque, clumsy savage.
+
+"Oh--yes," she murmured. "Dear--yes--"
+
+"You speak English--strange, here on Vulcan--"
+
+"But from your Captain Roberts--he was the fren' of mine--of all the
+Senzas--"
+
+"He's dead. An arrow in him--lying over there by his wrecked ship--the
+rest of them, dead inside--"
+
+"Yes. I know it. That was these Orgs. I was caught--just the last time
+of sleep. Tahg--surely it seems it must be Tahg who sent this Org to
+take me from my father's home--"
+
+A captive! And she had fought with her savage captor to stop him from
+sending an arrow into me. Then, in his absorption as he tried to stalk
+me, she had broken loose from him.
+
+"Just this one Org?" I murmured. "Is he the only one around here? He
+and that--animal-thing which I killed?"
+
+"That--a female _mime_--you--you--"
+
+She was huddling beside me, clinging to me, still shuddering. "Two Orgs
+there were," she whispered. "And another mime--a fire-male--"
+
+The flame-creature! Queerly, it was not until that instant that I
+thought of Jan. Out there across the gully, that swirling swaying blob
+of light-fire! Those snarling sounds! Jan had been attacked by another
+of the savages, and by the weird flaming creature! The mime fire-male,
+as the girl called it.
+
+I jumped to my feet. "What--what you do?" she demanded.
+
+"You stay here. What's your name?"
+
+"Ama. Daughter of Rohm, the Senza. He my father. He very good fren' of
+the Captain Roberts--good fren' of all the Earthmen. Like you? You are
+Earthman?"
+
+"Yes. Now Ama, listen--I came here with another Earthman--with two
+others, in fact. One of them is over there by the Roberts' ship.... You
+wait here--"
+
+"No!" she gasped. I had dashed toward the tunnel entrance, but I found
+her with me. "No--no, I stay with you."
+
+From the entrance the gully showed dim and silent. Over the little rise
+of ground, just the top of the Roberts' spaceship was visible.
+
+Ama clung to me. "I stay with you," she insisted.
+
+Cautiously we picked our way across the gully, up the small ascending
+slope. No sound; nothing moving. But now there was a pungent, acrid
+chemical smell hanging here in the windless air.
+
+"The fire-mime!" Ama whispered. "You smell the fire? Then he was angry,
+ready to fight--"
+
+"He fought," I retorted grimly. "I saw it--"
+
+"Look! Look there--"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Her slim arm as she gestured tinkled with metal baubles hanging on
+it.... I saw, up the slope, the blob of something lying on the rocks.
+Jan! My heart pounded. But it wasn't Jan. The body of one of the weird
+oblong animals was lying there. Lying on its side, with its six legs
+stiffly outstretched. Ugly hairless thing, like a giant dog which had
+been skinned. I could see now that the grey-green flesh had a greasy,
+pulpy look. What strange organic material was this? Certainly nothing
+like it existed on Earth. Impervious to heat, as the human stomach
+tissue is impervious to the action of its own digestive juices.
+Evidence of the thing's flaming oxidation was here. Wisps of smoke were
+rising from the ground about the slack body.
+
+Had Jan killed it? The ring of eyes above the long muzzle snout bulged
+with a glassy, goggling dead stare. The jaws were open, with a thick,
+forked black tongue protruding, and green, sticky-looking froth still
+oozing out. The teeth were long and sharp, fangs like polished black
+ivory protruding from the jaw. The cause of its death was obvious. A
+knife-slash had ripped, almost severed its throat in a hideous wound
+where green-black viscous ooze was still slowly dripping, with smoky
+vapor rising from it.
+
+For a moment, with little Ama clinging to me, I must have stood
+appalled at the weird sight of the dead fire-mime. If Jan had fought
+and killed it--then where was he now? And where was that other Org,
+companion of the clumsy savage I had killed when it had tried to
+attack me?
+
+And where was Torrence?
+
+"Your fren'--he did this?" Ama was murmuring.
+
+"Yes, I guess so." I raised my voice cautiously. "Jan--Oh, Jan, where
+are you?"
+
+The dark shadowed rocks mocked me with their muffled, blurred echo of
+my call. There seemed nothing here alive, save Ama and me. The wrecked
+spaceship lay broken and silent on the rocks, with the gruesome, strewn
+bodies of the Earthmen in it. And the body of Roberts still lay here
+outside, near the bow.
+
+"Jan--Jan--"
+
+Then Ama abruptly gasped, "The Orgs! See them--up there!"
+
+The cliff which was the gully wall, at this point was some fifty
+feet high. I stared up to a patch of yellow light which had appeared
+there in the darkness. A band of the murderous Orgs! Carrying flaming
+torches, a dozen or more of the gargoyle savages stood above us on the
+cliff-brink. One stood in advance of them, pointing down at us. He was
+the other one, doubtless, who had originally been down here with Ama.
+Around them, half a dozen of the huge greenish mimes bounded, whining
+with gibbering cries of eagerness.
+
+And in that instant, an arrow came down. I saw one of the savages sling
+it from a flexible, whip-like contrivance. The whizzing metal shaft
+sang past our heads and clattered on the rocks.
+
+Ama was clutching me. "You come! Oh hurry--they kill us both."
+
+There was no argument about that. I flung a last look around with the
+vague thought that I would see Jan lying here. Then I let Ama guide
+me. At a run, we headed back down the declivity and diagonally across
+the gully. A rain of arrows came down, clattering around us, but in a
+moment most of them were falling short.
+
+"Which way, Ama? Where we go?"
+
+"My people--my village--not too far."
+
+"Which way?"
+
+"Through this cliff. There are passages into the lower valley."
+
+"You know the way?"
+
+"Yes, oh yes."
+
+A dark opening in the opposite cliff presently was before us. The Orgs
+were coming down the other cliff now; their bellowing voices and the
+whining cries of the mimes were a blended babble.
+
+"A storm is coming," Ama said suddenly.
+
+The distant sky over the lower end of the gully was shot now with weird
+lurid colors. In the heavy dark silence here around us, a sudden sharp
+puff of wind plucked at us, tossing Ama's long tawny hair.
+
+"This way--" she added.
+
+My arm went around her as another wind-blast thrust us sidewise, almost
+knocking her off her feet. Then clinging together, fighting our way
+in a rush of wind which now abruptly was a roar, we plunged into the
+depths of the yawning tunnel.
+
+
+                                  III
+
+I must recount now what happened to Jan, as he told it to me when after
+a sequence of weird events, he and I were together again. When I left
+him crouching there close against the hull of the wrecked Roberts'
+ship, he lost sight of me almost in a moment. There was just the faint
+blob of me sliding into a shadow; and then the lowering ground down
+which I went hid me. Tensely he crouched, peering across the gully,
+listening to the heavy silence.
+
+Two minutes, I had said; and then he must throw the rock. His hand
+fumbled around, found a sizable rock-chunk. He understood my purpose,
+of course--to divert our adversary across the gully at a moment when I
+might be close to jump him from the other direction.
+
+Jan was excited, apprehensive, just an inexperienced boy. Was the
+crouching savage with the girl still there across the gully? There was
+no sound, no movement. Was it two minutes now?
+
+He flung the stone at last and raised himself up a little with his
+gun leveled. The stone clattered off to the right. But it provoked
+no whizzing arrow. No sound of me, jumping upon my adversary....
+Nothing.... But what was that? Jan stiffened. Distinctly he heard the
+sizzling puff of a flashgun shot. My gun! He knew it must be; it was to
+the left, out in the gully. And following it there was a low gibbering
+snarl. Faint in the distance, but in the heavy silence plainly audible.
+
+I had been attacked! Jan found himself on his feet, with no thought
+in his mind save to dash to me.... He had taken no more than a few
+scrambling leaps on the rocks. He reached the brink of the descent.
+Far down and out in the gully it seemed that he could see the blur of
+something fighting.
+
+His low incautious movement had betrayed him. From behind him there was
+a low whistling. A signal! An eager whining snarl instantly resounded
+to it. Jan had no more than time to whirl and face the sounds when a
+great bounding grey-green shape was on him!
+
+Jan's shot missed it, and the next second the lunging oblong body
+struck him. The impact knocked him backward. His gun clattered away.
+Then the huge, hairless dog-like thing sprawled upon him, its slavering
+jaws snapping. They found his shoulder as he lunged and the fang-like
+teeth sank in....
+
+A miracle that Jan could have kept his wits so that he fumbled for
+his knife as he fell. But suddenly he got it out, stabbed and slashed
+wildly with it as he rolled and twisted on the ground with the snarling
+creature on top of him.... And suddenly he was aware that the thing had
+burst into flame!
+
+It could have been only a few seconds during which Jan fought that
+weird living fire. It was a wild chaos of horror.... Licking, oozing
+flames exuding like an aura from the sticky viscous flesh that horribly
+sprawled upon him. Monstrous ghastly adversary, with flesh that seemed
+now like burning bubbling rubber, stenching with acrid gas-fumes....
+
+Just a few seconds, then Jan realized that somehow he had broken loose
+from the jaws that gripped his shoulder. He tried to scramble to his
+feet. The flames searing his face made him close his eyes. He was
+holding his breath, choking. His clothes were on fire....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then the sprawling, lunging body knocked him down again. He was still
+wildly, blindly slashing with his knife. Vaguely he was aware, over
+the chaos of snapping snarls, that a human voice nearby with guttural
+shouts was urging the animal to dispatch its victim. But suddenly--as
+Jan's knife-blade ripped into its throat--the snarls went into a
+ghastly, eerie animal scream of agony--a long scream that died into a
+gurgle of gluey, choking blood-fluid....
+
+Jan was aware that the creature had fallen from him with its flames
+dying. On the rocks he rolled away from it, with his scorched hands
+wildly brushing his clothes to extinguish them. Then he was on his
+feet, staggering, choking, coughing. But his knife, its blade dripping
+with an oozing flame, still wildly waved.
+
+And then he was aware that twenty feet away, a heavy, grotesque
+man-like shape was standing with a club and arrow-sling. But with his
+flame-creature dead and the sight of the staggering, triumphant Jan
+waving his flaming knife-blade--the watching savage suddenly dropped
+his club and let out a cry of dismay and fear. And then he ran.
+
+For a moment Jan, wildly, hysterically laughing, went in pursuit. But
+in the rocky darkness the fleeing savage already had vanished....
+
+Then reaction set in upon Jan. His burned face and hands stung as
+though still fire was upon him. He was still gasping, choking from the
+fumes of his smoldering clothes. His eyes, with lashes singed, smarted,
+watering so that all the vague night-scene was a swaying blur.... He
+found himself sitting down on the rocks....
+
+And then suddenly he remembered me. Where had I gone? What had
+happened?...
+
+Vaguely Jan recalled that I had left him and gone across the gully....
+Where was I now?... Then he seemed dimly to recall that he had heard my
+shot....
+
+In the dimness suddenly it seemed to Jan that he saw me, far up the
+gully to the right, up on the cliff-top. For just a moment he was
+sure that it was the shape of me, silhouetted against the sky.... The
+sight gave him strength. Still staggering, he ran wildly forward....
+A quarter of a mile; certainly it seemed that far. He had crossed the
+gully by now. The figure up above had vanished.... Queer. What was I
+doing up there? Chasing the savage?...
+
+Jan climbed the little cliff, which was ragged, and lower here than
+elsewhere. It led him to the undulating, upper plateau, crag-strewn,
+dim under a leaden sky. But there was enough light so that he could
+see the distant figure. It was only two or three hundred yards away,
+plodding on, apparently not looking back....
+
+Jan ran after it. And then he was calling:
+
+"Bob! You Bob--"
+
+The figure turned. Started suddenly back, and called:
+
+"Is that you? Jan?"
+
+It was Torrence! He came back at a lumbering run now--Torrence,
+bare-headed, gun in hand. But he obviously hadn't had any encounter.
+His jacket was buttoned across his shirt; he looked just as he had when
+Jan had last seen him, out there at the bow of the wrecked spaceship
+when Jan had gone inside to join me.
+
+Torrence stared at the burned Jan. "Why--good Heavens," he gasped.
+"You--I saw that thing killing you. I was up here--I started down, but
+too late--"
+
+"Where's Bob?"
+
+"Bob? Why--he was killed. Burned--like you. I tried to help him--too
+late--the damned things--"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The lameness of it was lost on the still-dazed Jan at that moment. I
+had been killed! It struck him with a shock. And as he stood wavering,
+trembling, Torrence drew him to a rock.
+
+"Too bad," Torrence murmured sympathetically.
+
+"Where--where were you?" Jan said at last. "We came out of the
+ship--couldn't find you."
+
+"I was attacked by one of those cursed Things. Like the one that nearly
+got you--like the one that killed Bob. I chased it; shot at it when I
+got up here. But I shouldn't have come up--then I saw you and Bob--too
+late to get back to you. So I was starting for our ship. It's off this
+way, not so very far."
+
+For a little time Jan sat there numbed, and Torrence sat
+sympathetically, silently beside him.
+
+"When we get back," Torrence murmured at last, "you can put in your
+report with mine. We did our best--but there isn't any use now, us
+tackling this thing."
+
+Jan must have been wholly silent, thinking of me, dead, burned, back
+there in the darkness of the gully.
+
+"You all right now, lad?"
+
+"Yes," Jan said. "Yes--I'm all right."
+
+"When we get back, we ought to get a bonus," Torrence said. "Don't
+worry, Jan--I'll see you get plenty. Your report and mine--to tell them
+the hazards of this trip--"
+
+"We should go back?" Jan said.
+
+"Yes, certainly we should. Get back to Earth as fast as we can. No
+chance of doing anything else--"
+
+Torrence gazed apprehensively around them in the darkness. That much
+at least--the reality of his apprehension as they sat there on the
+open plateau--that was authentic enough. And Jan also felt that at any
+moment one of the flaming creatures might attack them.
+
+"You strong enough to start now?"
+
+"Yes, sure I am," Jan agreed.
+
+They started, picking their way along. Jan tried to remember how far we
+three had come from our own ship until we had discovered the Roberts'
+vessel.... For ten or fifteen minutes now he and Torrence clambered
+over the rocks.
+
+"You think you know the way?" Jan asked at last.
+
+"Yes--or I thought I did." Torrence's tone was apprehensively dubious.
+And that, too must have been authentic. Certainly it would be a
+desperate plight to be lost here on Vulcan. "It was Bob who was sure he
+knew the way back--"
+
+"I think we are all right," Jan agreed. "That big rock-spire off
+there--I remember it."
+
+As they progressed, Jan was aware now that the sky behind them was
+brightening. They turned and stared at it.
+
+"Weird--" Torrence muttered.
+
+"Yes--some sort of storm. If it's bad--you suppose we ought to take
+shelter? It's pretty open up here."
+
+The sky was certainly weird enough--a swirl of leaden clouds back
+there, shot now with lurid green and crimson. And suddenly there came
+a puff of wind. Then another. Stronger, it whined between the nearby
+naked crags. In a little nearby ravine it caught an area of loose
+metallic stones, whirled them before it with a tinkling clatter.
+
+"We came through that ravine, coming out this way," Jan said suddenly.
+"I'm sure of it."
+
+Torrence remembered it also. Another blast of wind came; and with
+it blowing them, they scurried into the ravine. The lurid storm-sky
+painted it with a crimson and green glare, so that the narrow cut in
+the rocky plateau was eerie. To Jan it seemed suddenly infernal. He
+clutched at the larger, far more bulky Torrence as they hurried along
+with the wind blasting them.
+
+Loose metallic stones were blowing around them now with a clatter.
+Then suddenly the sky seemed riven by a darting, jagged red shaft of
+lightning. And then red rain was pelting them.
+
+"Got to find some place," Torrence panted. He had to shout it above the
+roar as the wind tore at his words and hurled them away.
+
+"Over there?" Jan gestured. "Looks like a cave."
+
+The sides of the ravine were rifted in many places with vertical
+crevices. They headed toward a wider slit of opening which seemed
+to lead well back underground. A place of shelter until this storm
+passed....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To Jan, what happened then was weirdly terrifying. He suddenly realized
+that as they approached the opening, they were being pulled at it. Into
+it! A suction, as though somewhere down underground this storm had
+created a partial vacuum--a far lesser pressure so that the air of the
+little ravine was rushing into it!
+
+Terrified, both of them now were fighting to keep away. But it was no
+use. Like wind-blown puffs of cotton they were sucked into the yawning
+opening. A sudden chaos of roaring horror. Jan felt that he was still
+clutching at Torrence. Then both of them fell, sliding, sucked forward
+as a plunger cylinder is sucked through a pneumatic tube. The ground
+here in the passage felt smooth as polished marble.
+
+For how long they plunged forward Jan had no conception. Roaring,
+sucking darkness. Then it seemed that there was a little light. An
+effulgence; a pallid, eerie glow, like phosphorescence streaming from
+the rocks. The narrow passage was steadily widening; and then abruptly
+they were blown out into emptiness.
+
+It was a vast grotto, with smooth metallic floor almost level. The
+effulgence here was brighter, so that an undulating, vaulted ceiling
+glistened far overhead. For a moment the nearer wall was visible,
+smooth, burnished metal rock. Eroded by the winds of centuries, all the
+rock here was burnished until it shone mirror-like.
+
+The huge pallid interior roared and echoed with the tumbling
+wind-torrents seething in it. A lashing cauldron jumbled with eddying
+blasts. Jan and Torrence tried to get to their feet. They could see now
+that they were far out from the wall--sliding, buffeted, desperately
+clinging together, hurled one way and then another. Bruised from head
+to foot, panting, gasping in the swiftly changing pressures, Jan felt
+his senses leaving him. A numbed vagueness was on him, so that there
+was only the suck and roar of the winds and the feel of Torrence to
+whom he was clinging. They were lying prone now--
+
+"Easing up a little--" He heard Torrence's voice as though from far
+away. And then he came to his senses to find that he and Torrence had
+hit against a wall of the grotto and were clinging to a projection of
+rock.
+
+Easing up a little.... The storm outside lessening.... Jan must have
+drifted off again; and after another interval he was conscious that
+there was only a tossing, crazy breeze in here. It whined and moaned,
+echoing from one wall to another so that the pallid, silvery half-light
+seemed filled with a myriad gibbering little voices.
+
+And Jan could see now that he and Torrence had been blown into a recess
+of the grotto--a smaller cave. The rock formation here was as though
+this were the heart of a monstrous crystal--vertical facets of strata
+that glistened pallidly.
+
+"We'll have to try and cross back," Torrence said, and in the confined
+space his words weirdly echoed, split and duplicated so that there
+seemed many little whispering replicas of his words. "Find that passage
+where we came in--"
+
+They were on their feet now--suddenly to Jan there was around them a
+vast vista of pallid dimness. A glowing, limitless abyss stretching off
+into shadowy nothingness, everywhere he looked.
+
+"Why--why," he murmured, "this place--so large--"
+
+Torrence still had his flash cylinder. He fumbled in his jacket pocket,
+brought it out. Amazing thing! As he snapped it on, its tiny white beam
+showed mirrored in a hundred places of the paneled, crystalline walls!
+The blurred image of Torrence and Jan standing holding each other with
+their light-shaft before them, duplicated so that there were a hundred
+of them everywhere they looked! And countless other hundreds smaller
+and smaller in the myriad backgrounds!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With a startled curse Torrence took a few steps into what seemed pallid
+emptiness, and then suddenly his image was coming at him! Lost! To Jan
+came the rush of horror that they might, wander in here, balked at
+every turn....
+
+Another startled cry from Torrence stuck away Jan's thoughts. Neither
+he nor Torrence had time to make a move. There was suddenly everywhere
+the duplicated image of a thick, swaying, gargoyle savage, standing
+like a gorilla on thick bent legs, with one crooked arm holding a
+flaming torch over his head. A myriad replicas of him everywhere! Was
+he close to them, or far away? And in which direction?
+
+In that stricken second the questions stabbed into Jan's tumultuous
+mind. Then he was aware of something whirling in the air over his
+head--something crashing on his skull so that all the world seemed
+to go up into a splitting, blinding roar of light. He felt his legs
+buckling under him. There was only Torrence's fighting outcry and the
+sound of a guttural echoing voice as Jan fell and his senses slid off
+into a blank and black, empty silence....
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+I go back now to that moment when Ama and I, pursued by the roaming
+band of Orgs, plunged into a tunnel passage that led from the gully,
+near the wrecked Roberts' spaceship. It was quite evident that Ama was
+aware of the dangers of the wind-storms of her little world. There was
+a swift air-current sucking into this passage. But it was not powerful
+enough to do more than hurry us along. Once, where the tunnel branched,
+there seemed an open grotto up a little subterranean ascent to the
+right. It glowed with a brighter pallid light than was here in the
+passage. I turned that way with an interested gaze, but at once she
+clutched at me.
+
+"No--no. In times of the storm, very bad sometimes in places under the
+ground."
+
+There seemed no sign of pursuit behind us. "The Orgs--they run heavy,"
+Ama said when I mentioned it. In the pale opalescent glow of the
+tunnel, I could see her faint triumphant smile as she gazed up at me
+sidewise. Strange little face, utterly foreign so that upon Earth, by
+Earth standards one would have been utterly baffled to identify her.
+But it was an appealing face, and now, with her terror gone, the sly
+glance she flung at me was wholly feminine.
+
+"Those fire-mimes," I said. "Couldn't they rush ahead of their masters,
+trailing us?" I explained how on Earth dogs would do that, following
+their quarry by the scent. She looked puzzled, and then she brightened.
+
+"I remember. The Captain Roberts told us about that. The mimes are
+different. The male and female both--they follow what it is they see,
+nothing else."
+
+Then she told me about the weird, dog-like creatures. The male, exuding
+a scent--if you could call it that--a vapor which in the air bursts
+into spontaneous combustion as it combines with the atmospheric oxygen.
+
+How long we ran through what proved to be a maze of passages in the
+honey-combed ground, I have no idea. Several Earth-miles, doubtless.
+Several times we stopped to rest, with the breezes tossing about us as
+I listened, tense, to be sure the Orgs were not coming. Then at last we
+emerged; and at the rocky exit I stood staring, amazed.
+
+It was a wholly different looking world here. The pallid underground
+sheen was gone; and now again there was the dim twilight of the
+interminable Vulcan night. From where we stood the ground sloped down
+so that we were looking out over the top of a wide spread of lush,
+tangled forest. Weird jungle, rank and wild with spindly trees of
+fantastic shapes, heavy with pods and exotic flowers and tangled with
+masses of vines. Beyond it, far ahead of us there seemed a line of
+little metal mountains at the horizon; and to the left an Earth-mile or
+so away, the forest was broken to disclose a winding thread of little
+river. It shone phosphorescent green in the half light. The storm was
+over now, but still the colors lingered in the cloud sky--a glorious
+palette of rainbow hues up there that tinted the forest-top.
+
+Ama gestured toward the thread of river. "The Senzas--my people and my
+village--off that way beyond the little water. We go quickly. But we be
+careful, until we get beyond the water."
+
+"Swim it?"
+
+"We can. But I think I remember where there is a Senza boat hidden on
+this side."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She had already told me more of what happened to her. The Senzas,
+primitive obviously, yet with an orderly tribal civilization, were the
+dominant race here on little Vulcan. The savage Orgs--a far lower, more
+primitive type both mentally and physically--in nomadic fashion, roamed
+the metal deserts and little stunted forests which lay beyond the
+barren regions. They were, at times of religious frenzy, cannibalistic,
+with weird and gruesome festival rites which Ama only shudderingly
+sketched.
+
+For the most part, the clumsy Orgs and their weird mime-creatures were
+kept from the Senza forests. But occasionally they raided, stealing
+the Senza women, and roaming the lush forests for food. There had
+been, in the Senza village, one Tahg, a wooer of Ama. An older man,
+but somehow well liked by the Senza tribal leader. Repulsed by Ama, he
+had threatened her--and then he had vanished from the village; gone
+hunting, and the Senzas considered that the Orgs might have killed him.
+
+"But I think it was Org blood in him," Ama said. "I told the Captain
+Roberts that--I remember just before he and his men left us to finish
+the repairs of their ship--and then we found later that the Orgs had
+killed them all."
+
+Tahg, Ama thought, had become the tribal leader of this group of the
+Orgs--indulging with them in their gruesome rites.... Then, just a few
+hours ago, two Orgs had crept upon Ama as she slept--with extraordinary
+daring for an Org, had successfully seized her and carried her off.
+Taking her into the Org country, past the Roberts' spaceship, where
+they had come upon me, and Torrence and Jan....
+
+"We be careful now," she was telling me as we stood gazing out over the
+forested slope. "After a storm it is when the Orgs mostly roam--the
+hunting here is better when the little creatures are out after the
+water."
+
+The little creatures! Best of the animal foods here on Vulcan.... The
+red-storm quite evidently had emptied torrential rain on the forest.
+The fantastic trees were heavy with it. Soddenly it dripped from the
+overhead branches. And now as we started down the slope, I saw the
+little creatures. Insect or animal, no one could have said. A myriad
+sizes and shapes of them, from a finger-length to the size of a cat.
+Before our advance they scurried, on the ground, scattering with
+weird little outcries. Some flew clumsily into the leaves overhead;
+others ran up there on the vines, peering down at us as we passed. We
+came suddenly upon a pool of rain-water. Greedily a hundred little
+orange-green things, seemingly almost all head and snout, were crowding
+at the pool, sucking up the water. With eerie, maniacal little voices
+they rolled and bounced away at our approach.
+
+This weird forest! Abruptly I was aware that there were places where
+the rope-like vines and leafy branches of the underbrush shrank away
+from us as we advanced--slithering and swaying little vines in sudden
+movement before us. Sentient vegetation. There are plants on Earth
+which shrink and shudder at a touch. Others which snap and seize an
+unwary insect enemy. But here it was far more startling than that. I
+saw a vine on the ground rise up upon its myriad little tendrils; the
+pods, like a row of heads upon it were quivering, puffing. The extended
+length of it, like a snake slithered from my threatening tread.
+
+"It fears every human," Ama said. "A strange thing to you Earthmen?"
+
+"Well, slightly," I commented. "Suppose it--some of this vegetation got
+angry--" Fantastic thought, but the reality of it--a looping, swaying
+vine over our heads, as thick as my arm--that was a stark reality.
+"Would a thing like that attack us, Ama?"
+
+She shrugged. "There is talk of it. But I think no one is ever truthful
+to say it really happened."
+
+We were in the depths of the forest now. In the humid, heavy darkness
+it was sometimes arduous going. That thread of river--we could not see
+it now, but I judged it still must be half an Earth-mile away. Once
+we sat down in a little open glade to rest. In the thick silence the
+throbbing voice of the forest, blended of the scurrying life and the
+rustling vines, was a faint steady hum. Then suddenly I saw that Ama
+was tense, alert, sitting up listening. She looked startled, abruptly
+frightened.
+
+"What is it?" I whispered.
+
+"Off there--the vines, they are frightened. You hear?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It seemed that somewhere near us, the vine-rustling had grown louder.
+A scurry, mingled with little popping sounds from the pods. Someone
+coming? I recall that the startled thought struck me. Then from a
+thicket near at hand a group of little creatures came dashing. They
+saw us, wheeled and scurried sidewise. I was on my feet, peering into
+the shadowed leafy darkness. I thought I heard a low, guttural voice.
+Whether I did or not, the whizz of an arrow past me was reality enough.
+
+A wandering band of the Orgs were stalking us! At the whizz of the
+arrow I made a dash sidewise. My gun was gone; I jerked out my knife.
+Ama was up, and another arrow barely missed her--an arrow that came
+from a totally different direction so that I knew we must be already
+surrounded.
+
+"Ama--lie down! Down--"
+
+A woman under some circumstances can be a terrible handicap. She didn't
+drop to the ground; she stood gazing around her in terror, and then she
+came running at me, clutching me so that I was futilely struggling to
+cast her off. Another arrow sang past our heads, and then from several
+directions, the Orgs were bursting into the glade.
+
+I tore loose from Ama, but it was no use. Whatever effective fight I
+might have put up, it could have brought a rain of arrows which might,
+probably would, have killed the girl.
+
+"Quiet," I murmured. "They've got us. No chance to fight."
+
+I stood trying to shield her as in the dimness the Orgs crowded around
+us. Ten or more of them, jabbering at us, seizing me and presently
+shoving us off through the forest.
+
+Two or three others seemed to join us in a moment; and abruptly Ama
+gasped:
+
+"Tahg! There is Tahg--"
+
+The renegade Senza, quite obviously a leader here, shoved past his
+jabbering, triumphant men and confronted us. He was seemingly startled,
+and then triumphant at seeing Ama here. Then his gaze swept to me. He
+was a big, muscular, but slender fellow. He was clad in a brief brown
+drape; but his aspect was wholly different from the heavy, misshapen,
+clumsy-looking Orgs. His thick dark hair fell longish about his ears,
+framing his hawk-nosed, thin-lipped face. And his narrow dark eyes
+squinted at me as he frowned.
+
+"Well," he said, "Earthman? New one?" His English was evidently less
+fluent than Ama's, but it was understandable enough.
+
+"Yes," I agreed. "Friendly--like all Earthmen."
+
+He had signaled to the Orgs, and two of them had shuffled forward and
+taken Ama from me.
+
+"Jus' good time," Tahg said ironically. "Org gods pleased tonight to
+have Earthmen--"
+
+Earthmen! The plural! I had little opportunity to ponder it. Roughly
+I was shoved onward through the forest, back to where it thinned into
+a stretch of metal desert--and beyond that into a new terrain of
+stunted, gnarled trees and rope vines on a rocky ground. To me it was
+an exhausting march. Ama, with Tahg beside her, usually was behind
+me. Once we stopped and food and water were given me. When we started
+again, I saw that, at Tahg's direction, one of the savages had hoisted
+Ama to his back, carrying her in a rope-vine sling. Occasionally other
+small bands of Orgs joined us, until there were fifty or more of them,
+triumphantly returning to their village. Their torches were burning
+now, and a little ahead of us a pack of the huge green-grey mimes were
+leaping.
+
+Then Tahg came toward me. "Good-bye," he said. "You look more good to
+me when I see you next time. The gods prepare you now."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He turned and was lost in the darkness. My ankles had been fettered
+with a two-foot length of rope; my wrists were crossed and lashed
+behind me. No one was with me now but my two captors who urged me
+forward, impatient at my little jerky steps. The village and its
+jabbering turmoil and lights was in a moment hidden by a rise of the
+rocky ground. Then I saw before me a fairly large, square building of
+stone, flat-roofed, with a cone-shaped stone-pile on top like a crude
+church spire.
+
+An Org temple. It was windowless; some twenty feet high from ground to
+its roof. A narrow, rectangular slit of doorway was in front, where
+two huge torches, like braziers one on either side, were burning. An
+Org stood between them, with the torchlight painting him--an aged
+savage in a long, white skin drape which was fantastically ornamented.
+He was thin and bent, his round brown skull almost hairless, his
+body shriveled, parched with age. His skinny arms were upraised,
+outstretched to welcome me.
+
+But my startled gaze turned from him, for on the ground just at the
+edge of the swaying torchlight, I saw that two figures were lying. Two
+men, roped and tied into inert bundles.
+
+They were Jan and Torrence!
+
+
+                                   V
+
+There was a time when, roped and tied like Jan and Torrence, I was
+laid beside them while in the torchlight, alone with his pagan gods,
+the ancient Org priest stood intoning his prayers and incantations. It
+was then that Jan was able to tell me what had happened to him. He was
+lying between Torrence and me. I had little chance to talk to Torrence.
+Nor any great desire, for I considered him then merely a craven fellow
+who had deserted us at the very first of the weird attacks.
+
+Human emotions work strangely. It was obvious now, as we lay there in
+the darkness, with the aged savage in the torchlight near us--obvious
+enough that we were doomed to something horrible which at best would
+end in our death. Yet Jan and I--each having considered the other
+dead--were for a brief time at least, pleased that we were here. No
+one yet alive, can normally quite give up hope of escaping death. I
+recall that in the darkness I was furtively trying to loosen my bonds,
+twisting and squirming.
+
+"You needn't bother," Torrence muttered. "I've tried all that. And
+those two damned Orgs who carried you here--they're still watching us."
+
+"Going to take us inside, I guess," Jan whispered. "Inside this temple
+to--to--"
+
+His shuddering imagination supplied no words. But his idea was right,
+for presently the old priest was finished with his incantations. His
+cracked voice called a command and the two savages who had brought me
+here came from nearby. One by one, they picked us up and carried us
+inside.
+
+I was the last to go in. The place was a single stone square room. It
+was lurid with a swaying torchlight. Carved gargoyle images, crude
+and hideously ugly--grotesque personification of the pagan Vulcan
+gods--where ranged along the walls. The old priest was standing now on
+a little dais, between the two interior torches. His arms were upraised
+toward me as I was carried in; behind him there was a quick stone
+altar, with a line of smaller images on it. His voice rose, quavering,
+as I was slowly carried past him; and his hands over me might have been
+purifying me for the coming rite.
+
+In the center of the room, raised some five feet above the floor, there
+was a broad stone slab, with a big, grinning, pot-bellied stone image
+mounted up there. Then I saw that the slab had a broad, cradle-like
+depression in front of the image. Still bound, lying there side by
+side, with the belly of the huge image projecting partly over them,
+were Jan and Torrence. And now the two savages hoisted me up and rolled
+me among them.
+
+The sacrificial altar. Heaven knows, I could not miss the realization
+now. There was a weird, acrid, nauseous smell clinging here from former
+ceremonies. And as I was hoisted up, I saw that the smooth sides of
+the altar were seared, blackened by the heat of flames which so many
+times before must have been here.
+
+And the heat--the fire? Within a moment after I was rolled into the
+saucer-like depression of the alter--with Torrence muttering despairing
+curses and Jan pallid and grim beside me--outside the temple there
+sounded a weird gibbering chorus of baying. Ghastly, familiar sound!
+The mimes--the giant fire-males! Released at the temple doorway, they
+came bounding in--blobs of leaping red-green flame! A dozen or more
+of the weird creatures, all of these much larger than the male Jan
+had killed near the Roberts' spaceship. Fire-males trained for this
+ceremony. Enveloped in their lurid flames they rushed at the altar,
+circling it, swiftly running one behind the other so that we were
+encircled with a ring of leaping flames.
+
+I heard Torrence mutter, "To roast us! Just to roast us slowly--"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The shoulders and heads of the running, circling fire-mimes were nearly
+as high as the altar slab on which we were lying. The flames of them
+swirled two or three feet higher--blobs of fire which merged one with
+the other. A circular curtain of mounting flame walling us in. Through
+it the temple interior was blurred, distorted. Vaguely the figure of
+the aged priest was visible. He was now on his knees, turned partly
+away from us as he faced his little row of god-images, supplicating
+them.
+
+Curtain of swirling fire. Within a moment the heat of it was searing
+us. Heat slowly intensifying. It was bearable now; but the confined
+circle of air here was mounting in temperature; the big gargoyle
+image over us, the metallic-rock slab beneath us both were slowly
+heating. The smoke and the swirling gas-fumes would choke us into
+unconsciousness very quickly, I knew. And then the mounting heat would
+at last make this a sizzling griddle, on which we would lie, slowly
+roasting....
+
+A chaos of confused phantasmagoria blurred my mind in those first
+horrible moments.... I saw the old priest, so solemnly, humbly
+supplicating his gods as he officiated at this gruesome pagan
+ceremony ... then I could envisage us being carried off, back to the
+Org village where the people, not worthy of being here in the sacred
+temple, were so eagerly awaiting us ... then the orgy--sacred feast,
+endowing its participants with what future virtues and panaceas they
+conceived their gods would give them....
+
+The end, for us.... Already Jan was pitifully coughing.... But what
+was this? I felt a shape stir beside me; a small, slender figure with
+dangling hair; I felt trembling fingers fumbling at my bonds.
+
+Ama! She had crept from a little recess under the giant bulging statue
+of the gargoyle god, here on the altar. Ama, who had found a chance to
+slip away from the wooing Tahg, and had preceded us here--hiding up
+here so that she might try and release us....
+
+But it was too late now. So obviously too late! She had accomplished
+nothing, save to immolate herself here with us!
+
+Into my ear her terrified voice was whispering, "I thought that the
+fire-males would not come so soon."
+
+In the blurring, blasting heat and smoke, she had untied us, but of
+what use? "No--no chance to try and jump," she stammered. "As we fell
+they would leap upon us--kill us in a moment--"
+
+The sizzling, crackling of the flames--the gibbering baying of the
+fire-mimes mingling with the incantations of the old priest--it was
+all a blurred chaos.... Then suddenly I was aware that Jan, coughing,
+choking, had struggled half erect on the slab. There was just an
+instant when I saw his contorted face, painted lurid by the flames.
+Wild despairing desperation was stamped there. But there was something
+else. An exaltation....
+
+"You--run--" he gasped.
+
+And then he jumped. A wild, desperate leap, upward and outward.... It
+carried him through the curtain of flame and out some ten feet to the
+temple floor. The thud of his crashing body mingled with the gibbering
+yelps of the fire-mimes as they whirled and pounced upon him--all of
+them in a second, merged into a great blob of flame out there on the
+temple floor where they fought, scrambling over him, ripping--tearing--
+
+Gruesome horror.... I knew in that second that already Jan was dead....
+And then I was aware that the other side of the altar, behind the
+gargoyle image, was momentarily completely dark. All the flaming
+creatures were fighting over Jan's body. Torrence, too, had realized
+it. I saw him stagger up and jump into the darkness. I shoved at Ama;
+rolled and tumbled her off the slab. We fell in a heap and scrambled
+erect. The pawing, snarling group of fire-mimes, twenty feet away with
+the big altar slab intervening, intent upon their scattering fragments,
+for that moment did not heed us. On his little dais by the wall, the
+old priest had turned and was standing numbed, confused. There was no
+one else in the sacred temple. The single doorway was a vertical slit
+of darkness. Already Torrence was running for it. I clutched at Ama and
+we ran.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Out into the rocky blackness. I recall that I had the wits to turn us
+away from where the Org village lay nearby, behind the hillock....
+Then, suddenly, from behind a crag, a dark figure rose up. Tahg! Tahg,
+who had been crouching here, evidently impatient for his feast so that
+he would be the first to see us as we were brought from the temple....
+
+He stood gasping, startled; and in that same second I was upon him, my
+fist crashing into his face so that he went backward and down. With
+desperate haste I caught up a rock from the ground--pounded it on
+his head--wildly pounding until his skull smashed.... Then I was up,
+clutching Ama. Torrence already was ten or twenty feet ahead of us in
+the darkness. We ran after him; he heard us coming and waited.
+
+"Which way?" he gasped. "She ought to know. Our spaceship--that would
+be best--"
+
+At the door of the temple the old priest now was standing screaming.
+From behind the little hill, answering shouts were responding....
+
+"Is it closer to your village, or to our ship?" I demanded of Ama.
+
+"Why--why to your ship, I think."
+
+"You know the way?"
+
+"Yes--yes, I think so. Not to where you landed--that I do not know. But
+to the Roberts' ship--"
+
+And the Orgs doubtless would consider that we would head into the Senza
+country. The forests in that direction would be full of roaming Orgs
+hunting us....
+
+She and I and Torrence ran, plunging wildly forward in the rocky
+darkness, with the lights and the turmoil behind us presently fading
+away into the heavy blank silence of the Vulcan night....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I think that there is little I need add. It was a long, arduous
+journey, but we reached our little spaceship safely. And in a moment,
+with the rocket-streams shoving downward and with the lower-hull
+gravity plates in neutral, slowly we were rising into the cloudy
+darkness.
+
+"You will take me to my people?" Ama said anxiously. "You did promise
+me--"
+
+"Yes, of course, Ama--we'll land you near your village--"
+
+Queerly enough, it was not until that moment after all the tumultuous
+events which had engulfed us, that suddenly I remembered the deposits
+of _allurite_ which we had hoped to locate upon Vulcan. If I could
+take back samples of the ore--to my sponsors that doubtless would
+be considered the major success--the only success indeed--of my
+expedition.... It occurred to me then that we could land at the Senza
+village, and for a little time, prospect from there....
+
+But even that plan was doomed to frustration. I mentioned it to
+Torrence. "We should head for Earth," he said dogmatically. "I have had
+enough of this."
+
+It was then, before we had gone far toward the Senza country, that
+I noticed the rocket streams were acting queerly. A seeming lack of
+power.... Torrence had gone down into the hull; he came back presently
+to the turret.
+
+"The Pelletier rotators are slowing," I said. "What's the matter?"
+
+He shook his head. "I noticed it," he said. "Haven't found out yet. You
+want to come and look?"
+
+I locked the controls, left Ama and went down into the hull with
+Torrence. In the dim mechanism cubby, as I bent over the Pelletier
+mechanisms, suddenly Torrence leaped on me! It came as quickly,
+unexpectedly as that. The culmination of his brooding, murderous,
+cowardly plans. His heavy face was contorted, his eyes blazing. In his
+hand he held a sliver of metal arrow. It was bent, doubled over, so
+that all this time he had been able to keep it hidden in his clothes.
+The arrow he had taken from Roberts' body, as it lay there near the
+bow of the wrecked spaceship! The little light in the mechanism cubby
+gleamed on it now; glistened on the green and red spots of the sleek,
+sand-colored metal. _Allurite!_ The precious substance--not an alloy,
+not a low-grade _allurium_ ore, but _allurite_ in its pure state! On
+Earth this single bent little arrow could be worth a fortune!
+
+And the frenzied Torrence was gloating: "See it, you damn fool--your
+_allurite_--right under your nose all the time! And now it's mine--"
+In that second he would have plunged the needle-sharp arrow-point like
+a stilletto into my heart. But his own frenzied, murderous hysteria
+defeated him. My fist struck his wrist, knocked his stab-thrust away,
+with the arrow clattering to the floor. And then I had him by the
+throat, strangling him until he yielded and I tied him up....
+
+As you who read this, of course, already know from the news reports, I
+dropped Ama near the edge of the Senza village. I recall now how she
+stood in the Vulcan night, in the torchlight with the excited crowd of
+her people behind her; the last I saw of Vulcan was the little figure
+of her waving at me as I rose into the leaden sky and headed back for
+Earth.... Maybe--just maybe--I'll return someday to that land where Jan
+gave his life that his friends might live.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Flame Breathers, by Ray Cummings
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 62321 ***