path: root/62321-0.txt

*** 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

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