Homepage
Login
Profile
BookClubs
dmBox
Read Ebook: The Mercurian by Long Frank Belknap
Font size:
Background color:
Text color:
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page
Ebook has 55 lines and 5293 words, and 2 pages
at last and went stumbling from her presence with one thought uppermost in my mind.
I must get medical aid to her quickly, before that trance could deepen, before it could endanger her life.
Going up in the jacket-lift to the sick bay I kept visualizing Ned Dawson's face. Dawson was a strong-jawed, competent physician with years of experience behind him and I was sure he would know what to do.
He was usually in the sick bay attending to the many little sprains and bruises the men brought in with them from the crust. There was a flicker of violet light as the jacket-lift hummed to a stop. I stepped out and raced down a cold-lighted passageway to the "drug shop," my breath coming fast.
On meta-glass chairs amidst a faint odor of antiseptics two men sat frozen, but I thought they were asleep. I went straight through the waiting space with scarcely a glance at them, and burst into the sick bay unannounced.
Dawson was there all right, but he was bent nearly double, frozen in the act of applying a gauze bandage to the badly cut ankle of a miner who stood contemplating his navel like a schizophrene, his head sunken on his chest.
For an instant I just stood there gasping, too stunned to realize that I was staring at a physician who could no longer heal. It wasn't until I went up to him and discovered that his body was cold and his face a frozen mask that my brain started to soak up horror.
I went reeling out into the passageway like a drunken man and tried to locate the commander, and found him at last in the control room with his body glinting in light-silvered dust.
Murphy was standing beside him. The Irishman had evidently come in for orders and stiffened to immobility with a pipe in his mouth and a slightly provoked look on his face, as though my stupidity still riled him.
A nightmare unreality lengthened the minutes which followed into unevenly-spaced eternities filled with a steadily mounting dread. In the more crowded parts of the ship frozen men clustered in little queues. Every member of the atomotor crew stood frozen at his post. The starboard watch looked like statues carved in bronze and in the chain locker room were three crewmen whose muscular contortions conveyed an illusion of motion as they tugged at windlasses which had ceased to turn.
My palms were wet and I was trembling in every limb when I completed my inspection of the ship. It was especially bad going back in the jacket-lift to the commander's cabin. In the dark fore-hold I had glimpsed obscure, rigid shadows which had unnerved me more than all the frozen, brittle men illumed by cold light in the crew spaces fore and aft.
It was a telepathic voice, but I didn't know that. I thought it was a human voice speaking close to my ear. Appalled, I swung about.
The frog was peering around a bend in the passageway, its stalked eyes pointing toward the lift. I fought a desire to scream as it leapt agilely toward me. It seemed to be grinning up at me. Its wet, yellowish lips were split in a grimace which gave it the appearance of being convulsed with mirth.
"You mean you are--"
"Intelligent, yes. So intelligent that you seem very primitive to us. It is a hindrance, in a way. Too wide a gulf."
The frog's eyes quivered. "Don't glare at me, Rawley. I have no intention of harming you."
"I harmed--Oh, I see. The girl, eh? We propagate by fission, so we've been spared all that. I didn't harm her, Rawley. All I did was diminish her mass. I had to do that to warm myself.
"Rawley, I was almost gone. I can stand a little cold, but that liquid air--"
"Diminished her mass. Now keep your shirt on, Rawley. I need the glow to warm me. Needed it badly. For real warmth there's nothing like the radiant energies imprisoned in kalium. The bodies of terrestrials are ideal sources of heat in all respects; not only because they contain kalium, but because the other elements of which they are composed are among the easiest to tap.
"No harm done, you understand. I can radiate back subatomic particles at any time. All I did was squeeze out the radiations in a soft, glutinous mass. You don't have to bombard atoms or surround them with water-jackets to strip them, Rawley. With a little patience you can squeeze out their energies the way you squeeze toothpaste from a tube.
"My body has soaked up a fine, tingling warmth from all those frozen terrestrials. They are mere atomic husks now, but perfectly preserved and restorable at any time."
I scarcely heard it. Something was happening to the ship. Beneath my feet the deck was unmistakably swaying, and there were twangings and creakings all along the passageway which could only mean one thing.
The ship was in motion!
The frog had noticed it, too. It stiffened abruptly and cocked its head as though listening, its stalked eyes squinting shut.
In paralyzed astonishment I stood staring at the vibrating overhead, wondering what in hell it could mean. Had one of the frozen crewmen regained the use of his limbs and attempted an emergency take-off? I strained my ears, but could detect no atomotor drone, or other indication that we were rocketing upward from the crust.
"No, Rawley," the frog's voice came again, vibrant but strained. "No, we are not leaving the planet. I think I know what is happening. Rawley, you have an instrument which enables you to see the ship as though it were being viewed from a distance by someone out on the planet. Horiz--horizonscope. Suppose we see for ourselves."
We descended in the jacket-lift together, the frog bracing its knees precisely as the commander had done long ago in another world.
I don't know how I lived through the next ten minutes. When I stood in the control room and looked in the horizonscope I saw a sight which I shall never forget if I live to be a hundred.
On both sides of the ship were dozens of froglike shapes moving in single file, their bodies bent nearly double as though they were straining at the leash.
All about them swirled steamy vapors and flickering tongues of flame. A blood-red sun, so gigantic that it spanned a fifth of the sky, hung like a vast, glowing eye directly overhead, dazzling my pupils as I stared. Even in the horizonscope it seemed huge, blinding.
The scene was weird beyond all imagining--weird and unutterably terrifying.
"Rawley, they are moving the ship. They are using magnetic tow lines and making a mighty good job of it."
"Where--where are they taking us?" I gasped.
The frog's reply was utterly bewildering. "We'll label it terrestrial fauna--habitat group. We'll take the ship right into the museum. Large-brained bipeds from the third planet, stooping above their artifacts in perfectly natural attitudes. Magnificent.
"What good are shriveled specimens? So long as sunlight doesn't touch them they'll keep this way for a thousand years. This one has been--helpful. Oh, enormously. Just as well I didn't tap him.
"I mustn't let him suspect that I couldn't--can't. I've absorbed too much radiance as it is. My energies are brimming over. He thinks I can still diminish his mass. Might have to kill him if he knew.
"Kill him. I could do that, of course. But I'd hate to lose one of these specimens."
It hit me all at once, with the force of a physical blow. There was something that the frog didn't know. It didn't know that I could listen in on its private thoughts. It thought it could shut off its mind from me. Hitting me also with force was the sudden realization that when in close proximity to it I had telepathic powers which were first rate, as good as its own.
Keeping my excitement down wasn't easy. There was a lot of anger mixed up with it, and more fear than a man of courage likes to own up to. I wondered how strong the magnetic tow lines were. Would they hold the ship if I blasted out all the rocket jets and started the atomotors ten seconds later?
It didn't seem likely. If I could reach the control panel nine-tenths of the battle would be won. Nearer to it I inched, and nearer.
The frog stirred just as my hand touched the rocket control. I swung down on it hard. Something in my brain started babbling as I swung my other hand toward the atomotor emergency bulb and splintered it with my naked palm.
The whole ship seemed to explode, carrying the top of my skull with it. I was no longer in a Mercury run spaceship screaming defiance at a frog.
I was far out in space between massive gaseous suns, red and blue and mottled, with island universes to right and left of me and a long-tailed comet sweeping down from a ragged hole on the sky.
When I crawled through the fence into my own backyard again I was bruised and partly numb, but the ship was plowing steadily through the void, and Mercury was so far away from it that it was a mere fly-speck mottling on the dull-corona-encircled disk of the sun.
The frog? Yes, it was still with us, but all the cockiness had gone out of it. It came to me, as meek as a lamb, and laid all its cards on the table.
It would be the specimen now. So long as we didn't cast it out through the air-locks to freeze in the void it would consent to be exhibited in every museum on Earth. Only the museums would have to be roofless, because it would need the sunlight.
But on Earth it would tap the sunlight. It pointed out that the sunlight falling on one square foot of Earth would keep one of our big power plants running for a year, if we knew as much as the Mercurians did about radiant heat.
I was no longer listening. There was something I had left unfinished and it suddenly seemed more important to me than anything a frog could say or do.
Going down in the jacket-lift to Sylvia I kept trying to recall just how I felt when it had cheated me out of something I was entitled to.
It didn't seem right to leave a kiss dangling in midair, and I was sure that Sylvia was feeling frustrated, too.
She was. She came into my arms in utter silence, and we did the kiss up brown, and stored it away in our memories for when we were eighty-eight.
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page