Astounding Stories, August, 1931, Various [100 best novels of all time .txt] 📗
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ida, standing beside Mich'l, shivered and pulled her over-robe closer around her. There was sadness in her voice as she said:
"These children.... They remind me of the thousands of children we must abandon with our people. If I could, I'd steal a few to take with us."
Mich'l grinned without mirth.
"And be damned as a kidnapper of a particularly horrible sort, as long as Subterranea lasts!"
"I know. I know. But what will happen to them all when the automatic machinery fails?"
"They may learn to run it, if they have to. Or if we succeed in establishing[211] ourselves in the outer world we can tunnel back to them around the Gate in a year or so. Don't worry about them too much. We're taking the big risk, not they."
Gobet Hanlon, accompanied by Flos Entine and Mila Mane, approached. He was loaded down with a huge case of concentrated food.
"I've given orders to bring with us all the cold resisting fabrics we could carry. Got 'em loaded down, eh?"
"All here?"
"Every last one."
"Let's go, then." Mich'l stepped to a small door that led into the main corridor close to the Gate. This door had not been used by the technies when assembling. Through a tiny hole the guard, four soldiers, could be seen about a blanket, tossing sixteen-sided dice. Mich'l opened the door, his needle-ray pointed.
"Don't move, or you burn!" he commanded harshly.
he guards, taken completely by surprise, did not move. In a few moments they were bound, gagged, and dumped into a corner of 37X. Eager technies were swarming over the complicated mechanism that they had dared to touch, before, only for inspection and maintenance. The Frozen Gate was like a huge stopper in a bottle, made of chromium steel. It was thirty feet in diameter, and thirty feet thick from its well insulated inside face to that enigmatical Outside that had been a grisly mystery to the race for some five hundred centuries.
There was a flash of sparks, and the quiet hum of motors. With a shuddering groan the great plug freed itself from the grip of millennia; turned a few inches in its hole. The supporting gimbals took the load now, and slowly the great mass moved inward, carried by an overhead traveling crane whose track was bolted to the rock roof. The rate of movement was slow, not much over three or four inches a minute.
An excited murmur filled the cavern—almost hysterical joy. But Mich'l, watching that widening margin for the dreaded gush of liquid air, only trembled with relief. At least the calamity that had visited rash Atlantica would not be repeated here.
A young technie, one of the heat distributors, climbed up the heavy bosses on the gateway's face.
"I'm going to be the first to see the Sun!" he shouted joyously. His challenging gaze roved over the waiting crowd, and suddenly his face turned ashen. For at the turn of the corridor, some hundred yards away, he had seen men. No mistaking those uniforms; they were soldiers. And Mich'l, following his gaze, saw a riot-ray being wheeled into place. His own riot-ray already commanded the corridor, but he dared not use it. The soldiers, under the partial protection of the turn, could incinerate the helpless technies with little danger to themselves.
"Wait!" Mich'l shouted, running into the open.
n officer came to meet him. He then recognized Captain Ilgen, whose exceptional shrewdness had almost undone him before. Ilgen could not see the slow movement of the gate, and Mich'l, himself weaponless, counted only on parleying for time.
They met midway between the two forces, and the small black lens of the captain's weapon pointed steadily at Mich'l's chest.
"Mich'l Ares, I arrest you." It seemed that the captain's fine gray eyes looked out of the lean face with real sympathy. "It may be there will be executive clemency for these people of yours, but for you—"
Mich'l, tense and deadly, saw the captain's vigilant attention leave his face for a second; saw his eyes widen[212] in consternation. He could not know that Ilgen had seen a slender crescent of green light appear in the Frozen Gate, but he did not lose the opportunity. His fist crashed on the captain's jaw, so that the soldierly figure reeled and the needle-ray fell to the ground. Mich'l leaped after him, picked him up, held him. The riot-ray was turned full on him, and a soldier's hand trembled on the lever. But it did not pull.
"You'll kill him!" Mich'l shouted. And then he ventured to turn his head to look at the Gate. He saw the first of the fugitives struggle into the narrow crack. The gate seemed to have stuck, and there was barely room to pass. Ilgen, half conscious, was trying to rain blows on Mich'l's back, compelling him to stop and pass the officer's hands through the belt of his tunic and to manacle them with a pair of bracelets which he found in his pocket. As he staggered toward the Gate with his burden, he saw Gobet beside him, the stolen riot-ray menacing the soldiers, who would otherwise have rushed in.
uddenly Ilgen struggled upright.
"Fire," he commanded in stentorian tones.
"They'll kill you too, you fool!" Mich'l exclaimed angrily.
"I am a soldier!" Ilgen answered with contempt. His legs barely supported his weight, and he was struggling to free his manacled hands. He threw himself into the narrow crevice of the Gate, to obstruct the stream of fugitives. He started to shout again:
"Fi—" Crack! Again Mich'l's fist caught him. He hooked the officer's elbows over two of the bosses, so that he was supported in plain sight of his men, and turned to urge haste. The last two stragglers were hurrying through, and with relief Mich'l turned to follow. But he set the closing mechanism in motion before he leaped for the narrow opening that was becoming still narrower, though very slowly. Now for that green crescent of light, and hope!
He felt a wave of heat. Glancing back, he saw the irresolute guards scattered by the enraged charge of a square, blocky man in civilian robe—the usually smiling Provisional President, Senator Mollon. Mollon himself was fumbling with the lever of the riot-ray. Ilgen had evidently reported where he was going before starting in pursuit of the technies.
Again that withering flash of heat, and Mich'l saw Captain Ilgen, still semi-conscious, suddenly turn red-faced. Mollon would burn him up without compunction, in the hope of catching one of the fugitive technies. And now a figure in uniform leaped forward at Mollon's angry gesture, and bent purposefully to the sighting tube.
The crescent was now so slender that Mich'l had to turn sideways to squeeze back into the corridor. And slowly, inexorably, it was growing smaller still. With desperate haste the practiced, uniformed man was adjusting his range.
Captain Ilgen struggled when Mich'l seized him.
"I arrest—"
Mich'l thought for a sickening moment that he was caught in the closing gate. Then he was free in the cylindrical tunnel into which the plug was creeping. Luckily, Ilgen was slight. His body squeezed through with little more difficulty than Mich'l's own. Now the opening was too small for any man's body. A red glow illuminated that narrowing slit; an acrid wave of heat, and the smell of burnt metal came with the strong current of air that blew out of Subterranea.
ich'l dragged his captive down the rocky tunnel, the floor of which dipped gently away[213] from the Gate; for drainage, no doubt. Around a bend, the source of the greenish light was apparent. The fugitives were in an ice cavern. The light seemed to emanate from roof and walls. The air was uncompromisingly chill, for the blast of warm air from Subterranea had stopped.
But the cold of the air was nothing to the icy chill that settled on the heart of Mich'l Ares, and the hearts of Senator Mane, and the other leaders of this desperate enterprise. So this, this was the Outside! A cavern of ice—small, hemmed-in! Those ancient folk-legends of a Sun—
"I arrest you, Mich'l Ares!"
Mich'l laughed shortly. What a single-minded fellow this Captain Ilgen was! Still groggy, of course. Didn't know where they were. He left the soldier with the red, blistered face.
"Mich'l! Mich'l!" a voice echoed shrilly from the ice walls. It was a high-pitched voice, and an excited one. A boy came flying out of a narrow crevice, his short robe flying, his cloth-wrapped legs twinkling.
"Mich'l!" he shouted. "I saw it! I saw the Sun, the beautiful Sun!"
Lucky it was that in the rush no one was hurt. The small cleft opened into a wide tunnel, a low-roofed cave through which milky-white water flowed. The cave opened upon a vista of blue sky and towering mountains whose tops were burdened with snow and upon whose sides glaciers slid down and melted; and the milky-white stream brawled down into a green valley, far, far below. On a mountain meadow, not far from the glacier that still buried the Frozen Gate, they rested....
nd so came a new strain of humanity upon the surface of the earth—a strain tempered and refined by the inexorable process of evolution and environment. Already animal life had reappeared, drastically changed and ruthlessly weeded out by the most severe Ice Age the world had ever known, and now Man stood once more on a new threshold of time.
Something of this may have passed through the minds of the refugees luxuriating in the strong sunlight of this mountain meadow, and in active and alert brains the foundations of a new civilization were already being built.
They were preparing to go into the valley below when there was a dull concussion. The glacier over the Frozen Gate rose slightly, then disappeared completely out of sight, leaving a yawning hole in the mountainside. Ice and rocks slid down, filling the hole. The refugees gazed at the scene in fear and wonder.
"They have blown up the gate! And the chambers leading to it!" Senator Mane—now only Leo Mane—said slowly. "There goes our last chance to save them!" His tones were deeply sad. He could not look upon these people as an experiment that Nature had abandoned, although he knew that history is thronged with the shadows of vanished races, culled by the process of natural selection.
But Youth looks only ahead. The majority of the rescued technies were young, and with eagerness and anticipation, they followed Mich'l and Nida Ares down into the valley to build their first homes.
[214]
The Midget From the Island A COMPLETE NOVELETTE By H. G. Winter
"For God's sake, Hagendorff, what's come over you?"
n the chill of an early morning, a rowboat drifted aimlessly down the Detroit River. It seemed to have broken loose from its mooring and been swept away; its outboard motor was silent and it swung in slow circles as the currents caught at it. But the boat carried a passenger. A man's nude body stretched face downward in it.
It was a startling figure that lay there. The body was fully matured and had a splendid development of rounded muscles—and yet it was not more than[215] three feet in length. A perfectly formed and proportioned manikin! The two officers in the harbor police launch which presently slid alongside to investigate were giants in comparison.
They had not expected to find such weird cargo in a drifting rowboat. They stared at the naked, unconscious midget in utter amazement, as if seeing a thing that could not be real. And when one of them reached down to lift the tiny body aboard, his eyes went wider with added surprise. His lift was inadequate. The dwarf's weight was that of a normal-sized man!
This was mystery on mystery. But they got the uncannily heavy figure aboard at last and ascertained[216] that, though the skin showed many wounds and was blue from long exposure, the heart was still beating. And realizing that the life might flicker out beneath their eyes unless they took action immediately, they proceeded to work over him.
After some minutes, the dwarf gave signs
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