Astounding Stories, July, 1931 Part 26

Slowly, carefully, straight for the waiting globe the two men were conducted; and in his state of half-consciousness Clee wondered at the impotence of his will to make his body offer resistance. They pa.s.sed right by their tent and up the ramp to the inside of the strange sphere.

Clee's impressions were blurred and dull, but he noticed that they were in a small room brilliant with amber light, on one wall of which there was a circular area which contained a dozen or more instruments and levers and wheels. As his eyes rested on them, one of the levers moved, seemingly of itself, and the ramp came sliding into the ship and the thick door slowly swung closed. Then they were conducted along a short, narrow pa.s.sageway into which opened, on the right, a small dim room; and there the grip about their bodies loosened and they slumped to the floor. The door whereby they had entered, closed.

A faint vibration became noticeable; they suddenly felt very heavy; and to the accompaniment of a low but rising hum they saw one wall of their room begin to glow with a beautiful cherry color. Although they had been too stupefied to try to speak, this spurred their tired bodies, and they dragged themselves over to it. They found the wall to be of some kind of hard crystal; it was the outer sh.e.l.l of the sphere; and it now gleamed redly transparent.

Far out and down the men saw a great convex surface on which lay narrow ribbons of silver, winding veinlike through dark areas that were in some places lit by little cl.u.s.ters of twinkling lights. As they watched, the distances on the surface shrank in on themselves; they could see the outline of a great circle. The sight stimulated the exhausted men. In a hushed and awestruck voice, Jim Wilson broke the silence.

"We've been kidnaped," he said. "Being taken G.o.d knows where, out among the stars...."

He was getting the sky-ride he had asked for.

Clee smiled faintly, and was going to remind him of this; but he was too tired to make the effort. He only looked at the tremendous scene below: at the Earth they knew so well, with its familiar streets, comfortable fireplaces, the faces of those they loved and those others who were their friends....

The Earth soon became a ball--a globe such as he had used at school, showing clearly the outline of the continents and oceans. And little by little it dwindled, until it was only a ghostly shape far out in nothingness....

A little later, had the two Earthlings not been deep in sleep, they might have seen enter a strange-looking man clad in odd garments--a man whose great, bulging head was quite bald, and whose wrinkled, leprous-white face wore an expression of unutterable wisdom and majesty. In his hands he carried a strange piece of apparatus which he held to Jim's wrist while it emitted a coa.r.s.e vibratory hum that whined slowly up in pitch until it pa.s.sed the range of hearing. He did the same thing to Clee, and then he quietly left.

But the two Earthlings knew nothing of this. Limp on the floor, oblivious to everything, they slept....

Some hours later found the kidnapped men well recovered and sitting on the floor of their cell talking over their situation. As usual, Wilson was thinking out loud.

"What can they be?--or who?" he asked, frowning with his thought.

"They can't be from Earth, for no one there could invent such a ship as this and keep it a secret; and even if someone had, he could never have done the equally astounding thing of inventing a way to render living bodies invisible. I doubt if the thing that caught us was human, by what I was able to feel in my short struggle with it. There was something that might have been a hand; but the strength and the weight of its body was enormous!"

"Well, we'll probably soon see," commented Clee with philosophic resignation and pulling out of a hip pocket a package of tobacco and his corn-cob pipe. "Or, rather, we may soon know. Our captors may keep themselves invisible; and of course it's barely possible that it's their natural state to be invisible, so that we may never hope to see them. What I'm chiefly afraid of, is that they are from some other planet, and that that's where we are being taken--though heaven knows what any creatures so infinitely far ahead of us Earthlings scientifically could want with a pair of young Earth lawyers!"

He offered the package to Jim. "Here, have a smoke; you'll feel better," he said. "While there's tobacco there's hope."

"At least they don't seem disposed to kill us right off," returned Jim, handing back the tobacco after lighting his own pipe. "Later--if there's to _be_ any 'later' for us--we may be able to find a way to get out of this room; though how we'd run the ship, to get back home, is another hard brick wall.... Maybe the controls are invisible, too!"

he suggested with a wry grin. "Ever take any pre-law courses on how to work the invisible controls of a s.p.a.ce ship?"

Clee's reply was spoken low, and was entirely irrelevant.

"That's funny," he said.

He was looking at the face of the watch on his left wrist. For the first time since they had been abducted, its abnormal brightness had left it.

As Jim watched, inquiringly, Clee moved his right hand a little, and once more the dial leaped out through the dimness with unnatural brilliance. Jim saw that his friend was holding in this hand the package of tobacco. Clee repeated the demonstration.

"The dial glows with unusual brightness always--except when I hold the package of tobacco in front of it at this spot," he said wonderingly, half to himself. "If I remember my science right, ultra-violet light would make the radium on the dial glow; and the lead in the tin-foil of the tobacco wrapping would screen it off. Let's see--"

He crossed to the other side of the room and held his watch and the package of tobacco in various positions until he again found one line along which the watch-dial gave off only its customary light.

"Yes," he said, "--exactly in the extended line made by my watch and this package of tobacco is the source of the ray which makes the watch-dial glow. It's probably the control room of this ship."

"An extraordinary deduction, my dear Sherlock," commented Wilson drily; "and valuable. I wish you'd now take a moment and deduce the reason for the mysterious appearance of the lumps on the back of our necks. I know I didn't have mine before I was taken for this sky-ride."

As he spoke, his hand sought the back of his neck where there was a fat lump about the size of a quarter--a lump not painful, for all its newness and size. Hard pushing with probing fingers had revealed something that seemed to be hard and flat, buried within; but close examinations failed to show any wound or scar, and the men had no notion what the lumps might be. Clee's was just like Jim's.

But Clee did not respond to his friend's invitation. A heavy mood had come over him; he was standing by the outer wall, looking out. Jim went and stood beside him, his hand on his shoulder, and together they gazed through the cherry-crystal wall of their prison ship out on the loneliness of the immeasurable miles outside. For them, s.p.a.ce was red, instead of the deep black they knew they would see through colorless gla.s.s. Brilliant pinpoints of light, millions of them, in all sizes, made up the infinite s.p.a.ce that was the background of their adventure.

To which one--near which one were they going? Would they ever return to their Earth again? Would their friends ever know of the incredible adventure that had overtaken them?--or would they, after the few weeks of searching and inquiry that must follow their disappearance, at last conclude that some nameless mountain disaster had made them victims, and give them up for dead? No doubt. And month after succeeding month their memory would fade from the minds of those who had loved them, while they would be--where?...

A peculiar, dynamic thought came simultaneously into the minds of the two men. It was not a word: it seemed more like a feeling; but its unquestionable import was "Come." Together they rose, and looked at each other wonderingly. Again came the feeling. They started for the door.

"But that's foolish!" Jim said aloud, as if objecting to his own thought. "The door's locked! We tried it!" He looked at Partridge, who returned his gaze blankly--and then, in spite of what he had said, he reached out and turned the latch.

The door swung open!

Expressions of surprise died on the men's lips as again came the compelling urge to go to some unknown destination.

"Suggestion!" said Clee, as he pa.s.sed through the doorway. "Someone's suggesting--telepathically willing--that we come to him! And I--G.o.d help me--I can't resist!"

His neck corded with veins and muscles with his effort to restrain his body from obeying the mysterious command that was drawing it onward.

Wilson, one arm outstretched in a repelling gesture, his legs stiff and tight, was also trying to resist. But the will that had sounded within them was stronger than theirs, and slowly, inevitably, they were drawn down the pa.s.sage.

Their carpeted way took them back to the entrance chamber and then up a steeply sloping corridor that led upward to the left. As they pa.s.sed along they saw that the hand of a master had made on the walls, in panel effect, marvelously complicated decorations in many-colored mosaic. No man of Earth could ever have done such work, the two men realized--and this thought did not cheer them any.

At the top of their curving pa.s.sage a doorway led them into a s.p.a.cious room hung with soft, finely woven tapestries with a metallic l.u.s.tre and furnished with deep-napped rugs and luxurious chairs and divans.

Through this room the intangible threads of the alien will directed them--on into a wide-vaulted alcove about one-third its size. There, the strange clutch on them relaxed, and they looked about, at first apprehensively, then with growing boldness and curiosity.

"This is the control room!" exclaimed Clee suddenly; and after a moment Jim agreed with him. It was the simplicity of the controls which had prevented them from recognizing it at first. Against the left wall was a great table with a tilted top, bearing, in its center, a raised and hooded eyepiece giving a view into a large, enclosed black box. On each side were several rows of small, shiny, metallic levers and what they took to be instrument dials--round, cup-shaped depressions with pointers free to move across dials lined with disorderly and meaningless convolutions. For the full length of the middle wall, straight ahead, was a broad table of some jet-black polished material, and on it was a large array of instruments and apparatus, all unfamiliar to them. Against the draperies of the wall to their right was one large cushioned chair, simple and beautiful in its lines.

No living person or thing could be discerned in either the main room or the alcove.

For several minutes the two men walked all about, examining everything they saw with curiosity and interest; and then Clee discovered a peculiar thing. His watch-dial, glowing very brightly now, would perceptibly increase in brilliance every time he neared the great chair. With sudden inspiration he took out his package of tobacco and held it in the line his watch made with the chair--and he found that his watch stopped glowing. He tried it again from another angle, and the result was the same. From that chair came the electrical disturbance that was making his watch-dial glow--yet nowhere near the chair was any bit of electrical apparatus to be seen.

What he did see in the chair, though, almost caused his heart to stop beating. The cushions of the seat, compressed before, began to puff out to full volume, as if someone had just risen from them. And then, faintly but sharply outlined in the long-napped rug in front, appeared the print of a human shoe!

"A man!" breathed Clee. "A human being!"

The two men stood frozen in their tracks. Clee's arm, with the package of tobacco in his hand, was still outstretched toward the great chair, but now the dial of his watch was glowing brightly again. Something within caused him in spite of his terror to move the package between the watch and the s.p.a.ce above the footprint on the rug. The glowing stopped. The man--devil--whatever it was that made the print--was the source of the strange excitation!

This took but a second--the interval before another shoe-print formed in the rug in their direction. Jim gasped something unintelligible and started to back away; but no sooner did Partridge start to follow suit, than a compulsion to stand still came over them. Caught where they were, unable to move, they saw the shoe-prints come towards them.

Slowly, step by step, twelve inches apart, they came, and did not stop until they were only four or five feet away.