Kenneth Bulmer - Demons' World

“Belle! Yes, the radio tech! We’ve got to find her! I’ve got to talk to the ship.”

That awful overpowering stifling sensation, the impression inseparable from confinement in the earth that he was nailed down in his coffin, rose chokingly as the lurid darkness, the screaming people, the sinister bubbling of boiling water and the continuous earth tremors rocked in a mad saraband all about. He had to hold on. Had to!

“Ship?” said Delia, stupidly. “Ship?”

“You wouldn’t know. Thing your ancestors came to this planet in thousands on thousands of years ago. Probably called the Ark. Common name for colonist ships going out on the long haul.” He smiled down on her, fighting to regain sanity. “One thing you were right about, Delia. The Empire of Archon probably did descend directly from that old Ark.”

“I… I don’t know, Stead. What can we do?”

“Find Belle and my radio. Pronto! Come on!”

Heaving and struggling they fought their way through the masses of people, avoiding rock falls, ducking where the roof sagged menacingly. Dust choked everywhere. Twice they had to dodge streams of water. But, thankfully, that water now was no longer boiling; as it seeped into the earth, into the man-made runnels, its temperature dropped. But still it came, and soon splashing sounds rose eerily from the lower depths.

“The Captain and his Crew want to get out of there quick,” he said, dragging Delia after him.

Belle’s wireless lab was not too far off. They reached it, found the wall in ruins, bundled through to a familiar scene of devastation. Somehow, Simon had stayed with them. Belle rose up, ashen, disheveled, weeping, staggering amid the ruins, panic stricken.

“Belle!” snapped Tait, brutally. “Where is my radio?”

She couldn’t understand, open-mouthed, distraught.

Simon, knowing only that Stead offered some salvation, began to ransack the place.

The radio stood on a shelf in a cupboard, face down on the floor. Eagerly, Tait snatched it up. The smashed end gave him a heart-jolting second of defeated panic; then he realized that he could still use the transmission circuits; only the receiving circuits were broken.

Without a tremble his fingers span the dial, switched on. He began calling out, voice near the concealed mike to shield it from the dinning bedlam about.

“Calling Cochrane! Calling Cochrane! This is Captain Tait. This is Captain Tait. Listen carefully. I have no reception, repeat, I have no reception, repeat, I have no reception.”

He heard Simon say, “What on earth language is that?” And sorted out the language they had taught him with a feeling of relief that his mind could still function on two levels.

“I am down on Samia. Get a fix on my transmission. Tell the Samians to stop digging out the rats. Repeat. Tell the Samians to stop digging out the rats.” He repeated this over and over again as the earth shook and dust stifled eyes and nose and rock fell rumblingly.

At last he paused, said, “I hope they’re getting this. It may be a job to find the right house to tell the Demons to stop digging.”

Simon and Delia gaped.

“Yes, the Demons are a kindly, friendly people. And I… I shot one in the eye; God forgive me!”

“The Demons—friendly!” Simon blustered. “You must be mad, Stead; all this horror has broken your mind!”

“No, the Demons are a gentle people—yes, the Demons! You are a gentle man, Simon, yet you kill a rat without a second thought, knowing it to be an evil pest.”

“I… I see that,” whispered Delia. “Are you succeeding in doing… whatever it is you’re doing?”

“I don’t know.” He went on calling out, sweat running down his body his voice hoarse. He broke off to say, “I can only try. All I can do is try.”

He didn’t tell them that Cochrane might be gone. He had no real estimate of his time below here. Commander Good-wright might have spaced out, mourning the loss of a skipper and a friend. “No,” he said, fiercely. “No! Come on, Goody! You’ve got to stop the Demons—tie Samians—from digging us out! You’ve got to!”

The far roof caved in; dirt and rocks tumbled down in an avalanche of terror, and light, bright, white, cruel light, splintered through.

“Stop them, Cochrane!” he yelled into the mike. “Stop them! They’ve dug us open; they’ll be trampling all over us soon! For God’s sake, stop them!”

The roof ripped back. Brilliant, stabbing beams of actinic fire lanced down, stung his eyes, brought tears spurting. Delia screamed. Simon clapped his hands to his tortured eyes.

The noise became impossible to sustain. Hydrogen bombs and planetary volcanoes seemed to combine in one hellish cacophony. Typhoons whirled about the figures of the human beings, crouching in holes in the ground.

Up there lay nothing—up where Tait looked with something still left of the fears of Stead; a sky, a distant prospect of clouds drifting, roseate, far off, serene.

Simon, lowering his hands, looked up and… screamed. He fell writhing to the ground. Still shouting into his mike, Tait could do nothing for the old scientist struck down by rooflessness. Delia clung to him.

“Shut your eyes!” he screamed to her in a panted aside.

Against those clouds, so familiar, so awful to these people of the skirting board labyrinths, a dark shape moved. In the broken-open ground now, pitilessly exposed to the light of the Samian day, men and women ran and screamed and dropped, scuttling like ants in a nest disturbed by a probing stick.

And up there that looming monstrous shadow towered up and up and up. “My God!” said Tait, awed. “They’re big!”

Flat on the ground with one arm around Delia, the other grasping the radio, he continued to call out desperately, incoherently. The camouflage cape spread itself out over them, its sixteen legs tucking themselves neatly in at the sides. But it was puzzled by the light, by the feeling in the air, its chromatophores changed sluggishly. The cape, too, felt naked under this inconceivable nothingness above.

Face strained, muscles jumping, the cords in his throat taut with the effort of shouting into the mike, he saw a sudden shining expanse of metal appear with a crash of displaced air directly before them. Something lifted him, a brief intolerable pressure, then he was sprawling on the metal. It lifted. It swooped dizzily up into the sky.

He screamed into the mike, “The Demon’s got us! It’s put us on its shovel! For pity’s sake, Cochrane, tell them.”

A blackness whirled about him. Star-shot darkness engulfed him. Something extraordinarily hard cracked deftly down along his temple. Everything whirled away into nothingness.

Tait woke up in the sick bay aboard Cochrane.

He lay in the comfortable bed between sweet-smelling sheets, feeling the goodness in him, the drowsy after-sleep pleasantness seeping along his muscles, his whole body aglow with health.

Old Doc Hejaz must have worked overtime on him.

A sudden fluttery movement at his side brought lazily incurious eyes to focus. His camouflage cape lay in the bed with him, still, he guessed, attached to him by its twin umbilical cords; old Doc Hejaz’s eyes must have popped open at that one. But, like the sensible medico he was, he’d left the cape in situ until the skipper woke up to explain.

It felt good just to lie in the sick bay and think over what had happened. Nothing he could do now would alter what had happened. One glance had shown him Delia’s red curls on the pillow of the next bed. H’mm. She might not understand space rules and regulations.

He thought about her attempts to bring back his memory. She’d been right, too. Sex was, after all, the most potent factor in racial memory; it would have worked probably without that crack on the head. And she’d have shown him the kit Thorbum had found with him.