Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

“Ahoy the Ertak!” I hailed. “Descend at once!”

“Right, sir!” Hendricks turned to relay the order, and, as the rest of the men burst forth from the cavern, the ship struck the ground before us.

“All hands board ship!” I ordered. “Lively, now.” As many years as I have commanded men, I have never seen an order obeyed with more alacrity.

I was the last man to enter, and as I did so, I turned for a last glance at the enemy.

They could not come through the small opening my bombs had driven in the rock, although they were working desperately to enlarge it. Leaping back and forth between me and the entrance I could see the vague, shadowy figures of the outside slaves, eagerly seeping up the life-giving fumes that escaped from the cavern.

“Your orders, sir?” asked Hendricks anxiously; he was a very young officer, and he had been through a very trying experience.

“Ascend five hundred feet, Mr. Hendricks,” I said thoughtfully. “Directly over this spot. Then I’ll take over.

“It isn’t often,” I added, “that the Service concerns itself with economic conditions. This, however, is one of the exceptions.”

“Yes, sir,” said Hendricks, for the very good reason, I suppose, that that was about all a third officer could say to his commander, under the circumstances.

“Five hundred feet, sir,” said Hendricks.

“Very well,” I nodded, and pressed the attention signal of the non-commissioned officer in charge of the big forward ray projector.

“Ott? Commander Hanson speaking. I have special orders for you.”

“Yes, sir!”

“Direct your ray, narrowed to normal beam and at full intensity, on the spot directly below. Keep the ray motionless, and carry on until further orders. Is that clear?”

“Perfectly, sir.” The disintegrator ray generators deepened their purr as I turned away.

“I trust, sir, that I did the right thing in following you with the Ertak?” asked Hendricks. “I was absolutely without precedent, and the circumstances were so mysterious—”

“You handled the situation very well indeed,” I told him. “Had you not been waiting when we fought our way into the open, the nearly invisible things on the outside might have—but you don’t know about them yet.”

Picking up the microphone again, I ordered a pair of searchlights to follow the disintegrator ray, and made my way forward, where I could observe activities through a port.

The ray was boring straight down into a shoulder of a rocky hill, and the bright beams of the searchlights glowed redly with the dust of disintegration. Here and there I could see the shadowy, transparent forms of the creatures that the self-constituted rulers of this world had doomed to a demi-existence, and I smiled grimly to myself. The tables would soon be turned.

For perhaps an hour the ray melted its way into the solid rock, while I stood beside Ott and his crew, watching. Then, down below us, things began to happen.

Little fragments of rock flew up from the shaft the ray had drilled. Jets of black mud leaped into the air. There was a sudden blast from below that rocked the Ertak, and the shaft became a miniature volcano, throwing rocky fragments and mud high into the air.

“Very good, Ott,” I said triumphantly. “Cease action.” As I spoke, the first light of the dawn, unnoticed until now, spread itself over the scene, and we witnessed then one of the strangest scenes that the Universe has ever beheld.

Up to the very edge of that life-giving blast of mineral-laden gas the tenuous creatures came crowding. There were hundreds of them, thousands of them. And they were still coming, crowding closer and closer and closer, a mass of crawling, yellowish shadows against the sombre earth.

Slowly, they began to fill out and darken, as they drew in the fumes that were more than bread and meat and water to us. Where there had been formless shadows, rotund creatures such as we had met in the cavern stood and lashed their tentacles about in a sort of frenzied gladness, and fell back to make room for their brothers.

“It’s a sight to make a man doubt his own eyes, sir,” said Correy, who had come to stand beside me. “Look at them! Thousands of them pouring from every direction. How did it happen?”

“It didn’t happen. I used our disintegrator ray as a drill; we simply sunk a huge shaft down into the bowels of the earth until we struck the source of the vapor which the self-appointed ‘ruling class’ has bottled up. We have emancipated a whole people, Mr. Correy.”

“I hate to think of what will happen to those in the cavern,” replied Correy, smiling grimly. “Or rather, since you’ve told me of the pleasant little death they had arranged for us. I’m mighty glad of it. They’ll receive rough treatment, I’m afraid!”

“They deserve it. It has been a great sight to watch, but I believe we’ve seen enough. It has been a good night’s work, but it’s daylight, now, and it will take hours to repair the damage to the Ertak’s hull. Take over in the navigating room, if you will, and pick a likely spot where we will not be disturbed. We should be on our course by to-night, Mr. Correy.”

“Right, sir,” said Correy, with a last wondering look at the strange miracle we had brought to pass on the earth below us. “It will seem good to be off in space again, away from the troubles of these little worlds.”

“There are troubles in space, too,” I said dryly, thinking of the swarm of meteorites that had come so close to wiping the Ertak off the records of the Service. “You can’t escape trouble even in space.”

“No, sir,” said Correy from the doorway. “But you can get your sleep regularly!”

And sleep is, when one comes to think of it, a very precious thing.

Particularly for an old man, whose eyelids are heavy with years.

Hansen was sitting at the control board in the single building on Communications Relay Station 43.4SC, when the emergency light flashed on for the first time in two hundred years.

With textbook-recommended swiftness, he located the position of the ship sending the call, identified the ship and the name of its captain, and made contact.

“This is Hansen on 43.4SC. Put me through to Captain Fromer.”

“Fromer here,” said an incredible deep voice, “what the devil do you want?”

“What do I want?” asked the astonished Hansen. “It was you, sir, who sent the emergency call.”

“I did no such thing,” said Fromer with great certainty.

“But the light flashed—”

“How long have you been out of school?” Fromer asked.

“Almost a year, sir, but that doesn’t change the fact that—”

“That you’re imagining things and that you’ve been sitting on that asteroid hoping that something would happen to break the monotony. Now leave me the hell alone or I’ll put you on report.”

“Now look here,” Hansen began, practically beside himself with frustration, “I saw that emergency light go on. Maybe it was activated automatically when something went out of order on your ship.”

“I don’t allow emergencies on the Euclid Queen,” said Fromer with growing anger. “Now, if you don’t—”

Hansen spared himself the indignity of being cut off. He broke contact himself. He sighed, reached for a book entitled Emergency Procedure Rules, and settled back in his chair.

Fifteen minutes later the emergency light flashed on for the second time in two hundred years. With its red glow illuminating his freckled excited face, Hansen triumphantly placed another call to the Euclid Queen.

“This is Hansen on 43.4SC. Let me speak to Captain Fromer, please.”