by P. Schuyler Miller
A moon of mottled silver swam in the star-flecked sky, pouring its flood of pale light over the sea of blue-green vegetation that swelled up and up in a mighty, slow wave to break in the foaming crest of the Andes. The shadow of the plane raced far below, dipping into the troughs, breasting the summits of that vast, unbroken sea of emerald stretching on and on beyond reach of vision.
And the stars—blinking Mira nearly overhead, a great Fomalhaut blazing over the far off mountains, and to the south a host of exotic strangers, burning with a fire that we of the north seldom know—clustered like great, glowing fireflies around the invisible Pole. But I paid little heed to moon and stars and silvered jungle, for night had caught me unawares, and it is no simple matter to lay down supplies in a little clearing, marked only by a flickering camp-fire, lost somewhere among the jungles of Brazil.
Or was it Brazil? Here three great states mingled in an upland of forest and mountain and grassy valley—Peru, Bolivia, Brazil. Here ancient races had made their home, raised their massive temples in the little valleys, wrested a fortune from the mountains, given their lives to the jungles—a people more ancient by far than those others beyond the ranges whom the Incas conquered. Here none had come before to study, yet now, somewhere in the gloom beneath me, was a little oval valley hung midway between crag and forest, and there would be the tents and fires of scientists, men of my own world.
I must swoop and circle and loose my load, then soar off into the silver night like some great moth spurning the flame, out into the world of the moon and the jungles, back to the government that had sent me, to plunge once more into the hum-drum routine of government flight, the moon and the silvered jungle forgotten and forever gone.
But there came no glimmer of flame in the darkness, no flicker of white tents in the moonlight. Along the outflung cross of the plane swam the unbroken sea of green, dark and boding against its wan beauty. It takes little error of judgment to miss a tiny clearing in the dark. So, as the western ranges crept out of their alignment, I swooped and soared, and was roaring back, higher now, over the silent moon-lit forests.
But one gap had I seen in the jungle—a harsh, black scar seared by some great fire from the bowels of the planet, ugly and grim in the soft beauty of the night. Again it slipped beneath, and as the shadow of the plane vanished against its harsh blackness it seemed to me that there came a scurry of furtive motion, an instant’s flicker of shadow against its deeper gloom. I half checked the course of the plane, to wheel and search it closer, then of a sudden the air about me blazed with a dull crimson fire that burned into my body with a numbing fury of unleashed energy, the drone of the engines gasped and died, and we were spinning headlong toward the silver sea beneath!
As it had come, the tingling paralysis passed, and I flattened out the mad dive of the crippled plane, cut the ignition, and dived over the side. As in a dream I felt the jerk of the parachute, saw the deserted plane, like a huge, wounded bat of the jungles, swoop and check and swoop again in a long flat dive that broke and pancaked into the upper reaches of the forest. Then the heavy pendulum of my body alone beat out the dull seconds as I swung and twisted beneath the silken hemisphere of the ‘chute. And then the leafy boughs, no longer silver but like hungry, clutching talons of black horror, swept up and seized me. I crashed through a tangle of vine and brittle bough into a hot, sweet-scented darkness where little hidden things scurried away into the night and the silence.
The rain-forest is like a mighty roof stretched over the valleys of tropical America. Interlacing branches blot out the sun from a world of damp and rotting dark, where great mottled serpents writhe among tangled branches and greater vines strangle the life out of giants of the forest in the endless battle for light. And there are little, venomous things of the dark ways—savage two-inch ants with fire in their bite, tiny snakelets whose particolored beauty masks grim death—creatures of the upper reaches and of the glorious world above the tree-tops. With the sunrise, a blaze of life and flaming color breaks over the roof of the jungle—flame of orchid and of macaw, and of the great, gaudy butterflies of this upper world. Beneath, there comes but a brightening of the green gloom to a wan half-light in which dim horrors seem to lurk and creep and watch, and giant lianas twist and climb up and ever up to the living light. And lowest of all is death and damp decay—the dull, sodden carpet of mold and rotting vegetation where fat white grubs burrow in blind fear and huge centipedes scurry underfoot.
The sun was an hour gone when I fell, but it was not until its second coming when I managed to writhe and slip through the tangle as if I too were of the jungle, moving toward the spot where my memory placed that blasted clearing, and the light. And with the deepening of the gloom in the upper branches, I came upon it, quite by accident, from above.
It was a little valley, perhaps a mile long and two thirds as wide, lying in an oval of glittering jet against the side of the mountain. Here the Andes were beginning their swift climb up from the jungles to the snows, and beneath me fifty-foot cliffs of sheer, black rock dropped to the valley floor.
I have spoken of it as blasted, seared into the living heart of the jungle. It was all of that, and more! There was a gentleness in its rocky slopes that spoke of centuries of hungry plant-life, prying and tearing at jagged ledges, crumbling giant boulders, dying, and laying down a soft, rich blanket of humus over the harsh under-rock, forming a little garden-spot of life and light in the dark heart of the forest.
Then came fire—an awful, scourging blast of fierce heat that even Man’s Hell cannot equal! It blasted that little valley, seared its verdant beauty horribly, crumbling blossoms and long grasses into dead white ash, stripping the rich soil of past ages from its sleeping rocks, fusing those rocks into a harsh, glittering slag of seared, burnt black, cold and dead and damned! The sheer cliffs of its sides, once draped with a delicate tracery of flowered tendrils, had cloven away under the terrible heat, split off in huge slabs of the living rock that had toppled into the holocaust beneath and died with the valley.
The few thin shrubs that screened me at their summit showed blackened, blistered leaves and twigs, though here the heat had been least. As no other spot on Earth that little upland valley was awfully, terribly dead, yet at its center something moved!
* * * *
Eagerly, fearfully, I peered through the gathering dusk. Full and golden, the moon was rising over the forest, throwing new shadows across the valley floor, brightening new corners, revealing new motion. And as its smoky orange cleared to white gold and waned to limpid silver, that glorious light seemed to soften the harsh jet of the valley. It wakened a lustrous opalescence in the two great spheres that nestled like mighty twin pearls against the dark rock, to create beings of the rock and of the shadow, gliding wraithlike among the shattered boulders!
Painfully I crept through the dense growth of the brink, nearer to those great spheres and their dreadful cargo. Within me my brain whirled and throbbed, my throat froze against the cry of shocked incredulity that rushed to my lips, cold, clammy sweat oozed from gaping pores! It was beyond all reason—all possibility! And yet—it was! Now I could see them clearly, rank on rank of them in orderly file, some hundred of them, strewn in great concentric rings about the softly glowing spheres—harsh as the black rock itself, hard, and glittering, and angular—a man’s height and more from summit to base—great, glittering tetrahedra—tetrahedra of terror!
They were tetrahedra, and they were alive—living even as you and I! They stirred restlessly in their great circles, uneasy in the dim light. Here and there little groups formed, and sometimes they clicked together in still other monstrous geometric shapes, yet always they moved with an uncanny stillness, darting with utter sureness among the scattered rocks. And now from the nearer of the twin spheres came another of their kind, yet twice their size, the pearly walls opening and closing as by thought-magic for his passing! He swept forward a little, into the full light of the moon, and the rings followed him, centered about him, until the spheres lay beyond the outermost and the giant tetrahedron faced alone the hosts of his lesser fellows!
Then came their speech—of all things the most mind-wracking! I felt it deep within my brain, before I sensed it externally, a dull, heavy rhythm of insistent throbbing, beating at my temples and throwing up a dull red haze before my staring eyes!
And then I knew it was no fancy—that the great things of the blasted valley were indeed speaking, chanting, in low, vibrant monotone that beat physically upon me in long, slow waves of the air! You have heard those deepest notes of a great organ, when the windows tremble, even the walls, the building itself vibrate in resonance, beat and beat and beat to its rhythm until you feel it throbbing against your skull, pulsing in your mind in a vast, relentless sea of thundrous sound!
Such was the speech of the tetrahedra, only deeper still beneath the threshold of sound—so deep that each tiny nerve of the skin sensed its monotonous pressure and shouted it to a reeling brain—so deep that it seemed like a great surf of more-than-sound thundering dismally against desolate, rocky shores!
For it was without inflection—only the dull, dead beat and beat and beat, mounting throb on throb in my pulsing brain, and bringing madness in its wake! I think now that it was a sort of chant, the concerted cry of all the scores of tetrahedra, dinning savagely, angrily at their giant leader in a dismal plaint of discontent and unease! I think they were restless, aware of unfulfilled promises and purposes, anxious to make sure their mission, or to be gone. I think that the seed of tetrahedral mutiny was sown among them, and that as angry convicts will drum at their prison bars and scream in monotone, even so these things of another world, another life-stuff, drummed their grievances at their mighty leader!
For soon I sensed a deeper, stronger voice beating against the din, drowning it out, thundering command and reproof, shouting down the mob until its lesser drumming sank to a mutter and ceased. But the voice of the giant tetrahedron rang on, inflected now as our own voices, rising and falling in angry speech and command, pouring out burning sarcasm, perhaps, cowing them with its great insistence!
Like all great leaders, his followers were as children to him, and the hard, harsh beat of sound swept off into a soothing, cajoling murmur of whispering ripples, tapping ever so lightly against the packed sand of some distant tropic beach, almost sibilant, if such a sound can be so, yet none the less dominant and definite in its message. And it sank to a far, hinting rumble and vanished.
For a long instant they lay quiet, like graven things of the stone itself, then through the circles, like a spreading wave, rose a thrill of slow motion, quickening, livening, until all were astir! The ranks parted, the giant tetrahedron swept swiftly over the valley floor to the two great spheres, his angular hordes flowing in swift, soft motion in his wake! Again, with that speed and silent mystery of thought, the spheres gaped open and the ranks of the tetrahedra were swallowed up within! Alone, the twin pearls of fire-flecked opalescence nestled among the black rocks—great orbs of soft light, glowing with the magic of the full moon.
For a long moment I lay there under the bushes at the cliff’s edge, staring out over the valley, stunned by the weird unreality of the thing I had seen. Then, out of the dark behind me, came a hand, gripping my shoulder in a vise of iron! Mad with sudden terror I twisted free, struck blindly at the thing that had seized me, a thing that fastened with the grip of a Hercules upon my flailing arms, pinioned them to my sides—a thing that spoke, its words a hoarse mutter that barely penetrated the gloom!
“For God’s sake, man, be still! Do you want them to hear?”
It was a man—a human like myself. My frozen tongue stammered reply.
“Who are you? What are those things out there? What Hell of Earth did they spring from?”
“None of Earth, you may rest sure!” came the grim answer. “But we will tell you all that later. We must get clear of this place! I am Marston of the Museum expedition—the biologist. I suppose you are the aviator— Valdez saw them burn you down last night. Follow me.”
“Yes, I’m Hawkins. The plane is somewhere over there, if it didn’t burn, with all your supplies in it. I was held up crossing the mountains. But tell me, first—those things, there—are they alive?”
“You’ve wondered that? I suppose anyone would. The Indians make them gods of a kind—realize they’re beyond all experience and tradition. But I’m a biologist. I have had some experience in strange forms of life. They are as much alive as we—perhaps even more than we. After all, if life is energy, why should it not rest where it will? Need we—soft, puny things of carbon and water and a few unstable elements—be the only things to harbor life? But this is no place to moralize—come on!”
He vanished into the dark, and I followed, plunging blindly after the sound of his crashing progress, away from the seared valley and the tetrahedra, to safety of a sort in the sombre depths of the rain-forest.
They crouched beside a tiny fire of bark and twigs, like men of old Cro-Magnon, fifty thousand years ago—two gaunt skeletons hung and swathed with soiled rags, brooding over their pitiful little flame. With the crackle of our approach they sprang at bay—two hunted things of the jungle—then relaxed as we came into the firelight
I will always remember them as I saw them then—Hornby, the Museum archaeologist, tall, grey-haired, his haggard face seamed with deep wrinkles of sleeplessness and fear and puzzled wonderment. Valdez, his colleague of the government that had sent me, short, dark, his Portuguese blood blended with that of the squat tribes of the interior, teeth gleaming in a snarl like that of some great jungle cat, cornered, crazed, and dangerous! He seemed plumper than the others, and I felt that he could and would care for himself very well if need be.
Now, too, I saw my guide for the first time as something more than a black hulk in blackness. Marston, the biologist, looked like an old-time blacksmith, a massive man of bone and muscle, with keen grey eyes under heavy brows and the beginnings of a mighty beard. A Hercules, I have said—more like an Atlas, upholding the burden of this little wilderness world from the shoulders of one who could not and one who would not share it! Muscles that had had scant padding of reserve flesh now lacked it utterly, jutting like knotted tree-roots from his rugged frame, making him seem a being rudely hewn from some twisted cypress stump by the master hand of a forest god, and given life.
“We’re all there are, Hawkins,” he rumbled, his unhushed voice bearing much of the quality of the speech of the tetrahedra. “We’ve got to find that plane soon, if it’s still whole. Did you see flames, Valdez?”
“Flames, Senor Marston? No—as I have so often said, I saw merely the falling of the plane, like a great wounded bird seeking the shelter of the jungle, and Senor—Hawkins, is it—with his parachute. I am not certain that I can find it, now that a day and a night have passed, but I will try. With the guides gone, it is not easy to feed even three mouths—eh, Senor Marston?”
“Four is no worse than three, Valdez. I’m glad Hawkins is here. He’s new blood, a new brain, and with his help we may lick the damn’ things yet!”
Then Hornby’s voice—dry and withered as his shrunken body—weary as his tired old eyes.
“You have seen the tetrahedra, Lieutenant Hawkins? You realize that they are living, intelligent beings? You can comprehend the menace of their presence here on our Earth?”
“Yes, Professor,” I answered slowly, “I have seen them and heard them. I can see that they’re not like anything I know of, on Earth or off, and that there is some sort of purpose behind them. But I saw them only in the half-light, for a few moments at best. They had a great leader, twice the size of any of them, and the rest seemed to be dissatisfied with the way he was running things.”
“You hear that, Marston?” cried the Professor, almost savagely. “You hear—they are impatient—they will act, soon, as soon as they have fed again! We dare not wait longer! We must do something, Marston—we must act—now!”
“Yes, I saw them too,” said Marston slowly. “They’re on the brink, all right. But I don’t know what we can do—four men with three rifles and a couple of machetes against a hundred of them and what they can do. I don’t know that we can even puncture one—they look almighty hard to me!”
“Marston,” I put in eagerly, “if it’s guns you want, there are two machine-guns and plenty of ammunition in the plane—it was a government ship, fresh from the uprising in the North. If we can find that, there’ll be guns as well as food. I think I could find it, from the valley, in daylight.”
“Valdez—you hear that? Can you help him search? You are the one who saw him fall, and you have been out with the Indians more than once. How about it?”
“Very well, Senor Marston, I will do what I can. But do not hope for too much—remember, there has been a day and a night, and I had only a glimpse. And the guns—what can they do against those devils from the spheres? We are fools to stay here, I tell you—we would do better to flee, now that there is food, and warn the world of what has come upon it!”
“I’ve heard that stuff preached before, Valdez. Stow it! If it comes to announcing them to the world, those things will do it for themselves faster than we could! It would be our own hides we’d be saving, and that not for long! Besides, you know the reputation these Indians have, once they’re roused! Looks like you’re the fool of the lot, Valdez. You’ll hunt with Hawkins in the morning!”
Professor Hornby had said little—he merely crouched against a tree, staring blankly at the flames. Now, at Marston’s words, he roused again.
“Marston,” his voice came petulantly, “have you seen the Indians in the forest, as I have? Have you seen them, felt them staring at your back, fingering their little darts in the dark? Marston, they take those tetrahedra for gods, or devils—things to worship and propitiate with sacrifice! The forest is full of them—I feel it—I can tell! Marston, what are they doing?”
* * * *
CHAPTER II
The Coming of the Tetrahedra
Marston’s bluff rumble drowned out that final wail. “Sure, Prof, they’re here, all right—all about us, out there in the jungle with the beasts. I can feel them too—watching us from the dark. But they’re harmless—just inquisitive, that’s all. It’s the things yonder that draw them—gods, maybe, or devils, like you said, but something out of old times and old tales, when the Old People had their forts and palaces here under the shadow of the hills. It’s a legend come true, for them, and until they find out different, I reckon they link us with the things that have appeared in the place where we used to be—we, with our white magic and our questions of the Old People. They’re not apt to hurt us for a while yet, but it won’t hurt to slip a mite closer to the valley, where we can watch the things and keep the association fresh for the Indians.”
Then Valdez slipped in his acid wedge of dissent, smoothly and blandly as ever, yet deadly sharp beneath the flashing smile.
“You remember, of course, Senor Marston, that these poor Indios retain the superstitions of their ancient masters, and that in time of peril it was the way of the Old People to make blood sacrifice to their gods— the blood of their most holy priests! Old customs linger long among savages, Senor! You have a proverb, I think—’Out of sight, out of mind’, is it not? There is truth in such old maxims, Senor Marston.”
“Meaning we can skip out and let them forget us? We’re not playing that game, as I think I’ve said before, Valdez. None of us—get that! We’re staying, and we’re fighting, just as soon as you and Hawkins locate those guns, which is tomorrow. Your memory will improve with a little sleep, I think. And, Prof—I reckon Hawkins here would like to hear about those things yonder. Tell him what there is to tell—you have it clearest of any of us, I guess.”
And so, huddled there by the tiny, flickering fire, I listened as the thin, dry voice of the old Professor marched through the awful story of the coming of the tetrahedra. It was graven deep in his mind, and with every telling the tale grew more vivid to him. Even now the sweat oozed from his face as he spoke, staring in fascination at the dying flames. The eyes of Marston and Valdez watched us across the embers and those other, unseen eyes in the darkness that hung its velvet shroud beyond the waning flicker of the fire-light, peered furtively out of the night.
They had come to the little valley in the hills, three white men and a half-dozen Indian guides from the more civilized tribes to the north. Here in its oval bowl they had made their camp among flowers and waving grasses, with the dark rampart of the jungle standing about them like the walls of a prison. And from those walls, in the end, came the Indians of the forest—poor, savage creatures hag-ridden by superstition and ignorance, wracked by famine and disease—a feeble remnant of those who had been servants to the Old People in days long gone.
For they treasured weird legends and aborted ceremonies where understanding of other things had passed. Perhaps they had never known the reality of the great deeds with which they had served the Masters—cunningly fitting huge boulders into smooth-cut walls and terraces, hacking long roads into jungle and mountain, eking out a livelihood for the decadent ruling race.
But true it was that they bore memories of things that even the savage mind can ponder, memories of magic and ritual, and the adoration of fierce and powerful gods. As the newer magic of this younger, paler race gripped their childish minds, they told of the things that their fathers before them had learned of grandfathers through the centuries, tales not only of custom and life in those long-gone days, but of cities swallowed up in the rain-forest, cities of massive stone and untarnishing metal—”the metal of the Sun,” that sleeps in long, fat serpents in the white rock of the mountains. In Hornby’s old eyes gleamed a new, young frenzy of hope and joy, and in the little eyes of Valdez another, older lust-light wakened at the tale of the golden serpents. Marston saw it, but Marston had known that it would come, and he went about his study of the plants of valley and forest as if it had not been there—worked, and watched.
Then, one day—and Professor Hornby’s hoarse voice sank almost to a whisper as he told of it—there came the little group of savages who were to lead the way to the buried ruins of a great city of the Old Ones, four little brown men with blow-guns and deadly darts, waiting patiently for the great White Ones to take up their magic and follow. Hornby had stepped to the door of his tent to call their chieftain to conference, and as he went he gazed up at the towering Andes, whence the Old Ones had sprung. There, drifting like wind-tossed bubbles just above the tree-tops, floated the spheres of the tetrahedra!
Gently they sank to rest at the other end of the little valley—lay there in the thick grass like the eggs of some huge moth out of fable. The Indians had fled in terror, but as Hardy and Marston raced down the slope toward the twin globes they sensed that furtive eyes would be peering from the undergrowth, half-fearful, half-wondering, waiting with timeless patience for new magic—new masters.
The three came to the spheres as they lay ‘there in the lush grass-Hornby, Marston, Valdez—and in each heart must have been something of the wonder that I in my turn had felt. For the spheres were unbroken by any opening, were as twin orbs hewn from mother-of-pearl, iridescent, with delicate hues of blue and rose tinting their snowy white, and yet there came a force from them, a tingling of excess energy that thrilled in every nerve and set their minds on edge with unwonted keenness!
It grew in strength, slowly, and it was Marston who first sensed its lurking hostility, who turned his gaze from the enigmatic spheres to see the long grasses about their bases wither and shrivel to soft grey ash under the blasting radiation! It was he who cried the alarm, and in sudden panic they fled a little way up the valley, to stand like startled sheep, then flee anew as the surge of energy poured forth in ever-quickening pulses from the opal spheres.
It swept all life before it into sudden, luxuriant growth that as suddenly dropped into blighted destruction! Beside their tents, nearly in the shadow of the brooding forest, they stood at last and watched the slow torrent sweep the life of their little valley home into the sullen ash of death. And then its invisible van drifted up the slope to their feet, and again its subtle venom thrilled evilly in their veins, and they ran crazily, headlong, into the jungle!
* * * *
But they could not long shun the brain-troubling enigma that had engulfed their little home. Marston, Hornby, Valdez—they struggled back and stared from the damp dark of the forest at the thing that was happening there in the sunlit oval on the mountainside. Then it was that Marston broke the spell of fear that had been laid upon him—seized rifles, blankets, food from the deserted tents in the ebbing of the invisible waves, and fled again as the second billow of devastation poured from the silent spheres! The grasses and delicate blossoms of the valley had passed under the first blight, but here and there grew hardier blooms and bushes, akin to the life of the forest, and higher forms of life—insects, rodents, birds. Again the wave of death surged, and again, and now they could see a faint flush of crimson burning angrily where it passed, a glow more of the atmosphere than of the blighted, seared life of the valley! Then, for a time, there came a lull—a peace almost of the days and hours when this little spot of light in the green dark was the home of happy, busy men—almost, yet not quite!
For there was a boding in it, an ominous sense of oppression, a tension of the very ether, a stress that spread to mind and brain and sucked hungrily at the dazed consciousness! Now they saw that the spheres were alight with a cold green radiance that glowed vividly even above the glare of the sun upon the bleaching ash! Almost an incandescence they might have called it, yet there was no feeling of heat, only a great, overpowering energy that was being hurled from those unearthly spheres upon the little valley and its walling forests. And they were not wrong, for of a sudden, with an awful violence that shook even the stolid Marston, the storm burst in its full fury over the valley!
It did not touch the forests—indeed, it seemed to shun their cool, damp dark—and so the three could watch its awful progress and live. In an instant’s time the tension burst into a seething, chaotic turmoil of blue-green flame, electric fire akin to lightning, yet far surpassing any lightning of Earth in its fury!
In a great beating sea of horrid flame it lashed the oval valley, driving into the soil, into the very rock, waking them into an angry answer of leaping, burning crimson fires. The fires swept the thin black soil from the underlying rock and scored the naked face of the rock itself with an awful furnace of consuming fury. Filling all the bowl of the valley and beating high against its bounding walls, licking away their flowery curtain of lacing vines, rending from them huge flakes of rock that burst like monster bombs as they toppled into the fiery sea below, it rushed in a mighty pillar of roaring fires hundreds of feet into the shuddering air!
And through the curtain where fire of heavens and fire of Earth met in that terrible holocaust, those three saw the curving flames of the twin spheres gape wide, saw huge angular shapes file from the darkness within —shapes never yet associated in the Mind of Man with the meaning of life! Careless of the flame that seethed about them, they glided out over the fusing rock of the valley floor, score on score of them, showing in the fierce glare as mighty, eight-foot tetrahedra of dark, glistening crystal. They were of a purple that seemed to be of the essence of the things themselves, rather than a pigmentation of their surface; and near one apex each had two green-yellow unstaring, unseeing eyes!
Within them one glimpsed a spherical body—purple too—from which ran hundreds of curious filaments to the smooth surfaces. Tetrahedra they were—living tetrahedra of chilling terror that feared neither flame nor lightning and spread destruction on every side!
Sick at heart the three men watched, while the flames died and the winds came and stripped the blanket of dust and ash from the blasted rock. The tetrahedra meanwhile glided about their endless affairs, forming and reforming in geometric pattern. Or they clicked swiftly into many-faceted forms that in turn mounted into monolithic, crystalline monstrosities, then melted with startling suddenness into their original components. These were idle, pointless maneuverings from the human viewpoint, yet fraught with some hidden meaning and purpose as alien to Earth as the things themselves. They suggested the terrible energies that were under their control—energies such as our little science has never hinted at.
“I cannot tell you of the feeling that came to me,” the weary, dried-out voice of the Professor droned despairingly on. “Here was a power absolutely at odds to all the great, painfully evolved civilization of mankind, a power that could and would crush us as a fly, if we came into conflict with the motives of the tetrahedral race! Here were beings endowed by nature with powers beyond our science—alien to our ideas of evolution, well-nigh to our imagination and reason. I felt the latent doom of mankind and of the very life-forms of all Earth, squatting here in our little, blasted valley with an ominous, cruel indifference that struck chill fear into my heart! And I knew that if Man must die, I would die too—die fighting for my race and my civilization! I think we all felt it, knew it in our hearts, and swore our oath of undying feud upon the violated rock of our valley home!”
His voice trailed off into silence as his deadened eyes saw once more the vision of that awful day. I thought he had done, but again his voice broke the quiet.
“Perhaps we can flee, even now—hide away in some corner where they can have no motive for searching—exist for a few dreadful months or years while our planet sinks under their unearthly tyranny. Perhaps, for a little, we can save our lives, and yet—I wonder if it is not better to die foolishly, futilely, but to die with the knowledge that we have been closer than any man to the unfathomable, to the reality that underlies all life.”
From the dark beyond the glowing embers came Marston’s quiet rumble:
“We can’t do less, Prof, and we won’t. We will fight, as men fight, and if our way is greater and better than their way, you know, down in your heart, that we will win as Man has always won—and that science will have another doubtful bone to quarrel over. In the morning we must lay our plans. They are getting restless—they may strike any minute, and we must be ready and waiting. We’re going to die, I guess, but we’ll die as men should!” That was all.
* * * *
The events of the past few hours had crowded in upon me with such staggering force and complexity that I found my mind in a whirl. I could get no clear-cut impression—no broad meaning—only a blurred, fantastic cyclorama of unearthly event and taut emotion, piling thought on thought in an orgy of color and sound and feeling that completely swamped me. Even now, with it all past and much of it clarified by time, I feel that same vagueness, that groping for concepts, that I felt then. With the morning all this changed—changed swiftly and utterly as event after event rushed upon us, broke like a tidal wave upon our outraged consciousness, and vanished before the tumultuous onslaught of another, greater clash of mind and matter.
We were up with the dawn, and after a scant breakfast of dried fruits, salvaged from the tents before the destruction of the valley, Valdez and I set out to find the plane. I wanted to return to the valley to get my bearings, but Valdez protested—claimed it was uselessly dangerous, that he could make better time from where we were. We struck into the tangle of dank underwood, Valdez leading, and within seconds of our leaving camp I was utterly lost. My companion seemed sure of his way, slipping through the maze of fine growth like a beast of the jungle, almost as if he were following an invisible trail.
For nearly an hour we plunged ahead, then of a sudden came a gap in the forest roof as the level of the ground fell in a narrow ravine, and I woke to angry realization of what was happening! The sun, on our right when we started, lay behind us! We were traveling dead away from the valley, the camp, and the plane!
Angrily I sprang forward, seized Valdez by the shoulder! He spun like a striking snake, fury in his half-closed eyes, fury and crazed fear! In his hand was a gun!
“So—you have awakened at last, Senor Hawkins,” he sneered. “You feel that things are not quite as they seemed—is it not so? You fool—did you for one moment think I would cast my lot with those idiots back there? Do I seem mad, that I should offer my life for fools like them? You— you were not invited to our little party, but you came—you are here, and on my hands—and you will do as I say or wish you had! Am I clear?”
“You’re too damn’ clear!” I shouted. “You’re not fit to live, Valdez, and it’s high time someone told you so to your sneaking face! So you’re going to sneak off and leave your comrades to the tender mercies of those tetrahedra—you want to make sure of your precious hide! Why, damn you, it’s you that’s a bigger fool than any of us! How can you expect to get clear of this filthy jungle, with the guides gone? Where are you going to find food when your shells run out? What do you think these damn’ stinking savages will do to you when they catch you out here alone, running away from their new gods? You haven’t the least chance in the world —you’re crazy, that’s it! You’re stark, staring mad—a damned, yellow, mad dog!”
“You say unfortunate things, Senor Hawkins,” he replied coldly, the ugly sneer still on his thin, red lips. “I think that I can dispense with your company. It might interest you to know that Valdez is the name of my father by adoption, Senor. My people are those whom you have so kindly classified as ‘damned stinking savages’—my home is these very forests that you seem to find so unpleasant! And, Senor Hawkins, have I not said that I can always find your plane?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, Senor, that it has always been I who could find the plane, and I who did find it, not very many minutes after it crashed. You would be disappointed, Senor Hawkins, were you to see it now. The food, the guns and ammunition of which you boasted—they can never have existed save in a mind disordered by jungle fevers. Or can it be that the Indios— the ‘stinking savages’ that even now are all about us, there behind you in the shadows, have stolen them? It would be most interesting to know the truth of the matter, would it not?”
I stared up through the matted branches at the blandly shining sun, red hate clouding my vision! I raised both hands, fists clenched, as if to crash them down upon the evilly smiling face! But the little snub-nosed gun that bored into my belly spoke eloquent warning, and of a sudden came clear thought and cool, calculated words:
“So even in this you must lie, Valdez! It is bred in the blood, I think! I do not question that you stole the food and weapons that meant life to your comrades—it is much too characteristic an act to doubt—but, Senor Valdez, no Indian would so steal another’s food. Was it, perhaps, your mother who was white?”
Blind fury glazed his little, bloodshot eyes and drew back his thin lips in an ugly snarl of rage! I saw murder staring at me from those eyes, and in the instant when he stood frozen with his hate I leaped—swung with all my weight on the great liana that was looped over the branch above me! Even as the gun spat flame, the tautening vine caught him full at the base of the skull and toppled him forward into the black mold of the forest floor, out, and out for good!
* * * *
CHAPTER III
The Tetrahedra’s Power
It was his life or mine, but I had not contemplated killing him. The vine was heavy and swung loose on the limb, and it whipped taut with the force of a snapping hawser, catching him squarely at the base of his maddened brain! It was an awful blow, every bit as heavy as the swing of a sledge hammer, and it broke his spine free from his skull as I would snap an apple from its stem! I turned him over, his features purple and contorted, and as I lifted him his head flopped forward like that of a rag dummy! With a shudder I dropped him and turned away.
Yet part of him was white, and all of him was human, and so I scooped a shallow trench in the soft mold and buried him, first searching his body for weapons and food. In his breast pocket was a rough sketch-map, showing the valley, the camp, and a small cross where the plane had fallen. Across its penciled contours ran a fine dotted line, due north from the camp nearly to the place where the plane lay, then bearing off to the west, toward the mountains, and toward a little upland river that ran down from the snows.
There was the gulley where I stood, a dried-out stream-bed leading up into the lower end of the valley, and just beyond a second little cross, to the south of the trail. I knew what it meant—the food and guns from the looted plane! I could see now that the way was cunningly marked by untangled vines and diverted branches—a path of least resistance, more than a trail—and within five minutes I had uncovered Valdez’ cache, under the cover of an outcropping ledge of quartz, and loaded one of the packs we had brought along.
How to return to camp with my news was another question entirely. I knew it was hopelessly futile for me to try to follow the back trail, or to run by the rude map for either plane or camp. There remained the valley—straight south along the ravine—and I felt certain that once there I could regain my lost sense of direction or wait until one of the others found me. The valley—and the tetrahedra! Driven by instinct or intuition, I shouldered one of the very light machine-guns and wrapped three belts of ammunition about my waist, under my shirt.
The going was easier along the rim of the little ravine than at its bottom, where extra moisture made the tangle thicker. Indeed, it seemed almost like the trail Valdez had followed—a path of least resistance, carved invisibly into the underbrush by unknown hands. To right and left the thicket held like a tightly woven fabric, but ahead, parallel to the gulley, the branches slipped silently apart under a slight pressure of the hand and closed us quietly behind. It was obvious that either Valdez or the Indians had made this way to the valley, and it was not on Valdez’ map.
The trail finally swung away from the stream-bed, toward the east, and suddenly emerged on a sort of peninsula jutting into the valley just above the point where the twin spheres lay. I saw the glare of sunlight through the trees, for there was a sort of clearing overlooking the parade-ground of the tetrahedra. Here were gathered the forest Indians, clustered behind the thin screen of vegetation, gazing in dumb adoration at the things below. So rapt were they that my approach went unnoticed, and I was able to retreat and bear to the west, creeping up to the edge of the valley midway between clearing and ravine.
It was nearly noon, and the fury of the blazing sun made the valley a black cauldron of flickering air-currents. They boiled up from the naked rock in vast, shimmering waves of heat that made the distant jungle and the rocky valley floor seem to engage in a weird witches’ caper with the unearthly things that basked at the valley’s heart.
Now, in the full light of day, I could see that it was as Professor Hornby had said. The tetrahedra were formed from some hard, crystalline mineral, black almost to invisibility, with a faint wash of rich purple running through it. As they moved, the sun sent up glittering flashes of brilliance from their polished flanks, dancing like little searchlight rays along the shadowed face of the forest. For the tetrahedra were restless, were weaving aimlessly in and out among the boulders in weird arabesques as of some unearthly dance of the crystal folk, were condensing in little groups of half a dozen or less that formed and broke again even as do restless humans, waiting impatiently for some anticipated event.
Apart from the rest, motionless in a sort of circular clearing among the rocks, squatted the giant leader of the tetrahedra. In him the deep violet of the crystal became a rich, plum-like hue, purple flushed with warm red, and the underlying black seemed less harsh. It was warmer and more like the calm velvet of the tropic night. But these are impressions, qualitative terms with which to distinguish him in some way other than by mere size from his fellows. To an observer, the distinction was apparent, but it is not easy to express in everyday terms. It must suffice that he was indefinably different from the others, that he seemed to have character and personality, where the rest were but pyramidal crystals, albeit terribly alive.
And now the giant leader was dinning out his mighty call in long, slow billows of beating sound that seemed to thrust me back, press me into the dark of the forest, away from the alien monsters of the valley! In response came thirty of the lesser tetrahedra, chosen seemingly at random from the scattered ranks, to range themselves at equal intervals about their master, forming a single great circle a dozen yards in diameter.
Again the throbbing call shattered against the cliffs about me, and now all the hordes of the tetrahedra broke into flowing motion, converging in a torrent of glittering purple crystal upon the natural amphitheater, clustering in threes at the spots that their fellows had marked—all but ten, who glided into place before every third group, forming a giant toothed wheel with hub and rim and spokes of living, sentient crystal—crystal with a purpose!
There under that blazing sun they lay, gleaming like giant purple gems against the jetty rock. I thought of the great stone wheel of Stonehenge, and of the other monolithic circles that men have found in England and on the Continent. Strange resemblance, between the pattern of living monsters of another world and the ancient temples of a prehistoric race! And yet, is it too far-fetched to suggest that the superstitious savages should pattern their greatest temples after the unearthly gods of their worship-gods of purple crystal that came and smote and vanished again into the skies, leaving the memory of their inevitable circling, and the thunder of their language in the great drums of worship? May it not be that they have come before, and found Earth unfitted for their usage, and passed on to other worlds? And if they have so come, and found us wanting, what lies beyond that has prevented them from bearing back the tale of their findings, marking Earth as useless for their tetrahedral purposes? Why have they had to come again and again?
* * * *
I could see that the groups of three that formed the toothed rim of the giant crystal wheel were tipping inward, bringing their peaks together in a narrow focus, and more, that the ten that were the spokes, the binding members of the wheel, were of the same rich hue as their master. The shadows of the myriad tetrahedra squatted short and black about their shining bases, against the shining rock.
As the sun soared higher, pouring its blazing rays straight down upon the sweltering world, I sensed the beginning of a vague roseate glow at the foci of the circling trios, a glow as of energy, light, focussed by the tetrahedra themselves, yet not of themselves, but sucked from the flood of light that poured upon them from above. For the light that was reflected from their sides gleamed ever bluer, ever colder, as they drank in the warm red rays and spewed them forth again into the seething globes of leashed energy that were forming just beyond their pointing tips!
The rose-glow had deepened to angry vermillion, seemingly caged within the spheres defined by the tips of the tilted tetrahedra. Thirty glowing coals against the black, ninety great angular forms gleaming ghastly blue in the pillaged sunlight, forms that were slowly closing in upon the center, upon their mighty master, bearing him food, energy of the sun for his feasting!
Now the scarlet flame of the prisoned light was mounting swiftly in an awful pinnacle of outrageous color—pure fire torn from the warm rays of the sun—raw energy for the glutting of these tetrahedral demons of another world! It seemed to me that it must needs burst its bounding spheres and fuse all that crystal horde with its unleashed fury of living flame, must win free of the unimaginable forces that held it there between the eager, glittering facets, must burst its unnatural bonds and sweep the valley with a tempest of awful fire that would consign the furnace of the tetrahedra to pitiful insignificance! It did none of these, for the power that had reft it from the golden sunbeams could mould it to the use and will of the tetrahedra, as clay before the potter!
Slowly the great ring contracted, slowly the tetrahedra tipped toward their common center, bearing at their foci the globes of angry flame. Now they stopped, hung for a long moment in preparation. Then in an instant they loosed the cradled energy of the spheres in one mighty blaze of blinding crimson that swept out in a single huge sheet of flame, blanketing all the giant wheel with its glory, then rushing into the blazing vortex of its center. Here, all the freed energy of the flame was flowing into the body of the mighty ruler of the tetrahedra, bathing him in a fury of crimson light that sank into his glowing facets as water into parched sand of the desert, bringing a fresh, new glow of renewed life to his giant frame!
And now, as in recoil, there spouted from his towering peak a fine, thin fountain of pale blue fire, soundless, like the blaze of man-made lightning between two mightily energized electrodes—the blue of electric fire— the seepage of the giant’s feast! Like slaves snatching at the crumbs from their master’s board, the ten lesser tetrahedra crowded close. As their fierce hunger voiced itself in awful, yearning force, the fountain of blue flame split into ten thin tongues, barely visible against the black rock, that bent down into the pinnacles of the ten and poured through them into the crowding rim of the giant wheel, a rim where again the spheres of crimson fire were mounting to their climactic burst!
Again the crimson orbs shattered and swept over the horde in a titanic canopy of flame, and again the giant master drank in its fiery glory! Now the fountain of seepage had become a mighty geyser of sparkling sapphire light that hurtled a hundred feet into the shimmering atmosphere, and, bent by the fierce hungering of the lesser creatures, curved in a glorious parabola above the crystal wheel, down over them and into them, renewing their substance and their life!
For as I watched, each tetrahedron began to swell, visibly, creeping in horrid slow growth to a magnitude very little less than that of their giant leader. And as they mounted in size, the torrent of blue fire paled and died, leaving them glutted and expectant of the final stage!
It came, with startling suddenness! In an instant each of the hundred clustering monsters budded, burst, shattered into four of half its size that cleaved from each corner of the parent tetrahedron. They left an octohedral shape of transparent crystal, colorless and fragile, whence every evidence of life had been withdrawn into the new-born things—a shell that crumpled and fell in fine, sparkling crystal dust to the valley floor. Only the giant ruler lay unchanged beneath the downward slanting rays of the sun. The hundred had become four hundred! The tetrahedra had spawned!
Four hundred of the monstrous things where a hundred had lain the moment before! Drinking in the light of the noonday sun, sucking up its energy to give them substance, these tetrahedral beings from an alien world held it in their power to smother out the slightest opposition by sheer force of ever-mounting numbers! Against a hundred, or four hundred, the armies and the science of mankind might have waged war with some possibility of success, but when each creature of these invulnerable hosts might become four, with the passing of each noon’s sun, surely hope lay dead! Man was doomed!
On the jutting point to my left I sensed new activity. The Indians were chanting, in weird low tones, to the rhythm of a great, deep-throated drum. It was some monotonous hymn or supplication to their ancient gods—gods now personified in the things below. Through the screen of shrubbery between us, I glimpsed their chieftain, taller by a head than the rest, his arms up-raised, leading the exhortation. Their voices rose, broke in an angry clamor as a dozen of their kind burst from the forest dragging the bound form of a white man—of Marston!
I must be closer. Here, separated from them by a hundred feet of space and a double screen of matted vines, I dared not fire for fear of slaying friend with foe! Headlong I dived into the tangle, shoving the machine-gun ahead of me! Had they not been utterly engrossed in their savage ritual, the Indians must surely have heard my blundering approach, ripping blindly through the undergrowth with caution flung to the winds! By chance or fortune the tangle was less matted than elsewhere, and I burst into the cleared space barely in the nick of time.
* * * *
For all of his traitorous hypocrisy, Valdez had spoken truly of old customs and old sacrifices! Marston’s huge, straining frame was bent back over a rounded slab of polished rock in the center of the clearing, the dwarfed forest-men fairly swarming over him to hold him in place! Arms raised in supplication, their chieftain stood over him, his features distorted by something more than fear of his gods, and frenzy of sacrifice! Hate and terrible rage had seized upon his bronzed visage, making of it a veritable devil-mask! And in his clenched fist he grasped a glittering knife of steel, a knife that half an hour ago I had seen buried in the black soil of the forest Root—Valdez’ knife!
Again he was raising his chant of dedication and sacrifice, screeched to the thunderous rhythm of the drum in the manner of those Old Ones before the Incas! Again it mounted to its climactic crescendo of frenzied adoration and black hate—rose to a maddened scream, and broke as his arm swept down against that bearded throat! With a merry cackle of savage laughter, my gun woke the echoes, sweeping leaden death across the clearing, mowing its swath of lives in sacrifice more terrible than any savage mind could plan!
Through a bloody haze I saw the brown, broken bodies twisted and flung bodily from their feet by thudding missiles that tore their unresisting flesh from their broken bones and bathed the altar and the gaunt form stretched over it with spouting, smoking blood! Blood lust was in me as I raked their bewildered ranks with the laughing death, then the belt of cartridges was gone, and as I fumbled for a second the few cowering survivors fled screaming into the sheltering jungle!
Sanity came, and horror at the slaughter I had done, and with them an awful fear that in my unreasoning rage I had murdered friend as well as foe! Stumbling over the torn and bleeding windrows of slain humanity, I raced across the bloody clearing to where he lay, the gun forgotten! And as I reached the rude altar where he lay, Marston heaved his blood-soaked frame free of the bodies that covered it, sat up, and growled whimsically:
“Are you quite sure you’ve killed enough for the day? Or didn’t you know it was loaded?”
“Marston, man!” I shouted frantically. “Are you all right? Did I hit you?”
“Oh, not at all. I’m quite all right. You’re a rotten shot if I do say it—bring in a blasted flail, and then you can’t hit me! Though I’ll not say you didn’t try hard enough. You did well by the innocent bystanders, and of course the public must come first in the mind of every good citizen.”
As a matter of fact, I had nicked a chunk out of his arm—a nice, clean hit—and the blood on him was not all Indian. Still, his sarcastic joshing served its purpose and brought me out of my near-hysteria, where I was doing nobody the slightest good, into a sort of sanity in which I could at least talk without dithering like a crazy fool. Not until we were well clear of the shambles around the altar did he speak of Valdez.
“What happened?” he asked. “Did Valdez bolt?”
“He tried to,” I replied glumly. “He had the stuff from the plane cached on the trail out, and—well, I wouldn’t listen to reason, he pulled a gun, and we had it out. I broke his neck—killed him.”
“I’m not blaming you for it. I saw it coming, and I reckon it was you or he. But it’s stirred up merry hell among the Indians. Did you know he was a breed? He claimed to be pure Indian, son of a jungle chieftain and a princess of some remnants of the Old People, but he was a breed, and crossed the wrong way! The least hint that anyone had guessed the truth made a beast of him. I’ve seen him deliberately bash a man’s head to jelly because the fellow, a Portuguese muleteer, claimed relationship— on his mother’s side! He was one of their priests, a heritage from his father, and I guess they found his body. Hornby doesn’t know, though, and if I were you I’d lay the blame to the Indians—the dead ones. Right?”
“I suppose so. It happened as you guessed. I slugged him in the neck with a heavy liana, too hard. But how did they get you?”
“I told you I was suspicious of Valdez. I tried to follow you, and they jumped me, south of here, near the ravine. It must have been shortly after they found Valdez, for they were all crazy mad. I think the Doc is safe, though. Do you realize that this spawning means that they’re ready to go ahead and burn their way right through everything—make this whole planet a safer and better place for tetrahedra? Doc has figured they’re from Mercury—overcrowded, probably, by this wholesale system of reproduction in job-lots, and hunting for new stamping-grounds. I don’t know what our chances are of bucking them—about a quarter of what they were an hour ago—but they’re mighty slim, armed as we are. You’ve got the other machine-gun?”
“It’s at the cache, with most of the food, if the Indians didn’t find it when they found Valdez. I have a map here, that he was using.”
“Good. Let’s have it. You keep an eye on the Professor tomorrow, now that the Indians are out for blood, and I’ll get the stuff back to camp. Now I know they’re hostile, I’ll keep my weather eye open for trouble and I’ll guarantee I won’t be caught napping again. Come on—let’s hunt him up now, while they’re still scared.”
“Wait, Marston,” I replied. “You get the stuff now. I have a hunch we’ll need it, and that soon. I can find Professor Hornby well enough, and I don’t think the Indians will want any more for some time to come.”
“Right you are!” he exclaimed. “So long then.” And he swung off along my back-track.
* * * *
CHAPTER IV
At Bay!
I had no trouble in finding the Professor. In truth, he found me. He was all but boiling over with excitement, for he had seen something we had not.
“Hawkins,” he exclaimed, grabbing my shoulder fiercely, “did you see them spawn? It is remarkable—absolutely unequalled! The speed of it all— and, Hawkins, they do not have to grow before cleaving. I saw two that divided and redivided into three-inch tetrahedra—over a thousand of them! Think of it—Hawkins, they can overrun our little planet in a few days, once they start! We’re done for!”
“I guess you’re right, Professor,” I replied. “But tell me—have you seen anything of the Indians?”
“The Indians? Yes—there seems to be something wrong with them now, Hawkins. They seem to have lost their reverence for the tetrahedra. These tribes do not paint much, but those I have seen were decorated for battle, and one old man was cursing the things from the edge of the forest, working himself up into a regular frenzy of invective. They may resist, now, if the tetrahedra try to start anything.”
“Marston will be glad to hear that! Right now, I think we had better strike for the high ground across the ravine, where their flame is less likely to reach us. I’ll leave you there and then look for Marston and the guns. We’re going to need them before long.”
“Very well, Hawkins. Your plan sounds good, and I’m glad you found the plane. But where is Valdez? Isn’t he with Marston?”
“No. He’s dead.”
“Dead! You mean—the Indians?”
“Um. They nearly got Marston too, but I had one of the guns. Come on, we’ll pick it up, and my pack of food, and find a place where we can see what happens and still be fairly safe. Follow me.”
We found an ideal fortress, high on the west side of the ravine, where a little spur ran down from the highlands to the valley of the tetrahedra. Indeed, it had been used as a lookout by the ancient inhabitants of the region, ages ago, when great cities of cut stone lay in the valleys now choked by vegetation. Enough of the ancient walls remained to provide a decent bulwark against attack, and I left Professor Hornby with the gun to hold the fort until I could find Marston.
I had little difficulty in locating him, and between us we transferred the supplies from cache to lookout, while the Professor kept a perfunctory guard over them. As a matter of fact, he was more interested in digging around in the ancient floor of potsherds and tools of the former inhabitants. He explained that the ancient Pleistocene wave of immigration from Asia, via Alaska and North America, had split at Panama to pass down both sides of the Andes. On the west, along the coast, arose the ancient American civilizations, culminating in the Incas. On the east were the forest Indians, poor savage creatures of the thick jungles, such as we had seen. And here, on the boundary between these two regions, he sought a link between the two. Perhaps he had found it. We were never to know.
It was two days before the hostilities began. Meanwhile we had found the wreck of the plane, very nearly intact but quite useless in this dense jungle. We drained the tanks of what gasoline they contained, storing it in great glazed jars of painted earthenware that Professor Hornby had found intact in a niche below our present floor-level. His idea was to fight fire with fire, incidentally clearing a space about the spur on which our little fort was perched, so that we could see what we were about in case of trouble.
Marston and I cleared out the brush as best we could, and cut deep slots in the larger trees on the down-hill side. A back-fire is ticklish work in the forest, but we worked it, piling the quickly drying underbrush at the far side of our little swath, saturating it with gasoline, then digging in to one of the Professor’s excavations while the fireworks went off. In a drier climate we would not have lived to tell the tale. As it was, we more or less leveled the thick forest for about two hundred feet on all sides, before the fire petered out, leaving a tangled mess of blackened wreckage that effectively kept us in and others out, as well as clearing the field of view.
Our fire may have served to set off the onslaught of the tetrahedra. Certainly, with the next morning, there was renewed activity in their rocky pocket. They cleared out a sizeable ring of forest before sun-set. The next noon they had another sunfeast, and now the blackened valley was fairly teeming with their angular forms, large and small, for many seemed to have split without growing, as the Professor had seen one do before.
Now, their army of destruction assembled, the tetrahedra began their conquest of Earth! In vast waves of horrid destruction with rays of angry yellow flame darting from apexes their flaming floods of energy swept over the jungle, and now not even its damp dark could resist. Mighty forest-giants toppled headlong, by the cleaving yellow flame, to melt into powdery ash before they touched the ground. Giant lianas writhed like tortured serpents as their juices were vaporized by the awful heat, then dropped away in death to lie in long grey coils along the stripped rock of the forest floor—rock that was fast taking on the glassy glare of the little valley, rock fused by heat such as Earth had never known.
By evening, our spur of rock was a lone peninsula, an oasis in a desert of harsh black, a height which the tetrahedra, for some unknown reason, had not attempted.
Now we could watch their plan of campaign, and our hearts sank in fear for our race, for while half of the tetrahedral army engaged in its holocaust of destruction, the remaining half fed and spawned in the full blaze of the sun. With every day dozens of square miles were added to their hellish domain and thousands of tetrahedra to their unnatural army. For now we could see that more and more of them were taking the second course, were splitting into hosts of tiny, three-inch creatures which, within a few days’ time, had swelled to full size and on the following day could spawn anew! It was dreadful, but now we were hopelessly isolated—an island in a sea of black rock, untouched as yet by the blasting fires, but utterly unable to save ourselves or our world.
* * * *
Aside from the vegetation which they were so methodically blasting, the Mercutian tetrahedra—for such Professor Hornby swore they were and such we later found them to be—had not yet come into real contact with the life of our planet, much less its master, Man. The worship of the Indians had been carried on from afar, and we ourselves were careful not to tempt our visitors from space. Now all that was changed in something of a double-barreled fashion. It began with the Indians. It ended with us.
Now that we were shut off from the jungle, we no longer sensed the unease and stealthy activity of the forest people. Their gods had betrayed them—perhaps they thought them devils now—their sacrifice had been interrupted and their chief men slaughtered unmercifully by the slayers of their half-white brother. Their whole life and legend had gone wrong. The tetrahedra were to blame, and the tetrahedra must pay!
The invaders did not start their daily program of devastation until the sun was high. Of late, the people of the forest had become creatures of the night, and so it was that Marston roused us about midnight to watch the fun, as he put it. As a matter of fact, we all realized that what the Indians did would probably be of vital importance to our own situation.
The spheres were too small to hold all the tetrahedral hosts, now, and they lay crowded in great confocal ovals about them, sleeping, if such things can be said to sleep. The first indication of the attack was a tiny fire of leaves and twigs on the rocks above the ravine, now choked with slabs of rock scaled from its walls by the terrific heat. It was barely visible —merely a smudge in size, kindled for some magical purpose. Then there came a low, wailing chant, rising swiftly in vehemence and bitter hatred— a curse designed to blast the unearthly invaders where they lay. Professor Hornby was fairly gasping at the enormously ancient background of legend and superstition which it revealed, when it suddenly broke in a shrill, senile yammer of sheer madness! The strain was more than the old priest could stand.
As in answer, other, greater fires sprang up all along the walls of the valley, and by their light we could see the Indians closing in from the edge of the forest—thousands of them, drawn to worship over untold leagues of jungle paths, and now racing into battle with all the mad fanaticism of an outraged religion! It was like a tidal wave of screeching humanity, pouring down over the black rock to break over the sleeping tetrahedra! Yet, as the last Indian burst from shelter of the jungle, the attacking force was revealed as pitifully small, compared to the ranks of those whom they attacked. Like a great city of black, tetrahedral tents the Mercutians lay, dim-lit by the failing moon, as if unaware of the savage swarm, led by its gibbering priest, that raced upon them. But they were far from unaware!
It was I who first noticed the faint, rosy glow that hung over the silent ranks—a glow like that which had brought down my plane. I whispered to Marston, and he told me that it had not been there before—that the tetrahedra must be awake, and waiting!
He was right. The red glow was spreading swiftly, out over the valley floor, and there must have been another, invisible emanation that preceded it, for I saw the old priest falter, beat with clawed fists at an unseen wall, then topple with a choking scream and lie still. Now, all round the valley, the first ranks of the savages were meeting this slowly advancing wall of unseen death—meeting it, and falling before it! In long windrows they lay, body after body piling up before the momentum of the unleashed rush of the red-skinned hordes! Stones, arrows, spears flew through the thickening red mist to clatter harmlessly upon the quiescent tetrahedra! But not as harmlessly as it seemed, for here and there among them showed a little spurt of pale blue flame as one of the smaller things was crushed by a hurtling stone! They were hard, but their skins of crystal were thin, and a well-flung stone might break them! They were not invulnerable!
The Indians sensed this, too, for they had deserted spears and darts in favor of a hail of stones, large and small, that clattered among the tetrahedra in a veritable downpour, dealing really telling destruction among those who had not attained a fair size.
The savages were yelling in triumph, now, thrilled with success, and their blind onslaught was checked, but still the invisible barrier crept on, dealing death all along their evilly grimacing front, and still the rose-red haze followed after, dissolving the crumpled bodies in fine white ash that in turn vanished in the deepening red. The yelling circle was thinning fast, yet they had not realized the futility of their attack when suddenly the tetrahedra deserted quiet defense for active combat!
The cause was evident. Five Indians on the upslope had shoved over the cliff a huge rounded boulder that bounded like a live thing among the rocks and crashed full into the side of a great eight-foot tetrahedron, splintering its flinty flank and freeing the pent-up energy in a blinding torrent of blue flame that cascaded over the nearby ledges, fusing them into a white-hot, smoking pool of molten lava that glowed evilly in the ill-lit gloom! It was the last straw! The mad attack had become a thing of real menace to the tetrahedra, and they sprang into swift retribution. From their apexes they flashed out the flaming yellow streaks of destruction.
Now at last the Indians broke and fled before the advancing hordes, but flight came too late, for the tetrahedra were aroused and they gave no quarter! Long tongues of yellow reached out, beating down like awful flails on the fleeing savages and searing them with swift agony, dropping them in their tracks, driving them down in shapeless horror against the smoking rock, where the scarlet sea swept over them and dissolved them in drifting, fusing ash! The doomed Indians seemed to float in a yellow sea and what the sea touched was gone in an instant! Before that awful barrage nothing living could stand!
Of a sudden the tragedy was borne forcibly to our own quarter, as a handful of Indians sought the refuge of our rocky spur! Like brown apes they scrambled up its precipitous side toward our fortress and burrowed through the tangled debris of our back-fire. They were men like ourselves, men in awful danger of their lives, and Marston and Hornby sprang to the parapet, shouting at them in their native tongue. But the frightened savage knows no friend, and their reply was a volley of long arrows that toppled the Professor into my arms and sent Marston cursing for the guns! Lips set grimly, he sprayed the rocky slope with whining leaden death, mowing down the frenzied savages as I had done in the place of sacrifice! At sight of us, their madness burst forth anew and they broke their flight to rush our pinnacle, voices raised in wild vituperation!
* * * *
Laying Professor Hornby under the shelter of the wall, I dragged out the other gun and kicked open a case of ammunition, joining Marston in the defense of the fort. That other time I had had surprise and superstition to aid me in my single-handed victory, but now we two were leagued against outraged fanaticism, and the odds were great. Like locusts they came on, from every side, eyes red with blood-lust, teeth bared in hate-beasts of the jungle, ravening for the kill! It was the debris of our backfire, piled in a matted belt around the spur, that saved us, for here the mad charge must halt and here our guns took their toll. Nor were we two alone, for now I heard the crack of a rifle and knew that Professor Hornby was covering the ledge of rock that ran back at our rear to join us to the hills.
Even so, I think our defense must have failed but for the tetrahedra. They had not been slow to recognize the changed nature of the Indians’ fight, and they turned that realization to their own advantage, curving around the spur to cut off a second retreat, then laying down their fiery yellow barrage upon the rear of the clamoring savage host, licking them up as a bear licks ants. It was a matter of minutes before the last Indian lay in grey ash on the rocky slope of the crag.
For a moment matters were at a deadlock. We paused and took stock-three men with their guns against thousands of tetrahedra, armed with lightnings. Hornby had slumped back against the low wall, his eyes closed, his spare frame racked with coughs that brought back blood to his twisted lips. An arrow had pierced his lungs. Marston dropped the machine-gun, now smoking-hot, and grabbed up a rifle. I followed suit. So for perhaps two minutes the rival forces held silent, waiting.
The Mercutians took the initiative. Their yellow tongues of flame crept slowly up the hillside, scouring it clean—up, up toward our little refuge on the peak. Now they began to glide forward, on every side, beginning the ascent. In answer our rifles rang out, and now there was no doubt as to their vulnerability, for wherever the steel-jacketed lead hit, there the thin crystal splintered and the night was lit by the glare of freed energy, the life-blood of the tetrahedra! We could not save ourselves, but we would do no puny damage!
Now came a dull thunder from the rear, and by the dim light of the red mist I could see the giant leader of the Mercutians, standing at the summit of the cliff above the valley, commanding the attack. In reply, the yellow barrage began to beat upward along the rock, toward us, and with the same signal a faint, blurred scheme leapt into my fuddled brain! I raised my rifle, fired—not at the advancing front but farther back, into the body of the horde, slowly driving my fire back toward the giant commander, picking off monster after angular monster, nearer and nearer to where he squatted!
Then he was flinching, gliding back before the sea of flame that burst around him as his crystal warriors fell, and in reply I brought down one after another of those toward whom he was retreating, hemming him in with death, threatening—but not striking! I cannot tell why we did not destroy him, for Marston had followed suit, neglecting the threat of the flame, which waned and died as the tetrahedra woke to the meaning of our fire. Somehow we felt that it was wiser to spare him, and our intuition was good. For a moment he hesitated, then thundered his drumming command, and the ranks of the tetrahedra drew slowly back, leaving us in peace and safety.
So we remained, virtually prisoners, for eight days. On the third, Professor Hornby died—a blessing, for he suffered greatly. He was the only one who really understood these tetrahedra, and we shall never know how he deduced that they were from Mercury, a fact which Marston later proved. The archaeological data collected by the expedition are lost, too, since both he and Valdez are dead and we could bring out no specimens. The tetrahedra left us alone, barring us from flight with their haze of red energy, which extended up the slope to a level above that of the saddle connecting us with the forested mountain-slopes. Meanwhile they continued their barrage of the jungle, laying it waste on every side, mile after mile, day after day.
Through the binoculars we had watched them slowly advance, and noted their very human surprise as they burned the covering jungle from the great ruined city which the expedition had sought. It was their first real experience with the works of Man, and it caused a great commotion among them. Led by the purple giant, they swarmed over and through its ruined labyrinth, studying its every niche and angle, learning it. Here was their proof that Earth harbored a civilization—that they might expect real opposition. I do not think they ever realized that our puny defense was a fair example of what that civilization could do.
Later in the same day they found the wreck of the plane, and this time consternation indeed reigned. Here was a machine of some sort, evidently the product of that civilization that they feared. Moreover, it was recent where the city was ancient. Could it mean that they were watched—that the unseen creatures of this unknown ruling race were lurking in the dark of the jungle, with their engines of war and destruction—waiting? Now, as never before in their descent on Earth, the tetrahedra were faced by the stark blankness of the utterly unknown, and I think that they began to be afraid.
The little valley was still the center of their activity, and every day we watched their spawning as the sun rode high, saw the piling up of the hordes that would overwhelm our race and planet, and make of it a dead, black thing like that little pocket on the east slope of the Andes. There was always a double ring of the tetrahedra about us now, and their aim-son sea of energy beat high about our prison. The giant who led them came often to observe us, to sit and stare with invisible eyes at our fortress and ourselves. Their drumming speech had grown familiar, too, and I felt that it would not be hard to understand, given the key to its meaning.
Marston seemed fascinated with the things and their ways. There was a spring, just above the limit of the red haze, where we got our water, and he would sit there by the hour, as close to the things as he could get, watching and listening. I could see him sway to the rhythm of their thunderous speech, see his lips move in low response, and I wondered if he were going mad.
Ever since Marston had first mentioned Professor Hornby’s theory that the things were Mercutians, I had been trying to find some way of verifying it. Now that we were in semi-intimate terms with the tetrahedra, I wondered if I might not get them, somehow, to supply this evidence. I thought of stories I had read of interplanetary communication—of telepathy, of word-association, of sign-language. They had all seemed far-fetched to me, impossible of attainment, but I resolved to try my hand at the last.
There was some rather soft rock in the structure of the watch-tower, and as Valdez had rescued my tool kit from the plane, I had a hammer and chisel. With these, and a faulty memory, I set out to make a rough scale diagram of the inner planets, leaning a bit on the Professor’s theory. I cut circular grooves for the orbits of the four minor planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars—and dug a deep central pit. In this I set a large nugget of gold, found in the ruins of the fortress, for the Sun, and in the grooves a tiny black pebble for Mercury, a large white one for Venus, and a jade bead from the ruins for Earth. Earth had a very small white moon, in its own deep-cut spiral orbit. Mars was a small chunk of rusty iron with two grains of sand for moons. I had a fair-sized scale, and there was no room for more.
Now I was prepared to attempt communication with the tetrahedra, but I wanted more than one diagram to work with. Consequently I attempted a map of Earth, with hollowed oceans and low mountain-ridges. All this took plenty of time and trouble, but Marston was not at all in evidence, and I was not sorry, for my scheme seemed rather pointless, and I did not relish his ridicule.
* * * *
CHAPTER V
Face to Face
So things stood when the tropical storm broke over us. Its cause is not hard to explain. Remember, when those scathing fires blasted the jungle, all the superabundant moisture of the region was vaporized. Even our little spring, as it ran down into the crimson haze, vanished in plumes of steam as it passed the scarce visible boundary between life and death. To add to this, during all the long summer, the sun had been literally boiling the moisture out of the rain-forests all over the Amazon Basin. The air was nearly saturated with water-vapor, though the rainy season was normally a month off. The electrical disturbances set up by the continual barrage of fire added to the general effect. Things were ripe for a storm, and it camel
A cloud-burst, it would be called in the United States. The heavens opened in the night, and water fell in torrents, streaming from every angle of the rock, standing in pools wherever a hollow offered itself, drenching us and the world through and through. Day came, but there was no sun for the tetrahedra to feed on. Nor were they thinking of feeding, for very definite peril threatened them. To the tetrahedra, water was death!
As I have said, their fires had flaked huge slabs of rock from the walls of the ravine leading from the high-walled valley where they slept, choking its narrow throat with shattered stone. And now that the mountain slopes, shorn of soil and vegetation, were pouring water into its bed, the stream that had carved that ravine found its course dammed—rose against it, poured over it, but not until the valley had become a lake, a lake where only the two pearly spheres floated against the rocky wall, the thousands of tetrahedra gone forever—dissolved!
Water was death to them—dissolution! Only in the shelter of the spheres was there safety, and they were long since crowded. The hordes of the tetrahedral monsters perished miserably in the night, before they could summon the forces that might have spun them a fiery canopy of arching lightnings that would drive the water back in vapor and keep them safely dry beneath. A hundred had come in the twin spheres. A hundred thousand had been born. A bare hundred remained. Our way of escape was clear!
But escape had been possible before, and we stayed then as now. Flight was delay—nothing more. A miracle might save us, and I think we believed in miracles. So we vainly sought shelter from the deluge in the ruins of the tower, and stared through the falling rain at the two spheres, now clear of the water and perched on the ravine’s edge, above the dam.
Our ‘local shower” lasted for three days. Then came the sun, and the mountains began to drain. Only the new-born lake remained to remind us of the rains, a lake stained deep violet with the slowly dissolving bodies of the crystal tetrahedra. Those in the two spheres waited for a day, then came forth to survey the ruins of their campaign—the giant leader and a scant hundred of his richly purple subordinates. And now, too, came proof of the method in Marston’s madness.
The tetrahedra had resumed their guard about the base of our crag, although the crimson barrage did not beat so high nor so vividly. Their master squatted outside the ring, brooding, watching us—perhaps pondering our connection with the tempest that had wrecked his hopes. And now Marston took under his arm the great Indian drum that I had brought away from the place of sacrifice, a drum of ancient ritual, headed with well-tanned human skin, and stalked down the slope to confront the tetrahedra. I stuck by the guns and waited.
I can see them yet, giant leaders of two utterly different races, born on two planets sixty millions of miles apart at their nearest, inherently opposite and inherently enemies, squatting there on the black rock, watching each other! A rumble of speech from the great leader and the rose-hue of the barrage deepened, climbed higher about the crag. A bluff, it was. Marston did not move.
And then he took up the great drum. He had cared for it as for a child during the long rain, sheltering it as best he could, testing the tautness of its grisly membrane, drying it carefully with sun and fire during all the previous day. Now I learned the reason.
Slowly, softly, using the heel of his palm and his fingers in quick succession, he began to drum. This was not the rhythmic throb of native dances, not the choppy voice of signal drums. Faster, ever faster the great drum of sacrifice boomed forth its message, until the beats melted into a low, continuous thunder of bottomless sound, mounting in volume to a steady, rolling roar, rising and swelling in delicate inflection. His wrist must have been wonderfully strong and flexible to so control the sound! On and on in great throbbing billows rolled the drumming, and but for its thunder all the world lay still—Marston and I on the slope of the spur, the tetrahedra about its base, the purple giant beyond, on the shore of the lake. On and on, thundering through my brain in dull, insistent beatings of dead surf on the beaches of a dead world, possessing me, filling me, speaking to me in the voice of the storm—speaking—that was it! Marston was speaking to the tetrahedra with the voice of his giant drum!
During those long, empty days on the crag-side he had been listening, learning, drilling into his scientist’s brain the meaning of every voiced command that the great master of the Mercutian tetrahedra thundered to his crystal hosts, learning their inflections, storing them in his mind! He had memorized a simple vocabulary—sounds that signified the great commander, the horde, the tetrahedra as a class; simple verbs for coming and going, for altering the barrage; words for human beings, for their planet and our own—a host of nouns and verbs that even yet seem beyond the power of any man to glean from the muttering of an alien race, coupled with the actions that fitted the words. But Marston had learned, and with the sullen voice of the giant drum he was replying, in rough, broken, ill-chosen words, falteringly expressed, words that the tetrahedron understood!
For the crimson mist faded, vanished. The crystal ranks split, and through the lane between them glided the giant ruler, coming to where Marston sat with his drum. He stopped, spoke in words very like those that Marston had used—simple words, such as our own babies learn, roughly connected.
“What—you?”
And the drum: “We—tetrahedra—Earth.” I translate rudely, as they spoke. His words were not so literal as I must make them, to suit our limited tongue—were ideas, rather than words. And yet, they got their message across!
The giant was startled. How could we, misshapen, flabby monstrosities, be rulers of a planet, equal to themselves? He was incredulous:
“You—tetrahedra?”
The drum muttered approval, as for a fulfilled command. The idea had been transferred, but the purple giant did not seem to think much of it.
“You—weak! (Easily vulnerable, like vegetation, was the sense of the term used.) You—dead—easy. (Here he used a term with which he had designated the tetrahedra shattered in the battle with the Indians.) We— tetrahedra—our planet—and Earth!”
There wasn’t much answer to that one. They could rule both planets with ease. And yet—Marston called to me.
“Hawkins, bring down those stones you’ve been chipping, and a flask of water. Wait—bring two flasks, and a gun.”
So he had seen me at work and guessed my plan. Well, his own beat it hollow, but if he had an idea, I wasn’t going to hinder him. I lugged the slabs down and went back for the stoppered canteens of water and the gun. At his directions I set one flask against the rock of the hillside, above him. He took the other. And all the while his drum was murmuring reassurance to the giant and his horde.
“You work the slabs, Hawkins,” he said, “while I talk. I’ll translate, and you act accordingly.” The drum spoke:
“Sun—Sun—Sun.” He pointed. “Your Sun—our Sun.”
The tetrahedron approved. He came from our own Solar System.
Now he was pointing to my diagram, to the Sun, the Earth and its orbit. “Sun. Sun. Earth. Earth.” I rolled the jade bead slowly along its groove, the white moon-pebble following in its spiral course. I rolled the other planets, showed him their colors and relative sizes. Marston was drumming again, as I touched planet after planet, questioning.
“Your planet—your planet? Your planet—what? This?”
The giant disapproved. It was not Mars.
“This?” It was anything but Venus! Venus must have been pretty wet for the completest comfort
Eagerly—”This?” Assent! The Professor was right! They came from Mercury! But Marston wanted to be sure. He found a white speck of quartz in the black stone that was Mercury, and now he turned it to the golden Sun—held it there as Mercury revolved slowly in its orbit. There was emphatic approval. Mercury it was—the planet with one side always to the Sun. So far, so good. Marston took my other plaque—the relief map of Earth.
“Earth—Earth.”
Yes, the Mercutian recognized it. He had seen it thus from space.
With a crystal of quartz, Marston gouged our particular section of South America, pointed to the ground, to the lake, the forests. “This—this,” he said.
More approval. They knew where they were, all right.
Now he reopened a closed subject. He started up the monotone of reassurance, then superimposed on it a few deft words.
“You—tetrahedra—Mercury.” They sure were!
“We—tetrahedra—Earth!” Not so good! He repeated: “You—Mercury. We—Earth. We—tetrahedra!” There were evident signs of dissent! Marston swelled the reassurance-tone, then added a sharp call to attention, raised his gun, fired twice, threw the weapon down, and redoubled his assurance of well-meaning and safety.
His aim had been good. The flask was pierced at top and bottom, and a thin stream of water was jetting forth, trickling over the glassy rock toward us. It made a little pool at his feet, lipped over, and the double rank of tetrahedra drew back to let it pass. It formed another little pool, close to the base of their giant leader. He wasn’t taking bluffs! A flash of blinding energy and the pool was steam and the rock white-hot! Marston learned another word.
“Water—dead! We—tetrahedra—Mercury and Earth!”
Not so good! Marston tried another.
“You—tetrahedra—Mercury. Water—tetrahedron—Earth!”
An alarming idea that! Water the lord of Earth!
“Water—no—dead!” Decided negation in the drum. He pointed. True enough, the steam was condensing and running down the smooth rock in little droplets. Water could not be killed! It always came back!
“We—tetrahedra—water!”
Phew! That was a statement! He proved it. He dabbled his fingers in the pool at his feet, took some up in his hand and slicked back his hair. I gave a thunderous grunt by way of attracting attention, uncapped the other canteen, and poured a long and very visible stream of water down my throat. Marston took the canteen and did the same, then sent me for more water, a pailful.
“Water—tetrahedron—Earth!” he reiterated. He illustrated his point, dipped water from the pail with much splashing and poured it over my relief of the Earth, filling the hollows of the seas. He emphasized it, with a gloomy note in his drumming. “Water—tetrahedron—Earth. Water. Water!”
He had another hunch, rolled Venus around its orbit. “What?” asked the drum. He was answered, glumly. He dipped Venus in the water. Venus was pumice and floated.
“Water—tetrahedron—Venus?” Oh, decidedly. The purple giant was sure of that. Marston tried Mercury. Mercury sank. Time after time it sank. Water didn’t like Mercury.
“You — tetrahedra — Mercury. Water—no —tetrahedron —Mercury.” A pause. Then slowly, ominously—”Water— tetrahedron—you!”
And he was right. Water had them licked. I had a bright idea, and Marston moved camp to the brink of the lake, striding like a conqueror between the double file of tetrahedra. Arrived beside the water, with the giant fairly close and the army very much in the background, I stripped and dove in—”brought up bottom”—brought up a chunk of half-dissolved purple crystal! Marston rubbed it in, gleefully.
“Water—tetrahedron—you!” They had to admit it. Now he tried to coin a word—pointed to the sky and shuffled syllables on the drum. “Up—up. Water—up.” The giant caught on and supplied the correct term. Marston coined a real one—a genial, murmurous “Thank-you”—on his drum. I tried my hand again, dipped up a bucket of water and doused Marston, then stepped toward the great tetrahedron with another. He retreated. I wallowed in it myself instead—childish, but convincing. By now the idea was definitely set that water was rank poison to the tetrahedra and a second home to us. Now for the real information!
Marston drummed attention and reassurance, and the great leader glided back, carefully avoiding puddles. I could see that he floated about three inches clear of the ground. Perhaps, with the lesser gravitation of Mercury, he flew.
I started demonstrating my little Solar System again, while Marston announced again that Earth was largely water—no fit place for tetrahedra —water that could be killed, but that came down again in rain. He drilled in the idea of rain, until he was sure he had made his point, securing various Mercutian expressions of disgust and dislike. He found a word for “rain”—really coined one, for it did not seem to exist in Mercutian. It was a combination of “water” and “up,” so as to be quite clear, with a double-ruffle of emphasis to characterize it. The etymology of the word was quite clear to all concerned. They knew what rain was, now.
I had poked a hole through the soft, thin rock of Mercury’s orbit and put clay plugs in Earth’s orbit at diametrically opposite points. Now Marston demonstrated. He poured water on Mercury. It vanished.
“Mercury—no—rain. No!” The entire host had crowded in, and there was a general murmur of assent
Venus, on the other hand, being a deep groove, held plenty of water. “Venus—rain. Water—tetrahedron—Venus.”
They got that, too. Weather of Venus is ideal for ducks and frogs—wot for tetrahedra.
He moved out one planet, and I could feel a tensing. They knew what he was driving at! He was going to describe weather-conditions of Earth. Half Earth’s orbit held water to the brim. The other half was rather damp. He slowly moved Earth around her circles, showing that six months were wet and six not so wet. He took to the drum for emphasis.
“Water—tetrahedron—Earth. We—tetrahedron—water. Water—tetrahedron—you.” A delicate inference. Then, slowly, emphatically, “Water—Venus. Water—Earth.” And now his final card.
He set Mercury in its orbit, placed Venus almost opposite, paused. The giant assented. That was where the planets were at present. He skipped Earth and went to Mars, rolled it along its orbit, stopped it. Assent. All true, so far. And now I saw his point, for when he dropped Earth in place, very nearly in line between Mars and Mercury, it fell in the middle of the dry half of the orbit!
A hundred tetrahedra slid back a yard or so in recoil. This rain which had drowned out practically all of their army of thousands, was an example of our dry season! By inference, our real wet weather must have been sheer Mercutian hell to every tetrahedron of them!
But Marston was too good a diplomat to give them a hands off without suggesting an alternative. He slowly poured water on Mars. Mars apparently, and actually, had a hole in its bottom, for it drained bone dry. Mars, now, was very nice. But Earth was nasty and wet, as bad as Venus or worse. And it was inhabited by a race of super-intelligent fish, to judge from the impression he gave the tetrahedra. He picked up the drum for a last word.
“Earth—rain. Mars—no—rain. We—Earth. You—no—Earth. You—Mars?” He dwelt on the question. “Mars? Mars???” He rolled out an endless question-mark, then suddenly quit, took a long, flashing drink of water from the flask, and dove into the lake, clothes and all. I followed him, and together we splashed to the other shore, making our mastery of the water very evident, then climbed out, waiting. If things worked out, all well and good. If they didn’t—well, we had the lake between us.
And it did work! For a moment they stood motionless, the mighty sixteen-foot tetrahedron of royal purple and his eight-foot purple retinue, silent, considering. Then came a sudden command, and the hundred flowed in orderly motion to the spheres, entered. Their mighty master was alone. For an instant he hesitated, then swept forward to the very edge of the lake. From this towering peak beat the white lightnings, lashing the purple waters into great billowing clouds of steam that threw up a dense wall of mist between us! Through the hiss of the steam came his thunderous voice, in last comment upon the invasion of his tetrahedral race! Marston translated, softly:
“Water—tetrahedron—Earth. You—tetrahedron—water. We—kill—water! You—Earth. We—Mars. Mars!” And a long, rolling assent, an infinitely underlined YES!”
Water and Earth seemed to be synonymous, and we were perfectly at ease in that dangerous element. For all that, they, the tetrahedra of Mercury, could “kill” it, which, by inference, we could not. They weren’t going to admit defeat, by Man or water, but this was a big Solar System. We could have our soggy Earth! They were going to Mars!
Up from behind the wall of “killed” water rose two great, glorious pearls, marvelously opalescent in the rays of the setting sun—up and up, smaller and smaller, until they vanished into the deepening blue above the Andes. Ironically, it began to rain.