Godson of Almarlu: A Collection of Science Fiction Novellas, Page 2

  Janice's face grew serious. "You say those things because you do not know Hekki," she said. "Shall I tell you about him? It would relieve me to share my knowledge with someone."

  The young man nodded but made no comment.

  "Two years ago," she began, "I went to Taboor on Mars to study sculpture. Not long after my arrival at school, in the company of a number of other art students, I attended a ball given at a glorious old palace in the heart of the ancient Martian quarter. Our gracious host was Hekalu Selba himself. I met him, danced with him, and talked with him. From the first he was attracted to me and I to him, and so we were often together.

  "Though some of his peculiar affectations were obnoxious to me, I thought that his good qualities far overbalanced his failings. He seemed always kind and considerate in his dealings with all about him; he was well informed on almost every possible subject; he painted pictures and played various musical instruments with a skill that was little short of genius, and his tales of his travels and adventures in the little-known region beyond the orbits of the minor planets could not fail to delight any listeners. Dreamer and brilliant artist—that was Hekki as I saw him then. Effeminate—yes, but brave and resourceful too.

  "Our intimacy grew. He made frequent proposals of marriage to me, but I put him off, saying that I was not sure I loved him. I informed Father back here in Chicago of our friendship. His next letter showed plainly his enthusiasm over the idea of the possible marriage of his daughter with this young noble of the ancient Martian house of Selba. 'Get him, Jan,' he wrote. 'He'd be the catch of a lifetime. Why, his total assets would make the treasure of Crœsus look like a little piece of twisted copper wire.' Poor practical old Dad! For once his business judgment was in the wrong. It was well that I did not follow his advice."

  At this point Jan's story was interrupted by the sudden dropping of the plane. They had reached their destination. The craft descended vertically and landed with a light impact in the center of a small private roof garden at the summit of a great apartment building.

  "Dad won't be home now," said Jan. "He was delayed in New York, and will not appear until tomorrow. There isn't anyone else around here except old Rufus, so we needn't go down stairs. Let's sit over there instead." She pointed toward a quaintly wrought bench beside a splashing fountain. The moon was shining, and the solitary cypress tree cast a spear-like shadow over the pool. There was a faint fragrance of flowers in the night.

  Janice and Shelby seated themselves and the girl continued:

  "Shortly after my meeting with Hekalu Selba rumors began to come to me. Men died mysteriously, and there were people who made vague hints that my noble friend was responsible. An uncle of Hekki's had made him the principal heir to his fortune—shortly afterward the uncle contracted a virulent disease and passed away. On both planets men that were obnoxious to Hekki were murdered—capable business rivals and people who perhaps 'knew too much.' Always the circumstances of their deaths were peculiar. Frequently they were found in locked rooms to which an assassin could scarcely have gained entrance without breaking his way. But such violent methods had not been used. Never was there a shred of evidence to implicate the noble.

  "But I was beginning to see Hekalu's true color. The lavish display of his wealth—his estates and his art treasures, and the endless round of good times he sought to provide, were merely an attempt to cover up his wickedness. One afternoon that I was with him, he was under the influence of the Elar drug. His face was red and his eyes gleamed with a wicked light. He proposed to me again, and when I made an angry refusal he threatened me—said that if there was another whom I loved he would destroy him and me too.

  "That, I assured myself, was the end. Hekki tried to make up, but when he found that I would have nothing to do with him he vanished. I think he went off into the outer regions of the solar system again. He was gone for a long time, and I devoted myself entirely to my studies.

  "Then suddenly, out of the blue, I received a letter from Hekki. It came from a small village far to the west of Taboor. A gift accompanied it. Hekki informed me that in a valley far out in the unexplored Taraal desert he had run across a ruined city built by the Melbar kings some seventy-five thousand years ago. He hoped to make an enormous fortune from the art treasures he had found there.

  "The gift and the small photograph he sent me, I shall show you at the first opportunity. They are packed away now. The former is a dagger with a flexible blade of a shiny black substance unknown to me. It does not seem to be metal. The hilt is a lump of platinum. It is carved to represent some strange animal with scores of coiling tentacles. Hekki says that the object is one of his treasures, found on the site of the ancient city. But I have doubted this. I know something of the art of the Melbar kings, and certainly the dagger does not resemble the products of their craftsmen. The same is true of those wares of Hekki's which my friends have bought. They are strange—belonging neither to Earth nor Mars.

  "The picture too is equally puzzling. It depicts a night scene in a desert valley. Jagged hills in the distance and the nearer moon of Mars in the sky. The floor of the valley is in shadow and things there are indistinct. There are shapes there—vast shapes, odd and grotesque. And there is something in the foreground which might be almost human!

  "In his letter Hekki asked if he might see me again, and I immediately wrote and told him that I would. To you, Austin, this probably seems a crazy thing to do, but like most everyone who is young, I had a genuine love for intrigue and mystery, even though they might be dangerous things to meddle with.

  "Hekalu came to Taboor, but I saw comparatively little of him. He seemed always to be tremendously busy. Sometimes he would be extravagantly jubilant, as though he had met with some tremendous success, or again he would apparently be worried almost to the point of madness. What these emotional changes meant, he would never tell me.

  "Several times old Alka, his favorite slave, spoke to me. 'The Master is not as he used to be, Miss Darell,' he would say. 'He works feverishly with odd mechanisms, and every night when he is at home he stares out into space toward the farther planets with his new super-telescope. Always, what he sees makes his face turn white and hard; sometimes, he smiles and sometimes his features look like a devil's mask.'

  "And still Hekki's weird treasures continued, and still continue to come from the Taraal.

  "A group of men was sent by the heads of the Place of Knowledge out into the desert to investigate. They disappeared. The officials of the Planetary Patrol made only a hasty and unsuccessful investigation.

  "On the day of my departure from Mars, after having finished my course, I saw Hekki, believing that it was for the last time. He said he was going back into the Taraal. And then he popped up on the liner. And that, Austin, is all I know about Hekalu Selba. What do you make of it? What is he trying to do out there in the desert?" She placed her hand lightly on Shelby's arm and looked up appealingly into his face. "Can't you offer some suggestions, Austin? You know that when suspicious events are troubling you, a plausible explanation eases your mind even though you cannot know the truth. And I am afraid, afraid that he is deliberately following me to Earth!"

  While Jan had been telling of her acquaintance with the Martian, Austin had been staring at a very large Sadu moth which hovered, and leisurely moved about on thrumming gorgeous wings, which spanned fully eighteen inches. It moved from blossom to blossom in a nearby flower bed, delicately sipping nectar. Always its great luminous eyes, which glowed like coals of gleaming fire, were turned toward the pair. Shelby had scarcely noticed it, for he was absorbed with the girl's account; but now, when it edged closer towards them, and then made a sudden mischievous swoop not six inches above their heads, its presence could no longer be ignored. The girl gave an exclamation of revulsion and shrank involuntarily toward her companion. He leaped to his feet, and picking up a pebble from beside the fountain, hurled it at the night prowler.

  "You dirty eavesdropper!" he shouted angrily. "The man who brou
ght your kind from Mars for ornamental purposes must have been crazy!"

  The moth buzzed up into the cypress tree and squatted there, silently, apparently resting. Only its eyes continued to glare fixedly, almost malignantly at the occupants of the garden. But they quickly forgot about its presence.

  "I don't know whether I can offer a sensible explanation for Hekalu's actions or not, Jan," Shelby said. "However, as far as his activities in the Taraal are concerned, it seems quite possible that he did discover ruins there, and is trying to keep other fortune seekers away. The ruins may of course not really belong to the Melbar dynasty. They might have been built by some contemporary race. Just what he is doing among the minor planets, we can't any more than guess at. Probably he's just adventuring like a few other people. And as for his following you to Earth—well, I admit that you do seem to be popular!"

  "You're making it sound awfully simple, Austin," said Jan. She paused and thought for a moment, and then, with seeming irrelevance she continued: "Haven't you heard of queer clusters of luminous specks recently seen by astronomers not far beyond Mars? They called them meteor clusters, but they drifted about here and there, not following definite paths as meteors should do."

  "You're trying to suggest that they are space ships, aren't you, Jan?"

  She nodded.

  "But they aren't," Shelby assured her. "They don't polarize the reflected light of the sun as space ships do. Besides, where could they have been built? Certainly not among the planetoids. And any place on the planets, the Taraal desert for instance, would be an almost equally impossible site for their construction.

  "Think of the enormous crews of men and the vast supplies of food and water and materials that would have to be taken out there into the wilderness. Undoubtedly Hekalu could back such a project financially, but he would be discovered before he had made a fair start, and the Martian Planet Patrol would wipe him out of existence. Still, though I don't think that the luminous specks are man-built vessels, I am equally certain that they aren't meteors either."

  "Then what are they?"

  The young man smiled and shrugged. "I don't know," he said. The intuitive feeling that unknown, and not too beneficient forces were at work in the ether about, was troubling him again, making his scalp muscles tingle.

  For a moment Shelby stared at the ground. "Jan," he said, "I didn't tell you what I saw on the liner. I didn't tell anyone because I don't want to be called a lunatic. But I guess it's all right to let you in on this now. Briefly, during the sleep period, I came upon Hekalu Selba prowling in a passageway aboard the Ekova, in the company of a vague thing that may have been similar to that shape in the photograph—long arms, big head, squat and muscular. If we knew what that thing was, and where it came from, the snarl might be half untangled."

  Janice Darell's face took on a sudden surprised look. "You actually saw what you say you saw?" she cried. When her companion nodded, she continued excitedly with wide-open eyes. "I still believe that Hekalu knows something about the meteor cluster. And the beast figures in somewhere too. Austin," she cried, "what if Hekki is trying something really great? I know you don't take stock in any such idea, but just supposing he is—what if—"

  "Let him try!" the young man cut in. "I almost wish he would! I'm afraid he would get the surprise of his life." He was staring straight at the unwinking, malignant eyes of the Sadu moth.

  "What do you mean?"

  Shelby drew a small black case from his sleeve pocket and opened it. He took from it a device which looked like a tiny pistol. There were several other odds and ends of mechanisms in the case. "For a year I have been working on a new weapon," he said. "All the parts are completed, and tonight I shall finish assembling them. This little gun is the projector for a new ray which I have discovered—an etheric vibration of extremely short wavelength. A portion of the atomic energy in any solid or liquid substance the ray touches is instantly released.

  "You doubt whether it is effective? Well, I can't give you any proof now; I can only say that when I was back on Mars, fooling with my first cumbersome projector, which produced only the weakest of vibrations, I blasted a big hole in the wall of my apartment, and nearly killed the Martian physician who lived in the rooms next to mine. I had a devil of a time explaining the explosion, and narrowly missed getting myself into serious trouble. In a few days I shall try to sell the weapon to the Earth Government. If they are convinced of its value, and I don't see how they can help but be convinced, our friend from the Red Planet will have to be very careful if he tries anything."

  Shelby glanced at his wrist watch. "Eleven thirty—my bed time," he said with mock seriousness. "But Jan, there's one favor I want to ask you before I go. Try not to see anymore of Hekalu Selba, Akar."

  Janice Darell made a valiant attempt to act the part of one whose pride and sense of freedom had been deeply outraged. "Mr. Shelby," she said, "what right have you to tell me what I shall or shall not do?" But a light laugh broke from her lips and spoiled her bluff.

  "There are two reasons," replied her companion seriously. "First, because we both believe that Hekalu Selba is dangerous; second—because I love you." He leaned closer toward her with the light of eagerness in his eyes. "Oh, I know I'm crude, Jan," he said passionately. "I'm just a clumsy engineer, not a poet or ladies' man. What I'm trying to say to you must seem awfully trite, but anyway, I want you with me always."

  "You mean—?"

  He nodded.

  "All right, Austin," she said quietly, looking straight into his eyes.

  His arms crept around her, and now he drew her gently to him.

  Some moments later, in the nearby pergola, the door which led to the rooms below opened, and an ancient negro clad in gaudy pajamas and bathrobe peered out into the garden. He saw the pair and recognized the girl. A happy grin came over his wrinkled black face. "Well, if dat ain't a mos' pretty sight to look at," he muttered. "My baby done come back at las', and dat sho' am a han'some boy she got dar!" He turned, and leaving the door open and the light burning on the stair, descended. Very softly and wistfully he was crooning an old darky love song.

  It was an hour later before Shelby's craft whirred up into the moon-bathed night over the winking lights of the city. And at the same time the big-eyed Sadu moth which had been crouching in the cypress tree, rose on its velvety wings and sped away, as though some urgent mission had suddenly claimed its attention.

  CHAPTER III Hekki's Proposal

  When Shelby reached his apartment, he immediately donned his laboratory smock and set to work. But he had scarcely finished mounting a tiny coil of wire within the hand-grip of his weapon, when the view-phone bell rang insistently.

  The inventor pulled off his smock and threw it over the materials on his work bench, so that the person at the other end of the view-phone connection, whoever it was, would not be able to see them. Then he snapped the television and audio switches. The mists in the view-plate cleared, and there before him, as real as though he were actually in the room, sat Hekalu Selba. The Martian's eyes gleamed with suppressed excitement.

  "Mr. Shelby," he was saying, "it may seem strange that I should be calling you so soon, but I have something simply colossal to talk over with you. You must come up to my place immediately! I realize that you may be very busy, but this is important!" And he added, "It's nothing to discuss over the view-phone. Will you come?—please!"

  Shelby was about to make a cold reply, but he checked himself. An intense curiosity gripped him.

  "All right, Akar Hekalu," he said. "I'll be there." The switches clicked.

  Hastily Austin changed to his street clothes, and then gathered together the material for his weapon and placed them in the wall safe. Only one thing he selected from the jumble of apparatus—a tiny pinkish crystal, without which it was impossible to produce the Atomic Ray. This he secreted in a hollow button on his sleeve.

  For a long moment he stared at his automatic, which lay on his work bench. "Better take you along," he mutt
ered at length, "—may need you."

  A wizened black-clad man whom Shelby surmised was the slave Alka, met him at the entrance on the landing platform of a quaint Martian tower atop a huge apartment building, and ushered him into an elevator. He was whisked rapidly downward, and emerged into the central light-well which pierced the structure from top to bottom. The barbaric tapestries upon the walls of this tall cylindrical chamber, the tiling of the floor, which consisted of squares and circles and spear points of various colored stone, fitted artfully together, giving an effect of pleasant disorder. And most of all, the smell of strange incense in the air, told Shelby that he had dropped into a little bit of old Pagar or Mars. Evidently the Prince of Selba was master of the entire tower, which, in itself, was by no means small.

  Alka led the way down a short passage, and admitted the Earthman to a large sumptuously furnished room, one end of which was softly illuminated by a quaintly beautiful floor lamp. The farther end of the room was in complete darkness. The Pagarian architects had made it imitate the interior of a natural cavern, for where the light approached the gloom, two glassy stalactites gleamed with a scintillant elfin light.

  Shelby had but a moment to take note of his surroundings—the dark hangings woven with silver threads, the embossed shield and spear of an ancient Martian warrior mounted on the wall—before Hekalu entered. The young man saw at once that the noble had lost his air of bored languor which he had noticed about him at the time of their first meeting. His eyes flashed with excitement and his movements were quick and cat-like.

  "I see that you have come quickly, Mr. Shelby," said the Martian, "and I am glad. Won't you sit down?"