Hell Stuff For Planet X, Page 5

  He came at last to a place where a crude stairway had been recently cut in the outer slope of a small crater’s wall by members of his party. Agilely he climbed it, and peered intently into the inky shadows that shrouded the volcano’s floor. The laboratory building, located at the bottom, was as completely hidden as if it did not exist.

  Steve’s eyes narrowed. Yes, there must be trouble here, otherwise there would be lights burning in the laboratory. He paused, his head hunched between massive shoulders, the excessive breadth of which was enhanced by the fantastic garb which he wore. Then slowly, cautiously, he started forward, down the stair cut in the steep, inner slope of the crater. He called again. Nothing came through his phones.

  He became suddenly conscious of the brooding silence that hung, thick and heavy, over the fantastic world about him. The pit beneath was filled with a dense, almost tangible blackness, like a lake of ink. His eyes blinked at the farther rampart of the crater, glaring grey-white in the intense sunlight, yet somehow drab and sombre. He saw the distorted pinnacles looming beyond—twisted, motionless nightmares of this bizarre devils’ paradise about him. His eyes roved to the sky. Instead of the normal blue of the earthly firmament, it was dark slate-grey, sprinkled with countless stars, even though the sun was well above the horizon. Those stars did not blink kindly; they merely stared, with an inscrutable brightness. It would not take much of loneliness in this empty world, to make a raving maniac of a man.

  In a sort of panic, Steve scrambled down to the crater’s floor. Using his small flashlight, he made his way to the squat, circular structure which for three months had been the lunar explorers’ home. The airlock was closed, but beside it there was a gaping rent in the double wall of sheet aluminum, and the layers of cold-resisting packing between them.

  Old Steve’s hard-set jaw tightened. His impulse was to rush headlong into the dark interior of the building, yet something deep and primal within him warned him to caution. He advanced warily, now and then calling in a hoarse whisper the names of the members of his party: “Mr. Melconne! Claire! Walker!” His only answer was an eloquent, deathly stillness.

  The bright beam of his flashlight bobbed here and there over the walls and floor. The latter was splotched with peculiar dried areas of a substance which had probably originally been a greenish, slimy fluid. The living quarters were in wild disorder; furniture, cooking utensils, and articles of clothing were scattered haphazardly about. Steve passed into the test room. Apparatus and equipment here had been hastily dismantled and carried off. The air-purifying machinery had been completely and methodically wrecked.

  He made his way to the hangar, which was next to the test room. The great doors were flung wide, and both the spaceship that had brought the expedition to the moon and the small auxiliary flier were gone.

  Steve’s flashlight groped over the floor, and wavered upon a huddled form. He approached it. It was a human form, unprotected by any space-armor. The eyes bulged hideously, and the face was bloated and purple under the short, black beard. The teeth, between the curling lips, were flecked with foamy blood.

  To have hinted in any way that old Steve Jubiston was soft, would have been the supreme insult to him; yet now, something that was very like a dry sob escaped from his throat.

  The man on the floor was Frank Walker, Steve’s side-kick during many an interesting episode on the Pacific, and in ports of the Far East. Steve was down on his knees, chafing the cold hands between his space-gloves before he realized that his act was useless—that this was a corpse.

  He stared in vague bewilderment about the dark hangar, at a loss as to what move to make. Who had done this? The fact that much of the laboratory equipment had been taken away, suggested that a man, or a group of men with scientific interests was back of the deed.

  A thought came to old Steve, and for a fleeting instant he fancied he knew who the criminal was. That thought brought with it an emotion that was stronger and more devastating than mere physical terror. It struck close to his pride, his self-respect, his hopes and his dreams. But no, he had guessed wrongly. That fellow was dead. Besides, the tracks—

  Out of the lonely silence, which seemed for the moment filled with the piping, chuckling whisperings of a thousand little demons, there came a human voice. Steve started, then strained his ears to catch the words coming through his phones. Someone was calling his name weakly. It was Claire Melconne’s voice. The boy was somewhere in the building, then!

  Presently, after a feverish search, he found him trying to creep across the floor in the main living room. With awkward gentleness, Steve raised him, and placed him in a broken bunk.

  “Hurt, kid?’’ he questioned, while he examined him as well as he could for indications of serious injury. He could not remove the boy’s space armor, for to do so now that the air-tight walls of the building had been pierced, would of course have been immediately fatal.

  “It’s not serious,” Claire Melconne reassured him. “Pretty well bruised up though, and I feel sort of sick.... Say, I’m sorry, but—well, Steve—Garth Jubiston did this. Garth and about twenty plant-men. You know, the specimen I shot just after we arrived. Garth has evidently become pretty familiar with them. Same kind of things. I—”

  “Garth?” Steve questioned. His voice was almost a harsh whisper, that was nevertheless full of meaning. “But, kid, he must be dead! He left us six weeks ago. He couldn’t have lived all that time without food, water, and oxygen! Think again!”

  CHAPTER II

  Garth and the Plant-Men

  Old Steve was thankful for the darkness that hid the look of pain which crossed his face. Garth Jubiston was Steve’s younger brother. But the expression on the old sailor’s face passed quickly. His lips became a hard line.

  "No, Steve, he’s alive,” Claire told him. “The mere fact of the existence of the plant-men indicates that air and water are available somewhere around here, probably in subterranean grottoes, as Garth once said. And where there’s air and water, there might easily be food.

  "Say, Steve, I know this thing is tough any way you look at it; but I’ve got an idea that maybe Garth has got a good reason for not being quite responsible for what he’s doing. He’s sick, Steve. He staggered a little when he was leading his forces toward the laboratory, and I got a glimpse of his face. His eyes were staring, and there was something across his nose and down along one cheek. Thought at first that it was grease or some other kind of dirt; but no, it was grey and fuzzy. Reminded me of something; a grey, parasitic growth which I found on some white lichens a couple of miles north of camp just a few hours ago. Garth found a similarly diseased lichen before all this trouble started, if you can remember....

  “I was in the test room, getting my diseased lichen ready for the specimen chest, when I happened to look out of the window. I saw Garth and his band just climbing over the crater rim. With their long legs, the plant-men looked almost like big, hungry spiders scrambling down a wall. It was sort of queer to see them so active out there, where there’s practically no atmosphere. You have to think a couple of times before you remember that they’ve got thick, heat-resisting, cold-resisting, evaporation-resisting shells over their bodies, and that they are really green plants which can, with the aid of sunshine, of which there is plenty, manufacture their own oxygen from the thin atmosphere of carbon-dioxide[2] which exists around here.

  “Not one of them was less than eighteen feet tall. Garth was in their midst, apparently directing them, as they came loping toward the laboratory. It was then that I saw his face.... All the plant-men carried big rocks, and I knew that they meant trouble. I warned Walker and Dad, and then got into my space-suit. But those things didn’t waste much time breaking in. They just used their rocks. The walls crumpled up and broke like cardboard. I potted two of them with my automatic as they rushed in. Dad got another. Then a plant-man grabbed me in his tendrils, and threw me down upon the floor. I must have been completely out for at least a minute. When I came to, I could tell by the
thumping on the floor under me that they were still in the place. I managed to get into the closet. I thought I’d get a few shots at them through the crack of the door, but I must have passed out again. Somehow, they didn’t find me. That’s all I remember until I heard you. I couldn’t answer right away. We’ve got to do something, Steve—quick. Our air'll be gone in a few hours. We’ve got to go—” Claire Melconne’s voice trailed away.

  Old Steve nodded slowly to himself. He was getting the fantastic affair straight at last. Plant-men—Garth. It was a bizarre thought that Garth should be associating with those strange lunar creatures; and it was still more bizarre that Garth should lead them against men in the laboratory, that he should cause the death of Walker, and place the rest of them in a position where extinction within a few hours seemed inevitable.

  Garth Jubiston was Steve’s junior by ten years. He had been left an orphan when he was a small boy, and the responsibility of his raising had devolved upon his older brother. Since Steve’s job carried him far and wide over the world, he hadn’t seen Garth for long stretches of time; but old Steve had gotten the boy through school. Garth was ambitious, and he had something which Steve did not possess—a flash of genius. His advance had been rapid. Everyone who had known Garth had admitted that his record had been above reproach.

  Finally, because of his ability, and because of his friendship with Claire Melconne, with whom he had become acquainted while holding an important instructorship in a large American university, he had joined the expedition.

  Everything had gone well until some time after their arrival on the sidereal sphere. Claire had shot the plant-man—the only one they had seen. Garth had been intensely interested in the creature. Shortly afterward, they had prepared a collection of strange lunar lichens, to be taken, back to Earth. Among them had been the white lichen with the parasitic grey spots—the one Garth had found.

  Almost immediately, Garth had become irritable and abusive. During the next few hours, he had made two trips alone and on foot, away from the camp. Then, when all the others were sleeping, he had returned, and had gathered together a few of his belongings before starting out again. The brief note he had left had informed them caustically that he hoped that they would all find their way to Hell in the near future.

  Steve and his companions had searched the surrounding country for the fugitive for many hours. Once, when they had been traversing a narrow cleft, a bullet had glanced off Professor Melconne’s oxygen helmet, and a mocking, maniacal laugh had grated in their head-phones. But they had failed to catch even a glimpse of Garth. Until long after his eight-hour supply of oxygen should have been used up, they had continued their quest, but without results. Finally convinced that Garth was dead from suffocation, they had given up.

  And now Garth Jubiston had come back, and had done this! Black fury smoldered in old Steve’s mind, but there were questions there also.

  Steve knew about the plant-men. They had rather carefully examined the specimen Claire had shot. The explosive bullet had torn it badly, but the carcass had been complete enough to give a fair idea of what it had been like in life. It had stood perhaps eighteen feet tall. Its two stalky, many-jointed legs were covered with countless matted brown fibres, resembling roots. A tough, leathery mantle of bright leaf-green, oddly reminiscent of a military cape, hung over its spiny ovoid body. From the edge of this, its tactile tendrils, or tentacles, projected. The creature had no head. At the top of its body was a sort of hard brown shell, resembling the calyx of an enormous flower. It was not difficult to imagine that when the occasion demanded, the plant-man’s entire vulnerable anatomy, including his long legs, could be drawn into, and sealed in this shell, which might serve as a protection during the intense cold of the lunar nights. Sprouting from between the sections of this integument, was a long forked stalk, bearing two globular organs. One of these was clearly an eye; the other seemed to be a light-producing organ like those of fireflies, for even after the creature was dead, the globe had emitted a faint, greenish glow.

  The four men had discussed the creature rather fully. It had seemed very strange to them that a plant should assume so many of the characteristics of animals: the ability to move about freely, intelligence and so forth. But they had agreed that there was nothing impossible about it. They had recalled that various Earthly forms of carnivorous flora, the Venus Flytrap for instance, are able to move their parts with a rapidity comparable with the movements of animals. They also remembered that these plants give evidence of possessing intelligence, or at least a rudimentary nervous system, that might, through a process of evolution, develop into a thinking brain.

  The requirement of carbon-dioxide for green plants was taken care of by the thin lunar atmosphere made up chiefly of that gas. Under the action of the strong lunar sunlight, the chlorophyl in their tissues converted it into free oxygen and starch, which served as fuel for their muscles. And the carbon-dioxide resulting from this oft-repeated chemical union was again split up to supply food and air for the plant-men. All this was clear. One thing puzzled the Earthians, however. How did the plant-men obtain their necessary water? The thick skin of the creatures would resist the evaporation of body fluids quite effectively, but where did they get their water in the first place?

  Professor Melconne had offered a theory. “There must be a place, in some deep cavern, possibly, where there is a soil containing moisture, where the plant-men can, at periodic intervals, bury their roots and absorb the necessary water, and also the silicates and other minerals necessary for the building up of their tissues,” he had said.

  “You’re right, Professor,” Garth Jubiston, still his old eager self, had exclaimed. "See!” He was pointing to the brown, thread-like hairs growing on the lower limbs of the plant-man. “There are fragments of dried clay clinging to those roots. There is a place, and we’ll find it!”

  That was the story.

  CHAPTER III

  The Horror of the Grey Mold

  And now old Steve Jubiston was thinking fast. He knew that his own air supply couldn’t last for more than two hours. The kid’s would probably last longer because he had donned his space-suit an hour or so later. Since the air-purifying machinery of the camp had been destroyed, there was no easy means of getting more. Something would have to be done during those two hours, or death by asphyxia would come upon them, prompt and certain. The lunar night, with its dreadful cold, that could bite through the thick, insulating material of their space armor, was not far off.

  Steve shook Claire Melconne gently to arouse him from the semi-stupor into which he had fallen. The boy mumbled incoherently at first, then, realizing their position, brought his mind back to lucidity, apparently by sheer force of will.

  “As far as I can see, Claire,” said Steve, “there is only one way out of this mess for us—to follow Garth and the plant-men. They evidently know where there’s a supply of breathable air. They have both shown themselves to be our enemies, and we'll have to treat them as such. Besides, your dad is probably a captive. We’ve got to attempt to rescue him. You know our chances. Think you are equal to the task?”

  “Sure!” replied Claire Melconne, attempting to make the word sound brisk. “I feel a little groggy yet, but I’ll be all right. A little exercise—” He had staggered up from the bunk, and stood drunkenly on unsteady legs.

  Old Steve had his misgivings. The plant-man had certainly thrown the kid pretty hard. Claire ought to be in bed, under the care of a physician, but there wasn't anything that Steve could do about it. He couldn’t very well leave the boy here, for if he did, it was hardly likely that he could bring a supply of oxygen back to him in time. To stay in the laboratory with him, and wait supinely for the end, was utterly against Steve’s grain. The only thing to do was to take Claire along.

  With the boy leaning on Steve’s shoulder, they made their way out of the building. Through his phones, Steve could hear Claire’s labored breathing. Now the youth coughed raspingly. There was little strength in
his battered body. Steve almost carried him up the steep slope, over the crater wall, and down into the valley, which was now a harshly mixed medley of dense shadow and patches of brilliant sunshine.

  They started to follow the tracks made by the plant-men.

  The youth seemed taken by a sudden thought. He disengaged his arm from about the older man’s supporting shoulders, and staggered a few steps away from him. “Steve,” he said with husky earnestness. "I think I know what changed Garth. It was that mottled fungus he found just before he left us. He handled it, and some of the spores settled on his skin, and took root there, beginning to eat his flesh. There isn’t anything impossible about that, of course. Our ordinary ringworm of Earth is caused by a microscopic fungus or mold. It was this lunar fungus that poisoned Garth’s blood, and deranged his mind.”

  Claire paused. “And now, Steve,” he went on, “I think—well—that the same kind of fungus is attacking me. I found one of the plants just shortly before the lunarians arrived. When I packed it away, I handled it with my bare hands. My hands and forearms are smarting now as though I’d rubbed them with the juice of nettles....”

  Claire’s voice became even calmer and more earnest as he continued: “Let me out of this, Steve. It isn’t fair. I’m just hindering you. Without me, you’ve got a small chance, but this way we’re both doomed. I’ll tell you what, Steve—you take my oxygen supply—”

  Steve checked him. “For God’s sake, kid! Do you think I could—”

  “No!” Claire shot back. “Of course you couldn’t. I know you well enough to be sure you wouldn’t do that to your worst enemy. But still there are ways of making you, Steve.” The boy’s eyes blazed defiantly in his white face, and his lips were set hard. “I’m going to take my medicine now, Steve,” he continued, “and give you half a chance.” His hand was on the feed pipette which led under his arm from the oxygen tanks on his back to the forward portion of his helmet.