A Vintage From Atlantis (32 page)

They heard the mental command of Aispha:

“Go forward and join those who partake of the luminous emanations of the Dōir. We believe that by so doing you will, in course of time, become purged of your terrestrial grossness; that the very substance of your bodies may eventually be transformed into something not unlike that of our own; and your senses raised to a perceptional power such as we possess.”

Half unwillingly, with an eerie consciousness of compulsion, the men started forward.

“I don’t like this,” said Furnham in a whisper to Langley. “I’m beginning to feel queer enough already.” Summoning his utmost will-power, he stopped short of the emanating rays and put out his hand to arrest Langley.

With dazzled eyes, they stood peering at the Dōir. A cold, restless fire, alive with some nameless evil that was not akin to the evil of Earth, pulsated in its heart; and the long, sharp beams, quivering slightly, passed like javelins into the semi-crystalline bodies of the beings who stood immobile around the column.

“Hasten!” came the unvocal admonition of Aispha. “In a few moments the force in the Dōir, which has a regular rhythm of ebb and flow, will begin to draw back upon itself. The rays will be retracted; and you will have to wait for many minutes before the return of the emanation.”

A quick, daring thought had occurred to Furnham. Eyeing the Dōir closely, he had been impressed by its seeming fragility. The thing was evidently not attached to the basin in which it reposed; and in all likelihood, it would shatter like glass if hurled or even dropped on the floor. He tried to suppress his thought, fearing that it would be read by Aispha or others of the ultra-violet people. At the same time, he sought to phrase, as innocently as possible, a mental question:

“What would happen if the D ir were broken?”

Instantly, he received an impression of anger, turmoil and consternation in the mind of Aispha. His question, however, was apparently not answered; and it seemed that Aispha did not want to answer it—that he was concealing something too dangerous and dreadful to be revealed. Furnham felt, too, that Aispha was suspicious, had received an inkling of his own repressed thought.

It occurred to him that he must act quickly, if at all. Nerving himself, he leapt forward through the ring of bodies about the Dōir. The rays had already begun to shorten slightly; but he had the feeling of one who hurls himself upon an array of lance-points. There was an odd, indescribable sensation, as if he were being pierced by something that was both hot and cold; but neither the warmth nor the chill was beyond endurance. A moment, and he stood beside the column, lifting the glowing egg in his hands and poising it defiantly as he turned to face the ultra-violet people.

The thing was phenomenally light; and it seemed to burn his fingers and to freeze them at the same time. He felt a strange vertigo, an indescribable confusion; but he succeeded in mastering it. The contact of the Dōir might be deadlier to the human tissues than that of radium, for aught he knew. He would have to take his chances. At any rate, it would not kill him immediately; and if he played his cards with sufficient boldness and skill, he could make possible the escape of Langley—if not his own escape.

The ring of ultra-violet beings stood as if stupefied by his audacity. The retracting spokes of light were slowly drawing back into the egg; but Furnham himself was still impaled by them. His fingers seemed to be growing translucent where they clutched the weird ball.

He met the phosphoric gaze of Aispha, and heard the frantic thoughts that were pouring into his mind, not only from Aispha but from all the partakers of the Dōir’s luminous beams. Dread, unhuman threats, desperate injunctions to return the Dōir to its pedestal, were being laid upon him. Rallying all his will, he defied them.

“Let us go free,” he said mentally, addressing Aispha. “Give me back my weapon and permit my companion and me to leave your city. We wish you no harm; but we cannot allow you to detain us. Let us go—or I will shatter the Dōir—will smash it like an egg on the floor.”

At the shaping of his destructive thought, a shudder passed among the semi-spectral beings; and he felt the dire fear that his threat had aroused in them. He had been right: the Dōir
was
fragile; and some awful catastrophe, whose nature he could not quite determine, would ensue instantly upon its shattering.

Step by step, glancing frequently about to see that no one approached him by stealth from behind, Furnham returned to Langley’s side. The Tiisins drew back from him in evident terror. All the while, he continued to issue his demands and comminations:

“Bring the rifle quickly… the weapon you took from me… and give it into my companion’s hands. Let us go without hindrance or molestation—or I will drop the Dōir. When we are outside the city, one of you—one only—shall be permitted to approach us, and I will deliver the Dōir to him.”

One of the Tiisins left the group, to return in less than a minute with Furnham’s Winchester. He handed it to Langley, who inspected the weapon carefully and found that it had not been damaged or its loading or mechanism tampered with in any way. Then, with the ultra-violet creatures following them in manifest perturbation, Furnham and Langley made their way from the building and started along the open street in the general direction (as Langley estimated from the compass he carried) of the Tarim River.

They went on amid the fantastic towering of the crystalline piles; and the people of the city, called as if by some unworded summons, poured from the doorways in an ever-swelling throng and gathered behind them. There was no active demonstration of any overt kind; but both the men were increasingly aware of the rage and consternation that had been aroused by Furnham’s audacious theft of the Dōir—a theft that seemed to be regarded in the light of actual blasphemy. The hatred of the Tiisins, like a material radiation, dark, sullen, stupefying, stultifying, beat upon them at every step. It seemed to clog their brains and their feet like some viscid medium of nightmare; and their progression toward the Gobi slope became painfully slow and tedious.

Before them, from one of the buildings, a tentacled, star-fish monster, like the thing that had assailed Langley, emerged and lay crouching in the street as if to dispute their passage. Raising its evil beak, it glared with filmy eyes, but slunk away from their approach, as if at the monition of its owners.

Furnham and Langley, passing it with involuntary shivers of repugnance, went on. The air was oppressed with alien, unformulable menace. They felt an abnormal drowsiness creeping upon them at whiles. There was an unheard, narcotic music, which sought to overcome their vigilance, to beguile them into slumber.

Furnham’s fingers grew numb with the unknown radiations of the Dōir; though the sharp beams of light, by accelerative degrees, had withdrawn into its center, leaving only a formless misty glow that filled the weird orb. The thing seemed latent with terrible life and power. The bones of his transparent hand were outlined against it like those of a skeleton.

Looking back, he saw that Aispha followed closely, walking in advance of the other Tiisins. He could not read the thoughts of Aispha as formerly. It was as if a blank, dark wall had been built up. Somehow, he had a premonition of evil—of danger and treachery in some form which he could not understand or imagine.

He and Langley came to the end of the street, where the ultra-violet pavement joined itself to the desert acclivity. As they began their ascent of the slope, both men realized that their visual powers had indeed been affected by the injective treatment of the Tiisins: for the soil seemed to glow beneath them, faintly translucent; and the boulders were like semi-crystalline masses, whose inner structure they could see dimly.

Aispha followed them on the slope; but the other people of Ciis, as had been stipulated by Furnham, paused at the juncture of their streets and buildings with the infra-violet substances of Earth.

After they had gone perhaps fifty yards on the gentle acclivity, Furnham came to a pause and waited for Aispha, holding out the Dōir at arm’s length. Somehow, he had a feeling that it was unwise to return the mystic egg; but he would keep his promise, since the people of Ciis had kept their part of the bargain so far.

Aispha took the Dōir from Furnham’s hands; but his thoughts, whatever they were, remained carefully shrouded. There was a sense of something ominous and sinister about him as he turned and went back down the slope with the fiery egg shining through his body like a great watchful eye. The beams of light were beginning to emanate from its center once more.

The two men, looking back ever and anon, resumed their journey. Ciis glimmered below them like the city of a mirage in the moonlit hollow. They saw the ultra-violet people crowding to await Aispha at the end of their streets.

Then, as Aispha neared his fellows, two rays of cold, writhing fire leaped forth from the base of a tower that glittered like glass at the city’s verge. Clinging to the ground, the rays ran up the slope with the undulant motion of pythons, following Langley and Furnham at a speed that would soon overtake them.

“They’re double-crossing us!” warned Furnham. He caught the Winchester from Langley, dropped to his knees and aimed carefully, drawing a bead on the luminous orb of the Dōir through the spectral form of Aispha, who had now reached the city and was about to enter the waiting throng.

“Run!” he called to Langley. “I’ll make them pay for their treachery; and perhaps you can get away in the meanwhile.”

He pulled the trigger, missing Aispha but dropping at least two of the Tiisins who stood near the Dōir. Again, steadily, he drew bead, while the rays from the tower serpentined onward, pale, chill and deadly-looking, till they were almost at his feet. Even as he aimed, Aispha took refuge in the foremost ranks of the crowd, through whose filmy bodies the Dōir still glowed.

This time, the high-powered bullet found its mark, though it must have passed through more than one of the ultra-violet beings before reaching Aispha and the mystic orb.

Furnham had hardly known what the result would be; but he had felt sure that some sort of catastrophe would ensue the destruction of the Dōir. What really happened was incalculable and almost beyond description.

Before the Dōir could fall from the hands of its stricken bearer, it seemed to expand in a rushing wheel of intense light, revolving as it grew and blotting out the forms of the ultra-violet people in the foreground. With awful velocity, the wheel struck the nearer buildings, which appeared to soar and vanish like towers of fading mirage. There was no audible explosion—no sound of any kind—only that silent, ever-spinning, ever-widening disk of light that threatened to involve by swift degrees the whole extent of Ciis.

Gazing spell-bound, Furnham had almost forgotten the serpentine rays. Too late, he saw that one of them was upon him. He leapt back, but the thing caught him, coiling about his limbs and body like an anaconda. There was a sensation of icy cold, of horrible constriction; and then, helpless, he found that the strange beam of force was dragging him back down the slope toward Ciis, while its fellow went on in pursuit of the fleeing Langley.

In the meanwhile, the spreading disk of fire had reached the tower from which the rays emanated. Suddenly Furnham was free—the serpentine beams had both vanished. He stood rooted to the spot in speechless awe; and Langley, returning to his aid, also paused, watching the mighty circle of light that seemed to fill the entire basin at their feet with a soundless vortex of destruction.

“My God!” cried Furnham, after a brief interval. “Look what’s happening to the slope.”

As if the force of the uncanny explosion were now extending beyond Ciis, boulders and masses of earth began to rise in air before the white, glowing maelstrom, and sailed in slow, silent levitation toward the men.

Furnham and Langley started to run, stumbling up the slope, and were overtaken by something that lifted them softly, buoyantly, irresistibly, with a strange feeling of utter weightlessness, and bore them like wind-wafted leaves or feathers through the air. They saw the bouldered crest of the acclivity flowing far beneath them; and then they were floating, floating, ever higher in the moonlight, above leagues of dim desert. A faintness came upon them both—a vague nausea—an illimitable vertigo—and slowly, somewhere in that incredible flight, they lapsed into unconsciousness.

The moon had fallen low, and its rays were almost horizontal in Furnham’s eyes when he awoke. An utter confusion possessed him at first; and his circumstances were more than bewildering. He was lying on a sandy slope, among scattered shrubs, meager and stunted; and Langley was lying not far away. Raising himself a little, he saw the white and reed-fringed surface of a river—which could be none other than the Tarim—at the slope’s bottom. Half- incredulous, doubting his own senses, he realized that the force of the weird explosion had carried Langley and himself many miles and had deposited them, apparently unhurt, beside the goal of their desert wanderings!

Furnham rose to his feet, feeling a queer lightness and unsteadiness. He took a tentative step—and landed four or five feet away. It was as if he had lost half his normal weight. Moving with great care he went over to Langley, who had now started to sit up. He was reassured to find that his eye-sight was becoming normal again; for he perceived merely a faint glowing in the objects about him. The sand and boulders were comfortably solid; and his own hands were no longer translucent.

“Gosh!” he said to Langley, “That was some explosion. The force that was liberated by the shattering of the Dōir—must have done something to the gravity of all surrounding objects. I guess the city of Ciis and its people have gone back into outer space; and even the infra-violet substances about the city must have been more or less degravitated. But I guess the effect is wearing off, as far as you and I are concerned—otherwise we’d be travelling still.”

Langley got up and tried to walk, with the same disconcerting result that had characterized Furnham’s attempt. He mastered his limbs and his equilibrium after a few experiments.