A World is Born | Page 8

Leigh Douglass Brackett
of men under fearful
strain, growing louder and louder, underscored with the tramp of
footsteps. Lights blazed suddenly in the cathedral dark, and from the
mouth of a great tunnel some hundred yards away, the men of the
Project poured into the cave.
And then, sharp and high and unexpected, a man screamed.
* * * * *
The lumps of blue light were moving. And a man had died. He lay on
the rock, his flesh blackened jelly, with a rope of glowing light running
from the metal of his gun butt to the metal buttons on his cap.
All across the vast floor of that cavern the slow, eerie ripple of motion
grew. The scattered lumps melted and flowed together, converging in
wavelets of blue flame upon the men.
The answer came to Gray. Those things were some form of energy-life,
born of the tremendous electric tensions on Mercury. Like all electricity,
they were attracted to metal.
In a sudden frenzy of motion, he ripped off his metal-framed goggles,
his cap and gun-belt. The Moultons forbade metal because of the
danger of lightning, and his boots were made of rubber, so he felt
reasonably safe, but a tense fear ran in prickling waves across his skin.
Guns began to bark, their feeble thunder all but drowned in the vast
rush of the wind. Bullets struck the oncoming waves of light with no
more effect than the eruption of a shower of sparks. Gray's attention,
somehow, was riveted on Jill, standing with Dio at the head of her men.
She wore ordinary light slippers, having been dressed only for indoors.
And there were silver ornaments at waist and throat.
He might have escaped, then, quite unnoticed. Instead, for a reason

even he couldn't understand, he ran for Jill Moulton.
The first ripples of blue fire touched the ranks of Dio's men. Bolts of it
leaped upward to fasten upon gun-butts and the buckles of the cartridge
belts. Men screamed, fell, and died.
An arm of the fire licked out, driving in behind Dio and the girl. The
guns of Caron's four remaining men were silent, now.
Gray leaped over that hissing electric surf, running toward Jill. A
hungry worm of light reared up, searching for Dio's gun. Gray's hand
swept it down, to be instantly buried in a mass of glowing ropes. Dio's
hatchet face snarled at him in startled anger.
Jill cried out as Gray tore the silver ornaments from her dress. "Throw
down the guns!" he yelled. "It's metal they want!"
He heard his name shouted by men torn momentarily from their own
terror. Dio cried, "Shoot him!" A few bullets whined past, but their
immediate fear spoiled both aim and attention.
Gray caught up Jill and began to run, toward the tube from which the
wind howled in the cave. Behind him, grimly, Dio followed.
The electric beasts didn't notice him. His insulated feet trampled
through them, buried to the ankle in living flame, feeling queer tenuous
bodies break and reform.
The wind met them like a physical barrier at the tunnel mouth. Gray put
Jill down. The wind strangled him. He tore off his coat and wrapped it
over the girl's head, using his shirt over his own. Jill, her black curls
whipped straight, tried to fight back past him, and he saw Dio coming,
bent double against the wind.
He saw something else. Something that made him grab Jill and point,
his flesh crawling with swift, cold dread.
* * * * *

The electric beasts had finished their pleasure. The dead were cinders
on the rock. The living had run back into the tunnels. And now the blue
sea of fire was flowing again, straight toward the place where they
stood.
It was flowing fast, and Gray sensed an urgency, an impersonal haste,
as though a command had been laid upon those living ropes of flame.
The first dim rumble of thunder rolled down the wind. Gripping Jill,
Gray turned up the tunnel.
The wind, compressed in that narrow throat of rock, beat them blind
and breathless, beat them to their bellies, to crawl. How long it took
them, they never knew.
But Gray caught glimpses of Dio the Martian crawling behind them,
and behind him again, the relentless flow of the fire-things.
They floundered out onto a rocky slope, fell away beneath the suck of
the wind, and lay still, gasping. It was hot. Thunder crashed abruptly,
and lightning flared between the cliffs.
Gray felt a contracting of the heart. There were no cables.
Then he saw it--the small, fast fighter flying below them on a flat
plateau. A cave mouth beside it had been closed with a plastic door.
The ship was the one that had followed them. He guessed at another
one
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