Strange Ports of Call Read online

  He began climbing the hill. Bloodroots crushed underfoot, clumps of prickly ash snagged him, and he pushed through tangles of wild grapevine on the lower slopes. Then he came to more open ground where elm and birch, maple and oak were unfolding their young leaves, and sunlight dappled the mold underneath.

  The greenish glow capped the rocky outcrops of the hilltop. The light rose in the shape of a great core with ridges, like the center petals of some luminous, unimaginable flower. It was a pulsing light, rigid in outline, but through whose depth ebbed and returned a rhythmic wave that started from the crystalline object.

  This was no shooting-star, the burned-out cinder of an iron-hard meteorite, fallen to earth from the gulfs of space. Milkily translucent, it resembled the nose of a shell, or a giant bullet, standing two feet high, upon a blackly metallic base; but its fluted sides curved to embrace a tiny filament set in its tip; the object tilted at an angle of nearly forty-five degrees, as though pointing toward its origin in the distant immensities of stars and universe; and its entirety veined with a network of fine green threads among the crystal. It was a little machine, designed for a purpose not beyond conjecture, but above his knowledge of even man’s inventions. And it remained perfectly balanced on an edge of the black base that barely touched ground, held thus by some guiding beam from remote space, or some gyroscopic part built inside the base.

  All around it, to the limits of the radiant bloom, whiteness covered the ground—as hoarfrost. He saw diamond points glitter as they settled. He stepped into the greenish light, and cold blanketed him, the chill of autumnal nights, of deep winter, of the frozen arctic wilds, then such cold as he had never known, when he approached the crystal bullet. His breath turned to a congealing puff. Young grass crackled like slivers of glass tinkling underfoot.

  He turned suddenly and strode down-hill. The warmth of sun fell upon him. The south wind dried the sweat that broke on his brow and back.

  Through the long afternoon, he guided his team and watched rills of black soil turn over. The course of plowing on this section took him steadily away from the hill. He could not, however, resist glancing at it each time he reversed his field; and each time the green light hung there, clearly marked against the ultra-marine of the sky.

  By late afternoon, the field was ready for the harrowing that would precede planting the golden kernels of corn. He unharnessed the grays, drove them to pasture, and turned them loose. The sun was setting, a dark red ball that cast lengthening shadows on the ground, while the edge of the ghost-white new moon shone.

  From the pasture he saw smoke rising above the farmhouse. Supper would be almost ready. The path homeward wound between pasture and the waters that filled an abandoned limestone quarry. The way home and the green light pulled him equally. He paused, watching the sunset’s bloody trail crawl across the pond. Muddied from melted snows and spring rains, and with a sullen fire upon it, the little lake looked like part of the somber stream which Charon ferried.

  The door of the distant farmhouse opened. Then, ringing clear in the twilight, through that hush between the stilled cry of the whippoorwill and the yet unrisen frog-piping of the hylas, a bell pealed. He had never failed to follow it, but now he walked away toward the glow shimmering spectral and unearthly on the hilltop.

  There were shadows on the slopes, and deeper pools in the wild grape thickets, but the last rays of the sun still slanted over the hill, where the green phosphorescence clung. Hoarfrost lay inch-deep around the crystal bullet, and diamond motes glittered down endlessly within the zone of frightful cold, approximately ten feet at its extreme radius, composed of a five-petal pattern, one petal for each of the fluted ridges on the crystal shell. He donned heavy workgloves, lifted the bullet, and marveled at its feather-weight, its strange incredible cold.

  The cold was insidious, deadly. It numbed him, crept into him, penetrated the thick gloves and overalls. He felt the warmth drain out of him in a perceptible tide. He had experienced temperatures of thirty-five degrees below zero in wintertimes, but never such frozen concentrate as this. It seemed, in some baffling and rapturous way, alive.

  He tried to drop the torpedo, and found that he could not. He began walking, with a sense of compulsion, and dreamlike mechanical steps, then broke into a rush, crashing against trees, and staggering along the path, while the frigid air he gasped burned his lungs.

  Near the farmhouse by a woodpile stood the old stump of a tree, a chopping-block. He attempted to set the bullet there, but stumbled and fell. His chin cracked on the sharp edge of the cut trunk. His face sandpapered itself on the bed of chips and the roots in the ground. He felt no pain, no sensation, nothing. The crystal shell, torn from his grasp, settled on the stump; and then, oddly, tilted sidewise until it stood at a forty-five degree angle as before.

  He got up, hammering his hands against his thighs. He whacked and slapped his frost-white features. It was like hitting the mask of ice on the coils of a refrigerator. After a while his face began to burn as though scalded, and a fiery bloom splotched it.

  He deliberately smacked the bullet, a powerful blow that should have hurtled it to smash and shatter against the woodpile.

  The bullet swayed back to perpendicular; and the moment his hand was released it stood on edge again, the pointer in its nose swinging northward toward the region of the Pole Star.

  He went in to supper. At the entrance of the doorway he stopped his wife, iron skillet in hand, running to help him. He pushed her back.

  “Take it away,” she begged. “Get rid of it.”

  He gently disengaged the skillet from her hand and replaced it on the stove. “Everything’ll be all right, long as we don’t touch it. I’ve heard tell museums pay cash money for meteorites and such. Maybe the scientists down in the Twin Cities at the U—”

  He ate supper in silence; and though he occasionally rubbed his bruised face, his thoughts appeared to be far away on other things.

  He got up and went out to the bam where the cows lowed. Green light blossomed around the stump with its crystal bullet, but he did not pause. Night had fallen, and the moon rode well above the horizon before he finished milking. He carried the full pails to empty into the big can in the kitchen. This time, passing the stump, he frowned at the queer torpedo, the layer of hoarfrost thickening on the ground in the five-petal pattern of measureless cold.

  He smoked a pipe for an hour with slow enjoyment, listening to the sounds his wife made doing the dishes, the frog chorus down by the pond, and all the small voices of night. When he strode outside to empty the bottle, the flower-like blossom of light still enfolded the crystal bullet, still poised uncannily on edge.

  Later, her warm, firm body a more solid reality beside him, he lay musing. When the corn was planted, he would write to the State Bureau of Minerals, or the newspapers, or the men at the U, about the strange bullet that had plummeted from space . . .

  Out of the void of troubled sleep, he woke with the sound of a thin, high, bell-like music tinkling in his ears. He listened in vain for the soft breathing of his wife, rhythmic in slumber beside him, for she was gone; but through all the air broke brittle flutings, like the snapping of a myriad of fine crystal threads; and to the jangle of that fantastic music, his nerves quivered eerily.

  Sliding from bed, the cool of the night unblanketing his body, he prowled out of the bedroom. A rectangle of moonlight whitened the floor, but a stronger light, a strange light, a greener light bloomed around the house, and when he came to the crystal bullet upon the chopping-block where he had left it, he was aware in a vague, sick manner that some boundless flood of energy was pouring from it; that three-dimensional shadows projected, moved, and took substance within the green radiance; that shapes and forms of things which had never walked upon earth by day or by night or hovered in dreams were issuing forth; curious organisms part gaseous, part mineral, part vegetable, and part flesh, with faceted eyes upon stalks and electrical discharges between feathery feelers and ruby-bright luminous rods
for skeletal structure in transparent, bubbling flesh; that steadily they became denser, more material; that they talked in a crystalline language which became louder as the green tide pulsed out in mounting waves; and that the five-petal pattern of terrible cold was expanding at an ever accelerating pace. Of all this he became conscious—and her chalk-white body, brittle as the tinkling music, rigid with the shell cradled against her and her hands crisped upon the now blindingly, coldly incandescent pointer in its tip. A queer alien glee, child-like, hideously rapturous, had been congealed upon her marble face.

  He lifted her and carried her in, heedless of cold that burned his arms and chest with intolerable fire. He pulled a quilt over her, as though any warmth could comfort the dead. He paused with his head at an angle, listening, as though to a dimly heard and ghostly echo of farewell, then prowled outside again. There was an old blanket hanging beside the kitchen door. He seized it and tossed it upon the crystal bullet. The green illumination, unsmothered, billowed away through the great teardrop forms of the five-petal pattern.

  He was hardly aware of twigs or stones that bruised his soles. Moonlight bathed the world, and the spring night was filled with many murmurs, whisper of wind, trees stirring with sap, the frog-throng of the hylas, and bat-wings overhead. He listened to these, and not to the hateful crystalline voices which the blanket could not muffle, and felt a growing cold penetrate the wool, until his chest became as insensitive, as brittle as glass, and the encroachment of ice crept into solid flesh.

  His heart had begun to labor fitfully, missing beats, and taking long, convulsive throbs, when he reached the old limestone quarry. Mechanically and without thinking he flung the bundle out as far as he could. Instantly there came a great drag upon his mind, a paralyzing inertia that struck him motionless, like a stone statue on the pond’s edge. But the bundle had been hurled, and the blanket fell away. The crystal bullet emerged, curving toward the moonlit waters, and the green light mushroomed over all the waters with a chorus of frenzied bells. Fantastic beings swirled in the luminous glow, so thick in substance, so real, so perilously close to breaking through the prison walls of radiance, that he would have leaped back had his heart given the command. This machine from unknown, mysterious wildernesses of the universe, this message from some planet in other galaxies, this bolt successfully hurled across light-years of space and millennia of time, bringing forth in triumph whatever purpose it had—or launching a three-dimensional record—or acting is a wonderful agency to transmit by ways and energies unguessed the very beings which had shot it upon its voyage—

  He would never know what, or care. The crystal bullet splashed. The water and the great cold reacted, created gasses and ice. As though a giant hand smote it into oblivion, green light and shadow creatures and tinkling voices vanished. A great geyser foamed and spewed, with a hissing roar. The bullet shattered, sinking in countless fragments that bubbled and boiled.

  Ripples widened across the water, while the swath of moonglow danced, and subsided.

  Like a drunken man, he weaved homeward, with heart pounding as the block of ice thawed from his chest. He felt a slowly deepening delayed shock of grief over something lost that might have flowered spendidly: the frozen body of his wife.

  George Allan England (1877—1936) wrote many books, over fifteen of which were published—the first of them in 1903, Underneath the Bough, being a book of poems. In addition to his books, he wrote innumerable serial novels and magazine short stories. Very often his strong Socialist sympathies tinged his writing. Among his best fantasies are Darkness and Dawn (1914), The Air Trust (1915), and The Golden Blight (1916).

  THE THING FROM OUTSIDE

  George Allan England

  THEY SAT ABOUT THEIR CAMP-FIRE, THAT little party of Americans retreating southward from Hudson Bay before the oncoming menace of the great cold. Sat there, stolid under the awe of the North, under the uneasiness that the day’s trek had laid upon their souls. The three men smoked. The two women huddled close to each other. Fireglow picked their faces from the gloom of night among the dwarf firs. A splashing murmur told of the Albany River’s haste to escape from the wilderness, and reach the Bay.

  “I don’t see what there was in a mere circular print on a rock-ledge to make our guides desert,” said Professor Thorburn. His voice was as dry as his whole personality. “Most extraordinary!”

  “They knew what it was, all right,” answered Jandron, geologist of the party. “So do I.” He rubbed his cropped mustache. His eyes glinted grayly. “I’ve seen prints like that, before. That was on the Labrador. And I’ve seen things happen, where they were.”

  “Something surely happened to our guides, before they’d got a mile into the bush,” put in the Professor’s wife; while Vivian, her sister, gazed into the fire that revealed her as a beauty, not to be spoiled even by a tam and a rough-knit sweater. “Men don’t shoot wildly, and scream like that, unless—”

  “They’re all three dead now, anyhow,” put in Jandron. “So they’re out of harm’s way. While we—well, we’re two hundred and fifty wicked miles from the C. P. R. rails.”

  “Forget it, Jandy!” said Marr, the journalist. “We’re just suffering from an attack of nerves, that’s all. Give me a fill of ’baccy. Thanks. We’ll all be better in the morning. Ho-hum! Now, speaking of spooks and such—”

  He launched into an account of how he had once exposed a fraudulent spiritualist, thus proving—to his own satisfaction—that nothing existed beyond the scope of mankind’s everyday life. But nobody gave him much heed. And silence fell upon the little night-encampment in the wilds; a silence that was ominous.

  Pale, cold stars watched down from spaces infinitely far beyond man’s trivial world.

  Next day, stopping for chow on a ledge miles up-stream, Jandron discovered another of the prints. He cautiously summoned the other two men. They examined the print, while the womenfolk were busy by the fire. A harmless thing the markings seemed; only a ring about four inches in diameter, a kind of cup-shaped depression with a raised center. A sort of glaze coated it, as if the granite had been fused by heat.

  Jandron knelt, a well-knit figure in bright mackinaw and canvas leggings, and with a shaking finger explored the smooth curve of the print in the rock. His brows contracted as he studied it.

  “We’d better get along out of this as quick as we can,” said he in an unnatural voice. “You’ve got your wife to protect, Thorburn, and I—well, I’ve got Vivian. And—”

  “You have?” nipped in Marr. The light of an evil jealousy gleamed in his heavy-lidded look. “What you need is an alienist.”

  “Really, Jandron,” the Professor admonished, “you mustn’t let your imagination run away with you.”

  “I suppose it’s imagination that keeps this print cold!” the geologist retorted. His breath made faint, swirling coils of vapor above it.

  “Nothing but a pot-hole,” judged Thorburn, bending his spare, angular body to examine the print. The Professor’s vitality all seemed centered in his big-bulged skull that sheltered a marvellous thinking-machine. Now he put his lean hand to the base of his brain, rubbing the back of his head as if it ached. Then, under what seemed some powerful compulsion, he ran his bony finger around the print in the rock.

  “By Jove, but it is cold!” he admitted. “And looks as if it had been stamped right out of the stone. Extraordinary!”

  “Dissolved out, you mean,” corrected the geologist. “By cold.” The journalist laughed mockingly.

  “Wait till I write this up!” he sneered. “‘Noted Geologist Declares Frigid Ghost Dissolves Granite!’ ”

  Jandron ignored him. He fetched a little water from the river and poured it into the print.

  “Ice!” ejaculated the Professor. “Solid ice!”

  “Frozen in a second,” added Jandron, while Marr frankly stared. “And it’ll never melt, either. I tell you, I’ve seen some of these rings before; and every time, horrible things have happened. Incredible things! Something bur
ned this ring out of the stone—burned it out with the cold of interstellar space. Something that can impart cold as a permanent quality of matter. Something that can kill matter, and totally remove it.”

  “Of course that’s all sheer poppycock,” the journalist tried to laugh, but his brain felt numb.

  “This something, this Thing,” continued Jandron, “is a Thing that can’t be killed by bullets. It’s what caught our guides on the barrens, as they ran away—poor fools!”

  A shadow fell across the print in the rock. Mrs. Thorburn had come up, was standing there. She had overheard a little of what Jandron had been saying.

  “Nonsense!” she tried to exclaim, but she was shivering so she could hardly speak.

  That night, after a long afternoon of paddling and portaging—laboring against inhibitions like those in a nightmare—they camped on shelving rocks that slanted to the river.

  “After all,” said the Professor, when supper was done, “we mustn’t get into a panic. I know extraordinary things are reported from the wilderness, and more than one man has come out, raving. But we, by Jove! with our superior brains—we aren’t going to let Nature play us any tricks!”

  “And of course,” added his wife, her arm about Vivian, “everything in the universe is a natural force. There’s really no supernatural, at all.”

  “Admitted,” Jandron replied. “But how about things outside the universe?”

  “And they call you a scientist!” gibed Marr; but the Professor leaned forward, his brows knit.

  “Hmm!” he grunted. A little silence fell.

  “You don’t mean, really,” asked Vivian, “that you think there’s life and intelligence—Outside?”