Ray Cummings: Golden Age Space Opera Tales

GODS OF SPACE-6

IT WAS A BLUR, A CHAOS of utter horror to Atwood. He had no time to do more than thrust Ah-li behind him when the monster was upon him. Weird and ghastly combat. He was conscious of being engulfed by the horrible glutinous mass as the noisome saffron pulp wrapped itself around him. Wildly he fought, staggering, with kicking legs and flailing arms. The intense yellow glow, so close to his eyes now, was dazzling, blinding. Its voice was chattering, like a dynamo gone awry; a throbbing voice that mingled with the girl’s cry of terror.

“Oh, do not fall. Keep standing!”

“You run—” he gasped. “Get past it and run.”

He mustn’t fall. That would be the end. The sticky weight of the thing pressed him. Sucking tentacles were wrapped around him. In the saffron glare he could not see if the monster still blocked the cave-opening. If only he could get it further inside, so Ah-li could slip past. Then he realized that as he fought to get loose, his flailing hands were pulling the oozy tissue apart. He ripped one of the tentacles loose. It fell like a segment of yellow flame, writhing on the ground. But there was no wound where it had been, for it seemed that the oozy flesh flowed around the break.

Then he felt Ah-li tugging at him as again he staggered, almost went down. She was tugging, trying to pull him loose. And the monster now, with chattering, enraged voice rising in pitch, was trying to draw him inward. A slap of the horrible stuff struck his face; choking him. He wiped it off; tore loose a great segment of the body and cast it away.

“Now—you—get free—we can run—” The girl’s panting voice came to him out of the chaos. Behind him she was pulling at his shoulders, adding her slight strength and weight to his.

And suddenly he found himself loose, staggering backward. The monster, gathered itself, with its glowing fragments on the rocks around it, rolled itself a few feet away. Atwood found that he was in the mouth of the cave. Ah-li shoved him, and he was outside.

“You jump—now!”

The huge, screaming, saffron ball lunged for them. With his hand gripping hers, they jumped, sailed together in a flat arc over the monster and landed fifty feet behind it. Atwood, who had fallen, picked himself up. At the mouth of the cave the huge round ball, with new tentacles growing upon it, stood seemingly confused by the escape of its prey. Then, growling with a low sullen murmur, suddenly it rolled itself back into the darkness of the recess. Lurking, with only the reflected light of it at the opening to show that it was there.

Panting, still with horror making him shudder, Atwood followed the girl. They skirted an edge of waving forest growth, descending a rocky declivity. Open rocky space was to the left of them now, with a little line of hillocks. Ahead, at a lower level, the glow of the purple Xarite-radiance was a big patch in the darkness. And now in the patch, Atwood could see what seemed a weird little human settlement. Clusters of low, mound-shaped dwellings of rocks and mud and grass. The semblance of crooked little streets. The purple glow bathed it—a half mile, irregular patch. And beyond it and to the sides, there was only blank darkness.

“That is Marla,” Ah-li was saying. “We shall have to put the light-force up now for the season of the growing of genes. The time has come.”

With his questions, she tried to make it clear. The radiance off there which enveloped the little settlement was inherent to the ground itself. Most of the Marlans of this little world lived here. And those others who were nearby, now at the season of the growing of the genes, would come flocking into the glow. A few days, a week or two; and then the genes would die away until the next cycle of their growth. But even this natural glow was not sufficient to hold them off, so that the Marlans set up around their settlement what Ah-li called a light-fence. A sort of barrage; a few hundred little braziers of Xarite, set at intervals on the ground, their spreading glow mingling one with the other, encircling the village. A barrage which no gene would dare pass.

“I see,” Atwood murmured. “But Ah-li, where do you get that Xarite? Near here?”

“Oh, yes.” She gestured toward the dark little line of hills off to the left. “It is there. Most of it, in grottos underground. You see, it is not far.”

“And what’s it like? Loose in the caves?”

He held his breath for her answer. “Yes,” she said. “The Drall-stone. It lies loose in the caves.”

Triumph swept him. He could get his insulated cylinder packed with Xarite, and then get back to his Spaceship and away. And take Ah-li with him.

“Listen,” he began, “show me the way to one of those caves. I want to see—”

“Here is water, for us to swim,” she interrupted. “The flesh of the genes is still on us.”

Heaven knew he had been conscious of it. A little stream of purplish phosphorescent water, impregnated no doubt with the Xarite, came babbling down the slope here from the distant hills. He and Ah-li plunged in; came out, with the purple phosphorescence of the water dripping from them.

Atwood breathed with relief. “That’s certainly better.” Now, if he could get her to lead him to the Xarite caves.

“Ah-lee. Ah-lee.” It was the sound of a guttural voice calling from the dimness of the rocks near at hand. The startled Atwood turned to see a group of small stocky figures approaching.

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