“A younger planet than ours,” DuQuesne said. “In the Carboniferous, or about. Aren’t those fern-trees like those in the coal measures, Seaton?”
“Check—I was just trying to think what they reminded me of. But it’s this ledge that interests me no end. Who ever heard of a chunk of noble metal this big?”
“How do you know it’s noble?” Dorothy asked.
“No corrosion, and its probably been sitting here for a million years.” Seaton, who had walked over to one of the loose lumps, kicked it with his heavy shoe. It did not move.
He bent over to pick it up, with one hand. It still did not move. With both hands and all the strength of his back he could lift it, but that was all.
“What do you make of this, DuQuesne?”
DuQuesne lifted the mass, then took out his knife and scraped. He studied the freshly-exposed metal and the scrapings, then scraped and studied again.
“Hmm. Platinum group, almost certainly . . . and the only known member of that group with that peculiar bluish sheen is your X.”
“But didn’t we agree that free X and copper couldn’t exist on the same planet, and that planets of copper-bearing suns carry copper?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t make it true. If this stuff is X, it’ll give the cosmologists something to fight about for the next twenty years. I’ll take these scrapings and run a couple of quickies.”
“Do that, and I’ll gather in these loose nuggets. If it’s X—and I’m pretty sure it mostly is—that’ll be enough to run all the power-plants of Earth for ten thousand years.”
Crane and Seaton, accompanied by the two girls, rolled the nearer pieces of metal up to the ship. Then, as the quest led them farther and farther afield, Crane protested.
“This is none too safe, Dick.”
“It looks perfectly safe to me. Quiet as a—”
Margaret screamed. Her head was turned, looking backward at the Skylark; her face was a mask of horror.
Seaton drew his pistol as he whirled, only to check his finger on the trigger and lower his hand. “Nothing but X-plosive bullets,” he said, and the four watched a thing come out slowly from behind their ship.
Its four huge, squat legs supported a body at least a hundred feet long, pursy and ungainly; at the end of a long, sinuous neck a small head seemed composed entirely of cavernous mouth armed with row upon row of carnivorous teeth. Dorothy gasped with terror; both girls shrank closer to the two men, who maintained a baffled silence as the huge beast slid its hideous head along the hull of the vessel.
“I can’t shoot, Mart—it’d wreck the boat—and if I had any solids they wouldn’t be any good.”
“No. We had better hide until it goes away. You two take that ledge, we’ll take this one.”
“Or gets far enough away from the Skylark so we can blow him apart,” Seaton added as, with Dorothy close beside him, he dropped behind the low bulwark.
Margaret, her staring eyes fixed upon the monster, remained motionless until Crane touched her gently and drew her down to his side. “Don’t be frightened, Peggy. It will go away soon.”
“I’m not, now—much.” She drew a deep breath. “If you weren’t here, though, Martin, I’d be dead of pure fright.”
His arm tightened around her; then he forced it to relax. This was neither the time nor the place. . . .
A roll of gunfire came from the Skylark. The creature roared in pain and rage, but was quickly silenced by the stream of .50-caliber machine-gun bullets.
“DuQuesne’s on the job—let’s go!” Seaton cried, and the four rushed up the slope. Making a detour to avoid the writhing body, they plunged through the opening door. DuQuesne closed the lock. They huddled together in overwhelming relief as an appalling tumult arose outside.
The scene, so quiet a few moments before, was horribly changed. The air seemed filled with hideous monsters. Winged lizards of prodigious size hurtled through the air to crash against the Skylark’s armored hull. Flying monstrosities, with the fangs of tigers, attacked viciously. Dorothy screamed and started back as a scorpion-like thing ten feet in length leaped at the window in front of her, its terrible sting spraying the quartz with venom. As it fell to the ground a spider—if an eight legged creature with spines instead of hair, faceted eyes, and a bloated globular body weighing hundreds of pounds may be called a spider—leaped upon it; and, mighty mandibles against the terrible sting, a furious battle raged. Twelve-foot cockroaches climbed nimbly across the fallen timber of the morass and began feeding voraciously on the carcass of the creature DuQuesne had killed. They were promptly driven away by another animal, a living nightmare of that reptilian age which apparently combined the nature and disposition of tyrannosaurus rex with a physical shape approximating that of the saber-tooth tiger. This newcomer towered fifteen feet high at the shoulders and had a mouth disproportionate even to his great size; a mouth armed with sharp fangs three feet in length. He had barely begun his meal, however, when he was challenged by another nightmare, a thing shaped more or less like a crocodile.
The crocodile charged. The tiger met him head on, fangs front and rending claws outstretched. Clawing, striking, tearing savagely, an avalanche of bloodthirsty rage, the combatants stormed up and down the little island.
Suddenly the great tree bent over and lashed out against both animals. It transfixed them with its thorns, which the watchers now saw were both needle-pointed and barbed. It ripped at them with its long branches, which were in fact highly lethal spears. The broad leaves, equipped with sucking disks, wrapped themselves around the hopelessly impaled victims. The long, slender twigs or tendrils, each of which now had an eye at its extremity, waved about at a safe distance.
After absorbing all of the two gladiators that was absorbable the tree resumed its former position, motionless in all its strange, outlandish beauty.
Dorothy licked her lips, which were almost as white as her face. “I think I’m going to be sick,” she remarked, conversationally.
“No you aren’t.” Seaton tightened his arm. “Chin up, ace.”
“Okay, chief. Maybe not—this time.” Color began to reappear on her cheeks. “But Dick, will you please blow up that horrible tree? It wouldn’t be so bad if it were ugly, like the rest of the things, but it’s so beautiful!”
“I sure will. I think we’d better get out of here. This is no place to start a copper mine, even if there’s any copper here, which there probably isn’t. . . . It is X, DuQuesne, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Ninety-nine plus per cent, at least.”
“That reminds me.” Seaton turned to DuQuesne, hand outstretched. “You squared it, Blackie. Say the word the war’s all off.”
DuQuesne ignored the hand. “Not on my side,” he said, evenly. “I act as one of the party as long as I’m with you. When we get back, however, I still intend to take both of you out of circulation.” He went to his room.
“Well, I’ll be a . . .” Seaton bit off a word. “He ain’t a man he’s a cold-blooded fish!”
“He’s a machine—a robot” Margaret declared. “I always thought so, and now I know it!”
“We’ll pull his cork when we get back,” Seaton said. “He asked for it—we’ll give him both barrels!”
Crane went to the board, and soon they were approaching another planet, which was surrounded by a dense fog. Descending slowly, they found it to be a mass of boiling-hot steam and rank vapor, under enormous pressure.
The next planet looked barren and dead. Its atmosphere was clear, but of a peculiar yellowish-green color. Analysis showed over ninety per cent chlorine. No life of any Earthly type could exist naturally upon such a world and a search for copper, even in space-suits, would be extremely difficult if not impossible.
“Well,” Seaton said, as they were once more in space, “We’ve got copper enough to visit quite a few more solar systems if we have to. But there’s a nice, hopeful-looking planet right over there. It may be the one we’re looking for.”
Arriving in the belt of atmosphere, they tested it as before and found it satisfactory.
Chapter 15
THEY DESCENDED rapidly, over a large city set in the middle of a vast, level, beautifully planted plain. As they watched, the city vanished and became a mountain summit, with valleys falling away on all sides as far as the eye could reach.
“Huh! I never saw a mirage like that before!” Seaton exclaimed. “But we’ll land, if we finally have to swim!”
The ship landed gently upon the summit, its occupants more than half expecting the mountain to disappear beneath them. Nothing happened, however, and the five clustered in the lock, wondering whether or not to disembark. They could see no sign of life; but each felt the presence of a vast, invisible something.