"Daley?" he gasped.
"Right behind you, Pink."
The mouth of their corridor was in sight. Then there were djinn, a rowof them standing side by side with feet firmly planted to make abarrier. My God, he thought, this is it! Circe vanished, he did not seewhere. The feet were there, and arms reaching down for him. He pitchedsideways, flipped by a questing finger; crashed on his shoulder, rolled,still miraculously hanging onto Jerry. The brashest course was the onlyone. He gathered himself and jumped onto a toe. It was as hard as therock. And this thing, he said irrelevantly in his mind, this massivepiece of solidity can vaporize into a gin bottle! He slid down the toeand scuttled ratlike under the lofty legs and was in the clear. Thetunnel, itself an astoundingly high cave, appeared directly before him.
There was no time now to look for Circe and Daley, vital though theirsafety was to him. He carried Jerry into the tunnel and loped withmultiyarded strides for the plain. He could not see any lamp-glare buthis own. But he could not stop. Humanity in that instant overcame allhis private desires. There were fifty-eight souls who would be blottedout if he didn't make the _Elephant's Child_ in two minutes. Sixty-one,if you counted Daley and Circe and Pink himself. In less than one ofthose minutes he had traversed the tunnel and come out above the plain.
The ship was still there. Some distance away from it stood the big trap,and even yet giants were speeding toward it from all points of thecompass. Pink gasped a breath and launched himself out and down thesteep hillside. He took it all in that one jump. As he was landing, acuriously weightless man on this tiny planetoid, Jerry came to life andwrithed suddenly in his arms, upsetting his balance. Pink fell and hisleft ankle shrieked with pain as it turned under him and was smashedinto the gray rock by his dropping body and Jerry's.
He sprawled full length and knew his ankle was broken or sprained. Jerryrolled free and collapsed, sighing into his radio. Pink tried to standand the ankle buckled. Horrified, he looked at his glove watch.
He had seventy seconds.
CHAPTER XXIII
Pink bellowed, "Jerry!" He yelled it so loudly that his ears protestedat the helmet echoes. Jerry said groggily, "Wha?"
"Stand up!"
Jerry sat up and at once fell flat again. "Judas priest, I can't. Thatyou Pink?"
"We've got to make the ship," he bawled, twisting with pain.
"Make it what?"
"If you want to live, son--stand up!"
Jerry got to his knees. "I'm sick, Pink."
He had used up six seconds. He had to try it on his own. Jerry was toofar gone to function properly.
Pink stood up. His teeth were grinding together like millstones, but hedidn't stop. He knew pain and dread and rage that shook him. He facedthe ship, and stood on his good leg and bent his knee and gave atremendous hop.
As he fell on his face, an unknown number of yards nearer, a great alienpassed him, the mighty sole slamming the rock a few feet from his pronebody. Pink struggled upright and balanced on the right leg and madeanother hop. This time he didn't fall when he lit. Praying thankfullyfor the two seconds that saved, he sprang again. And fell, painfully.
It was a useless piece of bravado. It was impossible to reach the ship.He got up and leaped. He fell. He forced himself up and sprang anddidn't fall and sprang and fell.
He couldn't waste a blink of time in looking at the watch or yellingwith agony or even praying now. He went through his routineautomatically, his mind a thing of terror. Eons seemed to pass him by ashe hopped over the djinn-infested gray rock plain.
A superb spring took him abreast of the big lead vat. What wild scenesof delirium were going on there he could not even imagine. He hoppedtwice more and was at the ship.
At any instant, at this very second the ship would blossom intored-white carnage of metal and flesh and death. Impossibly Pink stood onhis good leg and aimed for the scanner-port which he knew, or hoped,connected with the screen in the control room where Jackson sat.
Now the _Elephant's Child_ was done, Jackson was shoving the switchover, now it would all disintegrate in his face. He flew through spaceand struck the hull flat; all the perishing strength in him glued hisbody, his fingers in their thin gloves, to that curving surface. Hisgreat helmet, with the crest insignia of comets and spears that markedhim as the captain, hung for a short time directly in front of thescanner-port.
He shook his head violently, back and forth, back and forth. _No_, hescreamed in his mind, wishing insanely that his radio were constructedso that it could be heard in the ship. _No_, he shook, _no, no_!
Then his precarious grip on the smooth side slid off, and CaptainPinkham fell lightly but finally to the asteroid.
He lay there unresisting. He had done his best, absolutely his damnedbest. Let it blow. Let it blow.
After a while he looked at his glove watch. It was two minutes past thetime for explosion.
He had saved the _Elephant's Child_.
He turned and looked across the plain and saw, beyond the great trapinto which giant-smoke was settling, two figures come running toward himwith unearthly strides. One of them halted and gathered Jerry into itsarms. The other reached Pink and knelt beside him and hugged himtightly. Pink laughed, a passionate sound of relief. Circe said, "Youmade it, darling. You made it!"
The air-lock began to open.
CHAPTER XXIV
The djinni on the floor said, "I concede this battle to you, Captain. Ihave seen the ending on the screen. But there are others out there, onOasis and in the void. We'll win to Earth some day in spite of thisvictory."
Pink, snugly ensconced in a foam-chair with his sprained ankle proppedup, his surviving officers seated around him, and Circe on the arm ofthe deep chair, took another drink of lemonade. He made a face, almostasked for brandy, and remembered. He said, "Maybe the same way you cameto these asteroids?"
"No, not that. That way went only in one direction, through the fourthdimension, I think. The people of the continent you call Atlantis builtthat way for our use, though much against our desire; and the machinethey made was so fearful that its use sank their whole land into thesea. They were a great, scientific people, and we have not their skill."
"Atlantis too," Jerry said. "Now we've heard everything, all but theLittle People and Pan."
The djinni did not seem to hear him. Its eyes, like dead coals now inthe yellow face, rested on Pink. "It was clever of you to recognize usfrom history."
"You go into bottles, speak Arabic, fly and are humanoid in form. Ishould have guessed your race hours before."
"We are not humanoid. You are djinnoid. We came before you inevolution."
"How do you know?" asked Daley.
"Our legends ... I cannot tell, being no more than six or seven thousandyears old myself. But we are told we predate man."
"When were you relegated to this belt?" asked Jerry, who was still alittle pale. "You were around in Solomon's time."
"Yes. He caught and trapped most of my race--we are not so numerous asyou cursed rabbits--by the same means you used. One great vat hecollected, after some years of the bottles, and sealed up a multitude ofmy folk and cast them off a ship; somehow the currents dragged the boxto Atlantis. There my people were freed, and set about to conquer theland. But the Atlanteans captured them after several decades and, havingconstructed the terrible machine, sent them off to this forsaken hole inspace. The cataclysm the machine made--evidently they hadn't been soclever as they thought, may Allah rot their souls!--set off volcanicaction, which eventually sank their country. It was never very large,anyway...."
"How do you know this?" asked Pink. He was a bit breathless; at anymoment the being might decide to shut up and die. He had to satisfy hiscuriosity about the space-dwellers.
"I was one who escaped Solomon. I made my way to England after a fewcenturies of wandering, of being a minor deity here and there, and inEngland in the late seventeenth century I met a brother. He had been onAtlantis, and hovering above it had seen the exiling of our race and t
hedeath of the land. Together we determined to find the machine, repair itif need be, and bring back our people. We thought they were somewhere inthe bowels of the earth, or perhaps held invisible in the machineitself.
"We felt we were the last djinn at liberty. We went under the sea--"
"How?" This was Bill Calico, nursing a broken leg on the couch.
"We are oblivious to our surrounding elements, so long as they are nottoo dense for us to penetrate. After a year or two we found themachine. It was partially destroyed, but so simple that we easilyrepaired it. We could not see how it could make our race vanish, but aswe are indestructible except by lead, and the Atlanteans did not know ofthat metal, we knew that they had vanished rather than died. When we hadthe machine fixed, I volunteered to try it out and see what happened. Hewas to reverse it and draw me back shortly."
* * * * *
The monstrous thing sighed. "It was too complex for us. First I foundmyself floating a mile or so off Oasis, and then my friend joined me.His adjustments had failed. The cursed machine had relegated us both."
"God bless Atlantis," murmured Circe.
"I presume you are taking the bottles and the great vat of lead back toEarth?" it queried slyly.
"Not on your life," said Daley. "As soon as we're out of System Ninety,we'll drop 'em into the void. Your damn tribe will be marooned properlythis time."
"But they are alive in those prisons!" it shouted, its eyes momentarilyreddening again. "Such compression is most irksome to them, and theymust constantly shift about to keep clear of the lead in the stoppers.It's inhuman!"
"You're right," said Pink grimly. "It's djinnlike."
"How did you learn English?" asked Jerry suddenly. "Modern English, Imean."
"You forget; when you brought me aboard, in the guise of a Martian, youhanded me a lingoalter. It was simple to speak the English of the 17thcentury into it and listen as modern speech came out."
"That's another thing. That Martian suit--how'd you get it?"
"They had come this far. We found the suit, with its occupant longturned to dust. We kept it for such emergencies. When the space shipsfoundered nearby a few years ago, we refrained from molesting thiswoman, thinking that she might some day be a fine decoy."
"You watched me in the suit," said Circe.
"We did. We had not seen a human in a long time." The djinni paused,then said, "The Martians had space travel when Earthmen were barbarians.They came to Terra, and we, sensing danger in them, drove them out. Wesaw to it that the Martians would tell tales of the horrors of Earthlife, and never come back."
"By God," said Pink, "that's why they never colonized Earth, thoughthey had spaceships! It's one of the biggest problems we've known."
"Then I've solved it for you. Will you do me a favor in return?"
"What?"
"Have you any lead left?"
"A little."
"Then lay it on my chest, and give me a quick death."
"Get it," Pink said to Daley. The lieutenant started a protest. Pinksaid, "My Lord, can't we afford to be merciful now? After all thatslaughter?" And Daley went to find the lead.
Circe said, "Why do you want to go to Earth so badly? What's there thatyou want? You're such an independent form of life...."
"Atmosphere," said the djinni.
"But you don't breathe!"
"We do, however, talk; and we cannot hear each other in a vacuum. Wewanted to find Earth again and know the pleasure of communication. OnOasis we had to talk with our hands." It groaned, grotesquely human inits agony. "Can you imagine living for centuries without the joy ofconversation?" it asked pitifully.
Circe shook her head. "I don't much blame you," she said in a smallvoice.
Daley came back. He handed a small rough bar of lead to Pink. TheCaptain's mind seethed with questions he longed to ask; but the reactionof the battle was settling in with vengeance, and he could not see thisgreat paralyzed brute live on because of his own more or less idlecuriosity. He bent forward from the chair. "Sorry," he said, and droppedthe bar onto its chest.
"Wait!" said Jerry. "How did you know how to spell _phony_?"
The djinni made a small hissing noise that had something in it ofcontentment. Its eyes turned jetty, and they knew it was dead.
"It died happy," said Daley to the slim O. O. "It knew it was leaving usa problem that we'd never solve. What a--what a malicious character itwas!"
"Poor devil," said Circe. "No conversation for five hundred years!"
CHAPTER XXV
Four days later Pinkham and Circe stood quietly before a scanner screen,Pink leaning on a cane, and watched the great lead vat and then themultitude of bottles go tumbling into space. "We are giving them achance of survival," mused Circe. "There's about one chance in a billionthat some day they'll be found and released again."
"I wonder," said Pink, "if they did predate man in evolution? Or if theywere originally native to another planet that expelled 'em? There werealways legends of giants and ogres and djinn and demons on earth, mythsthat started to die out about the time this late friend of ours left theglobe for good. Maybe the djinni developed side by side with man, butwas limited because of his flaws. There are a million life-forms in theuniverse so alien to man as to be unexplainable, and a lot of them areright home on Terra."
Circe shook her dark head. "Is the whole thing real, Pink? Or is it afantasy we've uncovered out here in the void?"
"Every damn thing about them is scientifically possible. But I know howyou feel--it seems like a fairy story. If so many good guys weren't deadback there, I'd disbelieve it myself." He scowled a moment, then lookedat her and brightened. "Honey," he said, "remind me that I have to senda radio message to Earth as soon as we're close enough."
"Radio message? What?"
"A sort of temperance warning, that's all." He grinned. "It goes likethis: _If you find any bottles, don't open them!_"
THE END
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