Read Online Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1959 by The Dark Destroyers (v1.1) - Free Book Online Page A

more maddening than ever, seeming to rattle him
inside die cabin like a pea in a gourd. He clung to
the uppermost arm of the controls to keep himself steady.
                 Below
was ground, brown patches that seemed scalded and barren, with belts and clumps
of woods between. Up ahead he saw a great blue-gray sheet of water, stretching
far out to the northern horizon, and at the shore and upon hills to either side
were tufts of timber. There rose at almost the water's
brink, dead ahead of him, a great plump dome.
                 An artificial structure? A haven of these
Cold People? But it dwarfed the trees and the hills to nothing—it was
like a mighty mountain, at least five miles in diameter and fully two miles
high. As he swept toward it, he thought he could make out a pocking of ports—thousands
of ports or entrances. Nearer now, in the midst of his escorting foemen, and he
could see great veinlike abysses, that might be the cracks of great doorways ever
to slighdy ajar.
                 Surely,
this was a capital city of Earth 's conquerors, a dome so much larger and more complex than those he had
seen in southern regions that they would be like buttons beside a parasol. And
that flock of ships, darting and crowding around him, was forcing him toward
it. Ever the vibration shook his fugitive craft, tingling his nerves and making his hair brisde, driving him half wild.
                 He
tried to swerve aside; his controls did not respond. That meant that something
had taken hold of his vessel from outside, was guiding it. His speed checked.
He felt himself drop, felt the sickening tilt of the floor as it slanted
forward. Out of the port he looked at the dome, close in, as he approached it
in utter helplessness.
                 A
round black pit opened suddenly in the great structure's swelling flank, as a
dark passionless eye might open in a spacious face to stare at him. The pit was
black for only a moment—then, deep within it, a green glare sprang out, and
seemed to hurl itself upon him.
                 This is going to be the finish, Darragh
said hastily in his heart. This is the
goodbye wave of the fortune that kept me alive and brought me all the way up
here.
                 That
green radiance must surely be the explosion-ray of which he had heard utterly
terrible tales. He seemed to be getting time enough to draw himself up
straight, into a position of pride and defiance worthy of Spence or Capato, to
die like a man.
                 But
he was not dying. He was not exploding.
                The floor still tilted, the craft
still slid downward. But Darragh was alive inside it. He did not even feel
discomfort. Those vibrations were gone from him and from around him. Then he
knew that the ship was standing still, as though pedestalled upon the beam of
green light that involved it.
                 All
around him, things had turned green, as if the light mushroomed there, flowing
in at every port of the cabin. He himself seemed clamped in that braced erect
posture he had achieved, unable to stir hand or foot, barely able to breathe.
But he could see and think.
                 A
new sense came into him, as of lightness, of rising from the slanted floor.
That was it; the floor was trying to drop from beneath him. The green beam was
dragging him and the ship down to earth, down into the great round door in the
dome.
                 Seconds
later, he jarred to a standstill.
                At once the green fight was gone
from around him. All was dark outside, and the soft lights of his cabin, the
little flecks on map and diagram, had blinked out.
                 Some
inspiration of saving himself compelled him to thrust on his goggles and scarf,
to drag his gauntlets upon his hands, to pull the hood over his head again.
Then he dived at the sail that once before had been a shelter to him,