Chapter 22: Sacrifice

“Down in the pyramid! You went down there?” Herr Kreiss forgot even his absorbing experiments to exclaim incredulously at Chet’s report.

Guided by Towahg, Chet had returned to Happy Valley. There had been six days and nights to be spent, and he felt that he should tell Kreiss what he had learned.

“Yes,” said Chet dully; “yes, I went down.”

He was seated on a rock in the enclosure they had built. He raised his deep-sunk, sleepless eyes to stare at the house where he and Walt had worked. There Walt and Diane were to have made their home; Chet found something infinitely pathetic now in the unfinished shelter: its very crudities seemed to cry aloud against the blight that had fallen upon the place.

“And what was there?” Kreiss demanded. “This hypnotic power--was it an attribute of the ape-men themselves? That seems highly improbable. Or was there something else--some other source of the thought waves or radiations of mental force?”

Chet was still answering almost in monosyllables. “Something else,” he told Kreiss.

“Ah,” exclaimed the scientist, “I should have liked to see them. Such mental attainment! Such control of the great thought-force which with us is so little developed! Mind--pure mentality--carried to that stage of conscious development, would be worthy of our highest admiration. I should like to meet such men.”

“They’re not men,” said Chet; “they’re--they’re--”

He knew how unable he was to put into words his impression of the unseen things, and he suddenly became voluble with hate.

“God knows what they are!” he exclaimed, “but they’re not men. ‘Mind’, you say; ‘mentality!’ Well, if those coldly devilish things are an example of what mind can evolve into when there’s no decency of soul along with it, then I tell you hell’s full of some marvelous minds!”

He sprang abruptly to his feet.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” he said; “I can’t stand it. Four more days, and that’s the end of it all. I’m going back to the ship. I saw it from up on the divide. Still buried in gas--but I’m going back. If I could just get in there I might do something. There’s all our supplies--our storage of detonite; I might do some good work yet!”

He was pacing up and down restlessly where a path had been worn on the grassy knoll, worn by his feet and the pitiful, bruised feet he had seen from his shelter in the pyramid; worn by Walt and Diane--his comrades! And they were helpless; their whole hope lay in him! The thought of his own impotence was maddening. He poured out the story of his experience in the pyramid, as if the telling might give him relief.

Kreiss sat in silence, listening to it all. He broke in at last.

“Wait!” he ordered. “There are some questions I would have answered. You said once that they found us--these devils that you tell of--because of the trail that I left. That is true?”

“Yes,” Chet agreed irritably, “but what of it? It’s all over now.”

“Possibly not,” Herr Kreiss demurred; “quite possibly not. The fault, it appears, was mine. Who shall say where the results of that fault shall lead?

“And you say that these thinking creatures are devils, and that they plan to sacrifice your good friends to strange gods; and still the fault leads on.” Herr Kreiss, to whom cause and effect were sure guides, seemed meditating upon the strange workings of immutable laws.

“And you say that if you could reach the interior of your ship you might perhaps be of help. Yes, it is so! And the ship is engulfed in a fluid sea, but the sea is of gas. Now in that I am not to blame, and yet--and--yet--they all tie in together at the last; yes!”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Chet Bullard harshly. “It’s no use to moralize on who is to blame. If you know anything to do, speak up; if not--”

Herr Kreiss raised his spare frame erect. “I shall do better than that,” he stated; “I shall act.” And Chet stared curiously after, as the thin figure clambered up on the rocks and vanished into the cave.

He forgot him then and turned to stare moodily across the enclosure that had been the scene of their battle. Kreiss had done good work there; he had scared the savages into a panic fear. Chet was seeing again the scenes of that night when a faint explosion came from the rocks at his side. He looked up to see Herr Kreiss stagger from the cave.

Eyebrows and lashes were gone; his hair was tinged short; but his thick glasses had protected his eyes. He breathed deeply of the outside air as he regarded the remnant of a bladder that once had held a sample of green gas. Then, without a word of explanation, he turned again into the cave where a thin trickle of smoke was issuing.

Ragged and torn, his clothes were held together by bits of vine. There were longer ropes of the same material that made a sling on his shoulders when he reappeared. And, tied in the sling, were bundles; one large, one small, but sagging with weight. Both were bound tightly in wrappings of broad leaves.

“We will go now,” Herr Kreiss stated: “there is no time to be lost.”

“Go? Go where?” Chet’s question echoed his utter bewilderment.

“To the ship! Come, savage!”--he motioned to Towahg--”I did not do well when I made my way alone. You shall lead now.”

“He’s crazy,” Chet told himself half aloud: “his motor’s shot and his controls are jammed! Oh, well; what’s the difference? I might as well spend the time this way as any. I meant to go back to the old ship once more.”

Kreiss’ arm still troubled from the wound he had got in the fight, but Chet could not induce him to share his load.

“Es ist mein recht,” he grumbled, and added cryptically: “To each man this only is sure--that he must carry his own cross.” And Chet, with a shrug, let him have his way.

There was little said on the trip. Chet was as silent and uncommunicative as Kreiss when, for the last time, he paused on the divide to see the green glint from a distant ship, then plunged with the others into a forest as unreal as all this experience now seemed.

And at the last, when the red light of late afternoon ensanguined a wild world, they came to the smoke of Fire Valley, and a thousand fumeroles, little and big, that emitted their flame and gas. And one, at the lower end of the valley had built up a great mound of greasy mud from whose top issued hot billows of green gas. It was here that Kreiss paused and unslung his pack.

“Take this,” he told Chet; and the pilot dragged his reluctant eyes from the view of the nearby cylinder enveloped in green clouds. The scientist was handing him the larger of the two packages. It was bulky but light: Chet took it by a loop in one of the vines.

“Careful!” warned Kreiss. “I have worked on it for a month; you see, my equipment was not so good. I thought that the time might come when it would be put to use, only first I must conquer the gas--which I now prepare to do.”