TED DUSTIN’S first glimmer of returning consciousness after his space flier had crashed with him in the crater of Copernicus, was a queer, swinging sensation.
He opened his eyes and saw the broad shoulders of an armored warrior, on one of which rested a pole. The other end of the pole was carried by another warrior behind, and he was swinging in a net, each end of which was fastened to the pole. Two more warriors armed with long spears with heads that resembled long-toothed buzz saws, and with swords and ray projectors belted about their waists, walked on either side. He could hear the clanking armor of many more behind. An officer, in gaudy armor, walked ahead.
The young scientist saw that he was being carried through a beautiful garden of luminous trees, shrubs and plants, toward a tall, hexagonal building crowned with a pagoda-like structure of yellow metal, brilliantly lighted.
Presently the column came to a halt before a broad flight of steps leading up to a great diamond-shaped door. Standing on the lower step, surrounded by his courtiers, slaves and attendants, he recognized the huge rotund figure of P’an-ku.
At a command from the leader he was lowered to the ground. Then the two men who had been carrying him seized him on each side, and jerking him erect, dragged him before the monarch.
“O, Vicar of the Great Lord Sun,” intoned the officer. “I bring you alive, the presuming parasite from Du Gong who destroyed the experimental ray projector.”
“By the sacred bones of my worshipful ancestors!” exclaimed P’an-ku, peering down at the prisoner over his puffy cheeks, and twisting his long, stringy moustache. “If Dr. Wu sent us the correct description, it is none other than the upstart who calls himself a scientist, Ted Dustin.”
“And if I mistake not,” replied Ted, smiling, “you are P’an-ku, the master of bombast who calls himself ‘Lord of the Universe.’”
“O, slimy worm and wriggling maggot of Du Gong,” grated P’an-ku. “Think you that you have performed a great service for your people by destroying my experimental ray projector? Know then, that I am building, and will have completed in less than five of your days, a projector with ten times its power. You could have destroyed it as easily as the other, but you have merely saved me the effort of dismantling the smaller projector.”
“Everything in its turn,” replied Ted, feigning a complacency he did not feel.
“As to your death,” continued P’an-ku, closely watching his prisoner for signs of fear, “I will ponder over it. It was you who destroyed Ur—you who defied me—you who thought to break my power by destroying a small experimental projector. I must have leisure to devise a punishment befitting your crimes.”
He turned to the officer who had brought up the prisoner, saying:
“Away with him, to the dungeons of eternal darkness.”
Ted was hustled away to a small side entrance on the ground level of the palace, along a hallway, through a torture chamber where victims shrieked their anguish and hideously painted torturers laughed at their agonies, then down a spiral ramp dimly lighted by small globes of luminous yellow liquid, which appeared almost endless, so deeply did it penetrate the damp rock.
Presently, when it seemed to the young scientist that he must be at least a mile beneath the palace, the two men who were dragging him halted at a sharp command from the officer who led the way.
The officer then lighted a head lamp on the front of his pagoda-like helmet, and plunged into a dark hole in the wall, followed by the two warriors with their prisoner.
They were in a hand-hewn cavern, roughly circular in form. Cut in the wall at irregular intervals were the openings of passageways which led away from the cavern in all directions. The officer led the way into one of these passageways which was filled with a horrible, sickening stench that became stronger as they advanced.
Presently the passageway widened, and the cause of the foul odors became apparent, as Ted saw, leaning against the back of a niche cut in the wall at the right, a bloated, festering corpse, chained by the neck to a ring in the wall in such a manner that had the person been living he would neither have been able to stand erect nor lie down.
In niches on both sides of the passageway there now came into view more corpses in all stages of decay from cadavers of the freshly dead to mere skeletons. The floors of ail the niches were littered with human bones, as was the passageway itself, but the warriors stepped over them or kicked them out of the way without notice.
Suddenly, from the gloom ahead, there came a horrible, blood-curdling shriek, followed by peal after peal of demoniac laughter.
“Aiee-yah! Ha! Ha! Ha! Aiee-yah! Men and light! Light and life! Darkness and death! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!”
“Shen Ho still lives in body,” whispered one of the soldiers to the other, “but his mind is dead.”
“A mighty mind while it lived,” replied the other. “No puny intellect could have given us back the green ray of our ancestors.”
“Yet none but a fool would dare oppose P’an-ku, Lord of the Universe,” countered the first.
“All wise men are fools in some things,” was the reply.
A moment later Ted saw the madman, squatting in his filthy niche and combing his stringy gray beard with bony, clawlike fingers. A few dirty shreds of clothing still clung to his wasted body—clothing which had evidently been made from the richest of materials of the kind worn by great nobles.
“Aiee!” he shrieked. “Another victim of the darkness!”
The officer had stopped, and was peering into the niche opposite that of the madman. A skeleton, on which there hung a few unclean rags that had once been clothing, half leaned against the wall, the white skull nesting in the metal collar which hung at the end of the short, stout chain fastened to the wall.
“This one will do,” he said, and entering, kicked the moulding bones into a corner with one foot while he shook the chain to dislodge the skull from the collar.
With a key taken from his belt pouch, the officer unlocked the heavy collar and sprung it open. Then, while the two warriors held the prisoner in position, he snapped it on his neck, locked it, and replaced the key in his belt pouch.
“I leave you in distinguished company, O wise fool of Du Gong,” said the officer. “Dead men who have been doughty warriors and mighty Khans, and a madman who was once the mightiest and wisest of all khans. Farewell.”
Ted, who was now chained so he could neither stand erect nor lie down, squatted on his haunches among the bones of his filthy den, and watched the light from the head lamp of the departing officer grow more dim, until it finally disappeared and he was left in complete blackness.
Then he reached back to open his suit of insulating armor, which fastened in the back with an arrangement somewhat resembling a terrestrial zipper. With this armor off it would be an easy matter for him to get rid of his collar and chain, and he would have a fighting chance for his life, as his two pistol degravitors were underneath the armor and over the court suit he had been wearing when he had suddenly decided to attack the green ray projector in his flier.
To his consternation, however, the fastening would not budge. Like its terrestrial cousin the zipper, it worked beautifully when in good order, but when jammed it proved ten times as stubborn. Evidently it had been bent out of shape when his ship crashed with him in the crater. He worked futilely at it for more than two hours, then gave up the attempt as hopeless.
Presently a new idea occurred to him, and he began picking and pulling at the fuzzy exterior of his armor on his right side. If he could only make a hole big enough to get his hand on the pistol degravitor that pressed against his thigh the rest would be easy. But the armor proved as baffling as its fastenings, for interwoven with its tough fibers were tiny metal wires of extraordinary strength. He was still picking hopelessly at these wires when the madman in the cell across from him, who had been quiet up to this time, spoke.
“Who are you, white man?” he asked.
Surprised at the calm tones of this perfectly sane question, Ted replied:
“Men call me Ted Dustin.”
“A peculiar name,” mused Shen Ho. “From what part of Ma Gong do you come?”
“I am from Du Gong,” replied Ted.
“From Du Gong! Are you mad, or can it be that I am as mad as I have pretended to be? If you are from Du Gong how did you get here?”
“In my space flier,” answered Ted.
“You are a scientist?”
“Yes.”
“I, too, am a scientist. I rediscovered the secret of the green ray of our ancestors, after it had been lost for thousands of years. It was my idea to use the ray for defense, but P’an-ku decided to use it for conquest. I objected. That is why I am here—have been here for more than a year. He would have killed me long ago by torture had it not been that he thought he might want to use my brain for his benefit later. As I have nothing left to live for, I feign madness in the presence of the guards, hoping that my execution will be ordered and I may be released from this horrible existence—this living death. Why has P’an-ku sent you here?”
“I am his prisoner of war,” replied Ted, and recounted all that had happened from the time he had fired his projectile at the moon. It was a relief to have someone to talk to there in the stinking darkness.
“Many strange things can happen in a year,” said Shen Ho, when Ted had finished his story. “And to think, he has used not only my invention, but the inventions of my two younger brothers for a war of conquest. My brother Wen Ho, who is five years younger than I, invented the flying globe. My brother, Fen Ho, who is seven years my junior, was the inventor of the powerful explosive projectiles and firing mechanism. We of the house of Ho spent our lives and our talents on these inventions in order that our people might have adequate defensive weapons and live in peace forever. But P’an-ku thought differently about these things, and his word is law.”
“Did he jail your brothers, also?” asked Ted.
“They were condemned to these dungeons at the same time as I,” replied Shen Ho, “but we were all chained in separate passageways. I know not whether they are living or dead.”
“If you found an opportunity to escape, what would you do?” asked Ted.
“First I would search for my brothers and attempt to rescue them or assure myself that they had perished. This accomplished, I would seek P’an-ku.”
“And then?”
“And then, the Lord Sun willing, P’an-ku should die.”
“I have the means of escape at hand, yet cannot reach them.” said Ted, explaining the nature and position of his two pistol degravitors. “If I could but get my hand on one of these weapons, I could destroy our fetters. Then we could help each other.”
For some time Shen Ho was silent. Then he suddenly exclaimed:
“I have a way.”
“How?”
“By persistent rubbing, human teeth will sever that wire.”
“But I can’t bite my own hip,” replied Ted. “That’s out.”
“There are several skulls in your cell,” said Shen Ho, “and in the jaws are teeth.”
“Right!” exclaimed Ted. “We have a saying on Du Gong that two heads are better than one.”
“And you will find,” replied Shen Ho, “that if the first set of teeth wears out, two or three skulls are better than one. When and if you run out of skulls I have plenty more over here.”
After groping about in the darkness for some time, Ted finally secured a skull, tore the jaw bone loose, and began sawing at the armor over his right hip. It was slow work. The wires were tougher by far than he had thought possible, and as Shen Ho had predicted, the teeth in the jaw bone he used were being ground away. When he had worn them down to the bone after many hours of patient labor, he discarded the lower jaw and went to work with the upper set of teeth. These, also, were nearly worn away with but slight effect on the armor, when a light suddenly appeared far down the passageway.
“It is a slave with our food and drink,” whispered Shen Ho. “Cease your labors until he has gone. I will feign madness, as usual.”
Ted laid the skull on the floor and sat down with his back against the wall, while Shen Ho laughed and shrieked until the whole cavern resounded with his weird cries.
The slave, a yellow, round-bodied Lunite who wore a light strapped to his forehead, a long, loose shirt of some coarse material, and straw sandals, set a bowl of stewed fungus and a large cup of water before each prisoner. Although he was without appetite in his ill-smelling surroundings, Ted choked down the fungus and drank the water, not knowing how soon he might again be offered food and drink.
When the prisoners had finished their frugal meal the slave took the bowls and cups and departed, leaving them in total darkness once more.
Ted picked up a skull, the position of which he had marked while eating his meal, tore off the jaw bone, and resumed work on the armor. When he felt sure the slave was out of earshot, he asked Shen Ho how often food and drink were served.
“The slave comes once in a rotation of your world,” replied Shen Ho. “Our world moves so slowly on its axis that we use the rotation of yours to mark our measurement of time. We have our chronometers, of course, but your world is the great chronometer in the sky by which our own are guided and corrected. I had a small timepiece when I was brought here, but it ceased to function long ago and I gave it to a slave as a bribe for some few morsels of better food than is sent here regularly. A short time thereafter, that slave was chained in the niche you now occupy. He cursed me when he told me he had been caught with my chronometer and forced to confess his defection. Being quite superstitious, he died from terror in a short time, and it was his skeleton that was kicked into the corner by the guard and his skull that was shaken out of the collar to make a place for you . . . ”
Four times, thereafter, the slave came with food, thus marking the passage of five earth days in all. Ted had used up all the available teeth in his own niche, and was working with the upper set of the last skull which Shen Ho had been able to produce and toss over to him, but although he had cut through many wires in his armor, he was still unable to reach his degravitor.
Suddenly a light, brighter than the headlamp of the slave, appeared at the entrance of the passage way. The clank of arms and the footsteps of mailed warriors resounded through the cavern.
“Where have they hidden this miserable worm from Du Gong?” asked a voice.
“The officer said he was far back in the passageway, excellency,” answered another.
“I know that first voice,” whispered Shen Ho. “It is the cruel Tzien, who is Khan of the Torture Chambers. With him are four of his painted tortures. Work fast, Ted Dustin, or you are doomed.”
Ted scraped frantically at the remaining wires which kept him from reaching his degravitor. Several snapped, and he attempted to insert his hand, but the opening was still too small.
“Hurry!” called Shen Ho. “They are almost here!”
Gripping the skull in both hands, Ted scraped in frenzied haste while the footfalls and clanking armor grew louder. More wires snapped, yet he could not get his hand in the opening.
Before he could move, Tzien Khan, with his cruel features contorted in a grin of sadistic delight, stepped into view followed by four of his brawny, hideously painted torturers. Then Shen Ho howled and laughed, and muttered of light and life, and of darkness and death.