Read Ebook: The Last Monster by Fox Gardner F Gardner Francis Ingels Graham Illustrator

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Ebook has 304 lines and 12557 words, and 7 pages

The Last Monster

Irgi was the last of his monster race, guardian of a dead planet, master of the secret of immortality. It was he whom the four men from Earth had to conquer to gain that secret--a tentacled monstrosity whom Earthly weapons could not touch.

Irgi was the last of his race. There was no one else, now; there had been no others for hundreds and hundreds of years. Irgi had lost count of time dwelling alone amid the marble halls of the eon-ancient city, but he knew that much. There were no others.

Only Irgi, alone.

He moved now along the ebony flooring, past the white marble walls hung with golden drapes that never withered or shed their aurate luster in the opalescent mists that bathed the city in shimmering whiteness. They hung low, those wispy tendrils of mist, clasping everything in their clinging shelter, destroying dust and germs. Irgi had discovered the mist many years ago, when it was too late to save his kind.

He had flung a vast globe of transparent metal above this greatest of the cities of the Urg and filled it with the mist, and in it he had stored the treasures of his people. From Bar Nomala, from Faryl, and from the far-off jungle city of Kreed had he brought the riches of the Urg and set them up. Irgi enjoyed beauty, and he enjoyed work. It was the combination of both that kept him sane.

Toward a mighty bronze doorway he went, and as his body passed an invisible beam, the bronze portals slid apart, noiselessly, opening to reveal a vast circular chamber that hummed and throbbed, and was filled with a pale blue luminescence that glimmered upon metal rods and bars and ten tall cones of steelite.

In the doorway, Irgi paused and ran his eyes about the chamber, sighing.

This was his life work, this blue hum and throb. Those ten cones lifting their disced tips toward a circular roof bathed in, and drew their power from, a huge block of radiant white matter that hung suspended between the cones, in midair. All power did the cones and the block possess. There was nothing they could not do, if Irgi so willed. It was another discovery that came too late to save the Urg.

Irgi moved across the room. He pressed glittering jewels inset in a control panel on the wall, one after another, in proper sequence.

The blue opalescence deepened, grew dark and vivid. The hum broadened into a hoarse roar. And standing out, startlingly white against the blue, was the queer block of shining metal, shimmering and pulsing.

Irgi drew himself upwards, slowly turning, laving in the quivering bands of cobalt that sped outward from the cones. He preened his body in their patterns of color, watching it splash and spread over his chest and torso. Where it touched, a faint tingle lingered; then spread outwards, all over his huge form.

Irgi was immortal, and the blue light made him so.

"There, it is done," he whispered to himself. "Now for another oval I can roam all Urg as I will, for the life spark in me has been cleansed and nourished."

He touched the jeweled controls, shutting the power to a low murmur. He turned to the bronze doors, passed through and into the misty halls.

"I must speak," Irgi said as he moved along the corridor. "I have not spoken for many weeks. I must exercise my voice, or lose it. That is the law of nature. It would atrophy, otherwise.

"Yes, I will use my voice tonight, and I will go out under the dome and look up at the stars and the other planets that swing near Urg, and I will talk to them and tell them how lonely Irgi is."

He turned and went along a hall that opened into a broad balcony which stood forth directly beneath a segment of the mighty dome. He stared upwards, craning all his eyes to see through the darkness pressing down upon him.

"Stars," he whispered, "listen to me once again. I am lonely, stars, and the name and fame of Irgi means nothing to the walls of my city, nor to the Chamber of the Cones, nor even--at times--to Irgi himself."

He paused and his eyes widened, staring upwards.

It was a spaceship.

Emerson took his hands from the controls of the gigantic ship that hurtled through space, and wiped his sweaty palms on his thighs. His grey eyes bored like a steel awl downward at the mighty globe swinging in the void.

"The last planet in our course," he breathed. "Maybe it has the radium!"

"Yes," whispered the man beside him, wetting his lips with his tongue. "No use to think of failure. If it hasn't, we'll die ourselves, down there."

Radium. And the Plague. It had come on Earth suddenly, had the Plague, back in the first days of space travel, after Quigg, the American research scientist at Cal Tech, discovered a way to lift a rocket ship off the Earth, and propel it to the Moon.

They had been slow, lumbering vessels, those first spaceships; not at all like the sleek craft that plied the voids today. But it had been a beginning. And no one had thought anything of it when Quigg, who had made the first flight through space, died of cancer.

As the years passed to a decade, and the ships of Earth rode to Mars and Venus, it began to be apparent that a lifetime of space travel meant a hideous death. Scientists attributed it to the cosmic rays, for out in space there was no blanketing layer of atmosphere to protect the fleshy tissues of man from their piercing power. It had long been a theory that cosmic rays were related to the birth of new life in the cosmos; perhaps they were, said some, the direct cause of life. Thus by causing the unorderly growth of new cells that man called cancer, the cosmic rays were destroying the life they had created.

It meant death to travel in space, and only the stupendous fees paid to the young men who believed in a short life and a merry one, kept the ships plying between Mars and Earth and Venus. Lead kept out the cosmic rays, but lead would not stand the terrific speed required to lift a craft free of planetary gravity; and an inner coating of lead brought men into port raving with lead poisoning illusions.

Cancer cases increased on Earth. It was learned that the virulent form of space cancer, as it was called, was in some peculiar manner, contagious to a certain extent. The alarm spread. Men who voyaged in space were segregated, but the damage had been done.

The Plague spread, and ravaged the peoples of three planets.

Hospitals were set up, and precious radium used for the fight. But the radium was hard to come by. There was just not enough for the job.

A ship was built, the fastest vessel ever made by man. It was designed for speed. It made the swiftest interplanetary craft seem a lumbering barge by comparison. And mankind gave it to Valentine Emerson to take it out among the stars to find the precious radium in sufficient quantities to halt the Plague.

It had not been easy to find a crew. The three worlds knew the men were going to their doom. It would be a miracle if ever they reached a single planet, if they did not perish of space cancer before their first goal. Carson Nichols, whose wife and children were dying of the Plague, begged him for a chance. A murderer convicted to the Martian salt mines, Karl Mussdorf, grudgingly agreed to go along on the promise that he won a pardon if he ever came back. With Mussdorf went a little, wry-faced man named Tilford Gunn, who knew radio, cookery, and the fine art of pocket-picking. The two seemed inseparable.

Now Emerson was breathing softly, "Yes, it had better be there, or else we die."

He ran quivering fingers over his forearm, felt the strange lumps that heralded cancer. Involuntarily, he shuddered.

Steps clanged on the metal runway beneath them. Mussdorf pushed up through the trap and got to his feet. He was as big as Emerson, bulky where Emerson was lithe, granite where Emerson was chiseled steel. His hair was black, and his brows shaggy. A stubborn jaw shot out under thin, hard lips.

"There it is, Karl," said Nichols. "Start hoping."

Mussdorf scowled darkly, and spat.

"A hell of a way to spend my last days," he growled. "I'm dying on my feet, and I've got to be a martyr to a billion people who don't know I'm alive."

"You know a better way to die, of course," replied Emerson.

"You bet I do. There's a sweet little redhead in New Mars. She'd make dying a pleasure. In fact," he chuckled softly, "that's just the way I'd let her kill me."

Emerson snorted, glancing down at the controls. Beneath his steady fingers, the ship sideslipped into the gravity tug of the looming orb, shuddered a moment, then eased downward.

"Tell Gunn to come up," ordered Emerson. "No need for him to be below."

Mussdorf dropped to the floor, lowered his shaggy head through the open trap, and bellowed. A hail from the depths of the ship answered him. A moment later, Gunn stood with the others: a little man with a wry smile twisting his features to a hard mask.

"Think she's got the stuff, skipper?" he asked Emerson.

"The spectroscope'll tell us. Break it out."

"You bet."

The ship rocked gently as Emerson set it down on a flat, rocky plain between two high, craggy mountains that rose abruptly from the tiny valley. It was just lighting as the faint rays of the suns that served this planet nosed their way above the peaks. Like a silver needle on a floor of black rock, the spacecraft bounced once, twice; then lay still.

Within her gleaming walls, four men bent with hard faces over gleaming bands of color on a spectroscopic screen. With quivering fingers, Emerson twisted dials and switches.

"Hell!" exploded Mussdorf. "I might have known it. Not a trace."

Emerson touched his forearm gently, and shuddered.

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