Читать книгу Onslaught of the Druid Girls - Raymond King Cummings - Страница 3

by RAY CUMMINGS

Table of Contents

Lee Blaine went to find Earth's second moon, and found also a lovely girl in dire, mysterious danger.

FANTASTIC ADVENTURES

VOL. 3, NO. 4

June, 1941

Table of Contents

When Lee Blaine reached Earth's second moon, he found a tangle of mystery. Who were the Nonites? What danger menaced Aurita and her Druid girls?

The scream of the meteor, flaming its way down through the atmosphere, still echoed over the quiet Wisconsin countryside.

"Robert ... Robert," came an anxious, startled voice penetrating the lonely observatory from the staircase that led down to the little cottage itself, "What has happened? What was that awful noise?"

"A meteor, only a giant meteor," Dr. Robert Blaine's old voice called down. "It landed close, Mary, but everything's all right, I'm sure ..."

He turned and peered through the gloom of the observatory, toward the iron stairway that led to a tiny walk circling the room. Up there were a few small, shuttered windows. From them he might be able to see something ...

Slowly, because his old joints creaked with movement, he walked around the telescope that took up most of the center of the floor. Halfway up the stairway to the tiny walk he heard footsteps behind him. Light footsteps, sure and dainty still, even though the woman who had come into the laboratory was white-haired and wrinkled with the years that make a grandmother so sweet.

"I'm coming up to see too, Robert," she said. "Besides, you know you shouldn't be climbing around here. You're liable to fall ..."

"Now, Mary," he protested. "Just because you're my wife—these fifty years past—you don't have to treat me like those babies who've grown up and gotten out of your tender clutches. The years have meant less to you, because I've been kind ..."

"Yes, Robert, and haven't I always been a good wife and given as much as I received? So now, it is my shoulder you must lean on, when you climb."

He waited on the stairway until she was at his side. Then he reached out and kissed her fondly.

"It's been a good life, hasn't it, Mary? A little lonely, but ..." he paused as he saw the wistful look that flashed for a moment into her eyes.

"It would have been nice if Lee were here to help us both," she said. "He would take us to the meteor ..." She stopped suddenly—

"Oh, Robert, do you think...?"

"You mean—a message from him? The meteor...?" Dr. Blaine frowned. "He promised he'd communicate—if he could—some way, especially if he could justify my theory ..."

"Robert," she said swiftly, tremulously, "I have such a strange feeling. Almost as if our grandson were near ..."

Together they climbed the stairway and opened a shuttered window to the stars. Outside, it was night, and the sky was a blue vault of jeweled treasure.

"It landed on this side, to the east," said Robert Blaine, peering with his old eyes into the night.

"Robert! Over there! A red glow—and smoke. The grass is smouldering in the roadside near the barn ..." Mary's voice was youthful with excitement, and her still-beautiful face was tense.

Blaine peered in the direction she pointed, past the lacy cuff of her long-sleeved dress.

"Yes," he nodded slowly. "It landed there."

"A message—from Lee!" she exclaimed.

He laid a hand on her arm.

"Now, Mary, don't build up your hopes. Don't jump to conclusions. That's not the good astronomer I've taught you to be."

"I'm not an astronomer tonight," she said with a catch in her voice. "I'm a lonely old lady, with a woman's intuition, and a wish to hear from ... from Ethel's boy. When you lose your own children, a grandson seems to become even more dear."

Robert Blaine put an arm around her shoulder.

"I know, Mary," he whispered. "I loved Lee, too, and that night he went away, out into space, saying he would prove I was right about the second moon and restore my good name in astronomy, I wished I'd never discovered Zonara. Always was an impetuous lad, was Lee. Never gave a thought to the fact that he was gambling his life for something so trivial as his grandfather's integrity as an astronomer ..."

"It wasn't trivial to him ... and besides, Lee knew what he was doing. He believed in space travel. I know he's alive, that he didn't die out there in the void." Mary's voice took on a sure tone. "That meteor out there; we've got to dig it up ..."

But it was late afternoon of the next day before they got the meteorite out of the ground where it had buried itself eight feet beneath the surface. Henry, the hired man, had to dig a trench about it, then drag it out with the station wagon.

And then, when they got it into the basement, a welder had to come out from town to cut into its hard metal with a torch.

It had been, roughly, about three feet long and eight inches in diameter. Scarred and pitted, it was, from its fiery flight through the atmosphere. But even from the start, it had been obvious that it was no ordinary meteor.

"It's from Lee," Mary Blaine said positively many times.

And when it finally fell in two halves, her woman's intuition was found to be correct. For the shell contained a variety of objects. There was a manuscript, on strange buff-colored material that wasn't paper; a sheaf of maps, charts, and computations; a folded note; and strangest of all, two great diamond-like jewels that sparkled and shone brilliantly as the light fell on them.

"Diamonds!" gasped Mary. "Bigger than any on Earth ..."

"No," said Dr. Blaine slowly. "Not diamonds. Just some kind of crystal. But they are beautiful, aren't they?"

He picked one up and walked to the light to examine it. He peered into his carved facets, and an exclamation burst from him.

"Mary, look...!" he began.

"Robert," she interrupted him. "This note. From Lee. He's safe, and happy—but," her voice fell, "he says he has no means to come home ..." her voice trailed away. "Oh, Lee, my darling ..." she murmured.

Blaine took the note from her and read:

"Dear Mary and Bob (Lee had always called them that):" it began. "I am on Zonara, and I have proved all your theories. Charted proof is included in this shell, and the story of my adventures here. I am safe, but I cannot return to Earth. My machine is wrecked. I am happy, though, and would not leave if I could. If you will look into the crystals, you will find out why. Love to you both. Lee."

Dr. Blaine lifted the crystal he still held in his hand and stared once more into it.

"Look, Mary," he said gently. "Isn't she beautiful?"

Wonder in her eyes, Mary Blaine peered into the crystal, and a cry came from her old lips, as she saw, deep in its flashing depths, the shimmering image of a girl.

A tiny figure at first; but soon the image seemed to grow until Mary Blaine almost imagined she were looking through a window at the elfinly beautiful face of a lovely girl who stared out at her.

Long hair seemed to float in the wind, and deep blue eyes, filled with earnestness, and yet with a laughing joyousness, looked into hers.

"She's perfect!" breathed Mary. "Oh, Lee, if she's yours, then you are happy there on Zonara!"

"Look here," said Robert Blaine, handing her the other crystal. "It's ... Lee!"

Looking out of the crystal she saw the handsome features of Lee Blaine, although an older, more manly Lee Blaine than the youth who had gone so bravely and so foolishly into space three years before. He seemed tall and strong and fully developed. His cheeks were tanned, and he was healthy and smiling and happy. It was almost as if he were speaking, so real was the image confined in the depths of the mysterious crystal.

"So much better than our pictures," breathed Mary. "He cannot ever be far from us while we have these ..."

"Come, Mary," said Blaine. "Let's go upstairs and sit before the fire. You can read the manuscript. Your eyes are better than mine. I've spent too many long hours at the telescope ..."

He put an arm around her shoulder and they went upstairs. There they sat before the fireplace and read the manuscript of Lee Blaine, who went to Earth's second moon to prove that it really existed; to vindicate his grandfather, Dr. Robert Blaine, who listened now to his wife's clear, quiet voice reading the story on the curious buff sheets that had crossed the void from 440,000 miles away in space.

And this is the story of Lee Blaine and of Aurita, the Druid Girl of Zonara: