Part 28

“He took off his hat and went over to the border of the patch. He touched—just barely touched the brim of the hat to the gray matter and held it up. Already a growth was moving up the linen. He nodded, then threw it away, onto the sand. Speechless, we watched it fade away under the merciless attack of that horrible stuff, and then, in turn, the gray fungoid growth wither and disappear.

“‘Now do you understand? Do you see vat I meant? Vood, steel, linen—eferyt’ing vat it touches it _eats_. It grows fast—like flame in dry sticks. All-consuming. Aber—_siest du_—dot sand—ven it touched dot, it died. It starved. Und see! Look close—more closer still at dot sand. Do you see anything odd about it?’

“I shook my head. It looked very fine and light, but I could not see anything unusual.

“‘No? Iss it not glass, dot sand? Look at it und at der sand vere dot T’ing has not been, and see if it is not so different.’

“I picked up some sand from under my foot. And then I saw what _he_ had seen at once. The sand in my hand was coarser, dirtier—in short, like any fine-grained sand you may have seen. But the sand where the Grey had fallen was clear, glasslike. It was almost transparent, and I saw that what was there was a mass of silicon particles. I nodded.

“‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I see now. That stuff has eaten out every particle of mineral, of dirt and dust, but not the silicon!’

“‘Egsactly! Und dot iss vat has safed us from—Gott only knows vot! I do not know what dot stuff vill eat, but I _do_ know it vill not eat silicon. Vy? _I_ do not know. Dot iss yet a mystery. So—it starts,—_ach_, dot too, I do not know—but it starts somewhere. Und it eats und grows, und grows and eats, and eferyt’ing vot it touches it consumes—egcept sand. Sand stops it.

“‘It eats out der stuff in der sand, but not der silica, und starves and dies. It is a miracle. If der sand vas not here—_ach, Gott!_—it vould keep on going until—vell—I do not know! I haf nefer seen dot before. I am intrigued, und I am going to take dot stuff—oh, only a liddle bit—und I shall not rest until I haf learned something about it. Und, because I haf seen it does not lige sand, I vill make for it a cage—a liddle box of glass, und study it lige it vas a bug. Not?’

“We returned to where our natives still stood with our packs. We quickly fitted together some microscopic slides into a rough box and bound it about with string. With it, we returned to the edge of the gray patch. Von Housmann knelt down and carefully scooped up a bit of the fungus with a glass spatula he had brought along. He dumped this into his box and waited. In five minutes it had disappeared. He looked up blankly.

“‘You forget, Sigmund,’ I said, smiling at his woeful expression. ‘It starves on silicon. It won’t live in glass.’

“‘_Ach. Dumkopf!_ Of course! I haf forgot dot. But, ve vill fool dot hell-plant. He goes yet on hunger-strike—no? Ve try now dot forcible feeding.’

“He took out his knife and cut from a near-by tree several small splinters.

“Ve vill feed him, so. Dot vood, it vill be for him a greadt feast, und he shall eat und eat, und we vill study him und see vot we vill see.’

“Laughing, he bent over and shook out the tiny gray residue which was in the box. He dropped in a sliver of wood and was bending over to refill his box when I felt a sting on my foot. I looked down, and my heart stood still.

“On my shoe, just in between the laces, was a spot of gray. I could not move. I was cold. I can not describe how I felt, but I seemed turned to stone. My flesh quivered and shrank and I was sick—very sick. Sigmund looked up, startled, and then he looked at my feet.

“The next thing I knew I was on my back, my foot in his hand. One slash of his knife across the thongs which laced my boot, and he jerked it off.

“The biting grew worse. I heard him gasp, and then I felt a sharp pain. My head swam and I must have fainted. I regained consciousness—I don’t know how soon after—and I found myself back under the trees. I looked at my foot, which was throbbing and burning like fire. It was swathed in a bandage that Von Housmann had taken from his emergency kit and was wrapping around the instep. It was deeply stained with blood. I moved, and he looked up. He smiled when he saw I was conscious.

“‘Dot was a close shave—yes? It had just eaten into der shoe as I pulled it off und one spot—lige a bencil dot—on your skin vas gray. So I cut it out and all around it, und so you haf a hole in your foot, but—you haf your foot. Now so! You lie here, und I get der niggers and ve take you to bed.’

“A tent was soon erected and I was carried into it. For two days I lay there, delirious half the time. Sigmund never left my side. He even slept there. He was insistent that it was his fault. He said one of the apparently dead fungi had dropped on my shoe and had revived there. That is, the plant, instead of dying, had shriveled up, but the life-nucleus was still strong. I shudder even now when I think of what might have been.

“At the end of the third day I was able to hobble about a little with the aid of a cane. That afternoon Sigmund came to me and asked if I would care to go with him to fill his little glass box. I refused, and he laughed. It was the last time I ever heard him laugh. I begged him to leave that stuff alone.

“Still laughing, he made some light reply and left me. I lay in my cot. I was filled with forebodings. The heat was intense, and I must have dropped off to sleep. I dreamed horrible, troublesome, weird dreams. I awoke, bathed in a cold sweat. I felt sure something was wrong, that some one was calling for me. I got to my feet and left my tent. No one was in sight. I tried to laugh at my premonition. I bitterly regretted that I had allowed my friend to override my persuasions.

“Hurrying as much as was possible, I started toward the clearing. My wound throbbed and ached. It tortured me. I seemed weighed down. Once I stumbled in my eagerness. It was horrible. Like a nightmare.

“I must have covered half the distance when I heard a scream. What a shriek it was! I wake up nights even now hearing it. It was unrecognizable. Like some unearthly animal. Just that one scream. My stick hindered me. I threw it away and ran.

“My blood was cold in my veins, but I felt not one twinge of pain in my _foot_. At last I came to the edge of the clearing. And there—God, it makes me sick even now to think of it.”

* * * * *

The speaker paused; his face was chalky, and he shuddered and buried his face in his hands. I think he was crying.

Outside, the wind still howled, dully, monotonously, eerily. Sometimes it would shriek and scream. Then my friend’s voice again—level, dead, cold.

“I looked out; I saw Sigmund standing on the sand. I can see him as plainly as though he were here now. His face was ashen. He was looking down. At his feet were the fragments of the glass box he had made.

“He was holding out his hands, looking at them. They were gray. And they writhed and twisted, but his arms were still. He was not even trembling. My tongue clove to the roof of my mouth, and my throat was dry—but at last I called to him.

“‘Sigmund—Sigmund!’ I cried. ‘For God’s sake—’

“He looked up, and, I tell you, I never want to see such a face again! I can never forget it. The face of a soul in torture. He looked at me and held out his arms. His hands were gone—flaked off in large, gray, writhing drops to the sand at his feet!

“He tried to smile, but couldn’t.

“Another gray—Thing—dropped off. I was dizzy with sickness. It was unbelievable. And then he spoke. His voice was well-nigh unrecognizable. It croaked and broke:

“‘Done for, my friendt. I feel it eating to my heart. Be merciful and help me. _Shoot_—quick, through the foreheadt!’

“His words beat through the stupor clouding my brain, I started toward him—hands out-stretched. I could not speak.

“‘_Um Gottes Willen, bleibt da!_ Stop! Stop!’

“The words brought me up to a stop.

“‘Sigmund! My friend! What—?’

“‘Do not come near me! Vould you also be so tormented? Vat dot Gray touches it consumes. Do not argue, I say, but _shoot!_ _Heilige Mütter!_ Vy do you not shoot?’

“His voice rose into a shriek of agony. What was left of one arm had sloughed off—the other was almost gone. A little mound of gray grew larger at his feet. His flesh was consumed; skin, blood and bone, absorbed by that vile gray Thing, and he shrieked in agony and prayer. Both arms were gone, and the stuff at his feet had already begun to cut through his boots.

“I shot him—between his eyes. I saw him fall, and I fainted. When I came to, there was only a mound of tiny gray fungi, greedily reaching their hellish tentacles for sustenance and slowly shriveling up into tiny light gray specks of dust on a glossy patch of sand.”

Savants No Longer Know All Things

“Men in the business of knowing things have taken a tip from the plumbers, carpenters and plasterers,” announced Friar McCollister, one of the University of Chicago literati. “No longer is it possible to go to a hoary old gentleman with a pile of books and a skull on his desk and ask him any question, from the date of the birth of Copernicus to the conjugations of the verb ‘to know’ in Sanscrit, and get an answer. The scholar nowadays has learned to say what the plumber says when you ask him to fix the hole he has made in the wall: ‘That is not in my department.’ I found this out the other day when I tried to get some information on the discovery of a human skull three million years old.

“First, I went to the information office of the University. There I encountered a sprightly young man who turned out to be a professor of sociology. But he didn’t know anything about men three million years old. He only studied living men, he said. ‘Better go over to Haskell Museum,’ he told me. ‘They have some skulls and mummies over there.’

“I ran up three flights of stairs and into a dusty old room where I saw a Dr. Edgerton. He was copying strange characters out of a book yellow with age. When I put my question he replied that the only ancients he knew were Egyptian mummies. He said I should see an anthropologist. Back to the information office to see where they kept the anthropologists.

“They sent me up to Walker Museum, where a bland young man said, ‘Freddie Starr is not in, but you don’t want an anthropologist, anyway. You want to see an ethnologist.’

“When I found one, after dogging him all over the campus, he told me that the matter really belonged in the department of geology. From there they sent me to see the department of paleontology. At last I located it in a cubby-hole of a museum which I didn’t even know was there, although I have been on the campus three years.

“‘But, my dear sir,’ replied the head of the department to my question, ‘that is not in my department. What you want is a vertebrate paleontologist, and I am only a plain paleontologist. At present we have no vertebrate paleontologist at the University. The last one died a few years ago.’

“Well, I gave up my search,” said Mr. McCollister. “This age of specialization is too much for me.”

Ancient Legend Recalled When Misfortune Attends Tut’s Discoverers

There is an old legend to the effect that whoever molests the final resting-place of a Pharaoh will be afflicted with the curse of the ancient rulers; and recent events have revived this superstition.

After thirty-three years of patient, ceaseless toil, Howard Carter, the now famous Egyptologist, discovered the tomb of a powerful Pharaoh. He was a very sincere man, and devoted to his life work all of his energy. Just when success and reward for his labor was within his grasp, he was stricken down with a baffling disease. His condition became very serious and physicians said that if he lived he would probably be an invalid for a long time. Shortly before Carter’s illness, Lord Carnarvon, who was financing the expedition, and who was personally supervising the work, suddenly died.

Nobody seems to know just what killed him. Some attribute his death to the effects of an insect bite, some say that he was poisoned by some ancient death-potion with which he came in contact while in the tomb, and others declare that his death was the vengeance of King Tut-Ankh-Amen.

If such a legend could be credited anywhere, the Theban valley would be that place. By day nothing disturbs the place except the sound of the pick-axes and shovels of the native workmen. By night the stillness is broken only by the hooting of owls and the cries of jackals and wild-cats. The spectator is awed by the solemnity of the great, precipitous sandstone cliffs that stand sentinel on either side of the valley. In the midst of the silence and solitude one feels himself standing on the brink of two worlds, gazing into a vista of the unknown.

_The Author of “Whispering Wires” Offers Another Thriller to WEIRD TALES Readers_—

The Voice in the Fog

_By_ HENRY LEVERAGE

The _Seriphus_ was a ten thousand ton, straight bow ocean tanker, and her history was the common one of Clyde-built ships—a voyage here and a passage there, charters by strange oil companies, petrol for Brazil, crude petroleum that went to Asia (for anointment purposes among the heathen) and once there was a hurried call to some unpronounceable Aegean port where the _Seriphus_ acted against the Turks in their flare-up after the Great War.

The ordinary and usual—the up and down the trade routes—passed away from the _Seriphus_ when Ezra Morgan, senior captain in the service of William Henningay and Son, took over the tanker and drove her bow into strange Eastern seas, loading with oil at California and discharging cargo in a hundred unknown ports.

Of Ezra Morgan it was said that he had the daring of a Norseman and the thrift of a Maine Yankee; he worked the _Seriphus_ for everything the tanker could give William Henningay and Son; he ranted against the outlandish people of the Orient and traded with them, on the side, for all that he could gain for his own personal benefit.

[Illustration]

Trading skippers and engineers with an inclination toward increasing wage by rum-running and smuggling were common in the Eastern service. Ezra Morgan’s rival in that direction aboard the _Seriphus_ ruled the engine-room and took pride in declaring that every passage was a gold mine for the skipper and himself.

The chief engineer of the _Seriphus_ saw no glory in steam, save dollars; he mopped up oil to save money. His name was Paul Richter—a brutal-featured man given to boasting about his daughter, ashore, and what a lady he was making of her.

Paul Richter—whom Morgan hated and watched—was far too skilled in anything pertaining to steam and its ramifications to be removed from his position aboard the _Seriphus_. Henningay, Senior, believed in opposing forces on his many tankers—it led to rivalry and efficiency, instead of closeheadedness and scheming against owners.

The _Seriphus_, after a round passage to Laichau Bay, which is in the Gulf of Pechili, returned to San Francisco and was dry-docked near Oakland, for general overhauling.

Richter, after making an exact and detailed report to Henningay, Jr., visited the opera, banked certain money he had made on the round-passage, then went south to his daughter’s home. He found trouble in the house; Hylda, his daughter, had a heart affair with a marine electrician, Gathright by name, a young man with a meager wage and unbounded ambition.

Through the Seven Seas, from the time of his Bavarian wife’s death, from cancer of the breast, Richter, chief engineer of the _Seriphus_, had sweated, slaved, saved and smuggled contraband from port in order to say:

“This is my daughter! _Look at her!_”

Now, as Richter discovered, Hylda, twenty-seven years of age, somewhat prim and musical, had given her promise to an electrician whom the engineer believed was not fit to dust her shoes. Richter, used to breaking and thrashing coolie oilers, ordered Gathright from the house and locked up his daughter.

She cried for seven days. Gathright was seen in town. Richter’s rage gave way to an engineer’s calculation.

“What for I study in University and college? Why do I hold certificates? I fix Gathright!”

No oil was smoother than Richter’s well-laid plan; he sent Hylda away and met Gathright.

“All right about my daughter,” he told the electrician. “You go one voyage with me—we’ll see Henningay—I’ll fix you up so that you can draw one hundred and fifty dollars in wage, with a rating as electrician aboard the _Seriphus_.”

Gathright went with Richter to San Francisco. They recrossed the Bay, without seeing Henningay, Jr., and, at dusk, climbed over the shoring timbers and went aboard the _Seriphus_. Richter’s voice awoke echoes in the deserted ship and dry-dock:

“Come, I show you my dynamo and motors. We go to the boiler-room first, where the pumps are.”

The boiler-room, forward the engine-room of the tanker, was a place of many snakelike pipes, valves, sea-plates and oily seepage from the feedtanks. The _Seriphus_ was a converted oil-burner, having been built before crude petroleum was used for steaming purposes. Three double-end Scotch boilers made the steam that drove the tanker’s triple-expansion engine.

Richter knew the way down to the boiler-room, blindfolded. He struck matches, however, to guide Gathright, and remarked that the newer ships of Henningay’s fleet had a storage-battery reserve for lighting purposes when the dynamo ceased running.

Gathright, somewhat suspicious of Hylda’s father, took care to keep two steps behind the chief-engineer. They reached and ducked under the bulkhead beam where the door connected the engine-room with the boiler-room. Richter found a flashlamp, snapped it on, swung its rays around and about as if showing Gathright his new duties.

“There’s a motor-driven feed-pump,” he said. “Something’s the matter with the motor’s commutator. It sparks under load—can you fix it up?”

There was a professional challenge in the chief engineer’s voice; Gathright forgot caution, got down on his knees, leaned toward the motor and ran one finger over the commutator bars. They seemed polished and free from carbon.

Richter reversed his grip on the flashlamp, swung once, twice, and smashed the battery-end of the lamp down on Gathright’s head, just over the top of the electrician’s right ear.

Gathright fell as if pole-axed and dropped with his hands twitching on a metal plate.

Striking a match, Richter surveyed the electrical engineer.

“Good!” he grunted. “Now I put you where nobody’ll ever look—unless I give the order.”

* * * * *

A stump of candle, stuck by wax to a feed-pipe, allowed Richter illumination sufficient to work by. Swearing, sweating, listening once, he fitted a spanner to bolt-heads on a man-plate in the spare boiler and removed the stubborn bolts until the plate clanged at his feet.

Gathright was a slender man, easy to insert through the man-hole; Richter had no trouble at all lifting the electrician and thrusting him out of sight.

It seemed to the engineer, as he hesitated, that Hylda’s lover moaned once and filled the boiler with a hollow sound.

Hesitation passed; and Richter swallowed his superstitious fears, put back the man-hole plate, bolted it tighter than it ever was before, almost stripping the threads, and stepped back, mopping his brow with the sleeve of a shore-coat.

There was nothing very unusual in Richter’s further actions that evening. The ship-keeper, who came aboard at daylight, long before the dry-dock men began work, noticed a wet shore-hose, a thin plume of steam aft the tanker’s squat funnel, and there was a trailing line of smoke drifting aslant the _Seriphus’_ littered deck.

“Been testing that spare boiler,” explained Richter, when the ship-keeper ducked through the bulkhead door. “I think it’s tight an’ unscaled, but th’ starboard one will need new tubes and general cleaning. Get me some soap—I want to wash up.”

Richter dried his hands on a towel, tossed it toward the motor-driven feed-pump, then, when he left the boiler-room, his glance ranged from the tightly-bolted man-hole cover up to a gauge on a steam-pipe. The gauge read seventy-pounds—sufficient to parboil a heavier man than Hylda’s lover.

“I think that was a good job,” concluded the first engineer of the _Seriphus_.

The second engineer of the tanker, a Scot with a burr on his voice like a file rasping the edge of a plate, stood watching Richter balance himself as the stout chief came along a shoring-beam.

“I mark ye ha’ steam up,” commented the Scotchman, when Richter climbed over the dry dock’s wall.

“Yes, in the spareboiler.”

Mr. S. V. Fergerson tapped a pipe on his heel.

“I made an inspection, myself, of that, not later than yesterday forenoon. She was tight as a drum an’ free from scale. I left th’ man-hole—”

“Damn badly gasketed!” growled Richter.

Fergerson started to explain something; but the chief was in a hurry to get away from sight of the _Seriphus_. There was a memory on the tanker that required a drink or two in order to bring forgetfulness. Richter gave the Scot an order that admitted of no answering back.

“Go aboard an’ blow off steam! That boiler’s all right!”

A roar, when Richter strode past the dry-dock’s sheds, caused him to wheel around and listen. Fergerson, according to orders, was blowing off the steam from the spare boiler.

Something, perhaps water or waste, clogged the pipe; and the escaping vapor whistled, sputtered, and rose to a high piercing note that sounded to the chief’s irritated nerves like the cry of a soul in agony. The note died, resumed its piercing screeching. Richter’s arm and hand shook when he mopped his brow and drew a wet sleeve down with an angry motion.

In fancy the noise that came from the _Seriphus’_ starboard side, echoed and deflated by the hollow dock, was Gathright calling for Hylda. Richter covered his ears and staggered away.

* * * * *

Ezra Morgan hastened such repairs as were required for making the _Seriphus_ ready for sea; the tanker left the dry-dock, steamed out the Golden Gate, and took aboard oil at a Southern California port.

All tanks, a well-lashed deck load of cased-lubricant—consigned to a railroad in Manchuri—petroleum for the furnaces, brought the _Seriphus_ down to the Plimsoll Mark; she drove from shore and crossed the Pacific where, at three God-forsaken Eastern roadsteads, she unloaded and made agents for the oil-purchasers happy with shipments delivered on time.