CHAPTER IV

The City Above the Air

At last the light of day, filtering through my prison bars, aroused me from a terrible dream of a gleaming purple octopus that was crushing and strangling me in its coils. Little did I realize how soon that dream was to become a reality!

The red-uniformed sentry came and brought me a little breakfast. I tried to engage him in conversation as I ate, but all I could get out of him was "Aw, shut your trap, Pard!"

He ordered me out of the cell. As I stood outside, blinking in the blaze of morning sunshine, I saw that the crater had been deserted since I had entered. The rows of great sheds were empty, with doors ajar. The long lines of red planes were gone. Even the great ship into which I thought Ellen and the others were taken was not to be seen. The radio station appeared to have been dismantled. There were no more than a dozen airplanes left in the pit; and even as I looked, some of these took off and spiraled up into the sky.

Had the maniac finished his preparations for an attack upon the earth? Had his dreadful army gone forth to begin the ruin of the world?

The guard motioned with his bayonet toward one of the red ships near us on the ground. "Hustle!" he said. "Get aboard. You are going up to see the Master."

From what I later learned, there must have been several hundred white men in the conspiracy with Vars. In exchange for their services, he had offered freedom from the law (which was a great inducement to the class of men he gathered) and a chance to share in the spoils of world conquest. His recruits had numbered bandits and desperadoes of all descriptions, and even a few unscrupulous men of finely trained minds.

In a few minutes we were in the fuselage compartment of the red machine. It was closed and made air-tight. We were seated upon comfortable chairs, and had a good view through circular windows in the sides. The pilot was forward, out of sight, and there was another closed space to the rear, but our compartment took up most of the hull.

The guard refused to answer my questions concerning the ship's propulsion, but I later learned that it was lifted by the negative gravity gas. The motors utilized intra-atomic energy derived by the forced decomposition of thorium, and at high altitudes the propellers were supplemented by rocket guns.

Besides my taciturn guard, there were two other men in the ship. One, a fat, red-faced fellow, who looked as if he had been drinking too much mescale, was boasting of his close association with Vars, "the Master," and of his promised part in the spoil of the earth conquest.

The other was a lean, shrunken man, with red eyes. He stared apprehensively at the pilot's room forward, muttering to himself. I caught a few of his words,

"The shining horrors! The shining horrors. Devils from the sky!"

The machine left the crater floor and flew rapidly up on a steep spiral course. In a few minutes the rugged mountain panorama was spread out like a relief map below us. Presently the stars were visible, and still we climbed, comfortable enough in the heated, air-tight compartment. The propellers had been stopped, but the gravity-neutralizing gas continued to lift the vessel straight up.

Then I noticed a faint purple veil coming over the stars above. Suddenly it seemed that we were plunging through a bank of thin purple mist. Abruptly we shot above a landscape weirder than the wildest dream!

We had climbed above a vast plain!

A flat purple desert stretched illimitably away below us. Far in the west rose a colossal range of sheer purple mountains. The weird plain was covered with strange and stunted violet plants. In the south was a patch of blazing blue that looked like a lake of heavy mist. Beyond rose a forest of fern-like violet plants.

It was a new land above the air!

The sky was utterly black, above that desolate purple world. The stars were blazing with strange splendor, like a mist of sunlit diamond dust. They were brighter than they ever are on earth, for we were above the atmosphere. I turned toward the east, to look at the morning sun. Its light was blinding. The solar corona spread out like great wings from a sphere of livid white.

And on the purple desert, below the blazing sun, was a city!

Great spires and towers and domes rose above the dull flat expanse of purple and blue and violet. The strange buildings were scarlet. They gleamed with a metallic luster, as if they were made of the same metal as the red airplanes.

This was the land of the madman's allies, the home of the purple, gleaming creatures!

In all that strange world, save for the intense red of the weird city, there was no bright color. The smooth plains, the towering mountains, the great lakes, were dull purple or blue or violet. And all were semi-transparent! I could see the Sierra Madre like a little gray ridge, scores of miles below. And in the west, below those purple mountains, was the broad blue Pacific, gleaming like steel.

I cried out in wonder to the guard.

"Huh," he muttered. "It's nothin'. I've been up here a dozen times. Nothin' solid. Just mist. Even the--Things--cut like butter."

The Second Shell

Certainly our machine had risen easily enough through the purple rocks below us. The scientific aspects of that second crust about the earth have been considered very carefully, and the best scientific opinions have been sought.

Mankind dwells upon a comparatively thin crust about the molten or plastic interior of the earth. It would seem there is a similar crust about the air. Science long ago had evidence of it in the reflection of radio waves by the so-called Heaviside Layer.

The volume of the gases in the atmosphere depends upon temperature and pressure. As one leaves the surface of the earth, the air grows thinner, because the pressure is less. But interplanetary space is nearly at absolute zero, where molecular motion ceases. It follows that the molecular motion of the outside of the atmosphere is not sufficient to keep it in the gaseous state at all.

The top of the air is literally frozen into a solid layer!

Scientists suspected as much when they suggested that the Heaviside Layer effect was caused by the reflection of Hertzian waves by solid particles of frozen nitrogen in the air. But it seems that the many frozen gases (for the air contains hydrogen, helium, krypton, neon, xenon, and carbon dioxide, as well as nitrogen, oxygen, and carrying quantities of water vapor) possess chemical characteristics lacking at ordinary temperatures. They seem to have formed a relatively substantial crust, and to have formed an entirely new series of chemical compounds, to make life possible upon that crust. (The rare gases of the air are monatomic, and consequently inert, at ordinary temperatures.)

It would appear that intelligence had been growing up upon that transparent and unsuspected world above, through all the ages that man had been fighting for survival below. Vars had been the first to suspect it. He had got into radio communication with the denizens of that second crust, had enlisted their aid in a war upon his fellow men!

We flew on toward the crimson city.

"The armies from there will conquer the world. Those purple things fight like demons," the fat man boasted complacently, waving his half-empty flask toward the gleaming crimson battlements.

"Demons! Yes. Devils! Hell in the sky!" the shrunken man whispered through chattering teeth, never taking his red eyes from the door to the pilot's cabin.

We were over that strange city of red metal. It was a mile across, circular, with a metal pavement and a wall of red metal about the edge. Scattered along the rim were a dozen great gleaming domes of purple.

"Gas in the domes supports the city," my guard said briefly. "The ground is mist. Won't hold up anything solid."

I suppose that a dollar would have fallen through those purple rocks as a similar disc of neutronic substance, weighing eight thousand tons to the cubic inch, would fall through the crust of our own earth. Strength and weight are relative terms. The strange crust must have seemed solid enough to the weird beings that trod upon it, until they acquired the use of metals and of the negative-gravity gas. (Their "mines" may have been the meteorites of space.)

In the center of the city was a huge transparent dome, with a slender tube projecting through it. I was struck at once with the semblance of it to Dr. Vernon's ray tube. Had a duplicate already been installed here?

The fat man answered my question. "Old Vernon is some prize fool. We have his weapon as well as those already possessed by the Things. A ray tube in that city, and one in every plane. The Master has promised me a little model, to carry in my pocket. He is going to give me Italy and--"

Poison in Their Blood

I listened no more, for we were dropping swiftly to a broad platform of the red metal. Upon it were long lines of the thick-bodied red airplanes. And at one side was the larger ship into which I had seen three prisoners taken.

"--the army, ready to start," I heard the red-faced man again. "I'll be over New York tomorrow." He raised his bottle unsteadily.

Our machine was dropped lightly to the top of the great ship. Two red-clad mechanics moved through our compartment, toward the rear. In the next little room we found them waiting, when my guard had made me follow. They held a round metal door, above a dark opening in the floor. It seems that the machines were placed with openings opposite, and were clamped together to prevent loss of air.

"Crawl through. _Pronto!_" said the guard, giving me another prod with his bayonet and pointing to the hole.

I put my hands on the edge of the opening, dropped through, and found myself in a dark chamber--for a second, alone. It was the opportunity I had been awaiting. I slipped out the little tube of the Doctor's. On the night before, I had set the little dial. Now I pushed over the little lever that lit the tube, and played the invisible beam through the opening.

My guard climbed through, suspicious and in haste, evidently unconscious of the beam. I slipped the tube under my coat, to hide its crimson glow, playing the ray over him again, and over the mechanics and my two fellow-passengers, as they came through. I heard footsteps, and a light flashed on. I saw that we were in a long, low room, with a door at the farther end. Four men, in red uniform, with rifles, were approaching. Hopelessly, I gave them the benefit of the ray, but still nothing happened.

"Move on, Pard," my guard muttered. "The Master waits." He gave me another vigorous prod with the blade. (He seemed to enjoy his prerogative immensely.)

I still had the tube in my hand, concealed against my coat. Though it seemed to have no effect, I was missing no chances. We passed through a door at the end of the room, into another fitted up like a luxurious office. At a paper-littered desk, the lunatic, Vars, was sitting with three other men, who, for all their looks, might have been ex-pugilists or bootlegger kings (or both).

Suddenly Vars ducked, and a pistol flashed at his side. My hand went numb, and I heard the crash of glass. He had shot the tube as I turned it upon him. As he cursed and fired again, I threw myself at the feet of the fat man. Pistols cracked, and I felt the wind of bullets. Strangely, the big fellow collapsed as I dived, striking the floor at my side.

And then a fearful thing threw itself at me!

It was a many-tentacled creature of luminous purple fire, with an eye-like nucleus of bright scarlet in its shapeless, semi-transparent body! It was a thing or horror like that which had looked upon me as I lay in the cell--a nightmare being! I struck at it feebly, reeling in terror.

It had followed us into the room; it must have been the pilot of our ship.

Slender tentacles of purple fire coiled around me. They touched me. Their touch was cold--cold flame! But it burned! I felt a tingling sensation of pain--unutterably horrible. The contact with that monster shocked like electricity--but it was as cold as space!

I shrieked as I fell!

With my last energy, I sent out my fist at that flaming scarlet core. My arm went through it, cut it!

Then I have a confused impression of cries of agony and terror, of men cursing, screaming, falling. There were pistol shots, shouts, and dreadful sobbing gasps. I sat up, and saw that the room was full of writhing, dying men! Corpses weirdly splashed with red!

And the purple thing lay before me on the floor, inert and limp, with the fire in it fading. Still it was unspeakably horrible.

Then I heard Ellen cry out, calling my name! I ran on in the room. Ellen stood at the bars of a flimsy little door back of the desk at which the men had been seated.

"Bob," she cried, "I heard you! I knew it was you!"

I smashed the door with one of the rifles. The girl ran out to me, with Bill and the Doctor at her heels. The Doctor took in what had happened.

"The r-r-r-ray made slow p-p-p-p-poisons in their blood. Not adjusted right. It can upset the chemical equilibrium of the body in a thousand ways. But let's get b-b-b-back in the other ship before something happens."

We got through the manhole. I closed it again and unfastened the clamps that held us to the other ship, while the Doctor and Bill ran forward into the pilot's compartment. I felt the vessel rise.

Ellen and I stood by one of the round ports. We saw the weird red city drop away below us. Soon the flat, desolate purple desert was slipping along beneath us, with the green-gray earth visible through it, so far below.

And still there was no movement from the city.

We were several miles away before I saw the red ships rise in long lines from their places on the landing deck. Our flight had been discovered! And then I saw the great dome moving, the slender tube pointing at us.

They were going to use the ray!

The Doctor's voice came from the forward compartment. "I was afraid something would happen to the p-p-p-p-plans. You know I told you that I almost had an atomic explosion of the molten Vernonite electrode. The specifications on the blue print were almost right--almost--"

A great flare of white light burst from the transparent dome. A blaze of blinding incandescence blotted out the scarlet metal city. After a long moment it was gone, and we could see again. The city in the sky was no more!

There was only a vast ragged hole in the purple plain!

That was perhaps the most terrific explosion of history, but we neither felt nor heard it, for we were above the air.

* * * * *

That is a year ago, now. Ellen and I are married. Soon we shall go back to El Tigre, to see the Doctor and Bill. Dr. Vernon is working on a new model of his tube, and is making a painstaking examination of the strange ship we brought back to earth.

Did the destruction of a single city destroy the menace? In all that world above the air, larger than our own, may there not be other cities, or nations and races, perhaps, of intelligent beings? What might we not gain from them in the arts of peace, or not lose to them in war?

This summer the four of us are going to adventure above the air again, in that captured ship--to explore the Second Shell.

The End.