The Miniature Menace
Copyright© 2024 by Frank Belknap Long
Chapter 4
Beneath the descending cruiser the roof of the forest gleamed in russet and emerald splendor above a labyrinth of wooded archipelagoes.
It still seemed a little like a dream to Langford, but he knew that it wasn’t. The vision that he had experienced three days before, standing beside his wife in a white-walled room, had taken on the bright, firm texture of reality.
He stood before the controls, with a thrumming deck under him, and studied the shifting landscape through the White Hawk’s viewport. He had never before flown directly over the Amazon Basin, and a river of shining wonder seemed to flow into his mind as he stared.
It was Joan who broke the spell. She tugged gently at his arm, her face anxious. “I don’t see any sign of the three rivers!” she exclaimed. “Do you?”
Langford swung about. “We haven’t passed the great cataract of Itamaraca yet,” he said. “It rushes straight along for five or six miles. Then it becomes the most impressive waterfall in South America. A few miles below the falls the river spreads out into a lake.”
Langford turned back to the viewport. “When we see the lake we can look for another branching and the island. The island is right in the middle of the three rivers you saw in your vision. But it’s just a dot on the electrograph. Are you sure it has a distinctive shape?”
“It has a high, rocky shoreline,” Joan assured him. “The central tributary cuts it in half and the other rivers flow around it. It’s heavily forested, but the rent in the foliage where the ship came down is so wide you should be able to see it from ten thousand feet. The treetops are charred over a half mile radius.”
Langford smiled and squeezed her arm. “I bet you’d be happy mapping the Amazon in a bark canoe like a twentieth century explorer,” he said.
He grinned wryly. “A big rock island, mysterious as a cave of vampire bats, bisects the largest tributary west of the Tocantins, and it’s just a dot on an electrograph to us. We’ve explored every crevice of every world in the System, but sometimes I envy our ancestors; they had elaborate pictorial maps to guide them.”
After a moment the ship leveled off, and the Great Cataract swept into view. It was a shining whiteness between two towering walls of foliage festooned with hanging vines, and flame-tongued flowers upon which the red sunlight seemed to dance.
It foamed and cascaded over jagged rocks, swept around little clumps of submerged vegetation, and tore at sloping mud banks glimmering in the sunlight.
Then the cataract became a receding blur and the wide river split up.
Langford heard Joan cry out.
The island which loomed below was about eight miles in circumference and so heavily forested that it resembled a single shrub of wilderness proportions growing from a cyclopean stone flowerpot.
Its high banks were almost vertical, its summit a charred mass of foliage cleft by an enormous rent which funneled the sunlight downward to a circular patch of bare, scorched earth.
Something glittered on the forest floor, far below the blackened foliage. But whether it was the alien ship, or merely the glint of sunlight on the river which flowed completely through the island Langford could not determine from his aerial vantage point.
A divided island was really two islands, but Langford was in no mood for geological hair-splitting. Erosion had failed to efface the original, hoary uniqueness of that towering mass of jungle, and for all practical purposes it was one island still, its high banks and far-flung aerial traceries hemming it in, and sealing its teeming life in eternal solitude.
Langford turned and looked at Joan with eyes that were meshed in little wrinkles of confidence. “I’m going to gun her down through that gap!” he said. “We could crash through anywhere, but the best way to locate a wreck is to hew close to the cinder line!”
He bent grimly over the controls, in his mind a vision of a great host of alien creatures rushing toward him through the forest, swarming over the ship, refusing to let him emerge.
He feared their weapons, which he had never seen. He remembered the little statue with its suicidal impulses, and its ability to shed force-shell replicas of itself.
The ship thrummed as it swept downward, the lights in the control room blinking on and off. Lower it swept and lower. The blood was pounding in Langford’s temples when a black-rimmed funnel of swirling brightness yawned suddenly before the viewport. The same instant the cushioning pressure of the anti-gravity jets made itself felt, holding the ship suspended above the roof of the forest until its atomotors ceased to throb.
The ship descended under its own weight amidst a slowly dissolving pressure field. Sweeping down between the fire-blackened trees, it circled slowly about and settled to rest on the soggy forest floor.
When Langford and Joan emerged a warm breeze, laden with jungle scents, swept toward them. They stood for an instant close to the air-lock, staring about them.
No sound broke the stillness except the insistent hum of insects and the rustling of the vegetation on both sides of the ship. A few yards from where they were standing the ground sloped to the brown waters of a swift-running river, its surface flecked with white foam, and studded with little whirlpools that swirled with a darkly writhing turmoil as dry leaves fluttered down, twisting and turning in the breeze.
Twisting and turning above a limp form that lay sprawled on the riverbank, its bare shoulders horribly hunched, its head immersed in the muddy brown water.
Joan screamed when she saw it.
She broke from Langford’s restraining clasp and went stumbling forward until she was knee-deep in the swirling current. She was stooping and tugging in desperation at the half-submerged figure when Langford’s hand closed on her shoulder.
“Let me handle this,” he said, firmly; “it’s no job for a woman.”
On the bank Joan swung about to face him. “It’s a job for a mutant!” she protested, her lips shaking. “You don’t know how close he is to death. He’s still breathing, but if we don’t get him out—”
She broke off abruptly when she saw that Langford needed no urging. He was already on his knees, tugging at the sprawled form. For a moment he tried to succeed from the bank, his knees sunk deep into the mud, his neckcords swelling. Then, with a gesture of fierce impatience, he waded deep into the water and lifted the unconscious man on his shoulders.
Langford carried the man up the sloping bank, eased him to the ground and rolled him over. A small, wiry man, darkly bearded, his mouth hanging open! Staring down at the familiar face, Langford experienced a sense of irony so sharp and over-whelming it interfered with his breathing.
He leaned forward, and started working the man’s arms slowly up and down. He knelt in the soft mud, a murk of depth and shadow looming behind him, a grim anticipation in his stare.
Suddenly the man on the riverbank stirred, groaned and opened his eyes. “Hey, cut that out!” he grunted. “What in blazes are you trying to do, you devil? Wrench my arms from their sockets?”
“Good morning to you, Commander!” Langford said, chuckling.
“Langford!” Commander Gurney’s eyes began to shine, as though lit by fires from unfathomable depths of space. A convulsive shudder shook him. Digging his fists into the mud, he sat up straight.
“You stole my ship!” he rasped, staring at Langford accusingly. “What made you think I couldn’t trace my own cruiser? You can’t rip out infra-radiant alarm installations unless you know where to look. Didn’t you know I’d follow you in a fast auxiliary cruiser and get here ahead of you?”
“I was afraid you might, sir!” Langford smiled ruefully. “But it was a chance I had to take.”
Gurney’s eyes narrowed. “Your ship was sending out more automatic alarm rays than a chunk of radium. My men had orders to close in the instant you brought her down.”
“Just where are your men now, sir?” Langford asked.
Something happened to Gurney’s face. His features twitched and the strained intensity of his stare increased so sharply he seemed to be staring right through Langford into space.
“Those devilish things attacked us!” he muttered. “Exactly as that little statue did! There were dozens of them, ten feet tall, and they kept coming. We blasted, but the charges went right through them; they lifted my lads up in their devilish preying arms and dumped them in the river!”