Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of "the Scientific Romance" in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920 (15 page)

NEVER BEFORE had either of them realized just what the meaning of forty-eight stories might be. For all their memories of this height were associated with smooth-sliding elevators that had whisked them up as though the tremendous had been the merest trifle.

This night, however, what with the broken stairs, the debris-cumbered hallways, the lurking darkness which the torch could hardly hold back from swallowing them, they came to a clear understanding of the problem.

Every few minutes the flame burned low and Stern had to drop on more alcohol, holding the bottle high above the flame to avoid explosion.

Long before they had compassed the distance to the ground floor the girl lagged with weariness and shrank with nameless fears.

Each black doorway that yawned along their path seemed ominous with memories of life that had perished there, of death that now reigned all-supreme.

Each corner, every niche and crevice, breathed out the spirit of the past and of the mystic tragedy which in so brief a time had wiped the human race from earth, "as a mother wipes the milky lips of her child."

And Stern, though he said little except to guide Beatrice and warn her of unusual difficulties, felt the somber magic of the place. No poet, he; only a man of hard and practical details.

Yet he realized that, were he dowered with the faculty, here lay matter for an Epic of Death such as no Homer ever dreamed, no Virgil ever could have penned.

Now and then, along the corridors and down the stairways, they chanced on curious little piles of dust, scattered at random in fantastic shapes.

These for a few minutes puzzled Stern, till stooping, he stirred one with his hand. Something he saw there made him start back with a stifled exclamation.

"What is it?" cried the girl, startled.

But he, realizing the nature of his discovery—he had seen a human incisor tooth, gold-filled, there in the odd little heap—straightened up quickly and assumed to smile.

"It's nothing, nothing at all," he answered. "Come, we haven't got any time to waste. If we're going to provide ourselves with even a few necessaries before the alcohol's all gone, we've got to be at work."

And onward, downward, ever farther and farther, he led her through the dark maze of ruin, which did not even echo to their barefoot tread.

Like disheveled wraiths they passed, soundlessly, through eerie labyrinths and ways which might have served as types of Coleridge's "caverns measureless to man," so utterly drear they stretched out in their ghostly desolation.

At length, after an eternal time of weariness and labor, they managed to make their way down into the ruins of the famous and once beautiful arcade which had formerly run from Madison Avenue to the square.

"Oh, how horrible!" gasped Beatrice, shrinking, as they clambered down the stairs and emerged into this scene of chaos, darkness, death.

Where once the arcade had stretched its path of light and life and beauty, of wealth and splendor, like an epitome of civilization all gathered in that constricted space, the little light disclosed stark horror.

Feeble as a will-o'-the-wisp in that enshrouding dark, the torch now showed only hints of things. Here a fallen pillar, there a shattered mass of wreckage where a huge section of the ceiling had fallen. Yonder a gaping aperture left by the disintegration of a wall.

Through all this rubbish and confusion, over and through a score of the little dust-piles which Stern had so carefully avoided explaining to Beatrice, they climbed and waded, and with infinite pains slowly advanced.

"What we need is more light!" exclaimed the engineer presently. "We've got to have a bonfire here!"

And before long he had collected a considerable pile of wood, ripped from doorways, and window-casings of the arcade. This he set fire to, in the middle of the floor.

Soon a dull, wavering glow began to paint itself upon the walls, and to fling the comrades' shadows, huge and weird, in dancing mockery across the desolation.

Strangely enough, many of the large plate-glass windows lining the arcade still stood intact. The glittered with the uncanny reflections of the fire as the man and woman slowly made way down the passage.

"See!" exclaimed Stern, pointing. "See all these ruined shops? Probably almost everything is worthless. But there must be some things left that we can use.

"Think of the millions in real money, gold and silver, in the safes all over the city—in the banks and vaults! Millions! Billions!

"Jewels, diamonds; wealth simply inconceivable. Yet now a good water supply, some bread, meat, coffee, salt, and so on, a couple of beds, a gun or two and some ordinary tools would outweigh them all."

"Clothes, too," the girl suggested. "Plain cotton cloth is worth ten million dollars an inch now."

"Right," answered Stern, gazing about him with wonder. "And I offer a bushel of diamonds for a razor and a pair of scissors." Grimly he smiled as he stroked his enormous beard.

"But come, this won't do. There'll be plenty of time to look around and discuss things in the morning. Let's get busy!"

Thus began their search for a few prime necessities of life, there in that charnel-house of civilization, by the dull reflections of the firelight and the pallid torch glow.

Though they forced their way into ten or twelve of the arcade shops, they found no clothing, no blankets or fabric of any kind that would serve to cover them or to sleep upon. Everything at all in the nature of cloth had either sunk back into moldering annihilation or had at best grown far too fragile to be of the slightest service.

They found, however, a furrier's shop, and this they entered eagerly.

A few warped fragments of skins still hung from rusted metal hooks, moth-eaten, riddled with holes, ready to crumble at the merest touch.

"There's nothing in any of these to help us," judged Stern. "But maybe we might find something else in here."

Carefully they searched the littered place, all dust and horrible disarray, which made sad mockery of the gold-leaf sign still visible on the window: "Adele, Importer. All the Latest Novelties."

On the floor Stern discovered three more of those little dust-middens which meant human bodies. Pitiful remnants of an extinct race, of unknown people in the long ago. What had he now in common with them? The remains did not even inspire repugnance in him.

All at once Beatrice uttered a cry of startled gladness.

"Look here! A storage chest!"

True enough, there stood a cedar box, all seamed and cracked and bulging, yet still retaining a semblance of its original shape.

The copper bindings and the lock were still quite plainly to be seen, as the engineer held the torch close, though green and corroded with incredible age.

One effort of Stern's powerful arms sufficed to tip the chest quite over.

As it fell it burst, and disintegrated into a mass of pulverized, worm-eaten splinters.

Out rolled furs, many and many of them, black, and yellow, and striped —the pelts of the grizzly, of the leopard, the cheetah, the royal bengal himself.

"Hurray!" shouted the man, catching up first one, then another, and still a third. "Almost intact. A little imperfection here and there doesn't matter. Now we've got clothes and a bed—beds, I mean.

"What's that? Yes, maybe they are a trifle warm for this season of the year, but this is no time to be particular. See, how do you like that?"

As he spoke, he flung the tiger-skin over the girl's shoulders.

"Magnificent!" he judged, standing back a pace or two and holding up the torch to see her better. "When I find you a big gold pin or clasp to fasten that at the throat, you'll make a picture of another and more splendid Boadicea!"

He tried to laugh at his own words, but merriment seemed out of place there, and with such a subject. For the woman, clad this way, had suddenly assumed a wild, barbaric beauty.

Bright gleamed her gray eyes by the light of the flambeau; limpid, and deep, and earnest, they looked at Stern. Her wonderful hair, shaken out in bewildering masses over the striped, tawny savagery of the robe, made colorful contrasts, barbarous, seductive.

Half hidden, the woman's perfect body, beautiful as that of a wood-nymph or a pagan dryad, roused atavistic passions in the engineer.

He dared speak no other word for the moment, but bent beside the shattered chest again and fell to looking over all the furs.

A polar-bear skin attracted his attention and this he chose. Then, with it slung across his shoulder, he stood up.

"Come," said he, steadying his voice with an effort, "come, we must be going now. Our light won't hold out very much longer. We've got to find food and drink before the alcohol's all gone; got to look out for practical affairs, whatever happens. Well, let's be going."

Fortune favored them.

In the wreck of a small fancy grocer's booth down toward the end of the arcade, they came upon a stock of goods in glass jars.

All the tinned foods had long since perished, but the impermeable glass seemed to have preserved fruits and vegetables of the finer sort, and chipped beef and the like, in a state of perfect soundness.

Best of all, they discovered the remains of a case of mineral water. The case had crumbled to dust, but fourteen bottles of water were still intact.

"Pile three or four of these into my fur robe here," directed Stern.

"No, a few of the other jars—that's right. Tomorrow we'll come down and clean up the whole stock. But we've got enough for now.

"We'd best be getting back up the stairs again," said he. And so they started.

"Are you going to leave that fire burning?" asked the girl, as they passed the middle of the arcade.

"Yes. It can't do any harm. Nothing to catch here; only old metal and cement. Besides, it would take too much time and labor to put it out."

They abandoned the gruesome place and began the long, exhausting climb.

It must have taken them an hour and a half at least to reach their aerie. They found their strength taxed to the utmost.

Before they were much more than halfway up, the ultimate drop of alcohol had been burned.

The last few hundred feet had to be made by slow, laborious feeling, aided only by such dim reflections of the gibbous moon as glimmered through a window, cobweb-hung, or through some break in the walls.

At length, however—for all things have an end—breathless and spent, they found their refuge. And soon after that, clad in their savage robes, they ate.

Allan Stern, consulting engineer, and Beatrice Kendrick, stenographer, now king and queen of the whole wide world domain (as they feared) sat together by a little blaze of punky wood fragments that flickered on the eroded floor.

They ate with their fingers and drank out of the bottles, without apology. Strange were their speculations, their wonderings, their plans—now discussed specifically, now half-voiced by a mere word that thrilled them both with sudden, poignant emotion.

And so an hour passed, and night deepened toward the birth of another day. The fire burned low and died, for they had little to replenish it with.

Down sank the moon, her pale light dimming as she went, her faint illumination wanly creeping across the disordered, wrack-strewn floor.

And at length Stern, in the outer office, Beatrice in the other, they wrapped themselves within their furs and laid them down to sleep.

Despite the age-long trance from which they both had but so recently emerged, a strange lassitude weighed on them.

Yet long after Beatrice had lost herself in dreams, Stern lay and thought strange thoughts, yearning and eager thoughts, there in the impenetrable gloom.

Charles Billings Stilson was one of the earliest and most effective imitators of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Polaris of the Snows
and its two sequels established his reputation, and he returned to the writing of science fiction and fantasy often, though he found a ready market for westerns and other types of fiction.

He was an ingenious storyteller but only an average stylist. Nevertheless, some of his stories would gain a good reception if reprinted today.
A Man Named Jones
(ALL-STORY WEEKLY, October 25, 1919 to November 22, 1919), of a whacky set of characters in search of an emerald mine, and its sequel,
Land of the Shadow People
(ALL-STORY WEEKLY, June 26, 1920 to ARGOSY-ALL-STORY WEEKLY, July 24, 1920), of the race of Indians whose coloring changes chameleonlike with their surroundings, are outstanding entertainment.

He was as facile at the short story as the novel.
Yedra of the Painted Desert
(ALL-STORY WEEKLY, May 10, 1919), perhaps his most literary work, tells with beauty and poignancy the experience of a man lost in the desert who finds an idyllic oasis inhabited by a beautiful girl who has never seen civilization;
Dr. Martone's Microscope
(ALL-STORY WEEKLY, March 27, 1920) mentions in its context that it was inspired by Ray Cummings'
The Girl in the Golden Atom
; perhaps his most famous short story,
The Sky Woman
(ARGOSY ALL-STORY WEEKLY, September 25, 1920), features a woman who has traveled to earth from another planet.

During his writing career, he had published a number of hardcover books from the pages of the Munsey magazines:
Black Wolf of Picardy
as
The Ace of Blades
;
Son of the Black Wolf
as
Swordplay
; and
The Centaur of Navarre
as
Cavalier of Navarre
; fine adventures of old France, but none of his fantasy novels achieved this distinction.

He never was among Munsey's higher-paid authors, despite his popularity with the readers. He received four-hundred dollars for the 59,000 words of
Polaris of the Snows
; four-hundred dollars for its sequel,
Minos of Sardanes
, which was of comparable length; and seven-hundred dollars for
Polaris and the Goddess Glorian
, an 84,000-worder. At his best he never was paid more than two cents a word. Yet of all Burroughs imitators, he was the most effective, probably because he was fundamentally a storyteller. The efficacy of his method may be sampled in the opening chapters of
Polaris of the Snows
, where the hero kills polar bears with little more than his muscles and a knife, discovers a stranded American girl in the antarctic, and eventually casts his lot with a lost civilization in the ice wilderness. The episodes presented offer the authentic feel of the setting and situation of the novel, which inspired two highly popular sequels.