Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs (40 page)

Later I had reason to change my mind. How much later—a week, a month, two months—I cannot say, because Pellucidar has no sunrise, no sunset, no clocks, no seasons, no calendar. “Later” will have to suffice.

I was with Abner Perry in my office, going over his new design for an aeroplane. He was obsessed with bringing manned flight to Pellucidar. He’d succeeded in the balloon category, but his previous attempt at winged flight, an ungainly contraption, had been a miserable failure, catching fire and very nearly immolating me in the process. I wanted to be in on the early stages of the design of his latest.

“I wish I could identify the alloy of that sphere you brought from Thuria,” he said. “What a plane I could make if I had a supply of that!”

He’d just unfolded his preliminary sketches when one of my men at arms rushed in.

“Sir, a Thurian has arrived and insists on seeing you.”

“King Goork? I hope you didn’t—”

“No, sir. He says his name is Koort, son of Goork. He says his father is dead.”

I leaped from my chair. “Bring him here immediately.”

Shortly thereafter, Koort was escorted in. He looked terrible. He’d lost weight and looked distraught. More than distraught—he looked terrified. I rushed to meet him.

“Is it true about your father?”

He nodded, his throat working. After a moment, he managed to speak. “He’s dead! They are
all
dead! Thuria is no more!”

“What are you saying? That’s impossible.”

“It is true! The beads that came from the Dead World—they were seeds. They sprouted, they grew into red vines that spread and continued to spread.”

“Why didn’t you come to us for help?” Perry said.

“That was what I said to my father, but he and Kolk said Thurians do not need help against a plant.”

“What happened?” Perry said.

“We kept trying to cut back the vines, but every time we thought we succeeded, they reappeared elsewhere, as if by magic.”

Perry was scratching his chin. “Sounds like something in the
Pueraria
genus.”

“Meaning?”

“Kudzu is a member of that genus. You know about kudzu, don’t you?”

I nodded. The vine had been running rampant across the southeastern US since the late nineteenth century, smothering everything in its path.

“But Koort says this is red.”

“I didn’t say it was kudzu, but from what this fellow’s told us, it has similar characteristics. Kudzu spreads by seeds and stolons—surface runners—and rhizomes—subsurface runners. You can kill everything you can see, but those rhizomes are working through the soil beneath your feet, ready to pop up at the first opportunity. A triple threat like that is deucedly hard to eradicate. But . . .” He turned to Koort. “Death?”

Koort nodded vigorously, his throat working again. “All dead,” he said in a thick voice. “The killing mist—”

“Wait a minute now,” I said. “You didn’t mention a mist.”

“The flowers on the vines, they pop open and puff green air. It spreads everywhere, killing everyone. I came back from hunting on Lidi Plain and walked into it. It made me weak, but I was able to crawl away before it killed me. I hurried around to the az side where my father kept his palace. The green mist had seeped out of the forest and covered the shore. I saw my father and brother dead on the palace steps along with many others. I tried to reach them, but the mist began draining my life as soon as I breathed it.”

I turned to Perry. “I need to get there as quickly as possible. Too bad your aeroplane isn’t ready yet.”

“And what do you think you’ll do? Die like the rest?”

He had a good point.

“I’m their emperor! I can’t just sit around and do nothing!”

He smiled. “I know you can’t. But I may have a way for you to survive. Remember what happened when we attacked Phutra and tried to enter the city?”

The Mahars may be winged reptiles, but they built their cities underground. When our army charged into the tunnels, they released . . .

“Poison gas? You don’t think the Mahars—”

“This isn’t their style of warfare. But fearing we’d run into more poison gas back then, I designed and built some filtered masks to protect us. Fortunately we were able to use other methods to send them packing. But I still have the masks.”

I clapped him on the shoulder. “Excellent! I’ll leave right away.”

“Bring me back a sample of this vine. We have to find a way to kill it. It could be a threat to all of Pellucidar.”

On that chilling note, I began giving orders to ready the
John Tyler
.

The Dead World eclipsed the sun as we approached the shoreline. I stood on the shadowed foredeck, slack-jawed and dumbfounded.

The Thuria I had known was gone. It looked like it had been covered with a thick red mesh, which in turn had been layered with a sickly green mist. Even Goork’s palace, bordering the shore, was covered. The web of vines extended right to the waterline, but the mist didn’t stop there—a two-foot layer of it was spreading over the rippling surface.

And nothing moved on shore . . . nothing.

“This is worse than when I left!” Koort cried. “The palace was untouched then!”

“I don’t like the looks of this,” said Ah-gilak, coming up beside me.

I nodded. “I agree. Put about and anchor well beyond the mist. Then lower a boat.”

My captain gave me an unsettled look. “You’re not really thinking—?”

“Someone’s got to.” I looked at Koort. “Are you with me?”

He nodded without hesitation. “That is my land.”

“Good man.”

After the
John Tyler
dropped anchor, Koort and I clambered aboard the fifteen-foot dinghy and began to row. As we approached the mist, I handed him one of Perry’s masks.

“Put this on. It will protect us from the poison.”

I spoke with more confidence than I felt. I love Abner Perry like an uncle—a brilliant, eccentric, and sometimes forgetful uncle. He excels at conceptualization and design but tends to get distracted during execution. On his earlier aeroplane, the propeller vanes were reversed, so it could move only backward. When he sent Dian up in his first balloon to give her a panoramic view of Sari and the sea, he forgot to tether the rope and we almost lost her.

The masks were a life-or-death proposition. If they didn’t filter the mist, we’d be dead before we reached the shore. I’d given them a thorough inspection, and they seemed sound, but I’d had no way to test them.

The masks fit over the mouth and nose. We adjusted the straps, then bent to our oars again.

As we slipped into the green mist, I found myself holding my breath. I felt I was betraying Perry with my lack of trust, but I couldn’t help it. Then I noticed Koort’s chest rising and falling with easy breaths. He seemed unaffected by the mist, so I took my first breath. Then another.

The masks worked. Forgive me, Perry.

As we rowed, something strange occurred: the mist flowed into the dinghy and traveled up over our bodies, almost like a living thing. Before long we were each coated with a layer of green fog.

After we’d beached the dinghy, Koort hurried ahead, cutting his way toward his father’s palace through the vines with mist clinging to him. I grabbed the clay pot I’d brought along and followed close behind. When he reached the front steps, he exposed his father’s body. A sob escaped him, and I slowed my approach, wishing to give him a little time alone.

When I reached the body, I knelt on the opposite side and studied Goork. His eyes were closed, and his coarse features had eased into a tranquil gentleness. He looked like a caveman taking a peaceful nap, except his chest was still. I touched him, and his skin was cool.

My throat constricted. Goork had been more than a loyal ally—he’d been a friend. We’d broken bread countless times as we strategized ways to better the lot of Pellucidar’s human population.

Koort tore through more vines to expose his brother Kolk, but the story was the same there. I backed off to let him grieve in peace. He was an orphan now, as his mother had died before my arrival in Pellucidar.

Meanwhile I searched for a sample of the vine to bring back to Perry. I found a section that had set down roots from its stem node. The node had red seedpods and a bulbous, translucent green flower that looked more like a balloon. I used my knife to cut the stem node free from the rest of the plant, then dug into the dirt around the base.

As I worked to free the root ball, the flower deflated, puffing out a small cloud of the green mist. I glanced around as I worked and saw other flowers doing the same. When I looked back, my own flower had sealed itself and was filling again. What was the purpose of this mist? To kill all potential threats?

When I had the root ball free, I placed it in the clay pot. Abner Perry would have his sample vine to experiment with and find the best way to kill.

I returned to Koort. “We’ll take your father and brother back to Sari and give them proper burials.”

He shook his head. “They would wish to be buried in Thuria.”

“The vines are too thick. We’ll bring them back and preserve them until Abner Perry can destroy the vines. Then we’ll return them to their homeland.”

Koort thought about that, then nodded.

We carried the bodies to the dinghy, then rowed back to the
John Tyler
. I was enormously relieved to remove that uncomfortable mask. After we wrapped father and son in sheets and stowed them below, I looked back toward land and noticed something.

“Did we drift toward shore?” I asked Ah-gilak. “The mist seems closer.”

“We’re anchored, but that dad-burn mist
is
closer. It’s been moving this way at a steady pace.”

I pictured the vines spreading beyond Thuria across Lidi Plain. Millions and millions of those bulbous little flowers spewing their poisonous green mist. I remembered what Perry had said about the relentless spread of kudzu. That was bad enough, but kudzu did not emit a deadly gas. I was seized by a desperate sense of urgency as I visualized all of Pellucidar laid waste by this leafy red scourge and its green mist.

I raised my gaze to the Pendant Moon in whose shadow we floated. Had the Dead World launched an attack upon Pellucidar?

“Haul anchor and set sail,” I told Ah-gilak. “We’ve no time to waste.”

“Aye-aye.”

As the sails filled and we began to move, I couldn’t take my eyes off the shore. I noticed that the mist had reached the observatory. Not content merely to encircle its base, it had begun climbing the walls, almost as if it were a living thing.

I pointed this out to Ah-gilak, who shook his head and said, “Ain’t never seen anything like that in all me days, and I’ve had so many days I plumb lost count of them!” As he was turning away, he froze and cried out in English.

“Jeepers criminy!”

I turned and—

“Good Lord!”

Goork was stumbling up from belowdecks. Kolk followed close behind, rubbing his eyes.

“Where are we?” Goork croaked. “What happened?”

“Obviously some form of suspended animation,” Abner Perry said once he’d examined the two revived Thurians in his lab in Sari. “Right now they seem as healthy as can be. I’m thinking this gas you describe slows metabolism to an absolute bare minimum—just enough to prevent cellular death.”

Goork and Kolk had told us the story of the relentless spread of the vines, and how the Thurians had kept them check until the plant’s blossoms released the mist. In greater and greater numbers, Thurians began to succumb to the green gas, reducing their ability to fight the vines. A downward spiral began, toward an inevitable end.

“Even the Gorbuses were falling,” Kolk said. “Crawling out of their caves and dying among the vines.”

I turned to Perry. “Any progress on killing the vine?”

He gave me one of his miffed looks. “I might have had chance at a solution if the specimen had survived the trip.”

“What?”

“Dead as could be by the time it arrived.”

“But I carved out a good root ball—”

“Doesn’t matter, David. I can’t find a way to kill something that is already dead.”

As I pondered the inescapable logic of that statement, I had an epiphany.

The Dead World. The problem came from there. Maybe it held the solution. No, it
must
hold the solution.