LODANA

If I hadn’t known otherwise, I would have said that back in the Twentieth Century the forefathers of Jimmy Dumont must have operated a mail-order business. Either that; or he had a postal-rocket for a godmother. His one interest in life seemed to be the purchase of goods by remote control.

Of course I’ll admit that out here on the Sixth Moon of Jupiter the arrival of the monthly mail ship is an event of great importance. We count the days until the ship arrives, and then for the next five or six hours we curse the whim that led us to sign up for a three-year hitch with Sounds Ltd.

There were five of us at BeTaba, five Earthmen surrounded by some pretty alien landscape and by a couple of hundred treacherous Mutants. The former accounts no doubt for the “96 or better” psychiatric test requirement, and the latter, for the cumulative salary bonus which the company paid us if we stuck the full three years.

Jimmy Dumont definitely was a square peg in a round hole. What he didn’t know about the duties of a Sounds Ltd. man was colossal, and he didn’t seem to care either.

“Mining sound!” he would say with a sneer. “It’s a crazy business, crazier than those wafer-headed Mutants.”

It was too, although the Philosopher called it distinctive. Twenty years ago some ambitious explorer had discovered the BeTaba caverns. They weren’t so much as caverns go; they contained little or no artifacts, and only the hieroglyphics on the walls convinced him that they were the home of the lost Upper Caste Sixtian race.

Then a year later someone happened to examine the blue crystals in the cavern’s dome. And that was the beginning of Sounds Ltd, and the forthcoming trouble.

Those crystals were sixty per cent pure paxite and forty per cent pure carponium. During the time the caverns had been occupied they had been in a state of flux. Now they contained a complete “frozen” record of all sounds ever made in those caverns. Layer by layer, strata by strata, they had, captured for posterity the speeches, the music, the revels, the chance conversations of that lost race. All that was necessary to release the sounds was to subject the crystals to mechanical tension and the simultaneous amplification of two Haranta tubes, one revolving clockwise, the other counter clockwise.

* * * *

At first, before any mining restrictions were made by the Government, the crystals were chipped out at random, thus spoiling any continuity to the sounds that might have been discovered.

The fad of BeTaba crystals is an old story now. Every bourgeois house on Mars, Venus and Earth had one or more of them inset in the walls for use as doorbells, and so on. During those zany days Sounds Ltd. was a pretty prosperous concern. But today, although the mining of the crystals goes on, the market has been reduced to the demands of libraries, historical societies, and research organizations. Furthermore, we cut the crystals according to an outlined chart now, except in the more remote caverns, and much of the thrill of discovery has gone.

That is, I thought it had gone. Until the trouble that started with Jimmy Dumont.

Jimmy seemed to worship that monthly mail ship. Now Jupiter’s Sixth Moon isn’t exactly a frontier. There are three good-sized cities—Trolontis, Parcea, and New Chicago. But there was a magnetic band between the BeTaba caverns and the cities which made navigation extremely difficult. If the ship had come every week instead of once a month, my guess is that Jimmy would have blown his top completely.

Sending for stuff by mail! That was the Kid’s hobby. He dispatched letters ordering free samples of shaving cream, razor blades, fancy cigarette lighters. He ordered new fangled visi sets, chemical outfits, and a thousand and one other things. His quarters were piled high with the stuff, in addition to mountains of catalogues and magazine advertising sections.

Psychologically speaking, of course, in most cases he didn’t care a rap for the stuff he got. It was just a hangover from childhood, the anticipation of things yet to come. At first I was pretty tough on him. I said some pointed things about “growing up” until the Philosopher drew me aside one day.

“Go easy on him, Kendricks,” he said. “You see he hasn’t anyone to write letters to him.”

The Philosopher was Stewart. He was a quiet bookish fellow, tall and lean, with a high forehead. Besides him, the Kid, and myself, there was Holmes, the officer-in-charge, and Fleming. It was our job to see that the Mutants cut the crystals according to plan and didn’t run amok and kill us or themselves.

The first of September brought the monthly mail ship and the initial seed to our trouble. I got the first hint of the latter when the Kid burst through the airlock into our cuddy. His space suit was half open and there was a wild gleam in his eyes.

“It’s come!” he said. “Cost me a month’s salary, but it’s worth it. Take a look at that!”

He placed a half-open packing case on the table. Inside I could see a small plastic box, topped with a turn-table, an elliptic coil and what looked like an oversized Micro-Wellman tube. “What is it?” I said.

“Can’t you see?” the Kid said. “It’s a supersonic receiver, guaranteed to pick up and amplify vibrations up to thirty thousand cycles.”

“I see,” I said sarcastically. “And just what are you going to do with this piece of apparatus?”

Dumont gave me a withering look. “Why, I’m going to test the BeTaba crystals, that’s what I’m going to do.”

And that was the queer thing about the whole affair. Here BeTaba crystals had been known, heard, and sold for almost twenty years, and it had never occurred to anyone that all of the sounds imprisoned in them might not be audible to the ear.

Of course there was no good reason why the crystals should hold high frequency vibrations, if he race that had lived in the caverns supposedly had reached only a Grade C-5 state of civilization according to the Mokart scale. Those old-timers had known how to throw a banquet or a festival, all unaware that every word they uttered was being made immortal in the perfectly acousticized dome above them, but they hadn’t known anything about the modem concept of sound waves.

But that didn’t bother the Kid a bit. He set up a small laboratory in his room, and every time the Mutants brought a car of crystals up out of the mine, he took a number of samples and proceeded to test them for supersonic vibrations.

“You see,” he said, “we really don’t know what might be hidden in those crystals. We’ve only scratched the surface.”

On the night of the fifteenth of September the five of us were in Central Quarters in the cuddy. The Philosopher was reading Londow’s “Perfection of Races.” Holmes was going over his reports. And Fleming and I were playing a game of Martian rummy.

The Kid had moved his sonic receiver out from his room and was busy putting little segments of crystals on the slowly revolving turn-table. He wasn’t using the headphones now but had his ear close to a monorone parabolic horn which emitted no sound except an intermittent hissing.

Suddenly, however, the silence was broken. A voice sounded in the room, issuing from the horn. A woman’s voice, it was, soft and throaty as the vibration cycles were reduced by the receiver, and filled with lure and enchantment.

Stewart’s book slipped from his hands. He stared at the Kid’s apparatus with speculative, bewildered eyes. Holmes, the officer-in-charge, half rose from his chair.

The magic voice continued, not singing, not talking, but crooning a sort of spoken lullaby. The words seemed to be no part of a known language, but rather a combination of vowels and consonants arranged in a strange and euphonious way. And this was the horror of it! As the honeyed voice sounded, you got the impression that it was eating into your very brain!

On and on the voice continued, a black litany of horror. And then suddenly it stopped.

Stewart, the Philosopher, crossed to the Kid’s side and stared down at the bit of crystal on the turn-table.

“Did that voice come from that crystal?” he demanded.

Jimmy Dumont nodded.

“From a supersonic register?”

“Yes.” The Kid glanced at a dial. “From eighty thousand cycles. I stepped the receiver up.”

Stewart picked up the crystal and turned it over and over in his hands.

“Where did this sample come from?”

“From the uncharted caverns at the far end of Tunnel Six. I was down there yesterday and found it on the floor. I guess it had fallen from the ceiling.”

Stewart replaced the crystal on the turntable and started it revolving again.

The second sounding of that voice was madness! It carried a thousand mental reverberations that seemed to repeat themselves over and over in the brain. Hypnotic, an unseen Lorelei, it robbed the will, rendered the body powerless to act. I felt as if I could listen to it forever, and yet I knew, I realized that it was slowly devouring my brain!

With an effort Stewart switched off the receiver and faced us.

“Gentlemen,” he said. “I think Jimmy has found something! I think he’s found the living proof of the one-time existence of Lodana!”

Now I’m quite aware that the word “Lodana” may mean nothing to you. But mention it to any Colonial on this Sixth Moon of Jupiter, and he’ll give you a quick look and glance over his shoulder to see if you were overheard.

Lodana was the religion of the Mutants, a devil worship, a fetish to a legendary Lilith who was said to have once ruled over the lost race of the caverns. The most stringent restrictions on the part of the Colonials had failed to suppress it. Here at BeTaba we tolerated the noonday quarter-hour of supplication and the various hysterical “seizures” that came over one or more of the Mutants during working time.

The Mutants themselves were a queer offshoot of the normal Sixtian race, a wafer-headed undersized group of creatures, low in the intelligence scale. For the first twenty-five years of their lives their physical strength was prodigious, but after that they rapidly declined until death came at thirty or even earlier.

But now Stewart had said Lodana was an actuality. We had heard her voice. Did the Mutants have the ability to hear sounds from a supersonic register without the aid of receiving apparatus? And if so, did that feminine voice have the same effect on them that it did on us?

One thing was certain. If the Mutants became aware of the existence of this particular crystal, there would be the devil to pay. They were fanatical enough over their religion now.

Stewart took action at once. He closed off the remote caverns of Tunnel Six to the Mutant laborers. He ordered Jimmy Dumont to test samples of all shipments that left the mine. And he caught the next mail ship for Trolontis to report the discovery to Company headquarters.

While he was gone, the Kid continued to explore Tunnel Six. With the aid of Fleming and myself he slung a catwalk across a narrower part of the tunnel dome. But he found no more “voice” crystals, and it was easy to see he was losing interest in his latest hobby.

* * * *

Stewart returned in good spirits. He brought me a box of Venusian cheroots, the Kid a novelty house catalogue, and all of us some good news. The Sixtian Government had finally recognized the incapacity of the Mutants during the latter part of their tragically short lives and had voted them an assistance benefit, to be paid after the age of twenty-five, or, on their death, to their heirs.

It meant that the Mutants would finally be appeased. It meant that the greatest part of our “native trouble” at the mine was over.

That’s what we thought! What we didn’t realize was that at this very moment we were sitting on a powder keg with a short fuse.

The new catalogue which Stewart had brought started the Kid off again. In its pages he found the advertisement for what was called a “fortune finder,” and at once he proceeded to borrow the necessary money from Fleming and me and send for it. Meanwhile Stewart made no further mention of the voice in the crystal. Apparently satisfied that the assistance benefit was an answer to all of our troubles at the mine, he buried himself deeper in his books. And that was odd, because ordinarily he was the sort who wouldn’t pass up a chance for a scientific explanation to a puzzle like this.

Instead, he read Bellair’s “The Problem of the Misfits,” Connell’s “Perfection: A State of Being,” and even that much criticized Martian work, Horn Vala’s “The Utopian Race.”

It was Fleming who put it into words. “Things are too blamed quiet here,” he said. “There hasn’t been a Mutant revolt in a month, and for a week now none of the devils has tried to kill me.”

The mail ship brought the Kid’s “fortune finder.” A simple device, it consisted of a falex coil in the end of a long metal staff, the bottom of which was fitted with a hypersensitive arelium cap. About the only thing it could do was indicate deposits of metal beneath the surface. The enclosed direction-sheet stated that it would reveal without fail any hidden cache to a depth of twelve feet.

Jimmy Dumont lugged the thing down into Tunnel Six. Hours passed, and he didn’t come back. When we didn’t hear any word of him by eight o’clock, Holmes sent Fleming down to see what had happened to him. But Fleming didn’t return either.

From here on I hope I may be pardoned for any lapse in the continuity of this narrative. Things happened fast and horribly.

We found Jimmy Dumont and Fleming lying side by side at the farther reaches of Tunnel Six. A first glance at the widening pool of blood and the long hooked kalza knife lying in the center of it sent a wave of horror through me. A Mutant had ripped open Fleming’s space suit, and he had died almost instantly. Miraculously, the Kid had escaped death by shutting off the upper compartment of his suit after it, too, had been pierced. But there was an ugly stab wound in his thigh.

The thing that made us stand and stare, however, was the yawning hole at the Kid’s feet. He must have been digging for hours after his “fortune finder” had indicated a “find.” Approximately six feet beneath the surface was revealed the upper half of a roofless shrine containing an upraised dais, an image, and a supplication platform. And unmistakably it was pure Upper Caste Sixtian work, a shrine of that lost race.

Even the stark tragedy of Fleming’s death was offset for a moment by the significance of this discovery. For as Stewart said, the image was the image of Lodana.

There was tenseness and anticipation and depression that night in Central Quarters. We had little difficulty in piecing together the details of the tragedy. The Mutants had disobeyed orders and gone into Tunnel Six. There they had surprised the Kid and Fleming in the act of clearing away the buried shrine. And, aroused by what they deemed defilement of their fetish, they had sought to murder the two Sounds Ltd. men.

“There’s no telling what will happen now,” Stewart said. “The teachings of Lodana, you know, are that the future life is a more glorious one than the present, that one should not hesitate for an instant to end this existence, should the reason present itself. If we aren’t careful, news of this will spread to the cities—to Trolontis, Parcea, and New Chicago.” He closed his eyes wearily. “Philosophically speaking,” he said, “it’s too bad this mine isn’t located on Io or Ganymede.”

Holmes looked across at him. “What do you mean?”

“There are no Mutants on those moons,” Stewart replied. “There the races are pure.”

* * * *

We buried Fleming next day. We posted double guards on the Mutants. We electrically wired their barracks so that they could be stunned into inactivity on a moment’s notice. But when it came to closing off Tunnel Six, Stewart argued against it.

“I say clear away the shrine and let the Mutant laborers visit it whenever they want to,” he said. “When they see we’re making no move to interfere with their religion, I think all trouble will stop.”

Holmes finally, agreed. Then we all went down into Tunnel Six to take another look at that image.

The electric lift took us down five levels. The four of us got into a tracto car and a moment later were speeding over a floor as smooth as a pavement. The place was an enormous labyrinth. Subsidiary tunnels and caverns branched everywhere in a hopeless maze.

High above by the blue crystal dome great flocks of Ularlees—pseidemactata—circled endlessly, their wizened human-like faces peering down at us in open resentment at our intrusion. It has always been a matter of wonder to me how these creatures can exist in these caverns with only the scant mosses for subsistence.

Stretching a hundred feet down the central cavern was the fossil of a Penthisaur, the twin-head slug of this Sixth Moon’s Upper Mesozoic.

But it was the walls of the cavern that held one’s gaze. Protruding from their surfaces were hundreds of optic stones, half-organic, half-inorganic “growths” that were like human eyes mounted on three-inch stems. The lavender pupils of those eyes watched us as we passed, and the stems nodded and rustled a strange whispering.

We came at length to Jimmy Dumont’s shrine. The entire structure was scarcely more than ten feet across, but the image of Lodana was life-size—a woman clad in a loose-flowing robe with her hair streaming down her back. And it was at once beautiful and horrible.

Stewart was already giving voice to his plan.

“We can rope off all but this section of the cavern,” he said. “We can let a few of the Mutants in at a time and see how they react to it.”

Holmes nodded. All of us, I think, felt something there. It was a feeling akin to the one we had experienced when we first heard the woman’s voice released from the crystal. As if some alien entity were struggling to enter and devour our minds.

The first group of Mutants was permitted to enter Tunnel Six and visit the shrine the next day. Curiously, there was no disorder. The Mutant’s eyes grew large as they sighted the image. They immediately threw themselves down in supplication and mumbled their queer incantations.

The following day another group entered the cavern. And thus the daily pilgrimage became a ritual to be watched and endured. But the quiet was a false one. A weird tenseness hung like a pall over the mine.

Meanwhile the monthly mail ship, our only means of communication with the rest of the planet, was overdue. Day after day passed without a sign of it. But when it came, it brought a bombshell!

All over this Sixth Moon, Mutants were committing suicide on a mass scale. Seventy had been found in Trolontis. A hundred more were dead in Parcea. So far, the death plague had missed New Chicago, but Colonial officials there reported the native quarter in a state of great unrest.

Holmes swore when he heard this news. “I told you we should have destroyed that shrine,” he said. “Those devils won’t be content with killing themselves off soon. They’ll turn on the Earthmen next.”

Stewart shook his head. “It must be only coincidence,” he said. “There’s been no communication between the cities and the mine. And only the Mutant laborers here know of the existence of the shrine.”

For answer Holmes walked over to a cabinet and took down a fulmination rod. He threw its switch, set its little dial and handed it to Stewart.

“I want that shrine destroyed, and I want it destroyed immediately,” he said. “Take this down to Tunnel Six and see that it’s discharged.”

After Stewart had gone, Holmes, the Kid and I sat in Central Quarters, each trying to appear at ease. Only Jimmy succeeded. He was fiddling with a special non-magnetic visi-set which the mail ship had brought him. And suddenly as we sat there he got the thing to working.

It didn’t occur to me for a minute or two that he was doing something which no Company man had been able to do yet—pick up broadcasts from the cities from this side of the magnetic band. There was no image on the screen, but the announcer’s voice sounded clearly:

“—continuing with our noon-day report from Trolontis. For more than twelve hours there have been no further suicides reported among the Mutant population of this city. However, all streets of the Mutant quarter were deserted today, and it was understood a mass meeting is being held in their underground galleries.”

The kid turned a dial, and the voice faded. From his place in the opposite chair Holmes was watching him quietly, a rising gleam of interest in his eyes. Came the singing whine of the magnetic band hum, and then another announcer’s voice sounded, speaking fast and excitedly.

“This is Parcea, sending a general emergency call. Mutants here are in an open state of revolt. Sixteen Colonial officials have been murdered this morning, and at this moment a mob five hundred strong is advancing on Government House.”

Holmes lurched to his feet. “Where is that cursed Stewart?” he growled. “He should be back by now and—” Hand on the latch bar of the air-lock, he suddenly stiffened. “It’s locked,” he said slowly. “From the outside.”

Together we exerted all our strength on the mechanism, but it was useless. The airlock was equipped with an emergency latch bar on the outside of the cuddy, but it was hidden in a secret niche, and no Mutant could possibly have found it. Or could they?

And then as we stood there, we heard it. Soft and far away at first, but steadily growing louder and clearer, a woman’s voice sounded through the narrow confines of Central Quarters. It was a voice soft and enticing. Lodana!

The honeyed sound vibrated against our ears, reverberated back and forth across the room in a thousand echoes. Holmes clapped his hands to his head and fell to the floor. Even as he did, I felt that voice enter my brain like a bulbous thing alive, writhe and twist its way deeper and deeper with the relentless power of an auger.

It was devouring my brain!

Jimmy Dumont swung about frantically.

“The refuse tube!” he cried. “I may be able to squeeze through it.”

Somehow we stumbled to the galley. The voice of madness followed us, seemed to be even louder in this small chamber where our food was prepared. I looked at the refuse tube in despair. It didn’t seem possible a man could force his body through so small an opening. But the Kid started working frantically to remove the inner grate. As he struggled, the room seemed to swirl about me. Spots and queer colored lights formed in my vision. My brain was on fire!

Then there was the sudden plop as the hermetic cover banged into place. Jimmy Dumont was gone.

An instant later the Kid opened the airlock door, and Holmes and I stumbled outside. Away from that hideous sound we quickly revived.

Without a word the three of us now made for Tunnel Six as one man. Holmes had a heat pistol in his hand, and the Kid had picked up a flat piece of rock. I think each of us knew our quarry now, but the real truth was filtering into us slowly.

The descent down the lift to the lower level seemed endless. Then we were pacing three abreast down the floor of the cavern. No tracto car was in sight.

The shrine with its life-size image of Lodana came into sight, but there was no sign of anyone near it. We crossed the intervening space warily, Holmes slightly, in the lead. Then when we were ten feet away a voice suddenly broke the silence.

“Stop!”

Stewart, the Philosopher, stood there, one arm upraised over his head, poised with the fulmination rod. There was a mad glitter in the man’s eyes. His face was flushed, his hair clawed in wild disarray.

“Stop,” he said again. “This is as far as you go. If you move a step farther, I throw this rod, and I think you know what that means. Holmes, I see you’ve guessed the truth, but in your usual clumsy way, probably only half the truth.”

“You’re mad!” Holmes said.

Stewart shrugged. “Perhaps. Madness is only a relative state. The important thing right now is that a new group of Mutants will be entering this cavern in a few minutes. Not our Mutant laborers, Holmes. I dismissed them weeks ago after I discovered an old lost trail across the magnetic band. Each day you saw Mutants visit the shrine. Those Mutants were from Parcea. Trolontis, New Chicago, the cities to which they could return and spread the news of the latest developments of their religion. Perhaps you’re not completely acquainted with the teachings of Lodana. It is an admirable philosophy, Holmes. Lodana teaches self-destruction, and with the Mutants destroyed, the Sixtian race here on this moon could be a pure one. I’m a perfectionist, and a perfectionist can’t stand degeneracy.”

To the rear a sudden muttering began to fill the cavern. A crowd of a hundred or more Mutant laborers were advancing slowly on the image.

Exactly what happened after that I cannot be sure. At my side the Kid suddenly took aim and let fly the flat rock he had been holding. The missile struck Stewart on the wrist. He gave a cry of pain, and the fulmination rod clattered to the floor. In an instant he had dived to regain it, but Holmes pumped out two shots from his heat pistol.

Twin blazing white lances of fire struck with a double roar, missing Stewart by inches. He was up again like a released spring, running for the rear of the cavern. The Kid was about to rush forward, but Holmes yanked him back.

“Look out! The rod!”

A roar of a thousand thunders trembled the walls of the cavern. A cloud of smoke, dust, and debris billowed upward, blanketing the scene, and a sheet of greenish fire shot outward like a clutching hand.

When it had cleared, we saw what had happened. Of the shrine and the image of Lodana there was no sign. Fragments of metal and masonry were scattered over a wide area. Farther back, where the fulmination rod had spent the greater part of its explosive force, lay Stewart. His right arm was still extended as if he were in the act of reaching out for something. He was dead…

* * * *

A long time later Holmes lit his pipe in Central Quarters in the cuddy and attempted to explain.

“There’s still a lot I don’t understand,” he said slowly. “The workings of the human brain are difficult to explain, and when a man like Stewart is involved, you can’t always put everything into its proper slot like a picture puzzle.

“Stewart called himself a perfectionist. He would have liked to have had us believe that he instituted that wave of mass suicides among the Mutants because he wanted a pure race here on this moon. In reality he was an egoist and an opportunist. He saw at once what the rest of us did not see—that the lost race of the caverns had been much more advanced than we had originally thought. They had provided for the elimination of the Mutants—which must have been a problem even then—by preserving the voice of their fetish in a supersonic register at a very high pitch.

“Now it is well-known that super or ultrasonic vibrations under certain conditions have a harmful effect on the human organisms. Vibrations of a sufficiently high cycle rate will disintegrate the marrow of the bones and will injure the brain. The Mutants, however, had hypersensitive auditory nerves. In their ears the sound of the voice of Lodana had a strange effect. It produced a powerful sense of depression climaxed by a desire, an overwhelming desire, to destroy themselves.

“You will remember that the Government recently voted the Mutants an assistance benefit. Immediately after Jimmy discovered the voice in the crystal Stewart went to Trolontis, ostensibly to report the discovery to Company headquarters. Instead, he made arrangements with the Mutant leaders there to take over some of those assistance benefit policies in return for the promise to let them hear Lodana’s voice.

“Previously he had discovered a lost trail across the magnetic band. He secretly dismissed the Mutant laborers here at the mine, bringing in another group from the cities to take their places. He repeated this exchange every few days so that a constant stream of Mutant fanatics, inflamed by the voice of Lodana, could filter back into the cities and thus spread the doctrine of mass suicide.

“The shrine, of course, was the crux of the situation. Stewart knew from his readings that such an object must exist somewhere in the caverns, and he provided the Kid with a means of discovering it by urging him to send for the fortune-finder. As you now know, that shrine contained crude but effective apparatus to broadcast the high frequency vibrations which were molded into the voice of Lodana. The Mutants could hear it, but he couldn’t.”

“I see,” I said. “Then Stewart’s real motive was the assistance benefits. Every time a new group visited the shrine, he played on their superstitious fervor and induced them to sign those payable-on-death benefits over to him. But why—”

“Why did they do it?” Holmes puffed his pipe in silence a moment. “Probably because he told them they would receive Lodana’s favor for the trip to the next world. Thank heavens we were able to send a report of the image’s destruction back to the cities on the Kid’s visi-set. That should stop the rebellion and the wave of suicides.”