A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, February 1950 — page 76: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

76 A. MERRITT’S FANTASY sort. It’s not a completely new twist.” “Yes, of course,” said I. “A push is a lot easier to take than a punch.” “And suppose,” said he, “that you conceive a material that explodes from slow to fast, it would start a bullet slowly down the barrel of a rifle, and give it a harder and harder push all the way, eh? And that was the sort of stuff those people were burning up. With it, they jumped that night-fish of theirs through the stars, at a rate of over three hundred miles an hour—at low speed!” CHAPTER 22 Genealogy of the Wise Men QUIETLY tried to take that in. That would mean around the world in eighty hours! “Where in blazes would people get the idea, said I, “of putting themselves in- side a rifle, so to speak, holding onto it and letting it kick its way through the world ?” “That’s the octopus,” said he, “that squirts its way through the sea in much the same fashion. Its swimming appara- tus is simply a big pump, and the jet of water it throws kicks it backward through the ocean. But the people of the Smoking Land don’t have to trouble nature for patterns. They get them out of their own brains!” And he laughed, bitterly, his eye upon thoughts unseen by me. “Finally,” Darrell went on, “I asked where we were bound, and I got a sneer- ing laugh for an answer, and the informa- tion that we were bound for the Smoking Land, north of Alaska, and in the region of the Ice Pole.” That remark cleared up the rest of the sentence which I had been unable to guess from the words found on that scratched bit of metallized wood. “And then,” said Darrell, “when I got a chance, I picked up a little broken fragment of material such as I had never seen before. I asked what it was, and my nearest companion told me that a sheet of it, one thirty-second of an inch thick, would run back a steel-jacketed high- speed rifle bullet fired pointblank— “Tt was as light as wood and I thought that if it was as durable as all that, it might serve my purpose. I had on a diamond ring with a sharply pointed facet, and in the darkness I started scratching my new address as well as I could—but the fellow beside me suspected that some- thing was wrong. He grabbed my arm. “They have wonde brains in the Smoking Land, Smoky, but they haven't devised a good way of blocking a short right uppercut. I nailed my friend on the point of the chin and then smashed the heavy glass of the window beside me, ati threw the scrap of wood through the le. “Then other hands caught me as the ship rocked perilously. Finally I was tied hand and foot and remained captive for the rest of the trip. Daylight came on, polar day, dim, and misty. And then down through that mist we dove, like a fish hunting in the deep sea, and made a landing as soft as you please. “I was taken out of the airship, and got my first glimpse of the smoking moun- tain that gives its name to the island. We went underground immediately, and a few minutes later I was closeted with an old, decrepit, white-headed man. His hair was thin with age, and finer than cob- webs, It floated around his head and shoulders, and made him look like a very ancient picture of Zeus. And I heard from his lips the reason why I’d been brought to the Smoking Land, and what I was to do for them. “But before I tell you about that, I had better explain the whole picture of life up here.” | “Ves,” said I. “Tell me who these people are, and what their blood is, and whether they’re English or Esquimau or what !”’ ““Go back,” said he, “a few centuries, to the time when people were breaking their hearts to get across the barrier of the American continents to India. It never occurred to those hearty old sailors of Italy and France and Spain and Portu- gal and England that the ‘barrier’ was worth a devil of a lot more than all of India, multiplied by ten. Their minds were still filled with dreams about trees covered with golden fruit and diamond blossoms. . . . The Americas were simply in the way, and when they found that to get around, the Horn was no joke, and GOMIIGoOO ©