Caves of the Druufs

  Perry Rhodan

  Atlan And Arkon #72

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  Caves of the Druufs

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  1/ PRISONERS OF THE DRUUFS

  THE THING looked like an organ. It consisted of metal cylinders which were rigidly connected and decreased in size from right to left. The thing stood against the wall and seemed to be there for no purpose other than to bewilder the four prisoners.

  For three days it had been accomplishing this task. Then the prisoners had begun to regard it with more than mere contemplative attention. They had attempted to take it apart and had succeeded to a certain degree. Now, at this moment, Perry Rhodan was kneeling in front of one of the opened organ pipes, wondering what would happen if he were to press the little lever that protruded from the tangle of wires, glass rods, plastic bars and thumbwheels.

  Not that he had any choice in regard to the lever. They had worked hard to open a few of the organ pipes and after all that work it would have been ridiculous to stop now, just because no one knew which effect it triggered.

  Perry Rhodan looked around. Behind him Atlan the Arkonide, Reginald Bell and the mutant Fellmer Lloyd were sitting expectantly in bandy-legged, monstrous armchairs. None of them seemed to be frightened, they were all simply curious. For three days they had roamed through a series of subterranean rooms the Druufs had placed at the disposal of their prisoners. After ascertaining that there was no promising exit anywhere, they had finally returned to the organ which now captured their attention because of all the furnishings in the subterranean prison, it was the only piece whose function they did not know.

  With pocket knives, little metal screws they had removed from the chairs and similar utensils they succeeded in removing the cover paneling of three of the organ pipes. What appeared underneath did not provide any definite conclusion about the significance of the device. All that was adjustable on the thing without breaking something was the position of the lever.

  Perry Rhodan placed his finger on the small piece of metal. "Here goes," he said. "Hold your breath. We don't know what will happen!"

  Rhodan increased the pressure of his finger. He felt the little lever begin to yield. For one second Perry Rhodan wondered why absolutely nothing happened. Then suddenly it felt as if someone had landed a powerful blow on his shoulders. His arm sank, his hand with it, and in the process his finger pulled the little lever all the way down.

  Somebody screamed. Perry Rhodan felt like screaming himself. Something was pushing him down with overpowering might. He lunged forward and tried to brace himself with his hands but a few moments later his arms buckled under. He fell headlong to the floor. The fall took away his breath and conjured a colorful world of fiery circles before his eyes.

  The pressure did not lessen. It squeezed the air out of Rhodan's lungs, making it almost impossible to breathe. Rhodan realized with painful clarity that he would have to undertake something if he were to avoid becoming unconscious.

  When he had depressed the lever he had anticipated so many things that he needed a few seconds to properly evaluate the effect it had actually produced.

  The organ was an antigrav generator. Pressing the lever resulted in a five or six-fold intensification of the artificial gravity field within the subterranean room.

  That was disappointing, fulfilling none of the expectations Perry Rhodan had held. However, his expectations were of lesser significance at that moment. Most important of all was to return the lever to its previous position.

  He knew that he could not manage to prop himself up with his arms. The weight imparted to him by the artificial gravity field was too great, so he rolled over on his side, leaned on his right shoulder and tried to raise his left arm. Finally he managed. The next problem was that this time he had to shove the lever upward, which was considerably more difficult than the reverse had been. But he managed this as well.

  When his work was completed Perry Rhodan remained prone for awhile. He needed time to properly catch his breath and to banish the feeling of numbness from his body. Then he cautiously rose to his feet.

  The picture that presented itself was provokingly comical. The bow-legged armchairs had been unable to withstand the greatly increased weight of their occupants and had collapsed. Atlan and Fellmer Lloyd were stretched out unconscious between the shattered pieces. Reginald Bell had been less affected by the gravity shock. He was holding tight to two pieces of plastic wood, the only parts of his armchair still erect, and staring at the organ in equal amazement and fury.

  "Is that all?" he sullenly inquired. Perry Rhodan shrugged. "Seems like it," he replied. Reginald Bell stood up. The two remaining parts of his chair clattered to the ground.

  "Then we could have saved ourselves the trouble," he grumbled peevishly. "For one entire day we fooled around with that thing and it does nothing more after all than regulate an artificial gravity field." He gave the smallest of the organ pipes a contemptuous kick.

  "Well, now... you call that nothing?" asked Perry Rhodan. Reginald Bell and Perry Rhodan knew each other well enough to tell by the partner's tone of voice whether he had a new idea or not.

  Bell looked baffled. "Right offhand I still don't see anything," he carefully answered, "but perhaps you would give me a hint?"

  Rhodan smiled.

  At that moment Atlan, who had regained consciousness, arose from the shambles of his chair. He seemed to have heard the last sentences of the conversation. "Temporally variable gravitation fields," he casually said as if nothing had happened. "dG after dt, the product of the gravitation emitter, simultaneously proportional to the gravity mechanical induction... doesn't that mean anything to you?"

  Reginald Bell widened his eyes and gazed fixedly at the furthermost comer of the room.

  "It does indeed," he finally replied. "But I am afraid that the Druufs will not look kindly upon it, if we turned their antigrav into a teletype!"

  Perry Rhodan placed his hand on Bell's shoulder. "The question is," he said, "will they notice it at all?"

  Ten days earlier, on October 23, 2043 Earth-time, the catastrophe had its inception. The Arkonides had discovered the support base, Grautier, and attacked it immediately. The Terranian Fleet was at that time stationed far away in space, poised for an attack on Arkon. Perry Rhodan, Atlan, Reginald Bell and Fellmer Lloyd were still present on Grautier. The base had no chance against the massive attack. Within a few short hours the Arkon bombardment had transformed the entire planet into a glowing nuclear hell.

  Perry Rhodan and his companions had succeeded in escaping to an island and from there had sent a distress call over minicom. A ship appeared at the last moment to rescue them. However, it was not a Terranian ship, as they had hoped, but Arkonide. They had narrowly escaped the clutches of death only to fall into the hands of the Arkonides.

  A few light-minutes away from Grautier, the Arkonide ship that had picked them up transferred them to another vessel also serving the robot Brain of Arkon and apparently charged with bringing the prisoners to Arkon as quickly as possible. Perry Rhodan noticed that the commander of this second ship, an Ekhonide called Chollar, did not know his name. From this he deduced that the robot ruler's intent was to keep the capture of his most important opponent as secret as possible.

  In one bold move the four prisoners succeeded in overpowering the Command Central crew of the Ekhonide ship and in sending out an emergency call. The message was worded in a manner they hoped would arouse the interest of only a Terranian ship.

  Barely four hours later a spaceship appeared to rescue them. This time, however, it was neither Terranian nor Arkonide—but a ship of the Druufs. The relationship between Terrani
ans and Druufs was, politically speaking, quite peculiar. One regarded the other as a potential ally in the struggle against Arkon but for the time being mistrust far outweighed any enthusiasm for alliance. Like the Arkonides before them, the Druufs regarded Perry Rhodan and his companions as their prisoners. They brought them on board their ship and hastened to flee the space sector controlled by the Arkonides.

  Passing through the overlap front, for the present the only connection between the Einstein Universe and their own, they returned to their time-plane and confined their prisoners in a subterranean chamber on a monster of a planet.

  The flight had lasted two days. Other than the visits by a Druuf robot, who brought their meals, the four prisoners were alone during that time and seemingly unobserved. Their cabins contained no viewscreens. They saw nothing of what went on about them but the trip had apparently encountered no difficulties.

  Finally the ship landed. Perry Rhodan and his companions had meanwhile had time to accustom themselves somewhat to the gravitation on board of 1.95-normal, the same as the gravitation prevailing on the native planet of the Druufs.

  The four prisoners became aware of the fact that they had landed when a Druuf entered their cabin. With the aid of his electronic communicator he urged them to put on the spacesuits brought along from the Ekhonide ship and to leave the Druuf vessel. The Druuf offered no further details concerning the reason or purpose of these instructions. He was a 'Mike', as Terranians had come to call the lowest-ranking Druufs, and was apparently not authorized to give out information. On the other hand it was possible that he did not know much more about it himself.

  In any case the prisoners did as they were told and left the ship. The Druufs had landed their cylindrical vehicle flat on a sweeping rocky plain. From the rollramp of the Druuf ship Perry Rhodan and his companions took in a picture that seemed to have been created by a surrealistic painter, someone, who

  had shown few compunctions in his choice of colors.

  The plain expanded into the unending distance. The muted grey-brown of its rocky ground was the only hue which corresponded to one of Earth. Here and there solitary rock-needles, monoliths, soared upwards, climbing to dizzying heights despite their thinness. Their needle-sharp peaks pointed to a brown sky and the little turquoise clouds floating beneath it. It was not possible to determine the source of the light in the sky. Probably the daystar of the planet was about to rise. Not far from the Druuf ship the rocky ground dipped downward, forming a basin several hundred meters in diameter that was filled with a ruby-red fluid. A mild wind rippled the surface of the lake and from time to time little waves spilled over the edge of the rocky basin onto the plain.

  It was a fairytale landscape, wonderful to behold and as poisonous as a toadstool. Everything—the rock formations, the vast plain, the little clouds—indicated that the atmosphere consisted of ammonia and methane, as was the case with many grandiose but useless planetary giants found in almost every planetary system.

  As they glided down the rollramp they were astonished by the fact that the gravity of the fairyland seemed to be the same as it had been on board ship. They did not know that the shell of an artificial gravity field widely enveloped the Druuf ship. The border lay several meters beyond the foot of the rollway.

  Only upon crossing the border did they discover their error. A giant fist knocked them down and held them pinned to the ground. Panic-stricken at first, they writhed about trying to get back on their feet, but they achieved nothing more than utter exhaustion. Then they lay still and recalled the rules they had learned for coping with extreme pressure. They relaxed and forced their lungs to draw breath. Slowly they drew up their knees and leaned on their arms which threatened to give way under the massive weight. Centimeter by centimeter they drew themselves up. When they had managed to stand upright it felt as if they were strapped in a brace that was pressing them to the ground with all its might.

  But they remained on their feet. Around them swarmed the Druufs, three meters tall on their Cyclops legs. Although accustomed to higher gravitation than the Terranians, they were nonetheless a bit awkward and stooped under the enormous pressure of this world.

  Perry Rhodan estimated the gravitation at a bit below three-normal. Much later they determined that the exact value was 2.60-normal. This meant a load that the human body could endure for awhile without injury but under which it would collapse upon longer exposure.

  The Druufs made no attempt to ease the burden of their prisoners. They herded them in the direction of the closest monolith and the Terranians complied, dragging themselves towards it. If, while gliding down the rollramp, they had still given any thought whatsoever to seeking some opportunity to escape here in this colorful methane wasteland; such thoughts were long extinguished by the grueling strain that sapped all their strength.

  Perry Rhodan still retained some semblance of cool reflection. He knew that their situation would be completely hopeless if they weren't able to determine where this planet was situated, although he really had no clear notion of how this information could be of use. To date human knowledge about the foreign universe inhabited by the Druufs was more than scanty. The Terranians were acquainted with the Siamed System, the native system of the Druufs, and they were also acquainted with the two solitary worlds they called Solitude and Crystal Planet—without knowing, however, where the two planets stood in relation to the Siamed System. Even their knowledge of the native system of the Druufs was incomplete, in keeping with the haste and secrecy necessarily accompanying their investigations. The Siamed System revolved about a double sun, a red giant and a star whose wavelength of maximum energy was 5,000 Angstrom, making it appear yellowish-green to the human eye. The system was composed of 62 planets and a myriad of moons. In the eyes of man it was a monstrous system containing a great number of methane giants like the one on which the Druuf ship had landed.

  But this did not suffice for identification. Methane planets were present in most planetary systems and the cosmos of the Druufs certainly did not contain any less than the Einstein universe in which the Terranians and Arkonides lived.

  Perry Rhodan laboriously raised his head and stared up into the brown sky. There were no stars in sight but the narrow crescent of the moon, a dark red glow, could be vaguely seen close to the tip of the monolith towards which they were plodding.

  It was not the mere presence of a moon that was important but its color. It was almost at the zenith and was nonetheless red. It could be that the atmospheric layer of the methane planet was so high that it created the same effect upon heavenly bodies at the zenith as terrestrial atmosphere did upon those sinking into the horizon. It could be that the crescent of the strange moon was red for no other reason than the disc of the Earth's sun shortly before it sets.

  But it could also be that the color of the moon was derived from the central sun that shone on it. Red would then increase the probability that the methane giant on which the Druufs had landed belonged to the Siamed System. It was of utmost importance to establish this, for only within this system lay the sole support base thus far established by the Terranian Fleet in the foreign time plane: Hades, the Mercury-like twilight world.

  Perry Rhodan was still occupied with the odd coloring of the sky, wondering whether the brown could stem from the combined effect of two daystars, one red and one green, when his helmet receiver picked up a surprised outcry from Reginald Bell.

  Flanked by ten Druufs, the small band had reached the foot of a lone looming crag. The cause of Reginald Bell's surprise was a gloomy hole, big as a barn door, gaping out of the rocky wall that Perry Rhodan could not recollect having been there previously.

  So the monolith harbored the entrance to a cavern or a cavern system below the surface of the planet, which the Druufs had either found or built themselves. Apparently they considered this place secure enough for confinement of important prisoners.

  Beyond the hole, in the interior of the monolith, some sort of moderately inclined ramp beg
an. Its stony surface was polished smooth, probably from frequent use, and the four prisoners found it difficult to stay on their feet instead of submitting to the tug of gravity and simply rolling down the ramp.

  At the same instant as the cave entrance closed—it was impossible for Perry Rhodan to determine by which mechanism—a glaring light blazed on, illuminating the ramp down to its foot-end. The ramp ended in the middle of an almost completely circular room about 20 meters in diameter that had 12 passages branching off it in star form. The walls of the room and the passageway were crudely hewn. It seemed the Druufs did not value outer beauty, still they had outfitted the passages with conveyer belts that enabled the prisoners to progress quickly and spared them the task of resisting the torturous pull of the gravitation and lifting their legs anew with every step.

  The meaning and function of the cave did not become apparent to the prisoners as they moved through the passage on the conveyer strip. They were only able to make out a series of rooms with doorways in the passage wall and that the subterranean installation was considerably larger than they had at first assumed.

  The place, for example, where the Druufs indicated they were to get off the conveyer and wait at the edge of the passage until three of the ungainly doors on the right side of the passage had been opened, lay about 400 meters away from the entrance to the caverns. And in the diffuse light from invisible sources it could be seen that the passageway extended at least once again far into the depths of the rocky plains.

  What Perry Rhodan had taken to be doors finally proved to be an ingenious airlock construction designed to prevent the poisonous methane atmosphere of the outside world from entering. Behind the airlocks, through which the Druufs were leading their prisoners, lay a series of rooms. To the great astonishment of the Terranians, they were furnished with all the benefits and achievements of Druuf civilization, leaving no comfort to be desired. Unlike the passageway walls, the walls had been painstakingly smoothed and covered with colorful layers of heat insulator. Thick, springy plastic sheeting, used by the Druufs in place of carpets, covered the floor, and the furniture was more than ample and varied, even though somewhat large and cumbersome by Earth standards. It was evident that the Druufs had gone to great lengths to provide a few rooms in the depths of their cavern system in which they themselves could comfortably live for weeks or even months at a time, although far from all civilization. Because it suited their purpose—for they were not motivated by feelings of friendship towards humans—they were apparently prepared to turn over this excessive comfort to their prisoners.