Collected fiction, p.354
Collected Fiction, page 354
Alan shook his head. “You tell me,” he said.
They looked at one another in silence, and there was a strange fear in the eyes of both.
EVAYA said presently, “I felt the call from far away, very weak. And I remembered from many sleeps ago . . . All memories are washed away in the fountain when we take the great sleep, but somehow, I knew the call. So I went up to the citadel where the gods once lived—and you were there, A-lahn. But I think—A-lahn, I think this god is not one of the good Light-Wearers. If it is a god. I am not sure . . . I don’t wish to be sure. I shut my brain to it, A-lahn, when I hear the far-away echo of that call.”
“Have you heard it since I—came here? While I was asleep?”
She shook her head, the pale hair floating like gossamer around her face.
Alan sat down deliberately upon the cushioned, swaying floor. He beckoned, and Evaya sank beside him in a descending billow of her pale garments and silvery clouds of hair. He was trying to keep a tight grip upon the spinning in his brain. There was so much to be learned, and perhaps so little time to learn it, if Flande was watching—if the enigmatic thing Evaya knew as a god were calling from its unthinkable citadel . . . He could not let himself dwell upon the incredible strangenesses all around him, or the queer familiarity of the city that he had learned to know in his dreams.
“You’ve got to tell me,” he said, “—well, everything. From the beginning. Who are these gods of yours? Where did they come from?”
Evaya laughed on an exquisite ripple of ascending notes. “Not even Flande himself could answer all that! The gods? How should we mortals know? We have dim legends that tell of their conquering earth so long ago that we have no way to measure the time between. Great ships, dropping down out of the skies, bellowing thunder and flame. It may be they came from another world—no one knows that now. They were beings from—outside. They wore light like a garment, and to them humans were—vermin. They cleansed the earth of them. And in the end, the legends say, they ruled earth from those citadels they had built, like the one above, keeping only those humans they had bred themselves, like us. To ornament their beautiful cities. I think Carcasilla is the only one left now.”
Alan looked out over the airy suburbs floating before him, not seeing anything. Things were beginning to fit themselves together in his mind—but what stunning things, what appalling catastrophes and immeasurable vistas of time for a man’s mind to encompass!
Earth conquered, ravaged, ruined—while he slept his timeless slumbers in the ship. The ship? A ship from space, like those the invaders must have come in? It was the inevitable answer. The being of the golden globe, the bodiless presence in the citadel, the questing thing at their heels in the mist must somehow be one creature only—a Light-Wearer!
But what had gone wrong? Why had not the—the first of the alien beings—awakened when the armada that followed him came raging down from the skies?
Why had this inhuman Columbus slept through the heyday of his race’s power and glory, and wakened with his human captives only in the desolation of a time-ruined world?
Perhaps the Alien, first of his kind in a world inconceivably new to him, had misjudged the depths of his ageless slumber. His awakening, in the twilight of a dying world, must have been very terrible. Alan, from the depths of his own nostalgia for all that had passed into dust, could almost fed pity for the Light-Wearer who had come to lead his race to conquest—and slept, forgotten, while the dark sands of time ran irrevocably away. How frantically he must have scoured the empty earth before realization dawned that he was the last of his kind upon this ruined world. The first—and the last.
“Tell me about Flande,” he said presently, in a controlled voice. It was not, he thought, wise to think very deeply on the subject of the Alien, and of Earth’s ruin.
EVAYA answered obediently, “Flande is very old and wise. (She was a toy, he remembered bitterly. A toy created of human flesh, to amuse the gods of earth. Obedience was bred into her from unthinkable aeons ago.) “Flande has never taken the sleep. None but he remembers all that has happened since Carcasilla’s first days. Fie is afraid of forgetting, perhaps—something. He has many magics, and now he hates us both.”
“Is he—human?”
“Flande is—” She paused, closing her eyes softly. And she sat perfectly still, the drifting hair settling about her shoulders. “You see—” she murmured, and lifted heavy lids with infinite slowness. “A-lahn!” cried Evaya, with a curious, sleepy fright, looking at him under drowsy lashes. And she crumpled toward him, yawning with a flower-like delicacy.
He caught her in his arms, and again he was vividly aware of her blown-glass strength and fragility.
“What is it?” he asked frantically. “Flande—” she told him in a slow, drugged voice. “Flande—must be—
watching. Listening to—our talk. He will not let me—tell you—about him . . . I’m afraid, A-lahn—A-lahn dearest—the Light-Wearer . . .”
She relaxed in his arms with the utter limpness of death itself, though he could still feel breath stirring her ribs gently against his arm.
So—Flande had struck.
Well, it had been as good a way as any, he supposed, to summon him into Flande’s presence. This—this strange little whisper far back in his mind was not really necessary. He would have gone anyhow . . . He would have gone to Flande even if—
But it was not Flande who called.
Another voice—an alien voice—was summoning in the deepest depths of his brain. And beside him, Evaya stirred. “Yes, lord—” he heard her murmuring very softly, in a voice entirely without inflection. “Yes, lord—it shall be done.”
And she sat up stiffly. Her eyes were enormous, staring straight ahead, their pupils blackening the violet iris. Alan said sharply, “Evaya! Evaya!” and tried to shake her out of that mirrory-eyed stare. She was as rigid as ivory under his hands. Even her face was ivory, not flesh, its delicacy frozen as if by some inward congealing of the mind. And she rose to her feet.
She went forward with deliberate steps. And Alan, bemused by Flande’s power, could do nothing but follow, knowing with a dreadful certainty what was happening because of the stir deep in his own brain . . . .
So long as she remained awake and mistress of herself, Evaya had kept her mind closed to that distant call. But when Flande put his sleep upon her to stop her revealing words, he had opened the gateway of her priestess mind . . .
ALAN was scarcely aware of their passage through Carcasilla. That stirring in the roots of his brain blinded and deafened him to everything but the slim, cloudy figure moving stiffly on ahead, over the fantastic bridges, the spiraled streets, toward a distant spot which they both knew well . . . too well.
Before the great black circle where the light-veiled statue stood, Evaya paused. Alan paused behind her, a dozen paces away. The calling in his mind was very powerful now. A ravenous call, bellowing soundlessly from somewhere dangerously near.
Evaya touched something at the feet of the blinding statue, and quite suddenly a
great flare of brilliance shot out all around the figure. It was like the blare of a struck gong, shivering out in a great wave over Carcasilla. If there could be such a thing as sound made visible, this was it.
Under the light-pulsing figure Evaya stood motionless, staring up toward the high black circle on the wall with eyes that were still, Alan knew, mirrors of violet blindness.
Behind him he heard the rising murmur of many soft voices, drawing near. All Carcasilla whispering its surprise, whispering perhaps with the awakening of memories buried deep behind the forgetfulness of many sleeps. Alan turned slowly and with infinite effort, for some inhibitory power was drugging his nerve-centers now and spreading through his body from that summoning in. the brain.
The people of Carcasilla were answering the call. By tens, by scores, by hundreds, they came. Alan had not guessed before how many dwellers the city had. And when the last gossamer-robed citizen joined the crowd, and the wondering murmurs rose in a susurus all around them—To Be Continued exactly then, without turning, Evaya lifted her arms. Perhaps she touched some switch. Alan could not tell that.
She was facing the great circle of darkness upon the wall. Her arms were lifted, and her face. Her voice, clear and toneless as a bell, rang out over the assembly.
“Enter to your people, Light-Wearer and Lord.”
A shiver seemed to run over the surface of the black disc on the wall. It was less disc than opening now. The opening to a long, dark tunnel . . . Far down it something moved—brightly shimmering . . .
Alan knew that it was infinitely far away. But it was rushing nearer with breathtaking speed. Each stride of its long legs—if these were legs—carried it shockingly nearer, as if it covered leagues with every step. The light-robes swirled around its devouring strides . . .
It was near—it was almost upon them. It hovered monstrous and glowing in the mouth of the tunnel, filling the high black circle of its disc . . .
And then, with one great swoop, it burst into the violet daylight of Carcasilla.
To Be Continued in the Next Issue
GHOST
A ghost in the great calculator—a ghost of madness. A trained psychiatrist to cure a machine of a psychopathic condition! But there’s a saying about what a doctor should do; he didn’t—
The president of Integration almost fell out of his chair. His ruddy cheeks turned sallow, his jaw dropped, and the hard blue eyes, behind their flexolenses, lost their look of keen inquiry and became merely stupefied. Ben Halliday slowly swiveled around and stared out at the skyscrapers of New York, as though to assure himself that he was living in the Twenty-first Century and the golden age of science.
No witches, riding on broomsticks, were visible outside the window.
Only slightly reassured, Halliday turned back to the prim, gray, tight-mouthed figure across the desk. Dr, Elton Ford did not look like Cagliostro. He resembled what he was: the greatest living psychologist.
“What did you say?” Halliday asked weakly.
Ford put his fingertips together precisely and nodded. “You heard me. The answer is ghosts. Your Antarctic Integration Station is haunted.”
“You’re joking.” Halliday sounded hopeful.
“I’m giving you my theory in the simplest possible terms. Naturally, I can’t verify it without field work.”
“Ghosts!”
The trace of a smile showed on Ford’s thin lips. “Without sheets or clanking chains. This is a singularly logical sort of ghost, Mr. Halliday. It has nothing to do with superstition. It could have existed only in this scientific age. In the Castle of Otranto it would have been absurd. Today—with your integrators—you have paved the way for hauntings. I suspect that this is the first of many, unless you take certain precautions. I believe I can solve this problem—and future ones. But the only possible method is an empirical one. I must lay the ghost, not with bell, book and candle, but through application of psychology.”
Halliday was still dazed. “You believe in ghosts?”
“Since yesterday, I believe in a certain peculiar type of haunting. Basically, this business has nothing in common with the apparitions of folklore. But as a result of new factors, the equation equals exactly the same as . . . well, the Horla, Blackwood’s yarns, or even Bulwer-Lytton’s ‘Haunters and the Haunted.’ The manifestations are the same.”
“I don’t get it.”
“In witchcraft days a hag stirred herbs in a caldron, added a few toads and bats, and cured someone of heart disease. Today we leave out the fauna and use digitalis.”
Halliday shook his head in a baffled way. “Dr. Ford. I don’t quite know what to say. You must know what you’re talking about—”
“I assure you that I do.”
“But—”
“Listen,” Ford said carefully. “Since Bronson died, you can’t keep an operator at your Antarctic Station. This man—Larry Crockett—has even stayed longer than most, but he feels the phenomena. too. A dull, hopeless depression, completely passive and overpowering.”
“But that station is one of the science centers of the world! Ghosts in that place?”
“It’s a new sort of ghost,” Ford said. “It also happens to be one of the oldest. Dangerous, too. Modern science, my dear man, has finally gone full circle and created a haunting. Now I’m going down to Antarctica and try exorcism.”
“Oh. Lord.” Halliday said.
The Station’s raison d’etre was the huge underground chamber known irreverently as the Brainpan. It was something out of classic history, Karnak or Babylon or Ur—high-ceilinged and completely bare except for the double row of giant pillars that flanked the walls.
These were of white plastic and insulated. and each was twenty feet high, six feet in diameter, and featureless. They contained the new radioatom brains perfected by Integration. They were the integrators.
Not colloids, they consisted of mind-machines, units reacting at light-velocity speeds. They were not, strictly speaking, robots. Nor were they free brains, capable of ego-consciousness. Scientists had broken down the factors that make up the intelligent brain, created supercharged equivalents, and achieved delicate, well-functioning organisms with a-fantastically high I.Q. They could be operated either singly or in circuit. The capability increased proportionately.
The integrators’ chief function was that of efficiency. They could answer questions. They could solve complicated problems. They could compute a meteorite’s orbit within minutes or seconds, where a trained astrophysicist would have taken weeks to get the same answer. In the swift, well-oiled world of 2030, time was invaluable. In five years the integrators had also proved themselves invaluable.
They were superbrains—but limited. They were incapable of self-adjustment, for they were without ego.
Thirty white pillars towered in the Brainpan, their radioatom brains functioning with alarming efficiency. They never made a mistake!
They were—minds! And they were delicate, sensitive, powerful.
Larry Crockett was a big red-faced Irishman with blue-black hair, and a fiery temper. Seated at dinner across from Dr. Ford, he watched dessert come out of the Automat slot and didn’t care a great deal. The psychologist’s keen eyes were watchful.
“Did you hear me, Mr. Crockett?”
“What? Oh, yeah. But there’s nothing wrong. I just feel lousy.”
“Since Bronson’s death there have been six men at this post. They have all felt lousy.”
“Well, living here alone, cooped up under the ice—”
“They had lived alone before at other stations. So had you.”
Crockett’s shrug was infinitely weary. “I dunno. Maybe I should quit, too.”
“You’re—afraid to stay here?”
“No. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“Not even ghosts?” Ford said. “Ghosts? A few of those might pep up the atmosphere.”
“Before you were stationed here, you were ambitious. You planned on marrying, you were working for a promotion—”
“Yeah.”
“What’s the matter? Lost interest?”
“You might call it that,” Crockett acknowledged. “I don’t see much point in . . . in anything.”
“Yet you’re healthy. The tests I gave you show that. There’s a black, profound depression in this place; I feel it myself.” Ford paused. The dull weariness, lurking at the back of his mind, crept slowly forward like a gelid, languid tide. He stared around. The station was bright modern and cheerful. Yet it did not seem so.
He went on.
“I’ve been studying the integrators, and find them most interesting.”
Crockett didn’t answer. He was looking absently at his coffee.
“Most interesting,” Ford repeated. “By the way, do you know what happened to Bronson?”
“Sure. He went crazy and killed himself.”
“Here.”
“Right. What about it?”
“His ghost remains,” Ford said.
Crockett looked up. He pushed back his chair, hesitating between a laugh and blank astonishment. Finally he decided on the laugh. It didn’t sound very amused.
“Then Bronson wasn’t the only crazy one,” he remarked.
Ford grinned. “Let’s go down and see the integrators.”
Crockett met the psychologist’s eyes, a faint, worried frown appearing on his face. He tapped his fingers nervously on the table.
“Down there? Why?”
“Do you mind?”
“Hell, no,” Crockett said after a pause. “It’s just—”
“The influence is stronger there,” Ford suggested. “You feel more depressed when you are near the integrators. Am I right?”
“O.K.,” Crockett muttered. “So what?”
“The trouble comes from there. Obviously.”
“They’re running all right. We feed in the questions and we get the right answers.”
“I’m not talking about intellect,” Ford-pointed out. “I’m discussing emotions.”
Crockett laughed shortly. “Those damn machines haven’t got any emotions.”
“None of their own. They can’t create. All their potentialities were built into them. But listen, Crockett—you take a super-complicated thinking machine, a radioatom brain, and it’s necessarily very sensitive and receptive. It’s got to be. That’s why you can have a thirty-unit hookup here—you’re at the balancing point of the magnetic currents.”
“Well?”
“Bring a magnet near a compass and what happens? The compass works on magnetism. The integrators work on—something else. And they’re delicately balanced—beautifully poised.”
“Are you trying to tell me they’ve gone mad?” Crockett demanded.
“That’s too simple,” Ford told him. “Madness implies flux. There are variable periods. The brains in the integrators are—well, poised, frozen within their fixed limits, irrevocably in their orbits. But they are sensitive to one thing, because they have to be. Their strength is their weakness.”
