Collected fiction, p.650
Collected Fiction, page 650
Circe moved to my side, walking smoothly, surely, haloed in green light. I heard her voice, very sweet, not Cyane’s voice but the Enchantress herself speaking as she had spoken three thousand years ago.
“Hecate,” she called. “Mother Hecate!”
And the goddess heard, and answered. For a pool of green light began to glimmer at our feet—began to shimmer and rise.
We stood as if in a pool of translucent water, permeated and surrounded. It seemed to rise within us as well as all about us, cool and fresh, drowning out the heat. I saw Phrontis beyond the altar. He faced the sun upon the wall. He looked Apollo in the face.
Revulsion seemed to make his very flesh crawl upon his bones, as my flesh had crawled. I saw the terrible shudders sweeping him—I saw him fall to his knees, groveling in utter abnegation before the god he had scorned. All logic and intellect stripped away, he knelt shivering before a sight no human flesh could face and remain unaltered.
“Turn thy dark face from Helios,” I heard him sob the old chant that could not help him now. “Look not upon us—in the Hour—of thine Eclipse—” His voice faltered, strangled, went on In broken rhythms.
BEHIND us now the thunder of the centaurs’ retreat had passed. But the screaming of all Helios had risen to a crescendo that penetrated even these sacred walls. Phrontis in that frightful torrent of unseen fire began to shrivel as he knelt.
“Stoop not above our temple.”
He could not tear his blinded gaze from that Face which even I dared not look upon. Burning, blackening in the full blaze of it, he croaked his useless plea.
“Come not to us—Apollo—not to us—not—”
The voice was stilled. The golden sun-mask melted upon his chest, the golden robes blacked and fell to cinders: Phrontis was no longer there—only a shriveling shape of blackness before Apollo’s dark, laughing Face.
And all around us Helios itself was dying.
For Apollo poured out the black, lightless violence of his sun-heat in an invisible torrent that not flesh and blood, not metal nor stone could resist. And I thought I knew why. Hecate stood with us before Apollo’s altar, and that flood was focused upon her—upon us—the enemies of the sun.
He meant to consume us in that fearful torrent if it meant consuming all Helios too.
The green pool of radiance held us still. Apollo’s might beat in vain about us. But I felt the floor shudder in that bath of flame.
The temple, the city, even the earth beneath the city, shivered in the pouring energy that must be violent enough, almost, to smash the atom itself asunder.
A mounting thunder of sound spread through Helios, a shaking bellow of stone upon stone, metal shrieking upon metal, as Helios began to fall.
When a people die, the voice of their agonies is a sound no brain that hears it could ever forget. We heard those cries as Apollo’s people fell before the violence of his power. But when a city dies—no language spoken by human creatures could tell of the death-roar of its passing.
Stone and steel screamed in their dissolution. Wall roared down upon wall and roofs crashed deafeningly, incredibly, in long, thundering echoes upon the defenseless heads of their builders. Earth itself shuddered and cracked beneath the titanic murdered city. Helios fell as Olympus itself might fall, in cataclysmic chaos.
But we were not in Helios. We were no longer in this middle world of legend but in a place of inconceivable strangeness. The green light clouded around us, and when it thinned again we stood in the unknown world of the gods!
Jason had caught glimpses of this place, three thousand years ago. He had not understood. And though I understood a little more clearly what it was I gazed on, I knew that no human mind could entirely comprehend the vast and godlike scope of this domain.
There were things around me that my eyes could not quite see. Enormous structures—mighty colossi that dwarfed anything man might build—and were machines. Vast golden things rose into the golden sky so many thousands of feet that human eyes could not see all their heights. The topless towers of Ilium, I though confusedly.
Machines they were, but at once too complicated and far too incredibly simplified for human minds to grasp. A race of demigods had built them, for the purposes of their own strange, alien kind.
A dead race! For the machines were silent. The mightiest science that ever existed, I thought, had gone down into the eternal silence of oblivion.
There were traces of what must have been battle on some of those mountainous golden walls. Some stood half in ruins, their mysterious shining interiors open to the uncomprehending gaze. And some were smashed beyond all likeness to their originals. I wondered what titanic battle of the gods had raged here, and what its outcome was, millenniums ago.
A SOUNDLESS wind carried us weightlessly through that fantastic city. And far away, but coming toward us, a shining thing moved.
Hecate spoke in my mind.
“We go to meet Apollo,” the voice said quietly. “He or I must be destroyed. And the Son of Jason must know the reason why, so that this time he may not be tempted to fling down his armor and flee.
“If you fail me now, you must know the price of failure.
“I will tell, you the secret of Apollo.
“The time-streams crossed between two worlds more than seven thousand years ago. For awhile the twin worlds were one. And at that time our race was born—the race mankind called gods. They were not gods. They were mutations from human stock, born with strange powers, capable of a greater knowledge and a greater science than man could understand. Not all of us, but enough. Legends name, them—Zeus and Aphrodite, Hera, Ares, Pluto, Hephaestus—Hecate.
“When the time-streams parted, our race moved on to the middle world, where Helios stood. We grew in power and knowledge. And in the end, we made this farther world, a place of our own, in an artificial space-time, where we were not bound by the laws of any planet.
“Here we built and here we rose to a summit of power that no race before or since has ever known. I was One of them, though not the greatest and not altogether of their blood. Even in the days of legend, the gods of Greece had little heed for mankind. Even then they were moving toward their Olympian goal, away from the world of Earth. But Hecate worked more closely with the sons of man. Necromancy and enchantment were my skills, and I needed men and women to help me. So when the race moved on, I lingered.
“And when the final battle came, I was not among the slain.
“You see, we knew we were not gods. We knew death must come for us some day, and we wished to create a race that could mount on our shoulders to a pinnacle higher than even we had ever dared to dream. So there were many experiments. Many trials. Some were partly successful. We made the centaurs, the satyrs and fauns, and the children of wood and stream. They were nearly immortal, but failures because of their taint of the beast.”
The voice faltered, because now that soundless wind had swept us toward a high hill towering dimly in the golden air, and upon its height the glow that was Apollo stood waiting.
I thought I knew the hill. I had stood on it before—or Jason had.
This was that bare height upon Aeaea where the veil between two worlds hung thinly, where once before Apollo and Hecate had met in combat—and Jason fled.
Running, I had heard Apollo’s terrible laughter ringing down the heights of the sky behind me. I heard it again, now. I looked through the heart of that golden blaze and saw Apollo’s Face.
It was supernally beautiful. It was supernally horrible. My flesh crawled upon my bones again with the same sort of revulsion, in infinitely less degree, that many men feel in the presence of certain earth-things—snakes or spiders—that mysteriously outrage some instinct deep within us all.
Apollo was such an outrage. To the eye he was godlike, beautiful, superhumanly glorious. But something in the very soul rejected him. Something in my brain shuddered away from him, cried voicelessly that he should not be, should not exist or walk the same world as I or share the same life.
Hecate’s voice took up her tale again in my mind. But I think I knew the secret of Apollo, intuitively, in my bones and nerves, even before she put it into words in my brain.
“So we tried again,” she was saying. “In the half-gods we had failed. So we put aside living flesh and made Apollo.”
I knew. Something in human flesh can guess when that which it confronts should not be alive. Some buried vanity, perhaps, that cries out against the aliveness of outrageously non-human things.
Apollo was too beautiful to be human. Too terrible to wear flesh. I knew before Hecate put the thought in my mind. Apollo was a machine.
“In our vanity we made our own destruction,” Hecate’s voice said sadly in the depths of my brain. “For our beautiful Apollo was no failure—and no success. Our desires, like our race, sprang from human roots. But this being we created shares no desires of ours. By the standards of our race and yours, he is not sane. Or perhaps it’s we who are insane—before the terrible sanity of the machine.
“We made him too strong. And he destroyed us. There was a mighty battle long ago, a battle that raged for millenniums, but in the end—you see. All of my kind are dead now except—Hecate. And Apollo walks among the ruins of our world.
“Well, he must die. Before he slew the last of the gods—Hephaestus, our greatest artisan—the Fleece was woven for Apollo’s destruction. It can slay him. He knows that. But no god—no one of my race dares wear the Fleece. Death I do not fear—but death while Apollo lives would mean final defeat for all my people dreamed. I cannot die while our last deed lives on unchecked.
“So you wear the Fleece, Son of Jason. You know what you must do.”
Yes, I did know.
I glanced once at Circe—the inhuman loveliness of that alabaster face, red-lipped, long, green-burning eyes meeting mine, and then I turned away from her toward Apollo.
CHAPTER XV
Music from the Sea
QUICKLY, for one flashing instant I saw his Face again, beautiful as a machine is beautiful, cold, swayed by emotions I had no name for because until this moment I had never looked upon the emotion of a machine—a living machine that sees its doom approach.
I went forward one step—two—and then the Face dissolved in a glare that was like looking straight into the heart of the sun itself. Apollo called down the ravening violence out of heaven to shield himself against me and I felt the terrible heat of it swallow me up in a bath of freezing flame.
I smiled to myself. I knew that was a two-edged weapon—if I could endure the heat a moment longer. For I knew how to use the Fleece as Haphaestus meant it to be used—and Apollo the Machine was doomed before it.
Hephaestus must have delved deep into the secrets of the electron and the sources of energy. Apollo, being machine, could be destroyed by a machine, and the Fleece was simply that. Apollo was not alive as flesh lives—he drew his life from the source of solar energy, tapping the sun itself for the tiniest fraction of its strength, which was still enough to consume cities in one breath if he chose to release a part of it upon mankind.
But he drew upon the sun continuously.
It poured its golden stream through him in a ceaseless torrent, the excess power dissipating harmlessly into the shining air of this superworld.
The Fleece could seal all that power inside him. And not even Apollo could contain such a pouring flood for long. Hecate, I think, drew her own strength from some such source, which was why she dared not wear the Fleece against Apollo. Only a human could wear it, and live to cast it off again.
As I cast it off.
It quivered against my shoulders one last moment, the delicate ringlets of golden wire shivering all around me. Then I touched it and it clung obediently to my grasp as Hephaestus made it to cling so. very many generations ago. This machine obeyed as Apollo the Machine could not and must die because of it.
I stripped the Fleece from my shoulders—spun it out away from me in midair—sent it flying across the dazzling space I could not look into without blindness.
Burning gold though the “Fleece was, it looked black in that blaze. Without Hecate’s mist enfolding us, I know we must both be vaporized into mist in that incredible crucible of fire which Apollo had called down from the sun itself for protection.
As the super-race in its efforts had created its own doom, so Apollo the Machine created his when he called forth that terrible fire. And so, I think, does every living thing, even though it may live by grace of energy from the sun itself, like Apollo.
The Fleece struck and clung. For an unthinkable instant the full violence of that tiny sun-fraction upon which he drew poured down into the beautiful machine that had been a god. Poured down—and built within him an unspilling pool of power.
Apollo for that moment was a vessel that held the sun itself, and in such fire as that, nothing could endure for longer than the flash of a second.
How can I say what happened then? How can I describe in any human tongue how it was Apollo died?
I remember Circe’s lovely pale face close to mine for one spinning instant, the deep red lips parted on a cry I could not hear. I remember how the hill we stood on seemed to vanish from underfoot and the sky above us turn to flame.
And then I was floundering in salt water . . .
I was alone, and misty gray waves tossed me over and over, strangling, helpless. I went down twice, far down. I felt naked without the power the Fleece had poured into me, and weak as a child with the reaction from that tremendous battle.
But just as I thought I could fight no more against the engulfing waves, I heard a whispering, bubbling rush very near me, and something lifted me up—a great wave, or perhaps inhuman hands.
I could breathe again, and beneath me was a solid deck that rose and fell with the motion of the water.
Music sang in my ears. I heard the creak of oars and the whine of cordage in the wind, and the slap of water against a familiar prow.
With ah almost intolerable effort I lifted myself on one arm. Ghostly in the gray mist I saw the Argonauts bending to their oars, and heard the lyre of Orpheus singing in the fog.
I could not remember even falling back upon the deck after that. I remember nothing at all—nothing at all . . .
* * * * *
THE campfire had died hours ago. Mist was creeping down through the pines, and when Seward’s voice paused, the only sound was the soft washing of the sea.
Talbot said softly, “And then?”
“And then—I was lying on a beach, and it was night,” Seward said. “There were lights in the distance. Somehow I got that far before I passed out again. I was in a little town on the Oregon coast.” He shrugged. “It could have been hallucination. How I got from this spot down to Oregon overnight I can’t understand. A plane could do it, but why the devil—No, I’m not skeptical any more. I know it wasn’t hallucination.”
Talbot said, “Well, we’ve gone far enough into the sciences to realize how little we know. Everything that you tell about is theoretically possible, I suppose—super-race and all. All but the Argo.”
Seward nodded. “And yet,” he said, “the odd thing is that Argo is the one thing I’m surest of. It’s more real to me than Hecate or Aeaea, or even—Cyane.”
Talbot said gently, “Cyane?”
Seward shook himself with an impatient motion. “It isn’t over,” he said. “Cyane—Circe—one woman or two, I don’t know. But there was a promise at the start of it all, and the promise wasn’t kept. So I can’t rest. I can’t settle down to anything in this world. I know it isn’t over yet, you see. Unless Hecate died, too.
“Well, an adventure like that happens only once to a man. Or—if he had two lives—then perhaps twice. I don’t know. I know it wasn’t hallucination. I know I’m not insane because I remember it so clearly. And I know Hecate will fulfill her promise, some day, some day . . .”
He shrugged and rose. “I’ve talked enough. It’ll be dawn soon. I’m tired.”
Talbot lay sleepless for a long time, staring up at the stars among the pine tops and thinking. He thought of Jason and of Jay Seward, and of the origins of names and men. Argo, plowing the misty seas, warden of those waters that lap nameless shores. Warden of the seas—Sea-ward—Jay Seward—He slept . . .
The faint echo of music woke him just before dawn. It was very dark, here among the trees. And he was alone. He felt that uncannily in the blackness as he sat up, ears straining for another echo of the distant music. It came. Talbot got up and took a step toward the echoing sound.
It came from the water. He walked slowly down the slope, past Seward’s empty sleeping bag, listening and watching the dark for signs of another moving figure that answered, too, to distant music.
Far ahead of him he thought he heard a splashing above the ceaseless lap of waves on the shore. It was too distant to be sure. Talbot broke into a run and this time he called “Seward! Seward, where, are you?”
Only silence and the sea replied.
He ran until the sand of the water’s edge slowed his footsteps, and the waves rolled in where he halted to stare out across the dark water. Something moved there—a dim shape, long and slender, lying upon the water like—a ship? He never knew. The fog closed in too fast, and only the sea spoke.
Then a ripple of wordless music floated back along the wind, and Talbot shouted once more, for the last time: “Jason! Jason!” There was no answering cry. The shadow in the mists glided-away and was itself only mist. Talbot stood silent, watching, listening for an answer that would never come. The gray fog closed down, billow upon billow, and there was nothing left but darkness and the slow, soft sound of the moving sea.
HAPPY ENDING
Out of the Future emerge the Robot and Karn—while James Kelvin fights them blindly, knowing not friend from foe!
THIS is the way the story ended: James Kelvin concentrated very hard on the thought of the chemist with the red moustache who had promised him a million dollars. It was simply a matter of tuning in on the man’s brain, establishing a rapport. He had done it before. Now it was more important than ever that he do it this one last time. He pressed the button on the gadget the robot had given him, and thought hard.
