The early williamson, p.18
The Early Williamson, page 18
Ellis’s blue eyes blazed on him suddenly.
‘You want to stay? What would life mean to us, here? Growing old on a dead planet! Ghosts of the lost race all about us! Ghosts and dreams and memories! Surely, Keening, you aren’t going to be a -‘ He checked the harsh word, and said in its place’- to be afraid?’
The slight form stiffened, and the bandaged face looked at him quickly.
‘Very well, Drew. We follow.’
Ellis was instantly regretful. ‘Sorry, Keening, I didn’t mean what I said. Guess all this is getting on my nerves.’ He nodded at the grotesque, white machines. ‘Lord, to criticize your courage, after all we’ve been through together! Don’t mind it, Keening.’
‘That’s all right,’ whispered the other. ‘I thought of staying. But I see now that we have to go.’
By dusk they were back in the steel hull of the Cosmobile. Ellis went to the bridge and consulted upon the charts the notations he had made of the white cube’s positions and velocity. At last he came down to the galley, where Keening was preparing a meal.
‘You found out—’ whispered the little man.
‘Yes, Keening. We had enough of the elements to plot its course.’
The technician stopped, with a platter of smoking ham in his hands, stared expectantly.
‘Hard to believe it, Keening. But the cube is evidently bound for the ninth planet. For Pluto!’
‘Pluto?…We must follow, there…
‘As soon as we can find supplies.’
The steel ball rose in the dawn, and crossed the bay again, to empty Market Street. For a week they were busy there. Canned food they discovered in abundance. In a machine shop, Ellis found cylinders of compressed oxygen. Keening visited a hardware store, and brought back sporting-rifles, revolvers, and ammunition.
But they did not often separate. They were held together by instinctive dread of the lonely, lifeless Earth.
Ellis had intended to find some small dynamo-generator, which he could run to re-charge the batteries of the ether-ship. But none came to his attention, and presently, with a better idea, he moved the Cosmobile to an electrical supply house, and there replaced the old cells with new ones.
The cylinders of oxygen and the heavy batteries had not been easy to handle, and both were exhausted at the beginning of the long flight to Pluto—the outermost planet. Standing watch and watch beneath the steel dome of the hull, staring out endlessly into the black vacancies of the star-powdered void, they had ample time to rest.
Four hours long were the watches—by the chronometer. They seemed four minutes, sometimes, or four thousand years. No sun rose and set; time hung motionless. Silently the chronometer ticked. Their hearts beat. They watched and sometimes ate and slept, and spoke only in infrequent monosyllables.
And the ether-car drove out into dark infinity. Into void inconceivable. Earth and moon were two bright points, small and white, larger and green. Against endless night they dwindled, crept into one.
The sun shrank. Argent Venus and Jupiter, red Mars and yellow Saturn drew toward it, and waned. The sun became dimensionless. A bright star, lost and futile in the void of universal night.
Still they flew outward. To Pluto. The black planet. The border-world. The last outpost against night of void cosmos.
Pluto, the ultimate planet—and the eldest. It must have cooled enough for life when Jupiter was still a second sun, when Earth was not yet flung molten from the central star. Evolution—planetary and organic—must there have run its course.
Pluto, whose book of life should have been written to the end, sealed, forgotten. Star of darkness and death, was it yet undead? A vampire world, reaching from death across the void, to pluck from Earth the warm fresh fruit of the sun?
The voyage was done.
A black landscape, beneath the Cosmobile, expanded into frozen, starlit desolation. Perilously, the iron ball settled upon a ragged ebon crag. All about, in pallid star-shine, tumbled bleak and elemental wilderness of barren stone.
Dark planet. Livid, jagged mountains leaping with savage teeth at cruel, star-jeweled sky. Titanic peaks, gigantic buttresses of dark rock, cleft with colossal canyons that were wells of ominous obscurity. Jet, cyclopean ranges, plunging into gigantic gorges.
Air there was none. The cold was unutterable; the sun merely a yellow star. Nothing lived or moved upon all this tangled, alpine desolation of darkness and doom.
Yet to this world humanity had come—in a cube of aluminum. Why? To what evil end?
The steel sphere rose from the peak, and circled above grim, cataclysm-born ranges—above titanic mountains reared in the last fierce convulsions of a dying planet. Above sheer and incredible twisted crags and black, fathomless abysms. A weary time slipped by, measured only by the restless, silent ticking of the chronometer. And then they looked into an illuminated pit.
A volcanic shaft, rimmed with black and monstrous peaks. Miles it was across, and scores—or hundreds—of miles in depth, piercing to the very heart of the black planet. Blue the rocks glowed in its depths, with eldritch fire of radio-activity.
In that ghostly phosphorescence, so dim that it looked a specter thing, they saw the cube. Tens on tens of miles below, upon the rugged, pallidly glowing floor of the azure abyss. Like a child’s building-block painted silver and carelessly dropped among jagged boulders.
Did that cube, after all, contain the race of man?
Ellis wondered. And he wondered if one girl was in it, Tempest Durand. Once she might have been his, with her lithe, athletic beauty, her wit, her gay vivacity. And he had left her, because his work was too important, because he had no thought to spend upon a woman, because she disturbed his delicate mental processes. Had he then lost her? For ever?
The Cosmobile hung a long time over the rim of the pit.
‘Must we go down?’ whispered little Keening, watching Ellis Drew from his bandaged face. ‘Down into that blue flame? What can we do? What—against a power that could reach across to Earth?’
His whisper was frightened and pleading.
After all, Ellis asked himself, what could they do? What, when they did not even know the nature of the power they must fight? But he remembered Tempest Durand.
‘Yes,’ he told Keening. ‘We’re going down.’
The Cosmobile fell into the well. Past smooth, fire-glazed walls of volcanic obsidian. Past jagged ledges like threatening teeth. Past mysterious cavern-mouths.
The feeble gleam of starlight vanished from the rocks. And then the walls of the shaft were blue, glowing increasingly bright. Beneath was a field of boulders, cyclopean stones that had fallen from the sides of the chasm, a tumbled confusion of rugged masses, shimmering pallidly phosphorescent.
The opening above, a patch of cold stars, narrowed disquietingly. The black walls closed above the ether-car like a swallowing throat. And the blue bottom of the pit seemed to expand as it dropped.
At last the steel sphere was brought to rest upon the boulder-fields between two colossal masses of blue-glowing stone that offered it some concealment. Three miles away, perhaps, across ragged, luminescent rocks, rose the pale argent sides of the cube, smooth and unbroken. Beyond the cube, and in every direction, leapt up walls of shimmering rock, growing darker and narrowing at the top of this cyclopean well, about a tiny, star-flecked disk.
‘We are here,’ whispered Keening.
‘Here,’ repeated Ellis. ‘To do what we can. To find what has happened. And rescue a few—if we can. I had a friend…
‘There is air here,’ he announced, consulting his instruments. ‘Breathable air, though thin and dry and cold. We won’t need the atmospheric armor.’
They descended from the bridge, hurriedly donned heavy clothing, and each selected from their racks a heavy rifle and a revolver. And at last Ellis opened the valve and unrolled his metal ladder, and they climbed down upon rocks that shone dimly, with chill blue radiance.
The air was scanty and bitterly cold. Both of them were panting a little, even from the exertion of climbing down the ladder. There was no wind; but the gelid chill of this dead and frozen world drove through their garments.
Furtively, they slipped away from the steel sphere, along the floor of the rugged ravine in which it was hidden, following in the direction of the gigantic aluminum cube.
They had gone perhaps a hundred yards, when Keening voiced through his bandages a muted, whispering scream. With an icy, shaking hand, he grasped Ellis Drew’s arm, and pointed. Then both men dropped to their knees, and began to fire.
It is significant of their instinctive horror of the approaching things that they shot at once, without question or hesitation.
The little group of beings that came running toward them along the bottom of the ravine, between frowning walls of blue-shining stone, wore the shape of men. Men they were in form, but less than human and more than human. Weird metamorphosis had overtaken them since they had been snatched from the Earth.
Specters of elemental horror. Most of them were nude; a few wore foul and tattered scraps of garments. Like the rocks, their livid flesh glowed with pallid, bluish light. And it was translucent, so that their bones were visible.
Skeletons animated, clad in lucent flesh of ghostly blue.
They moved, though rapidly, with a curious stiffness, like inert and nerveless marionettes. Their faces were fixed, lifeless—dead, transparent masks in front of grinning skulls.
They made no sound; they did not speak. Each seemed unconscious of his companions. Those who fell beneath the rifle bullets neither screamed nor groaned. They spun about and went down silently—and the others trampled inexorably over them.
The things revealed no fear. Unarmed, they came on in the face or barking rifles, moving with stark and uncanny automatism. They were machines, bent ruthlessly upon one single end. Death alone stayed their stalking advance.
The rifles were empty, and half a score of the things strode grimly on. Fumbling for cartridges, Ellis cried to Keening:
‘Back to the ship! I’ll stand them off!’
Loading his own rifles, the little man laughed through his bandages with a curious dry sound, and moved closer to Ellis.
The guns were empty again when the remnant of the band reached them—now reduced to four monstrous things, grappling at them with long-nailed, skeletal talons, clothed in blue light. Ellis had no time to load again, or even to find the revolver in his pocket.
One went down beneath his clubbed rifle; the stock of the weapon splintered upon its ghastly skull. Then hands grasped him from behind. Icy hands, fiendishly strong, colder than living flesh could be, freezing with the eldrich chill of this black world of death.
Ellis struggled savagely, vainly, in strange arms whose bones were visible through ghostly-blue flesh. Then Keening’s revolver cracked; the arms relaxed and slipped from him.
The two then stood back to back. Again the rifle-barrel rose and fell in Ellis’s hands, and Keening’s revolver barked.
The battle abruptly was done, and they stood over sprawling skeletons that were clothed in translucent, shimmering flesh. No blood seemed to flow from the things. Dead, they were no more silent than they had been, living. Tense, waiting quiet reigned.
Ellis shuddered. ‘Sorry, Keening,’ he muttered. ‘I got you into this.’
He heard the little man’s whispered protest, ‘But we had to come, Drew. I understand that. Though I was afraid… But why are these men like that?’
‘I don’t know, Keening.’ He looked down at ghastly, shimmering faces. ‘They weren’t even alive. The one that touched me was cold.’
‘Let’s get back into the ship,’ whispered Keening.
Ellis retreated with him. ‘The luminescence of these rocks,’ he muttered, ‘must be caused by radio-activity. And that is what makes them—transparent. A penetrating radiation.’
‘Must be,’ assented Keening. ‘They do look as if they were under the X-ray. Bones surrounded with shadows of flesh.’
‘But that doesn’t explain what brought them here. Do you suppose—’ and mute horror struggled in his voice, ‘Do you suppose all humanity is - like these!
Keening never replied, for then the music smote them.
Music of madness!
It beat upon their brains. High, swift, pizzicati notes, strumming upon taut nerves like a crystal hail of sound. Tinkling, exciting, calling. A challenge and a lure.
Liquid, soothing rhythms, mellow sussurations, lulling, slumbrous.
Deep and throbbing infra-bass, booming, commanding, dominating.
Ellis realized from the first that he did not hear that music with his ears. It was not sound, but penetrating, all-pervading radiation. It pulsed through all his brain.
Music of madness. It swept firm, conquered him, thrust aside his mind. He was pushed aside. His body was surrendered to the music, moving freely to its wild rhythm.
Keening was beside him. They had dropped the rifles; they were running. Running after the mystic music, the thought beat through his mind, as the rats and the children of Hamelin ran after the Piper—and in the contrast of the familiar legend with their own desperate plight, he found a peculiar horror.
The physiological effect of the music is undeniable. And this was more than music. It was not sound, but a vibration that thrummed through all their bodies, impinging upon every fiber of their nervous systems. It was hypnotic.
Was it thus the human race had been drawn across the void? By mad music that had mastered their bodies, made them slaves of vibration?
Along the ravine they ran, their minds sitting helplessly apart in bodies ruled by that weird and soundless music. Past the looming, titanic mass of the silver-walled cube. And on, across what must once have been a city.
A level space, nearly circular, a mile wide. Surrounded with a curving ridge, it was scattered with heaps of crumbled stone. The piles, Ellis thought, were too regular to be anything save remains of buildings, but buildings that had been ruins five hundred thousand years, or a million. Where had the survivors gone—if there had been survivors?
The question was answered without words.
The silent music swept them on beyond the cube, and across the dead mounds, toward the cyanic-shining, vertical wall of the pit. It carried them out of the ruins, upon a worn and ancient road. And the road sloped downward, curved into a vast crevice whose jagged walls glowed with light of sapphires.
From the crevice they passed into lofty and interminable vaulted caverns, whose smoothed walls yet bore the mark of tools. Dust of eons lay thick upon the floor, swirled up chokingly about them.
The compelling, noiseless chords led them downward once more, and into a lower system of artificial caverns. Here the rock was brighter still, glowing with radiance softly electric-blue, shadowless and unearthly. The air was heavier here, and warmer, and the floor was clear of dust.
They were drawn into a colossal space, blue-walled, domed and circular, and far out across its floor. The mad music abruptly ceased its throbbing in their brains. The journey was ended.
Free of the dread, hypnotic music, Ellis was yet strangely paralyzed. His body stood erect, stiff and oddly tingling. It took all the power of his will to turn his head, to survey this weird space into which the vibration had swept them.
The place was titanic. Not less than two thousand feet across could the circular floor have been; the dome was fully half that high.
Resting in the middle of the floor, and surrounded by colossal mechanisms, was a red, pulsating mountain. A monstrous, quivering mass, scarlet, cleft, convoluted, wrinkled, folded. A heap of red, palpitating flesh, a full hundred feet high, supported by frames and plates of metal.
From the strange and intricate apparatus that surrounded it rose two tall, cylindrical tanks, of glass or other transparent substance, filled with luminously violet liquid. At the base of each cylinder was a throbbing pump, and a thick tube connected it with the mountain of flesh.
Soft, crimson mass, surrounded by weird and complex mechanisms. About it stood scores of men—or of things such as Ellis and Keening had fought. Monsters, with shining flesh translucent and grim skeletons visible.
Ellis, fighting that lingering paralysis, stared at the red mountain, and wondered. Then he saw the face of it, and understood.
The face was grotesquely and incredibly tiny, situated just above the blue floor, with quivering, wrinkled red folds bulging out above it. A thin, sharp, chinless beak, and two hideously malevolent, amazingly ancient eyes.
The eyes riveted his gaze. Two of them, protruding above the beak, at the corners of the tiny, triangular face. They were green. And compound, like the eyes of insects. Each had seven orbs. Age-old wisdom was writ cold in each septuple eye, and malign power, ruthlessly evil.
The scarlet mountain was a brain. A living brain, hypertrophied to the ultimate degree. It answered Ellis Drew’s old question; it was the hideous consummation of organic evolution upon the oldest planet.
Body it had none. Metal plates and girders formed its supporting pan. Its face was fantastically tiny, pressed down against the floor.
Then he saw its arms.
The virescent, septuple eyes rested with cold and unutterable malignancy upon Ellis, and then moved to Keening. And the little man ran stiffly forward from beside Ellis, like one in a dream, toward the dwarfed and hideous face beneath the crimson, palpitating mountain.
Thin and eager tentacles reached out to meet him, from beneath the brain. The hands of the monster. They were four, white and whip-like and many yards long, writhing and twitching avidly.
They grasped little Keening, twisted snake-like about his limbs, drew him toward the face. Abruptly he was struggling with fierce, futile energy. And Ellis heard him scream—a gasping and inchoate sound bursting through the bandages on his face, thick and clotted with horror.
Just once he screamed. The twining white tentacles brought him up to the tiny face. And the thin black beak found his throat.
Ellis tried to move.
Tingling paralysis still held him. He surged forward vainly against it, in a terrible attempt to follow Keening. Lifeless muscles failed him, and he almost fell.
