Collected short fiction, p.260
Collected Short Fiction, page 260
“The planet’s people, then, had become divided into two races. The surface had lost its atmosphere and moisture, through dissipation into space, save for traces that remained in the abysmal deeps of the ancient seas. A few still dwelt there, depending for their energy needs upon the scant and decreasing radiation of the star.
“But explorers had found air and water remaining in these far-stretching caverns, which were presently colonized. The new race of troglodytes depended first upon the planet’s small remnant of volcanic heat, and, when that was gone, upon the emanations of radioactive elements. In quest of vital power, they sank their mine shafts to the very heart of the planet.
“I came of the upper race. My father—for we were of two sexes, as your race is—was the greatest and the last scientist that our kind produced. We lived in a dome-armored city upon the salt-crusted cliffs above the last bitter sea. Our city was the last upon the surface, and we had no knowledge of the delving race beneath us.
“Early in his youth, Sardoc, my father, perceived that our race was near its end. Another Sun, a young, giant star, had long been observed approaching our dying system. My father’s calculations revealed that this great star, during his lifetime, would pass very near our ancient Sun.
“Collision would be very narrowly avoided, he predicted, and each star would survive to resume an independent path. But our old planet, he found, would suffer extreme vicissitudes. It would be seared, half fused, by the new Sun’s heat, wrenched and riven by terrific tidal stresses. It would be torn from its parent star, and finally flung into a regular orbit about the new Sun, but at such a tremendous distance that it would soon freeze and remain forever dead.
“I was a daughter, and my father’s only child.” Ivec became aware of infinite age-old weariness in Lakne’s voice, a leaden weight of tragic regret. “We dwelt together in that last city by the salt-rimmed lake, and I worked beside him in his laboratory.
“He told me of the coming danger, and of his plan to save his life, and mine. For he had found a means of compacting light quanta into a stable form that could serve as a vehicle for life, for mind. We prepared to trap the increasing radiations of the new Sun approaching, and build two of these spherical bodies. We were to escape the cataclysm with them, and perhaps journey to a kinder world to live.
“We were busy with that project. I was happy for a time, in anticipation of the adventure of the change, and the experience of eternal life with my father in a wondrous body that could fly from world to world.
“But sometimes, when I walked among the despairing, terror-stricken people of the city, who knew that they and their race must die in the cataclysm, dreadfully and without hope—then my heart was touched with pity.
“THUS, once I saw a male of our race, one named Gogok. He was young and strong and handsome to my eyes. He stood upon a white-crusted cliff, and looked with tragic, baffled gaze across black waters at the flaming star of doom.
“It wrenched my being with pain to see him so splendid in his strength, yet crushed with the terror of death, helpless and sick with despair. I loved him, and I could not endure to let him die.
“I begged my father to build a third sphere of photons, for Gogok. But we had not time or sufficient energy for that. And when my father perceived that my love for Gogok was greater than my love for him, or for life itself, he resolved to perish so that Gogok might take his own photon body.
“In the blindness, the madness, of my passion, I thanked my father, and let it be so. When the spheres were finished, and the giant, hurtling Sun was near, my father conveyed my being from my old body to one sphere, and my lover, Gogok, to the other.
“Gogok thanked my father, and I did. Father set his laboratory in order, and waited to observe the phenomena of the cataclysm, and to perish with his body.
“My lover and I were briefly happy in the freedom and the splendid power of our new bodies, in the high and strange communion that they made possible between our minds, and with the glory of the universe.
“As I have said, we had lost all knowledge of the race of troglodytes. For ages past, our fathers had been confined to the deep and narrow chasms where they dwelt, and the original entrances to the caverns had long since been covered by erosion.
“But when Gogok and I, rejoicing in the free, swift motion of our new bodies, were exploring the vast, high, airless plateaus, we entered a narrow crevice in the mountains and discovered the caverns of the other people.
“They were much changed by aeons of life beneath the surface. Their eyes were enlarged, their skins pale and colorless, their bodies adapted to the toil of delving. But they were still beings of intelligence, for their minds had been developed by the eternal struggle to survive.
“We found their greatest city within this very cavern—a busy place, ancient and populous. Its huge buildings were metal and stone, and the very walls glowed with eternal, varicolored light. We entered an immense central building, and made contact with the council of five who ruled the troglodytes.
“From the five we learned the history of the delving race. It was the story of an age-long struggle for power, energy, for light and heat, for transportation, for the manufacture of food. With the depletion of the planet’s feeble volcanic heat, they had turned to radioactive elements, for which their mines riddled all the planet.
“Their science, forced to meet the many problems of discovering, refining, and utilizing radioactive substances, reached a very high development. With increasing understanding and control of atomic and subatomic processes, they were able to speed the disruption first of uranium and then of a few other less-active elements.
“But at last the complete exhaustion of even those more common elements had brought the troglodytes to face a supreme crisis. Food supplies failed; the caves grew dark and cold again. Nine tenths of the race perished of famine. But lights burned on in their laboratories, when all else was dark; and their science, with its deep knowledge of the nature of matter, devised a catalytic control for the release of material energy.
“With that discovery, the troglodytes entered a millenium of triumphant happiness. No longer must their lives be spent toiling in the mines. The lifetime needs of an individual could be supplied by a pebble. Liberated science branched into many new channels. Art flowered among them for the first time. Splendid cities and monuments were built; the very walls of the caverns were cut into colossal representations of their history.
“OUR COMING signaled the end of that golden age. For all their science, the troglodytes were not astronomers; indeed, it was a dogma current among them that the universe outside the caverns was compact, of solid matter. They accounted for gravitation and the observed effects of the planet’s motion by a very ingenious hypothesis of the repulsion of matter toward the open space of the caves. We brought them their first hint of the approaching cataclysm.
“Gogok’s mind, I now discovered, had been warped by the fear of death. He was moved by a savage lust for life, energy, power—and by a mad and fearful jealousy of any other possessor of them. The dread of perishing for want of power that had haunted all his youth, that had first won him my sympathy and love, persisted even in the eternal security of the photon sphere.
“He determined at once to secure the secret of the material-energy catalyst from the troglodytes. But the five members of the council—who alone had been entrusted with it—refused to share the secret, lest it be used selfishly against them.
“Gogok, therefore, devised an elaborate stratagem to gain the secret. And I agreed to aid him with his plan, because I wanted the catalyst for my father and our race in the upper world.
“He and I, thereupon, parted, as if we had quarreled. I left the city, and he proceeded with the ruse. He first explained the science of astronomy to the five rulers, and told them of the cataclysm that was soon to result from the passing of the suns. But he made them believe that our planet was doomed to collision with the second Sun, and that they all must perish with it unless they escaped with his aid.
“He demonstrated the nature and the power of his photon sphere to the five, and convinced them that such bodies of light would be able to escape to another world and endure there forever. He proposed to build similar energy bodies for each of the five, in return for the secret.
“But the five were unwilling to betray their positions by giving away the secret and abandoning their people to perish. And Gogok, thereupon, called me back, with a thought beam, to play my part in the ruse.
“I came as an enemy of Gogok, and demanded the secret for myself. I displayed the destructive energies of my photon body, and threatened to destroy the cities of the troglodytes unless they yielded the secret to me.
“The energy process could have been used to destroy me. But the troglodytes were a peaceful race, somewhat softened by the generations of easy living since the discovery of the catalyst. They were, moreover, uncertain and apprehensive of the true extent of my powers. When Gogok offered to become their champion, they eagerly accepted his aid.
“He and I engaged in a mock duel, with the emanation of spectacular rays and field effects that destroyed buildings and shook the cavern walls. Gogok presently retired as if defeated. He told the five that I was a dreadful antagonist, and that they and he would surely be destroyed unless he was given the catalyst to restore his depleted energy.
“TO SAVE THEMSELVES, the troglodytes yielded the secret to the being they thought their friend. Armed with it, Gogok returned to the encounter and continued the struggle, until I fell helpless and became his prisoner.
“The five rulers now insisted that Gogok build them photon bodies, as he had offered to do before. For they were now alarmed by his possession of the secret, and wished to have these powerful bodies to protect their people.
“With a simulated reluctance, Gogok agreed. With the aid of my knowledge—for I had been my father’s helper—he constructed five spheres, and conveyed the beings of the rulers into them. But, as a part of his whole plot, he had made the spheres weak and unstable. One by one, they collapsed; and the five perished.
“Since none of the surviving troglodytes possessed any knowledge of the catalyst, they were helpless to resist when Gogok declared himself their absolute ruler, as he had planned to do.
“It was only then that I discovered that I, too, had been a victim of Gogok’s machinations. From the first, I had been tortured with regret that my father had given up his own eternal body that Gogok might live. I had been sometimes alarmed by Gogok’s selfish thoughts and the discovery of his mad lust for power. Yet I had forgiven him—even for his ruthless treachery in destroying the five—because I knew that only the dreadful fear of death had made him so, and because I loved him.
“I was wounded, beyond expression, to find that Gogok could be as cruel to me as he had been to the troglodytes. For he had agreed to allow me to carry the catalyst to my father, so that he might use material energy to build a photon body for himself, and to enable our race to survive after the cataclysm.
“Gogok, I thought, had made our sham battle realistic beyond necessity. I had been forced to expend nearly all my vital energy to protect my very life. Now, when I begged him to repair my body and restore my energy with the catalyst, he tricked me again.
“He made apparent preparations to give me the energy, and seemed to be willing enough for me to take the secret to my father. I submitted to his power, and found myself trapped in that gray block from which you released me.
“It was a prison which not only confined my movements, but prevented my absorbing energy from any source. To make my restraint doubly secure, he forced the enslaved troglodytes to hew this vault in the cavern wall and seal it with that great metal door.
“With that, my active part was ended; I have been but a grief-stricken watcher. The gray block damped out nearly all frequencies of energy vibration. For a long time my senses were blurred and dull. But, after a slow and laborious rearrangement of the quanta in my body, I was able to perceive, very keenly, events over all this planet and beyond it.
“I watched Gogok’s return to the surface world. He found that my father, ignoring caution in this extremity of peril, had inaugurated experiments of his own to find the catalytic control for material energy. Gogok was alarmed lest my father succeed and equal his own power.
“With cunning lies about the tremendous danger of the process, he infuriated the people against my father. Despite the fact that he was toiling to save their lives and the life of the race, the mobs attacked his laboratory and sought to destroy him. He was able to defend the laboratory until the danger point was passed, and successful results enabled him to promise life to the people.
“WHEN the mobs failed him, Gogok conceived another plan. He told my father that I had been attacked and overcome by the material energy weapons of the troglodytes, that I was helpless and in need of aid—as indeed I was. He thus induced my father to accompany him on a rescue expedition into the caverns; and, in a narrow place, turned upon him in sudden, cowardly attack, and destroyed him with the aid of the secret catalyst.
“My father’s death left Gogok the undisputed master of the planet. But, for a time, he dared not remain upon it. The approaching Sun was now near, the planet already scorching from its rays and cracking from tidal strains. Alarmed, Gogok fled far away into space, until the cataclysm should be ended.
“The celestial events took place as my father had foreseen. The two suns, red, ancient dwarf and hot-white, young giant, swept near together, each deflected from its straight path by the other’s gravitational pull.
“Each was torn by terrific tidal forces. Tremendous tides were raised upon the less-dense surface of the giant, and finally dragged out into the long spiral arm of gaseous matter which later separated into the condensations which formed your planet and the others of this system.
“This planet, meantime, suffered all that my father had predicted. It was flung toward the flaming, tide-racked giant. The mountains upon one face were fused; the surface was riven, shattered, battered with meteoric hail. Then it was hurled away again, out of the gravitational net, and, at last, torn from its departing mother sun and left to freeze forever in this remote and lonely orbit about the second star.
“The heat and the meteors destroyed the last surface city, where I was born; but a few of my kind survived in deep excavations. Many of the troglodytes died as their caverns crumbled to tidal strains, but their greatest metropolis, here, escaped.
“As if stimulated by disaster, the survivors made desperate efforts to renew their grasp on life. The last members of my race joined the troglodytes, and the two peoples made a common cause against cold and darkness and death. They found a new reservoir of radioactive elements in the meteoric matter that had fallen upon the planet. Again they sought, with the promise of success, the lost secret of material energy.
“But when all danger was past, Gogok, the fugitive, returned, to resume his lordship of the planet. He established his dwelling upon the surface, in that guarded place which you were seeking so unwisely to enter, when I first reached you. He reduced the two races to abject slavery.
“He seemed to rejoice in the degradation of his subjects, through fear, perhaps, of any independence or originality that might threaten his own absolute dominion. He allowed life to exist only in direct service to his vanity and his power lust. He killed a living world, to fashion a monument to his selfish egoism.”
THE opalescent sphere ceased its story. It lay quiet for a time, in the utter darkness of the great cave. The small, flawed green cube quivered beside it, as Ivec Andrel sensed again the immemorial antiquity of the dust-shrouded ruins where the troglodytes had dwelt, and felt the dreadful loneliness of this buried metal vault that had been the sealed prison of Lakne, the unfortunate daughter of Sardoc, the scientist, since before the Earth was born.
Keenly, he perceived the old weariness, like an illness, in the sphere, the heartbreaking regret that had been agelong torture, the agonizing tension of an ancient conflict of passionate love and bitter hatred that had never been resolved.
“And the ages have gone,” Lakne resumed at last. “I have lain here, tortured by thirst for the energy that is the food of this body, wearied to desperation by the agony of restraint. Aeon after aeon, I have watched events without, hoping for release.
“I saw Gogok crush the people of this planet into mindless automata. I watched them slave to build the dead and empty glory of his dwelling place, and then to tend it. I saw that Gogok’s fear-born selfishness had slain this world.
“When hope died here, I looked to the other planets for aid. But the nearest—which you call Pluto—cooled so swiftly that its life never emerged from its seas. A promising life form evolved upon Triton, single moon of Neptune—so swiftly that Gogok became alarmed by its advance, and went there to destroy it.
“Again Gogok obliterated a race of winged, metallic beings—splendid, vivid-colored things, whose vital energies were radioactive, and who could fly through interplanetary space—that had conquered all the moons of Saturn.
“Once more he destroyed the old fifth planet, the one within Jupiter’s orbit—shattering it into the myriad fragments you call the asteroids—when the electrostatic relation between the crystals of the cooling elements in its interior became the basis of a planetary intelligence.
“It is only recently that he visited Mars, to blot out the desert dwellers there, when their long struggle to conserve the dwindling water and atmosphere of their aging planet promised to develop minds sufficiently keen to grapple with the problem of material energy.
“Upon the same occasion he examined the life of your planet, but found that no animal had evolved sufficiently to leave the ocean. The Trilobites, then the dominant form, seemed unworthy of extermination.
