Collected short fiction, p.290
Collected Short Fiction, page 290
“Roger!” she whispered. “You have come!”
Lundoon walked softly past them, into the control room of the ship that now could take them safely back. His practiced mind was searching, already, for the fitting lead for his story that would scoop the world.
Dreadful Sleep
A thrilling tale, a romantic and tragic tale, a weird-scientific story of the awakening of the fearsome beings that lay in dreadful slumber under the antarctic tee, and the strange doom that befell the world
The Story Thus Far
CAPTAIN RON DUNBAR, the polar explorer who tells the story, at first refused to pilot Doctor Aston Harding’s expedition to Antarctica in 1960—the fateful year of the weirdly terrible Time Fault.
Maru-Mora came to him, and warned him not to go. She was a strange prehuman being, with the bust of an elfin queen, golden-furred and scarlet-crested, who dwelt somehow in a pylon of purple crystal on a mountain beyond the pole.
She showed him the Tharshoon—dread invaders from Saturn, frozen beneath the ice. She had cast them into a space-time stasis, ages past, as they destroyed her people. She is afraid they will be waked, now, to resume their conquest of the planet.
Believing the warning merely a dream, however, Ron went ahead—for the sake of Merry Bell.
Bell had invented the atomic battery with which they planned to thaw the ice. Another discovery of his, a deadly bacteriophage, stolen by his hunchbacked assistant, Mawson Kroll, and sold to the Asiatics, had killed a million Americans in the last war. Bell was exonerated, Kroll convicted and executed. But Bell, still guilt-burdened, wished to make atonement—by giving humanity a new continent.
They landed in Antarctica. Lured out of camp by the alien beauty of Maru-Mora—for, after all, she was no dream—Bell was found dead on the ice.
Tall gaunt Harding had seemed strangely changed. And now his wife discovered that he was not Harding—but Mawson Kroll! For Kroll’s brain had been transplanted to Harding’s body by the skill of an Asiatic surgeon. It was the innocent Harding that had died, while Kroll’s mad brain lived on to plot new crimes.
For Kroll plans to exterminate mankind. His spineless but brilliant henchman, Veering, has completed Bell’s apparatus and learned the secret of Maru-Mora’s stasis ray. He plans to thaw the ice and wake the sleeping Tharshoon.
Fighting them, Ron is joined by Karalee, Maru-Mora’s beautiful ward, whom he had seen and loved in the dream. She is really Carol Lee, he learns, daughter of the famous “Flying Lees,” Americans who were lost on a polar flight. She promises Ron to go back with him—if they win.
For Maru-Mora has sent the ancient treasure of her lost people, offering it to Kroll if he will give up his scheme and depart.
But Kroll refuses.
And he turns upon Ron and Carol the stasis ray, congealing them to the hardness of adamantine stone.
The story continues:
14. The World Below the Ice
HOW long my mental being was lost in that black and featureless abyss, outside of Time itself, I have no certain way of knowing. But consciousness, if it failed at all, recovered long before my body did.
For timeless eternities, it seemed, I dwelt alone in darkness. I had no awareness of my body, no fatigue or pain. Yet my mind became clear. I knew that Carol and I were petrified, at the mercy of Mawson Kroll. And the hatred of him lived and grew in me.
Silent ages passed: eons of flat darkness. I lived all my life again. Boyhood, when I was first filled with the desire to fly. College years, when I was absorbed in the modern science of exploration. My polar expeditions, and the small unsatisfying fame they won. The first strange dream of Maru-Mora, in which I saw Carol, and loved her, and knew that I had glimpsed the supreme goal of my life. And all the weird grim tragedy that had met us at the pole, up to the very flash of the stasis ray.
The body that I could not feel was eternal crystal now, I knew, more than diamond-hard, perdurable. Permanent as Time, it could endure unchanged for a million years.
I wondered if I might live and be awake for ever, and never able to move, even until this drifting continent sank beneath the sea again, and I was covered with the ocean’s ooze, and the mud hardened to stone, and the stone crumpled upward again to form a new mountainous land, and the mountains eroded and washed back into the sea again; so that in the end I should be left uncovered and alone, a luckless immortal, lying on some dead frozen desert when the sun went out.
At first I had had no physical awareness. But at last, as the black ages fled, sensation began to return. Still my body was rigidly motionless. But faintly to my deadened ears came some whisper of sound—it might be the crashing of some volcanic eruption, I thought, after a million years. And dimly, then, my fixed eyes began to perceive a glow of light.
I waited, and still millennia crept away. Desperately I strained to move, to hear, to see—to wake, even if it should be alone, on a dead world; even if Carol should be standing still beside me, a statue yet locked in that eternal sleep; or even if she had been waked, by Kroll, and her body dust a million years. Desperately, I wanted to know.
Still my body was rigid as iron. But the gray mist of light grew steadily stronger before my eyes. Vague shapes in it slowly took form. And at last I was able to see what lay straight ahead, though I could not turn my eyes.
At first I thought that indeed I must have survived to some far-off, fantastic future age. For my adamantine body, its tense pose unchanged since Kroll had congealed it with the stasis ray, stood upon the barren summit of an unfamiliar lofty mountain.
Before me, in the expanding cone of vision, a dark slope tumbled sharply down. Beyond and below, for scores of miles where the glaciers had lain a mile deep, spread a vast strange valley.
On a gentle hill at the foot of that wild slope stood—the white city, a city like a garden of the sea. Its low walls were milky mother-of-pearl. Its towered gates were graceful with the curves of racing waves. Its lofty, wide-set buildings were great shells of opalescent white, lifting spiral cones and fluted domes from paves like shining sand. Silver bridges arched the flowing curves of a thousand wide and mirror-like canals.
But it was a dead city. Nothing moved on pavement or bridge or canal. Gaps loomed in the nacrous wall. Fallen bridges clogged the canals. Exquisite opalescent buildings were shattered, crushed—as if by millennia of abandonment.
Its dead white beauty set up an ache of grief in my heart. Trying in vain to look away from its silent desolation, I discovered, beyond—the other city.
It lay beyond the area of my clear vision, so that I had not observed it at first, and now could not see it clearly. But it was a low, dark city, built, it seemed, all of squat dome-shaped mounds of red-black earth. It was hideous, strangely repulsive, as the other had been beautiful.
And it, too, was dead—a necropolis of evil.
Beside it, and almost beyond the cone of my vision, loomed something red, tremendous, glittering darkly. I strained to distinguish its outline with the corner of my eye. And appalling recognition came to me abruptly.
It was the ship of the Tharshoon—the same colossal machine that Maru-Mora had shown me in the dream, locked beneath the ice! And that squat red city was the city of the monstrous invaders from Saturn. And now the ice was gone, ship and city free again.
Dimly, I thought, at the very edge of my vision, I saw black shapes moving about that cyclopean ship.
Were all the hideous invaders, then, awake?
I could not be sure.
The first city, it came to me suddenly—that canal-woven wonder of shell-curved fairy white—had been a metropolis of Maru-Mora’s ancient race. Its exquisite beauty was dead because the invaders had ruthlessly slain it.
This was no world of the distant future, below me, but the world of the age-dead past. The atomic fire of that hot blue orb had thawed the ice as I slept—for weeks, perhaps, or even months; but surely not for years or geologic ages—and the water had flowed down through the eastern pass, uncovering this ice-locked valley of the forgotten past.
WHERE, I wondered, was Mawson Kroll? How far had he gone with his monstrous plan to extirpate mankind? And what of Carol, whom the congealing ray had caught here at my side?
My ears, then, caught the thunder of aero motors. Still my body could not move. But at last my own plane came into the fixed cone of my vision: the Austral Queen. It taxied to the end of a tiny level shelf that broke that rugged slope, and turned, ready for a take-off.
Aiding the motors were two monstrous things: headless swollen bodies, black-scaled and belted with purple. They flew like balloons, tugging at the plane with mighty triple tentacles.
Two!
So I knew that Kroll had waked another besides the Watcher—probably all the invading horde.
It was young Veering who stepped out of the plane as the motors died. Mawson Kroll stalked down to meet him—gaunt and powerful. He stood on a ledge, giving orders, while Veering and the monsters loaded the plane.
They first put aboard the dismantled tower and Bell’s atomic battery. Then one of the creatures came flying, carrying in its tentacles the great golden chest that Carol had brought: Maru-Mora’s treasure.
Kroll gesticulated. The monster laid down the chest, and came sailing back, directly at me, its tentacles dangling like immense black pythons. It settled above me. A black limb whipped in front of my face. I thought it had come for me. But when I could see it fully again, returning to the plane, it was carrying Carol.
Caught by the stasis ray, her limbs tense with dread, and horror a stark mask on her lovely face, the girl had been instantly congealed. She was a statue of consuming dread, executed by some master of terror.
Moving swiftly to Kroll’s harsh-toned command, Veering opened the ancient treasure-chest. Dark tentacles dropped the petrified girl into it: another jewel amid the matchless gems of Maru-Mora.
Veering closed and locked the chest. Living black cables swung it aboard the plane. Veering clambered after it, as if to secure his cargo, and Kroll came stalking toward me up the barren slope, tall and haggard, almost gigantic in his stolen body. He still wore whites and pith helmet, although the sky had turned dark and cold since the atomic ray had stopped. I could see his eyes, hideous in my old friend’s long ruddy face—one sharply contracted, its dark iris strangely flecked with evil red; the other dilated to a black well of horror.
I felt his hand on my rigid shoulder. I heard his voice—the familiar voice that had belonged to genial Doctor Harding. It was heavy with a mocking triumph.
“Well, Captain Dunbar, we’re going to say good-bye. You look almost as if you could hear me, Captain. As if you could speak. But you won’t move or speak, Dunbar, till the end of Time.”
Chuckling thickly, he drummed his knuckles on my iron-hard shoulder.
“We’re going north, to take things over. Your verminous breed is finished, Dunbar. I’m going to give the Saturnians a chance. And if the stasis ever wears off, you’ll wake in a different sort of world.
“Because we’re leaving you for a sort of statue, Captain. A memorial of error.” His fingers ceased their idle tapping on my shoulder. “A monument to the species that failed.”
He turned and strolled back down the naked slope.
The sky was filled with a dim gray twilight. Faintly, low above the northern horizon, I could see white Spica in the Virgin. A wind was rising, though my rigid body could not feel its cold. Clouds were drifting from behind me, and snow began to fall over the white fantastic city in the valley below.
Again I fought desperately to move my petrified body. But I might as well have set my will against the granite beneath my feet.
Meantime, at last, Veering started the motors again, let them thunder, one by one, warming up. Kroll turned to wave me a mocking farewell—though he must not have realized my awareness of the gesture—and climbed aboard.
It would have been difficult for the laden ship to take off safely from that snow-swept shelf, alone. But the two black monsters wrapped their tentacles about the wings, flew forward with it, helped to lift it. And it soared away over the valley, toward that titanic dark-red ship.
Thickening storm-clouds sometimes hid the ship from Saturn. And it was at the very faint verge of my vision. But dimly, at last, I saw the Austral Queen drop like a white mote upon one of the vast flat vanes that extended from its hull. A port opened, closed again, and the plane was gone.
Then long rods projecting all about the middle of that vast red hull began to glow with an intense blue-violet incandescence. Tongues of blinding flame flared from them, joined, until the ship was belted with purple fire.
Slowly, then, it lifted, with a grotesque seeming of heavy awkwardness—oddly resembling, in flight, one of its monstrous crew. Swiftly gaining speed, it drifted northward above the abandoned red mound city, and out of my sight.
Only after it had gone did its sound come to me: a monstrous reverberation, crashing, roaring, hissing, that rolled up the mountain like a crushing wave, thunderous and appalling.
That concussion passed me and died. I was left alone, standing petrified on that stark granite peak in the frigid polar world. The brief twilight was gone, those two dead cities lost again in the antarctic night. The clouds thickened. Snow fell steadily, blanketing the dark slope below. The wind made an eery whistling about my rigid body.
For still I could not move.
15. The Dreadful Calm
A SLOW fear crept upon me, as I stood there with the unfelt blizzard whipping the snow about my ankles: a dread more terrible than death. For a time I had hoped that I was somehow slipping from the stasis. Now I was afraid that I would exist for eternities, conscious, yet unable to move, unable even to die.
That huge red ship had been gone a long time—hours or days, I do not know—when the dark scene before me flickered again with the pale magenta of the stasis ray. And again oblivion fell upon me: a second shattering blow that blotted out awareness.
Ages of timeless blackness dragged again. Then sensation, as it had before, came slowly back. No sound, this time, reached my ears. But a gray mist came into my eyes, and imperceptibly increased, and at last I could see again.
It was a world queerly changed and still, in which I woke that second time. The wind had ceased to blow. The snow no longer fell. The ragged, angry storm clouds loomed against the night, dark and permanent as mountains. And a terrible silence filled the world. There was no faintest whisper of sound.
A dread suspicion struck me suddenly, with a cold impact of horror. I remembered Kroll’s reckless boast, spoken when I stood like a statue before him. He must have frozen all the world, I thought, with the stasis ray.
The life of all the planet congealed, stopped! All mankind cast into rigid sleep, defenseless—helpless prey to Kroll and his fearful allies! Dread of that vision numbed me, more piercing than the congealing ray itself.
For a second interminable space I stood there, frozen in that silent frozen world. No single object before me on the surface of the planet moved or changed in any way. I stared at a picture of eternal death.
But the brief twilight came and vanished. Pale Spica crossed a rift in the frozen clouds, and passed it again. I knew that the earth still turned.
Bitterly, I thought it might be my fate to stand there, as the Watcher had stood, rooted in the snow on the mountain, and count those same stars crossing that same rift, a million times, or a million million.
But a prickling numbness was suddenly in my left hand. It spread slowly up my arm. I discovered—with amazed, incredulous delight—that I could wiggle my fingers.
Somehow, I was recovering. I could close die fingers. I could move the whole hand, from die wrist. That painful stinging crept over all my body. I gasped a deep breath, took a reeling step. I could walk again!
I had come alive, in a dead world.
For a little time I stood there on the snow, incredulous, bewildered. For nothing else had moved. The terrible calm still ruled. In all the white world about me, there was no faintest sound or slightest motion.
It was only I that lived.
Wonderingly, still dazed and numb, I looked down at the left hand that had first come to life, and started to see a pale lambent gleam—the luminescence of the little trinket that Carol had given me.
Then, with a sudden aching in my throat, I understood: it was that jewel which had restored me!
The stasis ray, I knew, had been Maru-Mora’s weapon. Naturally she had prepared a shield against it. And knowing that Kroll had found the secret of the ray, she had given the shield to Carol, to guard her on her mission.
Carol had given it to me, made me promise to wear it in token of our life together, without revealing its wondrous property. Then it was because of me, I thought bitterly, that she was now petrified, amid the loot of Mawson Kroll.
Queer little brick of radiant silver, inscribed in scarlet with the Seeker’s spiral emblem. Examining it, I slipped it off my wrist—and at once a piercing numbness warned me that without its precious contact I should be petrified again, and for ever.
Swiftly replacing it, I discovered a little slide along its edge. Its pale light shone more brightly when I moved the knob—which must, I knew, regulate its power. It had been turned very low, I suppose to conserve its energy.
All my aching fatigue had come back in a blinding wave—for there was no rest in the timeless sleep of the stasis. Reeling, I looked about the mountain top. Kroll had left the white tent standing, and beside it lay Carol’s empty sledge. Everything else was gone.
I STAGGERED through that silent world to the tent. Its fabric, when I first touched it, was stiffer than metal, hard as a diamond sheet. At first I tugged in vain at the entrance flap. But it slowly softened in my hand—as the fabric was restored to its natural state by the radiation of the little silver plaque.
I entered. The floor was littered with rubbish and discarded clothing. Our extra furs and sleeping-bags were piled there, against a great stack of tinned supplies. I attacked a can of corned beef. It was unyielding as a block of steel, until I held it for a few moments near the shining plaque. Then I was able to open it, and eat. I drove the stasis from a sleeping-bag, in the same way, and crept gratefully into it.
