A large anthology of sci.., p.60
A Large Anthology of Science Fiction, page 60
“Most extraordinary,” all at once said the Professor, at noonday camp. He had become quite rational again. “Do you realize, Jandron, we’ve seen no traces of life in some time?”
The geologist nodded. Only too clearly he had noted just that, but he had been keeping still about it.
“That’s so, too!” chimed in Marr, enjoying the smoke that some incomprehensible turn of events was letting him have. “Not a muskrat or beaver. Not even a squirrel or bird.”
“Not so much as a gnat or black-fly!” the Professor added. Jandron suddenly realized that he would have welcomed even those.
That afternoon, Marr fell into a suddenly vile temper. He mumbled curses against the guides, the current, the portages, everything. The Professor seemed more cheerful. Vivian complained of an oppressive headache. Jandron gave her the last of the aspirin tablets; and as he gave them, took her hand in his.
“I’ll see you through, anyhow,” said he. “I don’t count, now. Nobody counts, only you!”
She gave him a long, silent look. He saw the sudden glint of tears in her eyes; felt the pressure of her hand, and knew they two had never been so near each other as in that moment under the shadow of the Unknown.
Next day—or it may have been two days later, for none of them could be quite sure about the passage of time—they came to a deserted lumber-camp. Even more than two days might have passed; because now their bacon was all gone, and only coffee, tobacco, beef-cubes and pilot-bread remained. The lack of fish and game had cut alarmingly into the duffle-bag. That day—whatever day it may have been—all four of them suffered terribly from headache of an odd, ring-shaped kind, as if something circular were being pressed down about their heads. The Professor said it was the sun that made his head ache. Vivian laid it to the wind and the gleam of the swift water, while Marr claimed it was the heat. Jandron wondered at all this, inasmuch as he plainly saw that the river had almost stopped flowing, and the day had become still and overcast.
They dragged their canoes upon a rotting stage of fir-poles and explored the lumber-camp; a mournful place set back in an old “slash,” now partly overgrown with scrub poplar, maple and birch. The log buildings, covered with tar-paper partly torn from the pole roofs, were of the usual North Country type. Obviously the place had not been used for years. Even the landing-stage where once logs had been rolled into the stream had sagged to decay.
“I don’t quite get the idea of this,” Marr exclaimed. “Where did the logs go to? Downstream, of course. But that would take ’em to Hudson Bay, and there’s no market for spruce timber or pulp-wood at Hudson Bay.” He pointed down the current.
“You’re entirely mistaken,” put in the Professor. “Any fool could see this river runs the other way. A log throw in here would go down toward the St. Lawrence!”
“But then,” asked the girl, “why can’t we drift back to civilization?” The Professor retorted:
“Just what we have been doing, all along! Extraordinary, that I have to explain the obvious!” He walked away in a huff.
“I don’t know but he’s right, at that,” half admitted the journalist. “I’ve been thinking almost the same thing, myself, the past day or two—that is, ever since the sun shifted.”
“What do you mean, shifted?” from Jandron.
“You haven’t noticed it?”
“But there’s been no sun at all, for at least two days!”
“Hanged if I’ll waste time arguing with a lunatic!” Marr growled. He vouchsafed no explanation of what he meant by the sun’s having “shifted,” but wandered off, grumbling.
“What are we going to do?” the girl appealed to Jandron. The sight of her solemn, frightened eyes, of her palm-outward hands and (at last) her very feminine fear, constricted Jandron’s heart.
“We’re going through, you and I,” he answered simply. “We’ve got to save them from themselves, you and I have.”
Their hands met again, and for a moment held. Despite the dead calm, a fir-tip at the edge of the clearing suddenly flicked aside, shrivelled as if frozen. But neither of them saw it.
The fugitives, badly spent, established themselves in the “bar-room” or sleeping-shack of the camp. They wanted to feel a roof over them again, if only a broken one. The traces of men comforted them: a couple of broken peavies, a pair of snowshoes with the thongs all gnawed off, a cracked bit of mirror, a yellowed almanac dated 1899.
Jandron called the Professor’s attention to this almanac, but the Professor thrust it aside.
“What do I want of a Canadian census-report?” he demanded, and fell to counting the bunks, over and over again. His big bulge of his forehead, that housed the massive brain of him, was oozing sweat. Marr cursed what he claimed was sunshine through the holes in the roof, though Jandron could see none; claimed the sunshine made his head ache.
“But it’s not a bad place,” he added. “We can make a blaze in that fireplace and be comfy. I don’t like that window, though.”
“What window?” asked Jandron. “Where?” Marr laughed, and ignored him. Jandron turned to Vivian, who had sunk down on the “deacon-seat” and was staring at the stove.
“Is there a window here?” he demanded.
“Don’t ask me,” she whispered. “I—I don’t know.”
With a very thriving fear in his heart, Jandron peered at her a moment. He fell to muttering:
“I’m Wallace Jandron. Wallace Jandron, 37. Ware Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’m quite sane. And I’m going to stay so. I’m going to save her! I know perfectly well what I’m doing. And I’m sane. Quite, quite sane!”
After a time of confused and purposeless wrangling, they got a fire going and made coffee. This, and cube bouillon with hardtack, helped considerably. The camp helped, too. A house, even a poor and broken one, is a wonderful barrier against a Thing from—Outside.
Presently darkness folded down. The men smoked, thankful that tobacco still held out. Vivian lay in a bunk that Jandron had piled with spruce boughs for her, and seemed to sleep. The Professor fretted like a child, over the blisters his paddle had made upon his hands. Marr laughed, now and then; though what he might be laughing at was not apparent. Suddenly he broke out:
“After all, what should It want of us?”
“Our brains, of course,” the Professor answered, sharply.
“That lets Jandron out,” the journalist mocked. “But,” added the Professor, “I can’t imagine a Thing callously destroying human beings. And yet—”
He stopped short, with surging memories of his dead wife.
“What was it,” Jandron asked, “that destroyed all those people in Valladolid, Spain, that time so many of ’em died in a few minutes after having been touched by an invisible Something that left a slight red mark on each? The newspapers were full of it.”
“Piffle!” yawned Marr.
“I tell you,” insisted Jandron, “there are forms of life as superior to us as we are to ants. We can’t see ’em. No ant ever saw a man. And did any ant ever form the least conception of a man? These Things have left thousands of traces, all over the world. If I had my reference-books—”
“Tell that to the marines!”
“Charles Fort, the greatest authority in the world on unexplained phenomena,” persisted Jandron, “gives innumerable cases of happenings that science can’t explain, in his ‘Book of the Damned.’ He claims this earth was once a No-Man’s land where all kinds of Things explored and colonized and fought for possession. And he says that now everybody’s warned off, except the Owners. I happen to remember a few sentences of his: ‘In the past, inhabitants of a host of worlds have dropped here, hopped here, wafted here, sailed, flown, motored, walked here; have come singly, have come in enormous numbers; have visited for hunting, trading, mining. They have been unable to stay here, have made colonies here, have been lost here.”
“Poor fish, to believe that!” mocked the journalist, while the Professor blinked and rubbed his bulging forehead.
“I do believe it!” insisted Jandron. “The world is covered with relics of dead civilizations, that have mysteriously vanished, leaving nothing but their temples and monuments.”
“Rubbish!”
“How about Easter Island? How about all the gigantic works there and in a thousand other places—Peru, Yucatan and so on—which certainly no primitive race ever built?”
“That’s thousands of years ago,” said Marr, “and I’m sleepy. For heaven’s sake, can it!”
“Oh, all right. But how explain things, then!”
“What the devil could one of those Things want of our brains?” suddenly put in the Professor. “After all, what?”
“Well, what do we want of lower forms of life? Sometimes food. Again, some product or other. Or just information. Maybe It is just experimenting with us, the way we poke an ant-hill. There’s always this to remember, that the human brain-tissue is the most highly-organized form of matter in this world.”
“Yes,” admitted the Professor, “but what—?”
“It might want brain-tissue for food, for experimental purposes, for lubricant—how do I know?” Jandron fancied he was still explaining things; but all at once he found himself waking up in one of the bunks. He felt terribly cold, stiff, sore. A sift of snow lay here and there on the camp floor, where it had fallen through holes in the roof.
“Vivian!” he croaked hoarsely. “Thorburn! Marr!”
Nobody answered. There was nobody to answer. Jandron crawled with immense pain out of his bunk, and blinked round with bleary eyes. All of a sudden he saw the Professor, and gulped.
The Professor was lying stiff and straight in another bunk, on his back. His waxen face made a mask of horror. The open, staring eyes, with pupils immensely dilated, sent Jandron shuddering back. A livid ring marked the forehead, that now sagged inward as if empty.
“Vivian!” croaked Jandron, staggering away from the body. He fumbled to the bunk where the girl had lain. The bunk was quite deserted.
On the stove, in which lay half-charred wood—wood smothered out as if by some noxious gas—still stood the coffee-pot. The liquid in it was frozen solid. Of Vivian and the journalist, no trace remained.
Along one of the sagging beams that supported the roof, Jandron’s horror-blasted gaze perceived a straight line of frosted prints, ring-shaped, bitten deep.
“Vivian! Vivian!”
No answer.
Shaking, sick, gray, half-blind with a horror not of this world, Jandron peered slowly around. The duffle-bag and supplies were gone. Nothing was left but that coffee-pot and the revolver at Jandron’s hip.
Jandron turned, then. A-stare, his skull feeling empty as a burst drum, he crept lamely to the door and out—out into the snow.
Snow. It came slanting down. From a gray sky it steadily filtered. The trees showed no leaf.
Birches, poplars, rock-maples all stood naked. Only the conifers drooped sickly-green. In a little shallow across the river snow lay white on thin ice.
Ice? Snow? Rapt with terror, Jandron stared. Why, then, he must have been unconscious three or four weeks? But how—?
Suddenly, all along the upper branches of trees that edged the clearing, puffs of snow flicked down. The geologist shuffled after two half-obliterated sets of footprints that wavered toward the landing.
His body was leaden. He wheezed, as he reached the river. The light, dim as it was, hurt his eyes. He blinked in a confusion that could just perceive one canoe was gone. He pressed a hand to his head, where an iron band seemed screwed up tight, tighter.
“Vivian! Marr! Halloooo!”
Not even an echo. Silence clamped the world; silence, and a cold that gnawed. Everything had gone a sinister gray.
After a certain time—though time now possessed neither reality nor duration—Jandron dragged himself back to the camp and stumbled in. Heedless of the staring corpse he crumpled down by the stove and tried to think, but his brain had been emptied of power. Everything blent to a gray blur. Snow kept slithering in through the roof.
“Well, why don’t you come and get me, Thing?” suddenly snarled Jandron. “Here I am. Damn you, come and get me!”
Voices. Suddenly he heard voices. Yes, somebody was outside, there. Singularly aggrieved, he got up and limped to the door. He squinted out into the gray; saw two figures down by the landing. With numb indifference he recognized the girl and Marr.
“Why should they bother me again?” he nebulously wondered. Can’t they go away and leave me alone?” He felt peevish irritation.
Then, a modicum of reason returning, he sensed that they were arguing. Vivian, beside a canoe freshly dragged from thin ice, was pointing; Marr was gesticulating. All at once Marr snarled, turned from her, plodded with bent back toward the camp.
“But listen!” she called, her rough-knit sweater all powdered with snow. “That’s the way!” She gestured downstream.
“I’m not going either way!” Marr retorted. “I’m going to stay right here!” He came on, bareheaded. Snow grayed his stubble of beard; but on his head it melted as it fell, as if some fever there had raised the brain-stuff to improbable temperatures. “I’m going to stay right here, all summer.” His heavy lids sagged. Puffy and evil, his lips showed a glint of teeth. “Let me alone!”
Vivian lagged after him, kicking up the ash-like snow. With indifference, Jandron watched them. Trivial human creatures!
Suddenly Marr saw him in the doorway and stopped short. He drew his gun; he aimed at Jandron.
“You get out!” he mouthed. “Why in——can’t you stay dead?”
“Put that gun down, you idiot!” Jandron managed to retort. The girl stopped and seemed trying to understand. “We can get away yet, if we all stick together.”
“Are you going to get out and leave me alone?” demanded the journalist, holding his gun steadily enough.
Jandron, wholly indifferent, watched the muzzle. Vague curiosity possessed him. Just what, he wondered, did it feel like to be shot?
Marr pulled trigger.
Snap!
The cartridge missed fire. Not even powder would burn.
Marr laughed, horribly, and shambled forward.
“Serves him right!” he mouthed. “He’d better not come back again!”
Jandron understood that Marr had seen him fall. But still he felt himself standing there, alive. He shuffled away from the door. No matter whether he was alive or dead, there was always Vivian to be saved.
The journalist came to the door, paused, looked down, grunted and passed into the camp. He shut the door. Jandron heard the rotten wooden bar of the latch drop. From within echoed a laugh, monstrous in its brutality.
Then quivering, the geologist felt a touch on his arm.
“Why did you desert us like that?” he heard Vivian’s reproach. “Why?”
He turned, hardly able to see her at all.
“Listen,” he said, thickly. “I’ll admit anything. It’s all right. But just forget it, for now. We’ve got to get out o’ here. The Professor is dead, in there, and Marr’s gone mad and barricaded himself in there. So there’s no use staying. There’s a chance for us yet. Come along!”
He took her by the arm and tried to draw her toward the river, but she held back. The hate in her face sickened him. He shook in the grip of a mighty chill.
“Go, with—you?” she demanded.
“Yes, by God!” he retorted, in a swift blaze of anger, “or I’ll kill you where you stand. It shan’t get you, anyhow!”
Swiftly piercing, a greater cold smote to his inner marrows. A long row of the cup-shaped prints had just appeared in the snow beside the camp. And from these marks wafted a faint, bluish vapor of unthinkable cold.
“What are you staring at?” the girl demanded.
“Those prints! In the snow, there—see?” He pointed a shaking finger.
“How can there be snow at this season?”
He could have wept for the pity of her, the love of her. On her red tam, her tangle of rebel hair, her sweater, the snow came steadily drifting; yet there she stood before him and prated of summer. Jandron heaved himself out of a very slough of down-dragging lassitudes. He whipped himself into action.
“Summer, winter—no matter!” he flung at her. “You’re coming along with me!” He seized her arm with the brutality of desperation that must hurt, to save. And murder, too, lay in his soul. He knew that he would strangle her with his naked hands, if need were, before he would ever leave her there, for It to work Its horrible will upon.
“You come with me,” he mouthed, “or by the Almighty—!”
Marr’s scream in the camp, whirled him toward the door. That scream rose higher, higher, even more and more piercing, just like the screams of the runaway Indian guides in what now appeared the infinitely long ago. It seemed to last hours; and always it rose, rose, as if being wrung out of a human body by some kind of agony not conceivable in this world. Higher, higher—
Then it stopped.
Jandron hurled himself against the plank door. The bar smashed; the door shivered inward.
With a cry Jandron recoiled. He covered his eyes with a hand that quivered, claw-like.
“Go away, Vivian! Don’t come here—don’t look—”
He stumbled away, babbling.
Out of the door crept something like a man. A queer, broken, bent over thing; a thing crippled, shrunken and flabby, that whined.
This thing—yes, it was still Marr—crouched down at one side, quivering, whimpering. It moved its hands as a crushed ant moves its antennae, jerkily, without significance.
All at once Jandron no longer felt afraid. He walked quite steadily to Marr, who was breathing in little gasps. From the camp issued an odor unlike anything terrestrial. A thin, grayish grease covered the sill.
Jandron caught hold of the crumpling journalist’s arm. Marr’s eyes leered, filmed, unseeing. He gave the impression of a creature whose back has been broken, whose whole essence and energy have been wrenched asunder, yet in which life somehow clings, palpitant. A creature vivisected.
