by C. L. Moore
“Don’t do it. For God’s sake, you don’t know!”
“Know what?”
The man glanced furtively round the room and licked his lips uncertainly. A curious play of conflicting emotions flickered across his face.
“Dangerous—” he mumbled. “Better leave well enough alone. We found that out.”
“What happened?”
The Earthman stretched out a shaking hand for the segir bottle and poured a brimming glass. He drained it before he spoke, and the incoherence of his speech may have been due to the glasses that had preceded it.
“We went up toward the polar mountains, where he said. Weeks ... it was cold. The nights get dark up there ... dark. Went into the cave that goes through the mountain—a long way ... Then our lights went out—full-charged batteries in new super-Tomlinson tubes, but they went out like candles, and in the dark—in the dark the white thing came ...”
A shudder went over him strongly. He reached out shaking hands for the segir bottle, and poured another glass, the rim clicking against his teeth as he drank. Then he set down the glass hard and said violently,
“That’s all. We left. Don’t remember a thing about getting out—or much more than starving and freezing in the saltlands for a long time. Our supplies ran low—hadn’t been for him”—nodding across the table—“we’d both have died. Don’t know how we did get out finally—but we’re out, understand? Out! Nothing could hire us to go back—we’ve seen enough. There’s something about it that—that makes your head ache—we saw ... never mind. But—”
He beckoned Smith closer and sank his voice to a whisper. His eyes rolled fearfully.
“It’s after us. Don’t ask me what ... I don’t know. But—feel it in the dark, watching—watching in the dark ...”
The voice sank to a mumble and he reached again for the segir bottle.
“It’s here now—waiting—if the lights go out—watching—mustn’t let the lights go out—more segir ...”
The bottle clinked on the glass-rim, the voice trailed away into drunken mutterings.
Smith pushed back his chair and nodded to Yarol. The two at the table did not seem to notice their departure. The drylander was clutching the segir bottle in turn and pouring out red liquid without watching the glass—an apprehensive one-eyed stare turned across his shoulder.
Smith laid a hand on his companion’s shoulder and drew him across the room toward the bar. Yarol scowled at the approaching bartender and suggested,
“Suppose we get an advance for drinks, anyhow.”
“Are we taking it?”
“Well, what d’you think?”
“It’s dangerous. You know, there’s something worse than whisky wrong with those two. Did you notice the Earthman’s eyes?”
“Whites showed all around,” nodded Yarol. “I’ve seen madmen look like that.”
“I thought of that, too. He was drunk, of course, and probably wouldn’t be so wild-sounding, sober—but from the looks of him he’ll never be sober again till he dies. No use trying to find out anything more from him. And the other—well, did you ever try to find out anything from a drylander? Even a sober one?”
Yarol lifted expressive shoulders. “I know. If we go into this, we go blind. Never dig any more out of those drunks. But something certainly scared them.”
“And yet,” said Smith, “I’d like to know more about his. Dust of the gods—and all that. Interesting. Just what does he want with this dust, anyhow?”
“Did you believe that yarn?”
“Don’t know—I’ve come across some pretty funny things here and there. He does act half-cracked, of course, but—well, those fellows back there certainly found something out of the ordinary, and they didn’t go all the way at that.”
“Well, if he’ll buy us a drink I say let’s take the job,” said Yarol. “I’d as soon be scared to death later as die of thirst now. What do you say?”
“Good enough,” shrugged Smith. “I’m thirsty, too.”
The little man looked up hopefully as they reseated themselves at the table.
“If we can come to terms,” said Smith, “we’ll take it. And if you can give us some idea of what we’re looking for, and why.”
“The dust of Pharol,” said the husky voice impatiently. “I told you that.”
“What d’you want with it?”
“We’re risking our necks for it, aren’t we?”
Again the bright, small eyes bored into the Earthman’s. The husky voice fell lower, to the very echo of a whisper, and he said, secretly,
“I’ll tell you, then. After all, why not? You don’t know how to use it—it’s of no value to anyone but me. Listen, then—I told you that the Three incarnated themselves into a material form to use as a door through which they could reach humanity. They had to do it, but it was a door that opened both ways—through it, if one dared, man could reach the Three. No one dared in those days—the power beyond was too terrible. It would have been like walking straight through a gateway into hell. But time has passed since then. The gods have drawn away from humanity into farther realms. The terror that was Pharol is only an echo in a forgetful world. The spirit of the god has gone—but not wholly. While any remnant of that shape which was once incarnate Pharol exists, Pharol can be reached. For the man who could lay hands on that dust, knowing the requisite rites and formulae, all knowledge, all power would lie open like a book. To enslave a god!”
The raw whisper rasped to a crescendo; fanatic lights flared in the small, bright eyes. He had forgotten them entirely—his piercing stare fixed on some shining future, and his hands on the table clenched into white-knuckled fists.
Smith and Yarol exchanged dubious glances. Obviously the man was mad ...
“Fifty thousand dollars to your account in any bank you choose,” the hoarse voice, eminently sane, broke in abruptly upon their dubiety. “All expenses, of course, will be paid. I’ll give you charts and tell you all I know about how to get there. When can you start?”
Smith grinned. Touched the man might be, but just then Smith would have stormed the gates of hell, at any madman’s request, for fifty thousand Earth dollars.
“Right now,” he said laconically. “Let’s go.”
-
II
Northward over the great curve of Mars, red slag and red dust and the reddish, lowlying dryland vegetation gave way to the saltlands around the Pole. Scrub grows there, and sparse, coarse grass, and the snow that falls by night lies all the cold, thin day among the tough grass-roots and in the hillocks of the dry salt soil.
“Of all the God-forsaken countries,” said Northwest Smith, looking down from his pilot seat at the gray lands slipping past under the speed of their plane, “this must be the worst. I’d sooner live on Luna or one of the asteroids.”
Yarol tilted the segir bottle to his lips and evoked an eloquent gurgle from its depths.
“Five days of flying over this scenery would give anyone the jitters,” he pronounced. “I’d never have thought I’d be glad to see a mountain range as ugly as that, but it looks like Paradise now,” and he nodded toward the black, jagged slopes of the polar mountains that marked their journey’s end so far as flying was concerned; for despite their great antiquity the peaks were jagged and rough as mountains new-wrenched from a heaving world.
Smith brought the plane down at the foot of the rising black slopes. There was a triangular gap there with a streak of white down its side, a landmark he had been watching for, and the plane slid quietly into the shelter to lie protected under the shelving rock. From here progress must be made afoot and painfully through the mountains. There was no landing-place any nearer their goal than this. Yet in measure of distance they had not far to go.
The two climbed stiffly out. Smith stretched his long legs and sniffed the air. It was bitterly cold, and tinged with that nameless, dry salt smell of eon-dead seas which is encountered nowhere in the known universe save in the northern saltlands of Mars. He faced the
mountains doubtfully. From their beginnings here, he knew, they rolled away, jagged and black and deadly, to the very Pole. Snow lay thickly upon them in the brief Martian winter, unmarked by any track until it melted for the canals, carving deeper runnels into the already jig-sawed peaks.
Once in the very long-past days, so the little whispering fanatic had said, Mars was a green world. Seas had spread here, lapping the feet of gentler mountains, and in the slopes of those hills a mighty city once lay—a nameless city, so far as the present generations of man remembered, and a nameless star shone down upon it from a spot in the heavens now empty—the Lost Planet, shining on a lost city. The dwellers there must have seen the catastrophe which blasted that sister planet from the face of the sky. And if the little man were right, the gods of that Lost Planet had been saved from the wreckage and spirited across the void to a dwelling-place in this greatly honored city of the mountains that is not even a memory today.
And time passed, so the story went. The city aged—the gods aged—the planet aged. At last, in some terrible catastrophe, the planet heaved under the city’s foundations, the mountains shook it into ruins and folded themselves into new and dreadful shapes. The seas receded, the fertile soil sloughed away from the rocks and time swallowed up the very memory of that city which once had been the dwelling-place of gods—which was still, so the hoarse whisper had told them, the dwelling-place of gods.
“Must have been right around here somewhere,” said Smith, “that those two found the cave.”
“Out around the slope to the left,” agreed Yarol. “Let’s go.” He squinted up at the feeble sun. “Not very long past dawn. We ought to be back again by dark if things go right.”
They left the ship in its shelter and struck out across the salt drylands, the harsh scrub brushing about their knees and their breath clouding the thin air as they advanced. The slope curved away to the left, rising in rapid ascent to black peaks that were unscalable and forbidding. The only hope of penetrating that wall lay in finding the cavern that their predecessors had fled ... and in that cavern—Smith loosened the heat-gun in its holster at his side.
They had plodded for fifteen minutes through the scrub, dry snow rising under their feet and the harsh salt air frosting their breath, before the mouth of the cave they were hunting appeared darkly under the overhanging rock they had been told of.
The two peered in doubtfully. That jagged floor might never have known the tread of human feet, so far as one might know by the look of it. Powdered snow lay undisturbed in the deep crannies, and daylight did not penetrate very far into the forbidding dark beyond. Smith drew his gun, took a deep breath and plunged into the blackness and the cold, with Yarol at his heels.
It was like leaving everything human and alive for some frosty limbo that had never known life. The cold struck sharply through their leather garments. They took out their Tomlinson tubes before they had gone more than twenty paces, and the twin beams illumined a scene of utter desolation, more dead than death, for it seemed never to have known life.
For perhaps fifteen minutes they stumbled through the cold dark. Smith kept his beam focused on the floor beneath them; Yarol’s roved the walls and pierced the blackness ahead. Rough walls and ragged ceiling and teeth of broken stone projecting from the floor to slash at their boots—no sound but their footsteps, nothing but the dark and the frost and the silence. Then Yarol said, “It’s foggy in here,” and something clouded the clear beams of the lights for an instant; then darkness folded round them as suddenly and completely as the folds of a cloak.
Smith stopped dead-still, tense and listening. No sound. He felt the lens of his light-tube and knew that it still burned—it was warm, and the faint vibration under the glass told him that the tubes still functioned. But something intangible and strange blotted it out at the source ... a thick, stifling blackness that seemed to muffle their senses. It was like a bandage over the eyes—Smith, holding the burning light-lens to his eyes, could not detect even its outline in that all-cloaking dark.
For perhaps five minutes that dead blackness held them. Vaguely they knew what to expect, but when it came, the shock of it took their breath away. There was no sound, but quite suddenly around a bend of the cavern came a figure of utter whiteness, seen at first fragmentarily through a screen of rock-toothed jags, then floating full into view against the background of the dark. Smith thought he had never seen whiteness before until his incredulous eyes beheld this creature—if creature it could be. Somehow he thought it must be partly below the level of the floor along which it moved; for though in that blind black he had no way of gauging elevation, it seemed to him that the apparition, moving with an effortless glide, advanced unopposed through the solid rock of the floor. And it was whiter than anything living or dead had ever been before—so white that it sickened him, somehow, and the flesh crept along his spine. Like a cut-out figure of paper, it blazed against the flat black beyond. The dark did not affect it, no shadows lay upon its surface; in two arbitrary dimensions only, blind white superimposed upon blind dark, it floated toward them. And it was tall, and somehow man-formed, but of no shape that words could describe.
Smith heard Yarol catch his breath in a gasp behind him. He heard no other sound, though the whiteness floated swiftly forward through the rocky floor. He was sure of that now—a part of it extended farther down than his feet, and they were planted upon solid rock. And though his skin crawled with unreasoning terror, and the hair on his neck prickled with the weird, impossible approach of the impossible thing, he kept his head enough to see that it was apparently solid, yet somehow milkily translucent; that it had form and depth, though no shadows of that darkness lay upon it; that from where no face should have been a blind, eyeless visage fronted him impassively. It was very close now, and though the extremities of it trailed below the floor line, its height lifted far above his head.
And a nameless, blind force beat out from it and assailed him, a force that somehow seemed to be driving him into unnamable things—an urge to madness, beating at his brain with the reasonless buffeting of insanity, but a wilder, more incomprehensible insanity than the sane mind could understand.
Something frantic within him clamored for instant, headlong flight—he heard Yarol’s breathing panicky behind him and knew that he too wavered on the verge of bolting—but something insistent at the roots of his brain held him firm before the whiteness bearing down in its aura of madness—something that denied the peril, that hinted at solution ...
Scarcely realizing that he had moved, he found the heat-gun in his hand, and on a sudden impulse jerked his arm up and sent a long, blue-hot streamer of flame straight at the advancing apparition. For the briefest of instants the blue dazzle flashed a light-blade through the dark. It struck the floating whiteness full—vanished—Smith heard a faint crackle of sparks on the invisible floor beyond and knew that it had passed through the creature without meeting resistance. And in that flashing second while the blue gaze split the thickness of the dark he saw it shine luridly upon a splinter of rock in its path, but not upon the white figure. No blaze of blueness affected the deathly pallor of it—he had a sudden conviction that though a galaxy of colored lights were played upon it no faintest hint of color could ever tinge it with any of man’s hues. Fighting the waves of madness that buffeted at his brain, he realized painfully that it must be beyond the reach of men—and therefore—
He laughed unsteadily and holstered his gun.
“Come on,” he yelled to Yarol, reaching out blindly to grasp his comrade’s arm, and—suppressing a tingle of terror—plunged straight through that towering horror.
There was an instant of blaze and blinding whiteness, a moment of turmoil while dizziness swirled round him and the floor rocked under his feet and a maelstrom of mad impulses battered through his brain; then everything was black again and he was plunging recklessly ahead through the dark, dragging a limply acquiescent Yarol behind him.
After a while of stumbling progress
, punctuated with falls, while the white horror dropped away behind them, not following, though the muffling dark still sealed their eyes—the almost forgotten light in Smith’s hand suddenly blazed forth again. In its light he faced Yarol, blinking at the abrupt illumination. The Venusian’s face was a mask of question, his black eyes bright with inquiry.
“What happened? What was it? How did you—how could we—”
“It can’t have been real,” said Smith with a shaky grin. “I mean, not material in the sense that we know. Looked awful enough, but—well, there were too many things about it that didn’t hitch up. Notice how it seemed to trail through the solid floor? And neither light nor dark affected it—it had no shadows, even in that blackness, and the flash of my gun didn’t even give it a blue tinge. Then I remembered what that little fellow had told us about his three gods: that, though they had real existence, it was on such a widely different plane from ours that they couldn’t touch us except by providing themselves with a material body. I think this thing was like that also: visible, but too other-dimensional to reach us except through sight. And when I saw that the floor didn’t offer any resistance to it I thought that maybe, conversely, it wouldn’t affect us either. And it didn’t. We’re through.”
Yarol drew a deep breath.
“The master-mind,” he gibed affectionately. “Wonder if anyone else ever figured that out, or are we the first to get through?”
“Don’t know. Don’t get the idea it was just a scarecrow, though. I think we moved none too soon. A minute or two longer and—and—I felt as if someone were stirring my brains with a stick. Nothing seemed—right. I think I know now what was wrong with those other two—they waited too long before they ran. Good thing we moved when we did.”
“But what about that darkness?”
“I suppose we’ll never really know. Must have had some relation to the other—the white thing, possibly some force or element out of that other dimension; because just as dark couldn’t touch the whiteness of that thing, so light had no effect on the dark. I got the impression, somehow, that the dark space is a fixed area there, as if a section out of the other world has been set down in the cave, for the white thing to roam about it—a barrier of blackness across the way. And I don’t suppose that it can move outside the darkness. But I may be wrong—let’s go!”
