by C. L. Moore
They stood there blindly, huddled together against the immense mystery and menace of a force that could shake the earth as it passed. And while they still stood quiet a faint, thin cry from overhead electrified them all.
"The bird again!" Karen whispered, and with the nervous dig of her fingers into his, Alan realized suddenly that they had been clutching one another with tense hands.
"There it is!" cried Mike Smith suddenly. "I see it! Look!" And his gun was in his hand with magical smoothness and swiftness, lifting toward the pale winged figure that was sailing low through the thinning mists overhead.
Alan's leap was pure reflex, too swift for even his own reasoning to follow. He had no time to wonder why he did it, but he felt his muscles gather and release with coiled-spring violence, and then his hurtling shoulder struck solid flesh, and he heard Mike grunt hollowly. The next moment the ground received them both with jolting force.
Alan rolled over and got to his feet, automatically brushing himself off and frowning down at Mike, who lay motionless, his gun a foot away.
The basic difference between the two men had come clearly into sight in the moment when the bird-creature sailed across the sky. Mike's instant reaction was to kill, Alan's to prevent that slaughter.
Sir Colin hulked forward and picked up Mike's fallen gun.
Mike was up then, swiftly recovered, and poised. Karen stepped in front of his catlike rebound. "Wait," she said, putting out an arm that stopped him in midstride. "Drake's right. We don't know what the sound of a shot might bring down on us. And those bird-things—what do we know about them? They might be—property. And the owners might be even less human than they are."
"I just wanted to wing the thing," Mike snarled. "How the hell can we trail a bird? It might lead us to food if we'd got it down on the ground. That's sense."
"We mustn't make enemies before we know their strength," Karen told him.
"We've got to hang together now," Sir Colin put in, pocketing the gun. "Otherwise, we haven't a hope. We must not squabble, laddie."
Mike shrugged, his good-looking cat-features darkened with his scowl. "I won't turn my back on you again, Drake," he said evenly. "We'll settle it later. But we'll settle it."
Alan said, "Suit yourself."
-
IT WAS very cold now. But even the wind felt lifeless as night deepened over the earth. When the stars came, they were unrecognizable. The Milky Way alone looked familiar. Alan thought fantastically that its light might have left it at the very moment they had left their own world forever—to meet them here in an unimaginable rendezvous where the last dregs of time were ebbing from the world.
Moonrise roused them a little. The great pale disc came up slowly, tremendously, overpowering and desolately beautiful in the night of the world.
"Look," murmured Karen in a hushed voice. "You can see the craters and the dead seas—"
"Not close enough yet to cause quakes, I think," Sir Colin said, squinting at it. "Might be tremendous tidal waves, though, if any water's left. I wonder—"
He stopped quite suddenly, halting the others. A rift in the ground mists had drawn cloudy curtains aside, and there before them, in monstrous silhouette against the moon, stood the great black outlines of that shape they had glimpsed for a fleeting instant from the ship. Misshapen, asymmetrical, but too regular to be any natural formation.
Karen's voice was as thin as a voice in a dream. "Nothing that men ever made ..."
"It must be enormous," Sir Colin murmured. "Far away, but big—big! Well, we head for it, I suppose?"
"Of course we do." Karen spoke sharply. Command was in her voice for the first time since their awakening, as if she had only now fully aroused from a dream. Alan looked at her in surprise in the gray of the moonlight. Seeing a chance of survival, she had come alive. Life and color had flowed back into her.
"Come on," commanded the crisp, new voice." Maybe there's a chance for us here after all. Sir Colin, let Mike have his gun again. We may need it."
"Don't expect too much, lassie," warned the Scotsman mildly, producing the revolver. "Most likely the place has been empty a thousand years."
"We've been acting like a pack of children," Karen declared sharply, swinging a keen stare about through the mist. "There're bird-things here—there may be others. Mike, you do a vanguard, will you? About twenty paces ahead unless the mist gets worse. Alan, drop back just a little and keep an eye out behind us. Sir Colin, you and I'll see that nothing sneaks up on us from the sides. We'll keep as close together as we can, but if we blunder into anything ahead, we mustn't all be caught at once."
Alan's ears burned a little as he obediently dropped back a few paces. When Karen awoke, she awoke with a vengeance. He should have thought of possible danger around them before now. They had all been walking in a dream—a dream of desolation and death, where nothing but themselves still breathed. But the birdmen lived, and there had been that great strange roaring that had shaken the earth.
As the moon rose higher, it seemed to draw mists from the ground. Presently the four drew closer together, so as not to lose each other. The pale, thick fogs were seldom more than waist high, but often they piled up into grotesque, twisted pillars and mounds, moving sluggishly as if half alive. Against the monstrous circle of the moon the citadel held steady, huge and enigmatic.
Out of the moving mists before them came something white as fog, coiling as the fog coiled. Something slow and pale—and dreadful. Mike Smith snatched out his gun. Karen made a futile gesture to stop him, but there was no need. It was all too evident that guns would be useless against this behemoth of a dying world.
Farther and farther, bigger and bigger, the great pale worm came sliding out of the mist. Alan's mouth went dry with sickened loathing as the thing coiled past, moving with a slow, unreal, sliding motion that was infinitely repellent. The creature was thick as a man's height; its body trailed off and vanished in the fog-veils. It was featureless, Alan thought. He could not see it clearly, and was grateful for that.
It neither sensed nor saw the humans. Monstrously it writhed past and was gone, slowly, silently, like a dream.
Sir Colin's voice was shaken when he spoke. "It's probably harmless. An adaptation—"
"God!" Mike licked his lips, staring after the vanished, misty thing. "God, what was it?"
Alan managed a grin. "A worm, Mike. Just a worm. Remember 'em?"
"Yeah." The other's voice was toneless. "But I wonder if everything is that big here."
The black citadel grew larger as they plodded on. They could see now that the unknown creators of that monstrous pile had dealt with mountainous masses of stone as though basalt had been clay. It was not basalt, of course; probably it was some artificial rock. Yet ordinary gravitational and architectural limitations seemed to have had no meaning to the Builders.
Half aloud, Alan mused, "Wonder how long we've been walking? My watch has stopped—quite a while ago, I suppose."
Sir Colin flashed him a whimsically sardonic glance.
"It'll need oiling, at least, before it runs again," he called back.
Alan smiled in turn.
"If we've slept for a million years—we've been remarkably well preserved. I mean our clothes and our ammunition. Powder doesn't last long, as a rule. Plenty of cartridges stored in nineteen nineteen were duds by nineteen forty."
(Sudden nostalgia, even for wars ... What tremendous battles had raged and ebbed over the ground they walked on now, before armies and ravaged lands together fell into dust?)
Sir Colin burred a laugh. "It wasna sleep, laddie. I think it was far more than suspended animation. Everything stopped. Did ye ever heard of stasis?"
Alan nodded. "The absolute zero? Slowing down the electronic orbits to stop the liberation of quanta."
"You know the catch-words," Sir Colin chuckled." Now look: we grow old because we lose more energy than we can take in. Take, for example, a pool of water. A stream flows into it, and out of it. As the human o
rganism acquires and loses energy. Now, come winter, what happens? There's a freeze, until the spring thaw."
"Spring!" Alan's laugh was harsh. He glanced around at the dark, desolate autumn of the world, an autumn hesitating on the verge of eternal winter that would freeze the universe forever. Sir Colin had dropped back until he walked abreast with Alan.
"Aye," he said. "The lochs are frozen with more than cold. The world's old, laddie. What lives in it now is the spawn of age—twisted abortions of evil. Mindless man-birds, worms gone mad with growth, what else we may never know." He shrugged wearily. "Yet you see my point. While the world died, we didna merely sleep. Something—perhaps a ray, or some sort of gas—halted our natural processes. The atomic structure of our bodies, our clothing, the powder in our cartridges—they must not have been subject to normal wear. The pool was frozen. My beard is no longer than it was when I last combed it."
Automatically, Alan fingered his own chin, where the stubble felt less than a few hours old. "And now we pick up where we left off," he said. "I ought to be hungry. But I'm not, yet."
"The ice breaks up slowly. Presently you'll be hungry enough. So will we all. And I've seen no food, except those flying things."
"They must eat. If we could follow them to water, there might be vegetation." j
Sir Colin shook his head. "There'd not be much water left by now. And its saline content would be greater than Salt Lake—enough to poison fish, unless they were adapted to living in it. The same for vegetation."
"But the flying things—"
"Maybe, maybe. But what d'ye think they eat? Perhaps stuff we couldn't touch."
"Maybe we'll know, when we arrive." Alan nodded toward the monstrous citadel outlined against the moon.
"Whoever built that damned thing," the scientist said, "with a curious note of horror in his voice, "I doubt strongly if their digestive systems were at all akin to ours. Have you noticed how wrong that geometry is, laddie? Based on nothing earthly. See?"
-
ALAN squinted through the mists. The great fortress had grown almost mountain-huge, now. Moonlight did not reflect from the vast dark surfaces at all, so that the thing remained almost in silhouette, but they could see that it was composed of geometric forms which were yet strangely alien, polyhedrons, pyramids, pentagons, globes, all flung together as if without intelligent design. And yet each decoration was braced as though against tremendous stresses, or against a greater gravitational pull. Only high intelligence could have reared that vast structure towering above the mists of the plain, but it grew clearer at every step that the intelligence had not been human.
"The size of it—" Alan murmured, awe in his voice. Long before they reached the building they had been forced to strain their heads back to see the higher pinnacles. Now, as they neared the base of the walls, the sheer heights above them were vertiginous when they looked up.
Sir Colin put out a wondering hand toward the dead blackness of the wall.
"Eroded," he murmured. "Eroded—and God knows there must be little rainfall here. How old must it be?"
Alan touched the wall. It was smooth, cold, hard, seemingly neither stone nor metal.
"Notice how little light it reflects," Sir Colin said.
"Very low refractive index—seems to absorb the moonlight."
Yes, the black wall drank in the moonlight. The pale rays seemed to flow into that cliff like a shining river into a cavern. As Alan stared, it seemed to him that he was looking into a tunnel—a black, hollow emptiness that stretched inimitably before him, starless as interstellar gulfs.
He knew an instant of the same vertigo he had felt when he stepped out of the dead darkness of the room in the ship. And—yes, these darknesses were related. Each of them a negation, canceling out light and sound. This wall was something more than mere structural substance. It might not even be matter at all, as we know it, but something from outside, where the laws of earthly physics are suspended or impossibly altered.
Mike's hand was on his gun-butt. "I don't like this," he said, lips drawn back against his teeth.
"No more do I," Sir Colin said quietly. He was rubbing his bearded chin and looking up and down along the blank base of the wall. "I doubt if there's a way in—for us."
"There is no way," Alan heard his own voice saying with a timbre he did not recognize as his. "There is no door for us. The entrance is—there?" He tilted his head back and stared up at those tumbled pinnacles above.
From far away he heard Sir Colin's sharp, "Eh? Why d'ye say that, laddie?"
He looked down and into three pairs of keen, narrowed eyes that stared at him without expression. A sudden shock of distrust for all three of his companions all but rocked him back on his heels in that sudden, wordless moment. What did they remember?
For himself, he could not be sure now just what flash of memory had brought those strange words to his mind. He forced his voice to a normal tone, and said through stiff lips, "I don't know. Thinking of the flying things, I suppose. There certainly aren't any doors here."
Alan wondered if a deep tide of awareness was running among the three of them, shutting him out.
As for entering the building—he understood Mike Smith's feelings poignantly. If even Mike could feel it, then there must be something more than imagination to the strange, sick horror that rose like a dark tide in his mind whenever he thought of entering. Why should he behave like a hysterical child, afraid of the unknown? Perhaps because it was not entirely unknown to him. He shut his eyes, trying to think. Did he know what lay within the black citadel?
No. No pictures came. Only the dim thought of the Alien, and a very certain sense that the colossal building housed something unspeakable.
Mike Smith's urgent whisper broke into his bewildering memories.
"Someone's coming."
He opened his eyes. Waist-deep, the white mists swirled about them. In the distance, floating slowly toward the black citadel, a quasi-human figure moved through the fog.
"One of those bird-things?" Mike breathed, straining eagerly toward the distant shape. "I'll get it—"
"Mike!" Karen cautioned.
"I won't shoot it. I'll just see it doesn't get off the ground." He crouched into the mists, and slid away like a smoothly stalking cat, vanishing into the grayness.
Alan strained his eyes after the moving figure. It was not, he thought, a bird-creature. His heart was pounding with the excitement of finding something other than themselves moving in human shape through this dust of all humanity. The distant figure flowed curiously in all its outlines—as if, perhaps, it were not wholly human.
A big dark figure rose suddenly beside it. Mike, with outstretched arms. The gossamer shape sprang away from him with a thin, clear cry like a chord struck from vibrating strings. All its filmy outlines streamed away as it whirled toward the citadel and the watching humans.
A wind made the mists swirl confusingly. They heard Mike yell, and through the rolling dimness saw his dark shape and the pale, mist-colored shape dodging and running through the fog. It was like watching a shadow-play. Mike was not overtaking his quarry, but they could see that he was driving it closer and closer to them.
Alan leaned forward, avid excitement flaming through him. Here was an answer, he told himself eagerly—a tangible, living answer to all the riddles they could not solve. What manner of being dwelt here in this last death of the world?
Suddenly out of the depths of a mist-wave that had rolled blindingly over them he heard a soft thudding and in the gray blindness something rushed headlong against him.
Automatically his arms closed about it.
-
Chapter II
Carcasilla
HIS first impression was one of incredible fragility. In the instant while mist still blinded him, he knew that he held a girl, but a girl so inhumanly fragile that he thought her frantic struggles to escape might shatter the delicate bones by their very frenzy.
Then the fog rolled back again, and m
oonlight poured down upon them. Mike came panting up out of the mist, calling, "Did you catch it?" Karen and Sir Colin pushed forward eagerly, staring. Alan did not speak a word. He was looking down, speechless, at what he held in his arms.
The captive's struggles had ceased when light came back around them. She hung motionless in Alan's embrace, head thrown back, staring up at him. Not terror, but complete bewilderment, made her features a mask of surprise.
They were unbelievably delicate features. The very skull beneath must not be common bone, but some exquisite structure carved of ivory. Her face had the flawless, unearthly perfection of a flower. That was it—she had a flower's delicacy, overbred, painstakingly cultured and refined out of all kinship with the coarse human prototype. Even her hair seemed so fine that it floated upon the misty air, only settling now about her shoulders as her struggles ceased. The gossamer robe that had made her outlines waver so strangely in the fog fell in cobwebby folds which every breath fluttered.
Looking down at her, Alan was more awestruck than he might have been had she been the wholly outré thing he expected. This delicate, hothouse creature could have no conceivable relation with the dead desert around them.
She was staring up at him with that odd astonishment in great dark eyes fringed with silver lashes. And as the deep gaze locked with his, he remembered for a swimming moment the instant of mental probing in the Tunisian desert, before the world blanked out forever. But he knew that it had been the Alien who probed their minds outside the ship. And the Alien could have no possible connection with this exquisitely fragile thing.
Sir Colin's rasping voice was saying, "She's human! Would ye believe it? She's human! That means we're not alone in this dead world!"
"Don't let her go," Karen cried excitedly. "Maybe she'll lead us to food!"
Alan scarcely heard them. He was watching the girl's face as she lifted her eyes to the heights of blackness above them. Alan's gaze swept up to the fantastic turrets. Nothing—nothing at all. But the girl stared as if she could see something up there invisible to them. Perhaps she could. Perhaps her senses were keener than theirs.
