A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  We stood there at the head of the stairs, behind the gun, staring at that door—half-naked, filthy, caked with blood. There was a great, breathless silence broken only by the patter of gunfire in the courtyard outside, muffled by the walls. Then Donegan picked up the gun and stepped over the crumpled body of a guard. His bare feet slapped on the cold stone of the hall and behind him our footsteps echoed, in perfect time, drumming the death-roll of Nicholas Svadin. We came to the door—and it opened!

  Heinrich Sturm stood there. Sturm—grown bent and little. Sturm with horror in his eyes, with horror twisting his face and blood streaming down his chest from a ripped-out throat. Sturm—babbling blood-choked German words, tottering, crumpling at our feet, who stood staring over him into the great, dark room beyond, at Svadin, red-mouthed, standing beside the great canopied bed, at the ten foul things that stood behind him!

  Donegan’s machine-gun sprayed death over the bleeding body of Zoologist Heinrich Wilhelm Sturm. Soft slugs ploughed into the soft body of Nicholas Svadin, into the bodies of the ten things at his feet. He shook at their impact, and the pallid flesh ripped visibly where they hit, but he only stood and laughed—laughed as the God of Gold had laughed, in a voice that meant death and doom to the human race!

  Laughed and came striding at us across the room with his hell-pack trotting at his heels.

  There are fears that can surpass all courage. That fear drenched us then. We ran—Donegan with his gun like a child in his arms, I with old Heinrich Sturm dragging like a wet sack behind me, the others like ragged, screaming ghosts. We stumbled over the windrows of dead in the corridor, down those sweeping stairs into the lower hall, through the open doors into the courtyard. We stood, trapped between death and death.

  A hundred men remained of the Brotherhood of the Cross. They were huddled in a knot in the center of the court, surrounded by the host who were faithful to fear, and to Svadin. As we burst through the great doors of the castle, led by the naked, haggard, flaming-haired figure of Jim Donegan, every eye turned to us—every hand fell momentarily from its work of killing. Then miraculously old Heinrich Sturm was struggling up in my arms, was shouting in German, in his babbling, blood-choked voice, and in the throng other voices in other languages were taking up his cry, translating it—sending it winging on:

  “He is no god! He is from Hell—a fiend from Hell! Vampire—eater of men! He—and his cursed spawn!”

  They knew him, every one. They knew him for Svadin’s intimate—the man who spoke with Svadin’s voice and gave his orders to the world. They heard what he said—and in the doorway they saw Svadin himself.

  He was naked, as he had stood when that door swung open and Sturm came stumbling through. He was corpse-white, blotched with the purple-yellow of decay, bloated with the gases of death. Svadin—undead—unhuman—and around his feet ten gibbering simulacra of himself—ten pulpy, fish-white monsters of his flesh, their slit-mouths red with the lapped blood of Heinrich Sturm!

  He stood there, spread-legged, above the crowd. His glassy eyes stared down on the bloody, upturned faces, and the stump of his hacked arm pounded on his hairless breast where the line of bullet-marks showed like a purple ribbon. His vast voice thundered down at them, and it was like the bellowing of a lusting bull:

  “I am Nicholas Svadin!”

  And in hideous, mocking echo the ten dwarfed horrors piped after him:

  “I am Nicholas Svadin!”

  In my arms old Heinrich Sturm lay staring at the Thing whose slave and more than slave he had been, and his old lips whispered five words before his head sagged down in death. Red Jim Donegan heard them and shouted them for the world to hear. Svadin heard, and if that dead-man’s face could show expression, fear sloughed over it, and his thick red lips parted in a grin of terror over yellowed fangs.

  “Burn him! Fire is clean!”

  I caught up the body of Heinrich Sturm and ran with it, out of the path of the mob that surged up the castle steps, Jim Donegan at their head. Svadin’s splayed feet sounded across the floor of the great hall, his hell-brood pattering after him. Then the crowd caught them and I heard the spat of clubbed fists on soft flesh, and a great roaring scream of fury went up over the yammer of the mob.

  They tore the little fiends to shreds and still they lived. They bound the Thing that had been Svadin and carried him, battered and twisting, into the courtyard. They built a pyre in the streets of Budapest, and when the flames licked high they cast him in, his hell-spawn with him, and watched with avid eyes as he writhed and crisped, and listened to his screaming. The beast is in every man when hate and fear are roused. Far into the night, when Svadin and his brood were ashes underfoot, the mad crowd surged and fought through the streets, looting, burning, ravening.

  When Svadin died, four men had ruled the world. Today four men rule a world that is better because Svadin rose from the dead that day in Budapest, that is free because of his inhuman tyranny. Moorehead—Nasuki—Rasmussen—Corregio. Red Jim Donegan is a hero, and I and a hundred other living men, but none pays homage to dead old Heinrich Wilhelm Sturm. He was too long identified with Nicholas Svadin for men to love him now.

  What we know of Svadin, and of other things, Sturm had learned, little by little, through the years. He told certain things to Donegan, before Svadin grew suspicious and ordered the American’s death. It was Heinrich Sturm’s mercy that won Donegan a cell instead of a bullet or the knife, or even worse. For somewhere during his association with the perverted dregs of Europe’s royal courts the reborn Svadin had acquired, among other things, a taste for human blood and human flesh.

  “All I know is what Sturm told me,” Donegan says. “The old man was pretty shrewd, and what he didn’t know he guessed—and I reckon he guessed close. It was curiosity made him stay on with Svadin—first off, anyway. Afterwards he knew too much to get away.

  “There must have been spores of life, so Sturm said. There was a Swede by the name of Arrhenius—back years ago—who thought that life might travel from planet to planet in spores so small that light could push them through space. He said that a spore-dust from ferns and moss and fungus, and things like bacteria that were very small, could pass from world to world that way. And he figured there might be spores of pure life drifting around out there in space between the stars, and that whenever they fall on a planet, life would start there.

  “That’s what happened to us, according to the old man. There were three spores that fell here, all within a short time of each other. One fell in the sea, and it brought the Sea-Thing to life, made mostly of complex molecules of colloidal water and salts out of the sea-ooze where the spore fell. It could grow by sucking up water, but it needed those salts from decomposed, organic things too. That’s why it attacked cities, where there was plenty of food for it.

  “The second spore fell on quartz—maybe in some kind of colloidal gel, like they find sometimes in the hard stuff. There was gold there, and the Thing that came alive was what I saw, and what the Indians thought was one of their old gods come to life again—the god of gold and crystal. Svadin killed it with some radium compound that he invented.

  “The third seed fell on Svadin and brought him to life. He wasn’t a man, really, but he had all the organs and things that a man would have. He had the same memories in his brain, and the same traits of character, until other things rooted them out. He came to life—but to stay alive he had to be different from other men. He had embalming fluid instead of blood, and wax in his skin, and things like that, and he had to replace them the way we eat food to replace our tissues. When he changed, it was in ways a dead man would change, except that he used his brain better and more logically than any live man ever did. He had to learn how a man would act, and he had some willing enough teachers to show him the rotten along with the good.

  “Those other things grew as they fed, and so did Svadin, but he was more complex than they were—more nearly like men. Where they grew, he reproduced, like the simplest kinds of living things, by
budding off duplicates of himself, out of his own flesh. It was like a hydra—like a vegetable—like anything but a man. Maybe you noticed, too—a couple of those things that grew after he lost his arm in Rio, had only one arm too. They were him, in a way. They called his name when he did, there at the last . . .”

  The sweat is standing out on his weather-beaten forehead as he remembers it. I see the vision that he does—those ten miniature Svadins growing, budding in their turn, peopling the Earth anew with a race of horrors made in mockery of man. He reaches for the bottle at his elbow:

  “We’ve seen Nature—the Universe—spawning,” he says. “Maybe it’s happened on Earth before; maybe it’ll happen again. Probably we, and all the other living things on Earth got started that way, millions of years ago. For a while, maybe, there were all kinds of abortive monsters roaming around the world, killing each other off the way Svadin killed the Sea-Thing and the God of Gold. They were new and simple—they reproduced by dividing, or budding, or crystallizing, and it was hard to kill them except with something like fire that would destroy the life-germs in them. After a while, when the seed of life in them would be pretty well diluted, it would be easier. Anyway, that’s how I figure it.

  “Svadin looked human, at first, but he wasn’t—ever. What he was, no one knows. Not even old Sturm. It’s pretty hard to imagine what kind of thoughts and feelings a living dead man would have. He had some hang-over memories from the time he was really Svadin, so he started in to fix over the world. Maybe he thought men were his own kind, at first—at least, they looked like him. He fixed it, all right—only, after a while there wasn’t anything human left in him, and he began to plan things the way a machine would, to fit him and the race he was spawning. It’s no more than we’ve done since Time began—killing animals and each other to get what we want, eating away the Earth to get at her metals, and oil, and so on. The God of Gold was kin to the Earth, in a way, and I guess he resented seeing her cut up by a lot of flesh and blood animals like us.

  “I said he learned some of our perversions. Once someone had taught him a thing like that, and he liked it, it became part of the heritage that he passed down to future generations. Somehow he got the taste for flesh—raw flesh—humans were just like another animal to him. After Sturm stopped being useful to him, he attacked the old man too.

  “You see—he had a human brain, and he could think like a man, and scheme and sense danger to his plans. Only—he didn’t ever really understand human psychology. He was like an amoeba, or a polyp, and I don’t guess they have emotions. He didn’t understand religion, and the feeling people had that he was a kind of god. He used it—but when awe turned into hate, and people thought of him as a devil instead of a god, they treated him like one. They burned him the way their ancestors burned witches!”

  He tosses down a shot of rye and wipes his lips. “Next time it happens,” he says, “I’m going to be drunk. And this time I’ll stay drunk!”

  RUST

  Joseph E. Kelleam

  Delicate distinctions are very hard for raggedly built war machinery—And they weren’t designed for constructive work—

  THE sun, rising over the hills, cast long shadows across the patches of snow and bathed the crumbling ruins in pale light. Had men been there they could have reckoned the month to be August. But men had gone, long since, and the sun had waned; and now, in this late period of the earth’s age, the short spring was awakening.

  Within the broken city, in a mighty-columned hall that still supported a part of a roof, life of a sort was stirring. Three grotesque creatures were moving, their limbs creaking dolefully.

  X-120 faced the new day and the new spring with a feeling of exhilaration that nearly drove the age-old loneliness and emptiness from the corroded metal of what might be called his brain. The sun was the source of his energy, even as it had been the source of the fleshy life before him; and with the sun’s reappearance he felt new strength coursing through the wires and coils and gears of his complex body.

  He and his companions were highly developed robots, the last ever to be made by the Earthmen. X-120 consisted of a globe of metal, eight feet in diameter, mounted upon four many-jointed legs. At the top of this globe was a protuberance like a kaiser’s helmet which caught and stored his power from the rays of the sun.

  From the “face” of the globe two ghostly quartz eyes bulged. The globe was divided by a heavy band of metal at its middle, and from this band, at each side, extended a long arm ending in a powerful claw. This claw was like the pincers of a lobster and had been built to shear through metal. Four long cables, which served as auxiliary arms, were drawn up like springs against the body.

  X-120 stepped from the shadows of the broken hall into the ruined street. The sun’s rays striking against his tarnished sides sent new strength coursing through his body. He had forgotten how many springs he had seen. Many generations of twisted oaks that grew among the ruins had sprung up and fallen since X-120 and his companions had been made. Countless hundreds of springs had flitted across the dying earth since the laughter and dreams and follies of men had ceased to disturb those crumbling walls.

  “The sunlight is warm,” called X-120. “Come out, G-3a and L-1716. I feel young again.”

  His companions lumbered into the sunlight. G-3a had lost one leg, and moved slowly and with difficulty. The steel of his body was nearly covered with red rust, and the copper and aluminum alloys that completed his make-up were pitted with deep stains of greenish black. L-1716 was not so badly tarnished, but he had lost one arm; and the four auxiliary cables were broken and dangled from his sides like trailing wires. Of the three X-120 was the best preserved. He still had the use of all his limbs, and here and there on his body shone the gleam of untarnished metal. His masters had made him well.

  The crippled G-3a looked about him and whined like an old, old man. “It will surely rain,” he shivered. “I cannot stand another rain.”

  “Nonsense,” said L-1716, his broken arms, scraping along the ground as he moved, “there is not a cloud in the sky. Already I feel better.”

  G-3a looked about him in fear. “And are we all?” he questioned. “Last winter there were twelve.”

  X-120 had been thinking of the other nine, all that had been left of the countless horde that men had once fashioned. “The nine were to winter in the jade tower,” he explained. “We will go there. Perhaps they do not think it is time to venture out.”

  “I cannot leave my work,” grated G-3a. “There is so little time left. I have almost reached the goal.” His whirring voice was raised to a pitch of triumph. “Soon I shall make living robots, even as men made us.”

  “The old story,” sighed L-1716. “How long have we been working to make robots who will take our places? And what have we made? Usually nothing but lifeless blobs of steel. Sometimes we have fashioned mad things that had to be destroyed. But never in all the years have we made a single robot that resembled ourselves.”

  X-120 stood in the broken street, and the sunlight made a shimmering over his rust-dappled sides.

  “That is where we have failed,” he mused as he looked at his clawlike arms. “We have tried to make robots like ourselves. Men did not make us for life; they fashioned us for death.” He waved his huge lobster claw in the air. “What was this made for? Was it made for the shaping of other robots? Was it made to fashion anything? Blades like that were made for slaughter—nothing else.”

  “Even so,” whined the crippled robot, “I have nearly succeeded. With help I can win.”

  “And have we ever refused to help?” snapped L-1716. “You are getting old, G-3a. All winter you have worked in that little dark room, never allowing us to enter.”

  There was a metallic cackle in G-3a’s voice. “But I have nearly won. They said I wouldn’t, but I have nearly won. I need help. One more operation. If it succeeds, the robots may yet rebuild the world.”

  Reluctantly X-120 followed the two back into the shadowy ruins. It was dark
in there; but their round, glassy eyes had been made for both day and night.

  “See,” squeaked old G-3a, as he pointed to a metal skeleton upon the floor. “I have remade a robot from parts that I took from the scrap heap. It is perfect, all but the brain. Still, I believe this will work.” He motioned to a gleaming object upon a littered table. It was a huge copper sphere with two black squares of a tarlike substance set into it. At the pole opposite from these squares was a protuberance no larger than a man’s fist.

  “This,” said G-3a thoughtfully, “is the only perfect brain that I could find. You see, I am not trying to create something; I am merely rebuilding. Those”—he nodded to the black squares—“are the sensory organs. The visions from the eyes are flashed upon these as though they were screens. Beyond those eyes is the response mechanism, thousands and thousands of photo-electric cells. Men made it so that it would react mechanically to certain images. Movement, the simple avoidance, of objects, the urge to kill, these are directed by the copper sphere.

  “Beyond this”—he gestured to the bulge at the back of the brain—“is the thought mechanism. It is what made us different from other machines.”

  “It is very small,” mocked X-120.