Terrors

by Richard A. Lupoff

  And the Atlanteans themselves—I wondered if they were truly human. They were shaped like men and women, but they were formed with such perfection as to make the statues of Praxiteles look like the fumblings of a nursery child pounding soft clay into a rough approximation of the human form.

  These Atlanteans had aircraft of amazing grace and beauty, and cities that would make the fancies of Wonderland or of Oz pale by comparison.

  And yet they had been captured and imprisoned on this terrible gray plain!

  I sped beyond the Atlantean settlement, wondering if yet more ancient civilizations might be represented. And they were, they were. People of shapes and colors I could only have imagined, cities that soared to the heavens (or seemed to, in that strange psychic world), wonders beyond the powers of my puny mind to comprehend.

  How many ancient civilizations had there been on this puny planet we call Earth? Archaeologists have found records and ruins dating back perhaps 10,000 years, 15,000 at the uttermost. Yet anthropologists tell us that humankind, homo sap. or something closely resembling him, has been on this planet for anywhere from two to five million years. Taking even the most conservative number, are we to believe that for 1,985,000 years our ancestors were simple fisherfolk, hunters and gatherers, living in crude villages, organized into petty tribes? And that suddenly, virtually in the wink of the cosmic eye, there sprang up the empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia, of ancient China and India, Japan and Southeast Asia and chill Tibet, the Maya and the Aztecs and the Toltecs and the great Incas, the empires of Gambia and of Ghana, the mysterious rock-painters of Australia and the carvers of the stone faces of Easter Island?

  This makes little sense. No, there must have been other civilizations, hundreds of them, thousands, over the millions of years of humankind’s tenancy of the planet Earth.

  But even then, what is a mere 2,000,000 years, even 5,000,000 years, in the history of a planet six billion years of age? What mighty species might have evolved in the seas or on the continents of this world, might have learned to think and to speak, to build towering cities and construct great engines, to compose eloquent poems and paint magnificent images … and then have disappeared, leaving behind no evidence that ever they had walked this Earth … or at least, no evidence of which we are aware?

  Such races did live on this planet. They had souls, yes, and so much, say I, for human arrogance. This I know because I saw their souls.

  How many such races? Hundreds, I tell you. Thousands. Millions. I despaired of ever reaching the end of the gray plain, but I had vowed to fly to its end however long it took. This time, if daylight found me still in the tower, so must it be. My cousin might discover my body, seemingly deep in a normal and restorative slumber, propped up in my easy chair. But she would be unable to awaken me.

  Yes. I determined that I would see this thing to its conclusion, and from this objective I would not be swayed. I saw the souls of the great segmented fire-worms who built their massive cities in the very molten mantle of the Earth; I saw submarine creatures who would make the reptilian plesiosaurs look like minnows by comparison, sporting and dancing and telling their own tales of their own watery gods; I saw the intelligent ferns and vines whose single organic network at one time covered nearly one third of the primordial continent of Gondwanaland; I saw the gossamer, feathery beings who made their nests in Earth’s clouds and built their playgrounds in Luna’s craters.

  We humans in our conceit like to tell ourselves that we are evolution’s darlings, that millennia of natural selection have led Nature to her crowning creation, homo sap. Let me tell you that the opposite is the case. The story of life on Earth is not the story of evolution, but of devolution. The noblest, the most elevated and most admirable of races were the first, not the last.

  But still I pursued my flight, past wonder on wonder, terror on terror, until at last I saw the gray plain, the gray plane curve upward, rise into the brilliant haze that I recognized as the primordial chaos from which our Solar System emerged. And the souls that were captured by the turret—what was their fate? For what purpose were they caught up in every era of being, and drawn backward, backward toward that primordial haze?

  A great mass of soul-force formed before my ectoplasmic eyes. A great seething ball of sheer soul-energy that accreted there in the dawn of time, now burst its bonds and rolled down that great gray plain, sweeping all before it, destroying cities as a boulder would crush an ants’ nest, shaking continents to their foundations, causing the globe itself to tremble and to wobble in its orbit around the Sun.

  But even this was only the beginning of the havoc wrought by this great ball of soul-energy. From the remote past to the present—our present, yours and mine—it roared, and then on into the future, sweeping planets and suns in its path.

  And when the roiling concentration of soul-force reached that unimaginably distant future, when all was dim and silent in the cosmos and infinitesimal granules of existence itself floated aimless in the endless void, it reversed it course and swept backward, roiling and rolling from future to past, crushing and rending and growing, always growing, growing.

  It reached its beginning point and reversed itself still again, larger and more terrible this time than it had been the first, and as it oscillated between creation and destruction, between future and past, between the beginning of the universe and its end, the very fabric of time-space began to grow weak.

  What epochs of history, human and pre-human and, yes, post-human, were twisted and reformed into new and astonishing shapes. Battles were fought and unfought and then fought again with different outcomes; lovers chose one another, then made new and different choices; empires that spanned continents were wiped out as if they had never existed, then recreated in the images of bizarre deities; religions disappeared and returned, transmogrified beyond recognition; species were cut off from the stream of evolution to be replaced by others more peculiar than you can imagine.

  A baby might be born, then disappear back into its mother’s womb only to be born again a monstrosity unspeakable. A maddened killer might commit a crime, only to see his deed undone and himself wiped out of existence, only to reappear a saintly and benevolent friend to his one-time victim.

  And what then, you might wonder, what then? I’ll not deny that my own curiosity was roused. Would humankind persist forever? What supreme arrogance to think this would be the case! Mightier species than we, and nobler, had come and gone before homo sap. was so much as a gleam in Mother Nature’s eye.

  In iteration after iteration of the titanic story, humankind disappeared. Destroyed itself with monstrous weapons. Was wiped away by an invisible virus. Gave birth to its own successor race and lost its niche in the scheme of things. Was obliterated by a wandering asteroid, conquered and exterminated by marauding space aliens –

  Oh, space aliens. Alexander Myshkin and I had debated that conundrum many a time. Myshkin believed that the universe positively teemed with intelligence. Creatures of every possible description, human, human-like, insectoid, batrachian, avian, vegetable, electronic, you name it. Myshkin’s version of the cosmos looked like a science fiction illustrator’s sample book.

  My universe was a lonely place. Only Earth held life, and only human life on Earth was sentient. It was a pessimistic view, I’ll admit, but as the mother of the ill-favored baby was wont to say, “It’s ugly but it’s mine.”

  Well, Myshkin was right. There were aliens galore. At various times and in various versions of the future—and of the past, as a matter of fact—they visited Earth or we visited their worlds or space travelers of different species met in unlikely cosmic traffic accidents or contact was made by radio or by handwritten notes tossed away in empty olive jars.

  One version of post-human Earth was dominated by a single greenish fungus that covered the entire planet, oceans and all, leaving only tiny specks of white ice at the North and South Poles. Another was sterilized, and thank you, weapons industry, for developing a bomb that could kill e
verything—everything!—on an entire planet. But spores arrived from somewhere later on, and a whole new family of living things found their home on Earth.

  I saw all of this and more, and I saw the very fabric of space-time becoming feeble and unsure of itself. I saw it tremble and quake beneath the mighty assault of that accumulated and ever-growing soul-force, and I realized what was happening. The cosmos itself was threatened by whatever screaming demons of chaos cavorted beyond its limits.

  At length a rent appeared, and I was able to peer into it, but the black, screeching chaos that lay beyond it I will not describe to you. No, I will not do that. But I peered into that swirling orifice of madness and menace and I mouthed a prayer to the God I had abandoned so long ago, and I swore to that God that if one man, if one soul could counter the malignities who populated the fifth dimension, or the fiftieth, or the five millionth, it would be I.

  Did I say that the soul is the immaterial and immortal part of a living, sentient being? And did I say that I had realized, in despite of my lifelong skepticism, that God was a living reality? Perhaps I should have said that gods were living realities. I do not know how many universes there are, each one created by its own god, each god behaving like a mischievous child.

  And that chaotic void beyond the cosmos—was that in fact part of a higher realm of reality, in which all the universes drifted like the eggs of some aquatic life-form, within the nourishing fluid of the sea? If my soul should leave our cosmos and enter that chaos, to face the demons—demons that I now realized were the gods of other universes—would it then forfeit its claim to immortality?

  Could those demons be stopped? Could I, one man, stand against this infinite army of insanity? There was a single way to learn the answer to that question. I decided that I would take that way.

  I –

  The Heyworth Fragment

  1. Discovery of the Item. The portion of material known as “the Heyworth Fragment” first came to the attention of the auditorium projectionist during one of the regular Sunday evening film showings in the fall semester. The announced program for the evening was Luis Buñuel’s classic featurette “The Andalusian Dog,” and a full-length film, the little known but critically well-regarded Rudolf Hess at Spandau.

  The projectionist was a graduate student, Tuck Heyworth, not at all given to practical jokes. In fact, Heyworth’s serious outlook and total lack of humor were well known on the campus. At the time he disclaimed all knowledge of the origin of the fragment which has come to bear his name, and to this day swears total ignorance of the matter.

  He submitted voluntarily to polygraph examination once the affair began to suggest serious implications, and all indications were that his ignorance was quite as abysmal as he alleged it to be.

  According to Heyworth’s statement, “The Andalusian Dog” was nearly over and he was about to thread up the first reel of Rudolf Hess at Spandau, when he discovered an additional reel of film on top of the feature film. It bore no label, but was wound on a standard 16 millimeter Goldsmith reel.

  Assuming the film to be a short cartoon or other suitable addition to the program, Heyworth attempted to thread it on the second projector so it would be ready for screening at the end of “The Andalusian Dog.” He was surprised that the film started without leader or titles, but later explained that this did not arouse his curiosity greatly as he assumed that the film was one produced by students, and that the technique of starting in medias res was used deliberately by the student film-maker.

  Heyworth was unable to thread the film, however, and after making several futile attempts to do so set it aside as a defective print and proceeded to thread and show Rudolf Hess at Spandau as had been the original intent of the program committee.

  When the showing of Rudolf Hess at Spandau was completed, Heyworth rewound the films and returned them to the distributor. How-ever, as there was neither receipt nor shipping case for the unexpected reel, it was left behind in the projection booth. It was only some days later that Heyworth recalled the odd print, and attempted once more to thread it, purely for his own satisfaction.

  He was again unable to do so, and upon examination of the print discovered that it was of nonstandard format. At this point Heyworth contacted the university’s film department, and turned the print over to the department for their disposition. He showed no interest in the content of the film at this or any later time, contending when questioned later that only his inability to thread the film roused his curiosity and that only the technical aspects of the film’s unusual format intrigued him.

  Heyworth has since received his master’s degree and resides in the area, working as a night supervisor in his father-in-law’s ladies’ purse factory. He has proven cooperative with regard to questioning concerning the fragment, but has been unable to provide any information further than that already reported.

  2. Irregular Format of the Fragment. Once delivered to the film department, the fragment was inspected for format. Almost immediately it became apparent why it had proved impossible to thread it in a standard projector, although the differences in format ware sufficiently slight as to have baffled Tuck, who was not a film technician but only a cursorily-trained projectionist who was limited to naked-eye examination of the film in a dimly-lighted projection booth.

  Although the film was wound on a standard 16-millimeter reel, and to the naked eye appeared to be of standard width, it was actually just over 17 millimeters wide. The precise width does not work out into exact units, fractions, or decimals in either the metric or English system, or in any other against which it was compared. This may be a significant datum, but there is no assurance but that the width was not set on some more obscure scale, or that it is not merely arbitrary.

  The frame format is square rather than being in the three-by-four horizontal format to which standard the industry adheres, but again there have been many variant formats developed, ranging from the successful wide-screen productions of recent years to round, upright, and other shapes, including square frames.

  Presumably because of the square frames, the sprocket holes, which are themselves square and slightly larger than normal, and which appear in an alternating pattern on either side of the print, are not spaced at the normal interval of three-tenths of an inch, (or six-tenths, as would be the case with the alternating arrangement of the Heyworth Fragment), but are approximately 20 millimeters apart.

  The frames themselves occur at a frequency of just under 32 per foot. Once again, it will be noted that none of the dimensions of the print are commensurate with either English or metric measurements. All attempts to bring the measurements of the Heyworth Fragment into coincidence with inches or millimeters have failed.

  It should be noted further that the “film” itself, or what is usually referred to as a film, was not one at all, strictly speaking. While the fragment appeared to the naked eye to be a standard celluloid-based motion picture print, later analysis proved it to be of an unusual organic-metallic compound. This compound, reproduced after some rather difficult laboratory procedures had been mastered, has been found to be a superior replacement for standard photographic emulsions, serving, in slightly different forms, as both original and print stock, with outstanding color fidelity and an unusual range of light sensitivities.

  In the case of the Heyworth Fragment, however, once the format of the print was adequately ascertained, the question arose as to whether it would be more practical to convert a standard projector for the showing of the film, or to attempt to convert the film for showing on a standard projector. A third course of action, to dismiss the entire affair as a joke by students, with or without the collusion of Tuck Heyworth, was given consideration only until naked-eye examination or the film proved so intriguing that a proper screening of the film was definitely decided upon.

  After some discussion, the chairman of the film department, Dr. Cashman, placed himself firmly on the side of converting the fragment. His argument, which came to be accepted through
out the department, was that once converted, the fragment could be duplicated and shown on any standard projector, but that if the projector rather than the film were modified, access to the single modified projector would be required for any study of the film. Further, the making of duplicate prints would be extremely difficult and tedious work because of problems entailed in working with the non-standard footage.

  The fragment was painstakingly matted onto 35-millimeter stock and duplicated through the use of an optical printer. Once a duplicate master in 35-millimeter format had been made it was of course no problem to strike as many 35-millimeter prints as desired. When projected with standard equipment these prints showed a full, square “Heyworth” frame, matted on black. The color of the original print was reproduced with excellent fidelity.

  Two additional problems were encountered in converting the print.

  One of these was the sound track. Because of the organic-metallic stock used in the fragment, no visible optical or magnetic track was noted at first, and it was assumed that the fragment was silent. However, upon screening of the converted version, it became obvious that sound was required to make sense of the content of the film. The original was re-examined, this time more closely than ever, and there was found, embedded in the edge of the film, very much as a sound track is placed in normal prints, an alloy wire of extreme fineness.

  Every attempt was made to read this wire as a sound-track, and after extremely lengthy efforts, Dr. Bloch-Erich of the Department of Computer Sciences claimed to have decoded the wire’s content. It was, he asserted, digitally recorded information, but not basically digital data. Rather, Bloch-Erich claimed, a continuous flow of analog data—possibly sound, possibly odor or other messages—had been recorded in digital form on the wire.