The Edmond Hamilton Megapack: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales

by Edmond Hamilton

  But this was different—this voyaging of deepest space, this pursuing of the fleets and navies of the stars to their own harbor, this going in among them. In a way Ezra Gurney was afraid. No man, not even Curt Newton, could look at that flaming sky ahead and not be a little afraid.

  The Comet had come into the region of the great clusters. Mighty hives of gathered Suns blazed and swarmed, rolling across space and time, carrying after them sweeping trains of scattered stars. Between and beyond the clusters and their trailing star-streams shone the glowing clouds of nebulae, banners of light flung out for a million miles across the firmament, ablaze with the glow of drowned and captured Suns. And beyond them all—the nebulae, the clusters and the stars—there showed the black brooding lightless immensity of a cloud of cosmic dust.

  The soul of Ezra Gurney shook within him. Men had no business here in this battleground of angry gods. Men? But was he here with men?

  “One-point-four degrees zenith,” came the metallic voice of Simon Wright from where he hovered above a bulky instrument.

  “Check,” Curt Newton said and moved controls slightly. Then he asked, “Dust?”

  “Definitely higher than average interstellar density now,” Otho reported, from his own place at the wide instrument panel. “It’ll thicken fast as we approach the main cloud.”

  Ezra looked at them—at the square, hovering metal case of the living brain, at the lithe eager android peering forward into the abyss with burning green eyes, at the giant imperturbable metal bulk of the robot.

  Not men, no! He was out here in the great deeps, rushing toward the mightiest secret of infinity, with creatures unhuman, with—

  Curt turned, and smiled briefly and wearily at him. And the clamoring panic in Ezra was suddenly gone. Why, these were his oldest staunchest friends, unshakably loyal and true.

  He drew a ong breath. “I don’t mind telling you that it’s nearly got me down.”

  “You’ve got worse coming,” Curt said uncomfortingly. “We’ll hit the main cloud soon.”

  “The cloud?”

  “The great cloud of cosmic dust that surrounds the Birthplace. That dust is born from the Birthplace—and flows out in mighty tides through our hole universe.”

  “To be born into new worlds?”

  “Yes. Weizsacker fathomed that part of the cycle, long ago in the nineteen forties when he formulated his theory of the gathering of the cosmic dust into new planets.”

  Before them now rose a wall of Suns, glaring like cyclopean furnaces as the Comet seemingly crawled toward them. Almost it seemed that they could hear the clang and thunder of cosmic forges as their tiny craft approached and went between the flaming giants.

  White and wild flared a far-flung nebula to the left beyond that rampart of stars. But ahead there gloomed farther still the black cloud that now seemed eating up the universe with jaws of darkness as they steadily approached it.

  “No sign of any other ship outside the cloud,” Otho reported coolly. “Our detectors won’t range inside it, of course.”

  “They had too big a start,” Curt said broodingly. “Two many days. Garrand and the other must already have been on the world of the Watchers for some time.”

  “Unless the whirls wrecked them,” Otho suggested.

  “Wishful thinking,” Curt said. “We ran the whirls and so could they.”

  Simon said, “Curtis, you will not go into the shrine of the Watchers again?”

  Curt Newton did not look at him. “I’ll have to if that’s where Garrand is.”

  “You don’t have to, Curtis. We three could go.”

  Now, Curt looked at Simon, his tanned face set and unreadable. “You don’t trust me with the power of the Watchers?”

  “You know what that power almost did to you before. It is for you to say.”

  Curt looked ahead and said doggedly, “I am not afraid and I will go in there after him.”

  Ezra Gurney, puzzled by the tension between them, asked, “Who are the Watchers?”

  “They have been dead for ages,” Curt said slowly. “But long ago they penetrated the Birthplace and conquered its secret and set up instruments to wield its powers. It’s why we have come. Garrand must not use those instruments.”

  “Nobody must use them,” said Simon. Curt said nothing to that.

  Gurney, looking ahead, saw the black cloud widening out across the starry universe like a great tide of doom, steadily blotting out the stars. A fitting cosmic shroud for the greatest of cosmic secrets, he thought. Its fringes engulfed bright stars that shone wanly through the dimness like dying eyes.

  “This dust,” said Simon, “is newborn matter, spawned by the Birthplace and pumped outward by pressure of radiation to flow out to the whole universe.”

  “And the—the secret itself—is inside?”

  “Yes.”

  There was no moment when the Comet plunged suddenly within the cloud. Rather the dust thickened steadily until all about the flying ship was a deepening haze, deepest and darkest ahead but drawing more and more veils behind them so that the stars back there shone like smothered witch-fires.

  The ship began to tremble as it encountered flowing spatial currents of denser dust. Struts and girders protested with slight creakings and then more loudly. They strapped into the recoil-chairs at Curt’s orders.

  “Here it comes,” said Grag in loud complaint. “I remember last time almost every bone in my body was broken.”

  Otho laughed. He started a caustic retort but had no time to voice it.

  To Gurney the Comet seemed suddenly to have crashed. The tell-tales on the panel went crazy and the recoil-chairs screamed in outrage as the ship was batted through the haze by unseen giant hands.

  There was nothing they could do but hang on. There was nothing even for Curt to do. The automatic pilot and stabilizers had to do it all now or they were finished.

  The mechanisms functioned staunchly. Again and again they snatched the buffeted little ship out of raging eddies of dust-currents and hurled it forward again. Now the whole hull was creaking and groaning from constantly changing stresses and the hiss of dust against its plates became a rising and falling roar.

  Ezra Gurney felt a quaking dread. He had already seen too much, had come too far. Now he felt that a universe become sentient and hostile was wrathfully repelling them from its hidden heart, from its supreme secret.

  The Comet fought forward, relentlessly impelled by its own mechanical brains, until the dust began to thin. It tore onward, still buffeted by swirling currents and drenched by radiation. And now, ahead, Ezra saw a vast hazy space inside the denser blackness of the cloud. And far away in this inner space, looming in vague gigantic splendor…

  “Good God!” said Ezra Gurney and it was a prayer. “Then that—that…” Curt Newton’s eyes were alight with a strange glow. “Yes—the Birthplace.”

  The hazy space within the denser cloud was vast. And at its center bulked and gleamed and shifted an enigmatic glory—a colossal spinning spiral of white radiance. Its whirling arms spanned millions of miles and it uttered cosmic lightnings of radiation that lanced out through the haze.

  Beating heart of the universe, fiery womb that spawned the stuff of worlds, awesome epicenter of cosmos! Cloaked and shrouded by the dense black cloud of its own making, safe behind its ramparts of terrible whirlpools and the wild tide-runs of untamed matter fresh from creation, it flamed across its millions of miles of space, shaped like a spiral nebula, spinning, whirling, sending forth its seed to the farthest corners of the galaxy.

  And to Ezra Gurney, cowering in his seat and staring at that far-off misty glory, it seemed that the eyes of men were not meant to see nor their minds to comprehend this shining Birthplace. “Surely,” he whispered, “surely we’re not going into that!

  Curt Newton nodded. He had still that strange look in his eyes, a look almost mystic, as though he could see beyond the wonder and the glory of the Birthplace to its innermost secret heart and glimpse there t
he hidden laws by which it worked and carried out its destiny.

  “Yes,” said Curt, “we’re going in.” He leaned forward over the controls, his face bathed in the misty radiance so that it seemed not his familiar face at all but the countenance of a being half godlike with the strange light flickering in his eyes.

  “You see how it is, Ezra?” he asked. “How it spins like a great centrifuge, sucking in the spent energy of Suns and whirling it in currents of incalculable strength until, in some utterly undreamable way, the energy coagulates into electrons and protons which are thrown off in never-ending streams from the rim of the vortex.

  “They form the shining haze that fills this hollow around the Birthplace. Then, farther out, they unite to form the atoms of cosmic dust. The pressure of radiation forces them on across the galaxy. And out of them new worlds are made.”

  Ezra Gurney shivered. He did not speak.

  “Curtis!” Simon’s voice was loud with a kind of warning and Curt Newton started, leaning back in his seat and turning again to the controls of the Comet. His face had tightened and his eyes were veiled.

  AND the ship sped on across that vast hollow in the heart of the dark cloud. And swift as its flight was it seemed only to creep slowly, slowly, toward the misty wheel of radiance. Pale witch-fires danced along its hull, growing brighter until the metal was enwrapped in veils of flame, tenuous, cold and having about them an eerie quality of life. The Comet was double-shielded against the radiation but even so Ezra Gurney could feel the echoes of that terrible force in his own flesh.

  The flaming arms of the Birthplace reached wider and wider across space. The radiance deepened, became a supernal brilliance that seared the flinching eyeballs. The ship began to be shaken now and again by subtle tremors as the farthest edges of out-thrown currents touched it and passed by.

  Ezra shut his teeth hard to keep from screaming. He had been driven once too close to the Sun and he had looked hard into the depths of the atomic furnace that was about to swallow him. He had not then known one tenth of the fear that he knew now.

  Slitting his eyes against the glare he could make out the central sphere from which the spiral arms curved out, a gigantic vortex of flaming force, the wheel-hub of the galaxy. The Comet was plunging straight toward it and there was nothing he could do to stop it, nothing…

  Curt sent the ship driving in between two of the sweeping arms. Tidal-waves, torrents of energy picked them up and flung them, a leaf in the cosmic millrace, toward the grip of a curving arm that burned and seethed with all the ultimate fires of hell. And Curt fought the controls and tore away again, heading in, heading in…

  The central sphere of force loomed up like a wall of flame higher than all the skies of space, and then they were in it.

  It was as though a million Suns had exploded. The force and fire took the Comet and whirled it tumbling away through a blind and terrible violence. Ezra sagged half-conscious in his seat and he thought that he had come a long, long way to die. No ship, no body, could live for long in this.

  The forces of the cosmic centrifuge would tear their substance, powder it to atoms and then still down into the fine raw stuff of atoms, send it out to join with the black dust, to begin the timeless pilgrimage across the empty spaces, to be built at last into the foundations of some new world to circle an alien Sun. Human, robot and android, they would all be one in the end.

  The Comet crashed suddenly clear of that hellish tempest of light and force into quiet space. Into a space enclosed by the spinning central sphere of the Birthplace itself, a calm at the very center of cosmic storm.

  Dazzled, half-stunned, Ezra heard Simon saying, “In here at the center is only one world—the world of the Watchers, where—”

  Curt Newton, leaning forward, interrupted with a strange low cry.

  “Simon, look! Look! There are other worlds here now—worlds and Suns and—” His voice seemed strangled by a surprise and terror too great for utterance.

  Ezra strained desperately to regain use of his dazzled eyes. As they began to clear he too peered tautly forward. At first what he saw did not seem so terrifying. Here, in the wide calm space at the heart of the Birthplace, there was a cluster of Suns and planets.

  Ruby Suns, flaring like new blood, green and white and somber smoky-gold Suns! Planets and moons that circled the changing Suns in sweeping trains, themselves ever changing! Comets that shot in living light between the worlds, meteor swarms rushing and wheeling, an astronomical phantasmagoria enclosed within this comparatively little space!

  “You said there were no worlds but one here,” Ezra began, bewildered.

  “There were none.” Curt’s face was deathly, and something in it struck at Ezra’s heart. “There were none but that little blue world—that alone.”

  Ezra glimpsed it at the center of the strange, close-packed cluster—a little blue planet that was a geometrically perfect sphere.

  “The powers of the Watchers are there—the instruments by which they could tap the Birthplace itself,” Curt was saying hoarsely. “And Garrand has been there with those instruments for days.”

  A comprehension so monstrous that his mind recoiled from it came to Ezra Gurney. “You mean that Garrand…”

  He could not finish, could not say it. It was not a thing that could be said in any sane universe.

  Curt Newton said it. “Garrand by tapping the Birthplace, has created the Suns and worlds and comets and meteors of that cluster. He has fallen victim to the old allurement, the strongest in the universe.”

  “As you almost fell victim once!” Simon Wright warned.

  “Can a man make worlds?” Ezra felt shaken and sick inside. “Curt, no—this thing—”

  “One who can harness the Birthplace can create at will!” Curt exclaimed. “And the instruments of the Watchers do harness it!”

  A kind of madness had come over him. Under his hands the Comet leaped forward at terrible speed. Ezra heard him talking, whether to the others or himself he never knew.

  “There is a balance of forces—always a balance! It cannot be tampered with too much. The Watchers left a warning, a plain and dreadful warning.”

  The ship rushed forward toward the distant small blue world, careening wildly through the unholy stars and worlds and comets whose creation had blasphemed against the natural universe.

  CHAPTER IV

  Power of the Watchers

  The blue world shimmered in the light of the monstrous aurora, a perfect jewel, with no height of mountain nor roughness of natural growth to mar its symmetry. Its surface showed a gloss that made Ezra think of porcelain or the deep gleam of polished lapis.

  “The Watchers made it long ago,” said Curt. “They made it out of the forces of the Birthplace and it was their outpost in this universe, where they studied the secrets of creation. There exists a city…”

  The Comet sped low across the curving plain. For a time there was nothing but the blank expanse of blue—what was it, glass or rock or jewel-stone or some substance new in the universe? Above them the little suns with their planets wheeled and shone, laced about with the fire of comets, and above those again was the golden sky of the Birthplace. Curt’s face, bent forward toward the blue horizon, was intense and pale and somehow alien.

  “There it is!” cried Otho, and Curt nodded. Ahead there were the tips of slender spires flashing in the light and a gleam and glow of faceted surfaces that made a web of radiance like the aura sometimes seen in dreams. The spires lifted into graceful height, shaped themselves into the form of a city.

  Walls of the same translucent blue enclosed the towers and in the center, rising high above them all, there was a citadel, a cathedral-form as massive and as delicate as the castles that sometimes stand upon the tops of clouds on Earth. And it was dead, the blue and graceful city. The walls, the streets, the flying arches that spanned the upper levels of the towers, all were silent and deserted.

  “Garrand’s ship,” said Curt and Ezra saw it on the plain b
efore the city, an ugly dark intruder on this world that had not been made for men.

  Curt set the Comet down beside it. There was air on this planet, for the Watchers had been oxygen-breathers even though they were not human. The lock of Garrand’s ship stood open but there was no life nor movement that Curt could see.

  “It seems deserted,” he said, “but we’d better make sure.”

  Ezra roused himself. He went out with the others and somehow the mere act of moving and the possibility of facing a human and comprehensible danger was a relief, almost a pleasure. He walked beside Curt with Otho beyond him. Their boots slipped and rang on the glassy surface. Apart from that there was no sound. The city brooded and was still.

  They went through the open airlock into the other ship. There did not seem to be anything to fear, but they moved with the caution of long habit. Ezra found that he was waiting, hoping for action, for attack. He needed some escape valve for the terrors that had grown within him during this flight into the heart of the universe. But the narrow corridors were empty and nothing stirred behind the bulkhead doors.

  Then, in the main cabin, they found a man.

  He was sitting on the padded bench formed by the tops of the lockers along one wall. He did not move when they came in except to lift his head and look at them. He was a big man, of a breed that Ezra Gurney knew very well, having fought them all his life across the Solar System. But the hardness had go ne out of him now. The strong lines of his face had sagged and softened and his eyes held only hopelessness and fear. He had been drinking but he was not drunk.

  “You’re too late,” he said. “Way too late.”

  Curt went and stood before him. “You’re Herrick,” he said. “Are you alone?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Herrick. “I’m alone. There were Sperry and Forbin but they’re dead now.” Herrick had not shaved for some time. The black stubble on his jaw was flecked with white. He ran his hand across it and his fingers trembled. “I wouldn’t be here now,” he said, “but I couldn’t run the whirls alone. I couldn’t take this ship clear back to Earth alone. I couldn’t do anything but sit and wait.”