Curt said, “Where’s Garrand?”
Herrick laughed. It was not pleasant laughter. “You know where he is. Go in and get him. Make him come out. That’s how Sperry and Forbin died, trying to make him. I don’t know why I’m alive myself. I don’t know if I want to be alive after what I’ve seen.”
HE GOT up. It was hard for him to rise, hard to stand. It was as though fear had eaten the bones away inside him, dissolved the strength from his muscles, leaving him only a hulk, a receptacle for terror. His eyes burned at them.
“You know me,” he said. “You know my kind. You can guess why I came with Garrand to get the secret of the Birthplace, what I was going to do with it afterward. I didn’t figure Garrand would get in my way. I needed his brains, all right, but there would come a time when I wouldn’t need them anymore.” He made a gesture, as of brushing away an insect with his hand. “As easy as that.” He began to laugh again and it was more weeping than laughter.
“Stop it!” said Curt and Herrick stopped quite obediently. He looked at Curt as though a thought had just come to him, creeping through the fear-webs that shrouded his brain.
“You can get me out of here,” he said. There was no threat in his voice, only pleading, the voice of a man caught in quicksand and crying for release. “It’s no use going after Garrand. He’ll die in there anyway. He won’t eat or sleep, he’s gone beyond those things, but whatever he thinks he is he’s human and he’ll die. Just go! Take me aboard your ship and go!”
“No,” said Curt.
Herrick sat down again on the bench. “No,” he whispered. “You wouldn’t. You’re as mad as he is.”
Simon said, “Curtis…”
He had remained in the shadowy background, listening, but now he came forward and spoke and Curt turned on him.
“No!” he said again. “I can’t go away and leave a madman there to play with the forces of the Birthplace till he dies!”
Simon was silent for a time and then he said slowly, “There is truth in what you say but only part of it. And I am sorry, Curtis—for I am no more proof against this madness than you. Even less, perhaps, than you.
“I shall stay out here with Grag to guard the ships and Herrick.” His lens-like eyes turned upon Ezra Gurney. “I think that you, of all of us, will resist the lure most strongly. You are like Herrick, a man of your hands—and Herrick, who came to steal the secret, felt only terror when he found it.”
He said no more but Ezra knew what he meant. Simon was giving Curt Newton into his hands to save him from some destruction which Ezra did not understand. There was a coldness around Ezra’s heart and a sickness in his belly and in his mind a great wish that he had never left Earth.
Curt said to Herrick, “Go to my ship and wait. When we leave you’ll go with us.” Herrick shook his head. His eyes lifted slowly to Curt Newton’s and dropped again. He said, “You’ll never leave.”
Ezra left the ship with Curt and Otho and he was sorry that Herrick had said those last three words.
They walked again across the ringing glassy plain, this time toward the city wall and the tall gateway that was in it. The leaves of the portal stood open and there was a look about them as though they had not been touched or closed for more ages than Ezra could think about. He and Otho passed through them, following Curt. Beyond, at a little distance, were two dark statues facing each other across the way. Ezra looked at them and caught his breath in sharply.
“The Watchers?” he whispered. “Where they like that? But what were they then?” Otho said, “They came from another universe. Simon thought they must have been liquescent from the formless structure of their bodies.”
Out of each amorphous figure stared two round yellow eyes, full of light from the glowing sky and uncannily lifelike. Ezra shuddered and hurried by, glancing as he did so at the strangely inscribed letters upon the bases of the statues. He assumed that that was the warning Curt had referred to and he did not want to enquire too closely into it.
“Go quietly,” Curt said. “Two men have already died here. We want to get as close to Garrand as we can before he kno ws we’re here.”
“Where is he?” demanded Ezra for the city was utterly dead and still. Curt pointed to the citadel.
“In there.”
They made their way as silently as they could along the blue translucent street. High above them the slender spires made soft bell-notes where the wind touched them and the crystal spans thrummed like muted harps. And the shimmering castle loomed close before them and the strange stars sparkled in the golden sky. Ezra Gurney was afraid.
There was a portal, tall and simply made, with an unknown symbol cut above it. They passed it, treading softly, and stood within a vast cathedral vault that soared upward until the tops of the walls were lost in a golden haze and Ezra realized that it was open to the sky.
The floor was of the same blue substance as the city and in the center of it, under the open vault, was a massive oblong block almost like a gigantic altar except that its top was set with hundreds of little, shining keys. Beside this block stood Garrand. He was not looking at it nor at the two men and the android who had entered. He was looking upward into that distant sky and through the opening Ezra could see the glittering of stars. Garrand was smiling.
Curt Newton walked out across the floor.
“Don’t came any closer,” said Garrand mildly. “Just where you are—that’s close enough.”
Curt stopped. Otho had begun to edge away along the curve of the wall very slowly, like a drifting shadow. Ezra stood a little behind Curt and to one side.
GARRAND turned toward them and for the first time Ezra saw his face quite clearly. Unshaven and deathly white, its cheeks and temples sunken with hunger and exhaustion, its eyes dark and burning, there was a beauty about it that had never been there before, something sublime and glorious and calm, as a sea is calm or a frozen river, with the potentials of destruction sleeping in it. And Ezra understood the danger that Simon had spoken of in regard to Curt. He understood now what the power that was here could do to a man.
“So, after all, you followed me,” Garrand said. “Well, it doesn’t matter now.” He stepped behind the block that was like an altar, so that it was between him and Curt.
Curt said quietly, “You must leave here, Garrand. You’ll have to leave some time, you know. You’re only human.”
‘“Am I?” Garrand laughed. His hand lightly caressed the bank of little shining keys. “Am I? I was once. I was a little physicist who thought adding to scientific knowledge supremely important and I stole and risked my life to come here for more knowledge.” His eyes lit up. “I came searching for a scientific secret and I found the source of godhead!”
“So now, because you’ve tampered with the Watcher’s powers and tapped the Birthplace, you’re a god?” Curt’s tone was ironic but Ezra could see the sweat standing out on his forehead.
Garrand took no offence. He was armored by an egocentric emotion so great that he merely smiled wearily and said, “You can go now—all of you. I dislike chattering. I dislike it so much that I will quite willingly call destruction in here to engulf you unless you go.”
His fingers had ceased straying, had come to rest on certain keys. Ezra Gurney felt a slow freezing of his flesh. He whispered hoarsely, “You’ll have to kill him, Curt.”
He knew the swiftness with which Newton could draw and fire the weapon at his belt. But Curt made no move.
“Can I fire into that bank of controls?” Curt muttered. “Otho’s speed is our only chance.”
He flung up his hand, his fingers crooked. He said loudly, “Garrand, I warn you—”
His gesture had been both a feint to draw attention, a signal. A signal that sent Otho lunging toward the oblong altar.
The phenomenal swiftness of the android, the reaction speed of nerves and muscles that were not human, made Otho’s movement almost blurring to the eye. But Garrand saw and with a low cry he pressed the keys.
T
o Ezra, in the next moment, the air around them seemed suddenly charged with power. The golden haze spun about him, darkened, thickened, all in a heartbeat. He felt the imminent materialization of an agency of destruction drawn from the great matrix of force about them.
He glimpsed through the thickening haze Otho pulling Garrand back from the altar. He saw Curt leaping in, his face desperate and raising the depressed keys.
And Ezra felt the half-materialized shadowy force around him melting back into nothingness. “What—” he stammered, still standing frozen.
“Death,” said Curt. “As to the form of it who knows but Garrand? Anyway, it’s over now.” His voice was unsteady and his hands shook on the keys. He looked down. Garrand had gone limp in Otho’s arms. Ezra thought at first that he was dead and then he saw the shallow breathing, the faint twitching of the mouth.
“Hunger and exhaustion,” said Curt. “Strain. He was already at the end of his rope. Get him back to the ship, Otho, and have Simon take care of him.”
Otho lifted the unconscious man without effort but he did not yet move away. “Aren’t you coming, Curt?”
“Not yet.” He glanced upward through the opening at the brilliant stars that swarmed where no stars ought to be. “I can’t leave this imbalance at the heart of the Birthplace. The Watchers were careful about that. They built their one small planet at the exact center of stress, where it wouldn’t upset anything. But those creations of Garrand’s—I don’t dare leave them here, Otho.”
Still Otho did not move and Curt said, “Go on, Otho. Garrand needs help.”
SLOWLY and reluctantly the android turned and as he did so he looked at Ezra, a look of warning, a pleading look. Then, he went out, carrying Garrand.
Curt Newton bent over the keys. “I haven’t forgotten,” he whispered to himself. “How could anyone ever forget?” He touched the gleaming keys, not pressing them, just touching them lightly and feeling the power that was in them, the unimaginable control of matter.
Ezra said hoarsely, “What are you going to do?”
Curt looked upward to where the little suns swam in the golden haze, the little suns that could create havoc in this cosmic womb where only the seed of matter belonged.
“Watch,” he said. “I am going to dissolve what Garrand created.”
Ezra watched. Slowly, carefully, Curt pressed a certain pattern on the keys and around a ruby star waves and bands of golden force began to flicker like faint auroras. They grew and strengthened and became streams of raw electrons, pouring their substance into the little Sun.
Ezra shielded his eyes, but not soon enough. The star had become a nova, but without the second, the collapsed stage of novas. The fury of electronic force launched upon it from outside in this universal vortex of such forces had swept away each fragment of the exploding atoms to return them to the parent cloud.
The ruby star had ceased to exist and its worlds had vanished with it.
Swifter now, more surely, Curt’s hands flashed across the keys. And Ezra Gurney cowered beside the altar, blinded, stunned, shaken by the savage explosions of far-distant matter, riven and burst apart.
How long he crouched there while the great lights flared in the sky and the cosmic hammers beat he never knew. But there came a time when everything was still and he looked up and saw Curt standing there with his hands motionless on the keys and his head strained back so that he could search the farthest reaches of the sky.
He spoke and Curt did not answer. He touched him and spoke again, and it was like speaking to a statue except that under his fingers he could feel the subtle tremors of Curt’s hard flesh, the taut quivering.
“Curt!” he cried out. And Curt very slowly lowered his head and looked at him with a kind of amazement in his eyes, as though he had forgotten Ezra Gurney.
“Is it finished, Curt?”
“Yes. It’s finished.”
“Then come away.”
Newton’s gaze, the unfamiliar gaze that did not see small things like men but looked on larger distances, slipped away to the banks of keys and upward to the sky again.
“In a moment,” he said. “In just a moment.”
Two red bars burned across the bones of his cheeks and the rest of his face was like marble. Ezra saw in it the beginning of the exaltation, the terrible beauty that had marked the face of Garrand. Curt smiled and the sinews of his hands moved delicately as he stroked his fingers across the keys.
“The worlds that I could make,” he whispered. “Garrand was only a little man. I could create things he never dreamed of.”
“Curt!” cried Ezra in a panic. “Come away!” But his voice was swallowed up in dreams and Curt whispered very softly, “I wouldn’t keep them. I would dissolve them afterward. But I could create…”
His fingers were forming a pattern on the keys. Ezra looked down at his gnarled old hands and knew that they were not strong enough. He looked at his gun and knew that he could not use it in any way. Searching desperately for a way to pierce through the dreams he cried, “Could you create another Earth?”
For awhile he was not sure that Curt had heard him, not sure but that he was beyond hearing. Then a vaguely startled look came into Curt’s eyes and he said, “What?”
“Could you create another Earth, Curt? Could you put the mountains and the seas together and build the cities and fill them with men and women and the voices of children? Could you create another Otho or Grag or Simon?”
Curt slowly looked down at his fingers, curved and hungry on the waiting keys, and a kind of horror flashed across his face. He snatched his hands away and spun around, turning his back to the altar. He looked sick, and shamed, but the dreams were no longer shadowing his face, and Ezra began to breathe again.
“Thanks, Ezra,” he said hoarsely. “Now let’s go. Let’s go, while I can.”
THE black cloud lay behind them and the Comet fled away from it like a frightened thing, back through the great blazing clusters of Suns that had now no terrors for them. Curt Newton sat silently at the controls and his face was so brooding that Ezra Gurney did not venture to speak.
Ezra looked ahead because he did not want to look back into the main cabin. He knew that what Simon was doing there was perfectly harmless and utterly necessary but there was something so uncanny about it that he did not want to see it being done.
He had looked in once and seen Simon hovering over the strange projector that Grag and Otho had rigged above the heads of the drugged unconscious Garrand and Herrick. He had come away from there quickly.
He sat unspeaking beside Curt, watching the great clusters wheel slowly past them until at last Simon Wright came gliding into the control-room.
“It is done,” said Simon. “Garrand and Herrick will not wake for many hours. When they do they won’t remember.”
Curt looked at him. “You’re sure that you expunged every memory of the Birthplace?”
“Absolutely sure. I used the scanner to block every memory-path on that subject—and checked by questioning them hypnotically. They know nothing of the Birthplace. You’ll have to have a story ready for them.”
Curt nodded. “We picked them up out here in deep space when their ship cracked up in cosmic ray research. That fits the circumstances—they’ll never doubt it.” Ezra shivered a little. Even now the blocking of part of a man’s memories, the taking away forever of a bit of his experience, seemed an eerie thing to do.
Curt Newton saw his shiver and understood it. He said, “It doesn’t harm them, Ezra—and it’s necessary.”
“Very necessary, if the secret of the Birthplace is not to get out again,” said Simon.
There was a little silence among them and the ship crawled on and on through the cosmic glare and gloom. Ezra saw that the somber shadow on Newton’s face deepened as he looked out through the wilderness of Suns and nebulae toward the far, far spark of Sol.
“But someday,” Curt said slowly, “someday not too far in the future, many men will be pushing out th
rough these spaces. They’ll find the Birthplace sooner or later. And then what?”
Simon said, “We will not be here when that happens.”
“But they’ll do it. And what will happen when they do?”
Simon had no answer for that nor had Ezra Gurney. And Curt spoke again, his voice heavy with foreboding.
“I have sometimes thought that life, human life, intelligent life, is merely a deadly agent by which a stellar system achieves its own doom in a cosmic cycle far vaster and stranger than anyone has dreamed. For see—stars and planets are born from primal nothingness and they cool and the cooling worlds spawn life and life grows to ever higher levels of intelligence and power until…”
There was an ironical twist to Curt’s lips as he paused and then went on “…until the life of that world becomes intelligent enough to tap the energies of the cosmos! When that happens is it inevitable that fallible mortals should use those energies so disastrously that they finally destroy their own worlds and stars? Are life and intelligence merely a lethal seed planted in each universe, a seed that must inevitably destroy that universe?”
Simon said slowly, “That is a terrible thought, Curtis. But I deny its inevitability. Long ago the Watchers found the Birthplace, yet they did not try to use its powers.”
“We are not like the Watchers, we men,” Curt said bitterly. “You saw what it did to Garrand and to me.”
“I know,” said Simon. “But perhaps men will be as wise as the Watchers were by the time they find the Birthplace. Perhaps they too will then be powerful enough to renounce power. We can only hope.”
CORRIDORS OF THE STARS
If the shadow trailing him was danger, Vance Evers wanted to know it now. He stood, the hand in his pocket clutching the sweaty hilt of his gun, and peered back along the street.
The Edmond Hamilton Megapack: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales Page 66
