Stopping at some hot, dusty scene of operations, it was a constant occurrence that some one should speak worshippingly to him.
“Reckon youse almos’ as good as Jehovah, ain’t you, Mist’ Shelbey?” a young colored man at the readjustment station near Jackson, Mississippi, had said with ready awe as he was dying from an injury caused by the collapse of a scaffold. “Reckon I’m glad to go to glory for you, Mis’ Shelbey, if it do you any good.’’
All of which must have pleased the cold, practical part of Iszt, the unknown, the unseen. Yes, Iszt surely was pleased, for such devotion simplified the culmination of his purpose—simplified it at least up to a point.
Anne Winters was his frequent companion—Anne who had known his secret, and had lost her knowledge in the Lethe of a hidden and wondrous science of psychology. She’d try to keep up with Curt Shelbey in his hurried, super-human pace, and she’d look hurt and tired and rueful when she found she couldn’t. And she’d laugh and say that he was perfectly right in his haste—that nothing mattered now except getting the job done.
Could a super-being see and appreciate the irony and pathos of situations like these? Human faith, human toil and sweat and sorrow, against the background of black treachery? But what should a creature like Iszt care? Injustice? Perhaps. But then there was a far greater thing at stake—the preservation of the galaxy! The lives of little, primitive dabs of slime were surely a cheap price to pay.
Such should surely have been Iszt’s attitude, and in part it was. One view of him was that of an adventuring demigod. But there was another view, another personality, full of a deeper understanding and a greater kindliness. For Iszt was a tiny, fragile thing, fighting a solitary battle with forces gigantic, living on a world that was utterly alien, and removed by a tremendous distance from his native haunts. Scared. Slightly unlike the rest of his people.
Iszt went on with his job with only one minor change of plan; but that change clearly indicated that something out of line with duty was going on inside his brain.
Great metal rings were built around all the larger cities. Did Iszt mean to protect them in some way from what was to come? If so, there was grave doubt, indeed, as to the value of his efforts. He might save the cities, and the people within them, but what then? Earth with a two-hundred-yard depth of its crust stripped away, its oceans depleted, and its atmosphere permanently thinned and poisoned, would be a hell of slow, creeping hideous death! Nor did Iszt have any personal resources that would enable him to combat these conditions. He couldn’t rebuild a broken world, nor was there a world, suitable to mankind, within five light-years of distance. Anyway, of spaceships there never would be a sufficient quantity.
And so Iszt’s motive in the construction of the rings around the cities would have held certain elements of mystery to one who knew his true nature and the true purpose of his being on Earth.
THE WORK of building the readjustment stations went on. Two years of furious, aching effort that used up the major portion of the planet’s wealth, and brought accidental death to thousands of martyrs. And Curt Shelbey was the guiding star of it all.
Often, when he was supposed to be asleep at night, his intellect, in the body of Iszt, shielded by a special insulated integument of light weight material, crept from within the human robot, and sped on the magic wings of science to the buried, alien laboratory, which, now as always, was a secret.
There, alone in the silence, Iszt conversed across the void—and through the mysterious transdimensional passages of space—not only with his own kind, many light-years away, but also with other beings, as far, or farther distant.
Something fierce and restless inspired the brain and will of the tiny horror during those stolen hours. Flashing in a view-screen before him were many pictures, drawn from realms as strange as anything a man’s fancy could conjure. Worlds—tumbling worlds! Clouds glowing with the reflected colors of bizarre, gigantic suns! Pressure and vacuum thinness, cold and heat—all expressing unbelievably diverse environments.
Sinuous shapes with glinting eyes, and delicate nerve filaments of mushroom pallor. Pulpy blobs with no eyes at all, but possessing a vast wisdom. Gigantic, crystalline things of intellect incredible. Creatures that oozed up out of the thick, fetid substance of hot seas—seas that shimmered under the rays of a half dozen great, blue suns! In such varying shapes were cast the peoples of Nirvana.
Iszt talked with those scattered, mighty clans, not by means of words, but in the swifter, subtler, more universal language of the mind. That language was not telepathy, exactly, but something hyperdimensional—something depending on an unhuman sense that could grope through the hidden texture of space, and feel the thought currents in a brain. But for swift and possible communication across the light-years, the indescribable impulses on which this odd means of exchanging ideas depended, must be artificially amplified and quickened, until they could bridge interstellar abysses far, far faster than any vibration known to man. For this purpose, and for the purpose of bringing the pictures to his view-screen, Iszt employed an apparatus dimly comparable to a Terrestrial radio.
Always Iszt seemed to plead with his varied audiences, and to ask for the answers to his questions. But always he was met by apathy—the apathy of too much, and still, perhaps, not quite enough—wisdom. What he asked for demanded swift action, a change of viewpoint, and real effort and danger even to demigods. And the recompense— Try as he might, Iszt could not present it effectively to his listeners. The spanning of tremendous distances, and the immaterial gain of colossal, dangerous work, did not appeal to them. They had made no preparation, and haste, when it was not really needed, was beneath their dignity.
Iszt was not pleading primarily for Earth, but for something that Earth had helped teach him. His attitude must have been slowly growing in his mind for many years. But now, met by flat refusal and even threats of vengeance, Iszt was a little discouraged in his quest for understanding.
TO-DAY, beautiful and clear, was the day. Curt Shelbey was at the Winters lab, which had been much altered and enlarged. Around it ran a ring of bright metal. Everybody on the planet had been warned. The populace was gathered within the similar, though much larger, protecting rings of the cities. Each city had taken in a vast store of provisions.
Curt Shelbey looked out of a window toward the rising sun, and smiled a smile of cool confidence—a feeling which Iszt could not now have shared. With Curt were Anne and her father. No others.
The youthful man-shape clutched a great black switch, and moved it the few inches that were necessary. At once there was a faint thud, as an aura of cold, shielding fire sprang from the ring around the laboratory, and formed a bubblelike dome above it. Not until then was the major effect of the moving of the switch made evident. Fire rippled up the sides of the great readjustment station, bulging from a row of hills in the distance—dazzling, sparkling, incandescent fire. Then, like the thunder which follows a spurt of lightning, the crash came, thin and high and nerve-shattering. It was as though the crystal silence of the morning had been broken into a billion, glittering fragments.
Trees and grass broke into flame—the flame of real combustion, flame which was now ripped and torn upward by the force of strange, luminous gases, rising everywhere from the substance of the ground. Swiftly the sky was flooded with the ghostly, fluorescent glow of those gases, born of the dissolving soil and rocks of the Earth. Transmutation, it was, and the release again of atomic energy. But this transformation of matter into power was comparatively slow—at least as yet.
Over the entire land surface of the planet, it was going on, induced by the presence of those massive readjustment stations, which, like the protecting aurae of the cities, were all controlled from the Winters laboratory. To a lesser degree, since there were no stations there, the waters of the ocean were also being converted into gases and free energy. Ionized helium and hydrogen were among those gases.
Viewed from space, Earth would now have been seen to assume a stubby ta
il, like that of a comet—a tail which extended farther and farther out toward a point beyond Sirius, the Dog Star. It was gaseous in structure, but the substance that composed it was restrained from indefinite expansion by a tight web of force. And it was moving at an ever-mounting speed toward a transdimensional passage, which shortened enormously the distance it had to go to meet the gigantic dark star it was meant to resist and to help deflect.
By now, other force-bound gaseous masses were hurtling from other sources scattered throughout the galaxy—sources under the direct control of one race of super-beings or another, and involving no lesser people in the apparent certainty of destruction. Super-beings who had taken sure precautions that would neutralize any danger to themselves.
IN COMBINATION, these several hurtling clouds of gas were meant to, and were capable of, producing enough drag to create a tiny difference in the dark star’s velocity and direction. Even gas is capable of offering considerable resistance, and when tremendous stellar velocities are involved, that resistance is proportionally much greater. And in a thousand years, the minute change in the dark star’s course would naturally be magnified many fold, so that what seemed an inexorable collision with Sirius would not take place.
All, then, seemed quite according to plan. But there was one thing wrong. And the trouble was on Earth, which had been selected for use in this immense task because of its ideal location in the complex structure of space, and because its size and mass and composition were correct for the proper energy output needed for its position. The finger of gas, stabbing from Earth, was not accurately aimed. It wouldn’t touch the dark star at all!
Was it possible that Iszt had blundered? Considering his vast scientific erudition there was slight room for doubt here. Almost certainly he had not blundered!
But then—what was his purpose? To suppose that he would throw a galaxy into the teeth of fate to save one race for a few more centuries was hardly to be expected of him. And he must have known, too, that what he was doing must mean swift punishment.
But whatever his objective, his man-guise, Curt Shelbey, remained cool and assured. Curt watched the streaming, phosphorescent haze out there beyond the shielding envelope of force, and he watched the trembling heat waves. Already it must be hot enough out there to fuse lead. The vegetation was ablaze in fitful, gust-torn spurts. You could see the ground reddening with heat. And it was dissolving, too—dissolving as zinc immersed in sulphuric acid might have done—the substance of it hurtling away into space. Now the wind was rising—assuming cataclysmic proportions—seeming to swirl like a glowing vortex around the bulging shape of the great readjustment station that influenced all the ten thousand square miles around it—creating, in the atomic structure of the soil, the necessary instability.
The intellect that animated Curt Shelbey knew the truth that concerned all this giant undertaking, but his companions didn’t. Or were they beginning to suspect at last? Anne Winters’ fingers were on Curt’s arm, clutching and unclutching nervously. The scene out there, assuming fresh fury every moment, was scarcely reassuring. The flickering, white light from the holocaust of the readjustment station held an element of catastrophe beyond any danger that a human being at home on Earth might ever reasonably expect to meet. It lit up the faces of the three in the laboratory with its grotesque, trembling flashes, awoke weird gleams in the instruments and controls all around. Somehow there was in it a vivid suggestion of a moving, immeasurable universe, and of the efforts of little mortals to control that immeasurably grand movement.
“You’re a very strange person, Curt,” Anne murmured with apparent irrelevance. “Sometimes I think I know you, and sometimes—”
ISZT MUST HAVE remembered, then, other things that she had said—things expressing faith and hope. Did justice, as it is conceived on Earth, have any genuine meaning to him? Had his strange defiance been influenced in any way by the knowledge that the people of this planet had toiled to the utmost? Did he glimpse a little of the potentially glorious future of these, to him, hideous, primitive folk?
Curt Shelbey waited passively for evidences of realization in his companions.
At last Dr. Winters spoke. “Something’s wrong, Curt,” he said quietly. “Already every living plant out there has been destroyed. You couldn’t have planned that. We’d better open the switch.”
Curt Shelbey did not respond in words. But his arm came up to restrain as gently as possible the old savant’s forward step.
And something deep and human ached in the cold soul of Iszt, the demigod. Was it admiration for the courage and control of this odd creature that had befriended him? Did he see in him a quality which his own people had lost, and might find again? It was true that Iszt’s kind had both courage and control. But most of them did not—had never needed to—sacrifice their comfort and risk their lives for the attainment of an objective.
Curt Shelbey gave his companions no chance to speak further. He lifted a small box from his coat pocket, and pressed the switch it bore. A vapid something was ejected from fine holes at one end of the container—a vapid mystery created by an alien, hyperchemical science. The coiling threads of it were visible only to the eyes of Iszt, who could see ultraviolet light. The threads wandered quickly across the room.
Dr. Winters gave a low gasp, and crumpled to the floor. With a hurt look in her eyes, expressing thoughts of reproof which doubtless Iszt could sense in that miraculous way of his, Anne submitted a moment later to the same spell. The two of them were asleep—lost in the slumber of a kind of hibernation that could last for months. They scarcely breathed. Their pulses moved scarcely at all.
Iszt and his robot were unaffected. And he knew that almost coincident with his release of the sleep substance here, his automatons in all the cities had released much larger quantities of the same agent. The entire populace of Earth was now sinking into slumber. At least the dangers of panic, in the events to come, would thus be avoided.
Now the being from the depths of interstellar space was alone in the laboratory. From without, his auditory organs could detect only the mounting, unnatural scream of the wind. Streaming flame, the ground out there beyond the protecting force shield was red like hot iron, heated by the breakdown of matter. For two Terrestrial months the processes which Iszt had started must continue in order to be effective. What he did now depended on whether fortune favored him or not in his next move. Certainly he had already dared to do that which once he would have considered beyond the realm of sanity.
There seemed to be plenty of time. Nevertheless, Iszt hurried as if pursued by a devil, or inspired by something mighty—something so old that it was new.
CURT SHELBEY was now just a machine that did not trouble to act like a man. With swift efficiency it donned a massive, protecting armor. It ran out of the laboratory building. The momentary short-circuiting of a portion of the encircling ring of metal, accomplished with a curious, forklike device, allowed it a passage through the force shield. Thence it bounded on, in long, superhuman leaps of a dozen yards, at last making full use of the tremendous power latent within its artificial muscles.
The ground was soft and crumbly, half disintegrated. Invisible rays were shooting up from it—cosmic rays, X-rays, and radiations of the same kind as those of radium, though tremendously more intense. The heat, too, was terrific, though of it, and of the other manifestations, Iszt had no immediate fears, for he was amply protected. The armor his robot wore was immune to the disintegration processes, for in the materials from which it was made there was an atom-locking web of energy.
Through the shrieking, furnace-like gale he hurried on, covering miles in a few minutes’ time. Presently he reached the site of his own secret laboratory, over which there was also a shield of force, tenuous as a curtain of thin flame, but effective. The ring of metal that induced it had been built by his automatons, and was concealed several feet under ground.
Iszt negotiated this bubble of energy as he had negotiated the one which enveloped the Wint
ers laboratory. Within the shield there still were wilting bushes and scrub pines. The concealed entrance to the lab folded upward like a hatch.
Iszt passed below. Here robot mechanisms rested, inactive now, and here, beyond the crystal door, was the super-chilled chamber where Iszt could really be himself.
Iszt dismounted now from his robot and switched on his vision screen. His little black eyes gleamed feverishly as he waited. His leechlike body trembled with excitement. In his mind an ultimatum had formed itself.
And then he seemed to be face to face with a score of small, black baroques of his own kind. They were gathered in a great, crystalline tetrahedron, packed with massive machinery. Beyond its walls were visible huge meteoric masses that were practically miniature worlds floating in space. From them, extended tremendous streamers of hurtling gas.
Did Iszt’s purpose in desiring to communicate with his kinsfolk seem ridiculous to him now? And dangerous out of all proportion to its possible benefits? Perhaps so.
But this did not daunt him. He went on with his intentions, arguing and pleading as he had done before. And the impressions of stout refusal came back to him in reply, as he had expected.
After that, however, he did not plead. He demanded instead. He knew that his kind had not lost their mental keenness, or their capacity for action. But they had been inert through all their tremendously long lives—most of them. They had depended on a few individuals to accomplish the tasks beyond the normal capacities of their robots, while they lived in an ethereal world of beautiful, artificially created dreams.
Godson of Almarlu: A Collection of Science Fiction Novellas Page 24
