The Godmen

by Edmond Hamilton

  He was sweating visibly. So was Garcia, but more neatly, refraining somehow from staining his tunic collar. Harlow said, “Give me the outside speaker. Fast."

  He strapped himself into his own recoil chair while Garcia flipped switches and made connections on the communic board. He too watched the screen. He could see the scars of combat on the barrel of the ram, the histories of old battles written in the chips and cracks in the stone warhead. He could see the faces of the Ktashans, quite clearly. They were the faces of fanatics, uniform across the galaxy no matter where you found them. The men who knew they were right, the men without mercy.

  Garcia handed him the mike. “Here.” He looked at the great red head of the ram and folded himself as small as he could in the confines of his chair, as though he wanted to compact his atomic structure as solid as possible against the coming shock.

  Harlow roared into the mike. Amplifiers picked up his voice and magnified it a thousand-fold and hurled it forth from the ship's exterior speaker system.

  "N'Kann!” he cried. “Get your men out of there. We're taking off.” In the screen he could see the startled faces upturned toward the gigantic sound of his voice, the bodies arrested in motion. “We're taking off! Run, or you die. N'Kann, you hear me? Leave the ram and run!"

  Kwolek turned from the intercom and said, “All ready."

  Harlow stared at the screen. Some of the Ktashans had turned to run. Others still stood undecided. Still others, the hard core of violence, shouted and waved their arms toward the ship, urging on the ram.

  Harlow groaned. “The fools,” he said. “I don't want to kill them. I can't—"

  The ram inched ponderously forward.

  "Get away!” he yelled at them with a note of desperation, and touched a stud on the central control board.

  The Thetis quivered and began to hum to herself, a deep bass note of anticipation.

  The ram stopped. The men stood by it, staring up. Behind them the larger crowd was melting away, slowly at first and then with increasing speed.

  Harlow touched the stud again, advancing it a notch. The hum became a growling, a wordless song. The Thetis gathered herself for the upward leap, “Get away!” screamed Harlow into the mike, but his voice was almost drowned in the iron voice of the ship, and then suddenly the men turned from the ram and fled away across the plain.

  Harlow set his teeth and slammed the firing key all the way down.

  * * *

  The Thetis went up in a great wobbling surge, like a bird with an injured wing. But she was an awfully big bird, and terribly strong, and the violence of her thrashings about nearly snapped the eye-teeth out of Harlow's head. He fought through a deepening haze to keep her from flopping over out of the control of her gyros and crashing back to the ground, feeling the contents of his skull wash back and forth like water in a swinging kettle, feeling the straps cut into him when he went forward and the bolts of the chair prod him through all the padding when he was flung back, hearing strange rasping grunting whistling noises that he knew was himself trying to breathe. The control panel dimmed and at last disappeared beyond the red mist that filled the cabin, or his own head. His pawings at the keys became blind and unsure. Panic swept over him. I'm blacking out, he thought, I can't hold her, she's going down. He tried to scream, in anger and protest against this sudden end, in fear and regret. The contraction of his diaphragm forced blood into his head and held it there for a moment, and the mists cleared a little and the wild gyrations of his insides steadied down just enough for him to get hold of reality, if only by its thinnest edge.

  He hung on, forcing himself to breathe deeply, slowly. One. Two. Three. The indicator lights winked peacefully on the board. The furious thrashings of the unbalanced drive had settled to a sort of regular lurch-and-spin no worse than that of a ship in a beam sea. The Thetis was in space. She was not going to crash.

  He looked around at Kwolek and Garcia. Both of them were bleeding at the nose — he found that he was too — and their eyes were reddened and bulging, but they managed to grin back at him.

  "That's a devil of a way to treat a good ship,” croaked Kwolek. “If I ever get hold of that Taggart—"

  "You and me both,” said Harlow. “Let's get that tube fixed."

  Kwolek was already unstrapping. He went staggering out of the control room. Harlow gave the controls to Garcia and staggered after him, heading toward his own quarters.

  He found Yrra almost unconscious in the bunk, her flesh already showing some cruel bruises from the straps. He unbuckled them and wetted a towel in cold water, and wiped her face, smoothing the thick tumbled hair back from her forehead. Presently she opened her eyes and looked up at him, and he smiled.

  "It's all right now,” he said. “Everything's all right."

  She whispered, “Brai?"

  "We're going after him. We'll get him back."

  "From the world of the Vorn.” She was silent a moment, her gaze moving about the unfamiliar cabin. The tiny viewport was open. She looked through it at her first view of deep space, the stars burning all naked and glorious in their immensities of gloom, and Harlow saw the thrill of awe and terror go through her. Her fingers tightened on his wrist, and they were cold.

  "On my own world I was not afraid of the Vorn,” she whispered. “I laughed at N'Kann and the old men. But now—” She stared out the viewport. “Now I am in the country of the Vorn, and I am afraid.” She turned suddenly and buried her face against him like a child. “I am afraid!"

  Harlow looked over the top of her head to the viewport. The country of the Vorn. The black and tideless sea through which they voyaged at will between the island stars. Harlow had never been afraid of the Vorn, either. He had hardly believed in their existence. But now, when he looked at space and thought of the brooding Horsehead and the two blue suns that burned in its shadow, he felt a cold prickling chill run down his spine.

  Dundonald had gone that way and he had not come back.

  * * *

  That prickling of fear did not leave Harlow in the long days that followed — arbitrary “days” marked out of the timeless night through which the Thetis fled. With the damaged tube replaced, she built up velocities rapidly on a course that took her straight toward the Horsehead. There was no sign of Taggart's Sunfire on the radar. He was too far ahead for that. In fact, he was so far ahead that there was no hope of overtaking him or forestalling any action he might take on the world of the Vorn, which he would reach long before Harlow. Any sensible man would have said the pursuit was hopeless, but the men of the Thetis were not sensible. If they had been they would never have signed up with Survey. Also, they were angry. They had been made fools of, and they had almost died of their foolishness, and now they were determined to catch up with Taggart if it took them the rest of their lives.

  Which might not be very long, Harlow thought. He looked gloomily at the screen that showed the panorama of space ahead of the Thetis. It was one of the most magnificent sights in the galaxy. You sat stunned and wordless before it, and no matter how often or how long you stared at it the wonder and the glory did not depart. There was the whole vast canvas of the universe for a backdrop, and all across it, arrogant, coal-black, and light-years vast, the Horsehead reared against a bursting blaze of suns. Magnificent, yes. Splendid and beautiful, yes. But there was another word that came to Harlow's mind, an old word not much used any more. The, word was sinister.

  Yrra spent as much time as she could with him in the control room, watching the screen, straining her eyes for some glimpse of the ship that carried her brother. Harlow noticed that the Horsehead had the same effect on her. There was a sign she made toward it, furtive and quick as though she were ashamed of it, and he knew that it was a Ktashan sign to ward off evil.

  For a long time the relative positions of the tiny ship and the great black nebula seemed not to change. Then gradually the blazing fringe of stars passed off the screen and the blackness grew and swallowed the whole viewfield, lost its shape,
and then finally produced a defined edge outlined against the light of distant suns, and eventually that black coast-like showed the marker-lights of two blue sullen stars.

  The Thetis decelerated and felt her way between the beacon suns.

  Beyond them was a bay, a bight in that incredible coastline. And now fear really caught the men of the Thetis—a fear much greater than any they might have felt for the deeds of men or the legendary Vorn. This was something absolutely elemental, and it had to do with the terror of darkness and alienage and unhuman might that go back to the beginnings of the race.

  None of them had ever been near a black nebula before. They were deathtraps, blind areas where radar was useless, where a ship was helpless to protect herself against drifting stellar debris, where you might ram yourself full on into a drowned dark star before you ever knew it was there. Now they were creeping antlike into the very flanks of the Horsehead. The bay was relatively narrow, and it wound and twisted around great shoulders of blackness, past upflung cliffs of dust that lifted a million miles to crests that blazed with the fires of hidden stars, over crevasses that plunged a million miles to break in a ragged cleft through which stars showed as faint and distant as those of Earth on a cloudy night. Everywhere you looked, up, down, ahead or on both sides, those incredibly vast clouds enclosed you in their eternal blackness, like the shrouding draperies of a funeral couch made ready for some god.

  Kwolek shook his head. “For God's sake,” he said. “If the Vorn lived in here, no wonder they found a way to conquer space. They had to!"

  The Thetis crept on and on in that nighted cleft, and presently there was light ahead, the blaze of a green sun that touched the looming clouds around it with a lurid glow.

  They crept closer and saw a planet.

  "That must be it,” said Garcia. “The world of the Vorn."

  "If there's anything in the Ktashan legends,” said Harlow. “Anyway, it's the world where Dundonald went, and where Taggart is. We're going to have to be damned careful going in—"

  Yrra, who was sitting at the back of the control room, suddenly made a small sound of exhaled breath.

  It was a very curious sound, suggesting a fear too great for mere screaming. Harlow's skin turned cold as though from a sluice of ice water. He turned his head. He saw Kwolek and Garcia, both frozen, staring at something still behind him. He saw Yrra. A sickness grew in him, a fatal feeling that something totally beyond human experience as he knew it was already confronting him. He continued to turn, slowly, until he could see.

  He was not wrong. From out of the blackness of the Horsehead and the fire of an alien star, silently, with no need for clumsy armor or the sealing of locks, something had come to join them in the ship.

  Yrra whispered a word. She whispered it so faintly that under ordinary conditions he might not have heard it, but now it rang in his ears with a sound like the last trump. She said:

  "The Vorn!"

  CHAPTER V

  There was nothing monstrous or terrible about the Vorn as far as looks went — no crude grotesqueries to shock the eye. It hung in the still air of the cabin, a patch of radiance like a star-cloud seen from far off so that the individual points of light are no more than infinitesimal sparks. The Vorn's component motes seemed at first to be motionless and constant, but as Harlow stared he became aware of a rippling, a fluctuation of intensity that was as regular and natural as breathing, and this was the crowning touch that turned his blood to ice. The thing was alive. Creature and force and flame, as the legends said, not human but living, thinking, sensing, watching.

  Watching him. This unhuman voyager between the stars, watching him and pondering his fate.

  Kwolek had picked up something and was holding it with his arm drawn back for a throw, but he was just holding it. Garcia just sat. His lips were moving, as though he prayed hastily under his breath. Yrra slid very slowly and quietly onto the floor in an attitude of abasement.

  Harlow spoke. Some automatic reflex set his tongue in motion, and words came off it, sounding so stiff and ridiculous that he was ashamed, but he could not think of any others. These words came easy, straight out of the Manual. He had said them many times before.

  "We belong to the Star Survey. We are on a peaceful mission. We have come to your world—"

  Knock it off, Mark!

  Harlow knocked it off in midbreath. He stared at Garcia and Kwolek. Neither one of them had opened his mouth.

  Yet somebody had spoken. Kwolek started violently. “Who said that?"

  "Nobody said anything,” Garcia whispered.

  "They did, too. They said, ‘Kwolek, put down that silly lump of iron before you get a cramp in your shoulder'."

  "You're crazy,” said Garcia quietly, and seemed to go back to his praying.

  "Mark,” said the voice again to Harlow, “I seem very strange and frightening to you but that is only because you don't yet understand the scientific principles that make this changed form of mine possible. My atoms are in different order from that in which you last saw them, but I'm otherwise quite the same. Well, no. Not quite. But near enough so that I can truthfully say that I'm still Dundonald."

  "Dundonald," said Harlow, staring at the patch of fluctuating radiance that hovered in the air before him. He added softly, “For God's sake!"

  Kwolek and Garcia turned their heads and looked at him. They spoke almost together.

  "Dundonald?"

  "You heard him,” Harlow muttered.

  "They didn't hear me at all,” the voice said to him. “Shake the cobwebs out of your head, man. You can't afford to be stupid now, you haven't the time. This is telepathy, Mark. I'm communicating with you direct because it's the only way I have now. Unfortunately I haven't the energy to communicate with all of you at once. Now listen. I've been waiting for you—"

  "What are you talking about?” Garcia said to Harlow. “What do you mean, Dundonald?"

  "You better take the time to tell them,” Harlow said to the patch of light. “I doubt if they'll believe me."

  He put his hands over his face and trembled quietly for a moment, trying to understand that his quest for Dundonald was ended, that this amorphous cloud of energy-motes was his friend, his drinking companion, the flesh-and-blood Dundonald with the strong hands and ruffled brownish hair and the bright blue eyes that were always looking past the familiar to the distant veiled shadows of the undiscovered.

  He could not believe it.

  "That doesn't matter,” said Dundonald's thought-voice in his mind. “Just accept it for the time being. What does matter is that Taggart is all ready for you. That ship of his carried heavy armaments. He has them set up, and the moment he catches your ship on his radar the missiles will fly. Then you'll be dead and I'll never get back, so please mind what I say."

  "You'll never get back?” repeated Harlow. “Back where?"

  "To the old me. Solidity. Taggert has the Converter. It's guarded night and day and I'd be killed on sight if I stepped through. So would any of the Vorn, I suppose, though none of them have for centuries. So—"

  "Wait,” said Harlow. “Just wait a minute. I'm trying to understand, but you've lost me. Converter?"

  "Of course, a converter. What did you think made us — me — like this?"

  "I don't know,” said Harlow numbly. “Just what is ‘like this'?"

  "Exactly as you see,” said Dundonald. The patch of radiance bunched up, swirled, then shifted so quickly that Harlow thought it was gone. “Matter into energy, only the ancient Vorn solved the problem of achieving the conversion without losing either intelligence or personality. The individual remains unchanged. Only his body is free of the limiting shackles of the flesh."

  The patch of radiance moved toward the iron bulkhead. It glided right through the solid iron, and then came dancing back again.

  "No more barriers. No more death. No wonder the Vorn lost interest in the old planet-bound life. I tell you, Mark, even in my brief term as one of them, I've seen done things — Ha
ve you any conception of what it is like to fly free as a bird between the stars, covering light-years at the flick of a thought, with no fear of anything? And not only the stars, Mark, but other galaxies. Time and distance are only words without meaning. The greatest secret ever discovered. Nothing so crude and clumsy as the transmission of matter, which would merely send you like a package from transmitter to receiver, leaving you as planetbound as ever. No, the Vorn developed a mechanism that gave them the real freedom of the universe."

  The radiance danced and floated, and Kwolek and Garcia and Yrra stared at it with naked fear, and the thoughts from it kept pouring into Harlow's mind and he did not think he could take any more. It was easy enough to talk of leaving off the shackles of flesh and wearing a body of pure energy, but it was too big for his brain to grasp as yet. He said, “Dundonald."

  "Yes?"

  "I'm Mark Harlow, remember? I'm just a guy from Earth. You spring this on me all at once, you expect me to—” He broke off, and then he clenched his hands and made himself go on again. He said, “Listen. I'm talking to a patch of light. And I get a thought in my mind that this light-patch says it's Dundonald, a man I knew. It's hard to take. You know?"

  Dundonald's thought came with a pitying quality in it. “Yes, Mark. I suppose it is."

  "All right.” Harlow felt sweat damp on his forehead, but he stared straight at the misty radiance and said, “Give it to me slow, then, will you?"

  "All right, Mark, I'll give it to you slow. But not too slow, please, for time is running out."

  Harlow asked, “You found the world of the Vorn from the legend Brai told you about?"

  "Yes."

  "You found the Vorn on it?"

  "No. No, Mark — the Vorn have been gone from that world for a long, long time. Ever since they found out how to change and become — like me. I found their dead cities, and I found the Converter. Not them."

  "The Converter that made you this way. What made you do it, Dundonald?"

  The answering thought was strong. “I had to. I had to try the thing, after I learned its secret. I went through. I was still like this — like the Vorn — when Taggart's ship came."