Outside, Beta was a mere smoldering splinter, taking one last desperate look at Lagash. The eastern horizon, in the direction of the city, was lost in Darkness, and the road from Saro to the Observatory was a dull-red line bordered on both sides by wooded tracts, the trees of which had somehow lost individuality and merged into a continuous shadowy mass.
But it was the highway itself that held attention, for along it there surged another, and infinitely menacing, shadowy mass.
Aton cried in a cracked voice, “The madmen from the city! They’ve come!”
“How long to totality?” demanded Sheerin.
“Fifteen minutes, but … but they’ll be here in five.”
“Never mind, keep the men working. We’ll hold them off. This place is built like a fortress. Aton, keep an eye on our young Cultist just for luck. Theremon, come with me.”
Sheerin was out the door, and Theremon was at his heels. The stairs stretched below them in tight, circular sweeps about the central shaft, fading into a dank and dreary grayness.
The first momentum of their rush had carried them fifty feet down, so that the dim, flickering yellow from the open door of the dome had disappeared and both above and below the same dusky shadow crushed in upon them.
Sheerin paused, and his pudgy hand clutched at his chest. His eyes bulged and his voice was a dry cough. “I can’t … breathe … Go down … yourself. Close all doors—”
Theremon took a few downward steps, then turned.
“Wait! Can you hold out a minute?” He was panting himself. The air passed in and out his lungs like so much molasses, and there was a little germ of screeching panic in his mind at the thought of making his way into the mysterious Darkness below by himself.
Theremon, after all, was afraid of the dark!
“Stay here,” he said. “I’ll be back in a second.” He dashed upward two steps at a time, heart pounding—not altogether from the exertion—tumbled into the dome and snatched a torch from its holder. It was foul-smelling, and the smoke smarted his eyes almost blind, but he clutched that torch as if he wanted to kiss it for joy, and its flame streamed backward as he hurtled down the stairs again.
Sheerin opened his eyes and moaned as Theremon bent over him. Theremon shook him roughly. “All right, get a hold on yourself. We’ve got light.”
He held the torch at tiptoe height and, propping the tottering psychologist by an elbow, made his way downward in the middle of the protecting circle of illumination.
The offices on the ground floor still possessed what light there was, and Theremon felt the horror about him relax.
“Here,” he said brusquely, and passed the torch to Sheerin. “You can hear them outside.”
And they could. Little scraps of hoarse, wordless shouts.
But Sheerin was right; the Observatory was built like a fortress.
Erected in the last century, when the neo-Gavottian style of architecture was at its ugly height, it had been designed for stability and durability rather than for beauty.
The windows were protected by the grillwork of inch-thick iron bars sunk deep into the concrete sills. The walls were solid masonry that an earthquake couldn’t have touched, and the main door was a huge oaken slab reinforced with iron. Theremon shot the bolts and they slid shut with a dull clang.
At the other end of the corridor, Sheerin cursed weakly. He pointed to the lock of the back door which had been neatly jimmied into uselessness.
“That must be how Latimer got in,” he said.
“Well, don’t stand there,” cried Theremon impatiently. “Help drag up the furniture—and keep that torch out of my eyes. The smoke’s killing me.”
He slammed the heavy table up against the door as he spoke, and in two minutes had built a barricade which made up for what it lacked in beauty and symmetry by the sheer inertia of its massiveness.
Somewhere, dimly, far off, they could hear the battering of naked fists upon the door; and the screams and yells from outside had a sort of half reality.
That mob had set off from Saro City with only two things in mind: the attainment of Cultist salvation by the destruction of the Observatory, and a maddening fear that all but paralyzed them. There was no time to think of ground cars, or of weapons, or of leadership, or even of organization. They made for the Observatory on foot and assaulted it with bare hands.
And now that they were there, the last flash of Beta, the last ruby-red drop of flame, flickered feebly over a humanity that had left only stark, universal fear!
Theremon groaned, “Let’s get back to the dome!”
In the dome, only Yimot, at the solarscope, had kept his place. The rest were clustered about the cameras, and Beenay was giving his instructions in a hoarse, strained voice.
“Get it straight, all of you. I’m snapping Beta just before totality and changing the plate. That will leave one of you to each camera. You all know about … about times of exposure—”
There was a breathless murmur of agreement.
Beenay passed a hand over his eyes. “Are the torches still burning? Never mind, I see them!” He was leaning hard against the back of a chair. “Now remember, don’t … don’t try to look for good shots. Don’t waste time trying to get t—two stars at a time in the scope field. One is enough. And … and if you feel yourself going, get away from the camera.”
At the door, Sheerin whispered to Theremon, “Take me to Aton. I don’t see him.”
The newsman did not answer immediately. The vague forms of the astronomers wavered and blurred, and the torches overhead had become only yellow splotches.
“It’s dark,” he whimpered.
Sheerin held out his hand. “Aton.” He stumbled forward. “Aton!”
Theremon stepped after and seized his arm. “Wait, I’ll take you.”
Somehow he made his way across the room. He closed his eyes against the Darkness and his mind against the chaos within it.
No one heard them or paid attention to them. Sheerin stumbled against the wall. “Aton!”
The psychologist felt shaking hands touching him, then withdrawing, a voice muttering, “Is that you, Sheerin?”
“Aton!” He strove to breathe normally. “Don’t worry about the mob. The place will hold them off.”
Latimer, the Cultist, rose to his feet, and his face twisted in desperation. His word was pledged, and to break it would mean placing his soul in mortal peril. Yet that word had been forced from him and had not been given freely. The Stars would come soon! He could not stand by and allow— And yet his word was pledged.
Beenay’s face was dimly flushed as it looked upward at Beta’s last ray, and Latimer, seeing him bend over his camera, made his decision. His nails cut the flesh of his palms as he tensed himself.
He staggered crazily as he started his rush. There was nothing before him but shadows; the very floor beneath his feet lacked substance. And then someone was upon him and he went down with clutching fingers at his throat.
He doubled his knee and drove it hard into his assailant. “Let me up or I’ll kill you.”
Theremon cried out sharply and muttered through a blinding haze of pain. “You double-crossing rat!”
The newsman seemed conscious of everything at once. He heard Beenay croak, “I’ve got it. At your cameras, men!” and then there was the strange awareness that the last thread of sunlight had thinned out and snapped.
Simultaneously he heard one last choking gasp from Beenay, and a queer little cry from Sheerin, a hysterical giggle that cut off in a rasp—and a sudden silence, a strange, deadly silence from outside.
And Latimer had gone limp in his loosening grasp. Theremon peered into the Cultist’s eyes and saw the blankness of them, staring upward, mirroring the feeble yellow of the torches. He saw the bubble of froth upon Latimer’s lips and heard the low animal whimper in Latimer’s throat.
With the slow fascination of fear, he lifted himself on one arm and turned his eyes toward
the blood-curdling blackness of the window.
Through it shone the Stars!
Not Earth’s feeble thirty-six hundred Stars visible to the eye; Lagash was in the center of a giant cluster. Thirty thousand mighty suns shone down in a soul-searing splendor that was more frighteningly cold in its awful indifference than the bitter wind that shivered across the cold, horribly bleak world.
Theremon staggered to his feet, his throat, constricting him to breathlessness, all the muscles of his body writhing in an intensity of terror and sheer fear beyond bearing. He was going mad and knew it, and somewhere deep inside a bit of sanity was screaming, struggling to fight off the hopeless flood of black terror. It was very horrible to go mad and know that you were going mad—to know that in a little minute you would be here physically and yet all the real essence would be dead and drowned in the black madness. For this was the Dark—the Dark and the Cold and the Doom. The bright walls of the universe were shattered and their awful black fragments were falling down to crush and squeeze and obliterate him.
He jostled someone crawling on hands and knees, but stumbled somehow over him. Hands groping at his tortured throat, he limped toward the flame of the torches that filled all his mad vision.
“Light!” he screamed.
Aton, somewhere, was crying, whimpering horribly like a terribly frightened child. “Stars—all the Stars—we didn’t know at all. We didn’t know anything. We thought six stars in a universe is something the Stars didn’t notice is Darkness forever and ever and ever and the walls are breaking in and we didn’t know we couldn’t know and anything—”
Someone clawed at the torch, and it fell and snuffed out. In the instant, the awful splendor of the indifferent Stars leaped nearer to them.
On the horizon outside the window, in the direction of Saro City, a crimson glow began growing, strengthening in brightness, that was not the glow of a sun.
The long night had come again.
A MATTER OF SIZE
Harry Bates
Here is the world seen through the eyes of an ant or a beetle, a world where the grass of your lawn becomes dense jungle growth, where the trickle of water in a gutter becomes an impassable torrent, where the casual footsteps of passers-by become blind instruments of complete obliteration. And in this world is a man who has become the size of an ant, but without the ant’s saving ignorance of the perils that beset his every movement. Still, even when reduced to an appalling miniature, man still possesses his ingenuity.
* * *
I
THOUGH his head was as stuffed with cotton, the details of the scene in his New York laboratory that night came back with insistent clearness. It was long past the turn of the clock, and he had been working for hours on a monograph on the Mutrantian Titans, which would establish indubitably the biological brotherhood of those colossi of Saturn’s Satellite Three with the genus Homo of Earth. He was deeply immersed, and the muted night murmurs of the great city around and below washed unheeded through his ears.
Then something, perhaps a slight motion, an extraneous noise, caused him to look up—and there, within the lamplight on the far side of his desk, stood the most amazing figure of a man that he, ethnologist though he was, had ever seen.
His visitor wore sandals and a loose-fitting blue robe. He stood ill at case, a slight, enigmatic smile on his face.
That man! He could see him now, as clear in every point as if he were present.
The head was massive, the cranium oval, and not one hair adorned its smooth and shining surface. Beneath the deep corrugations of the forehead the face sloped gently backward past a snub nose as far as the mouth, where it fell sharply away, leaving but the merest excuse of chin and lower jaw. The neck was long, the shoulders sloping; the whole apparition was grotesque. But he was not tempted to smile. No one could have looked into that man’s face and smiled. The eyes, large, light, and piercing, would have prevented that.
“You are Doctor Arthur Allison,” the man had said. “I’ve come a long way to see you.”
“You’re certainly not from Earth?” Allison said, gaping, stating the fact rather than asking it.
“No.”
“Then”—he could not restrain the question— “then, for Heaven’s sake tell me, are you sport or typical?”
The other smiled. “Always the scientist, I see! I am typical.”
Allison rose in amazement and went around the side of the desk. “But—but that can hardly be!” he exclaimed. “The solar system’s been pretty thoroughly explored, and no race such as yours has ever been discovered.”
The stranger’s smile faded. “That discovery has been reserved for you,” he said significantly. He paused. “May I come to the point of my visit?”
“Please do. I—I’m tremendously interested. Will you sit down?”
“Thank you—no. There is not much time.”
He locked the ethnologist with his eyes.
“I am the emissary of a people unknown to you,” he began. “Our abode lies within the solar system a reasonable distance away, and for sufficient reasons no uninvited man of your race has ever laid questioning eyes on it, and no man of your generation but you ever will. Our racial strain is cousin to yours, but our science and civilization are ahead by more than 40,000 years. Our powers exceed what might be your wildest imaginings. In terms of death, for instance, we could, in fourteen days, destroy every trace of crustal life on Earth and all her tributary planets; or we could, in that same space of time, reduce every single vertebrate to a state of impotent slavery.
“We would never do these things, however. We have neither the need nor the desire; we are not inhumane and not, of course, so stupid. Our self-determined developmental cycle will not bring us into intimate contact with you Earthmen for tens of thousands of years, and meanwhile we will remain as we are, aloof and inaccessible, happy within reason and practically self-sufficient.
“You note that I say ‘practically’. Once in every twenty-five years we invite one carefully chosen Earthman to do us a service. You, without knowing it, have ever since your graduation from college been our most promising candidate. We have had you under observation for seven years, have investigated your ancestors back for ten generations, and in heredity, manhood, intellect, and achievement you are all that we ask; so it is to you, alone of your generation, that I come now to offer this highest honor that could fall to a man of your time.
“I may not tell you what your service to us will be. You must trust me implicitly, obey me blindly. You will come to no danger or hurt. You must leave with me immediately, for a destination and by a route that will be kept secret from you. You will be gone four months. Those four months will be the high point of your intellectual, scientific, and, I might add, emotional life. Are you ready?”
“You make an extraordinary request!” the ethnologist said, when he found words.
“Ours is an extraordinary race,” was the instant answer.
“If I refuse?”
“I could use force, and you’d be just as valuable to us under coercion as without; but I won’t. You will not refuse. Not one of the men that has ever been approached has refused.”
“Has this ‘service’ anything to do with my specialty?”
The man’s eyes showed the faintest trace of amusement. “I may say yes,” he replied. “It is applied and very, very practical ethnology.”
“I shall be returned here without hindrance when this service is done?”
“Of course; and you may bring back with you all the knowledge of our science that you can absorb and retain.”
Allison considered a moment. He asked: “May I see your feet?”
The outworlder smiled. He sat on a chair and removed one sandal, exposing a foot such as no man on Earth had ever yet possessed. The big toe was very large, and was flanked by another only a little bit smaller. The three outer toes were vestigial. Here was the foot of the human race, thousan
ds of years in the future.
Allison’s eyes bulged. The knowledge there would be!
As if reading his mind the stranger said: “Your Mr. Wells said it long ago. ‘Think of the new knowledge!’ ”
The words were a light in Allison’s brain. He turned away. The stranger replaced the sandal and rose.
“Think of the new knowledge!” he repeated. The ethnologist turned to him. “What is your name?” he said.
The other smiled. “I am sometimes called Jones,” he replied.
And they were the last words that had been spoken. Allison remembered that he, too, had smiled; that he had spontaneously held out his hand in tacit acceptance; that as his palm touched the outworlder’s there had been a sharp sting as of a needle; and then all his senses had left him, and he sank down and down into oblivion.
For one and a half Earth hours Allison lay loggy on the immaculate white cot, only the changing expression of his opened eyes telling of the chaos within. Then slowly and by insensible degrees his delirium became more physical, and he strained at the broad cloth bands that held him down, tossed within their narrow confines, muttered gibberish in three languages.
A thousand horrific menaces disputed his long way up to a consciousness, each a nightmare shape spawned out of unknown frustrations in the abysmal unconscious. By twos and by threes he battled them—all the long dark arms, the fire eyes, the scale-skinned, and the amorphous, and those worse ones without name or substance which enveloped him with intangible oppression. It was most unfair, for no combat was ever decisive; always the shapes eluded him; and indeed they changed their identity as he faced them and were never twice the same.
Except three. Three there were that remained a little apart, but which came again and were always clear and undistorted. First was the outworldly stranger. Then the blue-eyed girl. And the last the interminable rows of doll faces, each a likeness of his own; each one himself.
Adventures in Time and Space Page 54
