“No. I can only use words that you yourselves have used since you came to us ... We have listened to your words ... Now we understand some of them.”
“How could you listen to us?”
“Our eyes and ears have been with you much ...”
“The hermit crabs?”
“Yes. That is what you have called them. Now that you know what they are—what is your name for such a thing?” Arabin pondered. ‘That depends. What are these eyes and ears? Are they creatures of another kind? Do you learn from them?”
Karinga Varga spoke. “I do not think they are creatures of any kind. I have tried to see their minds, and they have no minds.”
The voice explained. ‘The man is right. They are not creatures. They are part of us. We can send them among you, but they are still part of us. Have you no such things?”
I think the creature must have read our minds, to some extent, for it immediately added: “I can see that these things are strange to you. Have you a name for them?”
Had we a name for something none of us had ever experienced? We thought about the question.
‘They may be externalised sensory organs,” I suggested. “Or they could- be called projections of the mind, I suppose. Spiritualists believe in something of the kind.”
The voice seemed thoughtful. ‘These are new thoughts,” it said. “I find difficulty in understanding them. New words . . . new thoughts. You must know that the things you call hermit crabs are part of us, however you explain them.”
“Call ’em E.S.O.s for short,” said Arabin, impatiently. “Externalised sensory organs is too much to say. They are Esoes, from now on.”
It was a conception that was hard to accept, this idea of the rolling hermit crabs being remote parts of some other organism, but accept it we must.
Arabin persisted with the questions he wished to ask. “How long are we to be here?” he demanded. “It is a great hardship for us to be imprisoned like this. We need to return to our own people. Tell us what we can do to help you ... if you need help . . . and send us back to our people.”
The voice was silent for a while, and then—“Your people have gone,” it said slowly. ‘They have taken their machine, and all—little grey ones, men, and mechanical things—have gone.”
VIII
The news that we were abandoned on Varang-Varang was the ultimate shock—the terrifying thought that each of us had thrust to the back of his mind until now.
The voice left us when it had given us this appalling news. It went suddenly, to the accompaniment of the detonation we now expected of it on arrival and departure.
We were left there in darkness for some long time, and we talked across the width of the great stone hall. With the coming of light, we got together and tried to formulate some plan.
In the first place, we had to have our freedom again. There was the remote chance that the voice was wrong—we found it hard to believe that it lied; its sincerity had seemed genuine. If our party, with the single Disc, had only returned to the rendezvous in space with the other four Discs, then we had hope. If all five had gone, then we were indeed deserted. But there was no means of knowing any of these things while we remained penned up in the great stone temple.
And so we determined to appeal to the unseen creature that had questioned us. We would, we decided, use our strongest arguments, promise anything, and bring all our concerted intellects to bear on the problem of gaining our release.
We worked out our campaign together, and as the light began to wane we varied our programme and grouped ourselves together in the middle of the hall, on one of the great polished stone tables that towered there.
By concentrating our slender forces there, we were as nearly as possible equidistant from each wall and the roof, so that wherever the creature made its entry, we were as near as possible to it. During the day we had tried to produce fire, by striking Karim’s boulder against the rock furnishings, and against the softer stone platters. But we had failed to strike one single spark. By no means that we could discover could we raise a light to be used in the darkness.
Hampered as we were by our lack of light and implements, we waited for darkness and, we hoped, the coming of the owner of the voice.
But again, we waited in vain. It was several days—we lost count of days and nights, even in a short period of time— before anything happened again.
And then, when we had waited one night almost until the coming of light, there was the expected dull report, and the voice was with us again. Once more, it came from the vaulted roof of the hall, and we looked up as it spoke.
“Your minds are troubled, men,” it boomed. “Why are your minds troubled? I wish to understand this.”
“Our minds are indeed troubled,” replied Arabin. “Our race must live with its own kind, and it is difficult for such as we are to exist apart from other men.”
The voice answered: “And yet you left your other men to come to this world...”
“But we were many together, and we were free,” said Arabin hotly. “Now we are in a prison from which we cannot escape. On our world, men who did wrong were once kept in prison. We have done no wrong. Why are we in this prison? We cannot harm you, and could perhaps help you if we were free.”
Again, silence. The creature must have been considering this, we felt sure.
Then it replied. “You cannot harm us. But—you might harm yourselves. There is much for us to learn from you, and we can learn in this manner, with you here, and us . . .”
It did not intend to tell us where it and its fellows were.
“But we have troubled minds,” said Arabin, seizing upon the note of concern he thought he had detected in the voice when it first spoke. “And men with troubled minds cannot think and act as well as men who are untroubled—and free. Let us talk with you in daylight, where we can talk freely, without the trouble in our minds that is holding us back now.”
“What you call daylight is intolerable to up,” came the reply. “Here, we have provided you with something like the thing you call ‘light’. But even that is something that cannot be borne by us. And here is something I cannot understand, for I can see you now, in what you call ‘darkness’, yet you cannot see me.”
“Now we do not understand,” called Arabin indignantly.
“How are we to be of service to you, imprisoned here? If we are able, we will close our minds to you—we will no longer talk with you—we will die here and you will not then learn what you want to learn.”
It was a long shot. But the pause that followed, the thoughtful breathing of the unseen creature, seemed to indicate that the shot had told.
After a time, there was a reply. “You shall see me then. But Karim—he who speaks of djinns—is not ready to see me. It would be better if he did not see... When you have seen me, you shall decide whether you will teach us that which we wish to know. We would prefer that you did not see us, but if it is your wish. . . Is it the wish of each of you?”
“It is,” said Arabin, without hesitation.
“Then. . .”
And the light gradually came. It was a dim light, and at first we had difficulty in discerning anything more than an indistinct shape overhead in the darkness of the high vaulted roof.
But after a few seconds, we saw.
Hovering above us, on flapping wings that stretched a full twenty feet across, was a great white batlike creature.
At first we left Karim where he had fallen, for we were almost as appalled as he had been.
We stood and gazed at the creature in the dim light. One moment it was there, and then—a report, and it had gone.
Meanwhile, the light continued to increase, and as we tended Karim, we all talked at once.
“It was a bat!” panted Arabin, “A talking bat . . .”
“But who ever saw a bat that size?” I protested. “This may have looked like a bat, but its intelligence is probably equal to our own.”
“Equal? A damn sight ahead of ours
!” insisted Leo. “Can we vanish with a bang like that? Can we see in the dark? Can we learn a foreign language in a matter of days? This thing, whatever it is, must be far in advance of us . . . And those externalised sensory organs—can we send our minds out like that? And yet.. . these creatures want something that we have. There’s something we know that they need to know. What do you suppose it could be?”
Karinga Varga spoke. “They seek something, Leo Arabin,” he said. “They have been left alone in this world of theirs, where once were other beings. That much I know, because the thing’s mind told me. They have been left alone here— it might be as a punishment. They have a sense of wickedness —not now, but in the past—for which they must atone. But what they seek, I cannot tell. I do not think that even they know.”
“You’re no doubt right, Karinga Varga,” said Arabin. “But that brings us no nearer to escaping from this place . . . Feeling better, Casimir?”
Karim shook himself, and then remembered what he had seen. He sat up and looked around him with a wail of terror.
“It was a djinn!” he whispered. “A veritable djinn!”
“God knows what it was, Karim, but it’s not harmed us yet. It could have hurt us at almost any time, but we’re safe so far. Courage, Karim! Djinn or no djinn, we’re still alive, and we have to get out of here somehow.”
With the coming of the light, we made more strenuous efforts to find a way out, but with little hope. We had seen that the bat-creature had left, not by any physical exit, but by what we could only think of as dematerialisation. We compared our own theories, and finally agreed upon one that, wild as it was, seemed to fit the case.
The noise of arrival and departure gave us a clue. It was similar, on a smaller scale, to a thunder clap. And a thunder clap, we seemed to remember, was caused by air rushing in to fill a vacuum. So we concluded that the bat had the power of removing itself from physical space, probably appearing somewhere else at the same time. We hated to believe something so much at variance with what we knew of Terrestrial physical laws, but could see no other solution.
One disturbing feature of our solution was the fact that although the bat might find it easy enough to get into and out of our prison in this manner, we could hardly hope to learn to do the same by the same methods.
It was Karinga Varga who gave us a new line of thought. He reminded us that we had sought a way out only when we had light to aid us. Darkness bad always driven us to what cover we could find. Considering the strange vagaries of light and darkness in that underground labyrinth, coupled with the inexplicable changes of conformation in the corridors and chambers, could it not be—he asked—that changes of shape and form only occurred in darkness?
We agreed that such changes had only occurred when we had not seen them occur, and Karinga Varga’s theory set us planning a search in the night.
“In that case,” I pointed out, “we must keep together. If such changes do occur in darkness, then we might each of us take a different way, and become separated with no hope of finding each other again.”
Finally, we planned to keep close together and to make a thorough search of the hall in the darkness. By now we had an accurate knowledge of its shape and proportions, and felt sure that darkness would be little obstacle to us. And as a test, three of us at a time, with our eyes closed, carried out little expeditions at the bidding of the fourth, who looked on and checked our progress.
We found, after several of these sorties, that we could almost guarantee to find our way round the complexities of the stone chamber and its furnishings, and that we could, moreover, tell by touch or sound the exact spot in which we found ourselves.
When darkness at last came, we waited for what we calculated to be an hour, and then set out on our weird mission. From our first step we felt that the design of the place seemed somehow different in the darkness.
Whatever incomprehensible changes occurred, they certainly occurred when there was no light, we found. We made a number of circuits of the place in the dark, and found that it had, indubitably, changed its shape. The changes were only slight, but we were sure that here at last we had a line to follow.
But, when light came again, our hall appeared exactly the same as it always had appeared to us. Slight changes of shape and design—as one instance, we could not find the webbed door in the dark—had reverted to their original form by light.
The next time when darkness fell, we thought, we would try again, and would compare any changes then, with changes we found this time.
Again it was Karinga Varga who guided our policy. “If the bat-man should come again,” he said, “he will see us—for he can see in what we call darkness—moving on our search. Then I shall try to see his mind. His thoughts may provide us with the key to whatever door there may be.”
Leo clapped him on the back. “The best idea we’ve had yet!” he declared. “But—do you think you can read this creature’s mind? Remember: this is a completely alien life-form, and its mode of thought may be alien even to you.”
The Virian bowed. “Leo Arabin, I can see the mind of any creature. Sometimes, the picture I see means nothing to me —as these stone figures now mean nothing to any of us— but always there is a picture, even if it is not complete or not understandable. The Vulcanids—I could sometimes see their thoughts. The little creatures on . . .” and here he gave the almost unpronounceable name for Ganymede "... I could see their thoughts very often. The darkness will help, too.”
And when darkness came, we searched again.
While we were searching it was with a thrill of joy that we heard the small thunder clap of the bat-creature returning.
Almost at once, Karinga Varga spoke out.
“Straight forward!” he cried. “There are no walls now! This is a prison made by the mind . . .”
We walked forward fast, and then even faster when we found that where there should have been a wall before us, there was nothing.
We hurried, hands outstretched before us, and overhead, we seemed to hear the flapping wings of the bat-man, followed soon by the sound of his vanishing.
The ground beneath us seemed more irregular. Our fingers, stretched out to the sides, lost contact with any surface.
There was a shout from Karim: “Stars!”
We were out in the open.
IX
Our feet trod a hard, gravelly surface. Overhead we saw the swinging lights of the Plough, and breathed a cold, sharp atmosphere that was at first discomforting after the closeness of the underground world we had left.
The stars glittered with a hard light in the thin air, and there was no moon, for Varang-Varang now had no satellite. But away on the horizon we saw a brightly shining pearl of a star that was new to us.
How far had we travelled through space with the runaway planet? And how long had we been on this world?
We were at first so overjoyed at our escape that we gave little thought to the manner of it. Since then, we have discussed it long and often. Still we have no explanation. We have theories and the one that best seems to fit the case implies that our underground prison—both in the tunnels and caves and in the rock temple—was largely a construction in the minds of the strange creatures who imprisoned us, and was projected into our minds. Terrestrial philosophers in the days when Earth thrived, and before its population was stripped off it by the thorium bomb, used to argue about the power of the mind to influence material things. Some there were who held that the mind could exercise an influence at a distance, but by far the most scoffed at this theory, which they disproved entirely and thoroughly, to their own satisfaction. But then, in those days so many contrary views were dogmatically proved and disproved to somebody’s satisfaction. We often wondered how the disprovers of the possibility of travelling through space would react to the situation in which we live today.
And so whether our underground prison was entirely a work of the bat-creatures’ minds and our own minds is left to some future race to decide. Perhaps wh
en humanity has built itself up to the standard it achieved in the Twentieth Century, and if it can avoid destroying itself again, some mind may be found, equipped to solve the problem.
Meanwhile, we were free once more, but where were we? The terrain around us was totally different from that on which we had first landed from the Nagani Disc. Then, we had found dust everywhere, with a featureless landscape, save for the intricate interweaving of land and sea. Now, we stood on hard pebbly ground, with mountains visible on the horizon.
We had but the barest memories of the lie of the land as we had seen it on the televisor screens of th Disc, and had no means of orienting ourselves. True, we had not seen anything like the full picture of Varang-Varang’s surface from the Disc, but what we had seen had shown us no mountains.
We could only assume that we had now come to the surface of the planet at a point which the televisors had not covered.
How far we were from our original landing site we could not know.
In the blackness of the night, it was some minutes before we discovered that the bat-creature was no longer with us. We were walking aimlessly straight forward until Karinga Varga halted us.
“Let us wait until day,” he urged, waving his arm towards a quarter of the sky that grew lighter minute by minute.
We halted and sat down on the hard ground. For many nights we had enjoyed only the shortest periods of sleep, and were all thoroughly weary. I think we all slept heavily for some hours, for when I woke the sun was well overhead. I shook Karim, who was next to me, and we sat up and looked around us.
We found ourselves in a bowl-shaped depression, with jagged peaks surrounding us, and no sign of life anywhere. There was no vegetation, and the whole landscape was bleak and chilling in the extreme.
As the other two awoke, we talked of our hunger, and as soon as we were fully awake we rose and started our pilgrimage in search of the Disc. It was apparent that our way lay outside the valley, and we arbitrarily took a line in the direction of the sun.
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