In the field of religion, there was a revival of the ancient cults of the sea-gods, especially that of Dagon.
MARCH 15, 2337
Khons slithered through another correction, took up a complex orbit that circled one moon, crossed to the other, circled, returned, describing over and over the conventional sign for the infinite.
Shoten tapped a plate, and the large viewing screen inside Khons glowed once more, seeming to stand unsupported against the background of the two moons and the distant star-sprayed blackness. Every now and again the progress of the two whirling moons and Khons’s orbit around and between them would bring Yuggoth itself swinging across the view of the three crew members so that one or both of the worldlets and the ship’s data screen swept opaquely across the dark, pulsating oblateness.
Shoten commanded, and cyberbiots magnified the surface features of the moons on the data screen. The omnipresent craters sprang up, but then, as the magnification increased, it became obvious that they were not the sharp-edged features of the typical airless satellite but the shortened, rounded curves typical of weathering. Shoten gestured, and the focus slid across the surface of the nearer body. Above the horizon distant stars faded and twinkled.
“Air!” Shoten declared. And Njord and Gomati, agreeing, “Air.” “Air.”
Shoten Binayakya dropped Khons into a lower orbit, circling only one of the twin moons, that which Gomati had arbitrarily named as Thog. Again the magnification of the screen increased. In the center of a crater outlines appeared, forms of structures reared ages before by purposeful intelligence.
Amazed, Njord Freyr asked, “Could there be life?”
Shoten turned a metallic face toward him, shook slowly that ambiguous head. “Not now. No movement, no radiation, no energy output. But once …” There was a silence. Breathing, whirring, the soft clicks and hums of Khons. “But once …” Shoten Binayakya said again in that cold, synthesized voice.
Sri Gomati gestured. “This is where we must land. After all the explorations of the planets and their moons, even the futile picking among the rubbish of the Asteroid Belt by the great Astrud do Muiscos—to find signs of life at last! This is where we must land!”
Shoten Binayakya nodded agreement without waiting even for the assent of Njord Freyr. A limb flicked out, tapped. Khons bucked and started circling downward toward the reticulated patterns on the surface of Thog.
With a jolt and a shudder Khons settled onto the surface of the moon, well within the weathered walls of the crater and within a kilometer or less of the structured protuberances. Shoten quiesced the cyberbiots to mere maintenance level of Khons, leaving only the receptors and telemeters warm, then asked the others to prepare to exit.
Njord Freyr and Sri Gomati slipped breathers over their heads and shoulders. Shoten ordered a variety of internal filtration modifications within the recirculation system that provided life support. They took readings from Khons’s external sensors, slid back hatches, made their way from Khons, stood facing what, it was now obvious, were relics of incredible antiquity.
Abreast, the three moved toward the ruins: Njord on motorized, gyrostabilized cyborged wheel assemblies; Shoten Binayakya rumbling on tread-laying gear, stable, efficient; Sri Gomati striding left foot, right foot, organic legs encased in puff-jointed pressure suit like some anachronistic caricature of a Bipolar Technocompetitive Era spaceman.
They halted a few meters from the first row of structures. Like the crater rims, the walls, columns, arches, were weather-rounded, tumbled, softened. A metallic telescoping tentacle whiplashed out from the hub of one of Njord’s cyborg-wheels. A crumbled cube of some now-soft stonelike material fell away to ashes, to dust.
Njord turned bleak silver eyes to the others. “Once, perhaps …”
“Come along,” Gomati urged, “let’s get to exploring these ruins!” Excitement colored her voice. “There’s no telling what evidence they may contain of their builders. We may learn whether these worlds and their inhabitants originated in our own system or whether they came from—elsewhere.”
At Gomati’s final word she turned her face skyward, and the others followed suit. It was the worldlet Thog’s high noon or the equivalent of noon. The sun was so remote—sixteen billion kilometers, twice as far as it was from Pluto at the latter’s aphelion and 120 times as distant as it was from earth—that to the three standing on the surface of Thog, it was utterly lost in the star-dotted blackness.
But Yuggoth itself hung directly overhead, obscenely bloated and oblate, its surface filling the heavens, looking as if it were about to crash shockingly upon Khons and the three explorers, and all the time pulsing, pulsing, pulsing like an atrocious heart, throbbing, throbbing. And now Thog’s twin worldlet, dubbed Thok by the female crew member, swept in Stygian silhouette across the tumultuous face of Yuggoth, Thok’s black roundness varied by the serrations of craterrims casting their deep shadows on the pale, pink-pulsating gray rocks of Thog.
The blackness enveloped first Khons, then sped across the face of Thog, swept over the three explorers, blotting out the pulsing ruddiness of Yuggoth and plunging them into utter blackness.
Gomati’s fascination was broken by the purring synthetic voice of Shoten Binayakya. “An interesting occultation,” Shoten said, “but come, we have our mission to perform. Khons is taking automatic measurements and telemetering information back to Neptune. And here,” the silvery eyes seemed to flicker in distant starlight as a cybernetic extensor adjusted devices on the mechanical carapace, “my own recording and telemetering devices will send data back to the ship.”
MARCH 15, 1937—A SNAPSHOT
Dr. Dustin stood by the bed. The patient was semiconscious. His lips moved, but no one could hear what he said. Two old women sat by the bed. One was his aunt Annie. The other was Annie’s dear friend Edna, present as much to comfort the grieving aunt as to visit the dying nephew.
Dr. Dustin leaned over the bed. He checked the patient’s condition. He stood for a while trying to understand the patient’s words, but he could not. From time to time the patient moved his hand feebly. It looked as if he was trying to slap something.
The old woman named Annie had tears on her face. She reached into a worn black purse for her handkerchief and wiped the tears away as best she could. She grasped Dr. Dustin’s hand and held it between her own. She asked him, “Is there any hope? Any?”
The doctor shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Gamwell.” And to the other woman, almost bowing, “Miss Lewis.
“I’m sorry,” the doctor said again.
The old woman named Annie released the doctor’s hand. The other old woman, Edna, reached toward Annie. They sat facing each other. They embraced clumsily, as people must when sitting face to face. Each old woman tried to comfort the other.
The doctor sighed and walked to the window. He looked outside. It was early morning. The sun had risen, but it was visible only as a pale watery glow in the east. The sky was gray with clouds. The ground was covered with patches of snow, ice, slush. More snow was falling.
The doctor wondered why it seemed that he lost patients only in winter, or during rainstorms, or at night. Never on a bright spring or summer day. He knew that that was not really true. Patients died when they died. When their fatal condition, whatever it was, happened to complete the running of its course. Still, it seemed always to happen in the dark of the night or in the dark of the year.
He heard someone whistling.
He turned and saw two young residents passing the doorway. One of them was whistling. He was whistling a popular tune that the doctor had heard on the radio. He couldn’t remember what program he had heard it on. Possibly the program was “The Kate Smith Show” or “Your Hit Parade.” The tune was very catchy, even though the words were in some language that eluded Dr. Dustin’s ear. The song was called “Bei Mir Bist du Schön.”
Three thousand miles away, the Spanish were engaged in a confusing civil war. The old king had abdicated years before, an
d a republic had been proclaimed. But after the direction of the new government became clear, a colonel serving in the Spanish colonial forces in Africa returned with his troops—largely Berbers and Rifs—to change things.
He would overthrow the republic. He would end the nonsense of democracy, atheism, lewdness, that the republic tolerated. He would restore discipline, piety, modesty. He would reinstitute the monarchy.
At the moment it appeared that the republican forces were winning. They had just recaptured the cities of Trijuque and Guadalajara. They had taken rebel prisoners. These included Spanish monarchists. They included African troops as well. Strangely, some of the prisoners spoke only Italian. They said they were volunteers. They said they had been ordered to volunteer. And they always obeyed their orders.
In China, forces of the Imperial Japanese Army were having easy going. Their opposition was weak. The Chinese were divided. They had been engaged in a civil war. It was not much like the one in Spain. It had been going on much longer. It had begun with the death of President Sun Yat-sen in 1924. The Japanese were not the only foreign power to intervene in China.
Germany had owned trading concessions in China until the Treaty of Versailles ended them. Germany was burgeoning now and had ambitions to regain her lost privileges.
Other countries had felt their interests threatened by the Chinese civil war. England had sent troops. France had used her influence. France was worried that she might lose her valuable colonies in Indochina. Russia had tried to influence China’s internal politics. There had been grave danger of war between Russia and China. Especially when the Chinese sacked the Russian Embassy in Beijing and beheaded six of its staff.
The United States had intervened. American gunboats plied Chinese waterways. The gunboat Panay was sunk by aerial gunfire and bombing. The Panay was on the Yangtze river when this happened. The Yangtze is a Chinese river. But the Panay was sunk by Japanese forces. This pleased China. Japan apologized and paid compensation.
Joe Louis and Joe DiMaggio, two young athletes, were in training. Both of them had very good years in 1937.
A wealthy daredevil pilot named Howard Hughes flew across the United States in seven hours and twenty-eight minutes. This set off a new wave of excitement and “air-mindedness.” In Santa Monica, California, the Douglas Aircraft Company was completing its new airliner. This would carry forty passengers. It had four engines. It would be capable of speeds up to 237 miles per hour.
More conservative people felt that the zeppelin would never yield to the airplane. The great airship Hindenburg was on the Atlantic run. It was huge. It was beautiful. There was a piano in its cocktail lounge. The European terminus of its flights was Tempelhof Airdrome in Germany. The American terminus of its flights was Lakehurst, New Jersey.
On the morning of March 15, Rabbi Louis I. Newman found eleven large orange swastikas painted on the walls of Temple Rodeph Sholom, 7 West 83rd Street, New York. This was the third such incident at Temple Rodeph Sholom. Rabbi Newman suspected that the swastikas were painted in retaliation for Secretary of State Hull’s protests against abusive statements in the German press.
At Turn Hall, Lexington Avenue and 85th Street, the head of the Silver Shirts of New York replied. His name was George L. Rafort. He said the swastikas were painted by Jewish troublemakers. He knew this because the arms of the eleven swastikas pointed backward. He said, “This is a mistake no Nazi would make.”
In Providence, Rhode Island, the snow continued to fall. The city’s hills were slippery. There were accident cases in the hospitals.
In the Jane Brown Memorial Hospital on College Hill, Howard Lovecraft opened his eyes. No one knew what he saw. Certainly Dr. Cecil Calvert Dustin did not. Howard slapped the coverlet of his bed. He moved his lips. A sound emerged. He might have said, “Feather.” Perhaps he had been slapping at an errant feather. Or perhaps the word was “Father.” He might have said, “Father, you look just like a young man.”
MARCH 15, 2337
They rolled, clanked, strode forward a few meters more, halted once again at the very edge of the ancient ruins. Shoten Binayakya sent two core samplers downward from mechanized instrumentation compartments, one to sample soil, the other to clip some material from the ruins themselves. Carbon dating would proceed automatically within Shoten’s cyborged componentry.
Sri Gomati gazed at the ruins. They had the appearance, in the faint distant starlight, of stairs and terraces walled with marble balustrades. Gomati ran her optical sensors to maximum image amplification to obtain meaningful sight in the darkness of the occultation of Yuggoth.
And then—it is highly doubtful that the discovery would have been made by the single brief expedition, working in the ruddy, pulsating light of Yuggoth, it was surely that planet’s occultation by Thok that must receive credit for the find—Comati turned at the gasp of Njord Freyr. Her eyes followed the path of his pointing, armor-gauntleted hand.
From some opening deep under the rubble before them a dim but baleful light emerged, pulsating obscenely. But unlike the crimson pulsations of Yuggoth above the explorers, this light beneath their feet was of some shocking, awful green.
Without speaking the three surged forward, picking their way through the ruined and crumbled remnants of whatever ancient city had once flung vaulted towers and fluted columns into the black sky above the tiny world. They reached the source of the radiance barely in time, for as the disk sped across the face of Yuggoth, the black shadow that blanketed the landing site of the ship Khons and the ruins where the crew poked and studied, fled across the pale gray face of Thog leaving them standing once more in the red pulsating glare of the giant planet.
In the obscene half-daylight, the hideous metallic glare of bronze-green was overwhelmed and disappeared into the general throbbing ruddiness. But by now Shoten Binayakya had shot a telescoping core-probe into the opening from which the light emerged, and with mechanical levers pried back the marblelike slab whose cracked and chipped corner had permitted the emergence of the glow.
Servos revved, the stone slab crashed aside. Steps led away, into the bowels of the worldlet Thog. In the dark, shadowy recess the red pulsating light of giant Yuggoth and the baleful metallic green fought and shifted distressingly.
“The Chooric zone,” Sri Comati whispered to herself, “the Chooric zone.”
They advanced down the stairs, leaving behind the baleful pulsations of Yuggoth, lowering themselves meter by meter into the bronze-green lighted depths of Thog. The track-laying cybermech of Shoten Binayakya took the strangely proportioned stairway with a sort of clumsy grace. Njord Freyr, his wheeled undercarriage superbly mobile on the level surface of Thog, now clutched desperately to the fluted carapace of Shoten.
Sri Comati walked with ease, gazing out over the subsurface world of Thog. Seemingly kilometers below their entry a maze of dome on dome and tower on tower lay beside—she shook her head, adjusted metallic optics. There seemed to be a subterranean sea here within the depths of tiny Thog, a sea whose dark and oily waters lapped and gurgled obscenely at a black and gritty beach.
At the edge of that sea, that body which must be little more than a lake by earthly standards, on that black and grainy beach, great terrible creatures rolled and gamboled shockingly.
“Shoggoths!” Sri Gomati ran ahead of the others, almost tumbling from the unbalustraded stairway. “Shoggoths! Exactly as he said, splashing beside a foul lake! Shoggoths!” Exalted, she reached the end of the stairway, ran through towering columns past walls of sprawling bas-relief that showed hideous deities destroying intruders upon their shrines while awful acolytes crept away toward enigmatic vehicles in search of morsels to appease their obscene gods.
Gomati heard the grinding, clanking sounds of Shoten Binayakya following her, the steady whir of Njord Freyr’s undercarriage. She turned and faced them. “This is the year 2337,” she shouted, “the four hundredth anniversary of his death! How could he know? How could he ever have known?”
And
she ran down hallways beneath vaulted gambrel roofs, ran past more carvings and paintings showing strange, rugose cone-shaped beings and terrible, tentacle-faced obscenities that loomed frighteningly above cowering prey. Then Gomati came to another hallway, one lit with black tapers that flared and guttered terribly.
The air in the room was utterly still, the shadows of fluted columns solemn against walls carved and lettered in a script whose awesome significance had been forgotten before earth’s own races were young. And in the center of the room, meter-tall tapers of Stygian gloom marking its four extremities, stood a catafalque, and on the catafalque, skin as white as a grave-worm, eyes shut, angular features in somber repose, lay the black-draped figure of a man.
Sri Gomati raced to the foot of the catafalque, stood gazing into the flickering darkness of the hall, then advanced to stand beside the head of the body. Her silvery eyes shimmered and she began to laugh, to giggle and titter obscenely, and yet to weep at the same time, for some cybersurgeon long before had seen fit to leave those glands and ducts intact.
And Sri Gomati stood tittering and snuffling until Njord Freyr rolled beside her on his cyborged power-wheels and the ambiguous Shoten Binayakya ground and clanked beside her on tread-laying undercarriage, and they took her to return to the spaceship Khons.
But strangest of all is this. The stairway by which they attempted to return to the surface of the worldlet Thog and the safety of their spaceship Khons had crumbled away under the weight of untold eons and that of the cybermechanisms of the exploration party, and when they tried to climb those crumbling stairs they found themselves trapped in the Ghooric zone kilometers beneath the surface of the worldlet Thog.
And there, beside the oily, lapping sea, the foul lake where puffed shoggoths splash, they remained, the three, forever.
* Originally published in Chrysalis, 1977.
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