The Fourth Science Fiction Megapack

by Isaac Asimov

Yet there was something—

  “Sanfel,” a voice said. “Sanfel. Coth dr’gchang. Sanfel—sthan!”

  Sanfel…Sanfel…have you returned, Sanfel? Answer!

  It was a woman’s voice…the voice of a woman used to wielding power, quiet, somehow proud as the voice of Lucifer or Lilith might have been, and it spoke in a tongue that scarcely half a dozen living men could understand… A whole great race had spoken it once; only the shamans remembered now, and the shamans who knew it were few. Dantan’s godfather had been one. And Dantan remembered the slurring syllables of the rituals he had learned, well enough to know what the proud, bodiless voice was saying.

  The nape of his neck prickled. Here was something he could not understand, and he did not like it. Like an animal scenting danger he shrank into himself, not crouching, but withdrawing, so that a smaller man seemed to stand there, ready and waiting for the next move. Only his eyes were not motionless. They raked the room for the unseen speaker—for some weapon to use when the time came for weapons.

  His glance came back to the dark screen above the machine. And the voice said again, in the tongue of ancient, Klanvahr:

  “I am not used to waiting, Sanfel! If you hear me, speak. And speak quickly, for the time of peril comes close now. My Enemy is strong—”

  Dantan said, “Can you hear me?” His eyes did not move from the screen.

  Out of that blackness the girl’s voice came, after a pause. It was imperious, and a little wary.

  “You are not Sanfel. Where is he? Who are you, Martian?”

  Dantan let himself relax a little. There would be a parley, at any rate. But after that—

  Words in the familiar, remembered old language came hesitantly to his lips.

  “I am no Martian. I am of Earth blood, and I do not know this Sanfel.”

  “Then how did you get into Sanfel’s place?” The voice was haughty now. “What are you doing there? Sanfel built his laboratory in a secret place.”

  “It was hidden well enough,” Dantan told her grimly. “Maybe for a thousand years, or even ten thousand, for all I know. The door has been buried under a stream—”

  “There is no water there. Sanfel’s home is on a mountain, and his laboratory is built underground.” The voice rang like a bell. “I think you lie. I think you are an enemy—When I heard the signal summoning me, I came swiftly, wondering why Sanfel had delayed so long. I must find him, stranger. I must! If you are no enemy, bring me Sanfel!” This time there was something almost like panic in the voice.

  “If I could, I would,” Dantan said. “But there’s no one here except me.” He hesitated, wondering if the woman behind the voice could be—mad? Speaking from some mysterious place beyond the screen, in a language dead a thousand years, calling upon a man who must be long-dead too, if one could judge by the length of time this hidden room had lain buried.

  He said after a moment, “This place has been buried for a long time. And—no one has spoken the tongue of Klanvahr for many centuries. If that was your Sanfel’s language—” But he could not go on with that thought. If Sanfel had spoken Klanvahr then he must have died long ago. And the speaker beyond the screen—she who had known Sanfel, yet spoke in a young, sweet, light voice that Dantan was beginning to think sounded familiar… He wondered if he could be mad too.

  There was silence from the screen. After many seconds the voice spoke again, sadly and with an undernote of terror.

  “I had not realized,” it said, “that even time might be so different between Sanfel’s world and mine. The space-time continua—yes, a day in my world might well be an age in yours. Time is elastic. In Zha I had thought a few dozen—” she used a term Dantan did not understand, “—had passed. But on Mars—centuries?”

  “Tens of centuries,” agreed Dantan, staring hard at the screen. “If Sanfel lived in old Klanvahr his people are scarcely a memory now. And Mars is dying. You—you’re speaking from another world?”

  “From another universe, yes. A very different universe from yours. It was only through Sanfel that I had made contact, until now—What is your name?”

  “Dantan. Samuel Dantan.”

  “Not a Martian name. You are from—Earth, you say? What is that?”

  “Another planet. Nearer the sun than Mars.”

  “We have no planets and no suns in Zha.

  This is a different universe indeed. So different I find it hard to imagine what your world must be like…”

  The voice died.

  And it was a voice he knew. Dantan was nearly sure of that now, and the certainty frightened him. When a man in the Martian desert begins to see or hear impossibilities, he has reason to be frightened. As the silence prolonged itself he began almost to hope that the voice—the implausibly familiar voice—had been only imagination. Hesitantly he said, “Are you still there?” and was a little relieved, after all, to hear her say,

  “Yes, I am here. I was thinking…I need help. I need it desperately. I wonder—has Sanfel’s laboratory changed? Does the machine still stand? But it must, or I could not speak to you now. If the other things work, there may be chance… Listen.” Her voice grew urgent. “I may have a use for you. Do you see a lever, scarlet, marked with the Klanvahr symbol for ‘sight’?”

  “I see it,” Dantan said.

  “Push it forward. There is no harm in that, if you are careful. We can see each other—that is all. But do not touch the lever with the ‘door’ symbol on it. Be certain of that… Wait!” Sudden urgency was in the voice.

  “Yes?” Dantan had not moved. “I am forgetting. There is danger if you are not protected from—from certain vibration that you might see here. This is a different universe, and your Martian physical laws do not hold good between our worlds. Vibration…light…either things might harm you. There should be armor in Sanfel’s laboratory. Find it.”

  Dantan glanced around. There was a cabinet in one corner. He went over to it slowly, his eyes wary. He had no intention of relaxing vigilance here simply because that voice sounded familiar…

  Inside the cabinet hung a suit of something like space armor, more flexible and skin tight than any he had ever seen, and with a transparent helmet through which vision seemed oddly distorted. He got into the suit carefully, pulling up the rich shining folds over his body, thinking strangely how long time had stood still in this small room since the last time a man had worn it. The whole room looked slightly different when he set the helmet into place. It must be polarized, he decided, though that alone could not account for the strange dimming and warping of vision that was evident.

  “All ready,” he said after a moment.”

  “Then throw the switch.”

  With his hand upon it Dantan hesitated for one last instant of wariness. He was stepping into unknown territory now, and to him the unknown meant the perilous. His mind went back briefly to the Redhelms scouring the canyons above for him. He quieted his uneasy mind with the thought that there might be some weapon in the world of the voice which he could turn against them later. Certainly, without a weapon, he had little to lose. But he knew that weapon or no weapon, danger or not, he must see the face behind that sweet, familiar, imperious voice.

  He pressed the lever forward. It hesitated, the weight of milleniums behind its inertia. Then, groaning a little in its socket, it moved.

  Across the screen above it a blaze of color raged like a sudden shining deluge. Blinded by the glare, Dajatan leaped back and swung an arm across his eyes.

  When he looked again the colors had cleared. Blinking, he stared—and forgot to look away. For the screen was a window now, with the world of Zha behind it… And in the center of that window—a girl. He looked once at her, and then closed his eyes. He had felt his heart move, and a nerve jumped in his lean cheek.

  He whispered a name.

  Impassively the girl looked down at him from the screen. There was no change, no light of recognition upon that familiar, beloved face. The face of the girl who had died at the Redhelm hands,
long ago, in the fortress of Klanvahr… For her sake he had hunted the Redhelms all these dangerous years. For her sake he had taken to the spaceways and the outlaw life. In a way, for her sake the Redhelms hunted him now through the canyons overhead. But here in the screen, she did not know him.

  He knew that this was not possible. Some outrageous trick of vision made the face and the slender body of a woman from another universe seem the counterpart of that remembered woman. But he knew it must be an illusion, for in a world as different as Zha surely there could be no human creatures at all, certainly no human who wore the same face as the girl he remembered.

  * * * *

  Aside from the girl herself, there was nothing to see. The screen was blank, except for vague shapes—outlines—The helmet, he thought, filtered out more than light. He sensed, somehow, that beyond her stretched the world of Zha, but he could see nothing except the shifting, ever-changing colors of the background.

  She looked down at him without expression. Obviously the sight of him had wakened in her no such deep-reaching echoes of emotion as her face woke in him. She said, her voice almost unbearably familiar; a voice sounding from the silence of death over many chilly years,

  “Dantan. Samuel Dantan. Earthly language is as harsh as the Klanvahr I learned from Sanfel. Yet my name may seem strange to you. I am Quiana.”

  He said hoarsely, “What do you want? What did you want with Sanfel?”

  “Help,” Quiana said. “A weapon. Sanfel had promised me a weapon. He was working very hard to make one, risking much…and now time has eaten him up—that strange, capricious time that varies so much between your world and mine. To me it was only yesterday—and I still need the weapon.”

  Dantan’s laugh was harsh with jealousy of that unknown and long-dead Martian.

  “Then I’m the wrong man,” he said roughly. “I’ve no weapon. I’ve men tracking me down to kill me, now.”

  She leaned forward a little, gesturing. “Can you escape? You are hidden here, you know.”

  “They’ll find the same way I found, up above.”

  “The laboratory door can be locked, at the top of the shaft.”

  “I know. I locked it. But there’s no food or water here… No, if I had any weapons I wouldn’t be here now.”

  “Would you not?” she asked in a curious voice. “In old Klanvahr, Sanfel once told me, they had a saying that none could hide from his destiny.”

  Dantan gave her a keen, inquiring look. Did she mean—herself? That same face and voice and body, so cruelly come back from death to waken the old grief anew? Or did she know whose likeness she wore—or could it be only his imagination, after all? For if Sanfel had known her too, and if Sanfel had died as long ago as he must have died, then this same lovely image had lived centuries and milleniums before the girl at Klanvahr Fortress…

  “I remember,” said Dantan briefly.

  “My world,” she went on, oblivious to the turmoil in his mind, “my world is too different to offer you any shelter, though I suppose you could enter it for a little while, in that protective armor that Sanfel made. But not to stay. We spring from soil too alien to one another’s worlds… Even this communication is not easy. And there is no safety here in Zha either, now. Now that Sanfel has failed me.”

  “I—I’d help you if I could.” He said it with difficulty, trying to force the remembrance upon himself that this was a stranger… “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  She shrugged with a poignantly familiar motion.

  “I have an Enemy. One of a lower race. And he—it—there is no word!—has cut me off from my people here in a part of Zha that is—well, dangerous—I can’t describe to you the conditions here. We have no common terms to use in speaking of them. But there is great danger, and the Enemy is coming closer—and I am alone. If there were another of my people here to divide the peril I think I could destroy him. He has a weapon of his own, and it is stronger than my power, though not stronger than the power two of my race together can wield. It—it pulls. It destroys, in a way I can find no word to say. I had hoped from Sanfel something to divert him until he could be killed. I told him how to forge such a weapon, but—time would not let him do it. The teeth of time ground him into dust, as my Enemy’s weapon will grind me soon.”

  She shrugged again.

  “If I could get you a gun,” Dantan said. “A force-ray—”

  “What are they?”

  He described the weapons of his day. But Quiana’s smile was a little scornful when he finished.

  “We of Zha have passed beyond the use of missile weapons—even such missiles as bullets or rays. Nor could they touch my Enemy. No, we can destroy in ways that require no—no beams or explosives. No, Dantan, you speak in terms of your own universe. We have no common ground. It is a pity that time eddied between Sanfel and me, but eddy it did, and I am helpless now. And the Enemy will be upon me soon. Very soon.”

  She let her shoulders sag and resignation dimmed the remembered vividness of her face. Dantan looked up at her grimly, muscles riding his set jaw. It was almost intolerable, this facing her again in need, and again helpless, and himself without power to aid. It had been bad enough that first time, to learn long afterward that she had died at enemy hands while he was too far away to protect her. But to see it all take place again before his very eyes!

  “There must be a way,” he said, and his hand gripped the lever marked “door” in the ancient tongue.

  “Wait!” Quiana’s voice was urgent.

  “What would happen?”

  “The door would open. I could enter your world, and you mine.”

  “Why can’t you leave, then, and wait until it’s safe to go back?”

  “I have tried that,” Quiana said. “It will never be safe. The Enemy waited too. No, it must come, in the end, to a battle—and I shall not win that fight. I shall not see my own people or my own land again, and I suppose I must face that knowledge. But I did hope, when I heard Sanfel’s signal sound again…” She smiled a little. “I know you would help me if you could, Dantan. But there is nothing to be done now.”

  “I’ll come in,” he said doggedly. “Maybe there’s something I could do.”

  “You could not touch him. Even now there’s danger. He was very close when I heard that signal. This is his territory. When I heard the bell and thought Sanfel had returned with a weapon for me, I dared greatly in coming here.” Her voice died away; a withdrawn look veiled her eyes from him.

  After a long silence she said, “The Enemy is coming. Turn off the screen, Dantan. And goodbye.”

  “No,” he said. “Wait!” But she shook her head and turned away from him, her thin robe swirling, and moved off like a pale shadow into the dim, shadowless emptiness of the background. He stood watching helplessly, feeling all the old despair wash over him a second time as the girl he loved went alone into danger he could not share. Sometimes as she moved away she was eclipsed by objects he could not see—trees, he thought, or rocks, that did not impinge upon his eyes through the protective helmet. A strange world indeed Zha must be, whose very rocks and trees were too alien for human eyes to look upon in safety… Only Quiana grew smaller and smaller upon the screen, and it seemed to Dantan as though a cord stretched between them, pulling thinner and thinner as she receded into danger and distance.

  It was unbearable to think that the cord might break—break a second time…

  * * * *

  Far away something moved in the cloudy world of Zha. Tiny in the distance though it was, it was unmistakably not human. Dantan lost sight of Quiana. Had she found some hiding place behind some unimaginable outcropping of Zha’s terrain?

  The Enemy came forward.

  It was huge and scaled and terrible, human, but not a human; tailed, but no beast; intelligent, but diabolic. He never saw it too clearly, and he was grateful to his helmet for that. The polarized glass seemed to translate a little, as well as to blot out. He felt sure that this creature which he saw—or almost saw�
��did not look precisely as it seemed to him upon the screen. Yet it was easy to believe that such a being had sprung from the alien soil of Zha. There was nothing remotely like it on any of the worlds he knew. And it was hateful. Every line of it made his hackles bristle.

  It carried a coil of brightly colored tubing slung over one grotesque shoulder, and its monstrous head swung from side to side as it paced forward into the screen like some strange and terrible mechanical toy. It made no sound, and its progress was horrible in its sheer relentless monotony.

  * * * *

  Abruptly it paused. He thought it had sensed the girl’s presence, somewhere in hiding. It reached for the coil of tubing with one malformed—hand?

  “Quiana,” it said—its voice as gentle as a child’s.

  Silence. Dantan’s breathing was loud in the emptiness.

  “Quiana?” The tone was querulous now.

  “Quiana,” the monster crooned, and swung about with sudden, unexpected agility. Moving with smooth speed, it vanished into the clouds of the background, as the girl had vanished. For an eternity Dantan watched colored emptiness, trying to keep himself from trembling.

  Then he heard the voice again, gentle no longer, but ringing like a bell with terrible triumph, “Quiana!”

  And out of the swirling clouds he saw Quiana break, despair upon her face, her sheer garments streaming behind her. After her came the Enemy. It had unslung the tube it wore over its shoulder, and as it lifted the weapon Quiana swerved desperately aside. Then from the coil of tubing blind lightning ravened.

  Shattering the patternless obscurity, the blaze of its color burst out, catching Quiana in a cone of expanding, shifting brilliance. And the despair in her eyes was suddenly more than Dantan could endure.

  His hand struck out at the lever marked “door”; he swung it far over and the veil that had masked the screen was gone. He vaulted up over its low threshold, not seeing anything but the face and the terror of Quiana. But it was not Quiana’s name he called as he leaped.

  He lunged through the Door onto soft, yielding substance that was unlike anything he had ever felt underfoot before. He scarcely knew it. He flung himself forward, fists clenched, ready to drive futile blows into the monstrous mask of the Enemy. It loomed over him like a tower, tremendous, scarcely seen through the shelter of his helmet—and then the glare of the light-cone caught him.