As we reached the table, I felt a sinuous trunk wrap about me. With a flip I was hurled to the table top. It was but a step to the dish containing the universe. I snatched it up, dish and all, and handed it down to Scott. I let myself over the table edge, hung by my hands for an instant, and dropped. I raced after the others toward the work shop.
As we gained the room, the walking-stick-man made an adjustment on his machine. The purple rod faded away. The Creator, a towering cone of light, tottered for a moment and then glided swiftly for the doorway.
Instantly a sheet of purple radiance filled the opening. The Creator struck against it and was hurled back.
The radiance was swiftly arching overhead and curving beneath us, cutting through the floor, walls, and ceiling.
“He’s enclosing us in a globe of that stuff,” cried Scott. “It must be an energy screen of some sort, but I can’t imagine what. Can you?”
“I don’t care what it is, just so it works,” I panted, anxiously.
Through the steady purple light I could see the Creator. Repeatedly he hurled himself against the screen and each time he was hurled back.
“We’re moving,” announced Scott.
The great purple globe was ascending, carrying in its interior we five universe-men, our machines, and fragments of the room in which we but recently had stood. It was cutting through the building like the flame of a torch through soft steel. We burst free of the building into the brilliant blue sunlight of that weird world.
Beneath us lay the building, a marvel of outre architecture, but with a huge circular shaft cut through it – the path of the purple globe. All about the building lay a forest of red and yellow vegetation, shaped as no vegetation of Earth is shaped, bent into hundreds of strange and alien forms.
Swiftly the globe sprang upward to hang in the air some distance above the building. As far as the eye could see stretched the painted forest. The laboratory we had just quitted was the only sign of habitation. No roads, no lakes, no rivers, no distant mountain – nothing relieved the level plain of red and yellow stretching away to faint horizons.
Was the Creator, I wondered, the sole denizen of this land? Was he the last survivor of a mystic race? Had there ever been a race at all? Might not the Creator be a laboratory product, even as the things he created were laboratory products? But if so, who or what had set to work the agents which resulted in that uncanny cone of energy?
My reflections were cut short as the walking-stick-man reached out his skinny hand for the mass of matter which Scott still held. As I watched him breathlessly, he laid it gently on a part of the floor which still remained in the globe and pulled a sliding rod from the side of the machine. A faint purple radiance sprang from the point of the rod, bathing the universe. The radiant purple surrounded the mass, grew thicker and thicker, seeming to congeal into layer after layer until the mass of matter lay sealed in a thick shell of the queer stuff. When I touched it, it did not appear to be hard or brittle. It was smooth and slimy to the touch, but I could not dent it with my fingers.
“He’s building up the shell of the globe in just the same way,” Scott said. “The machine seems to be projecting that purple stuff to the outside of the shell, where it is congealed into layers.”
I noted that what he said was true. The shell of the globe had taken on a thickness that could be perceived, although the increased thickness did not seem to interfere with our vision.
Looking down at the laboratory, I could see some strange mechanism mounted on the roof of the building. Beside the massive mechanism stood the Creator.
“Maybe it’s a weapon of some sort,” suggested Scott.
Hardly had he spoken when a huge column of crimson light leaped forth from the machine. I threw up my hands to protect my eyes from the glare of the fiery column. For an instant the globe was bathed in the red glow, then a huge globule of red collected on its surface and leaped away, straight for the laboratory, leaving behind a trail of crimson.
The globe trembled to the force of the explosion as the ball of light struck. Where the laboratory had stood was merely a great hole, blasted to the primal rock beneath. The vegetation for great distances on either side was sifting ash. The Creator had disappeared. The colorful world beneath stretched empty to the horizon. The men of the universe had proven to be stronger than their Creator!
“If there’s any more Creators around these parts,” said Scott, smiling feebly, “they won’t dare train another gun on this thing in the next million years. It gives them exactly what was meant for the other fellow; it crams their poison right down their own throats. Pete, that mass of matter, whether or not it is the universe, is saved. All hell couldn’t get at it here.”
The walking-stick-man, his mummy-like face impassive as ever, locked the controls of the machine. It was, I saw still operating, was still building up the shell of the globe. Second by second the globe was adding to its fortress – light strength. My mind reeled as I thought of it continuing thus throughout eternity.
The elephant-men were climbing into their machines.
Scott smiled wanly.
“The play is over,” he said. “The curtain is down. It’s time for us to go.”
He stepped to the side of the walking-stick-man.
“I wish you would use our machine,” he said, evidently forgetting our friend could understand no word he spoke. “You threw away your chance back there when you built this contraption instead of a transmitter. Our machine will take you wherever you wish to go.”
He pointed to the machine and to the universe, then tapped his head. With the strange being at his side, he walked to our machine, pointed out the controls, explained its use in pantomime.
“I don’t know if he understands,” said Scott, “but I did the best I could.”
As I walked past the walking-stick-man to step into the timepower machine, I believe I detected a faint flicker of a smile on his face. Of that, however, I can never be sure.
Marooned in Time
I know how the mistake was made. I was excited when I stepped into the machine. My mind was filled with the many strange happenings I had witnessed. I thought along space directional lines, but I forgot to reckon the factor of time.
I thought of the Earth, but I did not consider time. I willed myself to be back on Earth, but I forgot to will myself in any particular time era. Consequently when Scott shoved over the lever, I was shot to Earth, but the time element was confused.
I realize that life in the super-universe of the Creator, being billions of times larger than life upon the Earth, was correspondingly slower. Every second in the super-universe was equal to years of Earth-time. My life in the Creator’s universe had equaled millions of years of terran existence.
I believe that my body was projected along a straight line and not along the curve which was necessary to place me back in the twentieth century.
This is theory, of course. There might have been some fault in the machine. The purple globe might have exerted some influence to distort our calculations.
Be that as it may, I reached a dying planet. It has been given to me, a man of the twentieth century, to live out the last years of my life on my home planet some millions of years later than the date of my birth. I, a resident of a comparatively young dynasty in the history of the Earth, now am tribal chieftain and demi-god of the last race, a race that is dying even as the planet is dying.
As I sit before my cave or huddle with the rest of my clan around a feeble fire, I often wonder if Scott Marston was returned to Earth in his proper time. Or is he, too, a castaway in some strange time? Does he still live? Did he ever reach the Earth? I often feel that he may even now be searching through the vast corridors of time and the deserts of space for me, his onetime partner in the wildest venture ever attempted by man.
And often, too, I wonder if the walking-stick-man used our time-power machine to return to his native planet. Or is he a prisoner in his own trap, caught within the scope of the great pu
rple globe? And I wonder how large the globe has grown.
I realize now that our effort to save the universe was unnecessary so far as the earth was concerned, for the earth, moving at its greater time-speed, would already have plunged into extinction in the flaming furnace of the sun before the Creator could carry out his destructive plans.
But what of those other worlds? What of those other planets which must surely swim around strange suns in the gulf of space? What of the planets and races yet unborn? What of the populations that may exist on the solar systems of island universes far removed from our own?
They are saved, saved for all time; for the purple globe will guard the handiwork of the Creator through eternity.
THG GIRL HAD GUTS
Theodore Sturgeon
We move forward another twenty years to the mid-fifties. When I first saw the film Alien in 1979, which in itself was pretty extreme, it reminded me of the following story which was written in 1956 and utilized a similar concept of an alien parasite. If I had to choose a writer who did more than any other in pushing the boundaries of science fiction and making the field mature, then I’d choose Theodore Sturgeon (1918–85), without doubt one of the most important of them all. His novels include More Than Human (1953), a fascinating study of gestalt personalities, and Venus Plus X (1960), which explores a future hermaphroditic society. On many occasions Sturgeon would argue about how writers needed to push themselves and their ideas and never be complacent. His own rigorous and high standards meant that he was seldom satisfied with his own work and as a result his output was sporadic. But at his best he was unbeatable. The following story appeared in the first issue of Venture, which was a companion to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and which set itself the task of publishing strong and challenging works of science fiction that would be difficult to place anywhere else. At the time, some readers found the story repulsive but it has since gone down as one of Sturgeon’s best.
The cabby wouldn’t take the fare (“Me take a nickel from Captain Gargan? Not in this life!”) and the doorman welcomed me so warmly I almost forgave Sue for moving into a place that had a doorman. And then the elevator and then Sue. You have to be away a long time, a long way, to miss someone like that, and me, I’d been farther away than anyone ought to be, for too long plus six weeks. I kissed her and squeezed her until she yelled for mercy, and when I got to where I realized she was yelling we were clear back to the terrace, the whole length of the apartment away from the door. I guess I was sort of enthusiastic, but as I said . . . oh, who can say a thing like that and make any sense? I was glad to see my wife, and that was it.
She finally got me quieted down and my uniform jacket and shoes off and a dish of ale in my fist, and there I lay in the relaxer looking at her just the way I used to when I could come home from the base every night, just the way. I’d dreamed every off-duty minute since we blasted off all those months ago. Special message to anyone who’s never been off Earth: look around you. Take a good long look around. You’re in the best place there is. A fine place.
I said as much to Sue, and she laughed and said, “Even the last six weeks?” and I said, “I don’t want to insult you, baby, but yes: even those six weeks in lousy quarantine at the lousy base hospital were good, compared to being any place else. But it was the longest six weeks I ever spent; I’ll give you that.” I pulled her down on top of me and kissed her again. “It was longer than twice the rest of the trip.”
She struggled loose and patted me on the head the way I don’t like. “Was it so bad really?”
“It was bad. It was lonesome and dangerous and – and disgusting, I guess is the best word for it.”
“You mean the plague.”
I snorted. “It wasn’t a plague.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know,” she said. “Just rumors. That thing of you recalling the crew after twelve hours of liberty, for six weeks of quarantine . . .”
“Yeah, I guess that would start rumors.” I closed my eyes and laughed grimly. “Let ’em rumor. No one could dream up anything uglier than the truth. Give me another bucket of suds.”
She did, and I kissed her hand as she passed it over. She took the hand right away and I laughed at her. “Scared of me or something?”
“Oh Lord no. Just . . . wanting to catch up. So much you’ve done, millions of miles, months and months . . . and all I know is you’re back, and nothing else.”
“I brought the Demon Lover back safe and sound,” I kidded.
She colored up. “Don’t talk like that.” The Demon Lover was my Second, name of Purcell. Purcell was one of those guys who just has to go around making like a bull moose in fly-time, bellowing at the moon and banging his antlers against the rocks. He’d been to the house a couple or three times and said things about Sue that were so appreciative that I had to tell him to knock it off or he’d collect a punch in the mouth. Sue had liked him, though; well, Sue was always that way, always going a bit out of her way to get upwind of an animal like that. And I guess I’m one of ’em myself; anyway, it was me she married. I said, “I’m afraid oP Purcell’s either a blow-hard or he was just out of character when we rounded up the crew and brought ’em all back. We found ’em in honky-tonks and strip joints; we found ’em in the buzzoms of their families behaving like normal family men do after a long trip; but Purcell, we found him at the King George Hotel—” I emphasized with a forefinger “–alone by himself and fast asleep, where he tells us he went as soon as he got earthside. Said he wanted a soak in a hot tub and 24 hours sleep in a real I-G bed with sheets. How’s that for a sailor ashore on his first leave?”
She’d gotten up to get me more ale. “I haven’t finished this one yet!” I said.
She said oh and sat down again. “You were going to tell me about the trip.”
“I was? Oh, all right, I was. But listen carefully, because this is one trip I’m going to forget as fast as I can, and I’m not going to do it again, even in my head.”
I don’t have to tell you about blastoff – that it’s more like drift-off these days, since all long hops start from Outer Orbit satellites, out past the Moon – or about the flicker-field by which we hop faster than light, get dizzier than a five-year-old on a drug store stool, and develop more morning-sickness than Mom. That I’ve told you before.
So I’ll start with planetfall on Mullygantz II, Terra’s best bet to date for a colonial planet, five-nines Earth normal (that is, .99999) and just about as handsome a rock as ever circled a sun. We hung the blister in stable orbit and Purcell and I dropped down in a superscout with supplies and equipment for the ecological survey station. We expected to find things humming there, five busy people and a sheaf of completed reports, and we hoped we’d be the ones to take back the news that the next ship would be the colony ship. We found three dead and two sick, and knew right away that the news we’d be taking back was going to stop the colonists in their tracks.
Clement was the only one I’d known personally. Head of the station, physicist and ecologist both, and tops both ways, and he was one of the dead. Joe and Katherine Flent were dead. Amy Segal, the recorder – one of the best in Pioneer Service – was sick in a way I’ll go into in a minute, and Glenda Spooner, the plant biologist, was – well, call it withdrawn. Retreated. Something had scared her so badly that she could only sit with her arms folded and her legs crossed and her eyes wide open, rocking and watching.
Anyone gets to striking hero medals ought to make a plattersized one for Amy Segal. Like I said, she was sick. Her body temperature was wildly erratic, going from 102 all the way down to 96 and back up again. She was just this side of breakdown and must have been like that for weeks, slipping across the line for minutes at a time, hauling herself back for a moment or two, then sliding across again. But she knew Glenda was helpless, though physically in perfect shape, and she knew that even automatic machinery has to be watched. She not only dragged herself around keeping ink in the recording pens and new charts when the seismo’s an
d hygro’s and airsonde recorders needed them, but she kept Glenda fed; more than that, she fed herself.
She fed herself close to fifteen thousand calories a day. And she was forty pounds underweight. She was the weirdest sight you ever saw, her face full like a fat person’s but her abdomen, from the lower ribs to the pubes, collapsed almost against her spine. You’d never have believed an organism could require so much food – not, that is, until you saw her eat. She’d rigged up a chopper out of the lab equipment because she actually couldn’t wait to chew her food. She just dumped everything and anything edible into that gadget and propped her chin on the edge of the table by the outlet, and packed that garbage into her open mouth with both hands. If she could have slept it would have been easier but hunger would wake her after twenty minutes or so and back she’d go, chop and cram, guzzle and swill. If Glenda had been able to help – but there she was, she did it all herself, and when we got the whole story straight we found she’d been at it for nearly three weeks. In another three weeks they’d have been close to the end of their stores, enough for five people for anyway another couple of months.
We had a portable hypno in the first-aid kit on the scout, and we slapped it to Glenda Spooner with a reassurance tape and a normal sleep command, and just put her to bed with it. We bedded Amy down too, though she got a bit hysterical until we could make her understand through that fog of delirium that one of us would stand by every minute with premasticated rations. Once she understood that she slept like a corpse, but such a corpse you never want to see, lying there eating.
It was a lot of work all at once, and when we had it done Purcell wiped his face and said, “Five-nines Earth normal, hah. No malignant virus or bacterium. No toxic plants or fungi. Come to Mullygantz II, land of happiness and health.”
“Nobody’s used that big fat no” I reminded him. “The reports only say there’s nothing bad here that we know about or can test for. My God, the best brains in the world used to kill AB patients by transfusing type O blood. Heaven help us the day we think we know everything that goes on in the universe.”
The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction Page 39
