“I didn’t,” Montray insisted. “Rick Webber burst out of that doorway—fired into the crowd. Then—”
“Is Rick dead too?”
“As a doornail.” Montray gently lowered the younger man to the sand beside Reade. “You were raving yourself, for a minute, young Slayton.” He shouted angrily at the roughneck who had shot, “You didn’t have to kill Webber! A bullet in the leg would have stopped him!”
“He ran right on me with the gun—”
Montray sighed and struck his forehead with his clenched hands. “Somebody made a stretcher for Reade and one for the kid here.”
“I’m all right.” Andrew shoved Montray’s hand aside; bent to look at Reade.
“He’s in a bad way,” the man from Dupont said “We’d better get them both back to Mount Denver while there’s time.” He looked sharply at Andrew. “You had better take it easy, too. You went shouting mad yourself, for a minute.” He stood up, turning to Montray.
“I think my theory is correct. Virus strains can live almost indefinitely where the air is dry. If such a plague killed off the people who built the city, it would explain why everyone who’s come up here has caught it—homicidal and suicidal.”
“That isn’t it—”
Montray checked him forcibly. “Slayton, you’re a sick man too. You’ll have to trust our judgment,” he said. He tucked his own coat around Reade and stood up, his face gray in the fading moonlight. “I’m going to the governor,” he said, “and have this place put off limits. Forty-two men dead of an unknown Martian virus, that’s too much. Until we get the money and the men to launch a full-scale medical project and knock it out, there won’t be any more private expeditions—or public ones, either. The hell with Xanadu.” He cocked his pistol and fired the four-shot signal to summon any stragglers.
Two of the men improvised a stretcher and began to carry Reade’s inert Body toward the sandbus. Andrew walked close, steadying the old man’s limp form with his hands. He was beginning to doubt himself. Under the setting moon, the sand biting his face, he began to ask himself if Montray had been right. Had he dreamed, then rationalized? Had he dreamed Kamellin? Kamellin? he asked.
There was no answer from the darkness in his mind. Andrew smiled grimly, his arm easing Reade’s head in the rude litter. If Kamellin had ever been there, he was gone, and there was no way to prove any of it—and it didn’t matter any more.
“... therefore, with regret, I am forced to move that project Xanadu be shelved indefinitely,” Reade concluded. His face was grim and resigned, still thin from his long illness. “The Army’s attitude is inflexible, and lacking men, medics and money, it seems that the only thing to do with Xanadu is to stay away from it.”
“It goes without saying,” said the man at the head of the table, “that we all appreciate what Major Reade and Mr. Slayton have been through. Gentlemen, no one likes to quit. But in the face of this, I have no alternative but to second Major Reade’s suggestion. Gentlemen, I move that the Martian chapter of the Geographic Society be closed out, and all equipment and personnel transferred to Aphrodite Base Twelve, South Venus.”
The vote was carried without dissent, and Reade and Andrew, escaping the bombardment of questions, drifted into the cold sunlight of the streets. They walked for a long time without speaking. Reade said at last:
“Andy, we did everything we could. Montray put his own commission in jeopardy for us. But this project has cost millions already. We’ve just hit the bottom of the barrel, that’s all.”
Andrew hunched his shoulders. “I could be there in three days.”
“I’d like to try it, too.” Reade sounded grim. “ But forget it, Andy. Shein-la Mahara is madness and death. Forget it. Go home—”
“Home? Home where? To Earth?” Andrew broke off, staring. What had Reade said?
“Say that again. The name of the city.*”
“Shein-la Mahari, the city of—” Reade gulped. “What in the hell—” he looked at Andy in despair. “I thought I could forget, convince myself it never happened. It left me when Hansen shot me. We’ve got to forget it, Andy—at least until we’re on the ship going home.”
“Ship, hell! We’re not going back to Earth, Reade!”
“Here, here,” said Reade, irritably, ‘”Who’s not going?”
Andrew subsided, thinking deeply. Then, with a flash of inspiration, he turned to Reade. “John, who owns the Society’s test animals?”
Reade rubbed his forehead. “Nobody, I guess. They sure won’t bother shipping a few dogs and chimps out to Venus! I’ve got authority to release them—I guess I’ll turn them over to Medic. Why? You want a dog? A monkey? What for?” He stopped in his tracks, glaring. “What bug have you got in your brain now?”
“Never mind. You’re going back to Earth by the next ship.”
“Don’t be in such a rush,” Reade grumbled, “The Erden-luft won’t blast for a week.”
Andrew grinned. “John, those animals are pretty highly organized. I wonder—”
Reade’s eyes met his in sudden comprehension. “Good lord, I never thought of that! Come on, let’s hurry!”
At the deserted shack where the Society’s animals were kept, a solitary keeper glanced indifferently at Reade’s credentials and let them in. Reade and Andrew passed the dogs without comment, glanced at and rejected the one surviving goat, and passed on to the caged chimpanzees.
“Well, either I’m crazy or this is it,” he said, and listened for that inner answer, the secret intruder in his brain. And after a long time, dimly, it came as if Kamellin could not at once reestablish lapsed contact.
I should have left you. There is no hope now, and I would rather die with my people than survive as a prisoner in your mind.
“No!” Andrew swung to face the chimpanzee. “Could you enter that living creature without his consent?”
There was a tightness across his diaphragm, as if it were his own fate, not Kamellin’s, that was being decided.
That creature could not give consent.
“I’m sorry, I tried—”
Kamellin’s excitement almost burst into speech. No, no, he is perfectly suited, for he is highly organized, but lacking intelligence—
“A chimp’s intelligent—”
A shade of impatience, as if Kamellin were explaining to a dull child; A brain, yes, but he lacks something—will, spirit, soul, volition—
“A chimp can be taught to do almost anything a man can—”
Except talk, communicate, use real reason. Yo« cannot entirely grasp this either, I know. It was the first time Andrew had been allowed to glimpse the notion that Kamellin did not consider Andrew his complete equal. The banshees are the first stage: A physical brain, consciousness, but no intelligence. They cannot be organized. Then your creature, your primate mammal, intelligence but no soul. However, when vitalized by true reason. . . . Kamellin’s thought-stream cut off abruptly, but not before Andrew had caught the concept, What does the Earthman think he is, anyhow?
Kamellin’s thoughts were troubled; Forgive me, I had no right to give you that. . .
“Inferiority complex?” Andrew laughed.
You do not function on the level of your soul. ‘You’re aware almost exclusively in your five senses and your reasoning intelligence. But your immortal mind is somehow stunted: You humans have slid into a differed time-track somehow, and you live only in three dimensions, losing memory—
“I don’t believe in the soul, Kamellin.”
That is the point I am trying to make, Andrew.
Reade touched his shoulder. “You give me the creeps, talking to yourself. What now?”
They picked out a large male chimp and sat looking at it while it grimaced at them with idiotic mildness. Andrew felt faint distaste. “Kamellin in that thing?”
Reade chuckled. “Quit being anthropomorphic. That thing is a heck of a lot better adapted to We on Mars than you are—look at the size of the chest—and Kamellin will know it, if you don’
t!” He paused. “After the switch, how can we communicate with Kamellin?”
Andrew relayed the question, puzzled. Finally he said, “I’m not sure. We’re using straight thoughts and he can’t get any notion of the -form of our language, any more than I can of his. Reade, can a chimp learn to talk?”
“No chimp ever has.”
“I mean, if a chimp did have the intelligence, the reasoning power, the drive to communicate in symbols or language, would its vocal cords and the shape of his mouth permit it!”
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Reade said, “I’m no expert on monkey anatomy, though. I wouldn’t bet against it either. Why? Going to teach Kamellin English?”
“Once he leaves me, there won’t be any way to communicate except the roughest sort of sign language!”
“Andy, we’ve got to figure out some way! We can’t let that knowledge be lost to us! Here we have a chance at direct contact with a mind that was alive when the city was built—”
“That’s not the important part,” Andrew said. “Ready, Kamellin?”
Yes. And I thank you eternally. Your world and mine lie apart, but we have been brothers. I salute you, my friend. The voice went still. The room reeled, went into a sick bluer—
“Are you all right?” Reade peered anxiously down at Andrew. Past him, they both realized that the big chimpanzee—no, Kamellin!—was looking over Reade’s shoulder. Not the idiot stare of the monkey. Not human, either. Even the posture of the animal was different.
Andrew—recognized—Kamellin.
And the—difference—in his mind, was gone.
Reade was staring; “Andy, when you fell, he jumped forward and caught you! No monkey would do that!”
Kamellin made an expressive movement of his hands.
Andrew said, “A chimp’s motor reflexes are marvelous, with a human—no, a better than human intelligence, there’s practically no limit to what he can do.” He said, tentatively, “Kamellin?”
“Will the chimp recognize that?”
“Look, Reade—will you remember something, as a favor to me? He—the chimp—is not a freak monkey! He is Kamellin—my close personal friend—and a damned sight more intelligent than either of us!”
Reade dropped his eyes. “I’ll try.”
“Kamellin?”
And Kamellin spoke. Tentatively, hoarsely, mouthily, as if with unfamiliar vocal equipment, he spoke. “An—drew,” he said slowly. “Shein. La. Mahari.” They had each reached the extent of their vocabulary in the other’s language. Kamellin walked to the other cages, with the chimpanzee’s rolling scamper which somehow had, at the same time, a controlled and fluid dignity that was absolutely new. Reade dropped on a bench. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “But do you realize what you’ve done, Andrew? A talking monkey. At best, they’d call us a fraud. At. worst the scientists would end up dissecting him. Well never be able to prove anything or tell anyone!”
“I saw that all along,” Andrew said bitterly, and dropped to the bench. Kamellin came and squatted beside them, alert, with an easy stillness.
Suddenly Andrew looked up. “There are about twenty chimps. Not enough. But there’s a good balance, male to female, and they can keep up a good birth rate—”
“What in the—”
“Look,” Andrew said excitedly, “it’s more important to preserve the Martian race—the last few sane ones—than to try convincing the Society—; we probably couldn’t anyhow. We’ll take the chimps to Shein-la Mahari. Earthmen never go there, so they won’t be molested for a while, anyhow— probably not for a hundred years or so! By that time, they’ll have been able to—to reclaim their race a little, gain back their culture, and there’ll be a colony of intelligent beings, monkeylike in form but not monkeyish. We can leave records of this. In a hundred years or so—”
Reade looked at him hesitantly, his imagination gripped, against his will, by Andrew’s vision. “Could they survive?”
“Kamellin told me that the city was—time-sealed, he called it, and in perfect order.” He looked down at the listening stillness of Kamellin and was convinced that the
Martian understood; certainly Kamellin’s reception of telepathy must be excellent, even if Andrew’s was not.
“It was left that way—waiting for a race they could use, if one evolved. Chimps have terrific dexterity, once they’re guided by intelligence. They made their food chemically, by solar power, and there are heat units, records—just waiting.”
Reade stood up and started counting the chimpanzees. “We’ll probably lose our jobs and our shirts—but well try it, Andy. Go borrow a sandbus—I’ve still got good contacts.” He scribbled a note on a scrap of paper he found in his pocket, then added grimly, “But don’t forget; we’ve still got to be on the Erdenluft when it lifts off.”
“We’ll be on it.”
Once again Andrew Slayton stood on the needled desert for a last look at the squat towers of Shein-la Mahari. He knew he would never come back.
Reade, his white shock of hair bent, stood beside him. Around them the crowd of Martians stood motionless, with a staid dignity greater than human, quietly waiting.
“No,” Reade said half to himself, “it wouldn’t work, Andy. Kamellin might take a chance on you, but you’d both regret it.”
Andrew did not move or answer, still looking hungrily up at the glareless ramparts. If I could only write a book about it, he was thinking. The day they had spent had been what every inter-planetary archaeologist dreams about in his most fantastic conjectures. The newly-incarnate Martians had been gratefully receptive to Reade’s expressive sign-language and the tour of the city was a thing past all their wildest imagination.
Beneath the sand of centuries Shein-la Mahari was more than a city; it was a world. Never would they forget the heart-stopping thrill when a re-inhabited Martian, working with skill and inhuman awareness, had uncovered the ancient machinery of the water supply, connected to the miles-deep underground lakes, and turned great jets of water into hydroponic gardens; seeds long in storage had instantly bubbled into Sprouting life. A careful engineer, her monkeylike paws working with incredible skill, had set sealed power units to humming. Rations, carefully time-sealed against emergency, were still edible. Reade and Andrew had shared the strangest meal of their lives with twenty-odd Martians—and it was not the suddenly-controlled chimpanzees whose table manners had seemed odd. Martian conventions were a cultural pattern of unbelievable stability.
Nor would he ever forget the great library of glyphs inscribed on flexible sheets of Vanadium, the power-room of throbbing machinery—
“Forget it,” Reade said roughly, “they’ll probably send us to Titan—and who knows what we’ll find there?”
“Yeah. We’ve got a spaceship to catch.” Andrew climbed into the sandcar, leaning out to grasp Kamellin’s paw—sensing that the Martian would understand the gesture, if not the words. “Goodbye, Kamellin. Good luck to all of you.” He cut the rockets in and shot away in a thunderstorm of sand. He drove fast and dangerously. He would never see Shein-la Mahari again. He would leave Mars, probably forever. And forever he would be alone. ...
“They’ll make out,” said Reade gruffly, and put an arm around his shoulders. To his intense horror, Andrew discovered that he was blinking back scalding tears.
“Sure,” he made himself say. “In a few hundred years they’ll be way ahead of Earth. Look what seventy-odd pilgrims did in North America, on our own planet! Synthetics-power—maybe even interstellar travel. They’d visited Earth once, before the plagues that killed them, Kamellin told me.” The sandcar roared around the rock-wall and Shein-la Mahari was gone. Behind them Andrew heard a rumble and a dull, groundshaking thunder. The pass behind them crashed in ruin; the Ridge was impassable again. Kamellin and his Martians would have their chance, unmolested by Earthmen, for at least a few years—
“I wonder,” Reade mused, “which race will discover the other first... ?
The Door Through Space
&nb
sp; Author's Note
I’ve always wanted to write. But not until I discovered the old pulp science-fantasy magazines, at the age of sixteen, did this general desire become a specific urge to write science-fantasy adventures.
I took a lot of detours on the way. I discovered s-f in its golden age: the age of Kuttner, C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, Ed Hamilton and Jack Vance. But while I was still collecting rejection slips for my early efforts, the fashion changed. Adventures on faraway worlds and strange dimensions went out of fashion, and the new look in science-fiction—emphasis on the science—came in.
So my first stories were straight science-fiction, and I’m not trying to put down that kind of story. It has its place. By and large, the kind of science-fiction which makes tomorrow’s headlines as near as this morning’s coffee, has enlarged popular awareness of the modern, miraculous world of science we live in. It has helped generations of young people feel at ease with a rapidly changing world.
But fashions change, old loves return, and now that Sputniks clutter up the sky with new and unfamiliar moons, the readers of science-fiction are willing to wait for tomorrow to read tomorrow’s headlines. Once again, I think, there is a place, a wish, a need and hunger for the wonder and color of the world way out. The world beyond the stars. The world we won’t live to see. That is why I wrote THE DOOR THROUGH SPACE.
—Marion Zimmer Bradley
Chapter One
Beyond the spaceport gates, the men of the Kharsa were hunting down a thief. I heard the shrill cries, the pad-padding of feet in strides just a little too long and loping to be human, raising echoes all down the dark and dusty streets leading up to the main square.
But the square itself lay empty in the crimson noon of Wolf. Overhead the dim red ember of Phi Coronis, Wolf’s old and dying sun, gave out a pale and heatless light. The pair of Spaceforce guards at the gates, wearing the black leathers of the Terran Empire, shockers holstered at their belts, were drowsing under the arched gateway where the star-and-rocket emblem proclaimed the domain of Terra. One of them, a snub-nosed youngster only a few weeks out from Earth, cocked an inquisitive ear at the cries and scuffling feet, then jerked his head at me.
Marion Zimmer Bradley Super Pack Page 14
