“Listen!” called Karen breathlessly. “Didn’t you hear it? Listen!”
And while they all stood in strained quiet, a far, faint, keening cry from high overhead came floating down to them through the twilight and the mist. Not a bird-cry. They all heard it clearly, and they must all have known it came from a human throat. While they stood frozen it sounded again, nearer and lower and infinitely sad. And then across their range of vision, high in the ruddy gloom a slim, winged shape floated, riding the air-currents like a condor with broad, pale wings outspread. They had glimpsed it before. And it was no bird-form. Clearly even at this distance they all could see the contours of a human body sailing on winged arms high in the twilight.
Once more the infinitely plaintive, thin cry keened through the air before the thing suddenly beat its winged arms together and went soaring off into the dimness, with the echoes of its heartbreaking wail fading on the air behind it.
No one spoke. Every face was lifted to the chilly wind as the pale, soaring speck melted into the sky and vanished far out over the unfeatured landscape. Alan found himself wondering if this slim, winged thing fading into the twilight be the last man on earth, down an unimaginable line of evolution that had left all humanity winged and wailing—and mindless.
For there was no doubt about that. It had been a human throat that voiced the plaintive cry, but no mind had sounded behind it. An idiot cry, sick with unreasoned grieving. Was it evolution that had brought the great race of man so low? Had evolution taken his mind from him and sent him soaring through the cloudy twilight, keening for the lost glories that had once been man’s and were not now remembered anywhere at all . . .
Alan shook himself a little.
“Evolution,” Sir Colin was murmuring, an echo of Alan’s thought. “So that’s the end of the race, is it? How long have we slept, then?”
“One thing,” said Alan in as brisk a voice as he could manage. “Whatever the thing was, it’s got to eat. Somewhere in the world there must be some food and water left.”
“Good for you, laddie,” grinned Sir Colin. “Hadn’t thought of that yet. Maybe there’s hope for us yet, if we follow—”
“Don’t forget, it can fly,” reminded Karen.
Alan shrugged. “All the more reason to start after it now, while we’re fresh. There isn’t anything here to stay for.”
“I think I’ll just have a wee look inside before we go,” put in Sir Colin thoughtfully. “There’s a bare chance . . .” He led the way back inside and the rest followed, none of them willing to stay out alone in the desert of the world.
But there was nothing here. Only the vast curved walls, the confused reflections of themselves that swam dizzily when they moved. Only empty concavity, and the arrow-shaped doorway behind which nothing dwelt now. The Alien was gone, but whether he—it—had just preceded them into the ruddy twilight of the world’s end, or whether he had been gone for many years when they woke, there was no way of guessing.
“If this was a space-ship once,” murmured Sir Colin, scratching his rusty beard, “there must have been controls, motors—something! Now where could they be but there?” And he cocked a bristling eyebrow toward the dark doorway.
A LITTLE coldness shivered through Alan and was gone. He did not know what he remembered of that narrow door, but the thought of approaching it made the flesh crawl on his bones.
Sir Colin moved as slowly toward the door as if he too shared the unreasoning revulsion, but he moved, and Alan followed at his heels. He was at Sir Colin’s elbow when the hulking scientist stooped his big, bony shoulders forward to peer into that slitted doorway they all feared without remembering why.
“Um—dark,” grunted the Scotsman. He was fumbling in the pocket of his shapeless suit. He found a tiny flashlight there and clicked on an intense needle-beam of light that flared in blinding reflection from the wall as he swung it toward the doorway.
He grunted in astonishment. “It shouldn’t work,” he muttered. “A battery, after a million years—”
But it did work, and it was useless. The light, turned to the narrow doorway, seemed to strike a wall of darkness and spray backward. That black interior seemed as solidly tangible as brick. Sir Colin put out his gun-hand and saw it vanish to the wrist in dark like water. He jerked it out again, unharmed,
Alan whistled softly. There was a moment of silence.
“All the same,” Alan said doggedly, “we’ve got to explore that room before we leave. There’s just a bare hope of something in there that can help us.”
He drew his own gun and took a deep breath, and stepped over the threshold of the arrow-shaped door like a man plunging into deep water. The most hideous revulsions crawled through every nerve in his body as that blinding darkness closed over his eyes. He could not even hear Sir Colin’s step behind him, but he felt a groping hand find his shoulder and grip it, and the two men moved forward with wary, shuffling steps into a darkness that blinded every sense like oblivion itself.
Alan’s outstretched hand found the wall. He followed it grimly, prepared for anything. He was trying very hard not to remember that once the Alien had seemed to brim this little room, filling the high doorway with a curling and shifting of dark against dark.
It was a small room. They groped their way around the wall and in a space of time that might or might not have been long Alan felt the wall fall away beneath his fingers and stepped out into the comparative brightness of the great dim hollow again. He had a moment of utter vertigo. Then the floor steadied under his feet and he was looking into Sir Colin’s face, white and a little sick.
“You—you look the way I feel,” he heard himself saying inanely. “Well—?” Sir Colin put his gun away methodically, pocketed the flash.
“Nothing,” said Sir Colin in a thinnish voice. “Nothing at all.”
Alan nodded silently, with a curious feeling of helplessness.
“I say let’s get moving,” broke in Mike Smith’s voice, and faint echoes woke along the ceiling at the loudness of it. “We’re wasting time here.”
Karen lifted questioning blue eyes to them, searched each face in turn. She did not ask them what they had found inside the arrowy doorway, perhaps she did not want to know. But after a moment, in a subdued voice, she echoed Mike.
“Yes, we’d better go. This ship—it’s no good any more. It will never move again.” She said it flatly, and for a moment Alan almost recaptured the memory he had been groping for. She was right. This ship had never needed machinery, but whatever motive power had lifted it no longer existed. It was as dead as the world it had brought them to.
He followed the others toward the door.
CHAPTER THREE
The Citadel
THE dust of the world’s end rose in sluggish whirls around their feet and settled again as they plodded across the desert. The empty sphere of the ship was hidden in the mists behind them. Nothing lay ahead but the invisible airy path the bird-man had followed, and the hope of food and water somewhere before their strength gave out.
Alan scuffed through the dust which was all that remained of the vivid world he had left only yesterday, before the long night of his sleep. This dust was Tunis, it was the bazaars and the shouting Arabs of Bizerte. It was tanks and guns and great ships, his own friends, and the titanic battle that had raged about the Mediterranean. He shivered in the frigid wind that whirled the dust of ages around him. Iron desolation was all that remained, desolation and silence and—
There was that cryptic structure he had glimpsed, or thought he glimpsed against the sky. It might hold life—if he had not imagined it. The bird-like creatures might have come from there. In any case, they might as well walk in that direction, lacking any other sign.
The stillness was like death around them. But was it stillness? Alan tilted his head away from the wind to catch that distant sound, then called out, “Wait!” In a moment they heard it too, the great rushing roar from so far away that its intensity was diminished to a whi
sper without, somehow, diminishing its volume. The roar grew louder. Now it was low thunder, shaking the drifting mists, shaking the very ground they stood on. But it did not come nearer. It went rushing and rumbling off into diminuendo again, far away through the mists.
They stood there blindly, huddled together against the immense mystery and menace of a force that could shake the earth as it passed. And while they still stood quiet a faint, thin cry from overhead electrified them all.
“The bird again!” Karen whispered, and with the nervous dig of her fingers into his Alan realized suddenly that they had been clutching one another with tense hands.
“There it is!” cried Mike Smith suddenly. “I see it! Look!” And his gun was in his hand with magical smoothness and swiftness, lifting toward the pale winged figure that was sailing low through the thinning mists overhead.
Alan’s leap was pure reflex, too swift for even his own reasoning to follow. He had no time to wonder why he did it, but he felt his muscles gather and release with coiled-spring violence, and then his hurtling shoulder struck solid flesh and he heard Mike grunt hollowly. The next moment the ground received them both with jolting force.
Alan rolled over and got to his feet, automatically brushing himself off and frowning down at Mike who lay motionless, his gun a foot away from his outstretched, sprawling fingers.
The basic difference between the two men had come clearly into sight in that moment when the bird-creature sailed across the sky. Mike’s instant reaction was to kill, Alan’s to prevent that slaughter.
Sir Colin hulked forward and picked up Mike’s fallen gun.
Mike was up then, swiftly recovered, and poised. Karen stepped in front of his catlike rebound. “Wait,” she said, putting out an arm that stopped him in midstride. “Drake’s right. We don’t know what the sound of a shot might bring down on us. And those bird-things—what do we know about them? They might be—property. And the owners might be even less human than they are.”
“I just wanted to wing the thing,” Mike snarled. “How the hell can we trail a bird? It might lead us to food if we’d got it down on the ground. That’s sense.”
“We mustn’t make enemies before we know their strength,” Karen told him.
“We’ve got to hang together now,” Sir Colin put in, pocketing the gun. “Otherwise we haven’t a hope. We must not squabble, laddie.”
Mike shrugged, his good-looking cat-features darkened with his scowl. “I won’t turn my back on you again, Drake,” he said evenly. “We’ll settle it later. But we’ll settle it.”
Alan said, “Suit yourself.”
THEY trudged on. The desolation of the world was falling again upon their spirits. Even Mike seemed unable to keep up the heat of his anger. Alan found himself remembering Dali’s surrealist landscapes. Here was the same smooth, unfeatured deadliness, the same aura of despair under a leaden sky.
It was very cold now. But even the wind felt lifeless as night deepened over the earth. When the stars came, they were unrecognizable. The Milky Way alone looked familiar. Alan thought fantastically that its light might have left it at the very moment they had left their own world forever—to meet them here in an unimaginable rendezvous where the last dregs of time were ebbing from the world.
Moonrise roused them a little. The great pale disc came up slowly, tremendously, overpowering and desolately beautiful in the night of the world.
“Look,” murmured Karen in a hushed voice. “You can see the craters and the dead seas—”
“Not close enough yet to cause quakes, I think,” Sir Colin said, squinting at it. “Might be tremendous tidal waves, though, if any water’s left. I wonder—” He stopped quite suddenly, halting the others. A rift in the ground mists had drawn cloudy curtains aside and there before them, in monstrous silhouette against the moon, stood the great black outlines of that shape they had glimpsed for a fleeting instant from the ship. Misshapen, asymmetrical, but too regular to be any natural formation.
“We didn’t dream it, then,” Alan breathed. “A fortress?”
Karen’s voice answered him, thin as a voice in a dream. “Nothing that men ever made . . .”
“It must be enormous,” Sir Colin murmured. “Far away, but big—big! Well, we head for it, I suppose?”
“Of course we do,” Karen spoke sharply. Command was in her voice for the first time since their awakening, as if she had only now fully aroused from a dream. Alan looked at her in surprise in the gray of the moonlight. Seeing a chance of survival, she had come alive. Life and color had flowed back into her.
“Come on,” commanded the crisp, new voice. “Maybe there’s a chance for us here after all. Sir Colin, let Mike have his gun again. We may need it.”’
“Don’t expect too much, lassie,” warned the Scotsman mildly, producing the revolver. “Most likely the place has been empty a thousand years.”
“We’ve been acting like a pack of children,” Karen declared sharply, swinging a keen stare about through the mist. “There’re bird-things here—there may be others. Mike, you do a vanguard, will you? About twenty paces ahead unless the mist gets worse. Alan, drop back just a little and keep an eye out behind us. Sir Colin, you and I’ll see that nothing sneaks up on us from the sides. We’ll keep as close together as we can, but if we blunder into anything ahead we mustn’t all be caught at once.”
Alan’s ears burned a little as he obediently dropped back a few paces. When Karen awoke, she awoke with a vengeance. He should have thought of possible danger around them before now. They had all been walking in a dream—a dream of desolation and death where nothing but themselves still breathed. But the bird-men lived, and there had been that great, strange roaring that shook the earth.
AS THE moon rose higher, it seemed to draw mists from the ground. Presently the four drew closer together, so as not to lose each other. The pale, thick fogs were seldom more than waist high, but often they piled up into grotesque, twisted pillars and mounds, moving sluggishly as if half alive. Against the monstrous circle of the moon the citadel held steady, huge and enigmatic.
Out of the moving mists before them came something white as fog, coiling as the fog coiled. Something slow and pale—and dreadful. Mike Smith snatched out his gun. Karen made a futile gesture to stop him, but there was no need. It was all too evident that guns would be useless against this behemoth of a dying world.
Farther and farther, bigger and bigger, the great pale worm came sliding out of the mist. Alan’s mouth went dry with sickened loathing as the thing coiled past, moving with a slow, unreal, sliding motion that was infinitely repellent. The creature was thick as a man’s height; its body trailed off and vanished in the fog-veils. It was featureless, Alan thought. He could not see it clearly, and was grateful for that.
It neither sensed nor saw the humans. Monstrously it writhed past and was gone, slowly, silently, like a dream.
Sir Colin’s voice was shaken when he spoke. “It’s probably harmless. An adaptation—”
“God!” Mike licked his lips, staring after the vanished, misty thing. “God, what was it?”
Alan, managed a grin. “A worm, Mike. Just a worm. Remember ’em?”
“Yeah.” The other’s voice was toneless. “But I wonder if everything is that big here.”
The black citadel grew larger as they plodded on. They could see now that the unknown creators of that monstrous pile had dealt with mountainous masses of stone as though basalt had been clay. It was not basalt, of course; probably it was some artificial rock. Yet ordinary gravitational and architectural limitations seemed to have had no meaning to the Builders.
HALF aloud, Alan mused, “Wonder how long we’ve been walking? My watch has stopped—quite a while ago, I suppose.”
Sir Colin flashed him a whimsically sardonic glance.
“It’ll need oiling, at least, before it runs again,” he called back.
Alan smiled in turn.
“If we’ve slept for a million years—we’ve been remarka
bly well preserved. I mean our clothes and our ammunition. Powder doesn’t last long, as a rule. Plenty of cartridges stored in 1919 were duds by 1940.”
(Sudden nostalgia, even for wars . . . What tremendous battles had raged and ebbed over the ground they walked on now, before armies and ravaged lands together fell into dust?)
Sir Colin burred a laugh. “It wasna sleep, laddie. I think it was far more than suspended animation. Everything stopped. Did ye ever hear of stasis?”
Alan nodded. “The absolute zero? Slowing down the electronic orbits to stop the liberation of quanta.”
“You know the catch-words,” Sir Colin chuckled. “Now look: we grow old because we lose more energy than we can take in. Take, for example, a pool of water. A stream flows into it, and out of it. As the human organism acquires and loses energy. Now, come winter, what happens? There’s a freeze, until the spring thaw.”
“Spring!” Alan’s laugh was harsh. He glanced around at the dark, desolate autumn of the world, an autumn hesitating on the verge of an eternal winter that would freeze the universe forever. Sir Colin had dropped back until he walked i abreast with Alan.
“Aye,” he said. “The lochs are frozen with more than cold. The world’s old, laddie. What lives in it now is the spawn of age, maybe the malformed children of a hag beyond her child-bearing days—twisted abortions of evil. Mindless man-birds, worms gone mad with growth, what else we may never know.” He shrugged wearily. “Yet you see my point. While the world died, we didna merely sleep. Something—perhaps a ray, or some sort of gas—halted our natural processes, The
atomic structure of our bodies, our clothing, the powder in our cartridges—they must not have been subject to normal wear. The pool was frozen. My beard is no longer than it was when I last combed it.”
Automatically Alan fingered his own chin, where the stubble felt less than a few hours old. “And now we pick up where we left off,” he said. “I ought to be hungry. But I’m not, yet.”
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