Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  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. Ailing 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 he 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,” he said, in a thinnish voice. “Nothing at all.”

  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. 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, “Walt!”

  In a moment they heard it, too, the great rushing roar from so far away that its intensity was diminished to a whisper 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.

  The basic difference between the two men had come clearly into sight in the 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.”

  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 t
hem, 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.

  Karen’s voice was as 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 had shaken 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 remarkably well preserved. I mean our clothes and our ammunition. Powder doesn’t last long, as a rule. Plenty of cartridges stored in nineteen nineteen were duds by nineteen forty.”

  (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 heard 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 eternal winter that would freeze the universe forever. Sir Colin had dropped back until he walked 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—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.”

  “The ice breaks up slowly. Presently you’ll be hungry enough. So will we all. And I’ve seen no food, except those flying things.”

  “They must eat. If we could follow them to water, there might be vegetation.”

  Sir Colin shook his head. “There’d not be much water left by now. And its saline content would be greater than Salt Lake—enough to poison fish, unless they were adapted to living in it. The same for vegetation.”

  “But the flying things—”

  “Maybe, maybe. But what d’ye think they eat? Perhaps stuff we couldn’t touch.”

  “Maybe we’ll know, when we arrive.” Alan nodded toward the monstrous citadel outlined against the moon.

  “Whoever built that damned thing,” the scientist said, with a curious note of horror in his voice, “I doubt strongly if their digestive systems were at all akin to ours. Have you noticed how wrong that geometry is, laddie? Based on nothing earthly. See?”

  ALAN squinted through the mists. The great fortress had grown almost mountain-huge, now. Moonlight did not reflect from the vast dark surfaces at all, so that the thing remained almost in silhouette, but they could see that it was composed of geometric forms which were yet strangely alien, polyhedrons, pyramids, pentagons, globes, all flung together as if without intelligent design. And yet each decoration was braced as though against tremendous stresses, or against a greater gravitational pull. Only high intelligence could have reared that vast structure towering above the mists of the plain, but it grew clearer at every step that the intelligence had not been human.

  “The size of it—” Alan murmured, awe in his voice. Long before they reached the building they had been forced to strain their heads back to see the higher pinnacles. Now, as they neared the base of the walls, the sheer heights above them were vertiginous when they looked up.

  Sir Colin put out a wondering hand toward the dead blackness of the wall.

  “Eroded,” he murmur
ed. “Eroded—and God knows there must be little rainfall here. How old must it be?”

  Alan touched the wall. It was smooth, cold, hard, seemingly neither stone nor metal.

  “Notice how little light it reflects,” Sir Colin said. “Very low refractive index—seems to absorb the moonlight.”

  Yes, the black wall drank in the moonlight. The pale rays seemed to flow into that cliff like a shining river into a cavern. As Alan stared, it seemed to him that he was looking into a tunnel—a black, hollow emptiness that stretched inimitably before him, starless as interstellar gulfs.

  He knew an instant of the same vertigo he had felt when he stepped out of the dead darkness of the room in the ship. And—yes, these darknesses were related.

  Each of them a negation, canceling out light and sound. This wall was something more than mere structural substance. It might not even be matter at all, as we know it, but something from outside, where the laws of earthly physics are suspended or Impossibly altered.

  Mike’s hand was on his gun-butt. “I don’t like this,” he said, lips drawn back against his teeth.

  “No more do I,” Sir Colin said quietly. He was rubbing his bearded chin and looking up and down along the blank base of the wall. “I doubt if there’s a way in—for us.”

  “There is no way,” Alan heard his own voice saying with a timbre he did not recognize as his. “There is no door for us. The entrance is—there?” He tilted his head back and stared up at those tumbled pinnacles above.

  From far away he heard Sir Colin’s sharp, “Eh? Why d’ye say that, laddie?”

  He looked down and into three pairs of keen, narrowed eyes that stared at him without expression. A sudden shock of distrust for all three of his companions all but rocked him back on his heels in that sudden, wordless moment. What did they remember?

  For himself, he could not be sure now just what flash of memory had brought those strange words to his mind. He forced his voice to a normal tone, and said through stiff lips, “I don’t know. Thinking of the flying things, I suppose. There certainly aren’t any doors here.”