by C. L. Moore
“What’s the job?” he asked.
The little man hitched his chair closer and sent a glance round the room from under lowered lids. He scanned the faces of his two companions half doubtfully. He said, “There have been many gods since time’s beginning,” then paused and peered dubiously into Smith’s face.
Northwest nodded briefly. “Go on,” he said.
Reassured, the little man took up his tale, and before he had gone far enthusiasm drowned out the doubtfulness in his husky voice, and a tinge of fanaticism crept in.
“There were gods who were old when Mars was a green planet, and a verdant moon circled an Earth blue with steaming seas, and Venus, molten-hot, swung round a younger sun. Another world circled in space then, between Mars and Jupiter where its fragments, the planetoids, now are. You will have heard rumors of it—they persist in the legends of every planet. It was a mighty world, rich and beautiful, peopled by the ancestors in mankind. And on that world dwelt a mighty Three in a temple of crystal, served by strange slaves and worshipped by a world. They were not wholly abstract, as most modern gods have become. Some say they were from beyond, and real, in their way, as flesh and blood.
“Those three gods were the origin and beginning of all other gods that mankind has known. All modern gods are echoes of them, in a world that has forgotten the very name of the Lost Planet. Saig they called one, and Lsa was the second. You will never have heard of them—they died before your world’s hot seas had cooled. No man knows how they vanished, or why, and no trace of them is left anywhere in the universe we know. But there was a Third—a mighty Third set above these two and ruling the Lost Planet; so mighty a Third that even today, unthinkably long afterward, his name has not died from the lips of man. It has become a byword now— his name, that once no living man dared utter! I heard you call upon him not ten minutes past—Black Pharol!”
His husky voice sank to a quiver as it spoke the hackneyed name. Yarol gave a sudden snort of laughter, quickly hushed, and said, “Pharol! Why—”
“Yes, I know. Pharol, today, means unmentionable rites to an ancient no-god of utter darkness. Pharol has sunk so low that his very name denotes nothingness. But in other days—ah, in other days! Black Pharol has not always been a blur of dark worshipped with obscenity. In other days men knew what things that darkness hid, nor dared pronounce the name you laugh at, lest unwittingly they stumble upon that secret twist of its inflection which opens the door upon the dark that is Pharol. Men have been engulfed before now in that utter blackness of the god, and in that dark have seen fearful things. I know”—the raw voice trailed away into a murmur—“such fearful things that a man might scream his throat hoarse and never speak again above a whisper…”
Smith’s eyes flicked Yarol’s. The husky murmur went on after a moment.
“So you see the old gods have not died utterly. They can never die as we know death: they come from too far Beyond to know either death or life as we do. They came from so very far that to touch us at all they had to take a visible form among mankind—to incarnate themselves in a material body through which, as through a door, they might reach out and touch the bodies and minds of men. The form they chose does not matter now—I do not know it. It was a material thing, and it has gone to dust so long ago that the very memory of its shape has vanished from the minds of men. But that dust still exists. Do you hear me? That dust which was once the first and the greatest of all gods, still exists! It was that which those men hunted. It was that they found, and fled in deadly terror of what they saw there. You look to be made of firmer stuff. Will you take up the search where they left it?”
Smith’s pale stare met Yarol’s black one across the table. Silence hung between them for a moment. Then Smith said,
“Any objection to us having a little talk with those two over there?”
“None at all,” answered the hoarse whisper promptly. “Go now, if you like.”
Smith rose without further words. Yarol pushed back his chair noiselessly and followed him. They crossed the floor with the spaceman’s peculiar, shifting walk and slid into opposite chairs between the huddling two.
The effect was startling. The Earthman jerked convulsively and turned a pasty face, eloquent with alarm, toward the interruption. The drylander stared from Smith’s face to Yarol’s in dumb terror. Neither spoke.
“Know that fellow over there?” inquired Smith abruptly, jerking his head toward the table they had quitted.
After a moment’s hesitation the two heads turned as one. When they faced around again the terror on the Earthman’s face was giving way to a dawning comprehension. He said from a dry throat, “He—he’s hiring you, eh?”
Smith nodded. The Earthman’s face crumpled into terror again and he cried,
“Don’t do it. For God’s sake, you don’t know!”
“Know what?”
The man glanced furtively round the room and licked his lips uncertainly. A curious play of conflicting emotions flickered across his face.
“Dangerous—” he mumbled. “Better leave well enough alone. We found that out.”
“What happened?”
The Earthman stretched out a shaking hand for the segir bottle and poured a brimming glass. He drained it before he spoke, and the incoherence of his speech may have been due to the glasses that had preceded it.
“We went up toward the polar mountains, where he said. Weeks…it was cold. The nights get dark up there…dark. Went into the cave that goes through the mountain—a long way…Then our lights went out—full-charged batteries in new super-Tomlinson tubes, but they went out like candles, and in the dark—in the dark the white thing came…”
A shudder went over him strongly. He reached out shaking hands for the segir bottle and poured another glass, the rim clicking against his teeth as he drank. Then he set down the glass hard and said violently,
“That’s all. We left. Don’t remember a thing about getting out—or much more than starving and freezing in the saltlands for a long time. Our supplies ran low—hadn’t been for him”—nodding across the table—“we’d both have died. Don’t know how we did get out finally—but we’re out, understand? Out! Nothing could hire us to go back—we’ve seen enough. There’s something about it that—that makes your head ache—we saw…never mind. But—”
He beckoned Smith closer and sank his voice to a whisper. His eyes rolled fearfully.
“It’s after us. Don’t ask me what…I don’t know. But—feel it in the dark, watching—watching in the dark…”
The voice sank to a mumble and he reached again for the segir bottle.
“It’s here now—waiting—if the lights go out— watching—mustn’t let the lights go out—more segir…”
The bottle clinked on the glass-rim, the voice trailed away into drunken mutterings.
Smith pushed back his chair and nodded to Yarol. The two at the table did not seem to notice their departure. The drylander was clutching the segir bottle in turn and pouring out red liquid without watching the glass—an apprehensive one-eyed stare turned across his shoulder.
Smith laid a hand on his companion’s shoulder and drew him across the room toward the bar. Yarol scowled at the approaching bartender and suggested, “Suppose we get an advance for drinks, anyhow.”
“Are we taking it?”
“Well, what d’you think?”
“It’s dangerous. You know, there’s something worse than whisky wrong with those two. Did you notice the Earthman’s eyes?”
“Whites showed all around,” nodded Yarol. “I’ve seen madmen look like that.”
“I thought of that, too. He was drunk, of course, and probably wouldn’t be so wild-sounding, sober—but from the looks of him he’ll never be sober again till he dies. No use trying to find out anything more from him. And the other—well, did you ever try to find out anything from a drylander? Even a sober one?”
Yarol lifted expressive shoulders. “I know. If we go into this, we go blind. Never dig any
more out of those drunks. But something certainly scared them.”
“And yet,” said Smith, “I’d like to know more about this. Dust of the gods—and all that. Interesting. Just what does he want with this dust, anyhow?”
“Did you believe that yarn?”
“Don’t know—I’ve come across some pretty funny things here and there. He does act half-cracked, of course, but— well, those fellows back there certainly found something out of the ordinary, and they didn’t go all the way at that.”
“Well, if he’ll buy us a drink I say let’s take the job,” said Yarol. “I’d as soon be scared to death later as die of thirst now. What do you say?”
“Good enough,” shrugged Smith. “I’m thirsty, too.”
The little man looked up hopefully as they reseated themselves at the table.
“If we can come to terms,” said Smith, “we’ll take it. And if you can give us some idea of what we’re looking for, and why.”
“The dust of Pharol,” said the husky voice impatiently. “I told you that.”
“What d’you want with it?”
The little bright eyes stared suspiciously across the table into Smith’s calm gaze.
“What business is it of yours?”
“We’re risking our necks for it, aren’t we?”
Again the bright, small eyes bored into the Earthman’s. The husky voice fell lower, to the very echo of a whisper, and he said, secretly.
“I’ll tell you, then. After all, why not? You don’t know how to use it—it’s of no value to anyone but me. Listen, then—I told you that the Three incarnated themselves into a material form to use as a door through which they could reach humanity. They had to do it, but it was a door that opened both ways—through it, if one dared, man could reach the Three. No one dared in those days—the power beyond was too terrible. It would have been like walking straight through a gateway into hell. But time has passed since then. The gods have drawn away from humanity into farther realms. The terror that was Pharol is only an echo in a forgetful world. The spirit of the god has gone—but not wholly. While any remnant of that shape which was once incarnate Pharol exists , Pharol can be reached. For the man who could lay hands on that dusk, knowing the requisite rites and formulae, all knowledge, all power would lie open like a book. To enslave a god!”
The raw whisper rasped to a crescendo; fanatic lights flared in the small, bright eyes. He had forgotten them entirely—his piercing stare fixed on some shining future, and his hands on the table clenched into white-knuckled fists.
Smith and Yarol exchanged dubious glances. Obviously the man was mad…
“Fifty thousand dollars to your account in any bank you choose,” the hoarse voice, eminently sane, broke in abruptly upon their dubiety. “All expenses, of course, will be paid. I’ll give you charts and tell you all I know about how to get there. When can you start?”
Smith grinned. Touched the man might be, but just then Smith would have stormed the gates of hell, at any madman’s request, for fifty thousand Earth dollars.
“Right now,” he said laconically. “Let’s go.”
2
Northward over the great curve of Mars, red slag and red dust and the reddish, low-lying dryland vegetation gave way to the saltlands around the Pole. Scrub grows there, and sparse, coarse grass, and the snow that falls by night lies all the cold, thin day among the tough grass-roots and in the hillocks of the dry salt soil.
“Of all the God-forsaken countries,” said Northwest Smith, looking down from his pilot seat at the gray lands slipping past under the speed of their plane, “this must be the worst. I’d sooner live on Luna or one of the asteroids.”
Yarol tilted the segir bottle to his lips and evoked an eloquent gurgle from its depths.
“Five days of flying over this scenery would give anyone the jitters,” he pronounced. “I’d never have thought I’d be glad to see a mountain range as ugly as that, but it looks like Paradise now,” and he nodded toward the black, jagged slopes of the polar mountains that marked their journey’s end so far as flying was concerned; for despite their great antiquity the peaks were jagged and rough as mountains new-wrenched from a heaving world.
Smith brought the plane down at the foot of the rising black slopes. There was a triangular gap there with a streak of white down its side, a landmark he had been watching for, and the plane slid quietly into the shelter to lie protected under the shelving rock. From here progress must be made afoot and painfully through the mountains. There was no landing-place any nearer their goal than this. Yet in measure of distance they had not far to go.
The two climbed stiffly out. Smith stretched his long legs and sniffed the air. It was bitterly cold, and tinged with that nameless, dry salt smell of eon-dead seas which is encountered nowhere in the known universe save in the northern saltlands of Mars. He faced the mountains doubtfully. From their beginnings here, he knew, they rolled away, jagged and black and deadly, to the very Pole. Snow lay thickly upon them in the brief Martian winter, unmarked by any track until it melted for the canals, carving deeper runnels into the already jig-sawed peaks.
Once in the very long-past days, so the little whispering fanatic had said, Mars was a green world. Seas had spread here, lapping the feet of gentler mountains, and in the slopes of those hills a mighty city once lay—a nameless city, so far as the present generations of man remembered, and a nameless star shone down upon it from a spot in the heavens now empty—the Lost Planet, shining on a lost city. The dwellers there must have seen the catastrophe which blasted that sister planet from the face of the sky. And if the little man were right, the gods of that Lost Planet had been saved from the wreckage and spirited across the void to a dwelling-place in this greatly honored city of the mountains that is not even a memory today.
And time passed, so the story went. The city aged—the gods aged—the planet aged. At last, in some terrible catastrophe, the planet heaved under the city’s foundations, the mountains shook it into ruins and folded themselves into new and dreadful shapes. The seas receded, the fertile soil sluffed away from the rocks and time swallowed up the very memory of that city which once had been the dwelling-place of gods—which was still, so the hoarse whisper had told them, the dwelling-place of gods.
“Must have been right around here somewhere,” said Smith, “that those two found the cave.”
“Out around the slope to the left,” agreed Yarol. “Let’s go.” He squinted up at the feeble sun. “Not very long past dawn. We ought to be back again by dark if things go right.”
They left the ship in its shelter and struck out across the salt drylands, the harsh scrub brushing about their knees and their breath clouding the thin air as they advanced. The slope curved away to the left, rising in rapid ascent to black peaks that were unscalable and forbidding. The only hope of penetrating that wall lay in finding the cavern that their predecessors had fled…and in that cavern—Smith loosened the heat-gun in its holster at his side.
They had plodded for fifteen minutes through the scrub, dry snow rising under their feet and the harsh salt air frosting their breath, before the mouth of the cave they were hunting appeared darkly under the overhanging rock they had been told of.
The two peered in doubtfully. That jagged floor might never have known the tread of human feet, so far as one might know by the look of it. Powdered snow lay undisturbed in the deep crannies, and daylight did not penetrate very far into the forbidding dark beyond. Smith drew his gun, took a deep breath and plunged into the blackness and the cold, with Yarol at his heels.
It was like leaving everything human and alive for some frosty limbo that had never known life. The cold struck sharply through their leather garments. They took out their Tomlinson tubes before they had gone more than twenty paces, and the twin beams illumined a scene of utter desolation, more dead than death, for it seemed never to have known life.
For perhaps fifteen minutes they stumbled through the cold dark. Smith kept his beam focused on
the floor beneath them; Yarol’s roved the walls and pierced the blackness ahead. Rough walls and ragged ceiling and teeth of broken stone projecting from the floor to slash at their boots—no sound but their footsteps, nothing but the dark and the frost and the silence. Then Yarol said, “It’s foggy in here,” and something clouded the clear beams of the lights for an instant; then darkness folded round them as suddenly and completely as the folds of a cloak.
Smith stopped dead-still, tense and listening. No sound. He felt the lens of his light-tube and knew that it still burned—it was warm, and the faint vibration under the glass told him that the tubes still functioned. But something intangible and strange blotted it out at the source…a thick, stifling blackness that seemed to muffle their senses. It was like a bandage over the eyes—Smith, holding the burning lightlens to his eyes, could not detect even its outline in that all-cloaking dark.
For perhaps five minutes that dead blackness held them. Vaguely they knew what to expect, but when it came, the shock of it took their breath away. There was no sound, but quite suddenly around a bend of the cavern came a figure of utter whiteness, seen at first fragmentarily through a screen of rock-toothed jags, then floating full into view against the background of the dark. Smith thought he had never seen whiteness before until his incredulous eyes beheld this creature—if creature it could be. Somehow he thought it must be partly below the level of the floor along which it moved; for though in that blind black he had no way of gauging elevation, it seemed to him that the apparition, moving with an effortless glide, advanced unopposed through the solid rock of the floor. And it was whiter than anything living or dead had ever been before—so white that it sickened him, somehow, and the flesh crept along his spine. Like a cut-out figure of paper, it blazed against the flat black beyond. The dark did not affect it, no shadows lay upon its surface; in two arbitrary dimensions only, blind white superimposed upon blind dark, it floated toward them. And it was tall, and somehow man-formed, but of no shape that words could describe.
