It seemed that an icy draft blew on his chest as he took her hands in his. Uncomprehendingly he saw the long white welts that rose where her fingers touched him. Her hands were on his arms now, sapping away their strength, and her red lips were raised to his, her pointed tongue licking out between her sharp white teeth. There was a perfume on her hair and her body, pungent and intoxicating, that filled his brain and drugged his reeling senses. He felt her body against his, and all its promise poured through him in a numbing, chilling wave that left in him a single core of searing fire. Her eyes were closed, but now they opened slowly and he plunged recklessly, hopelessly into their fathomless green depths.
In him a bubble burst. An atom of white fire exploded in his brain, scourging him, cleansing him. He looked into his grandfather’s steely eyes, over the sundered, bloodless body of the woman-thing, cleft by a singly blow of the great gray sword. He raised her body up in his two hands, and it was light as a husk of shadow and cold as the touch of Death. He hurled it out into the sea of violet flame, and saw it drift and spin and sink like a feather into the abyss. Then the fury of the winds burst over them and he was flat on his face at the abyss’ edge, clinging with bleeding fingers to the jagged quartz.
Inch by inch he dragged himself back from the verge, along the ribbon of amethyst to a place where he could scramble down into the shelter of the rocks. His grandfather was there, with the others who were still alive. The old man’s hand seized his arm in a grip of iron.
“You did it, boy! You did what every man of us has tried to do since we were spilled into this hell’s paradise! You went to her freely, and you broke her spell and her power with it. We’ve only the Stalkers to face now, and with her gone I’m thinking it will be a different tale.”
Moran shuddered. If the old man’s arm had not been strong and his eye sure, those full red lips would have touched his. What lay beyond he dared not guess. What had she been—she with her woman’s shape, a woman’s allure, yet dry and bloodless like a husk of cast skin? What manner of unnatural force kept the life in her, there in her crystal tomb and after? What would have been the price of that last kiss—or its reward?
“Tell me about it,” he said huskily. “What’s it all about?”
“She was the answer,” the old man told him. “Once there was a reason for it. They had brains, those old Stalkers that built the city and put her here. They knew what they were doing, but now”—he spat contemptuously—”these things that’ve come down from them do what they do because it’s habit, because their parents did, and theirs before them, because their pint-size brains haven’t room for anything but the things they’ve always done. Maybe she was a goddess, if things like that can have goddesses. Anyway, every time things were fixed so that Sirius’ companion star shone through the Black Hole they’d bring food and leave it by the crystal. We lived on that, and men like us have lived on it for Heaven knows how long. She never touched it—not her. We were the food she craved!
“I don’t know if they found her here, those old Stalkers, or if she was from another star, maybe another universe, and they put her there in the crystal to keep her from getting at them. She’d have taken them, all right. She drew no lines, but she liked her own kind best. She took them when she could. You’ve been through it—you know, maybe, what it was—but she left them dead and drawn, with something gone out of them—and smiling. It was the choice we gave to them, that broke the law—quick death by the sword, or her. Some of ‘em took her—
“That’s where the toad came in. She needed strong men, big men, men with brains that could fight her, that she could play like a fish before she took the life out of them. The Stalkers would bring what they could get, and them that got past the toad were fit for her. There’s been a lot of us, since I came here. It took a quick brain and a strong body to make it, and she got the best there was.”
“Why did you stay here?” Moran demanded. “There must be some way out.”
“Hell, we’ve all tried that!” It was a scarred half-caste from one of Earth’s stray colonies. “There’s no way, only the way we came, and there you’ve got the toad to pass and the Stalkers if you make it. With her dead we’ll starve here. There was worse things than goin’ to her!”
Moran’s eyes narrowed. “Are you mad enough to risk the Stalkers if I handle the toad?” They stared at him blankly. “They’re big but they’re stupid; some of us’ll get through. Do you have the guts to try?”
They shuffled forward, one by one, until they were crowding around him. “All right,” he told them, “you’ve got leather—make me two ropes, strong ones, and get together whatever you’ve got to fight with. Grandpa and me’ll do the rest.”
~ * ~
It was night when they crossed the summit of the pass and crept down the gorge through the eternal rains—a dozen men, armed with broken stones, knives of chipped flint, or their bare hands. Ahead of them went Moran, his eyes and ears alert for any signs of danger, and at his side marched the old man, fondling his beloved sword.
Shortly after dawn Moran gave the word. They lashed the ropes securely about his body and snubbed them about projections of the cliff. He walked slowly toward the edge of the pit. The toad was waiting. Slowly its flat head rose, its golden eyes blinked, and that hypnotic trill began to throb from its swollen throat. A chill of horror brought the cold sweat out on Moran’s skin. What if the ropes should break?
He was at the limit of his tether now. Fascinated, he stared at the hideous face that hovered at the pit’s edge. Gritting his teeth, Moran waved his arms. The trilling stopped; the great toad’s muscles tensed. With a shout Moran leaped back.
At once the pallid tongue licked out. He felt its sticky mass envelop him, felt the leather thongs cutting into his flesh as they resisted its pull. He was suffocating, strangling, the breath crushed out of his bursting lungs. Then came the scramble of feet on the stone and old Michael Moran was at his side. He heard the clang of steel on stone, and the severed tongue dropped at his feet. A second blow and the ropes were cut, and the two men sprang forward into the pit. Side by side they stood on the toad’s broad skull. Seizing the sword, Moran raised it high above his head and smote with all his strength. Blood and brain pulp spurted from the cleft in the monster’s skull, and the last dying kick of the great creature flung them from its back. Then it was still, and they were clambering up over its colossal bulk, out of the pit, with their crew close at their heels.
The Stalkers were aroused. In the half light of dawn Moran could see their ungainly forms scrambling out of their barrows, hear them calling out to each other in their purring voices. He saw their eyes glowing in the darkness like golden moons as they stalked across the valley toward the stairs.
Moran looked at his grandfather. The old man’s legs were braced, his white locks whipping in the wind. The others were close behind—ten grim-faced men, armed with chipped stones and bits of wood, waiting to die fighting against inhuman giants thirty times their size. With room to run, to dodge, to hide among the ruined buildings of the deserted city, they might have escaped. Here, penned on this narrow ledge, they had no chance. Even the great sword could do nothing against those giant bodies.
He took the old man gently by the arm. “Give me the blade,” he said. “You’ve had your fun, now. Let it be Paddy Moran that shows the creatures the welcome we have for them.”
Cradling the sword in his arms as his grandfather had done, he watched them coming up the steps. Their heads towered far above him; they were almost within reach. He flung a curt order over his shouler. “Wait—then run for their legs. They’ll be a bit busy at the first, and you’ll maybe get through.”
Grounding the sword’s point, he tensed for the first futile blow.
Black hail screamed down across his vision. Great sweeping wings—long, shining lances—ray guns spitting out their needles of white fire. In hundreds and thousands, streaming from the clouds like rain in a headlong dive, the Muraths came.
Bewildered, the Stalkers sto
od in a huddle, midway of the stairs, their misshapen heads cocked upward, their vast arms hanging limp. Then they were in retreat, stumbling across the plain to the shelter of the ruined city, striking vainly at the buzzing, darting mites that zoomed and banked about their heads striking death with rays and stabbing spears. Five of them lay dead and others were staggering, falling, to lie still on the bare stone.
Out of the winged horde one tiny figure dropped toward the watching men. It braked deftly and landed at Moran’s feet. “Greetings, O Man,” it croaked. “Shag holds his word. Life for life—that is law.”
~ * ~
It was Shag, the Murath, who showed them the road through the Mountains of the Night before he returned to complete the slaughter which his winged legions had begun. From time immemorial Stalkers and Muraths had warred, and many of Shag’s kinsfolk had gone to feed the great toad in the Stalkers’ pit. Never before had one of them escaped, to lead his race back to the hidden stronghold of the giants and to their vengeance.
<
~ * ~
Placet is a Crazy Place
BY FREDRIC BROWN
E
ven when you’re used to it, it gets you down sometimes. Like that morning—if you can call it a morning. Really, it was night. But we go by Earth time on Placet because Placet time would be as screwy as everything else on that goofy planet. I mean, you’d have a six-hour day and then a two-hour night and then a fifteen-hour day and a one-hour night and—well, you just couldn’t keep time on a planet that does a figure-eight orbit around two dissimilar suns, going like a bat out of hell around and between them, and the suns going around each other so fast and so comparatively close that Earth astronomers thought it was only one sun until the Blakeslee expedition landed here twenty years ago.
You see, the rotation of Placet isn’t any even fraction of the period of its orbit and there’s the Blakeslee Field in the middle between the suns—a field in which light rays slow down to a crawl and get left behind and
If you’ve not read the Blakeslee reports on Placet, hold on to something, while I tell you this:
Placet is the only known planet that can eclipse itself twice at the same time, run headlong into itself every forty hours, and then chase itself out of sight.
I don’t blame you.
I didn’t believe it either, and it scared me stiff the first time I stood on Placet and sate Placet coming head-on to run into us. And yet I’d read the Blakeslee reports and knew what was really happening, and why. It’s rather like those early movies when the camera was set up in front of a train and the audience saw the locomotive heading right toward them and would feel an impulse to run even though they knew the locomotive wasn’t really there.
But I started to say, like that morning. I was sitting at my desk, the top of which was covered with grass. My feet were—or seemed to be—resting on a sheet of rippling water. But it wasn’t wet.
On top of the grass of my desk lay a pink flowerpot, into which, nose first, stuck a bright green Saturnian lizard. That—reason and not my eyesight told me—was my pen and inkwell. Also an embroidered sampler that said “God Bless Our Home” in neat cross-stitching. It actually was a message from Earth Center which had just come in on the radiotype. I didn’t know what it said because I’d come into my office after the B. F. effect had started. I didn’t think it really said “God Bless Our Home” because it seemed to. And just then I was mad, I was fed up, and I didn’t care a holler what it actually did say.
You see—maybe I’d better explain—the Blakeslee Field effect occurs when Placet is in midposition between Argyle I and Argyle II, the two suns it figure-eights around. There’s a scientific explanation of it, but it must be expressed in formulas, not in words. It boils down to this: Argyle I is terrene matter and Argyle II is contraterrene, or negative matter. Halfway between them—over a considerable stretch of territory—is a field in which light rays are slowed down, way down. They move at about the speed of sound. The result is that if something is moving faster than sound—as Placet itself does—you can still see it coming after it’s passed you. It takes the visual image of Placet twenty-six hours to get through the field. By that time, Placet has rounded one of its suns and meets its own image on the way back. In midfield, there’s an image coming and an image going, and it eclipses itself twice, occulting both suns at the same time. A little farther on, it runs into itself coming from the opposite direction—and scares you stiff if you’re watching, even if you know it’s not really happening.
Let me explain it this way before you get dizzy. Say an old-fashioned locomotive is coming toward you, only at a speed much faster than sound. A mile away, it whistles. It passes you and then you hear the whistle, coming from the point a mile back where the locomotive isn’t any more. That’s the auditory effect of an object traveling faster than sound; what I’ve just described is the visual effect of an object traveling—in a figure-eight orbit—faster than its own visual image.
That isn’t the worst of it; you can stay indoors and avoid the eclipsing and the head-on collisions, but you can’t avoid the physio-psychological effect of the Blakeslee Field.
And that, the physio-psychological effect, is something else again. The field does something to the optic nerve centers, or to the part of the brain to which the optic nerves connect, something similar to the effect of certain drugs. You have . . . you can’t exactly call them hallucinations, because you don’t ordinarily see things that aren’t there, but you get an illusory picture of what is there.
~ * ~
I knew perfectly well that I was sitting at a desk the top of which was glass, and not grass; that the floor under my feet was ordinary plastiplate and not a sheet of rippling water; that the objects on my desk were not a pink flowerpot with a Saturnian lizard sticking in it, but an antique twentieth century inkwell and pen—and that the “God Bless Our Home” sampler was a radiotype message on ordinary radiotype paper. I could verify any of those things by my sense of touch, which the Blakeslee Field doesn’t affect.
You can close your eyes, of course, but you don’t—because even at the height of the effect, your eyesight gives you the relative size and distance of things and if you stay in familiar territory your memory and your reason tell you what they are.
So when the door opened and a two-headed monster walked in, I knew it was Reagan. Reagan isn’t a two-headed monster, but I could recognize the sound of his walk.
I said, ”Yes, Reagan?”
The two-headed monster said, “Chief, the machine shop is wobbling. We may have to break the rule not to do any work in midperiods.”
“Birds?” I asked.
Both of his heads nodded. “The underground part of those walls must he like sieves from the birds flying through ‘em, and we’d better pour concrete quick. Do you think those new alloy reinforcing bars the Ark’ll bring will stop them?”
“Sure,” I lied. Forgetting the field, I turned to look at the clock, but there was a funeral wreath of white lilies on the wall where the clock should have been. You can’t tell time from a funeral wreath. I said, “I was hoping we wouldn’t have to reinforce those walls till we had the bars to sink in them. TheArk’s about due; they’re probably hovering outside right now waiting for us to come out of the field. You think we could wait till—”
There was a crash.
“Yeah, we can wait,” Reagan said. “There went the machine shop, so there’s no hurry at all.”
“Nobody was in there?”
“Nope, but I’ll make sure.” He ran out.
That’s what life on Placet is like. I’ve had enough of it: I’d had too much of it. I made up my mind while Reagan was gone.
When he came back, he was a bright blue articulated skeleton.
He said, “O.K., chief. Nobody was inside.”
“Any of the machines badly smashed?”
He laughed. “Can you look at a rubber beach horse with purple polka dots and tell whether it’s an intact lathe or
a busted one? Say, chief, you know what you look like?”
I said, ”If you tell me, you’re fired.”
I don’t know whether I was kidding or not; I was plenty on edge. I opened the drawer of my desk and put the “God Bless Our Home” sampler in it and slammed the drawer shut. I was fed up. Placet is a crazy place and if you stay there long enough you go crazy yourself. One out of ten of Earth Center’s Placet employees has to go back to Earth for psychopathic treatment after a year or two on Placet. And I’d been there three years, almost. My contract was up. I made my mind up, too.
“Reagan,” I said.
He’d been heading for the door. He turned. ”Yeah, chief?”
I said, “I want you to send a message on the radiotype to Earth Center. And get it straight, two words: I quit.”
He said, “O.K., chief.” He went on out and closed the door.
~ * ~
I sat back and closed my eyes to think. I’d done it now. Unless I ran after Reagan and told him not to send the message, it was done and over and irrevocable. Earth Center’s funny that way; the board is plenty generous in some directions, but once you resign they never let you change your mind. It’s practically an iron-clad rule and ninety-nine times out of a hundred it’s justified on interplanetary and intragalactic projects. A man must be a hundred percent enthusiastic about his job to make a go of it, and once he’s turned against it, he’s lost the keen edge.
Travelers of Space - [Adventures in Science Fiction 03] Page 31
