Avon Science Fiction Reader 2

by Unknown Author

  “But I play only in a very amateurish way.”

  “We are both amateurs, and enjoy our art all the more because we pursue it for pleasure alone. From your singing, I know you have the soul of a musician. You’ll bring your violin and your favorite pieces of music, won’t you?”

  “If you wish. And may I see you to-morrow evening?”

  “I shall be very glad to have you call to-morrow.”

  The following evening Broderick found Eve alone in the music room. She rose from the piano bench to greet him.

  “Father is working at some experiments, and asks to be excused.”

  A courteous bow was Broderick’s response; but he did not stultify himself by any insincere expressions of regret.

  “I see you didn’t forget,” she remarked anent the instrument case which he carried.

  “No, I didn’t forget, much as I hesitate to play before you. Please don’t be too critical, will you?”

  “I don’t expect to have anything to criticise. Shall we try something right away? I just love to play accompaniments,” and she struck the A key on the piano.

  Imbued with the desire to make a good impression, and inspired by her faultless accompaniments, Broderick played with a brilliancy and fervor which astonished himself. Evelyn complimented him in the most cogent manner possible, by continually asking him to play more.

  At the end of an exquisite Strauss waltz, she exclaimed, “Oh, wouldn’t that be wonderful to dance to? I wish we could play and dance at the same time.”

  “Do you like to dance?“

  “Indeed I do. I enjoy dancing better than any other form of amusement.”

  “There’s the phonograph,” he suggested.

  “And we have the record of that very waltz. I’ll start it while you roll up the rug.”

  A moment later, the phonograph began to send forth its regular cadences, and Eve fluttered into Broderick’s arms. He was accustomed enough to the feel of a woman’s body in close proximity to his, but Eve was unquestionably different. The fragrance of her hair, the gentle heaving of her womanly bosom, the touch of her fingers on his arm thrilled him with ecstatic, yet pure emotions.

  And if she charmed him by her mere proximity, her incomparable skill as a dancer fascinated him. Though he danced with original abandon, following no set rules or conventional steps, she followed him as If her muscles were dominated synchronously by the same nerves which actuated his.

  The great clock in the hall boomed out ten resonant strokes.

  “The witching hour,” smiled Eve, “I have a fairy godfather who is more exacting than Cinderella’s godmother by two hours; and unless I obey him, I am in danger of losing the gifts he bestowed upon me.”

  Broderick took the hint and his departure.

  The daily meetings soon became a matter of custom rather than appointment. Though her chess playing, her athletic prowesses, her music, and her dancing had in turn attracted and charmed him, Broderick soon discovered that he enjoyed conversing with her most of all. There seemed to be no subject in literature, art, science or philosophy interesting to him, which was not at least passably familiar to Eve. He learned that she had been abroad for a year, and had a fluent command of French, German, Italian . and Spanish.

  One evening the talk turned to John Stuart Mill. “What is your idea of perfect happiness?” she asked.

  Fervently he responded, “My idea of perfect happiness is to hold you in my arms and press my lips against yours.”

  Surprised and hurt by his seeming rudeness, she frowned, “Oh, you don’t mean that. It’s so unworthy of you.”

  Genuine contrition gripped him. “No, I didn’t mean it exactly that way. But if you ask me to paint a picture of Paradise, it would include a little six-room bungalow, presided over by the one perfect woman in the world. There would be a lawn, and a garden, and two or three youngsters to rush out and meet me when I came home tired after the day’s work.”

  “That’s a little better.”

  “Oh, it’s very commonplace, and rather lacking in ambition, I know, but I’m dreadfully selfish, and I think that the greatest happiness comes to a man through his own home and family. Now tell me what your idea of happiness is.”

  “Oh, I’ve had such lofty aspirations—altogether impossible and impractical, I fear. If I could only accomplish something really big—something which would be a blessing to all humanity—like the invention of the radio, for instance, then I should indeed be happy. But, of course, that can never be. So I do the next best thing, and get all the pleasure I can out of working with my hands for those whom I love. Would you like to see my workshop?” Anticipating his assent, she led the way to a small room at the rear of the building. “Here is my room. I consider it more characteristic of me than my sleeping chamber. Father won’t let me have all the apparatus I’d like, for fear I’ll injure some of my precious members, but I manage to do some work in brass and leather.”

  Broderick cast interested glances about the room. He was struck with the neat orderliness, which nevertheless did not seem to remove the impression that it was put to frequent use.

  As Eve saw him stop to inspect an object lying on the bench, an involuntary cry escaped her. A second look explained the cause. The article was a card case of leather, beautifully embossed, and Broderick was astounded to see his own initials worked in the cover.

  “Oh, I didn’t want you to see that. I made it for you. To-morrow is your birthday.”

  “Why, so it is. I’d forgotten it myself. How in the world did you know?” “I got it from the application blank you made out for father.”

  “It certainly was thoughtful of you. I wish I knew how to express my appreciation. May I keep it now?”

  “Yes, with my best wishes.”

  “Thank you. And now I want to talk with you about a matter of great importance to both of us, something which we both must have had in mind right along, though we have scrupulously avoided mentioning it. You know what I mean?”

  “You mean’s father’s proposal?”

  “Yes, and I want to supplement it with a proposal of my own. First, let me tell you that I love you very, very much, so much that I can think of nothing else. Then I want to ask if you, of your own free will, without thought of the obligations you owe your foster-father, agree to the proposition he made me. In other words, do you wish me to submit to the operation which he proposes to perform on me?”

  “Not unless you feel inclined to agree of your own free will.”

  “But I do feel so inclined. I’d do anything in the world for you, Eve.” “Then it will please me very much to have you do what father asks of you, otherwise I cannot marry you.”

  “And from now on, you and I are engaged?”

  “Not yet. I have made a promise to father. Not until after—”

  “I shall see him to-night, and tell him that the sooner he starts, the better it will please me.”

  Doctor Goddard had anticipated Broderick’s decision almost to the minute. He had everything in readiness for the first operation, even to the man who was to provide the new member—a perfect right leg.

  The scenes of the operating room were new to Broderick, who had not experienced a sick day since childhood. With undisguised interest he watched the careful preparations; and when the sickening reek of ether reached his nostrils, he welcomed it as a harbinger of new experiences. Heavy, irresistible drowsiness slowly took possession of him; then he had the sensation of falling, or rather drifting through space; and finally came a thought-free void.

  When he again recovered consciousness, he found himself lying on a bed in a many windowed room, which seemed filled to the bursting point with sunlight. Doctor Goddard was bending over him.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Oh, all right. Just a little dizzy and sick to my stomach.”

  “That will soon pass off. Does your leg ache?”

  This was the first reminder of the reality of the operation. At first he was not sure that he had
a right leg, and he had to feel with his hand to make certain. He was surprised at the touch of his bare skin, instead of the bandages he had expected. Very cautiously, he wriggled his great toe. It seemed to work very naturally.

  “May I move my leg?” he asked.

  “Surely. You can do anything you want with it.”

  Broderick elevated his knee, twisted his ankle, and began to kick like a man whose foot had fallen asleep. Then he threw back the covers of the bed and sat up.

  “Try to walk on it,” Suggested the doctor; and Broderick complied, with the tread of a man suffering from a severe attack of the gout. Five minutes of cautious limping brought him to a chair. Here he sat down, and began to examine his right leg. With a puzzled expression on his face, he appealed to the doctor. “Do you know, that leg looks exactly like the one I’ve been using for the last twenty odd years?”

  Goddard smiled. “It is the same one.”

  “You mean you didn’t perform the operation?” Genuine disappointment was echoed by the question.

  “No, I didn’t undertake it. Get into your clothes, and I’ll explain.”

  “First,” the doctor continued, “I want to apologize to you and to confess that I have deceived you from the very start. Eve is not an adopted child but is my own natural daughter. Moreover, she is not perfect, though she comes as near to it as careful nurture and training could make a woman. As for my scheme for creating a perfect being, that was but a yarn invented for the occasion. It is accurate enough in theory, but I do not feel far enough advanced to undertake it in actual practice as yet.

  “You naturally wonder what it is all about. To me, Eve’s happiness is the most important consideration in the world; and I believe that she can only attain happiness through marriage with a man who is all that a man should be. There was just one thing concerning which I wanted to assure myself, and the story of the perfect woman was the last crucial test. This you have passed successfully, and you have convinced Eve and me that you possess the highest form of courage—the courage which prompts a man to risk life and Limb in the interests of science and human achievement.

  “Now, I suppose you would like to see Eve. You will find her in the room where you first met her. And, before you go, perhaps it might interest you to know that the nude figure you saw that first day, was nothing but a life-sized oil painting, which was so well done and so skilfully lighted that it looked just like a living woman. No doubt you’ve heard of ‘Stella’ and similar illusions.”

  With a mumbled commonplace of some sort, Broderick left the room, and, his mind teeming with intoxicating, puzzling thoughts, strode along the corridor.

  He found Eve clinging to the curtains through which she had first: stepped into his life.

  Anxiously she greeted him, “Has father told you?”

  “Yes. Everything.”

  “And now that you know, what do you think of me?”

  By way of answer, he gathered her up in his arms, and crushed his lips to hers in a fervid, suffocating kiss. “That is what I think of you,” he panted. “1 love you a million times more, now that I know that you are a real woman, and that every part of you is your own dear self.”

  “But I’m far from perfect.”

  “To me, you shall always be more than perfect—my superperfect bride.” “Are you sure you have no fault to find with me?”

  “There have been only two things about you that I objected to. One was that you were supposed to be created in an unnatural way, but that, of course, is removed now. And the other—”

  “Yes?” …

  “You don’t mind if I tell you? The other was the dominating influence which your father seems to have over you.”

  “Father dominating me?” she laughed. “My, but that’s rich! Why, I just twirl Father around my little finger. He does everything I tell him to. Listen. I met you once at a party, years and years ago. You don’t remember, because I was a mere youngster and therefore beneath your notice. But I have never forgotten; and—well—the fact of the matter is that you were picked out, not by father, but by me!”

  Vulthoom

  by Clark Ashton Smith

  Clark Ashton Smith’s unparalleled imagination has roved the universe and pictured the stars and their multifold worlds. At tunes it hits drawn itself in from the farther firmament to our own circle of solar planets and has lighted occasionally upon one of our visible neighbors. He has written two or three stories about the planet Mars, and he has pictured there a civilization besides which Egypt is an infantile upstart. Vulthoom is a novelette of Mars and of its ancient secrets. It is not a sequel to The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis, a better-known story, but it takes place in the same general locale.

  TO A Cursory observer, it might have seemed that Bob Haines and Paul Septimus Chanler had little enough in common, other than the predicament of being stranded without funds on an alien world.

  Haines, the third assistant pilot of an ether-liner, had been charged with insubordination by his superiors, and had been left behind in Ignarh, the commercial metropolis of Mars, and the port of all space-traffic. The charge against him was wholly a matter of personal spite; but so far, Haines had not succeeded in finding a new berth; and the month’s salary paid to him at parting had been devoured with appalling swiftness by the piratic rates of the Tellurian Hotel.

  Chanler, a professional writer of interplanetary fiction, had made: a voyage to Mars to fortify his imaginative talent by a solid groundwork of observation and experience. His money had given out after a few weeks; and fresh supplies, expected from his publisher, had not yet arrived.

  The two men, apart from their misfortunes, shared an illimitable curiosity concerning all things Martian. Their thirst for the exotic, their proclivity for wandering into places usually avoided by terrestrials, had drawn them together in spite of obvious differences of temperament, and had made them fast friends.

  Trying to forget their worries, they had spent the past day in the queerly piled and huddled maze of old Ignarh, called by the Martians Ignar-Vath, on the eastern side of the great Yahan Canal. Returning at the sunset hour, and following the estrade of purple marble beside the water, they had nearly reached the mile-long bridge that would take them hack to the modern city, Ignar-Luth, in which were the terrestrial consulates and shipping-offices and hotels.

  It was the Martian hour of worship, when the Aihais gather in their roofless temples to implore the return of the passing sun. Like the throbbing

  of feverish metal pulses, a sound of ceaseless and innumerable gongs punctured the thin air. The incredibly crooked streets were almost empty; and only a few barges, with immense rhomboidal sails of mauve and scarlet, crawled to and fro on the somber green waters.

  The light waned with visible swiftness behind the top-heavy towers and pagoda-angled pyramids of Ignar-Luth. The chill of the coming night began to pervade the shadows of the huge solar gnomons that lined the canal at frequent intervals. The querulous clangors of the gongs died suddenly in Ignar-Vath, and left a weirdly whispering silence. The buildings of the immemorial city bulked enormous upon a sky blackish emerald that was already thronged with icy stars.

  A medley of untraceable exotic odors was wafted through the twilight. The perfume was redolent of alien mystery, and it thrilled and troubled the Earthmen, who became silent as they approached the bridge, feeling the oppression of eery strangeness that gathered from all sides in the thickening gloom. More deeply than in daylight, they apprehended the muffled breathings and hidden, tortuous movements of a life for ever inscrutable to the children of other planets. The void between Earth and Mars had been traversed; but who could cross the evolutionary gulf between Earthmen and Martian?

  The people were friendly enough in their taciturn way; they had tolerated the intrusion of terrestrials, had permitted commerce between the worlds. Their languages had been mastered, their history studied, by terrene savants. But it seemed, that there could be no real interchange of ideas. Their civilization had grown old in d
iverse complexity before the foundering of Lemuria; its sciences, arts, religions, were hoary with inconceivable age; and even the simplest customs were the fruit of alien forces and conditions.

  At that moment, faced with the precariousness of their situation, Haines and Chanler felt an actual terror of the unknown world that surrounded them with its measureless antiquity.

  They quickened their paces. The wide pavement that bordered the canal was seemingly deserted; and the light, railless bridge itself was guarded only by the ten colossal statues of Martian heroes that loomed in warlike attitudes before the beginning of the first aerial span.

  The Earthmen were somewhat startled when a living figure, little less gigantic than the carven images, detached itself from their deepening shadows and came forward with mighty strides.

  The figure, nearly ten feet in height, was taller by a full yard than the average Aihai, but presented the familiar conformation of massively bulging chest and bony, many-angled limbs. The head was featured with high-flaring ears and pit-like nostrils that narrowed and expanded visibly in the twilight. The eyes were sunken in profound orbits, and were wholly invisible, save for tiny reddish sparks that appeared to burn suspended in the sockets of a skull. According to native customs, this bizarre personage was altogether nude; but a kind of circlet around the neck—a flat wire of curiously beaten silver—indicated that he was the servant of some noble lord.

  Haines and Chanler were astounded, for they had never before seen a Martian of such prodigious stature. The apparition, it was plain, desired to intercept them. He paused before them on the pavement of blockless marble. They were even more amazed by the weirdly booming voice, reverberant as that of some enormous frog, with which he began to address them. In spite of the interminably guttural tones, the heavy slurring of certain vowels and consonants, they realized that the words were those of human language.