The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 20 Classic Science Fiction Tales

by Frank Belknap Long

  He called out: “Molly, turn on the flash. Keep it trained on that bush. You hear? On the bush! But try to sweep it past me.”

  For an instant Molly remained utterly rigid, the flash a lump of ice against her palm. Then, with a shudder, she clicked it on. As she did so a child’s shrill scream sliced through the night.

  “Run, Betty, run! Quick, before he catches you!”

  Out of the thicket popped Betty Anne’s small figure, her eyes dark pools of terror. She stood for an instant blinking in the beam, her elbows pressed to her side.

  Then with a shriek she ran straight toward Molly, ignoring her father’s intervening bulk. The next instant there was a straining tightness about Molly’s neck, and a wet, cold cheek brushed her lips. As though from a great distance she heard her husband shout:

  “He’s still got Johnny! I’m going in after him!”

  Then she heard another voice, shriller, edged with defiance: “He hasn’t got me, Pop. I broke loose. But I—I can’t get past him.”

  Molly leaped up, pushed Betty Anne around in back of her, and trained the flash on the thicket again. It was not only terror she felt, but shame, that she could have forgotten even for an instant that she had a son. She hadn’t really forgotten, not deep in her mind, but her relief at finding Betty Anne in her arms had spilled over into the warm, bright little compartment reserved for her son. Now that compartment was as cold as ice.

  From the thicket there was a scrambling sound. Then the boughs parted, and Johnny sprang into view, his terrified face twisting in the beam. His shoulders jerked, and there was a fright upon him so intense as to seem unnatural in a child.

  Before Denham could move the robot parted the bushes directly behind his son with a single sweep of its long arms, as though it were stepping out from an annoying tangle of cobwebs.

  It moved so swiftly it was towering over Johnny before Denham could scream a warning, its gleaming arms upraised. But some instinct warned Johnny that he was in mortal danger.

  With a shriek, he swerved quickly to one side, pivoted about and raced toward his parents along the edge of the beam. Denham held his breath until Johnny was almost at his side.

  Then the automatic pistol jerked in his hand, erupting in dull flame. The flash of light was accompanied by a harsh, metallic splintering, and a swirl of smoke which blotted the robot from view.

  When the smoke cleared the robot was advancing on Denham in long, steady strides, its ponderous footsteps shaking the road. The blast had torn away half of its head, but it came on notwithstanding, its upraised right arm flailing the air like a gigantic mace.

  Denham recoiled a step and took careful aim at the globular body case, his eyes so hot and dry they seemed to be burning holes in his flesh.

  He was grateful for the beam which brought the monster into stark relief but the fact Johnny stood at his side, facing the horror in defiance of Molly, who was screaming at him to come to her, unnerved him so that his hand shook.

  “Careful, Pop!” Johnny warned.

  Denham fought to control his voice. “It’s either him or us. If he gets me, don’t yell or go down on your knees. You’ll be in trouble if you do.”

  “I’m not leaving you, Pop.”

  Denham was grateful for something that brought a sudden steadiness to his arm.

  He felt rather than heard the blast which spouted outward from his hand.

  He blasted again and again and again—exhausting the energy load. The ground seemed to spiral beneath him with the dancing flare, and the smoke which swirled about the robot was so dense that it blotted out the sky.

  When the smoke cleared the robot was still advancing.

  It was a twisted, smoking mass of wreckage, its head a charred shell spilling metal pipes that glowed white hot. The atomic charge had also turned it radioactive, so that it glowed in a more dangerous way over every inch of its body case.

  Denham’s throat was so dry that swallowing was a torture. He knew that the robot was a deadly danger now, walking or just standing. It was drenched with radiations which could destroy every red blood corpuscle in Johnny’s body if it came a yard closer.

  The robot was within twenty feet of Denham when it halted. Slowly its shattered bulk began to sway, back and forth, back and forth, like an immense shuttlecock balanced on a wire. Then, just as slowly, it began to move backwards.

  And as it moved away from Denham a yawning gulf of blackness which seemed as wide as the night swept toward it and swirled around it, obscuring its angular contours. It was suddenly small, a dwindling blur of spiraling light, weaving in and out between the trees. Then the darkness swallowed it up.

  * * * *

  Now they were castaways in an alien world, a world of dreadful shadows that kept lengthening on all sides of them.

  The trees were gigantic, with pale, almost translucent boles wrapped in coiling tendrils of mist. The boles glistened in the wan moonlight, and the branches of the trees had heavily-veined, flat leaves which gave off a cloying perfume which clung to the nostrils like musk.

  Others had foliage which swept the ground in long streamers and gleamed in the darkness with infinite gradations of color, like the sea-lashed tendrils of a Portuguese man-of-war.

  On both sides of the road the earth was covered with huge, whorl-shaped fungus growths, scarlet-veined and rimmed with long, tapering tendrils as transparent as glass. Between the flat whorls the ground was dotted with scarlet thistles and flowering shrubs, so fragile in structure they seemed woven of stardust and the even more elusive traceries of the glassblowers’ art.

  Molly had sensed the alienness back in the cottage, leaping out of bed, and staring out in terror at a sky that had changed. Sharing that knowledge with her husband had made it seem worse, perhaps because it was a knowledge that could not be sanely shared. But now that they all knew, it chilled their hearts like ice, so that they hardly dared discuss it with another.

  Other dimensions, Ralph had said. There were other dimensions impinging on the warm, secure world they’d always known. And now they were in one, stumbling back toward the cottage, a fearful purposefulness in their silence.

  Silence was a protection. It was the only safeguard, the only sure anchor in a world where nothing was sure.

  It was Betty Anne who shattered it. “Daddy! There’s something big and black standing right beside the house. If it’s Wulkins, he’s grown bigger.”

  Denham came to an abrupt halt. His lips whitening, he reached out and grabbed his daughter’s wrist—just in case. Children had been known to dash straight toward terrifying objects, for no reason an adult could fathom.

  He stood very still, staring past the cottage at the object which had frightened Betty Anne. He could see at once that it wasn’t—Wulkins! It was almost as tall as the cottage and it didn’t have a square head.

  It bulged out chillingly in the shadows, but—a building with oversize foundations which anchored it to the earth. And everything about the object proclaimed that it was just that—a building. It had a massive, architectural look, a firmly rooted look!

  He turned to Molly. “All right! Stay put—and keep the kids off my neck. I’m going to take a look.”

  A moment later Denham turned to wave in the darkness, the strange structure looming above him. “Molly, come here. It’s a big stone vault.”

  When Molly arrived at her husband’s side he was crouching at the base of the structure, training the flashlight on a massive slab of rock heavily overgrown with weeds.

  “It’s made of solid blocks of rock, cemented together a little unevenly!” he exclaimed. “Each block must weigh tons. But the stone’s beginning to crumble. I could probably force this entrance slab, if I put my shoulder to it.”

  “Oh, no!” Molly breathed.

  “I’m going to try,” Denham said,
straightening.

  Molly started to protest, but something in his expression silenced her.

  Five minutes later Denham was advancing alone into the vault, the entrance slab standing ajar behind him, a narrow shaft of light slicing through the darkness ahead of him. The light sliced through the darkness without dispelling it, like a luminous and expanding wire cutter.

  The odors which filled the vault were unnerving. The smell of stale air and earth mold mingled with a fainter exhalation which might well have been the smell of age itself. It did not seem to be the odor of corruption. There was no fleshly taint to it, no lingering reek such as a desiccated shape of flesh might have spread through the darkness, even after millenniums.

  For a moment the extremity of the beam wavered on a discolored surface of stone as rough as the exterior of the vault. Then it came to rest on a long stone slab, projecting straight out from the wall on a level with Denham’s knees.

  The slab was—occupied.

  Denham sucked in his breath sharply. The thing on the slab looked like nothing so much as an enormous cicada! Its gauzy wings, which were folded on its chest, glowed with a dull, metallic sheen, and its huge corpse-white eyes stared blankly, as though after thousands of years, it had given up trying to see in the dark.

  The thing conveyed pure horror in its attitude, as though it had been rolled on the shelf and left there to rot. For it had begun to rot, all down one side. Something chillingly like tomb mold was spilling from its vitals.

  As Denham steadied the flash a dizziness swept over him. Had the thing on the slab been unmistakably an insect Denham might have endured the sight of it. What unnerved him completely was his inability to put it into any category that did not make for unadulterated horror.

  For it seemed alive even in death, as though it might at any moment get up and go stumbling blindly about in the darkness.

  There was something hideously functional about it, something that was hard to associate with the slow, sure decay which time brings to fleshly creatures whether they be high or low in the scale of evolution.

  There was a silence, thick, cloying, ghastly. Denham fought down his revulsion, and then he saw the small, spindle-like objects which lay scattered at the horror’s feet and under its gauzy wings at the edge of the slab.

  His vision had become blurred from too much staring. But when he moved closer to the slab, and trained the flash directly on its weathered surface the spindles ceased to quiver and he found himself staring down in stunned incredulity at eight tiny, gleaming spools of photo-film with perforated edges.

  After a moment Denham’s amazement ebbed a little. His common sense told him there was nothing more functional than a threaded spool of photofilm. Projected images were inseparable from civilization. In fact, it was impossible to think of any advanced culture, in any age or dimension, without cinematographic recordings.

  As Denham turned from the slab, shoving the spools into his pocket, he found himself wondering a little wildly if the spools would fit his own cinema projector.

  Suddenly his heart pounded in his throat. Something was moving toward him across the floor. Rolling straight toward him from out of the shadows, with the brittle impetus of an autumnal puffball caught in a sudden gust of wind.

  The instant the object came to rest at Denham’s feet he stiffened, his senses touched queerly. The object was a fragile-looking crystal globe faintly suffused with light. As Denham stared down at it the light brightened, blazed with a radiance that dazzled his vision and held him rooted.

  After a moment the radiance dimmed a little, but still Denham’s gaze remained riveted on the globe. The skin crawled at the base of his scalp. Try as he might, he could not wrench his gaze from its gleaming convexity.

  As Denham stared something began to stir in the depths of the crystal. A dark insect-like face with bulging eyes and moving mouth parts came slowly into view, grew swiftly larger.

  For an instant the hideous face filled the globe, and then, just as slowly, it began to dwindle, moving further back into the glow until Denham could see its entire body, enmeshed in a blur of fluttering wings.

  Denham knew instantly that he was staring at a moving image of the ghastly shape on the slab. And—at something else! Behind the cicada-shape towered the angular, stationary bulk of Wulkins.

  The robot’s mirrored image was intact, and it was staring at Denham behind the cicada with its enormous eyes riveted on his face. It seemed to be reproaching him for what he had done to it, a cold malignity in its stare.

  Somehow Denham got the impression that he was gazing at something that no longer existed in reality, the cicada shape restored to a living vigor that belied its immobility on the slab; the robot restored to a mechanical vigor that was like a thought projected from its mind to him, through the medium of that hypnotic crystal.

  For if the crystal was not hypnotic why was he powerless to move, why did his thoughts seem to float up through his brain and out toward the glow as though drawn by a compulsion outside of himself.

  Torment can take many forms, but the worst kind of torture does not come from pain undergone in a physical struggle. It is subjective—a slow, merciless crushing of a man’s will to struggle. And Denham was feeling that torment now.

  Not only was his mind being invaded, its innermost secrets were laid bare.

  He felt himself regressing to a more primitive level of consciousness, where everything stood starkly revealed—the red, hideous impulses and rages he had inherited from the jungle, the heritage of humanity’s buried apehood—and thoughts no human mind could endure and remain sane.

  Abruptly, as Denham stared, sickened to the depths of his mind, another crystal ball came spinning toward him across the vault. The second sphere was much larger than the first and as it came to rest at Denham’s feet the light in the first globe went out.

  But the second crystal brought no relief to Denham, no cessation of the torment. Instead as it brimmed with radiance his anguish and terror increased, for he saw himself lying stretched out on the slab, with the cicada shape hovering over him, its wings vibrating, a long, gleaming scalpel twisting in its upraised claw.

  As Denham stared transfixed the cicada shape bent, and plunged the scalpel into his vitals! Denham screamed.

  The scream brought a sudden easing of the tension, shattering the unnatural hypnosis and enabling him to wrench his gaze away.

  Afterwards, he was unable to remember whether Wulkins was standing or crouching above the still larger crystal globe which it was just about to push toward him. He only knew that he saw Wulkins clearly for the barest instant, the Wulkins he had maimed, its head still shredded and glowing.

  The robot had moved out from a horizontal slab of stone a few yards from the slab and was facing him in the shadows, a mind-numbing assortment of objects at its back.

  The objects were indescribable in that they became increasingly nightmarish the longer Denham stared at them. Cubes without foundations, crisscrossing metal pipes set in frames that seemed to melt and run in all directions, and at least a dozen shapes of crystal that became square one instant, spherical the next.

  Some of the crystals were tiny, others were enormous, and a few were massed together in formations that gave the lie to the painstaking edifice of mathematical science which humanity had erected on the premise that parallel lines cannot meet.

  If lightning had diffused itself through all the vault in the second that Denham stood frozen he could not have acted with greater presence of mind.

  His feet were heavier than they should have been and his fingers felt numb. Yet he managed to switch off the flash and stood facing imminent destruction.

  He knew that he had no chance at all of eluding the robot with the light on. By its own glow it could see him faintly, even in the darkness. But with the light off he could see it clear
ly. By so thin a margin did his safety hang, but the small advantage was all he needed.

  He was suddenly in weaving motion, his eyes fastened on the robot as he backed away toward the entrance of the vault. It was terrible enough before the robot emerged from behind the slab and started after him. When it made blind clutches in the darkness, its feet scraping the floor, Denham almost succumbed to panic.

  But something he hadn’t realized until that instant kept him backing toward the entrance. To give Molly and his children a fighting chance to survive in a world that was black and horrible, he’d have grappled with Wulkins in a death struggle.

  No struggle took place. Yet the culmination of Denham’s desperate retreat across the vault was just as terrifying in a different way. Three paces from the entrance he stubbed his toe, and went reeling.

  Instantly the robot lunged, its glowing arms sweeping straight toward him through the darkness. Just in time Denham regained his balance, leaping so swiftly aside that the robot went crashing into the wall with a harsh, metallic clatter. Then Denham was outside the entrance slab, shouting at Molly:

  “It’s Wulkins! He was hiding in there! Quick, Molly! Head for the cottage. There’s another automatic load in my desk. Hurry, hurry! I can’t hold this slab much longer!”

  Molly stood rigid between her children, holding on tight to them.

  “Get away from that slab,” she said, almost without moving her lips. “If he wants to come out, let him!”

  “Molly, are you crazy?”

  “I don’t want to be a widow! That’s how crazy I am. You’re coming with us. We can make it, if we don’t stop to argue!”

  “Sure we can, Pop!” Johnny urged, his eyes shining in the darkness.

  * * * *

  Five minutes later Denham was crouching by a thrown-open window on the ground floor of the cottage, a recharged automatic gleaming in his hand. Behind him in shadows loomed the walls of his study, and in front of him stretched a wide lawn.