The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  “So I went ‘bang’ with my gun and Tweel went ‘puff’ with his, and the barrels were throwing darts and getting ready to rush us, and booming about being friends. I had given up hope. Then suddenly an angel dropped right down from heaven in the shape of Putz, with his under-jets blasting the barrels into very small pieces!

  “Wow! I let out a yell and dashed for the rocket; Putz opened the door and in I went, laughing and crying and shouting! It was a moment or so before I remembered Tweel; I looked around in time to see him rising in one of his nosedives over the mound and away.

  “I had a devil of a job arguing Putz into following! By the time we got the rocket aloft, darkness was down; you know how it comes here—like turning off a light. We sailed out over the desert and put down once or twice. I yelled ‘Tweel!’ and yelled it a hundred times, I guess. We couldn’t find him; he could travel like the wind and all I got—or else I imagined it—was a faint trilling and twittering drifting out of the south. He’d gone, and damn it! I wish—I wish he hadn’t!”

  The four men of the Ares were silent—even the sardonic Harrison. At last little Leroy broke the stillness.

  “I should like to see,” he murmured.

  “Yeah,” said Harrison. “And the wart cure. Too bad you missed that; it might be the cancer cure they’ve been hunting for a century and a half.”

  “Oh, that!” muttered Jarvis gloomily. “That’s what started the fight!” He drew a glistening object from his pocket.

  “Here it is.”

  The Last Poet and the Robots

  A. MERRITT

  Abraham Grace Merritt (1884–1943), who wrote under the name A. Merritt, was a US writer and editor. Much of his writing could be easily classified as fantasy of varying types, such as supernatural fantasy or dark fantasy. His fiction writing was actually a side interest of his successful journalism career, for which he was paid $25,000 per year in 1919 and $100,000 per year by the end of his life. This wealth allowed him to cultivate interests in world travel and such ironic hobbies as raising orchids and plants linked to, among other things, witchcraft and magic, including wolfsbane, blue datura, and cannabis.

  Merritt was good at renovations, and his influence on the science fiction and fantasy world occurred not because of his story lines necessarily, but because of his unique style and the genuine imaginative power he displayed in the creation of hypnotically attractive alternative worlds and realities. He was extremely popular during his lifetime, even having a magazine, A. Merritt’s Fantasy Magazine, named after him; to many readers, he was the premier fantasy genius of his time. He was posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1999.

  Even though Merritt’s repeated romantic image of the beautiful evil priestess was derived from a common Victorian stereotype of womanhood, the escapist yearning for otherness and mystery that he expressed has seldom been conveyed with such an emotional charge, nor with such lucid underlying pessimism, for his tales seldom permit a successful transit from this world. His vision is of a universe whose indifference to humanity reads like malice, a vision expressed most fully in The Metal Monster. His approach often includes some element of horror as a result, and reflects a general fusion of horror and science fiction also found in the work of Edmond Hamilton and Stanley G. Weinbaum.

  “The Last Poet and the Robots” (first published in Fantasy Magazine, 1934) was originally revised from a chapter of the round-robin novel Cosmos (the chapter was titled “The Last Poet and the Robots AKA The Last Poet & the Wrongness of Space”). It was published again as “The Rhythm of the Spheres” in Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1936. The Cosmos round-robin serialized novel was the brainchild of Julius Schwartz and Raymond A. Palmer, who gathered sixteen writers to contribute to this ambitious project later published in installments in the fanzine Science Fiction Digest. Edmond Hamilton and E. E. “Doc” Smith were also contributors. “The Last Poet and the Robots” confronts the conflict between science and art. It was seen as having reconciled these two forces and also transcending the divisions of sexuality and nationality.

  THE LAST POET AND THE ROBOTS

  A. Merritt

  Narodny, the Russian, sat in his laboratory. Narodny’s laboratory was a full mile under earth. It was one of a hundred caverns, some small and some vast, cut out of the living rock. It was a realm of which he was sole ruler. In certain caverns garlands of small suns shone; and in others little moons waxed and waned over Earth; and there was a cavern in which reigned perpetual dawn, dewy, over lily beds and violets and roses; and another in which crimson sunsets baptized in the blood of slain day dimmed and died and were born again behind the sparkling curtains of the aurora. And there was one cavern ten miles from side to side in which grew flowering trees and trees which bore fruits unknown to man for many generations. Over this great orchard one yellow sunlike orb shone, and clouds trailed veils of rain upon the trees and miniature thunder drummed at Narodny’s summoning.

  Narodny was a poet—the last poet. He did not write his poems in words but in colors, sounds, and visions made material. Also he was a great scientist. In his peculiar field the greatest. Thirty years before, Russia’s Science Council had debated whether to grant him the leave of absence he had asked, or to destroy him. They knew him to be unorthodox. How deadly so they did not know, else after much deliberation they would not have released him. It must be remembered that of all nations, Russia then was the most mechanized; most robot-ridden.

  Narodny did not hate mechanization. He was indifferent to it. Being truly intelligent he hated nothing. Also he was indifferent to the whole civilization man had developed and into which he had been born. He had no feeling of kinship to humanity. Outwardly, in body, he belonged to the species. Not so in mind. Like Loeb, a thousand years before, he considered mankind a race of crazy half-monkeys, intent upon suicide. Now and then, out of the sea of lunatic mediocrity, a wave uplifted that held for a moment a light from the sun of truth—but soon it sank back and the light was gone. Quenched in the sea of stupidity. He knew that he was one of those waves.

  He had gone, and he had been lost to sight by all. In a few years he was forgotten. Fifteen years ago, unknown and under another name, he had entered America and secured rights to a thousand acres in what of old had been called Westchester. He had picked this place because investigation had revealed to him that of ten localities on this planet it was most free from danger of earthquake or similar seismic disturbance. The man who owned it had been whimsical; possibly an atavist—like Narodny, although Narodny would never have thought of himself as that. At any rate, instead of an angled house of glass such as the thirtieth century built, this man had reconstructed a rambling old stone house of the nineteenth century. Few people lived upon the open land in those days; most had withdrawn into the city-states. New York, swollen by its meals of years, was a fat belly full of mankind still many miles away. The land around the house was forest covered.

  A week after Narodny had taken this house, the trees in front of it had melted away, leaving a three-acre, smooth field. It was not as though they had been cut, but as though they had been dissolved. Later that night a great airship had appeared upon this field—abruptly, as though it had blinked out of another dimension. It was rocket shaped but noiseless. And immediately a fog had fallen upon airship and house, hiding them. Within this fog, if one could have seen, was a wide tunnel leading from the air cylinder’s door to the door of the house. And out of the airship came swathed figures, ten of them, who walked along that tunnel, were met by Narodny, and the door of the old house closed on them.

  A little later they returned, Narodny with them, and out of an opened hatch of the airship rolled a small flat car on which was a mechanism of crystal cones rising around each other to a central cone some four feet high. The cones were upon a thick base of some glassy material in which was imprisoned a restless green radiance. Its rays did not penetrate that which held it, but it seemed constantly seeking, with suggestion of prodigious fo
rce, to escape. For hours the strange thick fog held. Twenty miles up in the far reaches of the stratosphere, a faintly sparkling cloud grew, like a condensation of cosmic dust. And just before dawn the rock of the hill behind the house melted away like a curtain that had covered a great tunnel. Five of the men came out of the house and went into the airship. It lifted silently from the ground, slipped into the aperture, and vanished. There was a whispering sound, and when it had died away the breast of the hill was whole again. The rocks had been drawn together like a closing curtain and boulders studded it as before. That the breast was now slightly concave where before it had been convex, none would have noticed.

  For two weeks the sparkling cloud was observed far up in the stratosphere, was commented upon idly, and then was seen no more. Narodny’s caverns were finished.

  Half of the rock from which they had been hollowed had gone with that sparkling cloud. The balance, reduced to its primal form of energy, was stored in blocks of the vitreous material that had supported the cones, and within them it moved as restlessly and always with that same suggestion of prodigious force. And it was force, unthinkably potent; from it came the energy that made the little suns and moons, and actuated the curious mechanisms that regulated pressure in the caverns, supplied the air, created the rain, and made of Narodny’s realm a mile deep under earth the paradise of poetry, of music, of color, and of form which he had conceived in his brain and with the aid of those ten others had caused to be.

  Now of the ten there is no need to speak further. Narodny was the master. But three, like him, were Russians; two were Chinese; of the remaining five, three were women—one German in ancestry, one Basque, one a Eurasian; a Hindu who traced his descent from the line of Gautama; a Jew who traced his from Solomon.

  All were one with Narodny in indifference to the world; each with him in his viewpoint on life; and each and all lived in his or her own Eden among the hundred caverns except when it interested them to work with each other. Time meant nothing to them. Their researches and discoveries were solely for their own uses and enjoyments. If they had given them to the outer world they would have only been ammunition for warfare either between men upon Earth or men against some other planet. Why hasten humanity’s suicide? Not that they would have felt regret at the eclipse of humanity. But why trouble to expedite it? Time meant nothing to them because they could live as long as they desired—barring accident. And while there was rock in the world, Narodny could convert it into energy to maintain his paradise—or to create others.

  The old house began to crack and crumble. It fell—much more quickly than the elements could have brought about its destruction. Then trees grew among the ruins of its foundations; and the field that had been so strangely cleared was overgrown with trees. The land became a wood in a few short years; silent except for the roar of an occasional rocket passing over it and the songs of birds that had found there a sanctuary.

  But deep down in earth, within the caverns, were music and song and mirth and beauty. Gossamer nymphs circled under the little moons. Pan piped. There was revelry of antique harvesters under the small suns. Grapes grew and ripened, were pressed, and red and purple wine was drunk by Bacchantes who fell at last asleep in the arms of fauns and satyrs. Oreads danced under the pale moon-bows and sometimes centaurs wheeled and trod archaic measures beneath them to the drums of their hoofs upon the mossy floor. The old Earth lived again.

  Narodny listened to drunken Alexander raving to Thais among the splendors of conquered Persepolis; and he heard the crackling of the flames that at the whim of the courtesan destroyed it. He watched the siege of Troy and counted with Homer the Achaean ships drawn up on the strand before Troy’s walls; or saw with Herodotus the tribes that marched behind Xerxes—the Caspians in their cloaks of skin with their bows of cane; the Ethiopians in the skins of leopards with spears of antelope horns; the Libyans in their dress of leather with javelins made hard by fire; the Thracians with the heads of foxes upon their heads; the Moschians, who wore helmets made of wood; and the Cabalians, who wore the skulls of men. For him the Eleusinian and the Osirian mysteries were reenacted, and he watched the women of Thrace tear to fragments Orpheus, the first great musician. At his will, he could see the rise and fall of the empire of the Aztecs, the empire of the Incas; or beloved Caesar slain in Rome’s senate; or the archers at Agincourt; or the Americans in Belleau Wood. Whatever man had written—whether poets, historians, philosophers, or scientists—his strangely shaped mechanisms could bring before him, changing the words into phantoms real as though living.

  He was the last and greatest of the poets—but also he was the last and greatest of the musicians. He could bring back the songs of ancient Egypt, or the chants of more ancient Ur. The songs that came from Mussorgsky’s soul of Mother Earth, the harmonies of Beethoven’s deaf ear, or the chants and rhapsodies from the heart of Chopin. He could do more than restore the music of the past. He was master of sound. To him, the music of the spheres was real. He could take the rays of the stars and planets and weave them into symphonies. Or convert the sun’s rays into golden tones no earthly orchestras had ever expressed. And the silver music of the moon—the sweet music of the moon of spring, the full-throated music of the harvest moon, the brittle crystalling music of the winter moon with its arpeggios of meteors—he could weave into strains such as no human ears had ever heard.

  So Narodny, the last and greatest of poets, the last and greatest of musicians, the last and greatest of artists—and in his inhuman way, the greatest of scientists—lived with the ten of his choosing in his caverns. And, with them, he consigned the surface of Earth and all who dwelt upon it to a negative hell—

  Unless something happening there might imperil his paradise!

  Aware of the possibility of that danger, among his mechanisms were those which brought to eyes and ears news of what was happening on Earth’s surface. Now and then, they amused themselves with these.

  It so happened that on that night when the Warper of Space had dealt his blow at the spaceships and had flung a part of the great Crater of Copernicus into another dimension, Narodny had been weaving the rays of the moon, Jupiter, and Saturn into Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. The moon was a four-day crescent. Jupiter was at one cusp, and Saturn hung like a pendant below the bow. Shortly Orion would stride across the heavens and bright Regulus and red Aldebaran, the Eye of the Bull, would furnish him with other chords of starlight remoulded into sound.

  Suddenly the woven rhythms were ripped—hideously. A devastating indescribable dissonance invaded the cavern. Beneath it, the nymphs who had been dancing languorously to the strains quivered like mist wraiths in a sudden blast and were gone: the little moons flared, then ceased to glow. The tonal instruments were dead. And Narodny was felled as though by a blow.

  After a time the little moons began to glow again, but dimly; and from the tonal mechanisms came broken, crippled music. Narodny stirred and sat up, his lean, high-cheeked face more satanic than ever. Every nerve was numb; then as they revived, agony crept along them. He sat, fighting the agony, until he could summon help. He was answered by one of the Chinese, and soon Narodny was himself again.

  He said: “It was a spatial disturbance, Lao. And it was like nothing I have ever known. It came in upon the rays, of that I am sure. Let us look out upon the moon.”

  They passed to another cavern and stood before an immense television screen. They adjusted it, and upon it appeared the moon, rapidly growing larger as though it were hurtling toward them. Then upon the screen appeared a spaceship speeding earthward. They focused upon it, and opened it to their vision; searching it until they came to the control room where were Bartholomew, James Tarvish, and Martin, their gaze upon Earth rapidly and more rapidly expanding in the heavens. Narodny and the Chinese watched them, reading their lips. Tarvish said: “Where can we land, Martin? The robots will be watching for us everywhere. They will see to it that we are destroyed before we can give our message and our warning to the world. T
hey control the governments—or at least control them sufficiently to seize us upon landing. And if we should escape and gather men around us, then it means civil war and that in turn means fatal delay in the building of the space fleet—even if we should win.”

  Martin said: “We must land safely—escape the robots—find some to control or destroy them. God, Tarvish—you saw what that devil they call the Wrongness of Space can do. He threw the side of the crater out of our dimension as a boy would throw a stone into a pond!”

  Bartholomew said: “He could take Earth and break it up piecemeal—”

  Narodny and Lao looked at each other. Narodny said: “That is enough. We know.” The Chinese nodded. Narodny said: “I estimated that they would reach Earth in four hours.” Again Lao nodded. Narodny said: “We will talk to them, Lao; although I had thought we were done with mankind. I do not like this which they call so quaintly the Wrongness of Space—nor the stone he threw into my music.”

  They brought a smaller screen into position before the larger one. They oriented it to the speeding spaceship and stepped in front of it. The small screen shimmered with whirling vortices of pallid blue luminescence; the vortices drew together and became one vast cone that reached on and on to the greater screen as though not feet but thousands of miles separated them. And as the tip of the cone touched the control room of the spaceship mirrored in the screen, Tarvish, upon the actual ship, gripped Martin’s arm.

  “Look there!”

  There was an eddying in the air, like that over roads on a hot summer day. The eddying became a shimmering curtain of pallid blue luminescence—steadied until it was an oval doorway opening into vast distances. And then abruptly, within that doorway, stood two men—one tall and lean and saturnine with the sensitive face of a dreamer and the other a Chinese, his head a great yellow dome and on his face the calm of Buddha—and it was strange indeed to see in the cavern of earth these same two men standing before the blue-coned screen and upon the greater one their images within the imaged room on which the tip of the cone rested.