The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 02

by Anthology

  I shielded my eyes with my hands and peered through the chinks of my fingers. Ranged directly in our path was a barricade of the cubes and upon them we were racing like a flying battering-ram. Involuntarily I closed my eyes against the annihilating impact that seemed inevitable.

  The Thing on which we rode lifted.

  We were soaring at a long angle straight to the top of the barrier; were upon it, and still with that awful speed unchecked were hurtling through the blackness over the shaft of phosphorescence, the ribbon of pale light that I had watched pierce it and knew now was but another span of the cubes that but a little before had fled past us. Beneath the span, on each side of it, I sensed illimitable void.

  We were over; rushing along in darkness. There began a mighty tumult, a vast crashing and roaring. The clangor waxed, beat about us with tremendous strokes of sound.

  Far away was a dim glowing, as of rising sun through heavy mists of dawn. The mists faded--miles away gleamed what at first glimpse seemed indeed to be the rising sun; a gigantic orb, whose lower limb just touched, was sharply, horizontally cut by the blackness, as though at its base that blackness was frozen.

  The sun? Reason returned to me; told me this globe could not be that.

  What was it then? Ra-Harmachis, of the Egyptians, stripped of his wings, exiled and growing old in the corridors of the Dead? Or that mocking luminary, the cold phantom of the God of light and warmth which the old Norsemen believed was set in their frozen hell to torment the damned?

  I thrust aside the fantasies, impatiently. But sun or no sun, light streamed from this orb, light in multicolored, lanced rays, banishing the blackness through which we had been flying.

  Closer we came and closer; lighter it grew about us, and by the growing light I saw that still beside us ran the abyss. And even louder, more thunderous, became the clamor.

  At the foot of the radiant disk I glimpsed a luminous pool. Into it, out of the depths, protruded a tremendous rectangular tongue, gleaming like gray steel.

  On the tongue an inky shape appeared; it lifted itself from the abyss, rushed upon the disk and took form.

  Like a gigantic spider it was, squat and horned. For an instant it was silhouetted against the smiling sphere, poised itself--and vanished through it.

  Now, not far ahead, silhouetted as had been the spider shape, blackened into sight a cube and on it Ruth and Norhala. It seemed to hover, to wait.

  "It's a door," Drake's shout beat thinly in my ears against the hurricane of sound.

  What I thought had been an orb was indeed a gateway, a portal; and it was gigantic.

  The light streamed through it, the flaming colors, the lightning glare, the drifting shadows were all beyond it. The suggestion of sphere had been an illusion, born of the darkness in which we were moving and in its own luminescence.

  And I saw that the steel tongue was a ramp, a slide, dropping down into the gulf.

  Norhala raised her hands high above her head. Up from the darkness flew an incredible shape--like a monstrous, armored flat-backed crab; angled spikes protruded from it; its huge body was spangled with darting, greenish flames.

  It swept beneath us and by. On its back were multitudinous breasts from which issued blinding flashes-- sapphire blue, emerald green, sun yellow. It hung poised as had that other nightmare shape, standing out jet black and colossal, rearing upon columnar legs, whose outlines were those of alternate enormous angled arrow-points and lunettes. Swiftly its form shifted; an instant it hovered, half disintegrate.

  Now I saw spinning spheres and darting cubes and pyramids click into new positions. The front and side legs lengthened, the back legs shortened, fitting themselves plainly to what must be a varying angle of descent beyond.

  And it was no chimera, no kraken of the abyss. It was a car made of the Metal Things. I caught again the flashes and thought that they were jewels or heaps of shining ores carried by the conscious machine.

  It vanished. In its place hung poised the cube that bore the enigmatic woman and Ruth. Then they were gone and we stood where but an instant before they had been.

  We were high above an ocean of living light--a sea of incandescent splendors that stretched mile upon uncounted mile away and whose incredible waves streamed thousands of feet in air, flew in gigantic banners, in tremendous streamers, in coruscating clouds of varicolored flame--as though torn by the talons of a mighty wind.

  My dazzled sight cleared, glare and blaze and searing incandescence took form, became ordered. Within the sea of light I glimpsed shapes cyclopean, unnameable.

  They moved slowly, with an awesome deliberateness. They shone darkly within the flame-woven depths. From them came the volleys of the lightnings.

  Score upon score of them there were--huge and enigmatic. Their flaming levins threaded the shimmering veils, patterned them, as though they were the flying robes of the very spirit of fire.

  And the tumult was as ten thousand Thors, smiting with hammers against the enemies of Odin. As a forge upon whose shouting anvils was being shaped a new world.

  A new world? A metal world!

  The thought spun through my mazed brain, was gone-- and not until long after did I remember it. For suddenly all that clamor died; the lightnings ceased; all the flitting radiances paled and the sea of flaming splendors grew thin as moving mists. The storming shapes dulled with them, seemed to darken into the murk.

  Through the fast-waning light and far, far away-- miles it seemed on high and many, many miles in length --a broad band of fluorescent amethyst shone. From it dropped curtains, shimmering, nebulous as the marching folds of the aurora; they poured, cascaded, from the amethystine band.

  Huge and purple-black against their opalescence bulked what at first I thought a mountain, so like was it to one of those fantastic buttes of our desert Southwest when their castellated tops are silhouetted against the setting sun; knew instantly that this was but subconscious striving to translate into terms of reality the incredible.

  It was a City!

  A city full five thousand feet high and crowned with countless spires and turrets, titanic arches, stupendous domes! It was as though the man-made cliffs of lower New York were raised scores of times their height, stretched a score of times their length. And weirdly enough it did suggest those same towering masses of masonry when one sees them blacken against the twilight skies.

  The pit darkened as though night were filtering down into it; the vast, purple-shadowed walls of the city sparkled out with countless lights. From the crowning arches and turrets leaped broad filaments of flame, flashing, electric.

  Was it my straining eyes, the play of the light and shadow--or were those high-flung excrescences shifting, changing shape? An icy hand stretched out of the unknown, stilled my heart. For they were shifting--arches and domes, turrets and spires; were melting, reappearing in ferment; like the lightning-threaded, rolling edges of the thundercloud.

  I wrenched my gaze away; saw that our platform had come to rest upon a broad and silvery ledge close to the curving frame of the portal and not a yard from where upon her block stood Norhala, her arm clasped about the rigid form of Ruth. I heard a sigh from Ventnor, an exclamation from Drake.

  Before one of us could cry out to Ruth, the cube glided to the edge of the shelf, dipped out of sight.

  That upon which we rode trembled and sped after it.

  There came a sickening sense of falling; we lurched against each other; for the first time the pony whinnied, fearfully. Then with awful speed we were flying down a wide, a glistening, a steeply angled ramp into the Pit, straight toward the half-hidden, soaring escarpments flashing afar.

  Far ahead raced the Thing on which stood woman and maid. Their hair streamed behind them, mingled, silken web of brown and shining veil of red-gold; little clouds of sparkling corpuscles threaded them, like flitting swarms of fire-flies; their bodies were nimbused with tiny, flickering tongues of lavender flame.

  About us, above us, began again to rumble the countles
s drums of the thunder.

  CHAPTER IX

  THE PORTAL OF FLAME

  It was as though we were on a meteor hurtling through space. The split air shrieked and shrilled, a keening barrier against the avalanche of the thunder. The blast bent us far back on thighs held rigid by the magnetic grip.

  The pony spread its legs, dropped its head; through the hurricane roaring its screaming pierced thinly, that agonizing, terrible lamentation which is of the horse and the horse alone when the limit of its endurance is reached.

  Ventnor crouched lower and lower, eyes shielded behind arms folded over his brows, straining for a glimpse of Ruth; Drake crouched beside him, bracing him, supporting him against the tempest.

  Our line of flight became less abrupt, but the speed increased, the wind-pressure became almost insupportable. I twisted, dropped upon my right arm, thrust my head against my shoulder, stared backward. When first I had looked upon the place I had sensed its immensity; now I began to realize how vast it must really be--for already the gateway through which we had come glimmered far away on high, shrunk to a hoop of incandescent brass and dwindling fast.

  Nor was it a cavern; I saw the stars, traced with deep relief the familiar Northern constellations. Pit it might be, but whatever terror, whatever ordeals were before us, we would not have to face them buried deep within earth. There was a curious comfort to me in the thought.

  Suddenly stars and sky were blotted out.

  We had plunged beneath the surface of the radiant sea.

  Lying in the position in which I was, I was sensible of a diminution of the cyclonic force; the blast streamed up and over the front of the cube. To me drifted only the wailings of our flight and the whimpering terror of the pony.

  I turned my head cautiously. Upon the very edge of the flying blocks squatted Drake and Ventnor, grotesquely frog-like. I crawled toward them--crawled, literally, like a caterpillar; for wherever my body touched the surface of the cubes the attracting force held it, allowed a creeping movement only, surface sliding upon surface--and weirdly enough like a human measuring-worm I looped myself over to them,

  As my bare palms clung to the Things I realized with finality that whatever their activation, their life, they WERE metal.

  There was no mistaking now the testimony of touch. Metal they were, with a hint upon contact of highly polished platinum, or at the least of a metal as finely grained as it.

  Also they had temperature, a curiously pleasant warmth --the surfaces were, I judged, around ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit. I looked deep down into the little sparkling points that were, I knew, organs of sight; they were like the points of contact of innumerable intersecting crystal planes. They held strangest paradoxical suggestion of being close to the surface and still infinite distances away.

  And they were like--what was it they were like?--it came to me with a distinct shock.

  They were like the galaxies of little aureate and sapphire stars in the clear gray heavens of Norhala's eyes.

  I crept beside Drake, struck him with my head.

  "Can't move," I shouted. "Can't lift my hands. Stuck fast--like a fly--just as you said."

  "Drag 'em over your knees," he cried, bending to me. "It slides 'em out of the attraction."

  Acting as he had suggested I found to my astonishment I could slip my hands free; I caught his belt, tried to lift myself by it.

  "No use, Doc." The old grin lightened for a moment his tense young face. "You'll have to keep praying till the power's turned off. Nothing here you can slide your knees on."

  I nodded, waddling close to his side; then sank back on my haunches to relieve the strain upon my aching leg-muscles.

  "Can you see them ahead, Walter--Ruth and the woman?" Ventnor turned his anxious eyes toward me.

  I peered into the glimmering murk; shook my head. I could see nothing. It was indeed, as though the clustered cubes sped within a bubble of the now wanly glistening vapors; or rather as though in our passage--as a projectile does in air--we piled before us a thick wave of the mists which streaming along each side, closing in behind, obscured all that lay around.

  Yet I had, persistently, the feeling that beyond these shroudings was vast and ordered movement; marchings and counter-marchings of hosts greater even than those Golden Hordes of Genghis which ages agone had washed about the outer bases of the very peaks that hid this place. Came, too, flitting shadowings of huge shapes, unnameable, moving swiftly beside our way; gleamings that thrust themselves through the veils like wheeling javelins of flame.

  And always, always, everywhere that constant movement, rhythmic, terrifying--like myriads of feet of creatures of an unseen, stranger world marking time just outside the threshold of our own. Preparing, DRILLING there in some wide vestibule of space between the known and the unknown, alert and menacing--poised for the signal which would send them pouring over it.

  Once again I seemed to stand upon the brink of an abyss of incredible revelation, striving helplessly, struggling for realization--and so struggling became aware that our speed was swiftly slackening, the roaring blast dying down, the veils before us thinning.

  They cleared away. I saw Drake and Ventnor straighten up; raised myself to my own aching knees.

  We were at one end of a vortex, a funneling within the radiant vapors; a funnel whose further end a mile ahead broadened out into a huge circle, its mistily outlined edges impinging upon the towering scarp of the--city. It was as though before us lay, upon its side, a cone of crystalline clear air against whose curved sides some radiant medium heavier than air, lighter than water, pressed.

  The top arc of its prostrate base reached a thousand feet or more up the precipitous wall; above it all was hidden in sparkling nebulosities that were like still clouds of greenly glimmering fire-flies. Back from the curving sides of this cone, above it and below it, the pressing luminosities stretched into, it seemed, infinite distances.

  Through them, suddenly, thousands of bright beams began to dart, to dance, weaving and interweaving, shooting hither and yon--like myriads of great searchlights in a phosphorescent sea fog, like countless lances of the aurora thrusting through its own iridescent veils! And in the play of these beams was something appallingly ordered, appallingly rhythmic.

  It was--how can I describe it?--PURPOSEFUL; purposeful as the geometric shiftings of the Little Things of the ruins, of the summoning song of Norhala, of the Protean changes of the Smiting Shape and the Following Thing; and like all of these it was as laden with that baffling certainty of hidden meanings, of messages that the brain recognized as such yet knew it never could read.

  The rays seemed to spring upward from the earth. Now they were like countless lances of light borne by marching armies of Titans; now they crossed and angled and flew as though they were clouds of javelins hurled by battling swarms of the Genii of Light. And now they stood upright while through them, thrusting them aside, bending them, passed vast, vague shapes like mountains forming and dissolving; like darkening monsters of some world of light pushing through thick forests of slender, high-reaching trees of cold flame; shifting shadows of monstrous chimerae slipping through jungles of bamboo with trunks of diamond fire; phantasmal leviathans swimming through brakes of giant reeds of radiance rising from the sparking ooze of a sea of star shine.

  Whence came the force, the mechanism that produced this cone of clarity, this NOT searchlight, but unlight in the midst of light? Not from behind, that was certain--for turning I saw that behind us the mist was as thick. I turned again--it came to me, why I knew not, yet with an absolute certainty, that the energy, the force emanated from the distant wall itself.

  The funnel, the cone, did not expand from where we were standing, now motionless.

  It began at the wall and focused upon us.

  Within the great circle the surface of the wall was smooth, utterly blank; upon it was no trace of those flitting lights we had seen before we had plunged down toward the radiant sea. It shone with a pale blue phosphorescence.
It was featureless, smooth, a blind cliff of polished, blue metal--and that was all.

  "Ruth!" groaned Ventnor. "Where is she?"

  Aghast at my mental withdrawal from him, angry at myself for my callousness, awkwardly I tried to crawl over to him, to touch him, comfort him as well as I might.

  And then, as though his cry had been a signal, the great cone began to move. Slowly the circled base slipped down the shimmering facades; down, steadily down; I realized that we had paused at the edge of some steep declivity, for the bottom of the cone was now at a decided angle while the upper edge of the circle had dropped a full two hundred feet below the place where it had rested-- and still it fell.

  There came a gasp of relief from Ventnor, a sigh from Drake while, from my own heart, a weight rolled. Not ten yards ahead of us and still deep within the luminosity had appeared the regal head of Norhala, the lovely head of Ruth. The two rose out of the glow like swimmers floating from the depths. Now they were clear before us, and now we could see the surface of the cube on which they rode.

  But neither turned to us; each stared straightly, motionless along the axis of the sinking cone, the woman's left arm holding Ruth close to her side.

  Drake's hand caught my shoulder in a grip that hurt-- nor did he need to point toward that which had wrung the exclamation from him. The funnel had broken from its slow falling; it had made one swift, startling drop and had come to rest. Its recumbent side was now flattened into a triangular plane, widening from the narrow tip in which we stood to all of five hundred feet where its base rested against the blue wall, and falling at a full thirty-degree pitch.

  The misty-edged circle had become an oval, a flattened ellipse another five hundred feet high and three times that in length. And in its exact center, shining forth as though it opened into a place of pale azure incandescence was another rectangular Cyclopean portal.

  On each side of it, in the apparently solid face of the gleaming, metallic cliffs, a slit was opening.

  They began as thin lines a hundred yards in height through which the intense light seemed to hiss; quickly they opened--widening like monstrous cat pupils until at last, their widening ceasing, they glared forth, the blue incandescence gushing from them like molten steel from an opened sluice.