Delphi Works of Robert E. Howard (Illustrated) (Series Four)

by Robert E. Howard

  THE CHALLENGE FROM BEYOND

  First published in Fantasy Magazine, September 1935

  In 1935, the editor of Fantasy Magazine asked five prominent science fiction writers and five prominent fantasy writers to write two “round-robin” stories, both called The Challenge From Beyond. The authors of the fantasy version were C.L. Moore, A. Merritt, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Frank Belknap Long. The science fiction version was written by Stanley G. Weinbaum, Donald Wandrei, Edward E. (E.E. Doc) Smith, Harl Vincent, and Murray Leinster. In the following text, the name of the author of each section of the story is given in square brackets.

  C. L. MOORE

  George Campbell opened sleep-fogged eyes upon darkness and lay gazing out of the tent flap upon the pale August night for some minutes before he roused enough even to wonder what had wakened him. There was in the keen, clear air of these Canadian woods a soporific as potent as any drug. Campbell lay quiet for a moment, sinking slowly back into the delicious borderlands of sleep, conscious of an exquisite weariness, an unaccustomed sense of muscles well used, and relaxed now into perfect ease. These were vacation’s most delightful moments, after all — rest, after toil, in the clear, sweet forest night.

  Luxuriously, as his mind sank backward into oblivion, he assured himself once more that three long months of freedom lay before him — freedom from cities and monotony, freedom from pedagogy and the University and students with no rudiments of interest in the geology he earned his daily bread by dinning Into their obdurate ears. Freedom from —

  Abruptly the delightful somnolence crashed about him. Somewhere outside the sound of tin shrieking across tin slashed into his peace. George Campbell sat up jerkily and reached for his flashlight. Then he laughed and put it down again, straining his eyes through the midnight gloom outside where among the tumbling cans of his supplies a dark anonymous little night beast was prowling. He stretched out a long arm and groped about among the rocks at the tent door for a missile. His fingers closed on a large stone, and he drew back his hand to throw.

  But he never threw it. It was such a queer thing he had come upon in the dark. Square, crystal smooth, obviously artificial, with dull rounded corners. The strangeness of its rock surfaces to his fingers was so remarkable that he reached again for his flashlight and turned its rays upon the thing he held.

  All sleepiness left him as he saw what it was he had picked up in his idle groping. It was clear as rock crystal, this queer, smooth cube. Quartz, unquestionably, but not in its usual hexagonal crystallized form. Somehow — he could not guess the method — it had been wrought into a perfect cube, about four inches in measurement over each worn face. For it was incredibly worn. The hard, hard crystal was rounded now until its corners were almost gone and the thing was beginning to assume the outlines of a sphere. Ages and ages of wearing, years almost beyond counting, must have passed over this strange clear thing.

  But the most curious thing of all was that shape he could make out dimly in the heart of the crystal. For imbedded in its center lay a little disc of a pale and nameless substance with characters incised deep upon its quartz- enclosed surface. Wedge-shaped characters, faintly reminiscent of cuneiform writing.

  George Campbell wrinkled his brows and bent closer above the little enigma in his hands, puzzling helplessly. How could such a thing as this have imbedded in pure rock crystal? Remotely a memory floated through his mind of ancient legends that called quartz crystals ice which had frozen too hard to melt again. Ice — and wedge-shaped cuneiforms — yes, didn’t that sort of writing originate among the Sumerians who came down from the north in history’s remotest beginnings to settle in the primitive Mesopotamian valley? Then hard sense regained control and he laughed. Quartz, of course, was formed in the earliest of earth’s geological periods, when there was nothing anywhere but beat and heaving rock. Ice had not come for tens of millions of years after this thing must have been formed.

  And yet — that writing. Man-made, surely, although its characters were unfamiliar save in their faint hinting at cuneiform shapes. Or could there, In a Paleozoic world, have been things with a written language who might have graven these cryptic wedges upon the quartz-enveloped disc he held? Or — might a thing like this have fallen meteor-like out of space into the unformed rock of a still molten world? Could it —

  Then he caught himself up sharply and felt his ears going hot at the luridness of his own imagination. The silence and the solitude and the queer thing in his hands were conspiring to play tricks with his common sense. He shrugged and laid the crystal down at the edge of his pallet, switching off the light. Perhaps morning and a clear head would bring him an answer to the questions that seemed so insoluble now.

  But sleep did not come easily. For one thing, it seemed to him as he flashed off the light, that the little cube had shone for a moment as if with sustained light before it faded into the surrounding dark. Or perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps It had been only his dazzled eyes that seemed to see the light forsake it reluctantly, glowing In the enigmatic deeps of the thing with queer persistence.

  He lay there unquietly for a long while, turning the unanswered questions over and over in his mind. There was something about this crystal cube out of the unmeasured past, perhaps from the dawn of all history, that constituted a challenge that would not let him sleep.

  A. MERRITT

  He lay there, it seemed to him, for hours. It had been the lingering light, the luminescence that seemed so reluctant to die, which held his mind. It was as though something in the heart of the cube had awakened, stirred drowsily, become suddenly alert... and Intent upon him.

  Sheer fantasy, this. He stirred impatiently and flashed his light upon his watch. Close to one o’clock; three hours more before the dawn. The beam fell and was focused upon the warm crystal cube. He held it there closely, for minutes. He snapped It out, then watched.

  There was no doubt about it now. As his eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness, he saw that the strange crystal was glimmering with tiny fugitive lights deep within it like threads of sapphire lightnings. They were at Its center and they seemed to him to come from the pale disk with Its disturbing markings. And the disc itself was becoming larger... the markings shifting shapes... the cube was growing... was it illusion brought about by the tiny lightnings...

  He heard a sound. It was the very ghost of a sound, like the ghosts of harp strings being plucked with ghostly fingers. He bent closer. It came from the cube...

  There was squeaking in the underbrush, a flurry of bodies and an agonized wailing like a child in death throes and swiftly stilled. Some small tragedy of the wilderness, killer and prey. He stepped over to where it had been enacted, but could see nothing. He again snapped off the flash and looked toward his tent. Upon the ground was a pale blue glimmering. It was the cube. He stooped to pick it up; then obeying some obscure warning, drew back his hand.

  And again, he saw, its glow was dying. The tiny sapphire lightnings flashing fitfully, withdrawing to the disc from which they had come. There was no sound from it.

  He sat, watching the luminescence glow and fade, glow and fade, but steadily becoming dimmer. It came to him that two elements were necessary to produce the phenomenon. The electric ray itself, and his own fixed attention. His mind must travel along the ray, fix itself upon the cube’s heart, if its beat were to wax, until... what?

  He felt a chill of spirit, as though from contact with some alien thing. It was alien, he knew it; not of this earth. Not of earth’s life. He conquered his shrinking, picked up the cube and took It into the tent. It was neither warm nor cold; except for its weight he would not have known he held it. He put it upon the table, keeping the torch turned from it; then stepped to the flap of the tent and closed it.

  He went back to the table, drew up the camp chair, and turned the flash directly upon the cube, focusing it so far as he could upon its heart. He sent all his will, all his concentration, along it; focusing will and sight upon the disc as he had
the light.

  As though at command, the sapphire lightnings burned forth. They burst from the disc into the body of the crystal cube, then beat back, bathing the disc and the markings. Again these began to change, shifting, moving, advancing, and retreating in the blue gleaming. They were no longer cuneiform. They were things... objects.

  He heard the murmuring music, the plucked harp strings. Louder grew the sound and louder, and now all the body of the cube vibrated to their rhythm. The crystal walls were melting, growing misty as though formed of the mist of diamonds. And the disc Itself was growing... the shapes shifting, dividing and multiplying as though some door had been opened and Into it companies of phantasms were pouring. While brighter, more bright grew the pulsing light.

  He felt swift panic, tried to withdraw sight and will, dropped the flash. The cube had no need now of the ray... and he could not withdraw... could not withdraw? Why, he himself was being sucked into that disc which was now a globe within which unnameable shapes danced to a music that bathed the globe with steady radiance.

  There was no tent. There was only a vast curtain of sparkling mist behind which shone the globe... He felt himself drawn through that mist, sucked through it as if by a mighty wind, straight for the globe.

  H.P. LOVECRAFT

  As the mist-blurred light of the sapphire suns grew more and more intense, the outlines of the globe ahead wavered and dissolved to a churning chaos. Its pallor and its motion and its music all blended themselves with the engulfing mist-bleaching It to a pale steel-colour and setting it undulantly in motion. And the sapphire suns, too, melted Imperceptibly into the greying infinity of shapeless pulsation.

  Meanwhile the sense of forward, outward motion grew intolerably, incredibly, cosmically swift. Every standard of speed known to earth seemed dwarfed, and Campbell knew that any such flight in physical reality would mean instant death to a human being. Even as it was — in this strange, hellish hypnosis or nightmare — the quasi-visual impression of meteor-like hurtling almost paralyzed his mind. Though there were no real points of reference in the grey, pulsing void, he felt that he was approaching and passing the speed of light Itself. Finally his consciousness did go under — and merciful blackness swallowed everything.

  It was very suddenly, and amidst the most impenetrable darkness, that thoughts and Ideas again came to George Campbell. Of how many moments — or years — or eternities — had elapsed since his flight through the grey void, he could form no estimate. He knew only that he seemed to be at rest and without pain. Indeed, the absence of all physical sensation was the salient quality of his condition. It made even the blackness seem less solidly black — suggesting as it did that he was rather a disembodied intelligence in a state beyond physical senses, than a corporeal being with senses deprived of their accustomed objects of perception. He could think sharply and quickly — almost preternaturally so — yet could form no idea whatsoever of his situation.

  Half by instinct, he realised that he was not in his own tent. True, he might have awaked there from a nightmare to a world equally black; yet he knew this was not so. There was no camp cot beneath him — he had no hands to feel the blankets and canvas surface and flashlight that ought to be around him — there was no sensation of cold in the air — no flap through which he could glimpse the pale night outside... something was wrong, dreadfully wrong.

  He cast his mind backward and thought of the fluorescent cube which had hypnotised him — of that, and all which had followed. He had known that his mind was going, yet had been unable to draw back. At the last moment there had been a shocking, panic fear — a subconscious fear beyond even that caused by the sensation of daemonic flight. It had come from some vague flash or remote recollection — just what, he could not at once tell. Some cell-group In the back of his head had seemed to find a cloudily familiar quality In the cube — and that familiarity was fraught with dim terror. Now he tried to remember what the familiarity and the terror were.

  Little by little it came to him. Once — long ago, in connection with his geological life-work — he had read of something like that cube. It had to do with those debatable and disquieting clay fragments called the Eltdown Shards, dug up from pre-carboniferous strata in southern England thirty years before. Their shape and markings were so queer that a few scholars hinted at artificiality, and made wild conjectures about them and their origin. They came, clearly, from a time when no human beings could exist on the globe — but their contours and figurings were damnably puzzling. That was how they got their name.

  It was not, however, In the writings of any sober scientist that Campbell had seen that reference to a crystal, disc-holding globe. The source was far less reputable, and infinitely more vivid. About 1912 a deeply learned Sussex clergyman of occultist leanings — the Reverend Arthur Brooke Winters-Hall — had professed to identify the markings on the Eltdown Shards with some of the so-called “pre-human hieroglyphs” persistently cherished and esoterically handed down in certain mystical circles, and had published at his own expense what purported to be a “translation” of the primal and baffling “inscriptions” — a “translation” still quoted frequently and seriously by occult writers. In this “translation’ — a surprisingly long brochure In view of the limited number of “shards” existing — had occurred the narrative, supposedly of pre-human authorship, containing the now frightening reference.

  As the story went, there dwelt on a world — and eventually on countless other worlds — of outer space a mighty order of worm-like beings whose attainments and whose control of nature surpassed anything within the range of terrestrial imagination. They had mastered the art of interstellar travel early in their career, and had peopled every habitable planet in their own galaxy — killing off the races they found.

  Beyond the limits of their own galaxy — which was not ours — they could not navigate in person; but in their quest for knowledge of all space and time they discovered a means of spanning certain transgalactic gulfs with their minds. They devised peculiar objects — strangely energized cubes of a curious crystal containing hypnotic talismans and enclosed in space- resisting spherical envelopes of an unknown substance — which could be forcibly expelled beyond the limits of their universe, and which would respond to the attraction of cool solid matter only.

  These, of which a few would necessarily land on various inhabited worlds in outside universes, formed the ether-bridges needed for mental communication. Atmospheric friction burned away the protecting envelope, leaving the cube exposed and subject to discovery by the intelligent minds of the world where it fell. By its very nature, the cube would attract and rivet attention. This, when coupled with the action of light, was sufficient to set its special properties working.

  The mind that noticed the cube would be drawn into it by the power of the disc, and would be sent on a thread of obscure energy to the place whence the disc had come — the remote world of the worm-like space explorers across stupendous galactic abysses. Received in one of the machines to which each cube was attuned, the captured mind would remain suspended without body or senses until examined by one of the dominant race. Then it would, by an obscure process of interchange, be pumped of all its contents. The investigator’s mind would now occupy the strange machine while the captive mind occupied the interrogator’s worm-like body. Then, in another interchange, the interrogator’s mind would leap across boundless space to the captive’s vacant and unconscious body on the trans-galactic world — animating the alien tenement as best It might, and exploring the alien world in the guise of one of its denizens.

  When done with exploration, the adventurer would use the cube and its disc in accomplishing his return — and sometimes the captured mind would be restored safely to its own remote world. Not always, however, was the dominant race so kind. Sometimes, when a potentially important race capable of space travel was found, the worm-like folk would employ the cube to capture and annihilate minds by the thousands, and would extirpate the race for diplomatic reas
ons — using the exploring minds as agents of destruction.

  In other cases sections of the worm-folk would permanently occupy a trans- galactic planet — destroying the captured minds and wiping out the remaining inhabitants preparatory to settling down in unfamiliar bodies. Never, however, could the parent civilization be quite duplicated In such a case; since the new planet would not contain all the materials necessary for the worm-race’s arts. The cubes, for example, could be made only on the home planet.

  Only a few of the numberless cubes sent forth ever found a landing and response on an inhabited world — since there was no such thing as aiming them at goals beyond sight or knowledge. Only three, ran the story, had ever landed on peopled worlds in our own particular universe. One of these had struck a planet near the galactic rim two thousand billion years ago, while another had lodged three billion years ago on a world near the centre of the galaxy. The third — and the only one ever known to have invaded the solar system — had reached our own earth 150,000,000 years ago.

  It was with this latter that Dr. Winters-Hall’s “translation” chiefly dealt. When the cube struck the earth, he wrote, the ruling terrestrial species was a huge, cone-shaped race surpassing all others before or since In mentality and achievements. This race was so advanced that it had actually sent minds abroad in both space and time to explore the cosmos, hence recognised something of what had happened when the cube fell from the sky and certain Individuals had suffered mental change after gazing at it.

  Realising that the changed Individuals represented invading minds, the race’s leaders had them destroyed — even at the cost of leaving the displaced minds exiled in alien space. They had had experience with even stranger transitions. When, through a mental exploration of space and time, they formed a rough Idea of what the cube was, they carefully hid the thing from light and sight, and guarded it as a menace. They did not wish to destroy a thing so rich in later experimental possibilities. Now and then some rash, unscrupulous adventurer would furtively gain access to it and sample its perilous powers despite the consequences — but all such cases were discovered, and safely and drastically dealt with.