COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 443
Nothing moved but the rubble under their feet. But the dark doorways were numerous now, and Alan felt uneasily that things were watching as they stumbled over the stones. "What's happened?" he demanded. "Where's Karen? And Mike?"
"Back in the Terasi cavern, laddie."
"Prisoners?"
Sir Colin laughed. "No. At least—not Terasi prisoners. But I'm thinking we may all be prisoners of the Alien, my boy, and not quite realize it yet ... No, the Terasi aren't quite the savages they look. We found that out. It was our guns that saved us, you see. Not as threats or as weapons, but as a sort of promise instead. A promise of knowledge. They're hungry and thirsty for knowledge, these savages of the tunnels. So at first they kept us alive to learn the secret of the guns—how to make them, where they came from, why they work. They had to teach us their language for that. Ye've been missing a long while, laddie."
"You learned their language?"
"Enough. And now we're allies—against the Alien." He shrugged heavily. "Yes, we have a verra grave task ahead of us, laddie. The rebuilding of a world, perhaps. But we'll talk about that later. Here—we can go faster now."
The floor before them was a road of shimmering gray metal. No, two roads, separated by a low curbing. Alan heard a rushing sound and felt wind drying the sweat upon his face.
"The Way of the Gods," Sir Colin rumbled. "Follow me now, laddie. Careful does it."
He stepped over gingerly upon the gray road. Instantly his heavy body rose weightless into the air, drifting forward as if upon the current of a slow stream. Over his shoulder he grinned and then beckoned. "Come!"
Alan braced himself and stepped uncertainly forward. He felt a giddy vertigo that nauseated him briefly. He shot past Sir Colin in the grip of the invisible air-river, and went dizzily along the tunnel, trying to right himself. Over and over, heels over head. Then Sir Colin's hand steadying him.
"Don't struggle. Relax now. There. The current's faster toward the middle."
"What is it?" Alan had fallen into a swimmer's position, head lifted, facing in the direction of the current's flow. Sir Colin drifted beside him. The tunnel walls moved past them with increasing speed, a soft murmuring of air in their ears.
"That gray stuff on the floor must cut off gravitation to some extent. Not too much or we'd smash against the roof. The force is angled forward, so we're carried with it. It's a river, Alan. A river of force. The Light-Wearers used it when they traveled the Way of Gods. It's one of the few things that still works in this god-forsaken place. This, and Carcasilla ...Tell me about it, laddie. What's happened since we left?"
And so Alan told him, drifting along over the gray ribbon of the roadway, through the ruins and darkness of the dead world. It did not take very long. Sir Colin was silent for a while as they floated on along the whispering river of air. Then, "Flande," he murmured. "I had wondered about him. Perhaps some day we'll learn the truth. But for the rest, it fits—yes, it fits verra well! I've learned a good deal since we came here, laddie."
"Tell me."
Sir Colin laughed and flapped his hands helplessly. "All at once? There's a lot to be said. Ye know about the Light-Wearers—how they came and conquered. How they cleared the earth of 'vermin' except for the pets they kept, and the experimental races they bred and interbred. Some of 'em—pretty nasty. And some of 'em still alive, the Terasi tell me, lurking in the caverns, feeding on each other and anything they can catch. I'd never realized how alien the Aliens were until I heard about the things they made out of human flesh in their laboratories here.
"But never mind that now. It's the Terasi ye'll want to know of. Back on their own world, wherever it may ha' been, the Aliens had a slave race. Not human, or even remotely human, but made of flesh like us. Not—well, vortices of living energy, or whatever the Aliens are. The slave race may ha' been the Aliens' hands. I'm theorizing, ye ken, but I've found out enough. And ye have to grant those Aliens were builders!" There was awe in the burring voice. "Anyway, when they came here they tried, I think, to make such a race from men. Parts of the brain they must ha' killed; others I believe they stimulated to make men builders, to be their hands as that other race had been. Only—they guessed wrong about humans. The little seeds of rebellion they thought they'd cut away kept growing back. Ah, those robot-humans built machines the like I never saw before. I'll show ye, later. I dinna know what for, but some day I'll learn. But the robot-humans learned something else, laddie. They discovered they were men!"
"Well?"
Sir Colin sighed gently above the soft sighing of the wind that blew along the Way of the Gods. "The Aliens destroyed them," he said abruptly.
Alan knew a sudden pang of loss, irreparable loss, as though history itself had become a book of blank pages.
"It may be," the Scotsman went on after a moment, "that the Terasi are remnants of that race. Or it may be they're descendants of some other experiments the Aliens made. There's been time enough to spare to let the human race rectify itself again from all the hideous things the Aliens superimposed upon them—if that's what happened. We'll never know, of course.
"The Terasi seem to be the only semblance of an independent human race left here. They're living in the great cave of the machines, where the robot-humans fought their last battles millenniums ago. And they're trying in their clumsy way to learn. Out of sheer thirst for knowledge, because there isn't any hope for the future and they know it well. The Earth's dying and the race of man will have to die, too."
-
HE SIGHED again, heavily, and for a while they drifted in silence along the slow stream. The tunnel walls went past in the dimness, opening enigmatic arches upon caverns where the creatures of the Aliens must have lived out their misshapen lives so long ago.
"About the Light-Wearer—" Alan prompted presently.
"Oh. Well, he knows he's alone now, and he knows he'll have to die, too, if he can't get at us. We were domned lucky back there in the ship, laddie, that he didn't suspect then what had happened. He must ha' wakened and gone in search of the race he led here, and by the time he knew they'd come and ruled and died, we'd escaped. I imagine him going back to the citadel and sending out calls all over the world—and only Evaya answered. He followed us to Carcasilla—remember? He was still unsure then, I think, stunned by the shock of what he'd found here. And afterward, when he knew, he couldn't reach us. You were safe in Carcasilla, and we—well, the Terasi ha' found a way to keep the thing at bay.
"It isn' flesh, ye ken. Its metabolism isna human at all. It may have no body as we know bodies. So the bullets I fired didn't hurt the creature. No, I think it was the psychic shock of the concussion. It's a highly specialized being in which body had been sacrificed to mind. Perhaps a vortex of pure force. How can we conceive of such a being!" Sir Colin rubbed his forehead wearily, the slight motion rocking him upon the current of air. "Ye recall what happened back there when the devil attacked ye?"
Alan shivered. "It was in my brain—sucking—"
"So I think it's a mental vampire. It lives on life-force—mental energy—and only the energy of intelligent human beings. The Aliens may ha' bred human slaves for that purpose only. And now this last of them's ravenous—starving. And only we and the Terasi are available now. Ye saw how it cast aside the Carcasillians. They're protected, somehow."
"Well, the Light-Wearer came out of his citadel and went hunting. And he found the Terasi. And he came ravening among them as we saw him come into Carcasilla. But the Terasi have a weapon. They have great gongs that make the whole cavern shiver with noise. And noise those Aliens canna stand. Ye remember Carcasilla is a silent city? So they fight him with noise. He's been besieging them a long while now. We dare not leave the city without portable gongs, and even they aren't really powerful enough. The food-caverns—mushrooms and such-like things—are a little way off from the city, and we can't get enough now. He won't let us. We've starving each other out, really." Sir Colin grinned. "But I think the Alien may win."
"So you came after me alone?"
Sir Colin shrugged. "I had my gun. Besides, you saved my life a few billion years ago, in Tunisia, and I wanted to pay the debt. As for why I delayed—I did come once, and couldn't pass the barrier into Carcasilla. This second time I followed the Alien's track."
This was high courage of a sort Alan had seldom encountered, but he said nothing. After a while the Scotsman went on, "I may ha' done ye no favor in bringing ye out of Carcasilla, after all. It looks as if ye're doomed to starve with the Terasi, or die at last as ye so nearly died in Carcasilla to feed the Alien. I dunno, laddie. I think our fortunes lie with the Terasi, but even if we found a way to beat the Alien—what?"
Now the Way of the Gods grew wider, and chasms opened in the floor and cracks ran down the ruined walls. Sir Colin touched Alan's arm, drawing him out of the weightless current toward one of the broad splits running from roof to floor.
"Here's our way. There was a gateway into this cavern, once, but a shrinking old planet like ours has its quakes. That road's closed. Most of these cracks are blind, but some open in. Here."
Alan glanced on along the Way of the Gods still stretching ahead. "Where does it go?"
"Probably to Hell. I've checked it with what charts I could find—not many—and I think it begins under the citadel we saw back on the plain."
The scientist had produced a taper of some fibrous plant, and lit it. "We've got a hard path to follow."
It wound and twisted upward a long, rough way before light showed ahead, a cold, pale radiance outlining the mouth of a crack like lightning against a night sky. Sir Colin put out the torch. Before them, the depthless expanse of a cavern loomed.
Alan thought irresistibly of his first glimpse of Carcasilla. Here was a cavern again, and incredible shapes filled it. By this time those shapes were mighty cylinders and bizarre silhouettes rising like water-carved rocks from the sea. It was a city of—machines?
If these were machines, indeed, then the Alien concept of machinery was as strange as their concept of human houses in Carcasilla. What lay before Alan was too vast, too breathtakingly immense, to be captured in familiar terms. These towers were machines perhaps, but of a size inconceivable! Only Alien-made metal—or was it plastic—could create such masses that would not topple under their own weight. And they were colored gorgeously and senselessly. Deep colors for the most part. Gargantuan shapes of purple and dark wine-red, and leaning towers of obsidian green.
"Aye," breathed Sir Colin at his elbow. "They were technicians!" There was respect in his voice. And Alan remembered that this cavern had seen perhaps the last rebels of earth, robots turned stubbornly human, fighting and falling before their Alien masters in a saga of courage and futility that was lost like the race that had failed. Only their handiwork remained, enigmatic, impossible.
"What are they for?" he asked Sir Colin futilely. "What could they be for?"
"What does it matter now?" the Scotsman said bitterly. "There isn't any power left in the whole domned planet. Come on down. It's not so safe up here."
They mounted a lip of rock, and the rest of the cavern floor was visible below them, a twisting rift of stone leading downward toward it. Against the farther wall Alan could see a huddle of rough huts—more like partitions than like shelters, for what shelter from the elements could men need here? Figures were moving among them, and Alan bristled a little involuntarily. The savage shapes looked dangerous; he could not forget his last meeting with these people.
-
BEFORE them, shadows stirred, and for one breathtaking instant Alan was back on the shore of the Mediterranean, where Mike and Karen had come out of the Tunisian night with their guns upon him—as they came now.
No one spoke for a moment. There were lines of strain on Karen's keen, pale face, and the blue eyes held an habitual alertness he had seen there before only for brief moments of violent action. Her bronze curls were tousled now, and her clothing tattered, with inexpert mends.
Mike's had not been mended at all. He stood there straddle-legged, a menacing figure of strong bronze, his blunt features restrained to an impassivity more revealing than any scowl. There was an air of iron firmness and strain about him. The sleek black head was roughened now, and he had the beginnings of a black beard. He looked taut as wire—and as dangerous if he should break, Alan thought.
Karen was watching Alan. "So, Drake, you're still alive."
"We all are," Alan said with a glance at Mike.
"You look damn good," the gunman remarked coldly. "Somebody been feeding you well, eh?"
Alan's mouth quirked. "I haven't eaten anything since I left you."
"Where's Brekkir?" Sir Colin asked.
"In the storage house, checking supplies," Karen told him. "Food's pretty low. If we don't send out another party soon to the food caves, it's going to be too late."
Sir Colin shook his head, lips tight. "I want to talk to Brekkir. Come along, laddie. Ye'll remember Brekkir—the man who stove your ribs in." And the Scotsman smiled grimly.
"I remember." Alan nodded, ignoring Mike's sudden bark of vicious amusement. There was still, he recalled, a score to be settled with Mike Smith. But not yet.
Under the great toppling heights of the machines they went, mountains of purple and rich deep blues and greens. Dead machines. But whatever air-conditioners had been installed unknown years ago were built for the ages, because the air was fresh here. Windless, but cool and clean. And the dimming lights shone down unchanging.
"What about you?" Karen was asking now. "The Alien—"
"I've met it," Alan said briefly.
Mike showed his teeth. "What is this Alien, Drake? Scotty's been talking about energy and vibration, but it doesn't make sense. The filthy thing can be killed, can't it?"
"God knows." Alan shrugged. "Not by bullets. It's afraid of sound, apparently, for whatever that's worth."
"But it can be killed!" The sentence was not a question. White dints showed in Mike's nostrils. The Nazi had courage, Alan knew for a certainty, but never before had that courage been tested against the unknown.
Mike's years of training with the German war machine had given him certain abilities, but it had destroyed certain others. Nazi soldiers fought to the death because they believed they were the master race, the herrenvolken. It all seemed trivial now, and incredibly long ago, but in this one application it was not trivial. For Mike had the weakness and the strength of his kind. When the German supreme confidence is undermined—that fanatical, unswerving belief in one's self—the psychological reaction is violent. And Mike Smith, brave as he undoubtedly was, had for weeks been facing a power against which he was completely helpless.
Over his shoulder Sir Colin said brusquely, "The Alien's not a devil. It's alive, and it has adaptability—to some extent. Without perfect adaptability it's vulnerable."
"To what?" Karen murmured.
"Metabolism, for one thing. Without food it willna live."
"Comforting!" Karen said. "When you think that we're the food it wants!"
Alan saw Mike Smith shudder ...
"Hungry?" Sir Colin asked as they came into the huddle of Terasi village under the out-curve of the cavern wall.
"Why, yes. I am. Thirsty, too." Alan felt surprise as he realized it. In Carcasilla the fountain had been both food and drink, but here he was mortal, it seemed. And he was not only hungry, he was famished. And very tired. That fight with the Alien had been more draining than he had realized, until now that comparative safety was reached. He was scarcely aware of the rude streets they were walking, or of the ragged Terasi who passed with curious stares, or of the great gongs hanging at intervals along the way, manned by grim-faced watchers.
Weariness and hunger made the whole cavern swim before him as reaction set in. He knew that Sir Colin was helping him into some rough-walled house, its roof only a network of pale-branched trellis. He heard Mike and Karen from far away. Someone put a spongy bread-like object in his hands and he tore at it ravenously, remembering the Alien's hunger with a wry sympathy now as he ate the mushroomy thing in his hand.
It helped a little. Sir Colin poured water into a metal cup and handed it to him, smiling. "There's no whuskey," he said gravely, "which probably accounts for the downfall of mankind."
The water was sweet and good, but food and drink were not all his wants now. He felt drained dry of energy by that terrible bout with the Alien. And he knew—he sensed unerringly that the Alien was not yet finished with him. He could feel it in the back of his mind as he ate and drank. Somewhere it was waiting, watching ...
"Sleep now," Sir Colin urged from somewhere outside the closed circle of his weariness. "We'll wake you if anything happens."
He did not even know when gentle hands led him to the bed.
-
Chapter IV
The Portals of Light
A DEEP, resonant vibration, shivering through the room, wakened Alan. He lay there staring, uncertain where he was. The sound came again as he lay blinking, and this time he recognized it and sat up abruptly, lifting one hand to his stubby cheek. The beard was beginning to grow again, as it had never grown in Carcasilla. But he had no time to wonder over that, for the gong was ringing desperately now and the whole cavern seemed to resound with that ominous sound.
