The Baen Big Book of Monsters, page 38
Then Hallet screamed. They heard it in their helmet-phones. He screamed again. Then for a space he was silent, gasping, and then he uttered shrieks of pure horror. But they were cries of horror, not of pain.
Moran found himself running, which was probably ridiculous. The others hastened after him. And suddenly the mistiness ahead took on a new appearance. The ground fell away. It became evident that the Nadine had landed upon a plateau with levels below it and very possibly mountains rising above. But here the slightly rolling plateau fell sheer away. There was a place where the yeasty soil—but here it was tinted with a purplish overcast of foleate fungus—where the soil had given way. Something had fallen, here.
It would have been Hallet. He’d gone too close to a precipice, moving agitatedly in search of a hiding-place in which to conceal himself until the people of the Nadine made a deal he could no longer believe in.
His cries still came over the helmet-phones. Moran went grimly to look. He found himself gazing down into a crossvalley perhaps two hundred feet deep. At the bottom there were the incredible, green growing things. But they were not trees. They were some flabby weed with thick reddish stalks and enormous pinnate leaves. It grew here to the height of oaks. But Hallet had not dropped so far.
From anchorages on bare rock, great glistening cables reached downward to other anchorages on the valley floor. The cables crossed each other with highly artificial precision at a central point. They formed the foundation for a web of geometrically accurate design and unthinkable size. Crosscables of sticky stuff went round and round the center of the enormous snare, following a logarithmic spiral with absolute exactitude. It was a spider’s web whose cables stretched hundreds of feet; whose bird-limed ropes would trap and hold even the monster insects of this world. And Hallet was caught in it.
He’d tumbled from the cliff-edge as fungoid soil gave way under him. He’d bounced against a sloping, fungus-covered rocky wall and with fragments of curdy stuff about him had been flung out and into the snare. He was caught as firmly as any of the other creatures on which the snare’s owner fed.
His shrieks of horror began when he realized his situation. He struggled, setting up insane vibrations in the fabric of the web. He shrieked again, trying to break the bonds of cordage that clung the more horribly as he struggled to break free. And the struggling was most unwise.
“We want to cut the cables with torches,” said Moran sharply. “If we can make the web drop we’ll be all right. Webspiders don’t hunt on the ground. Go ahead! Make it fast!”
Burleigh and the others hastened to what looked like a nearly practicable place by which to descend. Moran moved swiftly to where one cable of the web was made fast at the top. It was simple sanity to break down the web—by degrees, of course—to get at Hallet. But Hallet did not cooperate. He writhed and struggled and shrieked.
His outcry, of course, counted for nothing in the satanic cacophony that filled the air. All the monsters of all the planet seemed to make discordant noises. Hallet could add nothing. But his struggles in the web had meaning to the owner of the trap.
They sent tiny tremblings down the web-cables. And this was the fine mathematical creation of what was quaintly called a “garden spider” on other worlds. Epeira fasciata. She was not in it. She sat sluggishly in a sheltered place, remote from her snare. But a line, a cord, a signal-cable went from the center of the web to the spider’s retreat. She waited with implacable patience, one foreleg—sheathed in ragged and somehow revolting fur—resting delicately upon the line. Hallet’s frantic struggles shook the web. Faintly, to be sure, but distinctively. The vibrations were wholly unlike the violent, thrashing struggles of a heavy beetle or a giant cricket. They were equally unlike those flirtatious, seductive pluckings of a web-cable which would mean that an amorous male of her own species sought the grisly creature’s affection.
Hallet made the web quiver as small prey would shake it. The spider would have responded instantly to bigger game, if only to secure it before the vast snare was damaged by frenzied plungings. Still, though there was no haste, the giant rose and in leisurely fashion traversed the long cable to the web’s center. Moran saw it.
“Hallet!” he barked into his helmet-phone, “Hallet! Hold still! Don’t move!”
He raced desperately along the edge of the cliff, risking a fall more immediately fatal than Hallet’s. It was idiotic to make such an attempt at rescue. It was sheer folly. But there are instincts one has to obey against all reason. Moran did not think of the fuel-block. Typically, Hallet did.
“I’ve got the fuel-block,” he gasped between screams. “If you don’t help me—”
But then the main cable nearest him moved in a manner not the result of his own struggles. It was the enormous weight of the owner of the web, moving leisurely on her own snare, which made the web shake now. And Hallet lost even the coherence of hysteria and simply shrieked.
Moran came to a place where a main anchor-cable reached bed-rock. It ran under yeasty ground-cover to an anchorage. He thrust his torch deep, feeling for the cable. It seared through. The web jerked wildly as one of its principal supports parted. The giant spider turned aside to investigate the event. Such a thing should happen only when one of the most enormous of possible victims became entangled.
Moran went racing for another cable-anchorage. But when he found where the strong line fastened, it was simply and starkly impossible to climb down to it. He swore and looked desperately for Burleigh and Brawn and Harper. They were far away, hurrying to descend but not yet where they could bring the web toppling down by cutting other cables.
The yellow-banded monster came to the cut end of the line. It swung down. It climbed up again. Hallet shrieked and kicked.
The spider moved toward him. Of all nightmarish creatures on this nightmare of a planet, a giant spider with a body eight feet long and legs to span as many yards was most revolting. Its abdomen was obscenely swollen. As it moved, its spinnerets paid out newly-formed cord behind it. Its eyes were monstrous and murderously intent. The ghastly, needle-sharp mandibles beside its mouth seemed to move lustfully with a life of their own. And it was somehow ten times more horrible because of its beastly fur. Tufts of black hairiness, half-yards in length, streamed out as its legs moved.
There was another cable still. Moran made for it. He reached it where it stretched down like a slanting tight-rope. He jerked out his torch to sever it—and saw that to cut it would be to drop the spider almost upon Hallet. It would seize him then because of his writhings. But not to cut it—
He tried his blaster. He fired again and again. The blaster-bolts hurt. The spider reacted with fury. The blaster would have killed a man at this distance, though it would have been ignored by a chitin-armored beetle. But against the spider the bolts were like bites. They made small wounds, but not serious ones. The spider made a bubbling sound which was more daunting than any cry would have been. It flung its legs about, fumbling for the thing that it believed attacked it. It continued the bubbling sounds. Its mandibles clashed and gnashed against each other. They were small noises in the din which was the norm on this mad world, but they were more horrible than any other sounds Moran had ever heard.
The spider suddenly began to move purposefully toward the spot where Hallet jerked insanely and shrieked in heart-rending horror.
Moran found himself attempting the impossible. He knew it was impossible. The blast-pistol hurt but did not injure the giant because the range was too long. So—it was totally unjustifiable—he found himself slung below the downward-slanting cable and sliding down its slope. He was going to where the range would be short enough for his blast-pistol to be effective. He slid to a cross-cable, and avoided it and went on.
Burleigh and Brawn and Harper were tiny figures, very far away. Moran hung by one hand and used his free hand to fire the blaster once more. It hurt more seriously, now. The spider made bubbling noises of infinite ferocity. And it moved with incredible agility toward the one object it could imagine as meaning attack.
It reached Hallet. It seized him.
Moran’s blast-pistol could not kill it. It had to be killed. Now! He drew out his torch and pressed the continuous-flame stud. Raging, he threw it at the spider.
It spun in the air, a strange blue-white pinwheel in the gray light of this planet’s day. It cut through a cable that might have deflected it. It reached the spider, now reared high and pulling Hallet from the sticky stuff that had captured him.
The spinning torch hit. The flame burned deep. The torch actually sank into the spider’s body.
And there was a titanic flame and an incredible blast and Moran knew nothing.
A long time later he knew that he ached. He became aware that he hurt. Still later he realized that Burleigh and Brawn and Harper stood around him. He’d splashed in some enormous thickness of the yeasty soil, grown and fallen from the cliff-edge, and it was not solid enough to break his bones. Harper, doubtless, had been most resolute in digging down to him and pulling him out.
He sat up, and growled at innumerable unpleasant sensations.
“That,” he said painfully, “was a very bad business.”
“It’s all bad business,” said Burleigh in a flat and somehow exhausted tone. “The fuel-block burned. There’s nothing left of it or Hallet or the spider.”
Moran moved an arm. A leg. The other arm and leg. He got unsteadily to his feet.
“It was bessendium and uranium,” added Burleigh hopelessly. “And the uranium burned. It wasn’t an atomic explosion, it just burned like sodium or potassium would do. But it burned fast! The torch-flame must have reached it.” He added absurdly. “Hallet died instantly, of course. Which is better fortune than we are likely to have.”
“Oh, that . . .” said Moran. “We’re all right. I said I was going to kill him. I wasn’t trying to at the moment, but I did. By accident.” He paused, and said dizzily; “I think he should feel obliged to me. I was distinctly charitable to him!”
Harper said grimly;
“But we can’t lift off. We’re all marooned here now.”
Moran took an experimental step. He hurt, but he was sound.
“Nonsense!” he said. “The crew of the Malabar went off without taking the fuel-block from the wreck’s engines. It’s in a drawer in the Nadine’s control-room with a note to Carol that I asked her to read should something happen to me. We may have to machine it a little to make it fit the Nadine’s engines. But we’re all right!”
Carol’s voice came in his helmet-phone. It was shaky and desperately glad.
“We’re on the way,” said Moran.
He was pleased with Carol’s reaction. He also realized that now there would be the right number of people on the Nadine; they would take off from this world and arrive reasonably near due-time at Loris without arousing the curiosity of space-port officials.
He looked about him. The way the others had come down was a perfectly good way to climb up again. On the surface, above, their trail would be clear on the multi-colored surface rusts. There were four men together, all with blast-pistols and three with torches. They should be safe.
Moran talked cheerfully, climbing to the plateau on which the Nadine had landed, trudging with the others across a world on which it was impossible to see more than a quarter-mile in any direction. But the way was plain. Beyond the mist Carol waited.
An Epistle to the Thessalonians
INTRODUCTION
Normally, I disapprove of the practice of including an excerpt from a novel in an anthology as if it were a short story, but as Sturgeon’s Law puts it, “Nothing is always absolutely so,”* and this excerpt actually is a self-contained short story. Moreover, Damon Knight reprinted this same excerpt as a short story in his early 1950s SF magazine, Worlds Beyond, so there’s formidable precedent for doing this. Philip Wylie’s novel Finnley Wren was, as part of its long subtitle had it, “A Novel in a New Manner,” and at one point the narrator is reading a story that the title character has written titled, “An Epistle to the Thessalonians,” about an apparently human (he wears pants with cuffs!), but very, very big giant who descends from space, stays for a time, indifferent to the destruction he causes, then departs into the sky. Not surprisingly for the author of Generation of Vipers, Wylie’s focus is on satire, as he casts a jaundiced eye on the human reaction to the titanic visitor.
Philip Wylie (1902-1971) may be remembered mostly for his best-selling nonfiction work of social criticism, Generation of Vipers, but he was very much a prolific writer of science fiction. His early novel Gladiator was probably an influence in the creation of Superman, and his collaborative novels with Edwin Balmer, When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide, were national best-sellers in a time when science fiction was seldom published in book form. When Worlds Collide was sold to the movies and almost became a Cecil B. DeMille production in the 1930s, but instead languished until 1951 when George Pal brought it to the screen as his follow-up to Destination Moon. Wylie’s fantasy novel The Disappearance, another best seller, was cited by Theodore Sturgeon as one of his favorite novels. In the 1960s, his novel of atomic war, Triumph, was a best seller, as well as being serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, a triumph in itself. While Finnley Wren, from which “Epistle to the Thessalonians” is taken, is in no way either fantasy or SF, I recommend it highly, and I’m glad to see that Dalkey Archive is bringing the novel out in a new edition.
*Yes, that is Sturgeon’s Law. While “Ninety percent of everything is crud” is often mistakenly called Sturgeon’s Law, Theodore Sturgeon’s preferred name for the latter quip was “Sturgeon’s Revelation” when he presented it in his book review column in the March 1958 issue of the SF magazine Venture.
An Epistle to the Thessalonians
by Philip Wylie
Comerade Nikolai Dimitri Eisenstein, the renowned Leninist incendiary and pickpocket, having heisted the keister of Mrs. Benjamin Bissel, housewife, of 1594 East Orchid Street, the Bronx, reviewed its meager interior as he stood beneath the elevated on Sixth Avenue. He was quite unaware of the lacy pattern described on the trolley track by the sun in conjunction with the elevated ties until the phenomenon was blotted out, some say rudely, some say politely and gradually.
We will now drop Comrade Nikolai Dimitri Eisenstein.
The cause of the shadow which fell over the whole city of New York and many other cities besides on that halcyon July morning was an obstruction of Old Sol in the form of a giant one thousand miles high.
The giant, appearing from no one knows where and unannounced by the world’s observatories which, at the time, were jammed with hawk-eyed astronomers whose data tabulated in light-years about matters of less consequence than the visitor to our planet was always available while on this pertinent matter their information was nil, dropped rapidly from a strategic position behind the moon. As he entered the gravitational sphere of earth’s influence he picked up our rotary motion so that his descent upon the sea was not accompanied by embarrassing tidal waves. Indeed, he stepped onto the waters of the Atlantic so circumspectly that the lay notion he had jumped through space was absurd.
The lower two hundred miles of him penetrated our atmosphere between eleven-six and eleven-twenty A.M., Eastern Standard Time, and came to rest on the sea about an hour later, as he manifestly appreciated the danger of stamping upon the water.
However, his advent caused trouble enough, in spite of his elaborate caution. The sea rose in a slow surge which drenched the populous fringes of New York Bay and the lower portion of the Hudson River. His descending feet set in motion currents of air that roared and twisted over New York, Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut, causing property damage later totaled by the Associated Press at one hundred and seventeen million, loss of life to eighty-three persons and accidents of varying seriousness to a number estimated at two hundred twelve.
A minor earthquake was reported from the seismographs of several stations, the most remote of them located at Butte, Montana, and one Torrence Bemis cabled an interesting story to the New York Telegram headed, “Malaise among Inhabitants of Mombasa, Kenya, Africa,” with time corrections.
These geological eccentricities, however, were mere twaddle and fluff in comparison to the effect of the giant and his appearance upon mankind in general. No complete record will ever be made. Witness, for example, the following: at a time as recently removed from the incident as the present, no less than seven hundred three volumes have been published relating to the monstrous man and ranging in scope from Glover’s authoritative Economic Consequences of the Giant’s Visitation to Love in Giant Land, by Jacqueline Chiffon, an opus from the typewriter of a young Cleveland woman so saturated with sentimentality, so saccharine, and so illiterate that one Amos Golf, after reading it, went stark mad (to his infinite glory) and assassinated not only Miss Chiffon but the eleven other most famous American lady authors.
Twenty-six religions were founded during the stay of the giant or are now identified with his sojourn. Bouncerism, originating in Georgia, attempted to drive away the giant, claimed sole credit for his departure (which is widely believed to have been voluntary) and now holds as its major tenet the prevention of further visits. The devotees of Bouncerism pray in pig Latin while jumping up and down in each others’ arms. The Arrivalists, now segregated in Toledo, live in metal shacks, wear only garments woven of human beard hair, and celebrate July 19th as Giantmas. The Church of the Holy Nut, venerating a brown seed thirty-seven feet long which fell from the giant’s person and is assumed to be a spore from the stranger’s world, believe that their deity was Christ in his Second Coming. Legal process was necessary to keep the members of the Church of the Holy Nut from worshiping Him by blowing up mountains—a form of veneration doubtless appropriate, but unduly hazardous to the skeptical, of whom there were luckily hundreds of millions.
