The Baen Big Book of Monsters, page 9
Corll was stung with wordless anger at his companion’s objectivity; then he rounded the canyon’s bend to see the cliffs linked sharply a hundred yards in front of him. The concrete of the blockhouse that squatted at the base of the cliffs would have been magenta in the light of the waning sun, save for the warriors that clung to it like a layer of blazing fungus.
Corll halted.
“There’s a door,” Shedde prompted.
“I can’t get through those ants on the residue of the bomb,” Corll said. The whisper-whisper of feet a million times magnified echoed in his mind if not his ears.
“Use the last bomb, then. There’s no choice.”
Nor was there. Baying a defiant challenge, Corll charged for the structure. A stride before he reached the waiting mass, he smashed his last defense into vitreous splinters on his breast. Do the ants feel pain? he wondered, the warriors only a dying blur at the edges of his mind. Then, expecting it to slam open, he hit the portal in a bound—and recoiled from it. The metal door fit its jambs without a seam, refuge if open but otherwise a cruel jest.
“To the right,” Shedde directed. “There should be a pressure plate.”
The tapestry of ants, linked even in death, still hung in swathes across the blockhouse. Corll’s hands groped through the insects desperately, feeling the desiccated bodies crumble as easily as the ashes of an ancient fire. The door swung open on a lighted room.
Corll sprang inside. “The inner plate is also a lock,” his companion said. “Touch to open, touch to close. But only the touch of your kind.” Corll slammed the door and palmed the device.
They were in a narrow anteroom, softly lighted by a strip in the ceiling. At the back was another metal door, half closed. The only furnishings of the anteroom were a pair of objects fixed to the wall to either side of the rear door. In general shape they resembled sockets for flambeaux, but they were thrust out horizontally rather than vertically. Corll’s quick eyes flicked over them, but he did not move closer.
“Now what?” he asked.
“Now we wait, of course,” replied Shedde. “If the systems are still working, there should be water inside.” There was a pause before he concluded acidly, “And Hargen built to last.”
Corll eased open the door. The inner room was much larger, but it was almost filled with dull, black machinery. Against the far wall stood the framework of a chair in a clear semi-circle. It was backed against another door, this one open onto darkness. On the floor before the chair sprawled a skeleton.
The outer door of the blockhouse clanged as something heavy struck it.
“Who is Hargen?” Corll demanded. Half-consciously he backed against the inner door of the anteroom, shutting it against the gong-notes echoing through the building. His breath still came in short, quick sobs. “Shedde, what is this place?”
“Hargen,” Shedde repeated with a whisper of hatred. “Hargen was a genetic engineer. As a technician, as a craftsman, he may have had no equal . . . though perhaps the men who built his instruments, they were brilliant in their own right. But tools of metal weren’t enough for Hargen—he had his dream, he said, for the new Mankind.”
Corll eyed the room. He was uneasy because he had never before known such vicious intensity in his companion. A pencil of water spurted from one corner of the ceiling down into a metal basin from which it then drained. Corll tested a drop of the fluid with his tongue before drinking deeply.
“He had to change us, Corll,” continued Shedde. “Cut into genes, weld them, treat the unformed flesh as a sculptor does stone. ‘Your children will live forever!’ he said. ‘Your children will live forever!’
“Have we lived forever, Corll?”
The echoes that flooded the building changed note, warning Corll that the outer door was sagging. He quickly squeezed empty the long waterbag of intestine looped across his shoulders, then refilled it from the falling stream.
“Where does the other door lead, Shedde?”
“A tunnel. Try it.”
Pretending to ignore the undertone of his companion’s voice, Corll attempted to leap the chair. Something caught him in mid-air and flung him back into the room.
“You see?” Shedde giggled. “Hargen wasn’t just a genius, he had a sense of humor. He could sit there and control every machine in the building—and no man could touch him without his permission. Do you want to leave that way, Corll?”
“If they can batter down the outer door, they can get through this one,” Corll noted with the tense desperation of a fighter at bay. The sound of metal ripping underscored his words. “Shedde, what do we do?”
Suddenly calmer, Shedde replied, “The weapons should have manual controls. There, beside the door.”
Staring at the pair of hand-sized plates flanking the anteroom door, Corll realized what unfamiliarity had hidden from him: both plates displayed shrunken perspectives of the anteroom itself and the wreckage of the outer door. Joystick controls were set beneath the plates. When Corll twitched one of the rods, it moved the black dot he had thought was a flaw in the screen.
“If you push the top of the control rod,” Shedde said, “it fires. ”
The outer door of the blockhouse squealed again as it was rent completely away. A pair of giants that seemed ants in all but size stood framed in the doorway, their forelegs bowed a little to allow them to peer inside. Uncertain of what he was doing, Corll squeezed his thumb down on the stick.
The dazzling spatter of light blasted powder from the concrete, vapor from the outer doorjamb. Corll’s reflex slashed the fierce beam sideways across one of the giants. The creature separated along the line of contact.
The light blinked off when Corll raised the thumbswitch. The remaining giant was scrambling backwards. Corll flicked the control. The dot moved in the direction opposite to his expectations. He moved it the other way and squeezed, chuckling in wonder as the glare sawed lethally across the second monster as well.
“They’re hollow,” he exclaimed as he squinted at the jerking bodies.
“I wonder how they fuel them?” Shedde mused. “The exoskeleton would give adequate area for muscle attachment without the mass of digestive organs to contend with. Even the vermin seem to have their genetic geniuses.”
“How long will this weapon burn?” Corll asked, caution tempering his elation.
“Perhaps forever,” the other replied. “Near enough that neither of us needs be concerned. Hargen never took half measures.
“I stood here before,” Shedde continued, “to plead with him. I had been one of the first, you see. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing,’ I told him. ‘You call it freedom from the tyranny of the body, a chance for the children of the race to have the immortality that was only vicarious before. But it’s the death of those you change! We don’t breed, we won’t breed—it’s not worth personal immortality to me to know that I’ll never have a son.’ And Hargen laughed at me, and he said, ‘I have stayed here in this fortress for seventy-four years without leaving, so you think that I am ignorant. You can breed, little man; if the will is lacking, my knives didn’t cut it out of you.’
“I shouted at him then; but before his servants pushed me out, Hargen stood and stretched his long bones, those bones that lie there in the dust, and he said, ‘Come back in twenty thousand, come back in two hundred thousand years if it takes that long—come back and tell my bones then that I did not know.’ ” Shedde paused for so long that Corll thought he was done speaking, but at last he continued, “Well, you were right, Hargen. If we failed to breed, then so did the men you didn’t change—and yes, you knew it. Just as you knew what would come of the race you formed and called, ‘mere adjuncts to human immortality. . . .’ Gods, how you must have hated Man!”
Corll said nothing, leaning over the weapon control and watching the smear of tiny red forms thicken on the wreckage of the giants.
“But perhaps even you forgot the ants,” Shedde concluded bitterly.
The warriors surged forward in a solid wave that covered all four faces of the anteroom. Corll zig-zagged his flame through them, but there was no thrill in watching a black line razor across an attack condensed in the sights to an amorphous stain. More of the insects flowed over a surface pitted by earlier destruction. Corll did not raise his thumb, but the ants crawled forward more quickly than he could traverse his weapon across their rectangular advance.
Shedde, answering the question Corll had been too harried to ask, said, “The small ones can’t smash open the door, but they’ll be able to short out the weapon heads.”
Corll whipped his control about in a frenzy. With someone to fight the right-hand beam as well, the wave could have been stopped. But—a scarlet runnel leaked across the wall toward the other wire-framed gun muzzle, and Corll realized the same thing must be happening in the dead area too close to his own weapon to be swept by its fire. A moment later the beam of deadly light vanished in coruscance and a thunder-clap that shook the blockhouse and flung the remains of the first dead giant a dozen yards from the entrance. Corll leaped for the other control. He was not quick enough. As soon as he touched the firing stud, the right-hand weapon also shorted explosively.
The sighting displays still worked. A third giant ant scrabbled noisily into the anteroom, its feelers stiff before it. Held easily between its mandibles was a huge fragment of stone.
“Shedde,” Corll hissed, “this door won’t hold any longer than the other one did. How can we get out of here?”
“You can leave any time through the tunnel,” Shedde replied calmly. “Hargen must have kept a vehicle of some sort there.”
Corll hurled himself again toward the low doorway. Again the unseen barrier slammed him back. The anteroom door clanged, denting inward slightly.
“It throws me back!”
“It throws me back,” Shedde corrected gently. “Hargen’s sense of humor, you see. Unstrap me and get away from here.”
The door rang again. Flakes spalled off from the inside.
Corll seized a machine of unguessed precision and smashed it into the quivering metal. “I carried you since the day my father died!” he shouted. “My stomach fed you, my lungs gave you air, my kidneys cleared your wastes. Shedde, my blood is your blood!”
“Your family has served my needs for more years than even I can remember,” Shedde stated, utterly calm. “Now that you can no longer serve me, serve yourself and your own race. Quickly now, the door can’t hold much longer.”
The panel banged inward again.
Corll cringed back, in horror rather than in fear. “Shedde,” he pleaded, “you are the last.”
“Somebody had to be. This is as good a place as any, where the end began. Set me down and go.”
Keening deep in his throat, Corll fumbled at the massive crossbuckle he had unfastened only once before, while his father shuddered into death after a thirty-foot fall. “Shedde. . . .”
“Go!”
The upper door-hinge popped like a frost-cracked boulder as it sheared.
Sphincter muscles clamped shut the tiny valve in Corll’s back as the tube pulled out of it. Only a single drop of blood escaped to glint within his bristling fur. He carefully swung Shedde to the floor, trying as he did so not to look at his burden: the tiny limbs, the abdomen without intestines and with lungs of no capacity beyond what was needed to squeak words through the vocal cords. In the center, flopping loosely, was an appendage that looked like an umbilicus and had served Shedde in that function for millenia. The genitalia were functional, but anything they had spawned would have had to be transferred to a host body for gestation.
The skull was fully the size of Hargen’s, which leered vacuously from the floor. Shedde’s eyes were placid and as blue as was nothing else remaining on the Earth.
“Good luck against the ants, Corll,” the half-formed travesty of a man wheezed. “But I’m afraid Hargen may not have seen as clearly as he believed he did when he planned his new race.”
Corll clenched his fingers, (“To hold tools for your children,” Hargen had said so long ago) and sprang upright. “A stupid servant is a useless servant”—Hargen had said that too, and Corll’s forehead bulged with a brain to equal that of the man he had carried. But in Corll’s eyes bled a rage that was the heritage of the wolf and had not been totally expunged from the most pampered of lap dogs.
But the man on the floor whispered, “Go, my friend.”
And as the first of the giants smashed into the room, Corll whirled and leaped for the tunnel door and darkness.
Ooze
INTRODUCTION
Here’s another venerable yarn, this one appearing in the very first issue of Weird Tales, the issue dated March 1923. The invention of the microscope in the sixteenth century revealed a micro-jungle all around us, full of tiny predators, of which the amoeba was particularly fascinating, with its shapelessness and its way of engulfing its prey, then dissolving it. It was inevitable that someone would wonder what would happen if an amoeba could grow to much larger than normal size . . .
Not a great deal is known about Anthony Melville Rud (1893-1942), though with that middle name, he must have been destined to be a writer. Born in Chicago, he contributed stories to such pulps as Weird Tales, Munsey’s Magazine and Blue Book, as well as nonfiction pieces to such magazines as Scientific American. He was also a pulp magazine editor, and in one biographical note said that he had written movies. He wrote at least one borderline SF novel, The Stuffed Men, described by The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction as a “Sax Rohmer-esque fantasy.” And “Ooze,” the story you are about to read, was one of H.P. Lovecraft’s favorite stories.
Ooze
by Anthony N. Rud
I
In the heart of a second-growth piney-woods jungle of southern Alabama, a region sparsely settled by back-woods blacks and Cajans—that queer, half-wild people descended from Acadian exiles of the middle eighteenth century—stands a strange, enormous ruin.
Interminable trailers of Cherokee rose, white-laden during a single month of spring, have climbed the heights of its three remaining walls. Palmetto fans rise knee high above the base. A dozen scattered live oaks, now belying their nomenclature because of choking tufts of gray, Spanish moss and two-foot circlets of mistletoe parasite which have stripped bare of foliage the gnarled, knotted limbs, lean fantastic beards against the crumbling brick.
Immediately beyond, where the ground becomes soggier and lower—dropping away hopelessly into the tangle of dogwood, holly, poison sumac and pitcher plants that is Moccasin Swamp—undergrowth of ti-ti and annis has formed a protecting wall impenetrable to all save the furtive ones. Some few outcasts utilize the stinking depths of that sinister swamp, distilling “shinny” of “pure cawn” liquor for illicit trade.
Tradition states that this is the case, at least—a tradition which antedates that of the premature ruin by many decades. I believe it, for during evenings intervening between investigations of the awesome spot I often was approached as a possible customer by wood-billies who could not fathom how anyone dared venture near without plenteous fortification of liquid courage.
I knew “shinny,” therefore I did not purchase it for personal consumption. A dozen times I bought a quart or two, merely to establish credit among the Cajans, pouring away the vile stuff immediately into the sodden ground. It seemed then that only through filtration and condensation of their dozens of weird tales regarding “Daid House” could I arrive at understanding of the mystery and weight of horror hanging about the place.
Certain it is that out of all the superstitious cautioning, head-wagging and whispered nonsensities I obtained only two indisputable facts. The first was that no money, and no supporting battery of ten-gauge shotguns loaded with chilled shot, could induce either Cajan or darky of the region to approach within five hundred yards of that flowering wall! The second fact I shall dwell upon later.
Perhaps it would be as well, as I am only a mouthpiece in this chronicle, to relate in brief why I came to Alabama on this mission.
I am a scribbler of general fact articles, no fiction writer as was Lee Cranmer—though doubtless the confession is superfluous. Lee was my roommate during college days. I knew his family well, admiring John Corliss Cranmer even more than I admired the son and friend—and almost as much as Peggy Breede whom Lee married. Peggy liked me, but that was all. I cherish sanctified memory of her for just that much, as no other woman before or since has granted this gangling dyspeptic even a hint of joyous and sorrowful intimacy.
Work kept me to the city. Lee, on the other hand, coming of wealthy family—and, from the first, earning from his short-stories and novel royalties more than I wrested from editorial coffers—needed no anchorage. He and Peggy honeymooned a four-month trip to Alaska, visited Honolulu next winter, fished for salmon on Cain’s River, New Brunswick, and generally enjoyed the outdoors at all seasons.
They kept an apartment in Wilmette, near Chicago, yet, during the few spring and fall seasons they were “home,” both preferred to rent a suite at one of the country clubs to which Lee belonged. I suppose they spent thrice or five times the amount Lee actually earned, yet for my part I only honored that the two should find such great happiness in life and still accomplish artistic triumph.
They were honest, zestful young Americans, the type—and pretty nearly the only type—two million dollars cannot spoil. John Corliss Cranmer, father of Lee, though as different from his boy as a microscope is different from a painting by Remington, was even further from being dollar conscious. He lived in a world bounded only by the widening horizon of biological science—and his love for the two who would carry on that Cranmer name.
Many a time I used to wonder how it could be that as gentle, clean-souled and lovable a gentleman as John Corliss Cranmer could have ventured so far into scientific research without attaining small-caliber atheism. Few do. He believed both in God and human kind. To accuse him of murdering his boy and the girl wife who had come to be loved as the mother of baby Elsie—as well as blood and flesh of his own family—was a gruesome, terrible absurdity! Yes, even when John Corliss Cranmer was declared unmistakably insane!
