Collected Fiction, page 534
Stillness. The wall glinted with shifting points of brilliance; the great flower hung swaying on its stem, the girl rocking very gently to its motion, her hair swaying as the flower swayed. Ferguson almost stopped breathing.
Then the flower moved a little and a breath of sound murmured in its throat. A louder breath, a louder sound. The flower swayed to the volume of its own voice, and the flower was laughing.
Afterward, Ferguson could not quite remember clearly how they had left, stumbling in their heavy leaden robes, with the deadly radiance of the walls shining all around them and the great gusts of the flower’s laughter driving them out like a gale at their backs.
And, outside, they stood staring at one another, listening to the deep, inhuman laughter still echoing from the cave.
In the end, they went back to the stone house that had been Jacklyn’s. Cairns—who was Jacklyn—was silent, merely shaking his head when Ferguson tried to rouse him. Sampson and Parry were too shocked by what they had seen to be curious, but Ferguson’s mind was burning with questions. His old, lost scientific zeal had come back, and he had forgotten even the radium, for the moment, in his anxiety to know the secrets of this lost land. The secrets that Cairns—no, Jacklyn—must know.
“Why would you destroy your own creation?”
That inhuman, alien voice came back to Ferguson now as he moved through the perfumed forest. The jungle breathed all around them, stirring in its ceaseless, selfgenerated motion though no winds blew, Eyes upon flower-stems watched them from the dimness; ears that were stone or vine heard their words and perhaps understood them. There was no way to tell.
It did not seem so incredible. Those eyes were simply evolved photosensitive spots of tissue, and even ordinary plants could be phototropic—could respond to sunlight and moonlight and other radiations. As for mobility, many plants had limited mobility. But stone are different. Here were rocks that moved!
Ferguson thought of crystals that could build himself up in jagged, exotic formations in certain solutions, and was filled with awe.
It would be night soon. Luckily there was a full moon. Gathering material for a fire would be difficult, if not dangerous, in this forest where the trees bled burning, acid sap. And there were the flashlights with their regenerators. As for food, they had plenty, and their canteens were nearly full. Even the brooks that ran in this forbidden valley might be—different.
So, still under the oppressive burden of silence, they came to the stone house and paused on the threshold warily. Ferguson touched his pistol, staring into the gloom ahead.
“Cairns—Jacklyn, I mean.”
The scientist roused himself. “Yes. What is it, Ferguson?”
“Anything apt to be dangerous inside?”
Jacklyn ran his hand over the lintel and drew it back sharply, as though surprised to find it stone instead of wood.
“I don’t know. There’s danger all around us.” He stepped across the threshold, and Ferguson followed, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the dimness.
“Just as I left it, years ago,” Jacklyn said.
Here was peace and quiet and familiar things, as though the raging turmoil, of life gone mad in the valley had not dared enter the stone house. A crude table and canvas chairs, books were scattered around, and some pots and pans. Through a doorway Ferguson could see a cot, blankets still rumpled across its foot. And he saw more.
With a sharp inhalation of breath he went into that room. He touched the blankets gingerly.
They were stone.
Jacklyn had not followed. Ferguson heard his steps moving here and there, and Sampson’s heavier tread. He returned. Parry was still on the threshold, a silhouette against the brighter light outside.
“Nothing’s changed, except to stone,” Jacklyn said. “Just as I left it. Look at this.”
Ferguson came forward. Jacklyn indicated a Bible lying open on a stone table.
“My wife’s,” he said. “She used to read it.” He tried to turn the pages, but the book, too, was stone.
Yet the print was legible. Ferguson read half-audibly;
“The heaven shall reveal his iniquity, and the earth shall rise up against him.”
“The earth shall rise up!” Jacklyn whispered. He sank down on a chair, once canvas, now stone. “It did, Ferguson. It did. I remember.”
His voice died away, and rose again, stronger.
“Not even Adam saw what I saw. For God made Adam on the sixth day, after He had made the firmament and the earth and the waters under the earth . . .
“But I have seen—Creation!”
CHAPTER VI
Marble Man
STONE traceries of vines and bas-relief blossoms had clustered across the walls. Ferguson thought that those flowers of stone were watching. And that something—perhaps the walls themselves—was listening. He crossed the thick carpet to a chair and sat down, but Sampson and Parry stood waiting, their eyes on Jacklyn’s haggard face.
“The—the triumvirate—gave me my memory again, back there in that cave. I don’t know how. It—they—have strange powers.”
“You made that thing?” Parry asked in a shaken voice.
“I never saw it before. But I was responsible for it, yes. I unleashed the power that made it possible. Here in this valley, years and years ago . . .
The tired voice deepened. “It was a lovely place when we first came here, Mona and I. There was no shadow over it The Indios took care of us, and I worked on my experiments, and there was no shadow. I had found a clue to something man had been searching for years—the controlled cleavage of the atom. There was an element here which may exist nowhere else on earth, an element with a molecular structure large enough and simple enough to study under controlled conditions. I was seeking a basic pattern, a master key, and what I found was a new force. It was an energy powerful enough to permeate all matter, and to stimulate the rate of entropy.”
“I don’t get you,” Sampson said, but Jacklyn went on unheeding.
“Mona was expecting a child. I wanted to take her down river to Manaos, but she would not go. I’d have taken her by force, if necessary, but the child was born prematurely. There was nothing to be done but improvise. Still, I hold a medical degree, the child lived, and Mona lived too—for a while.
“But I found that master key. That part isn’t clear. Perhaps the—the triumvirate didn’t want me to remember it. I could never repeat the experiment, even if I should want to. It was enough that I opened the doors of Creation once.”
His face paled. “It was like a flame that leaped through the valley. An invisible flame.
I was out hunting when it happened. The air shook. The ground moved under my feet.
I—I felt that primal, ravening energy rush out from its focal point, as though God had stooped and touched this cursed valley with his finger.
“It was Creation.
“First—chaos. The forest shook, and the ground shook, and the sky shook too. I saw—unnameable things!” He pressed his palms against his eyes, shuddering. “One thing I remember. Mona running toward me, and the earth opening like a mouth, and—taking her . . .
“And after that, darkness. My mind was wiped clean. I must have escaped from the valley somehow. And some latent pattern of memories deep in my brain must have brought me back here, years later, though I did not quite know why, and rationalized it in various ways. But it was that lost memory that drew me back, after so many years.
“And during those years my daughter was alive here, in the new Eden. But the basic radiation I had loosed was working on her, changing her. I had planned, remember, to establish a linkage between all matter. Well, I succeeded. Stone and plant and human merged, and the ultimate synthesis was the thing you saw in the cave.
“A triumvirate. Three in one, one times three. And because of that basic pattern, not merely three. It is Eden.
“All Eden is one tremendous, living entity, welded into a unit, a synthesis of stone and other things. The ground beneath our feet is alive. And as much a part of the triumvirate as is my daughter now.”
Jacklyn paused before saying in a loud, tense voice, “But this hellish thing must be destroyed!”
Ferguson did not speak. He was staring down at the carpet at his feet. And he saw, suddenly, that it was not a carpet. It grew directly from the stone floor. But it was not grass, either.
It was fur, such as might grow on the hide of some immense carnivore.
“You’re crazy, Jacklyn,” Parry said. “Destroy that creature? It could wipe us out.”
“It’s the radium we’re after,” Sampson growled. “We were fools not to have got it while we were at the cave.”
Ferguson stared at him. “I’m not so sure. Those rock walls were moving. They were alive. They might have resented being dug into.”
Sampson and Parry looked at Jacklyn, hoping he would give them his opinion.
But Jacklyn was still on the trail of his thought. “Eden! Yes, this is Eden. But even in the first Eden there was the snake.”
“The snake?” Ferguson asked.
“Who destroyed that first experiment in mankind before it was finished. The snake—the reptile—the creature whose people ruled the world, perhaps, before humanity rose. We are the rulers of earth now. We are men. But before us, perhaps, was the snake. Two thousand years from now, there may be an allegory about this Eden, an allegory which will be read by a race not human, the race that is beginning in this valley now, the synthesis, the triumvirate.”
“So?”
JACKLYN turned his brooding eyes upon Ferguson.
“The snake was sent to test the first man. And perhaps we have been sent to test the triumvirate. We are the intruders in Eden now, the representative of the older race.”
“What good are guns?” Parry asked. “We can’t fight that monster. It’s too strong for us.”
Ferguson thought: “The serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field.”
Yes, the triumvirate was strong. But there were other weapons than strength. And in this Eden—were they not the serpent?
They were silent, while the slow night came down. Parry was absorbed in prodding the white spots upon his arm and face where the plant’s red blood had spattered. The spots were spreading. They were hard and white and cold, and the areas where they merged were wholly without feeling.
Finally they slept, and, outside, the jungle slept too, fitfully, moving in its sleep. Nothing disturbed them, though the blossoms of stone on the walls may have watched them all night, and a few moths that gave out the odor of roses blundered through the windows occasionally. Perhaps, Ferguson thought, in the cavern the flower slept, and the girl cradled in its tiger-spotted calyx. Perhaps even the crystal wall slept too, in its vague affinity with living things.
But when morning came, the awakening brought new fear.
There was nothing different about the valley. Dawn came up beautifully, full of light and cool color. The trees stretched their limbs like animals awakening; the flower-mouths yawned all through the woods.
Ferguson sat up first. Jacklyn was on guard, but his back was turned and he was staring through the doorway. Ferguson glanced at the sleeping Sampson, and then at Parry. He looked into Parry’s open eyes, and froze.
Parry’s eyes were altered. They were no longer dark; they were clear and colorless, and startlingly brilliant. They met Ferguson’s eyes with a bright, indifferent gaze.
“Parry!” Ferguson said. At the sound of his voice Sampson woke, and Jacklyn turned. They saw the change instantly. Parry met their stares without emotion. He did not seem to realize what had happened to him.
“He—he’s white,” Sampson whispered, pointing with an unsteady hand to Parry’s marble-pale, marble-hard face and mottled body where the tom shirt exposed the skin. “It’s spread! He’s—”
Ferguson said, “Even the eyes . . . like gems. Parry! Are you awake?”
Parry blinked his colorless, dazzling gaze at them. His face was the color of stone; even his brows and lashes were white, and his hair was a tangle of ridged marble like the hair of a statue. But his features were still shockingly flexible. He blinked his stone eyelids—which should not have been able to move at all!
“Sure, I’m awake,” he said in a strange, flat voice. “What’s the matter?” And they could hear the sound of his stone tongue touching his teeth of stone.
“You’ve turned to rock,” Sampson shouted half hysterically. “Get away from me—don’t touch me! You’re stone!”
Parry looked down in bewilderment. He lifted white hands and flexed the fingers stiffly, staring. Then with an abrupt gesture he ripped the shirt away and they could see all the marble torso, like a chiseled statue. Here and there mottlings of flesh still showed, as yesterday mottlings of marble had appeared upon his skin. But the flesh areas grew perceptibly smaller as they looked, as the inexorable marble crept over him and through him.
He lifted to the other men a diamond stare, and a wild glare of terror began to flame behind the dazzling clarity of his eyes.
“That tree!” he said. “The jewel-tree! Its juice did this.”
“No wonder the flower laughed,” Jacklyn said dully. “It knew. No one can enter this valley and live here unchanged. The taint spreads. And you’re the first, Parry. But not the last!” He glanced around the circle, searching the other faces, and each man involuntarily scanned his neighbor for the betraying mottlings upon the skin.
“Don’t touch anything,” Sampson said. “Don’t touch Parry. Don’t touch any branches or anything at all.”
“It can reach us through the ground,” Jacklyn said. “And it will. It will.”
“Who will?” Parry’s voice had thickened, as if the stone tongue was losing its mobility. “Who did this to me?”
“The triumvirate, I suppose,” Ferguson said. “The thing that spoke through the flower. Even if the valley’s one great unit, the flower is its ruler.”
PARRY had lurched to his feet “The flower!” he said in that thickened, flat monotone. “The flower did it! Changed me to a rock.”
He swung around and plunged through the doorway, shouting something in a voice as stony as his flesh.
Sampson leaped out of his path in terror. But Parry was gone in a moment, a white figure in tattered garments stumbling through the trees.
“But if he attacks the flower—we’ve got to stop him!” Jacklyn said. “That’s the center of the valley—its brain.”
“Fine,” Ferguson said coldly, “That’s why I told Parry where to go. Maybe we can’t hurt the flower, but he’s nearly stone. I doubt if it can hurt him.”
“You made Parry think the flower did it?” Sampson said.
“It was the truth. Don’t forget that. And Parry’s dying anyway. Or else he may live forever, in stone. This way, if he kills the flower he may get an easier death himself. And I think he’d want that.”
Jacklyn was already outside of the house.
“The flower isn’t the only part of the triumvirate. There’s the crystal, and my daughter. He might kill her.”
Ferguson had forgotten. Now, even though he knew that the girl was no longer human, he instinctively followed Jacklyn, and Sampson. He paused only to snatch up some equipment, before he ran from the house.
They moved fast. It was a nightmare flight through the awakening jungle, with Parry’s white figure flickering before them. Streamers from the trees reached down occasionally to impede their flight, but Parry ran unmolested.
“He’s part of the valley now,” Jacklyn panted. “The forest isn’t attacking him any more.”
They ran on, early sunlight dappling the path before them and inhuman voices beginning to waken in the trees. But in the end, when the mouth of the cavern loomed before them, glowing eternally with its deadly radiations, they were just in time to see a pale figure vanishing into the throat of the cave, just in time to hear Parry’s hollow shout echoing back.
Ferguson gripped Jacklyn’s shoulder and dragged him back. The scientist struggled to tear free.
‘The radium!” Ferguson shouted. “We can’t go in there without—”
“I’ve got the suits,” Sampson said behind them. He tossed two of the leaden robes to Ferguson, and even Jacklyn understood how suicidal it would be to enter the cave without their protection. But he chafed at the momentary delay, and the moment the hood was over his head, he was racing after Parry.
There was an extra suit.
“Forget it,” Ferguson said grimly. “Parry won’t need that any more.”
“Yeah,” Sampson said. He gripped a lead box in one hand as he followed Ferguson into the cave.
They were in time.
On the glittering threshold of the inner cavern they paused with Jacklyn, staring. The great tiger-flower swayed on its stem halfway up the wall of crystal. The palehaired girl stood just beneath it, watching the stone man charging forward.
“Parry!” Jacklyn shouted.
All through the room the light quivered. Parry’s feet boomed upon the stone floor as he ran. The flower tilted its cup downward and a roaring was beginning to hum from its tiger-striped throat as Parry hurled himself blindly forward.
He cast up both stone arms like a diver and sprang for the gaping flower mouth, straight into that monstrous, roaring throat.
CHAPTER VII
Eden No More
EVER afterward to Ferguson what happened then was nightmare. Ferguson saw the great streaked petals shut like a closing maw over the white body of Parry; he heard the muffled roaring echoing savagely from the walls. He heard the girl scream.
The closed flower lashed furiously on its stem. Parry’s yells mingled with the tiger-roars. Then there was a ripping, sucking sound, and the furred petals suddenly bulged and split. Golden blood poured down. Parry’s stone arms appeared, tearing at the tiger-striped flesh of the flower.
Louder the roaring grew, bellows of fury. There was a stir of motion behind the great blossom and a tall, folded bud leaned down from its leaves and began slowly to unfurl. The flower was calling for its successor bud to help.
