Collected Fiction, page 714
“Maybe,” Alan said. “Maybe not. You won’t be able to get to the fountain. Without that you’ll die.”
“No, I shall be in catalepsy; my body will need no fuel. By the time I waken only the Carcasillians will be left alive.”
“Your shield here—won’t that fail if you go into catalepsy?” Sir Colin asked.
“My shield is the power of the mind,” Flande said, with a touch of pride. “As for you—”
“Yes, what about us?” Mike Smith’s voice was rough with tension.
“You must stay, too,” Flande went on as if Mike had not spoken. “Stay and die, I suppose. If I left you free, you might find some way to rob the fountain. And certainly you would go to feed the Light-Wearer, and thus postpone still further the hour of my awakening. No, you must stay. But your death will be easy. I shall put my sleep upon you.”
A ribbon of silver fire flashed out above them. It coiled like a snake, winding into a net of intricate fiery patterns. They glowed on Alan’s retina, burning deeper and deeper, into his very brain. He could not wrench his gaze away.
Sir Colin whispered hoarsely, “Hypnotism! Dinna look at it, Alan—Mike—”
The ribbon of fire coiled on. Mike’s breathing grew thick. There was no other sound. Sir Colin’s hands fell away . . .
THERE was nothing in the world but that serpentine silvery ribbon, writhing into shapes of arabesque brilliance. Symbols—words in no known language. Alan could almost read their meaning. But not quite. It was the language of dream.
Hot agony seared his shoulder. With slow reluctance he retraced the steps back toward consciousness. The burning pain was relentless. It dragged him back. And now he could move again. His gaze jerked downward to the taper lying at his feet, its wick fading into a coal. Its burning had broken the spell.
When he looked up again the silver ribbon was gone. And except for that dying coal the darkness around him was complete. Flande had closed his door, retreated into the slumber that would last a hundred years.
He heard hoarse breathing at his feet. He stooped. Mike and Sir Colin lay motionless in the grip of hypnotic sleep that would end only in the deeper sleep of death. He shook them hopelessly.
Alan straightened in the darkness, facing the unseen wall through which Flande’s passionless face had pronounced doom upon the race of man. If he could waken Flande, perhaps the barrier around the tower might fall. And if the Light-Wearer swooped through to devour them all—well, the Light-Wearer was winning anyhow, and even that was preferable to death without hope.
How had Evaya summoned Flande, long ago? Alan stepped forward in the darkness, arms outstretched. Three steps and then the cool surface of the wall met his hands. He pressed. Nothing happened. He shifted his hands and pressed again. Still nothing. Did it work only when Flande willed it? He moved his hands once more.
A tiny slit of light glowed in the dark, spindle-shaped, expanding like a cat’s pupil. Rainbow mists were curdled beyond it. And beyond them hung the face of Flande, immense, immortal, eyes closed in a slumber like death.
Alan’s full-lidded eyes had narrowed to shining slits. There might be sorcery inside this tower—but death was coming to meet it.
He stepped through the colored mists and into Flande’s doorway.
The great face still hung before him, its eyes asleep. But the force of gravity had shifted strangely. He thought the floor was no longer underfoot, that he was dropping faster and faster toward that silent, enigmatic, gigantic face hanging in the gray air. The mists, he saw without surprise, were gray, too, now, and thick between him and Flande. And drowsiness was mounting about him as though he breasted a rising tide. The sands of sleep, too light to fall, hung in suspension inside Flande’s tower.
He stood at the threshold of the Face. It loomed like a cliff above him. He struggled forward, heavy-limbed, against the tide of sleep—and stepped through the illusion of the face.
Beyond it was grayness again, and sleep that beat at him with great, soft, stunning blows—like bludgeons of cloud . . . Another step forward, and another—remembering Evaya—
There was no face. Perhaps there was no Flande? There was nothing at all but sleep.
His knee struck something resilient and soft. Moving in a dream, he leaned over, and with an incredible precision that could happen only in dreams, found his hands fitting themselves about a throat.
The hands tightened.
Violet light pouring down around him wakened Alan from a dream in which he knelt with one knee upon a yielding couch and strangled a being who lay there. The mists of sleep were fading from his brain. He blinked. He stood in a great peaked tent of rain. Its soundless torrents poured down all around him along the walls, translucent, with the violet day of Carcasilla glowing through.
Then the barrier was gone!
He looked down. And he knew it was no dream. This was Flande’s face purpling upon the couch, the same face that had hung in gigantic illusion in the doorway. But a man’s face, a man’s perfect, deathly white body stretched upon the couch. Flande’s eyes looked up into his, wide, shocked into wakefulness, still veiled a little behind the memories of infinite time. But the layers of withdrawal were fading swiftly now, as ice cracks and melts, and Flande was lost no longer in the memories of his thousand years. It was no god whose throat Alan gripped—but a strangling man.
Flande’s face was blackening with congested blood, red veins lacing the whites of his staring eyes. He would be dead in another second unless—
Alan let him drop back on his cushions. Flande lay still for a moment, coughing and choking, pawing his throat with soft, pale hands. He was, Alan saw now, neither Carcasillian nor Terasi. Perhaps his race had died millenniums ago in some little world along the Way of the Gods. His body was symmetrical as a Belvedere—but soft, incredibly soft. Alan thought he knew why. A thousand years of inactivity, of stasis—Flande’s muscles must have changed to water!
A sound beyond made him turn. The curtains of rain still swayed apart to show Carcasilla through the opening. Sir Colin was clambering in now, a little dizzily. Behind him peered Mike Smith.
“The Alien?” Alan asked swiftly.
Sir Colin shook his head. His voice was thick. “I looked. Nothing—yet.”
Alan told him what had happened, watching his keen little eyes rake the interior of the tower even as he listened. Wakefulness was making his bearded face alert again by the time Alan had finished.
“So—” murmured Sir Colin, with a sharp glance at the still coughing Flande. “He’s no such a god now, eh? And this place of his empty. I wonder . . .” He moved across a floor like still, depthless water, to examine the farther wall. Mike followed him uneasily.
Flande’s coughing lessened. He was sitting up, now, on the couch. His eyes, fixed on the doorway and on Carcasilla beyond, were wide and filled with terror. He saw that the barrier was down.
“Stop him!” Sir Colin’s hoarse cry echoed from the walls of rain. Alan leaped forward, but his leap was a fraction of a second behind Flande’s. The soft body hurtling against his shoulder spun him off balance and he saw only a pale flash as the deposed godling shot by him toward the door. Mike Smith whirled, a grin of savage pleasure on his lips, and dived for the flying figure. His hand grazed Flande’s ankle; then he was stretched face down on the smooth pool of the floor, mouthing deep curses. Flabby Flande might be, but he could run!
Mike scrambled up. The three of them jammed for a moment in the doorway. Then Mike broke through and sprang down the waterfall steps, tugging at his gun.
“Don’t shoot!” Sir Colin called. “We need him!”
THEN they had no more breath to call.
The spiral steps seemed to whirl underfoot as Alan followed the scientist’s flying heels. When they reached the level Flande was far ahead, a pale figure flashing among the crystalline buildings, Mike’s dark bulk pounding in pursuit.
The chase led along the rim of an abyss that dropped away to swimming distances. Sir Colin’s age began to tell before they had run a hundred steps. Falling behind, he motioned Alan on.
Alan, rounding the edge of a great egg-shaped dome, saw that Flande was heading for the fountain. From here they could see it gushing up out of its basin, a great pillar of violet fire. Flande and Mike, dodging among the buildings below them, were drawing nearer and nearer to the wall of glassy multicolors above which the basin loomed.
Flande reached the wall. Alan could see the flash of his terrified white face as he worked frantically at the wall. Mike Smith plunged toward him, head down. Then suddenly there was an arched opening twenty feet high gaping in the wall. Across its threshold stole a faint, quiet light that had in it something of the fountain’s radiance. Alan could not see what lay inside.
He heard a thin, high-pitched wail of despair and looked up to see Mike hurling himself forward at Flande, hands clawing out. Briefly their bodies struggled. Then Alan saw that Mike had the demigod by one arm, twisting it viciously, a savage light of triumph on his face. He said something Alan could not hear.
“Easy, Mike,” he called, hurrying down the last stretch of blue ramp toward them. “You’ll break his arm.”
“Yeah, that’s right!” Mike grinned fiercely at him over one shoulder. “What about it?”
Flande, on his knees, was beating unavailingly against his captor’s hand, a stark, unreasoning horror in his eyes—fear, thought Alan, that did not involve Mike Smith. Instinctively, he glanced back toward the Gateway, but its great circle stood empty in the wall.
Sir Colin came panting down the ramp. “Mike!” he snapped. “Ye’ll have the mon fainting on us! Ease up now, like a guid laddie.”
Reluctantly Mike obeyed. He hoisted Flande to his feet, but kept a tight grip on the flabby wrist. He said contemptuously, “I could kill him with one hand.”
“No need now,” Alan said, with a queer conviction that he spoke the truth. “Flande can’t use his magic. Hell, he isn’t even using telepathy!”
It was true. Flande was pouring out frantic syllables in the trilling, birdlike tongue of Carcasilla. There was no trace of that vast calm on his face now; the demigod had collapsed with a vengeance, leaving only a very terrified man in his place. It was hard to believe that the giant visage which had awed them so in the doorway had any connection with this babbling creature in Mike’s grip.
“Let me go!” he was crying now. “Quick! Quick, before it comes!”
“Calm down,” Alan said. “It isn’t here now. Maybe—”
“It will come! It knows the force-shell is gone. It will come swiftly now!”
Alan said, “What’s beyond there!” and nodded toward the archway behind Flande.
The demigod averted his face stubbornly, not answering. Mike twisted his captive’s arm ruthlessly. Alan said nothing. This was no time for half-measures; anything was justified that gained an answer which might help them.
After a moment Flande cried out shrilly, “Stop him! Make him stop! I can’t stand this—”
“What’s inside the arch?”
“The—the power-source. I swear it! Now free me!”
“Why?”
Flande licked dry lips. “Look,” he said abruptly. “If I tell you this, if I save you from the Light-Wearer, will you free me? Otherwise, we die together here, when it comes.”
“All right,” Alan said. “What’s the answer?”
“Let’s go inside—”
“We’re staying right here until you talk.” An unpleasant chill was crawling down Alan’s back at the thought of the Light-Wearer flashing toward them along the Way of the Gods. But he dared make no concession to Flande. He nodded at Mike, who applied a little more pressure. Flande cried out.
“I’ll tell you! But we must be quick. It—”
“What’s inside?”
“The power-source that gave me my magic,” Flande said, talking fast. “I came to it long ago, when I first found Carcasilla. This place is forbidden. None of them dare enter. But I dared, and I saw the birthplace of the fountain.” His voice changed timbre a little. “I saw the Source. You’ve bathed in the fountain—you know what it can do. It healed you when you were dying; it gave you immortality. But I have seen the Source! I have stood at the outer edge of its radiance and bathed in the terrible glory of that power . . .” His voice trailed away. Then he said simply, “It made me a god.”
“How?” Alan demanded curtly.
Flande gave him a burning look. “How could you understand? I have stood closer than any human creature ever dared stand to the heart and the source of immortality. Here in my body and my brain there dwells something of that same power now. The brain of man has many secret chambers—their locks flew open before the impact of that force and I knew—I saw—” Again his voice died. Then, wearily, “But I am drained now. Building the force-shell was harder than I knew. Now I must bathe again, to replenish the power. Let me go—let me go, and I will build the shield around us all.”
“What’s he saying?” Mike asked impatiently.
Alan told them in quick sentences.
“The Source is down there, all right,” he finished. “But it sounds like something too dangerous to tackle. If the mere radiation of the outer edges did that to Flande, what actual contact with the thing itself would do I—”
Flande’s flat, thin scream broke off the sentence. Their eyes followed his shaking finger.
At the top of the long slope, against the background of the city and of Flande’s pale tower of rain, something moved. A formless shape of shadow and blinding radiance, impossibly tall, and horribly graceful in its swift, stooping motion. Eyelessly it watched them.
MIKE’S reaction was shocking. He seemed to fall in upon himself, like an old man; a palsy of terror shook him, and the bronze face relaxed into a mask of imbecile fear.
Flande’s thin squeak roused them from their paralysis. He twisted free from Mike’s flaccid grip and spun toward the tunnel behind them, moving fast.
The motion had an almost hypnotic effect on Mike as he whirled away from the terror above them. Here was a soft, frightened, fleeing thing—a thing that had offended the man’s pride and must be punished. Mike redeemed his terror of a moment ago in headlong pursuit of this creature which feared him. He flung himself after Flande with a hoarse shout.
Some premonition of what Mike intended galvanized Alan into action as he saw the Nazi’s first forward stride. Flande must not die yet. Alan hurled himself against Mike Smith’s shoulder with all his weight, sending the Nazi staggering. Before Mike could recover, Alan was sprinting down the tunnel after Flande.
The tunnel slanted sharply down. Flande was a flying white shape outlined against golden brilliance as he plunged down the slope. Alan could hear the pounding feet of the others behind him and for an instant wondered horribly if he could hear the Alien’s footsteps, too, as it ran upon its nameless limbs.
To flee from a thing that could move with the Alien’s flashing strides was worse than futile—yet they ran. And except for Mike, perhaps, they ran more from the Alien itself than in pursuit of Flande.
Then Alan came within sight of what lay at the tunnel’s foot, and for a moment all memory even of the terror behind was washed away. For a great room opened before him, brimming and blinding with a radiance he could not face. The eye could not measure the room’s size, for distance was warped and distorted here by the light that glowed in great rippling beats—from the Source.
Pure light had poured into these walls so long that even the rocks glowed now, translucent, permeated through and through with the strength of that golden violence. The walls were windows opening upon glowing distance; they were mirrors that gave back and refracted the light upon its Source. The whole room swam with it, so that Flande’s white figure, forging desperately ahead, seemed to advance against great waves of brilliance that beat through him as he ran.
In the center of the room a corona of light danced around the dazzling glory of the Source. Directly above it a circle of darkness drank in the swirling tides of energy. The fountain, then, must rise directly above this pool.
Toward it Flande was plunging, against intangible waves he had to fight like waves of strong wind. But he had slowed his pace.
He was glancing over one shoulder, now, at his pursuers, at the tunnel beyond which the Alien must still be hovering. Now he had reached the outer circle of the corona and he paused there, hesitating between the danger behind him and the burning danger ahead. Farther than this he had never dared to go.
Alan paused, too. The light was blinding, and he was not eager to come any nearer to that boiling heart of energy at which he could scarcely bear to look directly. Silent tongues of pure golden fire leaped out around it, and the room swam with the power of the Source.
Flande stood hesitating in that bath of flowing radiance. And Alan thought that a change was coming over the demigod’s face. A strange deepening of his eyes, as if godhood were distilling in his brain from the Source that burned beyond him.
Mike’s hoarse shout behind him broke the spell. Alan heard Sir Colin cry out something unintelligible in the rolling echoes that woke along the cavern walls as Mike plunged shouting past him, brushing Alan to one side with his momentum, blind to everything except the presence of his quarry.
Alan’s own voice rose in a useless cry, mingling with the echoes that rolled from the radiant mirrors of the walls. Mike hurtled past him, head down, a black bulk in the cavern of luminous sunlight. In silhouette Alan saw him stretch out both hands in unseeing, heedless triumph.
Flande screamed, his voice strangely deeper and more resonant. There was a thud of body striking hard against body. Alan, squinting against the brilliance, could see them toppling, locked in an embrace of rage and terror, while the silent flood of sun-rays breathed rippling past them.
They fell together, Flande and Mike Smith, into the heart of the boiling maelstrom that was the Source.
For the beat of a second Alan could see them standing there together, still locked in that furious grip, while the pure, pale violence of the flame burned blindingly through their bodies. They were shadows against that light. Shadows that ceased. The light barely flickered. Its serene waves beat out from that heart of fire.
