Collected Short Fiction, page 170
From the lofty window Fal-Kar stared down over snow-swept rugged slopes and vast black plains, over seas that were sheets of ice. He overlooked a world of death, of desolation, of doom. Nothing there was green. Nothing lived. Nothing had moved or changed there in a thousand centuries.
Yet it seemed sometimes to Fal-Kar that living hostile forces lurked unseen beyond the dark horizons. The cruel menace of the frozen world sometimes took life in his fancy, a brooding, alien monster, that grasped at him with frozen fingers of fear.
Fal-Kar’s mind was haunted by phantoms of the frost, phantoms that seemed to creep upon him, invisible on icy plain and frozen sea and dark mountain range, watching, waiting. Waiting until the last man was dead, until they could rule the world.
“You are brooding again, my son,” a strong genial voice rang in the high chamber. “You must forget those fancies. We have work to do—and not long to finish it!”
FAL-KAR turned to look at his father, who had just entered the metal-walled room, snapping on the radium light-tube that flooded it with warm, pinkish radiance.
Tro-Kar was tall as his mighty son; and age had not much weakened his great body, though the fine short fur that covered him had all become silver. Like his son’s, his eyes were blue; they twinkled with a good humor, an optimism, that was indomitable.
“But Father, can’t you feel them?” Fal-Kar demanded, with a fearful gesture toward the window. “The phantoms of the frost! Waiting out there in the frozen night. Mocking at our labor. Laughing, while they wait for the last man to die!”
Tro-Kar laughed; he seized his son’s shoulders with strong, great hands, and wheeled him from the window.
“Don’t give way to your imagination, Fal-Kar,” he urged. “I know that the shadow of vast peril is on us, and humanity. But one city left, of the four that survived when I came first to the Tower of the Kars. And even the radium mines under the city of Zen are now exhausted, so that it must soon fall before conquering cold, unless our work is done.
“Great, I realize, is the danger. But all the more reason for effort! Enough of giving way to dreams!”
“You’re right, Father. Forgive me!”
Fal-Kar laughed, and lifted the white giant affectionately in his mighty arms.
“Yet we will cheat those specters of their victory, and drive them from the planet with the rays of our new atomic sun!”
“Put it so if you will,” gasped the older man, as Fal-Kar set him down. “And now to the laboratory, my son, to check your new electronic reactions. They promise us much.”
Arm in arm, golden-brown giant and silvered one, they walked from the room, bearing upon their great shoulders the hopes of humanity.
It was long since Fal-Kar had left the lone surviving city of Zen, splendid metropolis beneath the shimmering green dome of its insulating Zone, to come to this lonely mountain tower. He had been only a youth, then, a weakling, ignorant of the great work of the Kars and his own part in it.
But often he recalled the time—as he recalled also the girl, Del-Ara, whom he had left unwillingly behind at the shimmering ray-screens of the Zone.
His father had met him as he stepped from the silvered shell of the little rocket-driven sky-sled, at the base of the looming red tower. Without a word they moved the light vehicle into the building, through the massive valves that shut out the cold. Both were shivering, then, from their brief exposure; and they bent over the glowing red coil of a radium heater.
“This is the Tower of the Kars,” his father boomed, speaking for the first time. “Within it we have labored for ten generations, my son, working at the greatest task that men have ever attempted. It is not done. Nor will it be finished in my life. That, Fal-Kar, is why I sent for you.”
“What’s that, Father? I always have wondered why you should imprison yourself in this cold, lonely tower, when Zen is so bright and so beautiful beneath her glowing Zone.”
“You will understand, my son. I want you to work with me, and carry our task on to completion after I am dead.”
“You mean I must live in this gloomy place?”
“Our laboratory is here, Fal-Kar. The work is too dangerous to be carried on in the city. And I must warn you, though I am sorry, that you will not have much time to visit Zen. Our labor will demand all that is in you.”
“But I can’t leave Zen! I know a girl there—Del-Ara is her name. She was studying with me in the Hall of Science. Father, she is a lovely being—if you could see her!”
“I’m afraid our task will leave you no time in youth for love, my son,” the older man said slowly. “When you are about to grow old, if you see that you can not finish the task of the Kars, you must have a son to carry on the work. But is is far too soon for you to think of that.”
“But Father,” Fal-Kar protested urgently, “I can’t give her up!” He took Tro-Kar’s arm. “I know you are a scientist. Science is wonderful, but life——”
“Wait, my son, until I have told you what the task is, what it means to humanity, to life.”
Young, then, and a little headstrong, Fal-Kar looked across the gleaming red coil at his father. He stared almost as at a stranger, for he had lived with his mother in Zen until she died in a rocket liner that was lost in the ice-gripped mountains northward, and then in the Hall of Science. His father he had seen only briefly and rarely, when he came to the city for equipment and supplies.
Impatiently, unwillingly, he listened.
“I KNOW that Zen is bright and beautiful, my son, beneath the green, glorious crown of her Zone. But that beauty is frail. The cruel talons of the cold ever menace it, waiting to snatch away her gay people if the Zone should fall.
“You know, Fal-Kar”—the older man’s voice had become deep and very earnest—“you know that we have drawn upon the energy of radium to heat and light our cities, to do all our work, for the thousands of centuries since the sun grew cold. But in the last few millennia the supplies of radium have failed. One by one the mines have been exhausted and abandoned. Every deposit in the crust of the planet has been worked out. The radium is used up! The supply of it that remains in Zen will not keep the Zone burning even through your own lifetime.”
“I had guessed that much, Father,” admitted Fal-Kar, “though the Six make a secret of how much radium remains in the vaults. But what can be done? We can’t hope to stop the cold. We can’t restore the dead sun. Better to forget what is inevitable, and enjoy the little time that remains. Del-Ara and I have talked of it.”
Tro-Kar smiled soberly, and leaned across the glowing coil to set a great hand on his son’s shoulder.
“We can hope, my son! Many generations ago the house of Kar foresaw this crisis. Our fathers set themselves the task of meeting it. They built this mountain laboratory; for ten generations we Kars have labored here.”
“But the sun is dead, Father. The heat of the earth’s interior was long ago used up. The wind and the tides have become too feeble to serve us. Now the radium is gone. What else is there? What can we hope to do?”
“We have all about us, Fal-Kar, a more powerful source of energy than any you name. The atoms of every substance are reservoirs of pure electricity. Tap them, and we have means to warm and illuminate the whole planet again—for all time.”
“The atom, yes. But they taught us in the Hall of Science that its locked energies can never be released.”
The great hand closed like a steel vise on Fal-Kar’s shoulder; his father’s voice grew deeper with stiff determination.
“Others have tried and failed, my son. But the Kars never fail. Ten generations have we labored. And you are fortunate, Fal-Kar. Nine of us have died with our task unfinished. So, I foresaw long ago, should I. But you shall witness our triumph!”
“How can you know that?”
“You must!” Great fingers dug into Fal-Kar’s shoulder. “You must! For the radium in the vaults of Zen will not last out your life. The atom must be conquered in your lifetime, to save Zen, to save mankind. Even to save the girl you spoke of—think of that! You will do it, my son. The Kars can not fail.”
THAT meeting of father and son had fallen far into the past. Fal-Kar had learned much, changed much, since then. In body and in spirit, he had grown. No longer was he a youth, but a strong man, driving with unfailing energy and resolution toward accomplishment of the task the Kars had set themselves.
But even so he had not forgotten Del-Ara. Sometimes, on the rare occasions when he drove his tiny radium-powered sky-sled to Zen for supplies, he was with her for a few joyous hours. Her beauty, he thought, had increased with time, as her lithe strong body developed beneath its velvet, snow-white fur. She, too, had found a work, attending the great generators of the Zone.
“Thus,” she told Fal-Kar, “I, too, can serve the race until your great work is done. It makes it easier to wait for you until we may be together again.”
Fal-Kar had the great tower laboratory now largely to himself; he had taken the reins of the research in his own hands and forged ahead beyond his father. Tro-Kar had become little more than a gifted assistant, most aiding his son by his courage, his enthusiasm, his boundless faith in the Kars.
The old man had so far relinquished his active part in the ancient quest as to erect an observatory upon the great roof of the tower, and spend there many hours studying the dead, dark moon which still followed the freezing world, like a haunting specter.
Even in the intense absorption of his labor, Fal-Kar saw that his father was worried at what he saw upon the black satellite, and demanded what it might be.
“The ancient task of the Kars is enough to absorb all your faculties, my son,” was his answer. “To share this new problem would unwisely increase your burden. You must leave it in my hands.”
And Fal-Kar toiled on in the laboratory, fighting off the fears and gloomy fancies that descended upon him with the twilight of a dying world. Then came the day when he swarmed up the metal ladder to his father’s high observatory, and burst eagerly into its instrument-crowded dome.
“The phantoms of the frost are conquered!” he shouted, seizing Tro-Kar’s silvery shoulder to jerk him from the ocular of a great telescope. “I have checked the last reaction. You yourself will see the atomic generator, Father. The new sun! And soon!”
The old man remained wearily in his seat, with Fal-Kar’s eager hand resting on his passive shoulder.
In the midst of his elation, Fal-Kar was struck abruptly with the gravity of his father’s expression, with the naked dread haunting his blue eyes.
“Why, Father,” he cried in sudden concern. “What troubles you? Is it you who now fear the phantoms of the frost? And when the labor of the Kars is done?”
“But it is not done,” Tro-Kar said, with slow solemnity. “Not until our new sun flames above the mountain. And it must be done very soon—or never! Even now, perhaps, it is too late.”
“But, Father, what do you mean?”
“For a long time, my son,” the old man whispered, “I have been studying the face of our dead neighbor, the moon. I have not let you concern yourself with what I have seen. But it is a strange thing, weird and fearful.”
“Tell me—what is it?”
“Wait, my son. I shall let you see it with your own eyes. But it is something, I believe, like your haunting phantoms of the frost. Your subconscious mind, perhaps, was warning you of the same things that the telescope reveals—sinister entities born of the cold on a frozen dead world, to war against warmth and light and the life we know.”
2. The Menace of the Moon
HIS mighty body was trembling a little as Fal-Kar seated himself at the eye-piece of the gigantic telescope from which he had, a few moments ago, so joyously pulled his father.
The field of vision was a dark circle before his eye, sifted with diamond dust of stars. Fingers quivering with the dread that filled him, he adjusted the instrument; and the frozen moon crept into the field, a dark blot against the gleaming net of stars.
“I see nothing here to fear,” he said. “The moon is black and dead, as it has been since the sun went out.”
“Wait, Fal-Kar, until I increase the power.”
The dark, ominous disk swelled until it filled almost the whole vast field. And Fal-Kar saw abruptly that it was no longer completely black. Weird phosphorescent flickerings raced across its somber face, evanescent gleams of icy blue and frozen violet.
Strange changing lights of cold blue-violet wove fantastic patterns upon the surface of the somber satellite. They flowed in rivers of chill radiance across jagged lunar mountains. They condensed into swirling balls of gelid flame above abysmal craters.
Whirling masses of frigid luminescence gathered and thickened, and seemed to leap away from the rugged face of the moon.
“I do see something,” Fal-Kar breathed at last. “Moving cold lights on the moon. What are they? What do they mean? They seem almost—living!”
“They are living,” said Tro-Kar, “but not as we live, it is true. You have seen a new form of life, Fal-Kar, born of the cold: living entities, made up of substances and forces that are alien to our sort of life, hostile, destructive. They belong to a new order of existence, risen by the inevitable law of nature to people the frozen planets of a dead universe.”
Fal-Kar sought to recover himself from the momentary horror that had seized him.
“Even so, Father, what is their threat to us? The moon is far away. Soon, with our new atomic sun flaming above the tower, we shall be for ever secure from the cold.”
“So I hoped, Fal-Kar, at first,” the old man said, wearily. “But the new life has not remained upon the moon. Since cold is its nature, it finds the frozen dark vacuum and the strange energies of interplanetary space a bridge, as we always found them an impassable barrier.”
“You mean,” Fal-Kar gasped incredulously, “the things—the lights—that I saw will be able to come across to the earth?”
“They are not only able to do it,” his father said heavily. “That I have long known. Only today did I discover that they have already done it.”
“Already!” cried Fal-Kar. “Already on the earth?”
“They are. More, they have found Zen. And hating light and warmth and our kind of life as they must, they are a menace, my son. A peril beyond conception.”
“But what are they? What are they like?”
“I don’t know. But like nothing we are familiar with, certainly. They are formed of chemical combinations that can exist only at the low temperatures of a dead world. Their alien forms of being will seem strange to us, my son, perhaps incredible. And they may attack us with forces beyond our experience. Unless the new sun is burning very soon, Fal-Kar, the long tale of humanity is ended. How soon can it be ready?”
Strained eagerness was in the old man’s tones; as Fal-Kar considered, he cried again, “How soon?”
“The formulas are simple, Father,” Fal-Kar said at last. “I shall ask you to derive them for me; you can do it in a day. But we must have power to inaugurate the process, more power than can be supplied by our own generators.”
“Then we are lost,” Tro-Kar breathed in dismay.
“No,” smiled Fal-Kar, grimly. “While you are deriving the formula? and setting up the other apparatus, I shall go to Zen and bring back one of the great radium cells that are used to maintain the Zone.”
“It is a time of danger,” Tro-Kar objected. “And the Six have none too much radium. They are not likely to let you take a cell; they never thought highly of this quest of the Kars. Their own scientists ever said we were mad to attempt to unlock the atom.”
“I shall bring back the cell,” Fal-Kar promised grimly, rising from the telescope.
His father smiled fondly, and embraced him.
“You are a Kar, my son. You can not fail! But you must set out at once. And hasten. Already the invaders make travel perilous. Remember, the fate of humanity rests with you. And that of your lovely Del-Ara! And the odds are against you! Hasten!”
3. Creatures of Cold
FAL-KAR and his father opened the mighty valves in the base of the red, ancient tower, dragged the slender bright shell of the sky-sled out upon the frost-rimed platform. Quickly, in the piercing chill of the motionless, bitter air, they embraced. Then the white giant ran back into the tower, and Fal-Kar slipped swiftly within the torpedo-shaped frail hull of crystal and argent metal.
The door sealed and the heater coil glowing red at his feet, he touched the controls. Golden flame leapt backward and downward from the radium-activated rockets; and the silvery shell lifted from the platform to soar away across crag-walled gorges and ghostly slopes of snow.
The sky was a black bowl inverted. The stars burned in it, living points, bright and diamond-hard. The galaxy was a streak of silver fire spilled across its velvet darkness. And against a white star-cloud hung the moon, a blot somberly and ominously dark.
The voice of the rockets was a shrilling scream; and trails of golden flame hung in the darkness behind the hurtling sky-sled, as it flashed across the lower snow-swept slopes of the lofty peak on which the tower stood, across deserts of star-lit frost beyond, and over ghostly flat ice-plains that were seas.
Fal-Kar drove toward the far city of Zen. This flight he had made many times, on his brief visits to the city. Every dark rock and leprous patch of snow was familiar to him. . . . And he saw abruptly, with wonder and heartstilling dread, that the grim landscape ahead had changed, as it had not changed in centuries of centuries.
A forest had sprung up on the dark ice-plains before him, such a forest as no man had imagined. Its growths were spiked, sword-like things, rather than trees, branching crazily. They were more gigantic than anything that ever had grown upon the planet, lifting the points of their bright spears thousands of feet, to Fal-Kar’s customary level of flight.
