Collected Short Fiction, page 280
He listened intently as Bell briefly outlined the momentous plan, after we had eaten. Keen enthusiasm lit his boyish face. Eagerly, he gripped Bell’s hand.
“Wonderful, Doctor Bell! It—it’s great. You have given the world another world!” And he began a question: “Your precise sub-atomic formulae——?”
“If I have revealed enough to convince you,” Merry Bell said gravely, “I shall reserve the rest until we have reached the site of operations.” Old bitterness shadowed his voice again. “So there cannot be another——” He bit his thin lip. “I have listed the equipment we shall need.” Veering’s enthusiasm ended indecision. We went on to plan the expedition: plotted a schedule for the flight to the frozen Stapledon Basin, that would be a race against the swift-falling polar night; listed our essential supplies and the nine tons of Bell’s equipment against the maximum capacity of my loyal old plane, the Austral Queen.
It was two o’clock when I got back to my room at the club, elated with this mad dream of conquering the polar world, yet troubled with vague apprehensions inspired by the change in Doctor Harding.
I was thinking moodily, too, of the mockery in Bell’s old nickname, for if ever I had seen a man walking alive in hell, it was surely he. It was worth all the risk and folly of the flight, I thought, to alleviate his torture. I went to bed, and, of old habit, fell immediately asleep.
From this point it is difficult for me to go on. Much of the remainder of this history must deal with facts and beings that will appear incredible in the severe light of established science.
I share the reluctance of the orthodox scientist to admit anything not proven by objective observations and beyond all doubt, for I know too well the possible subjective vagaries of the human mind. I am sensitive, too, of any charges of sensationalism or mistreatment of the truth.
Yet it is my obvious duty to omit nothing that happened, however fantastic or ill-supported the account of it may seem. To leave out anything would distort the whole. Perhaps it is to be expected, after all, that the circumstances leading up to the incredible phenomenon of the Time Fault should appear equally astounding.
I WOKE suddenly in my dim-lit room.
The city had grown almost quiet. The illuminated hands of the electric clock showed five minutes past three—I had been sleeping no more than an hour.
The sound that had waked me was totally unfamiliar—unless perhaps it suggested the song of some tiny, exotic tropical bird. Its plaintive keenness held a wail of lonely despair, yet somehow it was heart-piercingly sweet.
I sat up in bed abruptly, less frightened than merely startled although my heart was thudding. My hand went toward the light. Before I touched the switch, however, I saw what was in the room. And all movement left me.
My incredible visitor was floating a yard off the floor, beside my bed. It shone with a pale light of its own, so that I had no need of the electrics. A brief high note came from it again, keen with lonely longing, and somehow telling me not to be afraid.
A being beyond conception, supernal! An exquisite rosy shell, floating upright, flushed with a living light. Its fluted spirals tapered to a point, below. Its gleaming lips, flared out like a vase of pearl, held the bust of an elfin woman.
Maru—Mora!
Her tiny shoulders were covered with a fine golden down. Her delicate head was—or seemed—the head of a pigmy queen. But the golden plates that crowned it, I knew, and the plumed scarlet crest above, were living part of her.
Her small pointed face was whiter than alabaster, and imperial in its pride. Her eyes were huge, purple, limpid. They were round and sober with the innocence of a child’s; they were inscrutable with ageless wisdom; they were dark wells of agony, ancient and ageless.
Her lips were a tiny crimson wound. They were full, almost sensuous. They smiled at me, with a faint twist of malice.
Maru-Mora. I knew that she was nothing human. Yet my fancy ever made her so, for eyes and lips and even the impudent flirt of her crimson plume held all the essence of humanity: wisdom and the vain yearning to forget, pride and bitter defeat, hot passion and long frustration, hope and despair, bright courage and consuming fear, living joy and ultimate, infinite agony.
Against all that, it mattered not if she had a golden carapace instead of hair, if her great eyes were lidless, if her facial economy seemed to provide no nostrils. Bodily, she might have more in common with the mollusk than with man, but some chord in her spirit touched the human, none the less.
Altogether, elfin bust and pearly vase, she was less than four feet tall. And the flying shell, I knew, was as much a part of her, as much alive, as the shining crest or her purple eyes.
I sat in the bed, staring at her, bewildered, incredulous. She should have been a dream. The fastened window—for the room was air-conditioned—had not been disturbed; the door was still locked. But here she was. And I was as wide awake as I had ever been. I heard the distant thunder of an elevated train.
The red lips pouted, the keen voice came again, like a whistling, saying, as I sensed its wordless meaning: Do not be afraid. The shining being drifted a little toward my bed, settled toward me. Over the lip of the shell reached a slender arm, bright with golden fur.
The hand that reached for me was tiny, infinitely delicate, seven-fingered. It was thumbless, the middle finger longest. The nails were narrow, pointed, crimson. For all its golden strangeness, it was beautiful, and, to me, a hand.
The keen piping, so lonely, so sorrowfully sweet, wailed again. I looked into the infinite wells of those purple eyes. And something made me put up my own big hand, grasp those tiny furry fingers.
Instantly, incredibly, I was snatched out of my body.
I know how utterly fantastic, impossible, that must seem. But I had an instant’s impression of my body left behind in that dim room, sitting bolt-upright and motionless in the bed. Then we were plunging upward, outside, above the dark building and the restless city.
Southward we soared—that shining being beside me, drawing me by the hand, for my form was still the same, even if my body lay behind—across slumbering continents and over dark whispering oceans.
We swept into the frigid gray twilight that lay upon the polar lands. I recognized the very Mountains of Despair, of which my party had made an aerial survey on the last expedition, and lying vast and desolate beyond them, the Stapledon Basin.
And down we sloped again, across gray crevasse-riven glaciers, toward a towering transpolar range that I had glimpsed in the distance, called the Mountains of Uranus, but had never reached.
As we dropped toward those black granite peaks, bleakly stark, frost-shattered, yet rearing so majestically from the eternal ice, I was amazed to see what seemed a building, with twin hexagonal towers, projecting above the naked windswept ledges of a rounded summit.
This structure—I hardly know a name for it—seemed deeply anchored in the living granite. Its material was unfamiliar: ice-clear and richly purple, like some unimaginable colossal amethyst. Its low massive outline somewhat suggested those towered gateways of the ancient Egyptians that archeologists call pylons. But it had no opening; it appeared doorless, windowdess, one solid block of flawless crystal.
Near it, however, a wide fissure cleft the black summit. Worn stone steps, freshly swept free of snow’, led down into it. At their foot was a massive door of black metal, battered and corroded as if by the impact of ages.
WE SETTLED down upon the barren ledge above the fissure. I stood upon the snow-patched granite—or it seemed that I did, for I was still aware that my body lay back in New York. And the shining being floated beside me, the golden tendrils of her fingers still grasping my hand.
A weirdly unforgettable scene. The stark black mountain beneath us towering above the gray infinity of ice. The midnight sun burning low and ominously red in the misty distance. The immemorial mass of that towered crystal block, strange with deep-cut glyphs, looming above us like the enigmatic monument of some lost and forgotten race.
But the being at my side was looking down at that ancient black door. Her eery piping keened out again, calling. A little time went by. Then a girl opened the door, and came running lightly up the steps.
She was beautiful—slender, tall, filled with the glory of young womanhood. Her trim clothing was strangely cut from some pure white fur. The one strand of hair that escaped her close-fitting cap was a gorgeous ruddy gold. Her oval face was very fair, the forehead high and white. Her wide blue eyes were burning with some new-born eagerness.
Beautiful. . . . My stumbling words could never convey her perfect loveliness. I looked at her, drank deep of her vital splendor, for some old, haunting thirst was being satisfied. She held some elusive perfection that I had sought, for many weary years, in many lands, even in my polar explorations, and never glimpsed before.
Beautiful. . . . I knew instantly that I wanted her, to possess and to serve, to love, for ever. And I knew, bitterly, that this was was only some strange dream, that I really lay still—or my body did—back in New York City.
“Mam-Mora!”
The girl ran to the flying being, with that eager greeting on her tongue. She embraced those golden shoulders, lightly, gently. A tiny golden-furred hand stroked her head, affectionately. Then the keen thin piping of Maru-Mora came again, and the girl turned eagerly toward me.
“I know your name: you are Ron Dunbar,” she said, surprizingly. She spoke English. Her voice was low, faintly awkward, as if she were little used to speech. It was soft, deeply rich, delicious. “I am Karalee,” she said. “Maru-Mora brought you here to her dwelling—or a part of you—so that I might speak to you, for her.”
I—or the “part of me”—stood drinking in her sheer, glowing loveliness. Swift admiration had conquered my old diffidence with women, even my present amazement. I stood merely looking, delighted, until suddenly I was afraid that my gaze might offend or discomfit the girl.
“I’m glad that she did,” I said. “And I wish that she had brought all of me, so that perhaps I could stay.”
Deep and serene, the girl’s clear blue eyes looked into mine. Her full lips quivered suddenly; her white nostrils flared to a deeper breath; her deep bosom lifted.
“I wish, Ron Dunbar,” her low voice said simply, “that you could stay.”
Afterward, I was surprized at my swift surrender to a woman in a dream. But emotion, as well as thought, all through that incredible experience, seemed more direct and clear than common. Some old restraint was left behind.
“I’ll come again,” I found myself promising the girl. “Now I know the way. I’ll fly back to these very mountains. Next time, all of me—for you.”
Eagerness shone bright on her face.
“You will come, Ron—for me?” Gleaming tears misted her eyes. “And sometime—we can go out together—out into the World?”
The sweet exotic piping of Maru-Mora came again then, swiftly urgent. The girl Karalee looked up at that supernal being, and back to me. And all the eagerness had gone from her face. It was a pale, bleak oval, stricken. The tears were gone. Her eyes were dry, dark with pain.
“No, Ron, you must never come back.”
Her voice was steady and low. “That is what Maru-Mora brought you to hear. You must never fly your machine into this land again. You must promise that.” I looked at her, sharing all the agony written on her white face.
“But I’m coming back,” I said, “before the sun is gone. I’m coming to take you away, Karalee——”
Her face brightened for a moment, to a tortured eagerness of longing. She looked up again at the silent fantastic shape of Maru-Mora.
“No, Ron Dunbar,” her voice came slow and heavy with regret. “You must not come to this land again.” Her tone quivered. “Never—not even for me. Maru-Mora forbids it.”
I looked up at the shining being that still held my hand in her tiny furry fingers, demanding:
“Why?”
4. “They That Sleep”
Again that eldritch, plaintive piping sobbed from the elfin woman’s head, gold-crowned and scarlet-plumed, above that flaring opalescent shell. Again the fair girl Karalee, so lovely in her trim white furs, rendered translation:
“It is true, Ron Dunbar, that you are planning to fly here again, with new companions, before this sun is gone?”
“It is,” I said, surprized.
“It is true,” Karalee gave the next question, “that your purpose is to thaw the ice from all this world?”
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been amazed at that. After all, Maru-Mora had come to New York after me. It didn’t much increase the wonder of it, I suppose, that she now displayed knowledge of what had occurred there, that evening, in Harding’s apartment.
For an instant, however, I was speechless. A strange fear chilled and shook me, until I looked up into those great purple orbs. They came down to my face, and I felt a warmth of supernal peace. The fear was gone.
“That’s right,” I said. “We’re going to use atomic power. Doctor Bell hopes to make the whole continent temperate, and open it up to settlement.”
“Then you must give up the plan,” Karalee rendered the swift reply. “For the ice must never be thawed. . . . Death is sleeping under the ice, Ron Dunbar—the death of all the world! Take care lest you rouse it.”
“Death?” I demanded. “What do you mean?”
Then took place the strangest and certainly the most terrible part of all that incredible adventure.
We still stood together beside that colossal purple pylon, on the naked granite of that frozen peak. Red as blood, the midnight sun burned low in the horizonless distance, where the gray illimitable desert of ice merged with the gray and featureless sky. A bitter wind howled and moaned about the towers of the pylon. I was insensible of any cold, but the girl Karalee was already pale, shivering. She had gestured toward the steps that led down to the door in the rock.
“Let us go down into my rooms,” she said. “It is warmer there.” Dark with longing and regret, her eyes looked at Maru-Mora, and back at me. “If you are forbidden ever to return, at least——”
Maru-Mora’s piping cut her off. As if answering a command, the girl stepped quickly to the flying being. She held out a mittened hand. Tiny golden fingers clasped it.
“Come,” the girl translated. “Maru-Mora is carrying us to see the peril that you must not rouse. It is They That Sleep.”
We rose again. I had the briefest glimpse of Karalee left standing on that frozen ledge, her arm rigidly extended. Yet she was with us also, drawn by Maru-Mora’s other hand—drawn out of her body, as I had been.
WE THREE soared swiftly through chill gray mists, descended upon a rugged ice-plain from which jutted great boulders of granite, black, naked, shattered with the frost of ages. We stood at the brink of a dark crevasse. Karalee pointed across it.
Her lips moved twice before she could speak, and her voice came muffled, breathless, choked with horror.
“There,” she said. “One of Them. It is the Watcher.”
I shuddered at sight of that monstrous thing. It stood upright upon a cragged boulder, and it did not move. The body of it was black, covered with great scales, a swollen elongated thing shaped like an immense barrel. It stood upon three black tentacular limbs, whose extremities had coiled like mighty serpents to grasp the granite.
Head, it had none. But the bulged upper end of the black body was broken with a great sharp triangular projection, which looked like a hideous snout. Three scaled triangular flaps, just about its swollen equatorial belt, might, I thought, cover strange organs of sense.
This creature was utterly horrifying, in a sense I can hardly define. Its horror held nothing familiar. If Maru-Mora was clearly non-human, it was certainly nonterrestrial. It chilled me with an elemental, absolute revulsion.
I knew that the girl was sick and cold with dread. I heard her make a pleading little whistle: her human imitation of the voice of Maru-Mora. Her strained hoarse whisper came to me, urgent:
“Look swiftly, Ron, so that we can go. I do not like these things. But Maru-Mora says you must see——”
The black monstrosity, indeed, held my gaze with a fascination of utter terror. It had been there, motionless, a long time. The great black scales were silvered with frost. Snow was banked beyond it. The ice had climbed up over the coils of its ophidian limbs.
The boulder was cracked, I saw, shattered. Time had splintered the granite since those giant tentacles first grasped it. Only their frozen pressure held it from crumbling. How many centuries?
Surely, after so long, I thought, it must be dead—and I knew that it was not. Nothing dead could inspire such resistless fear. I sensed—or fancied—a slow, implacable beat, like a pulse of evil, measured, menacing, mind-shattering.
I flinched suddenly, turned away, hid my eyes with a trembling hand. I fought a strange and elemental sickness, a newborn horror that gnawed worm-like at the marrow of my bones. It brought a flood of vast relief when:
“Come,” said Karalee. “We go to see the others.”
We left that stark eternal black sentinel overlooking the glaciers. We soared swiftly through the leaden mists, came down upon ridged and fissured ice.
“The others,” said the girl, “are all about their ship, beneath the ice.”
Driven by a fascinated compulsion to see all I could, even though the horror of it should consume me, I was striving in vain to peer down through the gray-white obscurity of the ice—when suddenly we were beneath it!
Down through the darkness of the glacier we plunged, as swiftly as through the air above. The ice was all around us, like a blue-green liquid.
And suddenly we were standing again on a long ridge of granite. We were far beneath the glacier, which was like a thick green-black mist above us. I could see little at first, but gradually my vision sharpened—or perhaps Maru-Mora in some manner shared her own strange senses with me—and I perceived the great valley beyond and below us.
