Collected Short Fiction, page 289
“Venice, when the experiment hurled her into this Universe, fifteen years ago, was thrown into the same prison—still aboard the ship, but unable to operate it. They have been together.
“The psychode made them aware of our arrival. Mock-sun escaped—he has some power left, against the other. And he came to guide us to Venice.”
Suddenly the silver bubble was darting, as if with alarm, from port to port. Looking out, apprehensively, Kerry Lundoon saw an ominous thing. The shining web that veiled the dark sky was tightening, the queer living worlds drawing in about them.
“It’s closing in!” he gasped.
Hastily, Winship adjusted the psychode again. Intent with listening, his face went ashen white.
“Mock-sun says that the infinite entity has discovered his escape,” he whispered in dismay, “and terminated a sort of truce they had made. Now all its power is against us.”
CHAPTER V
Universe Lost
ROGER WINSHIP’S drawn hollow face showed no fear. An eagerness of hope was burning in his feverish eyes.
“It has been fifteen years.” His low voice was anxious and wistful. “If I could only see her again, before the finish, I should ask for nothing more—”
Kerry Lundoon was peering out, fearfully.
A scene of terrible wonder met his gaze. Burning against velvet dark, bound together with cords of flame, strange worlds were crowding thick about them. Various as to shape and color, fantastic as a madman’s dream.
A rope of hot red fire leaped at them suddenly, like a striking snake, from the center of a violet planetary ring. The end of it raveled out, into a million wirelike strands. These incandescent filaments shot to the deck. Bright cubes grew swiftly at their extremities, and the metal wasted again.
The reporter turned suddenly from it. He caught the silver bubble between his two hands. He chatted fearfully.
“Can you—can you help us?”
But Winship, with the helmet on his head, said hopelessly:
“We are lost. Mock-sun cannot use the power that he has. He can’t, now, even guide us to Venice. And there—the air!”
Lundoon looked out again, in time to see a black hole yawn in the pitted deck. Outrushing air condensed into a tenuous cloud of frost. And the frost was gathered into a glittering cube; nothing escaped the hunger of the universal being.
Rigid with the terror of death, the reporter saw a bright filament stab against the port. He saw the thick quartz transformed into little hard cubes, bright with opalescent gleams. And then the port was open.
The air exploded outward. Lundoon was hurled against the wall. Breath sighed out of his bursting lungs. Agony swelled his heart. The hammer of his pulse was deafening. He felt the hot rush of blood in his nostrils, his ears, tasted its salty sweetness in his mouth.
Pressed from their sockets by fiendish fingers, his eyes went blind. Terrible fingers closed on his throat. His empty lungs labored in vain. He staggered, fell.
And, in that last terrible moment, he thought he felt incandescent filaments burning against his body—to transform it also into hard tiny cubes.
But awareness came back to him, out of a queer dream in which he was winged, soaring above the towers of New York. He could breathe again. He opened his aching eyes, and discovered Winship near him, and the silver globe of Mock-sun.
They were all floating together in a queer transparent bubble. The wreckage of the Phantom Queen was a little distance away. Lundoon watched its last fragment dissolve into a little swarm of bright cubes, laced together with shining wires. The strange worlds, beyond, still were gathering.
Winship, the psychode still on his head, floated up from the bottom of the twelve-foot crystal bubble.
“What—” gasped the reporter. “How—”
“Mock-sun was able to use his power, after all,” the thin man said. “He made this transparent shield—it is akin to his own sub-space barrier. He filled it with oxygen, so that we can breathe. The cubes cannot enter it. And he can move it, so that we can continue the search for Venice.”
EVEN as Winship spoke, the bubble darted away, at a speed far greater than the Phantom Queen had attained. The bright living web was brushed backward. They plunged into a gulf of darkness, so vast that the clustered worlds were lost.
“The prison,” Winship rendered Mock-sun’s message. “A space drained of all energy.”
The bubble came, at last, to a sudden halt.
Roger Winship pointed abruptly out through its pellucid film, uttering a soft, choked cry. Staring, Lundoon saw, drifting beside them, a battered disc of steel, a smaller Phantom Queen.
“That’s Kallent’s first machine!” sobbed Winship. “Where Venice is!” The reporter saw a woman’s face looking through the round port of an air lock in the rim. A thin face, pale and anguished, its violet eyes were wells of tortured loneliness. Horror unspeakable had marked it. Yet, somehow, it was still beautiful.
“Venice!” Winship was shouting. “Venice—darling!”
The woman beckoned. The bubble floated closer to the valve. She vanished, flung it open. Escaping air hurled her out. She struck the shimmering wall. And, somehow, it let her in.
A throbbing ache closed Lundoon’s throat, to watch that reunion. Roger Winship caught the exile’s frail hands, with both of his. They stared for a moment at each other, on both their faces a startled, half-incredulous wonder.
“Roger!” whispered the woman. “You came!”
She burst suddenly into tears. Winship made a little choked sound, and drew her very tenderly toward him. And abruptly they clung together, desperately.
Then the little silver ball of Mock-sun was suddenly darting about the bubble. It bumped gently against Winship’s head. He turned from the woman, to adjust the psychode.
“Followed?” the scientist gasped.
Indeed, far off in the black gulf, the reporter saw a cometlike body. A bright spark, racing toward them, trailing a path of flame. Lundoon was still staring, fearfully, when Winship touched his arm.
“Get your breath,” he said. “We’re going back.”
“Back?” Lundoon was incredulous. “Back to Earth? How?”
“Mock-sun has mastered the geodesics,” Winship said. “And we are still so far away that he can shield the process from the enemy.”
“When?” Lundoon gasped.
But Winship had already made a warning gesture. And the reporter was overwhelmed again with racking torture, as if every atom of his body were crushed by inconceivable forces. The agony of the reversal field. It ended. And he was amazed to find himself sprawled on the ground.
He staggered to his feet, bewildered. The sky was blue above. The genial rays of a familiar sun fell across clumps of green trees and great, white-walled buildings. Fresh-mowed grass was crisp underfoot. The warm air shuddered to the distant mundane whistle of a locomotive.
This was Earth again.
Home!
THEY were back in the well-fenced grounds of the Kallent Memorial Foundation, he recognized, from which the Phantom Queen had carried them. Roger Winship was helping Venice to her feet, at his side. Mock-sun was bounding about over the grass, like a silver ball.
“We’re home!” sighed the weary man, happily. “After fifteen years! Venice, my darling—ugh!”
Lundoon heard the sudden croak of horror in Winship’s voice. He turned. Consternation froze him. For the thin, white-headed scientist was retreating from the woman he had rescued. His hands were lifted, his gaunt face ashen and rigid with dread.
The woman had laughed, mockingly. The laughter changed to a sound not human. Her slim body altered suddenly. It became a fantastic grotesquerie of hard, bright cubes.
“Venice!” Winship gasped. “Why, Venice—”
Beyond them, the silver globe of Mock-sun had dissolved into a cluster of glittering cubes. Already they were feeding on the grass. Bright filaments writhed from their corners down against the turf, absorbed it to grow new cubes.
The fantastic thing that had been Venice Kallent dissolved into a swarm of little opalescent blocks, that fell like locusts on the trees and grass.
Roger Winship staggered back against the bole of a tree, wiping horror-sweat from his gray, stricken face.
“What a fool!” he whispered. “What a fool I was!”
“What—” Lundoon gasped. “What—happened?”
“A trick,” came Winship’s rasping voice. “It was all a hoax, designed to destroy our Universe. In the attack on the Phantom Queen, when we were unconscious, the entity recaptured Mock-sun.”
“But Mock-sun helped us—”
“The thing that helped us, or pretended to, was a counterfeit Mock-sun, made to deceive us. It was easy for the entity has absolute mastery of matter. The counterfeit led us, not to Venice, but to another duplication. And so, unwittingly, we brought back the seed of the monster, to destroy our Universe!”
CHAPTER VI
Infinite Illusion
THE change which overwhelmed the world took place with a frightful and progressively increasing rapidity. Each cubic life-cell of the invader, when grown, could send out seven new filaments, from seven corners, to start new ones.
The grass and trees within the high-fenced enclosure were soon transformed to gleaming blocks. The white buildings fell, and then the fence. Trees and stacks in the distance crumbled. Inequalities were leveled. The earth, to the limit of vision, was soon a glittering opalescent pave.
The workmen and technicians employed by the Foundation, with their families, had lived in a model community village which occupied one end of the thousand acres. The fate of those neat homes was a scene of typical horror. Screaming men, hysterical women, wailing children, all fled vainly from the terror of the cubes.
Overtaken, struck ruthlessly down by conglomerate hammers, they were swiftly turned to bright cubes themselves—and so rose to pursue the rest.
Lundoon had momentarily expected the death of Winship and himself. Surely their lives had no value to the entity. And, since Earth was lost, their fate seemed to matter not at all.
But they were spared. The turf was consumed beneath their feet. A shrieking mechanic, running toward them, fell and was consumed almost at their feet. But they were left at the end, standing alone on a glistening plain of diamond blocks.
The world was flat, presently, to the level horizon. Nothing broke the glittering surface. And Lundoon saw a rope of purple flame leap out across the westward sky, toward the waning moon. He watched its mottled silver change to a poison green. He saw other fiery shafts arrow from it, to consume yet other worlds.
“It is done,” he whispered. “But were we spared?”
He looked at Roger Winship, haggard disheveled man, sunk in weary heart-crushed apathy. The scientist shook his white head, fantastic with the psychode still upon it. He made no reply.
Lundoon gripped his arm in sudden panic.
For the shining plain had heaved up before them. A rising cloud of cubes left a ragged pit. They clustered together to form, once more, a grotesque, gigantic manlike shape. It came toward them, still bound to the pit behind it. Standing before it, Winship adjusted the psychode, listened.
And Lundoon was suddenly absorbed by the expression on the face of the scientist. His despair and horror seemed to ebb away. A grim smile played for a moment across his lined features. And Winship shook his head.
The gigantic thing tramped nearer. Its great arms flailed threateningly. Colossal feet crushed down, almost catching the two men. And Roger Winship smiled again.
“Nothing doing, sweetheart,” he said softly.
He slipped off the helmet, and stood idly swinging it in his hand. The bewildered reporter caught his arm.
“Now what is it?” he asked.
Roger Winship made a cheerfully careless gesture at the appalling giant.
“It informs me that Venice is still alive,” he said. “Still in the ship that we saw imitated so expertly. And it will carry me back to the other Universe, to join her—if only I will disclose the inversion geodesics!
“It can do no harm to spill the geodesics, now, the entity argues, because our Universe is wiped out anyhow. And still it needs them, otherwise it is forever cut in twain. It is offering, therefore, to take us back to Venice, and to let us live out our natural lives there in the ship—if only we tell.
“If we don’t, torture for both of us—until we do.”
LUNDOON saw nothing to be so cheerful about. His throat was rough and dry, but finally a husky whisper came.
“Well—why not tell? If it can’t hurt—”
Wearily, Roger Winship smiled. “Mass doesn’t always mean quality. Among the largest brains ever weighed was that of a congenital idiot. The entity has set a very elaborate stage and produced a very impressive illusion—but there’s one obvious flaw.”
“Illusion?” gasped the reporter. “Flaw?”
“It is obvious,” said Roger Winship, “that we have not been returned to our own Universe. Therefore we have not seen Earth destroyed.”
“But we did—” began Lundoon.
“We thought we did. But we know that the entity is a master of matter. We have seen that its substance, at will, can be molded and transmuted into any form. More significant, we know, too, that the psychode, amplifying any thought, is a powerful adjunct to hypnotic suggestion.”
Lundoon glanced fearfully up at the threatening monster of cubes.
“But this is—was the Earth,” he insisted. “Mock-sun brought us back.”
“That’s the flaw,” said Winship. “The real Mock-sun knew the inversion geodesics. But the counterfeit that returned us was a part of the entity. And the entity doesn’t know them. Therefore, we weren’t brought back!”
Lundoon gasped, his head spinning. When he looked up at the darkening sky, he saw that its flame-veiled wonder had indeed grown curiously familiar. This world might very well be the opal planet where they had first landed.
He peered in bewildered apprehension at the fantastic giant. That, anyhow, was real, menacing. But suddenly the little blocks that formed it turned black, and began to fall apart. They clattered down, like shattering black glass, upon the plain.
And the plain itself was darkened. A circle of blackness ran out like a ripple, from where the monster fell. It expanded to the flat horizon. A shadow was cast upon the veil of flame above. The colored sparks of worlds were quenched in darkness. A dim purple twilight fell upon them, and Lundoon shivered to the chill of universal doom.
“It must be dying!” he whispered. “But why?”
A disc of battered metal came plunging out of that void of deepening purple, slowed itself, settled softly toward them.
“Kallent’s old machine!” cried Winship. “Or else the counterpart we saw!”
It landed beside them on the glassy, darkened plain. A valve opened in its rim. A familiar small globe of silver darted out, tapped against the helmet swinging from Winship’s hand. He put it on, lit the golden horseshoe, listened.
“If you are Mock-sun,” he said, “repeat the inversion geodesics. . . . Good! And where is Venice? . . . What has happened to the entity?” Consumed with wonder, the reporter studied Winship’s lean face. It went lax with amazement. It was suddenly bright with eagerness, then clouded with sorrow. Tears welled out of the weary eyes, ran down hollow cheeks.
THE purple dusk, meantime, grew deeper. As if, Lundoon thought, all light was being quenched from this Universe. He shivered to an increasing chill. The air seemed very thin; his lungs were laboring.
And something, he thought, was the matter with Mock-sun. Little irregular patches of darkness appeared and vanished on its bright silver. At last it sank, as if weary, upon the black pave.
Winship slowly looked away, toward the machine. Lundoon caught his arm, rapped out insistent questions.
“Yes, this is the real Mock-sun, who was in prison with Venice,” he said. “He has destroyed the entity—the being that was his brother. He did it with a subtle transformation of the space-warp, so that it is no longer an adequate medium for the other’s vital energy.
“Mock-sun had possessed the weapon for a long time. But they were brothers, alone together. Mock-sun, in a way that perhaps we can never understand, loved the other. He forgave it all its crimes—even his own imprisonment and torture.
“Mock-sun was near death, he says, when Venice was thrown into the same prison. She kept him alive with the heat radiated from her own body. They were together fifteen years. Mock-sun, it seems, came to feel something more than gratitude. For it was for her sake, at last, to insure the safety of the world she loved, that he killed the other being.”
In the thickening purple darkness, Winship looked down at the small globe lying at their feet. Larger patches of black were flickering across its silver.
“It is difficult to follow the emotions of an alien being,” Winship said. “But Mock-sun is ill—perishing. Not from any physical necessity, I think, but because his heart is broken by what he has done.”
A sharp, brittle snap drew Lundoon’s eyes to his feet. The silver sphere was gone. A minute naked body quivered, where it had been, and lay still. Wonderingly, they bent over it. At first it resembled the form of a tiny man. In a moment, however, it had crumbled to a pinch of gray dust.
Presently Winship got slowly and stiffly back to his feet.
“Come aboard,” he said. “The ship is uninjured. We can return to Earth.”
The rusted valve closed behind them. They came through the lock, into the machine. Winship stopped, with a soft cry of breathless joy, and then ran unsteadily forward.
For a woman had been waiting for him. Swaying to meet him, she looked thin and frail. Her hair was completely white. Her violet eyes were shadowed with the horror of her long exile, but happiness was a radiant light in them now.
