News From Elsewhere (21 page)

The Frenchman wore the look of one who wished mightily to be in two places at once.

After a final checkover, the rest of the expedition climbed aboard the monowheel, with Commander Thrace taking the control stick. As they set off toward the pyramid, they saw Professor Frontenac kneel down and put his head close to the sand. He was trying to see how his pet “boulder” managed to move.

The desert was, for the most part, surprisingly smooth, and the journey to the pyramid took barely ten minutes. On the way they passed several small varieties of plant and one curious patch of tall grass that contrived to strike with whiplike force at the monowheel as it went by. They also passed several of the “boulder” creatures, which Professor Thompson temporarily called Frontenac’s Friends.

As they neared the base of the great pyramid, their sense of excitement became so intense that it seemed to fuse into an unnatural calm. They were drunk with wonder. They felt like sleepwalkers who were yet wide awake.

The structure not only dominated the landscape; it seemed to reach the very zenith of the sky. Compared to this, the pyramids of Egypt were as the toys of a child.

First of all they drove slowly around the whole edifice 
in the monowheel, just gazing at it, unable to find either adequate comment or adequate explanation. It seemed quite beyond explanation—beyond possibility even. Yet there it stood: the greatest monument ever presented to the sight of man.

Its face appeared to be constructed of layer upon layer of a kind of black basalt, each single slab of which, though worn perhaps by sandstorm and blizzard, was still flawless in its dimensions. The layers rose inward like a triangulated giant’s stairway, reaching toward the shimmering apex that was itself a steppingstone to the sky.

But in the center of each of the massive steps, there was a shiny whitish slab veined with gold and crimson and green and silver—iridescent as a crystal mirror, more beautiful than any known marble of Earth.

The first of these slabs, like the layer of. basalt in which it was set, lay half-covered by the dull red Martian sand. The four men climbed out of the monowheel and gazed at it; and as they did so, the slab immediately above swung noiselessly back, revealing a faintly luminous passage. Out of this a long, light metal gangway extended itself with equal silence, its protruding end being lowered slowly to the level of the sand more than two meters below.

The end of the gangway came to rest almost at Colonel Krenin’s feet.

“By all the saints!” murmured Professor Thompson hoarsely. “It knows we’re here!”

Commander Thrace was the first to recover himself. “Photo-electric equipment,” he suggested helpfully. “Or maybe vibration sensors.”

“The point is,” said the Colonel, “do we accept the invitation or not?”

Dr. Chee smiled. “At least it has been put to us very gracefully.”

“It could be some kind of trap,” remarked Commander Thrace.

Krenin frowned. “Too elaborate. We could have been dealt with more efficiently and economically.”

Professor Thompson smiled. “Will you walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.”

“Some parlor,” said Thrace.

“It could be an intelligent spider,” retorted the Englishman.

Dr. Chee raised his eyebrows slightly. “One can hardly appreciate the psychology of a race capable of constructing pyramids to trap space travelers,” he ventured dryly.

Colonel Krenin became practical. “Two of us will accept the invitation,” he said, “and two will remain here.”

“We’ll draw lots,” said the Commander. He took four cigarettes from his pack, tore the filter tips from two of them and put them behind his back. When he displayed his hand once more, four smooth cigarette ends were showing. “The two short ones stay.”

Colonel Krenin drew first and got a full cigarette. Both Thompson and Chee drew short ones.

“We will limit ourselves to a maximum of one hour,” said the Colonel. “We will make radio contact only in an emergency. On no account are you to follow.” He tested the gangway with his foot.

“Good luck,” said Professor Thompson.

“You already have too much of it,” grumbled Dr. Chee.

With Krenin leading, the two men went cautiously up the gangway. At the top they turned to look at their companions for a moment, then entered the passage.

The inside walls were faced with the same kind of stone as the slab that had swung back to reveal the entrance. It glowed greenly, providing a pleasant and restful light by which the two men were able to see their way ahead. After a brief hesitation they walked forward.

The passage proceeded in a straight line, sloping slightly downwards, and looked as if it must lead to the center of the pyramid’s base. If that were so, Krenin and Thrace were in for quite a long walk.

At first they advanced slowly and in silence as if they half expected a pit to open suddenly at their feet, or some other equally noxious trick. But there were no tricks, and after a few minutes they gained enough confidence to walk forward at a brisk pace. After a time, they turned around and looked back. The opening was still visible as a tiny point of light, but it already seemed several kilometers away.

“The plot thickens,” said Commander Thrace softly to himself in English.

“I beg your pardon?” said Colonel Krenin in Lingua Franca.

“Sorry. The situation is absolutely baffling.”

“Not absolutely,” remarked Krenin with a thin smile. “There is much to indicate order, intelligence, and purpose.”

Suddenly Thrace grabbed his companion’s arm and pointed to the wall just ahead. A rectangular slab of black stone had been let into it, and on the stone a diagram had been engraved.

It was a symbolic, representation of the solar system. All the planets but two were shown simply as circles on lines indicating their orbital paths. But the third planet, Earth, was represented by a brilliant green stone; and the fourth planet, Mars, by an even more brilliant red one.

Krenin and Thrace were more than amazed: they were dumbfounded.

After a few moments, Commander Thrace broke the spell. “We’d better press on,” he said. “We have only forty-five minutes left, and I have a feeling there are more and bigger surprises waiting for us.”

He was right.

After a few more steps they discovered another black slab let into the opposite wall. This one showed the symbols for an atom of hydrogen, one of oxygen, and one of carbon. The two men stared at it in silence and then passed on. Words seemed totally inadequate.

The next slab they encountered showed what seemed to be a representation of a simple protein molecule. After that came what looked like the molecular pattern of deoxyribonucleic acid. And after that came the greatest shock of all.

There were two parallel slabs, one on each side of the passage. They showed with brilliant anatomical detail two human beings—a man and a woman. Both were represented, however, without any hair.

“I will now believe anything,” said Commander Thrace in a shaky voice. “Anything at all.”

“Then—then man is not a unique product of Earth!” exclaimed the Colonel. “Or perhaps . . .” The thought was too fantastic to be expressed.

With an effort, Thrace managed to rouse himself from the subtle state of hypnosis into which the diagrams seemed to be drawing him. “We ought to keep moving,” he said reluctantly.

Krenin glanced at his own wristwatch and sighed.

“There is so much—so much to observe, to consider.”

They continued on their way along the greenly glowing passage, feeling like children trapped in a mysterious dream world that was somehow confused with reality. Presently they came to a sharp turn in the passage, and as they negotiated it they were presented with the most fantastic sight of all.

Suddenly they found themselves in a vault large enough to contain any of the great cathedrals of Earth. It was suffused with the same green glow as the passage, but deeper now, so that for— a moment the two men felt as if they were walking across the floor of a great subterranean ocean.

Then the oceanic feeling gave way to lofty revelation—a feeling of infinite space and infinite beauty. It was as if they were engulfed by a cloud of soundless music blown all about them by dark draughts of light.

For a bright suspended moment, the two men felt as if they were dying.
And
then as if they were instantly reborn.

The walls of the vault were alive with solid pictures, fading and merging and blooming in a magnificent visual symphony. Here, for a moment, they glimpsed in all its awful grandeur the birth of the solar system. The fiery wisps of planets were flung out from a ravaged solar womb, out into the dark immensities of space. The wisps condensed into burning droplets, the droplets into solid spheres. And then the vision dissolved into a pattern of lifeless oceans, of monstrous volcanoes and blinding rivers of rock, of explosion and cataclysm and deluge, of floating continental islands and desperate aeons of scalding rain.

Again the patterned pictures changed. . . .

They peered deep into the heart of the angry seas, witnessing the emergence of life itself. They saw the life and death of a myriad lowly creatures, the fantastic centuries of slaughter caused by the receding waters, the inevitable, blind, courageous conquest of the land.

They saw forest and desert, ice cap and tundra. They saw the great reptiles locked in titanic combat through their flickering sovereignty. They glimpsed monstrous leathery wings that seemed to sprout brilliant features in a single moment, transforming saw-toothed killers into veritable birds of paradise. They saw shaggy and ravenous beasts of the trees miraculously walking upright, seeking 
the tools and tribal unity that would lift their restless minds above and beyond the hungry, all-consuming darkness of prehistory.

They saw the birth of civilization, cities blossoming like strange stone flowers on plains and in valleys. They saw death and discovery, warfare and worship, plague, fire, flood, and famine. They witnessed the endless conflict of man against nature, the vital tragedy of man against man. The age of glory and the age of machines. And also the age of destruction, when darkness fell from the air. . ..

Then suddenly the walls of the vault clouded and became clear. The visual saga of creation dissolved into the depths of a green eternity.

And then there was a voice. The voice came from nowhere and yet it was everywhere, rolling through the vault like thunder, whispering like the wind through summer grass. It was neither the voice of a man nor that of a woman. It was simply a voice.

“To the living of the third planet from the dead of the fourth planet, greetings,”
said the voice.
“To the star children from the star children, greetings.

“This, our salute to you, bridges fifty thousand planetary journeys round the star that is our sun. But let these words be to you more than the echo of distant ghosts, for there is that which binds the third and fourth planets inseparably
.

“In the pyramids we have built we bequeath to you the only possible gift—the story of our race. Once we of the fourth planet lived on a green and pleasant world. We were a race of leisure and wealth and power, having tamed for our needs the energies of the elements and the fantastic energies of the sun. We have even probed the secrets of life itself, so that immortality was ours. But you have seen the ultimate achievement of our greatness: it is nothing more than the barren desert and the pyramids in which our memory yet endures.

“It is true that we gained immortality; but the price we paid was too high, for in the end we became almost totally sterile. It is true also that we had at our command unlimited physical power. But our spiritual power was unequal to the challenge; and in quarrel over philosophies whose very defense by force indicated their weakness, we succeeded eventually in destroying both our race and the living richness of our planetary home. We had conquered the forces of nature, but we were defeated by the forces in our own hearts.

“Before all was lost, however, and in a brief period of sanity, we gathered together the few young and fertile people remaining to us. Determining that our race should not perish entirely in vain, we built transports to bridge the gap between the planets. And then our most precious possessions—our children—were carried to your world, their minds cleansed of the bleak wisdom and sophistication that had been our downfall.

‘‘There, in the forests of the third planet, we left them to endure all the slow anguish and adventure of a new spiritual and physical development in a new unsullied world.

“You who hear these words are their and our descendants. You have made yourselves the masters of unlimited physical power once more. We pray that, this time, your racial spirit, reforged in the fires of evolution, will prove equal to the challenge.

“We pray, also, that you will take this, the fourth planet, and in harmony of effort and unity of purpose, use your skills and energies to restore to it the green fertility that flourished long ago. You are truly our children and our future. .
. .
Welcome Home.”

There was silence and stillness. The two men looked at each other. The thoughts and feelings that possessed them were far beyond the scope of words. Presently they knelt down for a few moments as if the vault itself had become a temple, as if their quiet thanksgiving would somehow be heard. Then at last they turned back to the passage, slowly retracing their steps. . . .