The Edmond Hamilton Megapack: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales (89 page)

The blue world shimmered in the light of the monstrous aurora, a perfect jewel, with no height of mountain nor roughness of natural growth to mar its symmetry. Its surface showed a gloss that made Ezra think of porcelain or the deep gleam of polished lapis.

“The Watchers made it long ago,” said Curt. “They made it out of the forces of the Birthplace and it was their outpost in this universe, where they studied the secrets of creation. There exists a city…”

The Comet sped low across the curving plain. For a time there was nothing but the blank expanse of blue—what was it, glass or rock or jewel-stone or some substance new in the universe? Above them the little suns with their planets wheeled and shone, laced about with the fire of comets, and above those again was the golden sky of the Birthplace. Curt’s face, bent forward toward the blue horizon, was intense and pale and somehow alien.

“There it is!” cried Otho, and Curt nodded. Ahead there were the tips of slender spires flashing in the light and a gleam and glow of faceted surfaces that made a web of radiance like the aura sometimes seen in dreams. The spires lifted into graceful height, shaped themselves into the form of a city.

Walls of the same translucent blue enclosed the towers and in the center, rising high above them all, there was a citadel, a cathedral-form as massive and as delicate as the castles that sometimes stand upon the tops of clouds on Earth. And it was dead, the blue and graceful city. The walls, the streets, the flying arches that spanned the upper levels of the towers, all were silent and deserted.

“Garrand’s ship,” said Curt and Ezra saw it on the plain before the city, an ugly dark intruder on this world that had not been made for men.

Curt set the Comet down beside it. There was air on this planet, for the Watchers had been oxygen-breathers even though they were not human. The lock of Garrand’s ship stood open but there was no life nor movement that Curt could see.

“It seems deserted,” he said, “but we’d better make sure.”

Ezra roused himself. He went out with the others and somehow the mere act of moving and the possibility of facing a human and comprehensible danger was a relief, almost a pleasure. He walked beside Curt with Otho beyond him. Their boots slipped and rang on the glassy surface. Apart from that there was no sound. The city brooded and was still.

They went through the open airlock into the other ship. There did not seem to be anything to fear, but they moved with the caution of long habit. Ezra found that he was waiting, hoping for action, for attack. He needed some escape valve for the terrors that had grown within him during this flight into the heart of the universe. But the narrow corridors were empty and nothing stirred behind the bulkhead doors.

Then, in the main cabin, they found a man.

He was sitting on the padded bench formed by the tops of the lockers along one wall. He did not move when they came in except to lift his head and look at them. He was a big man, of a breed that Ezra Gurney knew very well, having fought them all his life across the Solar System. But the hardness had go ne out of him now. The strong lines of his face had sagged and softened and his eyes held only hopelessness and fear. He had been drinking but he was not drunk.

“You’re too late,” he said. “Way too late.”

Curt went and stood before him. “You’re Herrick,” he said. “Are you alone?”

“Oh, yes,” said Herrick. “I’m alone. There were Sperry and Forbin but they’re dead now.” Herrick had not shaved for some time. The black stubble on his jaw was flecked with white. He ran his hand across it and his fingers trembled. “I wouldn’t be here now,” he said, “but I couldn’t run the whirls alone. I couldn’t take this ship clear back to Earth alone. I couldn’t do anything but sit and wait.”

Curt said, “Where’s Garrand?”

Herrick laughed. It was not pleasant laughter. “You know where he is. Go in and get him. Make him come out. That’s how Sperry and Forbin died, trying to make him. I don’t know why I’m alive myself. I don’t know if I want to be alive after what I’ve seen.”

HE GOT up. It was hard for him to rise, hard to stand. It was as though fear had eaten the bones away inside him, dissolved the strength from his muscles, leaving him only a hulk, a receptacle for terror. His eyes burned at them.

“You know me,” he said. “You know my kind. You can guess why I came with Garrand to get the secret of the Birthplace, what I was going to do with it afterward. I didn’t figure Garrand would get in my way. I needed his brains, all right, but there would come a time when I wouldn’t need them anymore.” He made a gesture, as of brushing away an insect with his hand. “As easy as that.” He began to laugh again and it was more weeping than laughter.

“Stop it!” said Curt and Herrick stopped quite obediently. He looked at Curt as though a thought had just come to him, creeping through the fear-webs that shrouded his brain.

“You can get me out of here,” he said. There was no threat in his voice, only pleading, the voice of a man caught in quicksand and crying for release. “It’s no use going after Garrand. He’ll die in there anyway. He won’t eat or sleep, he’s gone beyond those things, but whatever he thinks he is he’s human and he’ll die. Just go! Take me aboard your ship and go!”

“No,” said Curt.

Herrick sat down again on the bench. “No,” he whispered. “You wouldn’t. You’re as mad as he is.”

Simon said, “Curtis…”

He had remained in the shadowy background, listening, but now he came forward and spoke and Curt turned on him.

“No!” he said again. “I can’t go away and leave a madman there to play with the forces of the Birthplace till he dies!”

Simon was silent for a time and then he said slowly, “There is truth in what you say but only part of it. And I am sorry, Curtis—for I am no more proof against this madness than you. Even less, perhaps, than you.

“I shall stay out here with Grag to guard the ships and Herrick.” His lens-like eyes turned upon Ezra Gurney. “I think that you, of all of us, will resist the lure most strongly. You are like Herrick, a man of your hands—and Herrick, who came to steal the secret, felt only terror when he found it.”

He said no more but Ezra knew what he meant. Simon was giving Curt Newton into his hands to save him from some destruction which Ezra did not understand. There was a coldness around Ezra’s heart and a sickness in his belly and in his mind a great wish that he had never left Earth.

Curt said to Herrick, “Go to my ship and wait. When we leave you’ll go with us.” Herrick shook his head. His eyes lifted slowly to Curt Newton’s and dropped again. He said, “You’ll never leave.”

Ezra left the ship with Curt and Otho and he was sorry that Herrick had said those last three words.

They walked again across the ringing glassy plain, this time toward the city wall and the tall gateway that was in it. The leaves of the portal stood open and there was a look about them as though they had not been touched or closed for more ages than Ezra could think about. He and Otho passed through them, following Curt. Beyond, at a little distance, were two dark statues facing each other across the way. Ezra looked at them and caught his breath in sharply.

“The Watchers?” he whispered. “Where they like that? But what were they then?” Otho said, “They came from another universe. Simon thought they must have been liquescent from the formless structure of their bodies.”

Out of each amorphous figure stared two round yellow eyes, full of light from the glowing sky and uncannily lifelike. Ezra shuddered and hurried by, glancing as he did so at the strangely inscribed letters upon the bases of the statues. He assumed that that was the warning Curt had referred to and he did not want to enquire too closely into it.

“Go quietly,” Curt said. “Two men have already died here. We want to get as close to Garrand as we can before he kno ws we’re here.”

“Where is he?” demanded Ezra for the city was utterly dead and still. Curt pointed to the citadel.

“In there.”

They made their way as silently as they could along the blue translucent street. High above them the slender spires made soft bell-notes where the wind touched them and the crystal spans thrummed like muted harps. And the shimmering castle loomed close before them and the strange stars sparkled in the golden sky. Ezra Gurney was afraid.

There was a portal, tall and simply made, with an unknown symbol cut above it. They passed it, treading softly, and stood within a vast cathedral vault that soared upward until the tops of the walls were lost in a golden haze and Ezra realized that it was open to the sky.

The floor was of the same blue substance as the city and in the center of it, under the open vault, was a massive oblong block almost like a gigantic altar except that its top was set with hundreds of little, shining keys. Beside this block stood Garrand. He was not looking at it nor at the two men and the android who had entered. He was looking upward into that distant sky and through the opening Ezra could see the glittering of stars. Garrand was smiling.

Curt Newton walked out across the floor.

“Don’t came any closer,” said Garrand mildly. “Just where you are—that’s close enough.”

Curt stopped. Otho had begun to edge away along the curve of the wall very slowly, like a drifting shadow. Ezra stood a little behind Curt and to one side.

GARRAND turned toward them and for the first time Ezra saw his face quite clearly. Unshaven and deathly white, its cheeks and temples sunken with hunger and exhaustion, its eyes dark and burning, there was a beauty about it that had never been there before, something sublime and glorious and calm, as a sea is calm or a frozen river, with the potentials of destruction sleeping in it. And Ezra understood the danger that Simon had spoken of in regard to Curt. He understood now what the power that was here could do to a man.

“So, after all, you followed me,” Garrand said. “Well, it doesn’t matter now.” He stepped behind the block that was like an altar, so that it was between him and Curt.

Curt said quietly, “You must leave here, Garrand. You’ll have to leave some time, you know. You’re only human.”

‘“Am I?” Garrand laughed. His hand lightly caressed the bank of little shining keys. “Am I? I was once. I was a little physicist who thought adding to scientific knowledge supremely important and I stole and risked my life to come here for more knowledge.” His eyes lit up. “I came searching for a scientific secret and I found the source of godhead!”

“So now, because you’ve tampered with the Watcher’s powers and tapped the Birthplace, you’re a god?” Curt’s tone was ironic but Ezra could see the sweat standing out on his forehead.

Garrand took no offence. He was armored by an egocentric emotion so great that he merely smiled wearily and said, “You can go now—all of you. I dislike chattering. I dislike it so much that I will quite willingly call destruction in here to engulf you unless you go.”

His fingers had ceased straying, had come to rest on certain keys. Ezra Gurney felt a slow freezing of his flesh. He whispered hoarsely, “You’ll have to kill him, Curt.”

He knew the swiftness with which Newton could draw and fire the weapon at his belt. But Curt made no move.

“Can I fire into that bank of controls?” Curt muttered. “Otho’s speed is our only chance.”

He flung up his hand, his fingers crooked. He said loudly, “Garrand, I warn you—”

His gesture had been both a feint to draw attention, a signal. A signal that sent Otho lunging toward the oblong altar.

The phenomenal swiftness of the android, the reaction speed of nerves and muscles that were not human, made Otho’s movement almost blurring to the eye. But Garrand saw and with a low cry he pressed the keys.

To Ezra, in the next moment, the air around them seemed suddenly charged with power. The golden haze spun about him, darkened, thickened, all in a heartbeat. He felt the imminent materialization of an agency of destruction drawn from the great matrix of force about them.

He glimpsed through the thickening haze Otho pulling Garrand back from the altar. He saw Curt leaping in, his face desperate and raising the depressed keys.

And Ezra felt the half-materialized shadowy force around him melting back into nothingness. “What—” he stammered, still standing frozen.

“Death,” said Curt. “As to the form of it who knows but Garrand? Anyway, it’s over now.” His voice was unsteady and his hands shook on the keys. He looked down. Garrand had gone limp in Otho’s arms. Ezra thought at first that he was dead and then he saw the shallow breathing, the faint twitching of the mouth.

“Hunger and exhaustion,” said Curt. “Strain. He was already at the end of his rope. Get him back to the ship, Otho, and have Simon take care of him.”

Otho lifted the unconscious man without effort but he did not yet move away. “Aren’t you coming, Curt?”

“Not yet.” He glanced upward through the opening at the brilliant stars that swarmed where no stars ought to be. “I can’t leave this imbalance at the heart of the Birthplace. The Watchers were careful about that. They built their one small planet at the exact center of stress, where it wouldn’t upset anything. But those creations of Garrand’s—I don’t dare leave them here, Otho.”

Still Otho did not move and Curt said, “Go on, Otho. Garrand needs help.”

SLOWLY and reluctantly the android turned and as he did so he looked at Ezra, a look of warning, a pleading look. Then, he went out, carrying Garrand.