Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  To take the final steps, to realize the dream that had brought these men together, called for one last synthesis of the knowledge locked in their separate brains. But the wall was between them now.

  The wall—and worse. Millard had seen the animal suspicion in their eyes, and he knew as he looked about the room that it was in his as well. He too was looking for the murderer.

  PELL HAD been the synthetist and leader among them, the only man who knew almost as much as all of them, and might have guided them, struck dumb as they were. So he was dead. Someone else’s thoughts, recoiling from the wall, had taken the same path to an explanation that Millard’s persisted in going. And had gone further, to a conclusion Millard would never make. Someone’s loyalty was no longer to the tower, but to the force, personified as will, that seemed to forbid the dream of the tower.

  He knew these men so well—Novinski the best, perhaps, since their fields, electronics and communications, interlocked so closely; and McLeod of old, from days before war and change—they two, Millard was sure, were the only ones with enough knowledge of psychology to appreciate the preposterousness of the wall . . . He knew them, but he could not guess which of them would be most likely to create a demon and sacrifice to it in blood.

  That question had to be answered first, though. In its terrible immediacy, it had already done enough to impede solution of the other, ultimately greater problem. The hopes he had built on these four were idle now.

  Before questions could be asked, let alone answered, there had to be communication, however makeshift. The makeshift had already occurred to him, driving across the dark desert—his recognition of star patterns was a valuable indication.

  He turned round once more, slowly, summoning each of them with a long look, trying to compel them with a gesture; and answering their distrust by pointing to the typewriter on the desk, amid the strewn papers.

  They came, creeping hesitantly from their corners, shrinking from one another as wild beasts shrink from nearness. A word would been an uncouth explosion of sound to bring down an avalanche.

  Standing well back so they could all see, Millard laid a hand on the keyboard. With deliberate care he struck three keys that clacked loudly on the bare black roller, startling as shots.

  W . . . h . . . y . . .

  He looked, and saw the dawn of understanding and hope in all their faces—even the murderer’s.

  The word was a ray of light into their darkness, a touch of warmth in their dread isolation. They understood, each out of his own imprisoned gropings for an answer, that Why? meant everything—the wall, its relation to the tower and the dead chief.

  Millard stepped back, crooking a curt finger. The group shifted with a wary shuffling, and Novinski stood before the typewriter. He stared at the keyboard through thick, impassive lenses, and his tapering index finger moved slowly, picking out letters as they watched.

  Russia.

  Millard restrained himself from any gesture. But with the corner of his eye, he saw another make the movement he had almost begun—a faint disbelieving headshake. Suddenly he felt a near certainty, and his muscles tensed with readiness.

  Weidemann fanned blunt fingers over the keyboard; briskly he depressed the shift and struck the leftmost key in the top row. Quotation mark. Ditto.

  Two of them, then, had made the humanly almost inevitable animistic assumption, and had equated the force, the someone, to a single well-worn symbol for all that moves formidably behind the veil. That, for them, was the end of thought. The symbol stood up, grimacing, threatening, barring the way . . . Novinski, at least, with his electronic creations that aped the organic brain, should recognize the unlikelihood of a human science beyond science that could have done this thing. But in Novinski’s mind there was probably a queer inverted residue of old-country nationalism, brought to the surface by psychic turmoil. The impact of the unknown had roused the oldest, least reasonable strata in all their minds—including the one who had killed.

  Carlsen frowned down at the machine, nervously stroking his chin. Then with tight precision he tapped out: Radiation leak.

  That was better—a good down-to-earth hypothesis, at home in an ordered mechanistic universe. Only—it was no more than a lame guess, acknowledged as such by the physicist’s hesitation. Carlsen, a wizard with popping nuclei and all manner of subtle particles, was a layman when it came to estimating the effect of his playthings on the human body and brain. Millard, who knew much less about the one field and a little more about the other, could not imagine a fortuitous energy escape with such a devastatingly specific effect. Atomic forces may sear and kill, but not tamper delicately with the mind.

  THEN MILLARD was bracing himself to meet the crisis, for McLeod was stooping over the typewriter. The tall astronomer’s eyes met Millard’s for a moment, blue and blank of apparent emotion. His hands, veined, lean, and strong, began writing rapidly, while the watcher strained to follow the pattern of keys and words.

  And they said, Let us built us a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven . . .

  Someone made a choked sound, and McLeod straightened up. That was enough, a confession of faith and murder.

  The pale blue eyes still held a curious look of placidity. The prophecy was fulfilled, the fanatic victorious, and the man was resigned . . . That was what fooled Millard. He barely jerked his head away from the full force of the blow that even so jarred him, sent him reeling back with the light blinking before his eyes.

  He heard hoarse wordless shouts, the crash of a chair knocked over, and came to himself leaning against the wall to see the side door flung open on the night.

  The others’ faces swirled round him, no longer cataleptically frozen, alive now with shock and alarm. Novinski dabbed at a blackening eye.

  Millard roared futilely, “Come on!” and dived out into the darkness.

  They followed him in a stumbling run, feet sinking into the loose soil of bulldozer-stripped desert. An orange moon was just rising, and ahead the skeleton tower was faintly silhouetted. By the same ghost of light they saw McLeod, stopped by the inner fence, fumbling with the gate; he heard them, gave up the lock and started to scramble upward, clinging to the wire.

  Millard leaped and caught him round the waist; the astronomer twisted, striking, and fell, and then the rest were on him.

  “Tie him!” panted Millard, then realized that no one could understand. He whipped off his belt and twisted it round the captive’s wrists behind his back.

  The madness seemed to have gone out of McLeod. He went tamely in their midst, back to the office-building. But none of them relaxed until they had lashed him to a chair with a second belt.

  The room was loud with men’s breathing. None of them spoke, for the wall was there, and revulsion before the grotesquerie of sound without sense. They looked at each other, and they looked to Millard.

  Millard stood, shoulders slumped in reaction from the fierce excitement of the moments just past. He felt Carlsen’s Novinski’s, Weidemann’s eyes on him, and knew that, free now from fear of each other, they would follow his leadership and finish their work, wall or no wall.

  Knew too that with only the four of them there could be no victory. A part was missing—McLeods part, that of the scout who knows the country beyond the frontier and blazes the trail for the pioneer people to follow.

  Millard faced the bound man, motioning the others away. McLeod sat rigid in the chair, and his eyes held new glints of fire.

  The typewriter was on the desk beside Millard; he didn’t touch it. That flimsy expedient would be worse than useless here. The only hope he could think of was crazy—as crazy as anything that had happened tonight.

  Slowly he drew a chair up to the desk and sat down in it. Forcing his actions to be natural and deliberate, he made the motion of picking something up from the desktop. An invisible deck of cards. He ruffled through them with a practised play of fingers, cut them and shuffled again, and all the time his eyes held McLeod’s burning gaze, and both
of them ignored the stares and interchange of glances among the other three in the room.

  MILLARD cut his nonexistent pack again, mimicked the action of sliding a few cards off the top and laying the rest aside. Five cards—he fanned them in his hand and sat gazing at thin air in faintly frowning concentration. For moments at a time his passionately inspired acting almost hypnotized him, recreating for him, as it must for McLeod, the long-past sessions whose every gesture Millard was reproducing in pantomime.

  In those dream-distant college days, he—the student, and McLeod the young instructor—had been considered one of the best teams that had taken part in those queer fumbling experiments, which at the same time evoked old superstitions and broached a scientific frontier perhaps an important as the tower. One of the few things they ever made sure of was that certain subjects worked well together; certain minds, similar of structure perhaps, seemed less isolated one from another than the great multitude . . . . But time works changes in brains as in bodies—time and events. McLeod’s mind then had not been a murderer’s. How many years ago? . . .

  Sternly Millard repressed his thoughts wandering. Eyes fixed on imaginary cards, he concentrated furiously on one thought—an image—a message. It swelled in his head to a silent shout.

  In front of him he saw McLeod’s eyes droop tiredly shut. The other was playing the game, as they had played it when it was more a game than anything else. Millard allowed himself to hope, then, and relaxed a little; and it seemed to him that something came back, an echo from great distance, through abandoned halls of space and time.

  Contact, so tenuous and wavering that it might well be autosuggestive illusion. Flitting pictures, impossible to say to which man’s memory they belonged: flashes from the past they had known together, before the dividing of ways.

  The contact seemed to broaden and deepen with that exchange. It was a conversation without real words, a mingled flow of ideas fed by the springs of two minds at once. And it was a battle.

  Remember the tower!

  There are more important things.

  You are a scientist.

  I am a man.

  Men made the tower. We don’t know who made the wall, or why.

  I know. You know.

  Two ghostly tides, lapping toward one another on a perfectly flat and illimitable beach. Receding, advancing, interpenetrating, but never touching.

  If there is a will behind this thing—

  There is.

  Then the will is that of a jealous enemy of mankind. Why should we yield?

  That is a matter of wisdom beyond our grasp.

  If an allpowerful wisdom has resolved to keep us earthbound, then we will jail whatever we do, whatever you do. Perhaps all this really happened before, in some half-remembered cycle of time, and ended in man’s failure. But man is so made that he must try and die trying if need be. Else why is he given a soul that longs for the stars?

  A cold wind of doubt blew over the pale flood and lashed it into waves and foam. When a coherent answer came, it was sullen.

  Man alone is the author of contradictions. We have rebelled—and I have repented.

  Millard was aware that, attacking on the other’s terms, he had touched a hidden weakness. He pressed the advantage home.

  You too are a man, and you have looked toward the stars, and you know that the spark within us is akin to those far lights. That we must strive toward them in obedience to the voice of our deepest being, as long as there shall be men. Whether we are wise or foolish, whether we are to rule the Universe or fail and perish as rebels, we are what we are. And you are not otherwise, you too are of Earth. You too must help fight the fight of our kind.

  It was the proper appeal. There could be no doubt and no deception . . . It was not pleasant, sharing the confusion of a sick mind, the stabbing doubt and gnawing regret. Sweat pearled on Millard’s forehead, for all that was in him too. But he had a sense that the others in the room had understood at last, that their will was with him, strengthening him in the intangible struggle.

  At the right moment he thought quietly:

  Perhaps we aren’t destined to fail forever. Remember what is written besides: “My spirit shall not always strive with man . . .”

  On the other side—or in his own brain?—a queer peace of surrender.

  So much is true, that what must be will be, in the nature of man also. Let us go to the tower.

  IN THE sunken shelter they crouched with their backs to the wall while the switch was thrown. The earth shook softly under the recoil of tremendous forces, and even here, under soil and rock and concrete, the air was filled with sound so great that it was only a pressure on the eardrums. The periscopes set in the wall over their heads sent out each one a shaft of light that impinged on the opposite wall in a sharp spot of eye-searingly brilliant blue.

  As the light died swiftly away, Millard was the first to gain his feet and look through a series of mirrors at the night outside.

  The moonlight warred with a blue blow that hung over the surface of the ground, a dimming but still deadly phosphorescence of atomic decay. And a red heat-shimmer of incandescence rose from the pit where the tower had been. The tower was gone, of course, vaporized. And the thing it had held in its base was gone too, had receded to a star and vanished before it was safe to look.

  Still gazing into the periscope, Millard felt inside his skull that the wall ceased to be.

  Slowly he turned to face the others. “Well, we did it,” he said, and watched with a keen joy their reaction, the small instinctive play of facial muscles that meant they understood, then the large delight as they realized the significance of their understanding.

  They had done it, each his task under the weight of silence—even McLeod, waxen-faced, moving like a man in a dream, as he was moving now—

  Millard’s throat contracted, cried hoarsely over the beginning babble of new-found voices, “Stop!” And he lunged across the bunker, too late.

  They heard the clang of armored doors that led to the outside. When they would have followed anyway, Millard shook his head soberly, waved them back. Through the periscopes they saw a black figure walk into the blue glow, stumble, recover, and go on a little way . . .

  Carlsen cleared his throat. “Right idea, maybe . . . done the same myself . . .”

  “Too bad. He was a good man,” said Novinski.

  Millard was silent. In his head was something that might have been an echo of the last thought of that other mind as it sank into darkness—or perhaps only the recrudescence of a memory:

  This they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

  STRANGE EXODUS

  Gigantic, mindless, the Monsters had come out of interstellar space to devour Earth. They gnawed at her soil, drank deep of her seas. Where, on this gutted cosmic carcass, could humanity flee?

  WESTOVER GOT A SHOCK when he stumbled onto the monster, for all that he knew one had been through here.

  He had been following the high ground toward the hills, alternately splashing through waist-deep water and climbing onto comparatively dry knolls. To right and left of him was the sullen noise of the river in flood, and behind him, too, the rising water he had barely escaped. The night was overcast, the moon a faint disk of glow that left river and hills and even the mud underfoot invisible.

  He had not sought in his mind for the flood’s cause, but had merely taken it numbly as part of the fury and confusion of a world in ruin. Anyway, he was dead tired, out on his feet.

  He sensed more than saw the looming wall before him, but he thought it the bare ledge-rock of a stripped hillside until he stepped into a small pot-hole and lurched forward, and his outflung hands sank into the slime that covered a surface faintly, horrifyingly resilient.

  He recoiled as if seared, and retreated, slithering in the muck. For moments his mind was full of dark formless panic; then he took a firm hold on himself and tried to comprehend the situation.

&
nbsp; Nothing was distinguishable beyond a few yards, but his mind’s eye could see the rest—the immense slug-like shape that extended in ponderous repose across the river valley, its head and tail spilling over the hills on either side, five miles apart. The beast was quiescent until morning—sleeping, if such things slept.

  And that explained the flood; the monster’s body had formed an unbreakable dam behind which the river had been steadily piling up in those first hours of night; if it did not move until dawn, the level would be far higher then.

  Westover stood motionless in the blackness: how long, he did not know. He was hardly aware of the water that covered his feet, crept over his ankles, and swirled halfway to his knees. Only the emergence of the moon through a rift of the cloud blanket brought him awake; its dim light gleamed all around on a great sheet of water, unbroken save for scattered black hummocks—crests of knolls like that on which he stood, all soon to be hidden by the rising flood.

  For a moment he knew despair. The way back was impassable, and the way ahead was blocked by the titanic enemy.

  Then the impersonal will that had driven him implacably two days and nights without stopping came to his rescue. Westover plodded forward, pressed his shrinking body against the slimy, faintly warm surface of the monster’s foot, and sought above him with upstretched hands—found holds, and began to climb with a strength he had not known was left in him.

  The moonlight’s fading again was merciful as he climbed the sheer, slippery face of the foot; but he could hear the wash and chuckle of the flood below. His tired brain told him treacherously: “I’m already asleep—this is a nightmare.” Once, listening to that insidious voice, he slipped and for instants hung dizzily by his hands, and for some minutes after Ire had found a new foothold merely clung panting with pounding heart.