by Jerry
“And now I greet you! Hail, Master of All the World! All is yours, all the lands and seas of Earth. Descend now and enter into your kingdom.”
Harsh, unpleasant, with a note of mockery running through it all. It was disturbing, but Coyne had no time for speculation. For, in the floor, close by the pedestal, supporting the casket, a shutter was opening, rolling the dust aside, exposing a clear lens. Coyne forced himself to steadiness as he looked down at a section of Earth like a map.
He was above a great city aglow in the light of a setting sun. It glittered with clear opalescent tints; it was like a rainbow, crystallized, shattered, and the fragments scattered by some giant hand. There was shore line and an expanse of sea. An island slanted outward.
Coyne, snapping suddenly erect, shouted his understanding: “It’s New York! There’s the bay! That’s Long Island!” Then the sphere was dropping swiftly beneath him; land and sea were rushing upward to meet him as the shutter closed.
He was weightless; then he was heavy. The floor pressed upward as the swift fall checked. The sphere thudded lightly, then lay still.
The voice of Princeps Tahgor called loudly: “Open!”
In the curved wall a door slid smoothly aside.
Coyne stood spellbound. Outside was sunlight of late afternoon; a soft breath of air swirled in with all the scents of the good familiar world. Out there the world was waiting—his world. There would be throngs of people
Coyne, suddenly, was trembling in every fiber of his body.
III.
A WORLD was waiting—and, abruptly, ludicrously, Coyne realized his own nakedness. His clothes were only a mound of dusty fragments, but beside them stood a chest.
Its lid had been raised. Inside was a robe that seemed made of spun gold. It was woven metal, its threads as fine as softest silk. Sandals beneath it were a heavier weave of the same metal. There was a flask of water, hermetically sealed.
Coyne knocked off the top of the flask and drank. He found tablets in a vial marked, “Food Concentrates.” These helped. Then he slipped his arms into the robe and put the sandals on his feet. And after that, more than half dazed, walking like one in a dream, he stumbled toward the door—through it—out into the sunlight’s glare.
The light was blinding, but at last he saw a sloping ramp that led down to a broad plaza whose marble paving reached out to a curved balustrade. Broad steps led still farther down; and beyond all were towering masses, buildings of glass in strange colors and forms.
He was beholding marvels, yet he gave them no thought. People—men and women—that was what he wanted. The touch of human hands! But the broad plaza was empty, like some holy place, too sacred for the tread of men.
Was he held in such veneration as that?—Coyne asked silently; then slowly he walked down the broad ramp and made his way across the empty plaza until he stood at the balustrade. And then the silence that hung over all bored in upon him.
Silence! In all the world below him was no slightest sound. Swiftly his gaze swept the vast panorama.
Colors blurred before his light-blinded eyes, but he saw in bewildering, kaleidoscopic succession the sky-piercing structures: black obsidian, emerald, topaz, rose. Lacy, gossamer bridges swung between them in incredible spans; broad streets arched in successive elevations; and through all a maze of giant skeleton tubes, twenty feet in diameter, thrust abruptly from one building to the next or curved downward to vanish in the ground.
Coyne turned and looked back. Already the sun was blocked off by the great sphere lying at rest in a cradling frame. From this lower level he could see only the upper half of the sphere; the doorway was hidden. His eyes, searching, searching, followed down the terraces to the plaza where he stood. Seeing more clearly now, he noted the pavement’s unevenness, its blocks forced apart and tilted. Here and there one was raised almost on end. Vegetation shown green between the stones. Sharply Coyne swung back toward the city.
The green things were there, too—he saw them now—vines and creepers everywhere, growing from every nook and crevice, tearing the great structures apart, working their slow conquest that was bringing these marvels back to the dust. In one nearer building shaped into a great dome a crack had opened like a gaping wound. Here a giant oak had thrust its trunk; the tree must have been a hundred years in growing.
Destruction! Even as Coyne watched, a slender tower gave way at its base. Its sky-flung pinnacle swung outward in a slow arc. Then the whole mass crumpled and changed to a cataract of metal and stone. The roar of its falling beat about him; the impact, when it struck, was like a blast.
He was deafened. The silent city took the roar and tossed it back and forth through its vast canyons; it changed the sound to thunder that rolled and boomed—until the last reverberation faded and left silence more devastating than before.
“Dead!” Coyne’s lips were stiff, his voice only a hoarse whisper. “A dead city—in a dead world!”
Over the plaza the shadows of evening crept to reach on and out across the silence. The city took on strange lights. Bands of color, zigzags of white light glowing softly; a high dome seemed shimmering with flame.
Each towering structure grew luminous; each slender spire was a fairy wand. Coyne hardly sensed it. He stood unmoving while darkness deepened, and stars in the night sky pricked out their familiar patterns. Until at last his feet took him blindly across the plaza, up the ramp and back toward the sphere. With numbed hands he gathered his robe about him and entered only to freeze rigid as chaos and destruction met his eyes.
The casket—and Coyne knew the weight of it—had been flung clear across the room. Its pedestal of black onyx was a heap of fragments. The chest, on end, its cover hanging askew, was a battered wreck. And the dusty floor was littered with scores of objects previously unseen. The shock of it brought Coyne to himself. His stupor left him. Something had been there! Something—
Crackling thoughts, swiftly changed. Not some thing but some one! Some one tremendously strong—clever—seizing the crashing thunder of the tower to screen this attack.
Coyne shot one quick glance about the room—at the curved walls, the dome above, the floor. His eyes stopped there. He did not move. Only a quivering rippled through every nerve. He was looking at footprints in the dust.
Bare feet—they had been everywhere. The toes, splayed out, only accentuated a distortion of what were unmistakably man-made marks. Yet no human could have left prints like these—only some one twice the size of a man.
Coyne, suddenly, was leaping for the door. He threw his weight against it. He cursed savagely at the ponderous metal that refused to move. He was panting; his lungs seemed bursting with the violence of his efforts.
He stopped. In a strangled voice he said: “I can’t close it! I can’t——” Then, as if the words had brought the inanimate metal to life, the great door swung shut.
And Coyne? Only a moment before he had been stricken by overpowering loneliness. Now all that was changed.
He was alone—in a voice choked to a whisper he thanked God that he was alone. Like some primitive man seeking safety in a cave, he stood panting. The softly lighted room was a refuge; the closing door was a barrier between him and the night. And out there in the night, in a world weirdly beautiful, waited something—some one—for which he could not even imagine a name.
But he was safe. He could wait here——
Under his sandaled feet a fragment of glass crunched sharply. He looked down. The dust was wet where he stood; a few drops of water still glistened, all that remained of his scant supply. Near by was the battered chest, empty. The vial of food concentrates was nowhere to be seen.
Every cell in Coyne’s body seemed clamoring. He was faint—the glowing walls appeared whirling about him. He must have food. And water—above all things he must have water.
Wildly staring, he was abruptly straining his eyes against utter dark. The lines of light in the sphere had winked out.
IV.
WATER! Water! Wa
ter! Throughout the night the word rang in tormenting repetition through Coyne’s mind. His body, after its long sleep, seemed afire; the blood pounding through him was a hot stream. And, intensifying it, was the memory of something he had seen in the outer world: water, a shimmering sheet of it flowing over broken marble blocks.
It had rippled in the distance—but that had been in daylight. Now even his torturing thirst could not drive him out into that night.
High over his head was a single bull’s-eye through which shone a star. Slowly that one point of light moved from sight and others took its place. They passed in leisurely procession, but at last they faded and the whole bull’s-eye grew gray with morning light. Then Coyne stood before the door.
The door had moved when Tahgor’s voice had called: “Open!” And Coyne himself had unwittingly used the word “close.” Child’s play—still Coyne realized that whoever devised it might have been uncertain as to his own mental perceptions; they had made this simple for him.
Coyne had a metal bar in his hand. He weighed it and swung it through the air once; then he called: “Open!”
A moment later he was outside. The morning air was cool. Again, at a word, the door closed; then Coyne, heedless of danger, broke into a run. But the bar was in his hands as he raced down the ramp, across the plaza and on toward the water that rippled invitingly in the distance. Like a thirst-crazed animal at a desert water hole he flung himself face down at the edge of a pool.
After a time he stood up, a solitary figure in a robe woven of metals still unmined back in his own past. He looked about him at a great circular space a half mile across.
It was paved. Gardens and fountains and statuary had once made it beautiful. At its center, terraces rose tier on tier; the flight of steps he had come down was one of many cutting the marble terrace walls. Above them was the plaza, then the broad ramp leading still up. And on the apex of it all, topping this man-made hill, rested the great sphere.
It must once have been a hub of the city. Great avenues had radiated from it; now these were choked with debris. Rocks, shattered glassy blocks, steelwork like gaunt, twisted skeletons. And mingled through it all, covering it, was a blanket of vines and dead leaves and dust.
It would have been depressing, but through Coyne the thrill of this great adventure was tingling. He would explore it all later on. Now he must go in search of food—that was the first requisite—but he would stay within easy reach of the sphere. He swung his metal club to his shoulder. He was glancing about, listening alertly for any sound, as he headed toward the nearest of the great radiating ways.
He fought through the choked avenue among towering structures of iridescent hues. Their beauty was bewildering; their immensity almost overpowering. Who had built them? What had that race been like? He found the answer in a magnificent statue where the avenue widened.
It was the figure of a man in heroic proportions. He stood erect in an arrogant pose. His face, as the morning sun sent slanting rays down the great canyon, seemed alive. A cruel face, thin-lipped and rather gaunt. The eyes slanted with a reminder of the orient. The head bulged into a hairless dome. Colors had been forced into the stone; the head was yellow and the face was the same.
Some master craftsman had carved that face. He had caught every subtle expression; he had shown there the soul of the man. And he had depicted a man as cold, as heartless, and as unfeeling as the stone itself.
Coyne shivered, so strong was the repulsion that he felt. Then he moved closer to read a name, deeply carved. “Princeps Tahgor,” the lettering said. Then the declaration: “I rule.”
Coyne turned away. So this was what the last great race had been. This was the man who had mocked him, knowing that for the sleeper there could be only a horrible awakening. Bitter thoughts—they ended abruptly. Between Coyne and the nearest building came a burst like an exploding shell.
The air shrieked with whistling fragments. One struck Coyne’s chest and knocked him to the pavement. He saw the fragment rebound. It was glass. It would have torn him in two but for the protection of his metal robe.
From where he lay he saw another mass descending. Back of it still others curved out in glinting arcs. They were coming from one of the slender bridges high overhead. Coyne sprang to his feet and ran. His explorations were at an end; all he asked now was the safety of the sphere.
Behind him, as he struggled over the littered street, was an endless succession of bursts. Twice he glanced back and saw the deadly rain of glass. Each one of the countless bridges above him was a fort from which the missiles were thrown.
He knew at last that he was being driven—no bursts blocked the way ahead—but what it was that drove him was unseen. There was only this incessant roar of exploding glass and himself, a human, driven on and on.
Crossing the big open space at last, he shot one look over his shoulder. Still the pavement was empty. His lungs were laboring painfully as his tired muscles dragged him toward the doorway of the sphere—a doorway he never entered.
The walls of the sphere were thick; the entrance recessed. Still fifty feet away, he knew that something waited there in the shadow. In one great bound it leaped out into the light.
A woman—a giant, savage woman—that was his first thought. In the same instant he knew the folly of it. It was no woman; it was nothing human. It was only a great she beast in human form that stood facing him.
It would have been ten feet in height if it had straightened, but it was half crouched, ready to spring. Naked, but for the scant covering of a wolf pelt about the big hips, its skin was a blotched mingling of yellow and brown. Its head was small and sunk between the shoulders. The thing was all body and bulging, sweaty muscles.
Coyne got it all in that one instant: the little wicked eyes, the straggling locks of hair about a round flat face. He sensed the beastliness of it; for a moment he even grasped dimly the idea of brutes like this being bred by men like Tahgor, bred for muscle and brute strength. Then in the flat face thick lips opened to show toothless gums, and, from the mouth, sound came to shatter Coyne’s certainty of the thing’s inhumanness. For it spoke human words in one hideous, snarling cry.
“Mine!” it shrieked. “Mine! Zeeten!”
From the silent city came a blood-chilling chorus in reply—but the word was different. “Kill!”—the dead walls echoed it and made it a bedlam of sound. “Kill! Kill!”
One look over Coyne’s shoulder showed the pavement suddenly swarming. She beasts, great hideous things like this that he faced, they came in a surging wave from the city. But between him and the safety of the sphere was only this one. Coyne, throwing himself forward in one mad rush, swung the bar over and down.
It was wrenched from his hands before it struck, torn from him with a force that paralyzed his arms. Great hands gripped about his throat. He felt no pain, only an unbearable pressure as blackness closed in.
The cry of the oncoming pack grew faint. “Kill! Kill!” Then even that was gone.
V.
SLOWLY consciousness came back to Coyne. Before he opened his eyes, before even he remembered, he was aware of little stabs of pain, stinging pains. They jabbed into his chest and legs; his whole body seemed attacked by little stabbing things. He moved restlessly, and at that the darts of pain ceased.
A moment’s peace, then they came again; but by now he was awake. He knew that he was lying on a hard floor and that his body was bare where his metal robe had been pulled aside. Stab—stab! The little pricking pains were back; a chattering of voices was in his ears. Without moving he raised his eyelids enough to admit a thread of light.
Violet light, everywhere. The walls glowed with it; the air itself seemed tinted with it. At first he saw nothing else; then, swarming about him, were little wizened men.
Man-things that were not men! Dwarfs! They ran on noiseless feet; their clawed hands snatched at him, their sharp nails biting his skin. Blood trickled in hot lines. Like poisonous insects they darted in through the violet haze,
stung and glided away. Suddenly Coyne jerked his legs under him and scrambled to his feet.
Screaming in shrill terror the tormentors fled. They huddled against a glassy wall like little hairless apes. After that first shrillness they fell silent, staring at Coyne from fearful eyes.
Their skins were mottled like the big she brute’s; there were fifty of them, perhaps. Coyne passed them by with only a glance. His whole mind was clamoring for understanding.
That big she beast had not killed him; she must have saved him instead. Why? And had the whole world been overrun with these halfhuman things? Could he escape? Where could he go if he did escape?
A thousand questions, and no answer for any. His gaze swept on about the room.
It was long and narrow. Walls of glass formed the sides—glass cast apparently in one piece and glowing throughout with the violet light. The room was a cell; one of many, perhaps, in a great prison. The front of it was a grillwork of bronze.
He was near the front. Through the grillwork he could see in a vast, violet-lighted room rows of machines. Wheels turned silently. Big female figures attended them, moving like ugly demons through the violet haze. And on the floor, swarming like vermin, were the young of this hideous race, utterly repulsive in their resemblance to humankind.
Coyne drew a long breath as he turned away. The air had been vile; now it almost nauseated him with the stench of putrid flesh, and, for the first time, he saw that the floor was littered with strange debris as if destructive children had torn toy animals to bits. He picked his way over feathers and clumps of fur as he moved down the room.
By now the stench seemed overpowering, coming in almost visible waves from the floor. And now bits of flesh and entrails among the litter gave mute evidence that these were no lifeless toys that had been destroyed. Understanding came to