by Jerry
CONRAD explained; he told about the City of Shiva, and about the Upinshads, the philosophers who had been driven into the caves; about the Kshatriya.
“It’s time now; they’re going to strike,” the woman beside Risha said in her calm serene way. And Risha answered. “Yes. This is the Time of Shiva.”
Koehler started to speak, stood silently gazing skyward. There was a tremendous streaming blue fire, then a wave of wind. Far down the valley was audible the repercusions of great explosions. A blast of boiling air swept them. The great pines bent low, snapped back, quivering.
“This is madness,” yelled Koehler. He shook his fists at the rising mushrooms of fire. “They’re planning to conquer the Universe?” He threw back his head and laughed wildly. “The Universe! A few hundred ships manned by a bunch of crackpots who—” He stopped laughing, stared at Conrad. His voice dropped to a whisper.
“But they can, can’t they? They’re human; they can go on and on once they get started. What can stop them? What? I hate myself because I’m human too. They’ll go on destroying, tearing everything out of their way until—” his voice died.
A buried ache in Conrad’s head shot out burning sparks. A small musical voice, trembling like shattered glass, said: “They will destroy.”
“Destruction. Destruction, forever.” Risha put an arm about the woman. Conrad heard him say. “If we’d only a little more time, Madge. We’re at the gate.”
Another tremendous explosion shook the world. A gigantic flash shone like a new sun across the sky; the whole country was lighted by a searing brilliance, like the strange glowing of a new and deadly aurora borealis, golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue, rising through intensities of heat into the X-ray part of the spectrum, into invisibility. The darkness of the forest became pits of flashing light; every distant peak and crevasse and ridge assumed a horrible clarity and beauty.
A few seconds later came the air blasts pressing hard, followed by howling roaring sound. A wind of hurricane proportion hurled them along the ground. There was doomed finality in the awesome roar and supernal fire.
7
CONRAD crawled against the howling winds to Kaye’s side. He heard the blundering frantic flight of animals crashing wildly through the glimmering hell; saw wild eyes blazing madly as they bounded down the valley toward the sea. He gripped Kaye’s arm. “The ship,” he gasped. “It’s our only chance.” He turned, yelled at Koehler a few feet away. Fine debris rained on them in clouds of minute spray.
Koehler stood facing into the wind, shaking his fists, swearing.
“Snap out of it, Koehler. Lead us to the ship! Know where it is?”
“I guess so. I can try to find it. But I’ll not board her, not that ship, it’s alive!”
“Maybe we can stay alive if we find it.”
Clutching each other’s hands they fought their way into the moaning wind. Conrad turned, yelled at Risha who stood with his arm about the woman. They were looking quietly toward the distant fires. Conrad turned away from them. They didn’t care; nothing mattered. They had known a part of Karma, a touch of ‘reality’. Maybe these Upinshads were insane. What was reality? Karma. Fourth-dimension. Words. But no one had ever answered the enigma poised by Kant. “What was the thing-in-itself?”
Babes in the woods.
Conrad yelled hoarsely. Koehler had broken away, was running ahead through the mad, distorted shadows between tortured trees. Conrad and Kaye stumbled after him. “Vou sure this is the way?”
Koehler’s lurching form weaved faster through the toppling forest. Weird lights played across the sky; tides of fear-crazed animals, whining and shrieking, surged blindly down the disintegrating valley.
Ahead of Conrad, Koehler’s body was ripping through brush, tearing branches aside. Conrad heard him swearing and crying by turns. Kaye struggled silently, her face a white blob, drained by the glaring whiteness of the distant heat.
“It’s right here somewhere,” shouted Koehler. “Somewhere—”
A trembling roar rolled over them in a colossal sea. Conrad screamed as the pain of high velocity compression waves tore through him; he went down. He crawled, and he saw Kaye dragging toward him, edging slowly over the buckling ground.
Debris, fine and large, pelted him with bullet-like force. Trees crashed in long, splintering cracks. He felt Kaye’s hand in his. They were managing to regain their feet, fight out through a barrier of imprisoning branches. The sky was a seething tide of cloud-boiling smoke and flame. A blast of furnace air sucked into his lungs; he coughed, staggered, cried out.
Conrad felt his foot on something soft. He dropped down. He tugged Koehler’s body partly from beneath a shattered tree trunk. Splinters of wood had pierced his stomach; he lay motionless. Koehler looked calm, sane for the first time since they had awakened on the ship; he was dead.
Kaye moaned, staggered as though blind. Swimming through only dim reality himself, Conrad pulled her after him in the direction Koehler had been leading them. Fires burst up around him, seared his face. An antelope sprang past, aflame, shrieking with its graceful neck twisted in an arc of pain.
Red rage, redder than the sky, rose in Conrad. There had seemed to be no possibility of war when they had left in the ship long ago. But man had always rationalized that way. After each orgy, he brushed away the vile film of its touch, and said, “No more. We’ve outgrown it. We’re too civilized vow.”
Six hundred years ago they had said that, eighteen hundred thousand light years. But there were still men who could only destroy, forever; they knew nothing else. The extent of inherent characteristics had never been known. Perhaps the will-to-power, and destruction, was hereditary, and only death would cure it.
And it had evolved to form the City of Shiva with a few thousand star-vikings in galleys shaped like spaceships. Planets, solar systems, galaxies would be ravaged, pillaged, burned.
Evil, the little dreamed faces sang
Destruction. Destruction, forever.
The evil ones must die.
But those voices were only dreams. Dreams were naive, wishful thinking. The Kshatriya of Shiva, under whatever label one chose, had conquered; Earth was going down into final destruction. Earth was only the beginning. “The end of the beginning,” someone had said long before, prophetic beyond his wildest nightmares.
CONRAD picked up Kaye, staggered forward; he slipped down a sharp incline. He felt the fire licking him; it was hungry. He dropped Kaye with sharp whines of horror, began beating at the flames around him. He knew agony, knew it in every screaming fiber of himself as he strained, half-blinded, choking, blinded, by smoke.
And then a curtain of smoke swirled aside and he saw the gleaming silver and black hull. It sat there, immobile, implacable, in the chaos of flames and crashing forest.
He sobbed. He dragged Kaye after him toward the smooth outline of the outer lock. Almost to it, he staggered, went down on his face. He crawled then, dragging her along, though he wondered where the strength was, where the will. Visible effect, invisible because—
He was sinking down, giving up, and the door opened for him. Somehow he dragged Kaye inside, through the air-lock chamber, and through the inner door.
The ship trembled around him, and he knew it was blasting off. He tried to turn his head, but he couldn’t. He was sprawled out on his back, stirring weakly. A voice, a thought, in his fevered mind ripped with fiery urgency.
Remember, Conrad, the voice said. Remember. Fight, before it’s too late! Remember us, Conrad, and the City of Light.
And of course he did remember; because they wanted him to. Because there was something depending on the memory that he had to do—now; something of fearful urgency.
l
IT WAS a lonely-looking, isolated sun on the distant rim of the galaxy. They wakened, Kaye and he, and saw the small elfin petal faces swimming through high layers of air that glowed with soft pearly luminescence.
The ship’s automatic pilot had thrown them into an orbit a
round a small world that crowded against a tiny red sun for warmth. Koehler and Hudson kept on sleeping; the alien things out there had awakened Kaye and Conrad only.
Their small petal faces beckoned, hovering in shimmering clouds on membranes as fluttering and delicate as tendrils of rainbow.
The great jeweled birds he remembered from that other dream returned, winging across an opaline sky. And the petal-faced people looked in at Conrad out of huge golden eyes flecked with irridescent colors that changed.
Conrad didn’t know whether their bodies or their minds followed the petal-people down to their City of Light. Conrad felt no fear, only ecstasy; hand in hand with Kaye he floated down through warm cloud layers into that crystalline jewel city of light and song and jade pools.
Communication was mental, or perhaps something even more incomprehensible. It was thought-communication that was partly music, partly movement of color: but there was utter understanding.
And at that moment of mutual understanding—that was when the beauty shattered, became darkened as with stains of wretched ink; the music broke into dissonances and dischords.
For these were alien people who had forgotten ugliness; they lived, breathed, drank, floated in beauty; they swam in a vast sea of it. They were alien to all ugliness and fear and hate. And they found all that was alien to their beauty in the minds of their visitors.
Conrad felt their reactions, saw their round tiny mouths wide with silent fear. Wide golden eyes that seemed to cry.
“They come from a diseased place; they will carry plagues of violence and death wherever they go.”
“They are blind; they are lost in a nightmare of illusion.”
“But there is hope for them!”
“Yes. There is hope.”
“Their minds show that all of them are not evil; they are not all the same. They think they are the same, obsessed with the delusion of similarity. They are of many kinds; some are driven by thirsts that make them destroy and rule; others seek only truths, and these desire to build. There are others who have no positive impulses at all, but float in a strange, unreal land of grey shadows.”
“Yes. These two are not evil; they have come here to escape evil.”
“But the two who did not awaken—one is evil and would destroy; the other knows only grey despair.”
Conrad could see Hudson, his eyes bright with dreams of conquest and the grandeur of power. He could see Koehler the lost, battling indecision, uncertainty, dreaming his futile dreams.
“Their world trembles with the ride of evil beneath which the builders and seekers are helpless. The evil ones must be destroyed; their dark dreams are limitless as the stars are numbered in all the galaxies.”
“These minds carry the ultimate plans of the evil ones. Read the plans of the evil ones here, the plans to destroy and conquer.”
“Death!”
“Evil!”
“Destruction. Destruction, forever.”
“We must send them back. Place the spark in their machine, for their machine is built for the spark. Erase our memory from their minds; they must not know until it is done. They must not be moved to act against our purpose. When the evil ones are destroyed, then these two may know; they may return to us then, should they desire.”
“Yes. They may return to us.”
l
Conrad groaned as the far sounds died, vague murmurings, rippling, falling away in far sweet tinklings. He had remembered now because they
had willed that he should remember. Voices from far Andromeda. M-32 in Andromeda.
And as Conrad struggled to his knees, he knew why this moment had been chosen for him to remember.
Silently, with deadly purpose, Hudson was creeping toward him across the small compartment. He had managed to break out of the suit locker. His intentions were obvious as he raised the alloy bar above his bloody head. He was going to kill; and he was going to wreck the ship.
That was why Conrad had remembered, so he would know what to do. He had to prevent Hudson’s madness from wrecking the ship. It didn’t want to be wrecked yet. It still had its assigned job to do.
8
THERE WAS little about the murderer coming toward him that Conrad remembered. He clutched the bar in one hand. His eyes glared with fanatical purpose; his hands and face were bloody and bruised from crashing against the walls of his prison.
Hudson hesitated, face twitching, eyes roving with fear and hate. “You’re in with the ship, Conrad. You’re going to help the ship. Help them against your own species! That’s what you’d like to do, but you won’t. Unless I destroy this ship, it’ll wipe out the human race. I don’t want that, Conrad.”
Kaye stirred, moaned gently, lifted an arm. Hudson swore at her. Conrad got one foot under him, managed to stand. Around him he could feel the steady throbbing of the ship’s powerful motors. “You can’t touch this ship, Hudson. It’s too big for you.”
“Traitor! Idiot!” snarled Hudson. “They’ve blinded you! I’ve known about them and their purpose; I’ve felt them. They drove me out of my mind, and had you lock me up. But I’ve won out. I’m stronger than they are. But you’re insane, Conrad. Fighting with aliens against your own species! Insane!”
“Only against a part of humanity, Hudson—a part that should have been wiped out a long time ago. Men like you.”
Hudson’s eyes shifted; the ship throbbed, pulsed under them like a great heart.
Fie yelled suddenly, harshly. His muscles strained as against some invisible power, then he hurled himself at Conrad. The bar fell. Weakly Conrad managed to duck his head aside, but the heavy metal smashed into his shoulder. Numbness stiffened that arm, left it lifeless. He rolled aside on the grid mesh as the bar swung hungrily at his head. The bar sung past his ear, bounded from the bulkhead. Hudson swore, dropped the bar from hands momentarily paralyzed by the shock of metal on metal. Conrad pushed the bar with his good hand, sent it spinning across the mesh and under a low shelf.
Conrad got to his knees in time to meet Hudson’s maniacal attack. They strained. Conrad felt dark waves of blind nausea billowing about him. He tried to pull those sweating bloody hands from his throat; but they were clamped there with a terrible kind of purpose.
Dimly he saw Kaye weaving toward them; then he heard a scream as Hudson kicked her savagely, sent her smashing back against the bulkhead. She sagged down slowly, and kept on sitting there.
RAGE GAVE Conrad enough strength to kick upward with his knee. Hudson groaned, bent back, and his hands slipped away, returned as knotty madly beating clubs. Dull, jolting pain exploded in Conrad’s head. He was falling back; he was lying there looking up at Hudson’s heaving body leaning over him. It was a strange-looking body. It shimmered and wavered back and forth, got small, then large.
Conrad thought dully. I can’t move. I want to, but I can’t.
He thought of the ship, the ship that lived. It had intelligence; but it could only operate within the limitations of its bodily structure, and it was only a machine. It couldn’t help him now. Could it even defend itself from an enemy who was inside of it? Conrad wondered. He realized that he knew nothing at all about the ship now that they had altered it. They had given it the ‘spark’. What specialized function it had now, he couldn’t know. Besides, he couldn’t move to anything about it if he did know.
He watched Hudson’s blurred figure dig the bar out from under the shelf, stand clutching it a moment hesitantly. Then he strode resolutely toward the panel leading into the corridor to the control chamber.
The man’s intentions were inevitable. He would smash that automatic pilot. ‘Kilroy’s’ hard vacuum brain case.
The panel slid open. Hudson started through, gripping the bar in his two hands.
The panel darted shut with quick determination; it closed on Hudson’s neck. With a kind of triumphant horror Conrad heard the dying cries, saw the body jerking and kicking futilely in the vise of the door. The panel kept on closing. Conrad shuddered, managed to let hi
s eyes fall shut. The panel had closed tight, closed completely.
The ship’s acceleration fell off suddenly. He heard the air sighing against the ship’s stressed skin. Wherever it had been going, it had gotten there.
Kaye disappeared from his restricted vision, returned. He felt the needle sink smoothly into his arm. He felt the sudden artificial fire brighten his blood, clarify his vision, shoot energy into his depleted system.
They avoided the horror blocking the floor by the panel, hurried into the control chamber.
Below them, through the observation screen, they saw the City of Shiva. But Conrad’s first impression of the city had altered; through what had seemed before an indestructible fortress, chaos ran screaming through many layered tiers of crumbling grandeur.
The ship trembled around them. They saw the dropping rain spilling from beneath them onto the city. Gigantic mushrooming clouds of boiling dust and churning debris shot toward them. A white cloud plumed upward through the center of the blackness. Seconds later came a sustained awesome roar.
As the gigantic column of smoke writhed away, Conrad saw the half a thousand Ships of Shiva again; most of them remained untouched. More explosions leaped skyward, edging toward the ships.
The rows of great ships was the vortex of milling swarms of small dark specks. Then suddenly in a drowning cushion of blasting flame, one of the ships began a slow acceleration. From it, Conrad saw rockets emerge, small, dark and deadly. They plunged straight for their attacking ship.
“Five hundred to one,” muttered Conrad.
“Come on, Kilroy!” Kaye said.
One by one the rocket bombs exploded harmlessly in the air. They felt their own ship bend away in an abrupt curve of tremendous speed. Conrad watched the rising ship of the Kshatriya arching toward them supported by a surging column of blue flame.
Their own ship bucked, recoiled, strained. Conrad fought dizziness that threatened blackness. His vision blurred, cleared with great effort of will. The rising spaceship ceased to exist in any visible form. It flamed in the sky like a miniature sun, then became nothing, nothing at all except shattered energy.