“This has sorely perplexed us, for what could have done away with the Arctarians who colonized this world? Our mighty colonists and their descendants surely could never have been overcome and destroyed by the pitifully weak mentalities that now inhabit this globe. Yet where, then, are they?
“That is why we sought to seize you and your companions. Low as we know your mentalities to be, it seemed that surely even such as you would know what had become of our colonists who once inhabited this world.”
The thought-stream paused a moment, then raced into Woodin’s mind with a clear question.
“Have you not some knowledge of what became of our colonists? Some clue as to their strange disappearance?”
The numbed biologist found himself shaking his head slowly. “I never—I never heard before of such creatures as you, such minds. They never existed on Earth that we know of, and we now know almost all of the history of our planet.”
“Impossible!” exclaimed the thought of the Arctarian leader. “Surely you must have some knowledge of our mighty people, if you know all the history of this planet.”
From another Arctarian’s mind came a thought, directed at the leader but impinging indirectly onto Woodin’s brain.
“Why not examine the past of the planet through this creature’s brain and see what we can see fo ourselves!”
“An excellent idea!” exclaimed the leader. “His mentality will be easy enough to probe.”
“What are you going to do?” cried Woodin, panic edging his voice.
The answering thoughts were calming, reassuring. “Nothing that will harm you in the least. We are simply going to probe your racial past by unlocking the inherited memories of your brain.
“In the unused cells of your brain lie impressed inherited racial memories that go back to your remotest ancestors. By our mental power of command we shall make those buried memories tempor dominant and vivid in your mind.
“You will experience the same sensations, see the same scenes, that your remote ancestors of millions of years ago saw. And we, here around you, can read your mind as we now do, and so see what you are seeing, looking into the past of this planet.
“There is no danger. Physically you will remain standing here, but mentally you will leap back across the ages. We shall first push your mind back to a time approximating that when our colonists came to this world, to see what happened to them.”
No sooner had this thought impinged on Woodin’s mind than the starlit scene around him, the humped masses of the Arctarians, suddenly vanished and his consciousness seemed whirling through a gray mist.
He knew that physically he was not moving, yet mentally he had a sense of terrific velocity of motion. It was as though his mind was whirling across unthinkable gulfs, his brain expanding.
Then abruptly the gray mists cleared. A strange new scene took hazy form inside Woodin’s mind. It was a scene that he sensed, not saw. By other senses than sight did it present itself, yet it was none the less real and vivid.
He looked with those strange senses upon a strange Earth, a world of gray seas and harsh continents of rock without any speck of life upon them. The skies were heavily clouded and rain fell continually.
Down upon that world Woodin felt himself dropping, with a host of weird companions. They were each an amorphous, glistening, single-celled mass, with a dark nucleus at its center. They were Arctarians, and Woodin knew that he was an Arctarian, and that he had come with the others a long way through space toward this world.
They landed in hosts upon the harsh and lifeless planet. They exerted their mentalities and by such telekinetic force of mental energy they altered the material world to suit them. They reared great structures and cities, cities that were not of matter but of thought. He sensed a vast, ordered mass of inquiry, investigation, experiment, and communication, but all were beyond his present human mind in motives and achievement. Abruptly all dissolved in gray mists again.
The mists cleared almost at once and now Woodin looked on another scene. It was later in time—many millennia later. And now Woodin saw that time had worked strange changes upon the hosts of Arctarians, of which he still was one. They had changed from unicellular to multicellular beings. And they were no longer the same. Some were sessile, fixed in one spot, others mobile. Some betrayed a tendency toward the water, others toward the land. Something had changed the bodily form of the Arctarians as generations passed, branching them out in different lines.
This strange degeneration of their bodies had been accompanied by a kindred degeneration of their minds. Woodin sensed that. In the thought-cities, the ordered process of search for knowledge and power had become confused, chaotic. And the thought-cities themselves were vanishing, the Arctarians no longer having sufficient mental energy to maintain them.
The Arctarians were trying to ascertain what was causing this strange bodily and mental degeneration. They thought it was something that was affecting the genes of their bodies, but what it was they could not guess. On no other world had they ever degenerated so!
That scene passed rapidly into another much later. Woodin now saw the scene, for by then the ancestor whose mind he looked through had developed eyes. And he saw that the degeneration had now gone far, the Arctarians’ multicellular bodies more and more stricken by the diseases of complexity and diversification.
The last of the thought-cities now were gone. The once mighty Arctarians had become hideous, complex organisms degenerating ever further, some of them creeping and swimming in the waters, others fixed upon the land.
They still had left some of the great original mentality of their ancestors. These monstrously degenerated creatures of land and sea, living in what Woodin’s mind recognized as the late Paleozoic age, still made frantic and futile attempts to halt the terrible progress of their degradation.
Woodin’s mind flashed into a scene later still, in the Mesozoic. Now the spreading degeneration made of the descendants of the colonists a still more horrible group of races. Great webbed and scale and taloned creatures they were now, reptiles living in land and water.
Even these incredibly changed creatures possessed a faint remnant of their ancestors’ mental power. They made vain attempts to communicate with Arctarians on other worlds of distant suns, to apprise them of their plight. But their minds were now too weak.
There followed a scene in the Cenozoic. The reptiles had become mammals; the downward progress of the Arctarians had gone further. Now only the merest shreds of the original mentality remained in these degraded descendants. And now this pitiful posterity had produced a species even more foolish and lacking in mental power than any before, ground-apes that roamed the cold plains in chattering, quarreling packs. The last shreds of Arctarian inheritance, the ancient instincts toward dignity and cleanliness and forbearance, had faded out of these creatures.
And then a last picture filled Woodin’s brain. It was the world of the present day, the world he had seen through his own eyes. But now he saw and understood it as he never had before, a world in which degeneration had gone to the utmost limit.
The apes had become even weaker bipedal creatures, who had lost almost every atom of inheritance of the old Arctarian mind. These creatures had lost, too, many of the senses which had been retained by the apes before them. And these creatures, these humans, were now degenerating with increasing rapidity. Where at first they had killed like their animal forebears only for food, they had learned to kill wantonly. And had learned to kill each other in groups, in tribes, in nations, and in hemispheres. In the madness, their degeneracy, they slaughtered each other until Earth ran with their blood.
They were more cruel even than the apes who had preceded them, cruel with the utter cruelty of mad. And in their progressive insanity, they came to starve in the midst of plenty, to slay each other in their own cities, to cower beneath the lash of superstitious fears as no creatures had before them.
They were the last terrible descendants, the last degenerated prod
uct, of the ancient Arctarian colonists who once had been kings of intellect. Now the other animals were almost gone. These, the last hideous freaks, would soon wind up the terrible story entirely by annihilating each other in their madness.
Woodin came suddenly to consciousness. He was standing in the starlight in the center of the riverside clearing. And around him still were poised the ten amorphous Arctarians, a silent ring.
Dazed, reeling from that tremendous and awful vision that had passed through his mind with incredible vividness, he turned slowly from one to the other of the Arctarians. Their thoughts impinged on his brain, strong, somber, shaken by terrible horror and loathing.
The sick thought of the Arctarian leader beat into Woodin’s mind.
“So that is what became of our Arctarian colonists who came to this world! They degenerated, changed into lower and lower forms of life, until these pitiful insane things, who now swarm on this world, are their last descendants.
“This world is a world of deadly horror! A world that somehow damages the genes of our race’s bodies and changes them bodily and mentally, making them degenerate further each generation. Before us we see the awful result.”
The shaken thought of another Arctarian asked, “But what can we do now?”
“There is nothing we can do,” uttered their leader solemnly. “This degeneration, this awful change, has gone too far for us ever to reverse it now.
“Our intelligent brothers became on this poisoned world things of horror, and we cannot now turn back the clock and restore them from the degraded things their descendants are.”
Woodin found his voice and cried out thinly, shrilly:
“It isn’t true!” he cried. “It’s all a lie, what I saw! We humans aren’t the product of downward devolution, we’re the product of ages of upward evolution! We must be, I tell you! Why, we wouldn’t want to live, I wouldn’t want to live, if that other tale was true. It can’t be true!”
The thought of the Arctarian leader, directed at the other amorphous shapes, reached his raving mind. It was tinged with pity, yet strong with a superhuman loathing.
“Come, my brothers,” the Arctarian was saying to his fellows. “There is nothing we can do here on this soul-sickening world. Let us go, before we too are poisoned and changed. And we will send warning to Arctar that this world is poisoned, a world of degeneration, so that never again may any of our race come here and go down the awful road that those others went down. Come! We return to our own sun.”
The Arctarian leader’s humped shape flattened, assumed a disk-like form, then rose smoothly upward into the air. The others too changed and followed, in a group, and a stupefied Woodin stared up at glistening dots lifting rapidly into the starlight.
He staggered forward a few steps, shaking his fist insanely up at the shining, receding dots.
“Come back, damn you!” he screamed. “Come back and tell me it’s a lie! It must be a lie—it must—”
There was no sign of the vanished Arctarians now in the starlit sky. The darkness was brooding, intense around Woodin.
He screamed up again into the night, but only a whispering echo answered. Wild-eyed, staggering, soul-smitten, his gaze fell on the pistol in Ross’s hand. He seized it with a hoarse cry.
The stillness of the forest was broken suddenly by a sharp crack that reverberated a moment and died rapidly away. Then all was silent again save for the chuckling whisper of the river hurrying on.
THE BIRTHPLACE OF CREATION
CHAPTER I
Citadel of the Futuremen
Garrand watched the face of the Moon grow larger in the forward port of his small cruiser. A white and terrible face, he thought. A death’s-head with meteor-gnawed bones and gaping crater-wounds, bleak and cruel and very silent, watching him come and thinking secret boding thoughts about him. A feeling of sickness grew in him.
“I am a fool and soon I will probably be a dead fool,” he said to himself.
He was not a brave man. He was very fond of living and he did not think of death at all as a thing to be dared and laughed at. The knowledge that he was likely to die there on the Moon gave him qualms of physical anguish that made him look as white and hollow as the stony face that watched him through the port. And yet he did not turn back. There was something in Garrand that was stronger than his fear. His hands trembled, but they held the cruiser grimly on its course.
The stark plains and mountain ranges took size and shape, the lonely mountains of the Moon that looked on nothing and the plains where nothing stirred, not even the smallest wind or whirl of dust. Men had gone out to other worlds and other stars. They had ranged far across space, founding colonies on asteroids and cities on the shores of alien seas. But they left the deathly airless Moon alone. They had looked at it once and gone away. There were only four who made the Moon their home—and not all of those four where men.
Tycho Crater widened out below the little ship. Licking dry lips metallic with the taste of fear, Garrand consulted a map, drawn carefully to scale and showing in that desolation one intricate diagram of a man-made structure. There were ominous gaps in that diagram and Garrand was painfully aware of them. He made his calculations and set his ship down well beyond the outer periphery of defenses marked on the chart.
His landing was a clumsy nervous one. White pumice-dust burst upward around the hull and settled slowly back again. Garrand cut his jets and sat for a moment looking out across Tycho, all ringed around in the distance with cliffs and spires and pinnacles of blasted rock that glittered in the light. There was no sign of the structure indicated on the chart. It was all below ground. Even its observatory dome was set flush, reflecting the Sun’s unsoftened glare no more than the surrounding plain.
Presently Garrand rose, moving with the stiff reluctance of a man going to the gallows. He checked over the bulky shapes of a considerable mass of equipment. His examination was minute and he made one or two readjustments. Then he struggled into a pressure-suit and opened the airlock. The air went out with a whistling rush and after that there was no sound, only the utter silence of a world that has heard nothing since it was made.
Working in that vacuum Garrand carried out a light hand-sledge and set it in the dust. Then he brought out the bulky pieces of equipment and loaded them onto it. He was able to do this alone because of the weak gravitation and when he was through he was able for the same reason to tow the sledge behind him.
He set off across the crater. The glare was intense. Sweat gathered on him and ran in slow trickles down his face. He suffered in the heavy armor, setting one weighted boot before the other, with the little puffs of dust rising and falling back at every step, hauling the sledge behind him. And fear grew steadily in him as he went on.
He knew—all the System knew—that the four who lived here were not here now, that they were far away on a distant troubled world. But their formidable name and presence seemed to haunt this lifeless sphere and he was walking now into the teeth of the deadly defenses they had left behind them.
“They can be beaten,” he told himself, sweating. “I’ve got to beat them.”
He studied his map again. He knew exactly how far he had come from the ship. Leaving himself a wide margin of safety he activated the detector-mechanism on the sledge. The helmet of his pressure-suit was fitted with ultra-sensitive hearing devices that had nothing to do with sonic waves but translated sub-electronic impulses from the detector into audible sound-signals.
He stood still, listening intently. But the detector said nothing and he went on, very slowly now and cautiously, across the dead waste until his footsteps in the dust approached the line of that outer circle on the map. Then the detector spoke with a faint small clicking.
Garrand stopped. He bent over the panel of the mechanism, a jumble of dials, sorters, frequency-indicators and pattern-indicators. Above them a red pip burned in a ground-glass feld. His heart hammered hard and he reached hastily for a black oblong bulk beside the detector.
&n
bsp; He thought, “I’m still far enough away so that the blast won’t be lethal if this doesn’t work.”
The thought was comforting but unconvincing. He forced his hand to steady, to pick up the four-pronged plugs and insert them, one by one in the proper order, into the side of the detector. Then he dropped behind the sledge and waited.
The black oblong hummed. He could feel it humming where his shoulder touched the metal of the sledge. It was designed to pick up its readings from the detector, to formulate them, adjust itself automatically to the indicated pattern and frequency, to broadcast an electronic barrier that would blank out the impulse-receptivity of the hidden trap’s sensor-unit. That was its purpose. It should work. But if it did not…
He waited, the muscles of his belly knotted tight. There was no flash or tremor of a blast. After he had counted slowly to a hundred he got up again and looked. The red pip had faded from the ground-glass screen. There was a white one in place of it.
Garrand watched that white pip as though it were the face of his patron saint, hauling the sledge on slowly through that outer circle and through the ones beyond it that were only guessed at. Three times more the urgent clicking sounded in his ears and the dials and pointers changed—and three times the pip faded from red to white and Garrand was still alive when he reached the metal valve door set into the floor of the crater.
The controls of that door were plainly in sight but he did not touch them. Instead he hauled a portable scanner off the sledge and used it to examine the intimate molecular structure of the metal and all its control connections. By this means he found the particular bolt-head that was a switch and turned it, immobilizing a certain device set to catch an unknowing intruder as soon as he opened the valve.
Within minutes after that Garrand had the door open and was standing at the head of a steep flight of steps, going down. His heart was still thudding away and he felt weak in the knees—but he was filled with exultation and a great pride. Few other men, he thought, perhaps none, could have penetrated safely to the very threshold of this most impregnable of all places in the Solar System.
The Edmond Hamilton Megapack: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales Page 63