Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  But as his father entered the room, he opened his eyes as if with an effort, fixed them on him, said, "Dad ... I've got to tell you."

  Mr. Chatham took the chair by the bedside, quietly, leaving his wife to stand. He asked, "About what, Harry?"

  "About--things." The boy's eyes shifted to his mother, at the foot of his bed. "I don't want to talk to her. She thinks it's just fever. But you'll understand."

  Henry Chatham lifted his gaze to meet his wife's. "Maybe you'd better go downstairs and wait for the doctor, Sally."

  She looked hard at him, then turned abruptly to go out. "All right," she said in a thin voice, and closed the door softly behind her.

  "Now what did you want to tell me, Harry?"

  "About them ... the rotifers," the boy said. His eyes had drifted half-shut again but his voice was clear. "They did it to me ... on purpose."

  "Did what?"

  "I don't know.... They used one of their cultures. They've got all kinds: beds of germs, under the leaves in the water. They've been growing new kinds, that will be worse than anything that ever was before.... They live so fast, they work so fast."

  Henry Chatham was silent, leaning forward beside the bed.

  "It was only a little while, before I found out they knew about me. I could see them through my microscope, but they could see me too.... And they kept signaling, swimming and turning.... I won't tell you how to talk to them, because nobody ought to talk to them ever again. Because they find out more than they tell.... They know about us, now, and they hate us. They never knew before--that there was anybody but them.... So they want to kill us all."

  "But why should they want to do that?" asked the father, as gently as he could. He kept telling himself, "He's delirious. It's like Sally says, he's been wearing himself out, thinking too much about--the rotifers. But the doctor will be here pretty soon, the doctor will know what to do."

  "They don't like knowing that they aren't the only ones on Earth that can think. I expect people would be the same way."

  "But they're such little things, Harry. They can't hurt us at all."

  The boy's eyes opened wide, shadowed with terror and fever. "I told you, Dad--They're growing germs, millions and billions of them, new ones.... And they kept telling me to take them back to the pond, so they could tell all the rest, and they could all start getting ready--for war."

  He remembered the shapes that swam and crept in the green water gardens, with whirling cilia and great, cold, glistening eyes. And he remembered the clean, empty fish bowl in the window downstairs.

  "Don't let them, Dad," said Harry convulsively. "You've got to kill them all. The ones here and the ones in the pond. You've got to kill them good--because they don't mind being killed, and they lay lots of eggs, and their eggs can stand almost anything, even drying up. And the eggs remember what the old ones knew."

  "Don't worry," said Henry Chatham quickly. He grasped his son's hand, a hot limp hand that had slipped from under the coverlet. "We'll stop them. We'll drain the pond."

  "That's swell," whispered the boy, his energy fading again. "I ought to have told you before, Dad--but first I was afraid you'd laugh, and then--I was just ... afraid...."

  His voice drifted away. And his father, looking down at the flushed face, saw that he seemed asleep. Well, that was better than the sick delirium--saying such strange, wild things--

  Downstairs the doctor was saying harshly, "All right. All right. But let's have a look at the patient."

  Henry Chatham came quietly downstairs; he greeted the doctor briefly, and did not follow him to Harry's bedroom.

  When he was left alone in the room, he went to the window and stood looking down at the microscope. He could not rid his head of strangeness: A window between two worlds, our world and that of the infinitely small, a window that looks both ways.

  After a time, he went through the kitchen and let himself out the back door, into the noonday sunlight.

  He followed the garden path, between the weed-grown beds of vegetables, until he came to the edge of the little pond. It lay there quiet in the sunlight, green-scummed and walled with stiff rank grass, a lone dragonfly swooping and wheeling above it. The image of all the stagnant waters, the fertile breeding-places of strange life, with which it was joined in the end by the tortuous hidden channels, the oozing pores of the Earth.

  And it seemed to him then that he glimpsed something, a hitherto unseen miasma, rising above the pool and darkening the sunlight ever so little. A dream, a shadow--the shadow of the alien dream of things hidden in smallness, the dark dream of the rotifers.

  The dragonfly, having seized a bright-winged fly that was sporting over the pond, descended heavily through the sunlit air and came to rest on a broad lily pad. Henry Chatham was suddenly afraid. He turned and walked slowly, wearily, up the path toward the house.

  * * *

  Contents

  WHEN THE MOUNTAIN SHOOK

  By Robert Abernathy

  Dark was the Ryzga mountain and forbidding; steep were its cliffs and sheer its crevasses. But its outward perils could not compare with the Ryzgas themselves, who slept within, ready to wake and conquer...

  At sunset they were in sight of the Ryzga mountain. Strangely it towered among the cliffs and snow-slopes of the surrounding ranges: an immense and repellently geometric cone, black, its sides blood-tinted by the dying sun.

  Neena shivered, even though the surrounding cold could not reach her. The ice-wind blew from the glacier, but Var's love was round her as a warming cloak, a cloak that glowed softly golden in the deepening twilight, even as her love was about him.

  Var said, "The Watcher's cave should be three miles beyond this pass." He stood rigid, trying to catch an echo of the Watcher's thoughts, but there was nothing. Perhaps the old man was resting. From the other direction, the long way that they two had come, it was not difficult to sense the thought of Groz. That thought was powerful, and heavy with vengeance.

  "Hurry," said Neena. "They're closer than they were an hour ago."

  She was beautiful and defiant, facing the red sunset and the black mountain. Var sensed her fear, and the love that had conquered it. He felt a wave of tenderness and bitterness. For him she had come to this. For the flame that had sprung between them at the Truce of New Grass, she had challenged the feud of their peoples and had left her home, to follow him. Now, if her father and his kinsmen overtook them, it would be death for Var, and for Neena living shame. Which of the two was worse was no longer a simple problem to Var, who had grown much older in the last days.

  "Wait," he commanded. While she waited he spun a dream, attaching it to the crags that loomed over the pass, and to the frozen ground underfoot. It was black night, as it would really be when Groz and his henchmen reached this place; lurid fire spewed from the Ryzga mountain, and strange lights dipped above it; and for good measure there was an avalanche in the dream, and hideous beasts rushed snapping and ravening from the crevices of the rock.

  "Oh!" cried Neena in involuntary alarm.

  Var sighed, shaking his head. "It won't hold them for long, but it's the best I can do now. Come on."

  There was no path. Now they were descending the steeper face of the sierra, and the way led over bottomless crevasses, sheer drops and sheer ascents, sheets of traitorous glare ice. Place after place had to be crossed on the air, and both grew weary with the effort such crossings cost. They hoarded their strength, helping one another; one alone might never have won through.

  It was starry night already when they saw the light from the Watcher's cave. The light shone watery and dim from beneath the hoary back of the glacier, and as they came nearer they saw why: the cave entrance was sealed by a sheet of ice, a frozen waterfall that fell motionless from the rocks above. They heard no sound.

  The two young people stared for a long minute, intrigued and fearful. Both had heard of this place, and the ancient who lived there to keep watch on the Ryzga mountain, as a part of the oldest legends of their chi
ldhood; but neither had been here before.

  But this was no time for shyness. Var eyed the ice-curtain closely to make sure that it was real, not dream-stuff; then he struck it boldly with his fist. It shattered and fell in a rain of splinters, sparkling in the light that poured from within.

  * * * * *

  They felt the Watcher rouse, heard his footsteps, and finally saw him--a shrunken old man, white-haired, with a lined beardless face. The sight of him, more marred by age than anyone they had ever seen before, was disappointing. They had expected something more--an ancient giant, a tower of wisdom and strength. The Watcher was four hundred years old; beside him even Groz, who had always seemed so ancient, was like a boy.

  The Watcher peered at them in turn. "Welcome," he said in a cracked voice. He did not speak again; the rest of his conversation was in thought only. "Welcome indeed. I am too much alone here."

  "You were asleep!" said Var. Shock made his thought accusing, though he had not meant to be.

  The old man grinned toothlessly. "Never fear. Asleep or awake, I watch. Come in! You're letting in the wind."

  Inside the cave it was warm as summer. Var saw with some surprise that all the walls were sheathed in ice--warm to the touch, bound fast against melting by the Watcher's will. Light blazed in reflections from the ice walls, till there was no shadow in the place. Behind them began a tinkling of falling water, thawed from the glacial ridges above to descend sheet-wise over the cave mouth, freezing as it fell into lengthening icicles. The old man gazed at his work for a moment, then turned questioningly to the young pair.

  "We need a little rest out of the cold," said Var. "And food, if you can spare it. We're pursued."

  "Yes, yes. You shall have what I can give you. Make yourselves comfortable, and in one minute.... Pursued, eh? A pity. I see the world is as bad as it was when I was last in it."

  Hot food and drink were before them almost at once. The Watcher regarded them with compassion as their eyes brightened and some of the shadow of weariness lifted from them. "You have stolen your enemy's daughter, no doubt, young man? Such things happened when I was young."

  Warming to the old man now, Var sketched his and Neena's history briefly. "We should have been safe among my people by now. And before very long, I'm sure, I would have performed some deed which Groz would recognize as a worthy exploit, and would thus have healed the feud between our families. But our flight was found out too soon. They cut us off and forced us into the mountains, and now they are only a few hours behind us."

  "A pity, indeed. I would like to help you--but, you understand, I am the Mountain Watcher. I must be above feuds and families."

  Var nodded somberly, thinking that an old recluse would in any case be able to do little for them against Groz and his violent kinsfolk.

  "And what will you do now?"

  Var grinned mirthlessly. "We haven't much choice, since they're overtaking us. I have only one idea left: we can go where Groz may fear to follow us."

  "To the mountain, you mean."

  "And into it, if need be."

  The Watcher was broodingly silent; his eyes shifted to Neena, where she nestled by Var's side. He asked, "And you--are you willing to follow your lover in this?"

  Neena returned his gaze without flinching; then she looked sidelong at Var, and her lips curled with a proud and tender mockery. "Follow? Why, I will lead, if his courage should fail him."

  * * * * *

  The old man said, "It is no part of my duty to dissuade you from this thing. You are free persons. But I must be sure that you know what you are doing. That is the second part of the law the First Watcher made: to guard lest the unwary and the ignorant should bring harm on themselves and on all men."

  "We know the stories," Var said brusquely. "In the hollow heart of their mountain the Ryzgas sleep, as they chose to do when their world crumbled. But if they are wakened, the mountain will tremble, and the Ryzgas will come forth."

  "Do you believe that?"

  "As one believes stories."

  "It is true," said the Watcher heavily. "In my youth I penetrated farther into the mountain than anyone before, farther even than did the First Watcher. I did not see the sleepers, nor will any man until they come again, but I met their sentries, the sentinel machines that guard them now as they have for two thousand years. When I had gone that far, the mountain began to shake, the force that is in the Earth rumbled below, and I returned in time." Now for the first time Var sensed the power in the old man's look, the power of four hundred years' wisdom. Var stared down at his hands.

  "The Ryzgas also were men," said the Watcher. "But they were such a race as the world has not seen before or since. There were tyrannies before the Ryzgas, there was lust for power, and atrocious cruelty; but such tyranny, power, and cruelty as theirs, had never been known. They ruled the Earth for four generations, and the Earth was too little for them. They laid the world waste, stripped it of metals and fuels and bored to its heart for energy, poisoned its seas and its air with the fume of their works, wrung its peoples dry for their labor ... and in each of those four generations they launched a ship of space. They were great and evil as no other people has been, because they wanted the stars.

  "Because of them we must build with dreams instead of iron, and our only fire is that of the Sun, and even now, two thousand years later, the Earth is still slowly recovering from the pangs and poison of that age. If you turn up the sod in the plain where the wild herds graze, you will find numberless fragments of rusted or corroded metal, bits of glass and strange plastic substances, debris of artifacts still showing the marks of their shaping--the scattered wreckage of the things they made. And we--we too are a remnant, the descendants of the few out of all humanity that survived when the Ryzgas' world went down in flame and thunder.

  "In the last generation of their power the Ryzgas knew by their science that the race of man would endure them no longer. They made ready their weapons, they mined the cities and the factories for destruction, making sure that their works and their knowledge would perish with them. Meanwhile they redoubled the yoke and the punishments, hastening the completion of the last of the starships.

  "From the memories that the old Watchers have left here, and from the memories of dead men that still echo in the air, I have gathered a picture of that world's end. I will show it to you...."

  * * * * *

  Var and Neena stared, unstirring, with wide vacant eyes, while the old man wove a dream around them, and the bright ice-cave faded from their vision, and they saw--

  Black starless night, a sky of rolling smoke above the greatest city that was ever built. Only the angry light of fires relieved the city's darkness--that, and the blue-white lightning flashes that silhouetted the naked skeletons of buildings and were followed by thunder and a shaking of the earth.

  Along lightless streets, half choked with rubble and with the dead, poured a mad, hating horde. The recurrent flashes lit scarred faces, naked bodies blackened and maimed from the hell of the workshops where the Ryzgas' might had been forged, eyes that stared white and half sightless from the glare of the furnaces, gnarled hands that now at long last clutched the weapons of the last rebellion--a rebellion without hope of new life on a world gutted and smoldering from the fulfilment of the Ryzgas' dream, without slogans other than a cry for blood.

  Before them death waited around the citadel where the masters still fought. All round, from the lowest and most poisonous levels of the shattered city, the slaves swarmed up in their millions. And the lightning blazed, and the city howled and screamed and burned.

  Then, unbelievably, the thunder fell silent, and the silence swept outward like a wave, from ruined street to street. The mouths that had shouted their wrath were speechless, and the rage-blinded eyes were lifted in sudden awe. From the center, over the citadel, an immense white globe soared upward, rising swiftly without sound.

  They had never seen its like, but they knew. It was the last starship, and it was leaving.r />
  It poised motionless. For an instant the burning city lay mute; then the millions found voice. Some roared ferocious threats and curses; others cried desolately--wait!

  Then the whole city, the dark tumuli of its buildings and its leaping fires and tormented faces, and the black sky over it, seemed to twist and swim, like a scene under water when a great fish sweeps past, and the ship was gone.

  The stunned paralysis fell apart in fury. Flame towered over the citadel. The hordes ran and shrieked again toward the central inferno, and the city burned and burned....

  * * * * *

  Var blinked dazedly in the shadowless glow of the ice-cave. His arm tightened about Neena till she gasped. He was momentarily uncertain that he and she were real and here, such had been the force of the dream, a vision of such scope and reality as Var had never seen--no, lived through--before. With deep respect now he gazed upon the bent old man who was the Mountain Watcher.

  "Some of the Ryzgas took flight to the stars, and some perished on Earth. But there was a group of them who believed that their time to rule would come again. These raised a black mountain from the Earth's heart, and in hollows within it cast themselves into deathless sleep, their deathless and lifeless sentinels round them, to wait till someone dare arouse them, or until their chosen time--no one knows surely.

  "I have told you the story you know, and have shown you a glimpse of the old time, because I must make sure that you do not approach the mountain in ignorance. Our world is unwise and sometimes evil, full of arrogance, folly, and passion that are in the nature of man. Yet it is a happy world, compared to that the Ryzgas made and will make again."

  The Watcher eyed them speculatively. "Before all," he said finally, "this is a world where you are free to risk wakening the old tyrants, if in your own judgment your great need renders the chance worth taking."