The Door to Saturn

by Clark Ashton Smith

  Since he spoke in the dialect of the Bhlemphroims, which differed somewhat from their own, it is doubtful if the Ydheems altogether understood the first part of his utterance. But Hziulquoigmnzhah was their tutelary deity; and they knew the language of the gods. At the words: “Iqhui dlosh odhqlonqh,” there was a most remarkable resumption and increase of activity, a ceaseless running to and fro on the part of the Ydheems, a shouting of guttural orders, and a recrudescence of new heads and limbs from the avalanche. Those who had issued from the temple re-entered it, and came out once more carrying a huge image of Hziulquoigmnzhah, some smaller eikons of lesser though allied deities, and a very ancient-looking idol which both Eibon and Morghi recognized as having a resemblance to Zhothaqquah. Others of the Ydheems brought their household goods and furniture forth from the dwellings; and, signing the Hyperboreans to accompany them, the whole populace began to evacuate the town.

  Eibon and Morghi were much mystified. And it was not until a new town had been built on the fungus-wooded plain at the distance of a full day’s march, and they themselves had been installed among the priests of the new temple, that they learned the reason of it all and the meaning of: “Iqhui dlosh odhqlonqh.” These words meant merely: “Be on your way,” and the god had addressed them to Eibon as a dismissal. But the coincidental coming of the avalanche and of Eibon and Morghi with this purported message from the god, had been taken by the Ydheems as a divine injunction to remove from their present location. Thus the wholesale exodus of people with their idols and domestic belongings.

  The new town was called Ghlomph, after the one that the avalanche had buried. Here, for the remainder of their days, Eibon and Morghi were held in much honor; and their coming with the message, “Iqhui dlosh odhqlonqh,” was deemed a fortunate thing, since there were no more avalanches to threaten the security of Ghlomph in its new situation remote from the mountains.

  The Hyperboreans shared the increment of civic affluence and well-being resultant from this security. There was no national mother among the Ydheems, who propagated themselves in a far more general manner than the Bhlemphroims, so existence was quite safe and tranquil. Eibon, at least, was really in his element; for the news which he brought of Zhothaqquah, who was still worshipped in this region of Cykranosh, had enabled him to set up as a sort of minor prophet, even apart from the renown which he enjoyed as the bearer of the divine message.

  Morghi, perchance, was not entirely happy: though the Ydheems were religious, they did not carry their devotional fervor to the point of bigotry or intolerance; so it was quite impossible to start an inquisition among them. But still there were compensations: the fungus-wine of the Ydheems was potent though evil-tasting; and there were females of a sort, if one were not too squeamish. So Morghi and Eibon both settled down to an ecclesiastic regimen which, after all, was not so radically different from that of Mhu Thulan or any other place.

  Such were the various adventures, and such was the final lot of this redoubtable pair in Cykranosh. But in Eibon’s tower of black gneiss on that headland of the northern sea in Mhu Thulan, the underlings of Morghi waited for days, neither daring to follow the high-priest through the magic panel nor daring to leave in despite of his orders. At length they were recalled by a special dispensation from the hierophant who had been chosen as Morghi’s temporary successor. But the result of the whole affair was highly regrettable from the standpoint of the hierarchy of Yhoundeh. It was universally believed that Eibon had not only escaped by virtue of the powerful magic he had learned from Zhothaqquah, but had made away with Morghi into the bargain. As a consequence of this belief, the faith of Yhoundeh declined, and there was a wide-spread revival of the dark worship of Zhothaqquah throughout Mhu Thulan in the last centuries before the onset of the great Ice Age.

  THE RED WORLD OF POLARIS

  I

  As he studied the slowly changing configuration of the stars in the huge reflectors of his ether-ship the Alcyone, Captain Volmar was now seized by a memory of his younger years, when he had been first officer of a trans-Atlantic liner. He recalled the broken mists and unclouded icy sapphire of nights when he had watched the pole-star from the vessel’s bridge. For now, amid the scattered flecks of light that formed the rearranged and scarce identifiable constellations, a single flaming point had began to emerge beyond the rest and was taking on the proportions of a remote sun; and this point, as he knew from his astronomical chart, was Polaris.

  His thin face, sharpened by the fires and rigors of well-nigh sacerdotal consecration to an ideal, was lit as with a reflection of the approaching orb. He watched it with the thrill of a mystic devotee as well as the eager curiosity of a scientist; and felt a renewal of all his pristine ardors, together with an actual sense of consummation. The terrestrial nights which he remembered so vividly, here in the everlasting night of space, had been marked by the inception of that unearthly vaulting ambition which had led years later to his first intersidereal voyage and then to his present project of circumnavigating the known universe. In those earlier times he had looked to Polaris as a far-off, unattainable goal; it had been the symbol of his dreams, the lodestar of his aspirations; and now he was nearing it, after more than a decade of cosmic voyaging among the illimitable systems.

  To Jasper, the first mate of the Alcyone, to Roverton the second mate, to the five members of the crew, Polaris was only one of a myriad array of suns; and they regarded it with no more than the quotidian interest accorded to the others. Jasper was guiding the controls of the Alcyone; and without express comment he turned to Volmar and asked for instructions:

  “We shall pass Polaris in about four hours, sir. Shall we keep the straight course, to the left?”

  “No—steer to the right. I want to take a look at Polaris. Also, there may be a planetary system; and if so, I’m curious to see it.” The dry, formal voice betrayed no evidence of Volmar’s internal eagerness.

  “Yes, sir.” Nothing more was said, as Jasper turned the heavy steering-rod of neo-manganese steel, and the vessel responded with inconceivable lightness, leaping through tremendous gulfs in the mere changing of its course, at more than the speed of any cosmical vibration.

  Burning with preternatural whiteness in the black ether, Polaris broadened hour by hour to a huge incandescent disk. Soon the flames of its corona were visible, soaring in the face of the measureless night; and, falling through the crystalline ports of the ether-ship, its rays mingled weirdly with the violet-tinged illumination of the electric bulbs, and cast their supermundane gleams on the pale faces of Volmar and his crew.

  Volmar, peering ahead with aquiline keenness, was the first to see the planets. Three of them were now discernible, one quite close to Polaris, at a distance comparable to that of Mercury from our sun; and the others travelling in more remote and widely divergent orbits. The inner world was very small; and the voyagers soon saw that it could be no more than a desert of torrid stone, of continental sands and gauntly rising mountains, with no trace of water or vegetation anywhere. The second world, as the Alcyone neared it, was found to differ little from the first; and Volmar and his men gave it merely a casual inspection, for all their interest was now centered on the third and outmost world, in its aphelion on the farther side of Polaris.

  This world, even as seen from afar, was plainly remarkable. It glowed with a deep red that was both sullen and fulgurant, in opposition to the livid grey of the other two; and since it revolved in a far-ulterior orbit, at a distance where the reflected light of Polaris should be proportionately feeble, the brilliance of its ruddy luster was mysterious and difficult to explain.

  Volmar and his crew watched it in a fascinated silence, as the ether-ship drove on and the strange planet became an ever-swelling globe. Its mystery grew with its apparent bulk, for there were no geographical or geological markings, no indications of seas or sea-beds, of mountains or hills, of valleys or elevations or depressions of any kind. It was an unbroken expanse of glowing red that dazzled the eyes and left an after
-image of changing colors. It was somehow suggestive of heated metal, and also gave the impression of an artificial rather than a natural body.

  The space-voyagers had approached many planets in their journeying; they had even landed on a number; and they knew the limitless variations of planetary development. They had found worlds that were shrouded with mist or snow, with clouds or ice, or were belted with auroral flames or seas of burning bitumen. They had found ocean-covered worlds where gigantic algae towered like forests above incalculable leagues of water; they had seen others that were riven from pole to pole with typhonian fissures and chasms, where etiolated fungi large as hillocks grew in the sunless river-bottoms; they had seen still others that were lob-sided with their burden of colossal mountains. But they had never before encountered a world that in any way resembled this.

  “What do you make of it, Captain?” queried Jasper.

  “I don’t know.” Volmar’s slow, deliberate voice was frankly puzzled. “Fly nearer—as near as you can.”

  The Alcyone dipped in a long spiral descent toward the monotonous ball that was now directly beneath. Soon it hung above the gleaming surface at an elevation of less than a mile. The red world was larger than Mars, though it lacked the dimensions of the Earth or Venus. But as far as the eye could see its horizons were perfectly smooth and level, and its plains were like a sheet of some luminous and deeply tinted copperish metal. The eyes of Volmar and his men were almost blinded with its glare. However, their approach to the weird orb had not occasioned any rise in the temperature of the space-vessel’s interior; so evidently the first impression of glowing heat was erroneous.

  “Still nearer—but be careful. We don’t know what it is, or what properties it may possess.”

  The Alcyone descended until it almost skimmed the ruddy plain. Now it could be seen that the surface was apparently made of innumerable tiny darting sparks and coruscations, interweaving like a dance of fiery atoms at a speed which the eye could hardly follow.

  “It must be some new form of matter,” suggested Roverton. “It looks like a million quintrillions of red-hot filings chasing each other in a field of magnetic force.”

  “Perhaps.” Volmar was studying the strange surface intently; and it seemed to him that directly below the vessel the gyrations of the dazzling particles were becoming slower, and that many of them disappeared and did not return to visibility. Then, with incredible suddenness, a deep and yawning pit revealed itself below the Alcyone, forming a circular shaft in the unknown substance. At the same time the ether-ship pitched violently downward, though Jasper had not moved the clutch that should have held it perfectly level and motionless in space. It sank dizzily into the shaft, as if all the gears and engines and levitative mechanisms had become utterly powerless. Jasper switched on the full force of the electromagnetic turbines, and sought to reverse the descent, but all in vain. The vessel shook and trembled as though it were fighting some irresistible power that drew it nadir-ward; but it continued to fall at an undiminished rate between the red walls of the shaft. A second more, and it plunged into a vast open space, where a world of glaring light, of kaleidoscopically various forms and colors, leapt up to meet it like a reeling and ever-broadening mosaic.

  II

  The transition from the outer sky to this internal gulf beneath the glowing red surface had occupied merely a few moments; and only men of supreme nervous alertness and presence of mind could have adjusted themselves in any degree to a situation so extraordinary. Jasper still strove to arrest the Alcyone’s descent, while the others watched with a swift cognizance of all apparent detail the world toward which they were falling with headlong velocity. Then, turning from it to gaze upward, they saw that the unknown fiery substance was arched above them from horizon to horizon like the cope of some unnatural metallic heaven. The sudden shaft that had formed to admit them was no longer visible; and the vault presented an unbroken expanse, pouring down a blinding, fulgurating luster, though no sun was now discernible.

  The vessel was helpless in the grip of the mysterious ultragravitational force that still dragged it downward. The roar of the fulminating engines, the response of the tightened brakes and the drawn levers, all served to attest that the machinery was in perfect order, and was struggling against a power such as never before had been encountered. Volmar and his crew resigned themselves to the seemingly inevitable crash; and all the events of their intersidereal voyage were marshalled before them in a crowded flash that was virtually simultaneous with the thought-image of its disastrous end.

  However, they were still able to note with astronomic interest the unknown world that surged toward them in geometric mazes of widening forms and spreading zones of color. There were belts that suggested water, there were others that gave the impression of a many-tinted vegetation, and still others denotive of a mineraloid character, like immense plots of ground with pavements of silver and cinnabar and lapis lazuli. And at intervals of many leagues on the great plain, colossal architectural piles upreared themselves to the zenith; and each separate edifice was vaster far than any terrene city.

  The ether-ship was falling directly upon one of these piles, whose level diamond-shaped roof was outstretched below in multiform and labyrinthine patterns of a hundred hues, like parterres and flower-beds. The headlong descent began to slacken gently at an elevation of three or four miles, the vessel drifted down with a buoyant ease, it landed and was brought to rest as skillfully and adroitly as if Jasper himself had guided it.

  Volmar and his men peered through the ports on a scene that was no less unbelievable than indescribable. They had come down on a vacant space at the center of the diamond roof, which reached away for a half-mile in every direction, and was seemingly made of some mineral substance unknown to terrene geology—a highly metallic stone with striations of black and yellow and bluish green. The roof was laid out like a garden with concentric rows of bizarre plants, all of which were either set in basins of fretted stone or were standing rootlessly on the bare pavement; and was crowded with living and moving creatures no less bizarre than the plants, who began immediately to collect around the Alcyone.

  Volmar was almost startled out of his habitual ascetic reserve as he studied these beings; and the others exclaimed with frank amazement. The beings resembled a multitude of forms and types; and all of them were either clothed in shards of metal or else possessed bodies that were radically different in their biological composition from any that the vessel’s crew had ever seen. They glittered and shone in the glaring light with a myriad hues and lusters redoubled by the intricate irregular facets into which their surfaces were divided. The commonest type among them was perhaps five feet tall, with a perfectly spherical head which was joined without a neck to a triangular body that radiated on each side, from a common center, four limbs that evidently served as both arms and legs since all of them were used alternately or simultaneously in locomotion and also in prehension. This type had a single cyclopean eye like a burning ruby in the middle of its silver face; and above the rounded dome of its head there were several glossy black antennae with vermicular segments, all terminating in tiny concave disks; and a short proboscis ending in a double mouth issued from the jointure of head and shoulders. There were other types, and certain unique individuals, varying monstrously in size and shape, and in the number or arrangement of their limbs and sense organs. But all of them gave the impression of artificial shells, of masks and armors, as if the entities that actuated them were unknowably domiciled within.

  “Talk about robots!” cried Roverton. “Did you ever see anything like them? Look at those copper joints that are as flexible as the joints of an acrobat. Look at those fingers or toes with seven flanges that can bend in any direction.”

  Two-score of the multifarious entities had grouped themselves around the vessel and were examining it with their single or manifold eyes. Behind the fixed inhuman expression of their metal masks, in the movements of their cunningly constructed limbs, the curiosity
of an incomprehensibly alien people somehow made itself felt. And the orchestral chattering of their voices, with notes that were resonant as drums, or shrill as clarions, or sweet as lute-strings, could be heard through the sound-valves of the Alcyone. They came nearer and touched the sides of the vessel as if to determine the material of which it was made; and some of them climbed the ladder to the man-hole and inspected it closely. After a little these latter descended and seemed to be holding a serious debate with the others, as if to decide a moot point or a course of action, while all of them continued to watch the Alcyone.

  Now the crowd drew back and a number departed, to return in a few minutes bearing among them an instrument whose use defied conjecture. It was a large tripod of some antimony-type substance, supporting a revolving globe of the same material, from which issued a long, slender tube with a flaring mouth. The tube was levelled at the vessel’s man-hole; and when a lever at the side of the tripod was pressed, a thin stream of ghostly yellow light emerged from the mouth and played upon the neo-vitriolene of the man-hole’s lid. Then, as if in response to the electrical mechanism by which it was operated, the lid unscrewed; and likewise the inner door of the ether-ship, giving on the compartment where Volmar and his crew were gathered, flew open to the same mysterious agency.

  III

  An atmosphere of humid warmth, laden as with hot-house odors of an ultra-tropical flora, flooded the vessel’s interior. Obviously there were strange elements, non-terrestrial gases in this air, for Volmar and his men began immediately to gasp for breath, and to experience a peculiar giddiness and lightheadedness. Volmar pressed the button which should have closed the outer and inner doors; but the mechanism refused to work, as if the batteries had gone dead or their force had somehow been nullified or paralyzed.