The Door to Saturn

by Clark Ashton Smith

“Quick! The respirative masks and air-tanks!” cried Volmar with a voice that fought the asphyxiating elements. These masks, covering the entire head and connected by a tube with a tank that was strapped to the shoulders, had been carried along for use in landing on alien worlds where the air might prove unfit for human respiration.

  The apparatus was quickly donned, and none too soon; for one of the men fainted, and the others had to fasten his mask. All of them felt an instantaneous relief from the symptoms of vertigo and difficult breathing.

  The act of putting on the masks had no sooner been completed, when a number of the weird multiform entities invaded the vessel one by one and surrounded Volmar and his crew. They gibbered among themselves with their instrument-like voices, they eyed the men with the unchanging glare of their single or triple or quadruple eyes, which offered the appearance of many-angled and diverse-tinted gems; they inspected and fingered the machinery and the furniture, and showed in many ways the investigative spirit which is the invariable mark of the scientist.

  “Of all the burglarious entries!” exclaimed Jasper. “No earthly safe-cracker could compete with these beings.”

  All the men stood irresolute, wondering as to the best mode of procedure, and the motives and dispositions of their visitors. The invaders gave no sign of hostile or unfriendly intentions; but in every motion of their metal flanges, every silver or bronze or iron tone of their voices, a spirit beyond the range of human sensation or understanding was manifest. They were plainly intelligent; but their exterior was that of highly organized and subtly animated machinery; and it was impossible to conceive them as possessing the motives, interests, or desires of normal biological forms.

  With perspicacious immediacy they had singled out Volmar as the leader of the expedition, for they were now addressing him in tones vaguely suggestive of invitation. Then, one by one, they left the compartment, walking backward with perfect surety toward the man-hole, and making signs that Volmar and his companions should follow them.

  “I believe they are asking us to be their guests,” Roverton observed.

  There was a brief discussion as to the best course of action.

  “These people,” said Volmar, “are plainly the masters of forces which we are perhaps not even fitted to understand. For some unknowable purpose, they have captured us; and any effort to escape would be fruitless, since the Alcyone is held as firmly as though it were anchored with a thousand chains and cables, doubtless by some magnetic ray. It would be more judicious not to antagonize our captors in any way, but to assent voluntarily to whatever they wish. I vote that we accept their invitation.”

  The others agreed that Volmar had summarized the situation and its potentialities very wisely and succinctly. They might as well yield without the ineffectual folly of resistance. And in spite of the humiliating and mystifying manner in which their vessel had been trapped, in spite of their ignorance regarding the intentions of these odd people, they were full of excited curiosity and were eager to see more of this remarkable world, which differed so uniquely from all others that they had hitherto examined.

  Descending the vessel’s steel ladder, they found that the throng had dispersed, leaving only a mere half-dozen of the beings with globular heads and triangular bodies, who were manifestly a reception committee. With elaborate genuflections that were like those of marionettes, these beings led the way through the fantastic roof-garden, with its winding spaces and pathways of stone, and semi-circular rows of indescribable plants and trees, toward a sort of open cupola that was visible about a hundred yards away.

  The cupola was supported by pillars carven with anaglyphs of a character so unusual that it was impossible to know whether they were miniature bas-reliefs, picture-writings, or phonetic symbols. Within, there were two large circular pits in the floor, which seemed to descend to the very base of the building. Their walls were perpendicular, with no sign of rungs or stairs or machinery of the elevator type. To the surprise and consternation of the earth-men, two of their guides stepped into the nearest pit as casually as if the descent were no more than a pace; and instead of falling headlong, they floated gently down with a feather-like movement utterly incongruous in view of their corporeal structure. The others made signs to the men that they should follow; and when the earthlings hesitated, another of them entered the pit and was wafted downward.

  “Well,” said Volmar, “if they can do it, I guess it is safe for us also. There must be a current of some gravity-negating force in the shaft.”

  He stepped over the circular verge, and felt as if he were being born on invisible cushions that sank slowly down between the walls of the shaft. His crew followed, and after them came the remaining three of the delegation of guides.

  The shaft descended for a well-nigh incalculable distance, far greater than the height of any terrestrial building. At regular intervals there were landings that gave on the various innumerable stories of the edifice; and there were glimpses of unending rows of titan columns in rooms that seemed to stretch without walls till they terminated in far-off balconies; and there were smaller rooms whose construction displayed an unfamiliar geometry, where scores and hundreds of the metal-sharded people were engaged in tasks of an unsurmisable nature by the light from glowing spheres of ever-shifting iridescent colors that hung in mid-air without chains or brackets. Also, there were glimpses of the second shaft, in which people were continually ascending, and from which they could step on any of the landings as if by a mere effort of will.

  Roverton and Jasper were side by side in the pit, behind Volmar.

  “This is certainly a superior kind of elevator system,” remarked Jasper, “I’d give something to know the secret of its operation.”

  “From all indications,” rejoined Roverton, “we have struck a world whose mechanical knowledge and masterdom of natural forces make our scientific accomplishments look like simple arithmetic beside algebra and trigonometry.”

  After several minutes of that feather-like descent, which was accompanied by the sensation of an almost total loss of bodily weight, the earthlings reached the ground floor of the edifice. Here, in a mile-long hall with ceilings of tremendous height, the three preceding guides awaited them; and they were joined in a few moments by the others.

  Now they were led along vistas of quadrangular columns more enormous than dolomites, through which there poured a saffron light of unbearable brilliance, emanating from the end of the hall. They passed many doors and intersecting halls, open or shut, and equally mysterious in what they concealed or revealed. Then, through a semi-circular portal, they entered a chamber of more moderate size, with septagonal walls. This chamber was the source of the light, which streamed from a huge globe suspended in mid-air. Beneath the globe, on a lofty tripodal chair of some electrum-like substance with alternate gleams of gold and silver, there sat a being who differed from the rest in the vaster dimensions of his bright orbicular head, which seemed to overweigh his wedge-shaped body like a full moon ensconced on a semi-lune. This entity turned his one eye, which resembled a great fiery carbuncle, on the earth-men; and addressed their guides in a voice of flute-like sweetness and modulation. One of the delegation left the room forthwith, and returned with a singular instrument, scarcely comparable in its form to anything used on earth, with many lenses of a transparent material arranged behind each other in a frame of spiral rods and arabesque filaments. This instrument was now fastened by a large circlet to the forehead of the being who sat upon the tripodal chair.

  The being lifted one of his many-jointed limbs, and pointed at the bare, windowless wall of the room, which gleamed in the saffron light like a polished surface of reflecting mineral. There, as the men gazed, a picture suddenly sprang into life, as if from the slide of a magic lantern, and filled the entire opposite face of the wall. It was a picture of the red world as the voyagers had beheld it hanging in space on their first approach. Above the world there hovered a tiny glimmering speck; and as the great orb grew larger, till only a
portion of its surface was depicted on the wall, it could be seen that the speck was the Alcyone, which descended till it almost touched the glowing plain. Then this picture disappeared abruptly, to be succeeded by a view of the roof of the Babel-like building on which the Alcyone had been drawn down. Here, with an optical instrument which resembled a periscope, one of the metal-sharded entities was peering at the red vault, which now seemed to become diaphanous, revealing the ether-ship beyond in space.

  “Good Lord!” said Roverton in an awed voice. “That was how they saw us coming. That optical instrument must have been a sort of long-range X-ray apparatus.”

  Even as he spoke, the picture faded. An enormous chamber was now disclosed, in which stood a labyrinthine mechanism of shining cubes and lozenges ramifying from a tall central cone of black, lusterless metal. The roof of the chamber became transparent, revealing the diaphanous vault of the heavens and the vessel itself once more as it still hung in outer ether. A dozen of the globe-headed people were grouped around the mechanism and were adjusting certain of its parts. Then one of them pulled a spiral lever, and a beam of some indescribable color, visible only for a moment, shot upward from the cone until it reached the space-vessel and curved around it like a grappling-hook. Then the Alcyone was seen to descend through a clear shaft in the vault, and was drawn down to the roof of the building in which the cone-mechanism was located.

  “Well, that’s plain enough,” commented Volmar. “He—or it—is showing us how we were captured. The cone-machine must be the generator of some force that is infinitely more powerful than gravitation, though probably akin to it. Amazing—but the pictures themselves are even more astounding, for they must be thought-images rendered visible by the lens-apparatus attached to that creature’s forehead. Who ever dreamed of a moving-picture machine capable of using the mind itself for a film?”

  Other views now succeeded the one of the space-vessel’s capture. They were plainly meant to depict the manner of hospitality which would be shown to the earthlings during their sojourn on the red planet: for the figures of Volmar and his crew were conspicuous in all of them, and were represented in the act of visiting many of the Babelian towers and viewing all sorts of mechanical wonders and marvellous plant or animal forms as they travelled throughout the world with their compulsory hosts. They were afterwards to remember and recognize many of these scenes. In one of them, a prodigious open shaft in the ground was shown, with people ascending and descending by thousands; and the impression was somehow conveyed that the shaft penetrated the entire diameter of the world, perhaps from pole to pole; and that those who sank into it at one end would arise to the surface at the other. Hundreds of titan towers, which apparently took the place of cities on the red world, were also shown; and the realm-wide agricultural fields, botanical gardens of forest-like extent, and breeding-pens of inconceivably monstrous animals, were likewise flashed on the wall together with many interior glimpses of the life led by this unique race.

  Then, in rapid alternation, came another series of scenes that were plainly historical, and which seemed to unfold the chronicles of the red world from remotest time. The beings who were shown in the first of them were not sharded in metal; though they displayed forms that were recognizably similar, with all the features of the globe-headed type, they possessed a more usual integument of hairless animal skin. The world in which they lived was vaulted with a greenish sky, in which the sun Polaris burned like any other solar luminary. It was a fertile and flourishing world; and the long epochs of its evolution, and the evolution of its peoples, were rapidly hinted in brief flashes. Anon, a period of racial and planetary decadence was denoted; the seas dried up, the fertile zones were blotched with ever-spreading deserts, the atmosphere became cloudless and rarified and almost irrespirable; and the people themselves grew senescent, they no longer reproduced their kind, and were dying one by one. But among them were scientists who had attained a well-nigh supreme knowledge of natural laws and a mastery of many forces both familiar and obscure. These scientists gathered in conclave to determine some method of racial salvation; and the result of their conference, as shown in the next pictures, was beyond conception or belief. Several bodies, duplicating in every detail the physical formation of the race, were constructed of various metals. The minutest cells and nerves were somehow reproduced; and only the brain-space in the heads was left vacant. Then some of the scientists submitted to an unusual operation: their brains were removed and transferred to the metal heads, where they swam in a bath of some ruddy fluid that must have had elixir-like properties; for after an interval the artificial bodies moved and arose to their feet; and were manifestly controlled and animated by the living brains within them. Then more bodies were made; some of aberrant or whimsical types, according to the taste of their future occupants; and others of the dying race underwent the same operation; till within an incredibly short length of time all of them had discarded their perishable anatomies of flesh and were inhabiting corporeal forms that were virtually indestructible. The red fluid, which was replaced at certain intervals, preserved and nourished their brains till they grew wise with an accumulated knowledge of out-lived aeons. Invention progressed with colossal paces; and machines of many types and sizes were builded for the use and control of every cosmic or planetary power, from refracted and magnified rays to the force released by exploding atoms. Towers were reared from heaps of desert sand by some of these machines, which could integrate and organize the molecules of matter in any desired pattern; and plants and animals were artificially created by a chemical duplication of the processes of life. There was no limit to the scientific genius of this people, who, in their metal bodies, retained no needs and passions other than those which were wholly intellectual. By a series of enormous magnetic engines, situated in every longitude of their world at regular intervals, they even enclosed their entire planet with a vault of metallic atoms in a zone of super-electric force, which served to insulate it from the encroaching cold of space, and also to conserve the remnants of the atmosphere, which was now gradually enriched and renewed by the addition of the necessary elements in gaseous form.

  Thus, in short flashes, a pictorial account of the planet and its history was presented to the earthlings. They were dumbfounded by such revelations; and their amazement grew with every scene. The unearthliness of the things and events, of the alien peoples and epochs shadowed forth, was beyond the most extravagant vagaries of imagination.

  The long display of images came to an end; and the lens-apparatus was removed from the brow of its user, who then vacated his chair. Volmar was motioned to come forward and seat himself on the tripod. Then, by a contraction of its circlet, which was formed in a series of regulable segments, the machine was fitted to his forehead.

  Volmar concentrated on various ideas which he wished to express; but the results were unsatisfactory. The pictures that formed on the wall were too dim and shapeless and chaotic to be intelligible. Obviously his brain was not powerful enough in its thought-vibrations to effect the desired visualization. And when the apparatus was tried by Roverton, Jasper, and the others, the resultant images were equally negligible and disappointing.

  IV

  The being with the vast moon-like head made a gesture of dismissal; and the earth-men were now conducted by their guides along another hall which led to the exterior of the building.

  The scene outside was overwhelmingly strange, and offered little resemblance in any detail to earthly landscapes or to those of other planets which the Alcyone’s crew had visited. Around the looming edifice with its innumerable stories and terrace-like balconies, there stretched a winding space of open pavement bordered with a park of vegetable growths that were no less variegated than extraordinary. Most of them, it was probable, were the synthetic creations of the metal-bodied beings; for they presented only a vague and distant likeness to the simpler flora that Volmar and his men had seen shadowed forth in the earlier historical tableau. They testified to a limitless hortic
ultural ingenuity, with an inclination toward the grotesque, the ornate, and the recherché. Some of them seemed to imitate in their stems, foliage, and blossoms the forms of novel animals, birds, and insects; others had apparently derived their inspiration from the crystallizations of unthinkably elaborate minerals; others resembled structures of coral flowering with many-chaliced shells; and some were suggestive of outlandish sculptures and arabesques, of the mad and demon-wrought vagaries of unimaginable art. There were titan fungi which bore an architectural resemblance in their cinnabar or malachite or azurite tiers, to pagodas and ziggurats. There were cacti that offered the appearance of immense and complicated machines. Most of the plants were not associable even in a superficial degree to any mundane genus. Some were rooted in an ashen-blue soil; but others were rootless, and wherever allowed, they had spread to the pavements and were sprawling or standing about as if they might creep or stalk away at any moment. They gleamed with unearthly textures, and colors denotive of a transidereal spectrum, in the sultry and shadowless effulgence that flamed upon them from horizon to zenith on all sides.

  The senses of the earthlings reeled in this blaze of inundating torrential light, this delirious riot of ultramundane form and supersolar iridescence. Their nerves were exasperated and then stunned by the continual impact of sensations which the human system was never meant to sustain. The vegetation seemed to dance like a sabbat of demons and witches; and the building they had left, and the further edifices that overtowered the plain, all staggered in drunken unison before their eyes as the metal guides conducted them along the pavement; and they heard as in a doubtful nightmare the voices of these beings, who were pointing out and apparently naming one object after another, in an effort to begin some sort of linguistic tuition. It was difficult to reduce their tones to a phonetic basis and to approximate them with the human vocal chords, but, by careful attention and tireless experiment, Volmar and the others were able to achieve a partial articulation and a remote likeness to some of the words and syllables. In pointing to themselves the beings uttered many times a vocable which sounded like tloong, which was plainly the generic name of their species. And they repeatedly called the earthlings ongar, which doubtless meant something like “alien” or “outsider.” In this way, a few words were approximately mastered, and the rudiments of a sort of communication were established. But, under the nervous tax that the earth-men suffered, the attempt to hear, comprehend, and reproduce the sounds correctly was a further addition to the nightmare tension and feeling of unbearable delirium.