The Top of the Volcano: The Award-Winning Stories of Harlan Ellison

by Harlan Ellison

  They stopped. Frozen in a world of muscles that trembled, of running energy with no place to go.

  “I’ll show you!” he yelled. “I’ll show you what it’s like! You want to know, so I’ll show you!”

  Then he breathed, and men died. Then he looked and others fell. Then he said, very quietly, so they would hear him: “It’s easy, till it happens. You never know, patriots! You live all the time and you say one thing or another, all your rules about what it takes to be brave, but you never know, till that one time when you find out. I found out, it’s not so easy. Now you’ll find out.”

  He pointed to the ground.

  “Get down on your knees and crawl, patriots! Crawl to me and maybe I’ll let you live. Get down like animals and crawl on your bellies to me.”

  There was a shout from the crowd; and, the man died.

  “Crawl, I said! Crawl to me!”

  Here and there in the crowd people dropped from sight. At the rear a woman tried to run away and he burned her out and the husk fell, and all around her, within sight of the wisps of smoke from her face, people fell to their knees. Then entire groups dropped; then one whole side of the mob went down. Then they were all on their knees.

  “Crawl! Crawl, brave ones, crawl nice my people! Crawl and learn it’s better to live, any way at all, to stay alive, because you’re human! Crawl and you’ll understand your slogans are shit, your rules are for others! Crawl for your goddamned lives and you’ll understand! Crawl!”

  And they crawled. They crept forward on hands and knees, across the grass, across cement and mud and the branches of small bushes, across the dirt. They crawled toward him.

  And far away, through mists of darkness, the Helmet-Headed One sat on his throne, high above all, with the basilisk at his feet, and he smiled.

  “Crawl, God damn you!”

  But he did not know the name of the God he served.

  “Crawl!”

  And in the middle of the mob, a woman who had hung a gold star in her front window, crawled across a .32 Police Positive, and her hand touched it, and she folded her fingers around it, and suddenly she raised up and screamed, “For Kennyyyyy…!” and she fired.

  The bullet smashed Lestig’s collarbone and he spun sidewise, up against the Yank’s puttees, and he tried to regain his stance but the crutch had fallen, and now the crowd was on its feet and firing…and firing…

  They buried the body in an unmarked grave, and no one talked of it. And far away, on a high throne, tickling the sleek hide of the basilisk that reclined at his feet like a faithful mastiff, even the Armed One did not speak of it. There was no need to speak of it. Lestig was gone, but that was to have been expected.

  The weapon had been deactivated, but Mars, the Eternal One, the God Who Never Dies, the Lord of Futures, Warden of the Dark Places, Ever-Potent Scion of Conflict, Master of Men, Mars sat content.

  The recruiting had gone well. Power to the people.

  * * *

  The Deathbird

  1974 Hugo Award: Best Novelette; Locus Poll Award: Best Short Fiction

  1

  This is a test. Take notes. This will count as ¾ of your final grade. Hints: remember, in chess, kings cancel each other out and cannot occupy adjacent squares, are therefore all-powerful and totally powerless, cannot affect one another, produce stalemate. Hinduism is a polytheistic religion; the sect of Atman worships the divine spark of life within Man; in effect saying, “Thou art God.” Provisos of equal time are not served by one viewpoint having media access to two hundred million people in prime time while opposing viewpoints are provided with a soapbox on the corner. Not everyone tells the truth. Operational note: these sections may be taken out of numerical sequence: rearrange them to suit yourself for optimum clarity. Turn over your test papers and begin.

  2

  Uncounted layers of rock pressed down on the magma pool. White-hot with the bubbling ferocity of the molten nickel-iron core, the pool spat and shuddered, yet did not pit or char or smoke or damage in the slightest, the smooth and reflective surfaces of the strange crypt.

  Nathan Stack lay in the crypt—silent, sleeping.

  A shadow passed through rock. Through shale, through coal, through marble, through mica schist, through quartzite; through miles-thick deposits of phosphates, through diatomaceous earth, through feldspars, through diorite; through faults and folds, through anticlines and monoclines, through dips and synclines; through hellfire; and came to the ceiling of the great cavern and passed through; and saw the magma pool and dropped down; and came to the crypt. The shadow.

  A triangular face with a single eye peered into the crypt, saw Stack; four-fingered hands were placed on the crypt’s cool surface. Nathan Stack woke at the touch, and the crypt became transparent; he woke though the touch had not been upon his body. His soul felt the shadowy pressure and he opened his eyes to see the leaping brilliance of the worldcore around him, to see the shadow with its single eye staring in at him.

  The serpentine shadow enfolded the crypt; its darkness flowed upward again, through the Earth’s mantle, toward the crust, toward the surface of the cinder, the broken toy that was the Earth.

  When they reached the surface, the shadow bore the crypt to a place where the poison winds did not reach, and caused it to open.

  Nathan Stack tried to move, and moved only with difficulty. Memories rushed through his head of other lives, many other lives, as many other men; then the memories slowed and melted into a background tone that could be ignored.

  The shadow thing reached down a hand and touched Stack’s naked flesh. Gently, but firmly, the thing helped him to stand, and gave him garments, and a neck-pouch that contained a short knife and a warming-stone and other things. He offered his hand, and Stack took it, and after two hundred and fifty thousand years sleeping in the crypt, Nathan Stack stepped out on the face of the sick planet Earth.

  Then the thing bent low against the poison winds and began walking away. Nathan Stack, having no other choice, bent forward and followed the shadow creature.

  3

  A messenger had been sent for Dira and he had come as quickly as the meditations would permit. When he reached the Summit, he found the fathers waiting, and they took him gently into their cove, where they immersed themselves and began to speak.

  “We’ve lost the arbitration,” the coil-father said. “It will be necessary for us to go and leave it to him.”

  Dira could not believe it. “But didn’t they listen to our arguments, to our logic?”

  The fang-father shook his head sadly and touched Dira’s shoulder. “There were…accommodations to be made. It was their time. So we must leave.”

  The coil-father said, “We’ve decided you will remain. One was permitted, in caretakership. Will you accept our commission?”

  It was a very great honor, but Dira began to feel the loneliness even as they told him they would leave. Yet he accepted. Wondering why they had selected him, of all their people. There were reasons, there were always reasons, but he could not ask. And so he accepted the honor, with all its attendant sadness, and remained behind when they left.

  The limits of his caretakership were harsh, for they ensured he could not defend himself against whatever slurs or legends would be spread, nor could he take action unless it became clear the trust was being breached by the other—who now held possession. And he had no threat save the Deathbird. A final threat that could be used only when final measures were needed: and therefore too late.

  But he was patient. Perhaps the most patient of all his people.

  Thousands of years later, when he saw how it was destined to go, when there was no doubt left how it would end, he understood that was the reason he had been chosen to stay behind.

  But it did not help the loneliness.

  Nor could it save the Earth. Only Stack could do that.

  4

  1 Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman
, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

  2 And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:

  3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

  4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:

  5 (Omitted)

  6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

  7 (Omitted)

  8 (Omitted)

  9 And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?

  10 (Omitted)

  11 And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?

  12 And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.

  13 And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou has done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.

  14 And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:

  15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

  —Genesis 3:1-15

  TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  (Give 5 points per right answer.)

  1. Melville’s Moby-Dick begins, “Call me Ishmael.” We say it is told in the first person. In what person is Genesis told? From whose viewpoint?

  2. Who is the “good guy” in this story? Who is the “bad guy”? Can you make a strong case for reversal of the roles?

  3. Traditionally, the apple is considered to be the fruit the serpent offered to Eve. But apples are not endemic to the Near East. Select one of the following, more logical substitutes, and discuss how myths come into being and are corrupted over long periods of time: olive, fig, date, pomegranate.

  4. Why is the word LORD always in capitals and the name God always capitalized? Shouldn’t the serpent’s name be capitalized, as well? If no, why?

  5. If God created everything (see Genesis, Chap. I), why did he create problems for himself by creating a serpent who would lead his creations astray? Why did God create a tree he did not want Adam and Eve to know about, and then go out of his way to warn them against it?

  6. Compare and contrast Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling panel of the Expulsion from Paradise with Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.

  7. Was Adam being a gentleman when he placed blame on Eve? Who was Quisling? Discuss “narking” as a character flaw.

  8. God grew angry when he found out he had been defied. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, didn’t he know? Why couldn’t he find Adam and Eve when they hid?

  9. If God had not wanted Adam and Eve to taste the fruit of the forbidden tree, why didn’t he warn the serpent? Could God have prevented the serpent from tempting Adam and Eve? If yes, why didn’t he? If no, discuss the possibility the serpent was as powerful as God.

  10. Using examples from two different media journals, demonstrate the concept of “slanted news.”

  5

  The poison winds howled and tore at the powder covering the land. Nothing lived there. The winds, green and deadly, dived out of the sky and raked the carcass of the Earth, seeking, seeking: anything moving, anything still living. But there was nothing. Powder. Talc. Pumice.

  And the onyx spire of the mountain toward which Nathan Stack and the shadow thing had moved, all that first day. When night fell they dug a pit in the tundra and the shadow thing coated it with a substance thick as glue that had been in Stack’s neck-pouch. Stack had slept the night fitfully, clutching the warming-stone to his chest and breathing through a filter tube from the pouch.

  Once he had awakened, at the sound of great batlike creatures flying overhead; he had seen them swooping low, coming in flat trajectories across the wasteland toward his pit in the earth. But they seemed unaware that he—and the shadow thing—lay in the hole. They excreted thin, phosphorescent strings that fell glowing through the night and were lost on the plains; then the creatures swooped upward and were whirled away on the winds. Stack resumed sleeping with difficulty.

  In the morning, frosted with an icy light that gave everything a blue tinge, the shadow thing scrabbled its way out of the choking powder and crawled along the ground, then lay flat, fingers clawing for purchase in the whiskaway surface. Behind it, from the powder, Stack bore toward the surface, reached up a hand and trembled for help.

  The shadow creature slid across the ground, fighting the winds that had grown stronger in the night, back to the soft place that had been their pit, to the hand thrust up through the powder. It grasped the hand, and Stack’s fingers tightened convulsively. Then the crawling shadow exerted pressure and pulled the man from the treacherous pumice.

  Together they lay against the earth, fighting to see, fighting to draw breath without filling their lungs with suffocating death.

  “Why is it like this…what happened?” Stack screamed against the wind. The shadow creature did not answer, but it looked at Stack for a long moment and then, with very careful movements, raised its hand, held it up before Stack’s eyes and slowly, making claws of the fingers, closed the four fingers into a cage, into a fist, into a painfully tight ball that said more eloquently than words: destruction.

  Then they began to crawl toward the mountain.

  6

  The onyx spire of the mountain rose out of hell and struggled toward the shredded sky. It was monstrous arrogance. Nothing should have tried that climb out of desolation. But the black mountain had tried, and succeeded.

  It was like an old man. Seamed, ancient, dirt caked in striated lines, autumnal, lonely; black and desolate, piled strength upon strength. It would not give in to gravity and pressure and death. It struggled for the sky. Ferociously alone, it was the only feature that broke the desolate line of the horizon.

  In another twenty-five million years, the mountain might be worn as smooth and featureless as a tiny onyx offering to the deity night. But though the powder plains swirled and the poison winds drove the pumice against the flanks of the pinnacle, thus far their scouring had only served to soften the edges of the mountain’s profile, as though divine intervention had protected the spire.

  Lights moved near the summit.

  7

  Stack learned the nature of the phosphorescent strings excreted onto the plain the night before by the batlike creatures. They were spores that became, in the wan light of day, strange bleeder plants.

  All around them as they crawled through the dawn, the little live things sensed their warmth and began thrusting shoots up through the talc. As the fading red ember of the dying sun climbed painfully into the sky, the bleeding plants were already reaching maturity.

  Stack cried out as one of the vine tentacles fastened around his ankle, holding him. A second looped itself around his neck.

  Thin films of berry-black blood coated the vines, leaving rings on Stack’s flesh. The rings burned terribly.

  The shadow creature slid on its belly and pulled itself back to the man. Its triangular head came close to Stack’s neck, and it bit into the vine. Thick black blood spurted as the vine parted, and the shadow creature rasped its razor-edged teeth back and forth till Stack was able to breathe again. With a violent movement Stack folded himself down and around, pulling the short knife from the neck-pouch. He sawed through the vine tightening inexorably around his ankle. It screamed as it was severed, in the same voice Stack had heard from the skies the night before. The severed vine writhed away, withdrawing into the talc.

  Stack and the shadow thing crawled forward
once again, low, flat, holding onto the dying earth: toward the mountain.

  High in the bloody sky, the Deathbird circled.

  8

  On their own world, they had lived in luminous, oily-walled caverns for millions of years, evolving and spreading their race through the universe. When they had had enough of empire building, they turned inward, and much of their time was spent in the intricate construction of songs of wisdom, and the designing of fine worlds for many races.

  There were other races that designed, however. And when there was a conflict over jurisdiction, an arbitration was called, adjudicated by a race whose raison d’être was impartiality and cleverness in unraveling knotted threads of claim and counterclaim. Their racial honor, in fact, depended on the flawless application of these qualities. Through the centuries they had refined their talents in more and more sophisticated arenas of arbitration until the time came when they were the final authority. The litigants were compelled to abide by the judgments, not merely because the decisions were always wise and creatively fair, but because the judges’ race would, if its decisions were questioned as suspect, destroy itself. In the holiest place on their world they had erected a religious machine. It could be activated to emit a tone that would shatter their crystal carapaces. They were a race of exquisite cricketlike creatures, no larger than the thumb of a man. They were treasured throughout the civilized worlds, and their loss would have been catastrophic. Their honor and their value was never questioned. All races abided by their decisions.

  So Dira’s people gave over jurisdiction to that certain world, and went away, leaving Dira with only the Deathbird, a special caretakership the adjudicators had creatively woven into their judgment.

  There is recorded one last meeting between Dira and those who had given him his commission. There were readings that could not be ignored—had, in fact, been urgently brought to the attention of the fathers of Dira’s race by the adjudicators—and the Great Coiled One came to Dira at the last possible moment to tell him of the mad thing into whose hands this world had been given, to tell Dira of what the mad thing would do.