Foundations of Fear

by David G. Hartwell

  “Soothe!” said Graham. “This stuff is more than soothing if you take enough of it. I’ll send you something more like what you want, and I’ll take this away, by your leave.”

  “I really can’t argue!” replied Arne . . . “If you see Alice, tell her you find me fairly comfortable and don’t put her off this room. I really like it best. She can come and see me here, I keep a good fire, tell her . . . I feel as if I wanted to sleep . . .” he added brusquely.

  “You have been indulging already,” said Graham softly, Arne had begun to doze off. His cushion had sagged down, the doctor stooped to rearrange it, carelessly laying the little phial for the moment in a crease of the rug covering the man’s knees.

  Mrs. Arne in her mourning dress was crossing the hall as he came to the top of the basement steps and pushed open the swing door. She was giving some orders to Foster, the butler, who disappeared as the doctor advanced.

  “You’re about again,” he said, “good girl!”

  “Too silly of me,” she said, “to be hysterical! After all these years! One should be able to keep one’s own counsel. But it is over now, I promise I will never speak of it again.”

  “We frightened poor Dolly dreadfully. I had to order her out like a regiment of soldiers.”

  “Yes, I know, I’m going to her now!”

  On his suggestion that she should look in on her husband first she looked askance.

  “Down there!”

  “Yes, that’s his fancy. Let him be. He is a good deal depressed about himself and you. He notices a great deal more than you think. He isn’t quite as apathetic as you describe him to be . . . Come here!” He led her into the unlit dining-room a little way. “You expect too much, my dear. You do really! You make too many demands on the vitality you saved.”

  “What did one save him for?” she asked fiercely. She continued more quietly, “I know. I am going to be different.”

  “Not you,” said Graham fondly. He was very partial to Alice Arne in spite of her silliness. “You’ll worry about Edward till the end of the chapter. I know you. And”—he turned her round by the shoulder so that she fronted the light in the hall—“you elusive thing, let me have a good look at you . . . Hum! Your eyes, they’re a bit starey . . .”

  He let her go again with a sigh of impotence. Something must be done . . . soon . . . he must think . . . He got hold of his coat and began to get into it . . .

  Mrs. Arne smiled, buttoned a button for him and then opened the front door, like a good hostess, a very little way. With a quick flirt of his hat he was gone, and she heard the clap of his brougham door and the order “Home.”

  “Been saying good-bye to that thief Graham?” said her husband gently, when she entered his room, her pale eyes staring a little, her thin hand busy at the front of her dress . . .

  “Thief? Why? One moment! Where’s your switch?”

  She found it and turned on a blaze of light from which her husband seemed to shrink.

  “Well, he carried off my drops. Afraid of my poisoning myself, I suppose?”

  “Or acquiring the morphia habit,” said his wife in a dull level voice, “as I have.”

  She paused. He made no comment. Then, picking up the little phial Dr. Graham had left in the crease of the rug, she spoke—

  “You are the thief, Edward, as it happens, this is mine.”

  “Is it? I found it knocking about: I didn’t know it was yours. Well, will you give me some?”

  “I will, if you like.”

  “Well, dear, decide. You know I am in your hands and Graham’s. He was rubbing that into me today.”

  “Poor lamb!” she said derisively; “I’d not allow my doctor, or my wife either, to dictate to me whether I should put an end to myself, or not.”

  “Ah, but you’ve got a spirit, you see!” Arne yawned. “However, let me have to go at the stuff and then you put it on top of the wardrobe or a shelf, where I shall know it is, but never reach out to get it, I promise you.”

  “No, you wouldn’t reach out a hand to keep yourself alive, let alone kill yourself,” said she. “That is you all over, Edward.”

  “And don’t you see that is why I did die,” he said, with earnestness unexpected by her. “And then, unfortunately, you and Graham bustled up and wouldn’t let Nature take its course . . . I rather wish you hadn’t been so officious.”

  “And let you stay dead,” said she carelessly. “But at the time I cared for you so much that I should have had to kill myself, or commit suttee like a Bengali widow. Ah, well!”

  She reached out for a glass half-full of water that stood on the low ledge of a bookcase close by the arm of his chair . . . “Will this glass do? What’s in it? Only water? How much morphia shall I give you? An overdose?”

  “I don’t care if you do, and that’s fact.”

  “It was a joke, Edward,” she said piteously.

  “No joke to me. This fag end of life I’ve clawed hold of, doesn’t interest me. And I’m bound to be interested in what I’m doing or I’m no good. I’m no earthly good now. I don’t enjoy life, I’ve nothing to enjoy it with—in here”—he struck his breast. “It’s like a dull party one goes to by accident. All I want to do is to get into a cab and go home.”

  His wife stood over him with a half-full glass in one hand and the little bottle in the other. Her eyes dilated . . . her chest heaved . . .

  “Edward!” she breathed. “Was it all so useless?”

  “Was what useless? Yes, as I was telling you, I go as one in a dream—a bad, bad dream, like the dreams I used to have when I overworked at college. I was brilliant, Alice, brilliant, do you hear? At some cost, I expect! Now I hate people—my fellow creatures. I’ve left them. They come and go, jostling me, and pushing me, on the pavements as I go along, avoiding them. Do you know where they should be, really, in relation to me?”

  He rose a little in his seat—she stepped nervously aside, made as if to put down the bottle and the glass she was holding, then thought better of it and continued to extend them mechanically.

  “They should be over my head. I’ve already left them and their petty nonsense of living. They mean nothing to me, no more than if they were ghosts walking. Or perhaps, it’s I who am a ghost to them? . . . You don’t understand it. It’s because I suppose you have no imagination. You just know what you want and do your best to get it. You blurt out your blessed petition to your Deity and the idea that you’re irrelevant never enters your head, soft, persistent, High Church thing that you are! . . .”

  Alice Arne smiled, and balanced the objects she was holding. He motioned her to pour out the liquid from one to the other, but she took no heed; she was listening with all her ears. It was the nearest approach to the language of compliment, to anything in the way of loverlike personalities that she had heard fall from his lips since his illness. He went on, becoming as it were lukewarm to his subject—

  “But the worst of it is that once break the cord that links you to humanity—it can’t he mended. Man doesn’t live by bread alone . . . or lives to disappoint you. What am I to you, without my own poor personality? . . . Don’t stare so, Alice! I haven’t talked so much or so intimately for ages, have I? Let me, try and have it out . . . Are you in any sort of hurry?”

  “No, Edward.”

  “Pour that stuff out and have done . . . Well, Alice, it’s a queer feeling, I tell you. One goes about with one’s looks on the ground, like a man who eyes the bed he is going to lie down in, and longs for. Alice, the crust of the earth seems a barrier between me and my own place. I want to scratch the boardings with my nails and shriek something like this: “Let me get down to you all, there where I belong!” It’s a horrible sensation, like a vampire reversed! . . .”

  “Is that why you insisted on having this room in the basement?” she asked breathlessly.

  “Yes, I can’t bear being upstairs, somehow. Here, with these barred windows and stone-cold floors . . . I can see the people’s feet walking above there in the
street . . . one has some sort of illusion . . .”

  “Oh!” She shivered and her eyes travelled like those of a caged creature round the bare room and fluttered when they rested on the sombre windows imperiously barred. She dropped her gaze to the stone flags that showed beyond the oasis of Turkey carpet on which Arne’s chair stood . . . Then to the door, the door that she had closed on entering. It had heavy bolts, but they were not drawn against her, though by the look of her eyes it seemed she half imagined they were . . .

  She made a step forward and moved her hands slightly. She looked down on them and what they held . . . then changed the relative positions of the two objects and held the bottle over the glass . . .

  “Yes, come along!” her husband said. “Are you going to be all day giving it me?”

  With a jerk, she poured the liquid out into a glass and handed it to him. She looked away—forwards the door . . .

  “Ah, your way of escape!” said he, following her eyes. Then he drank, painstakingly.

  The empty bottle fell out of her hands. She wrung them, murmuring—

  “Oh, if I had only known!”

  “Known what? That I should go near to cursing you for bringing me back?”

  He fixed his cold eyes on her, as the liquid passed slowly over his tongue . . .

  “—Or that you would end by taking back the gift you gave?”

  John W. Campbell

  Who Goes There?

  John W. Campbell was a revolutionary magazine editor in the science fiction and fantasy genre from 1937 to his death in 1971. His short-lived (1939-44) magazine, Unknown, had a profound influence on the development of horror fiction for decades. His entire body of fiction, written as a young man before he ceased writing as a job condition of becoming editor of Astounding Stories, was in the science fiction genre. His one exceptional piece of horror is the popular and influential novella, “Who Goes There?” the title story of one of the two later collections of his stories, and the source the famous 1950s film, The Thing. “Science fiction,” says Leslie Fiedler, “evokes a cataclysmic horror that threatens the entire earth . . . it is essentially terror fiction.” To the extent that this is true, it gets at the intimate connections between science fiction and the horror genre in the twentieth century. Campbell, a technological optimist, did not characteristically write in this mode, and when he did, published his stories under a pseudonym originally. Further, writing in the genre that had been invented only in 1926 (when the first issue of Amazing Stories declared a new genre of literature, “scientifiction”), for Astounding, the science fiction magazine that had published several major Lovecraft stories of cosmic horror and many stories by his circle, Campbell set out to write a science fiction story that would “scare the pants off people,” as he told me in conversation, but in a clear, unobtrusive style. He succeeded in creating not only an acknowledged classic of modern science fiction but one of the most influential horror stories of the century.

  I

  The place stank. A queer, mingled stench that only the ice-buried cabins of an Antarctic camp know, compounded of reeking human sweat, and the heavy, fish-oil stench of melted seal blubber. An overtone of liniment combatted the musty smell of sweat-and-snow drenched furs, the acrid odor of burnt cooking fat, and the animal, not-unpleasant smell of dogs, diluted by time, hung in the air.

  Lingering odors of machine oil contrasted sharply with the taint of harness dressing and leather. Yet, somehow, through all that reek of human beings and their associates—dogs, machines, and cooking—came another taint. It was a queer, neck-ruffling thing, a faintest suggestion of an odor alien among the smells of industry and life. And it was a life-smell. But it came from the thing that lay bound with cord and tarpaulin on the table, dripping slowly, methodically onto the heavy planks, dank and gaunt under the unshielded glare of the electric light.

  Blair, the little bald-pated biologist of the expedition, twitched nervously at the wrappings, exposing clear, dark ice beneath and then pulling the tarpaulin back into place restlessly. His little birdlike motions of suppressed eagerness danced his shadow across the fringe of dingy gray underwear hanging from the low ceiling, the equatorial fringe of still, graying hair around his naked skull a comical halo about the shadow’s head.

  Commander Garry brushed aside the lax legs of a suit of underwear, and stepped toward the table. Slowly his eyes traced around the rings of men sardined into the Administration Building. His tall, stiff body straightened finally, and he nodded. “Thirty-seven. All here.” His voice was low, yet carried the clear authority of the commander by nature, as well as by title.

  “You know the outline of the story back of that find of the Secondary Pole Expedition. I have been conferring with Second-in-Command McReady, and Norris, as well as Blair and Dr. Copper. There is a difference of opinion, and because it involves the entire group, it is only just that the entire Expedition personnel act on it.

  “I am going to ask McReady to give you the details of the story, because each of you has been too busy with his own work to follow closely the endeavors of the others. McReady?”

  Moving from the smoke-blued background, McReady was a figure from some forgotten myth, a looming, bronze statue that held life, and walked. Six-feet-four inches he stood as he halted beside the table, and with a characteristic glance upward to assure himself of room under the low ceiling beams, straightened. His rough, dashingly orange windproof jacket he still had on, yet on his huge frame it did not seem misplaced. Even here, four feet beneath the drift-wind that droned across the antarctic waste above the ceiling, the cold of the frozen continent leaked in, and gave meaning to the harshness of the man. And he was bronze—his great red-bronze beard, the heavy hair that matched it. The gnarled, corded hands gripping, relaxing, gripping and relaxing on the table planks were bronze. Even the deep-sunken eyes beneath heavy brows were bronzed.

  Age-resisting endurance of the metal spoke in the cragged heavy outlines of his face, and the mellow tones of the heavy voice. “Norris and Blair agree on one thing; that animal we found was not—terrestrial in origin. Norris fears there may be danger in that; Blair says there is none.

  “But I’ll go back to how, and why we found it. To all that was known before we came here, it appeared that this point was exactly over the South Magnetic Pole of Earth. The compass does point straight down here, as you all know. The more delicate instruments of the physicists, instruments especially designed for this expedition and its study of the magnetic pole, detected a secondary effect, a secondary, less powerful magnetic influence about 80 miles southwest of here.

  “The Secondary Magnetic Expedition went out to investigate it. There is no need for details. We found it, but it was not the huge meteorite or magnetic mountain Norris had expected to find. Iron ore is magnetic, of course; iron more so—and certain special steels even more magnetic. From the surface indications, the secondary pole we found was small, so small that the magnetic effect it had was preposterous. No magnetic material conceivable could have that effect. Soundings through the ice indicated it was within one hundred feet of the glacier surface.

  “I think you should know the structure of the place. There is a broad plateau, a level sweep that runs more than 150 miles due south from the Secondary station, Van Wall says. He didn’t have time or fuel to fly farther, but it was running smoothly due south then. Right there, where that buried thing was, there is an ice-drowned mountain ridge, a granite wall of unshakable strength that has dammed back the ice creeping from the south.

  “And four hundred miles due south is the South Polar Plateau. You have asked me at various times why it gets warmer here when the wind rises, and most of you know. As a meteorologist I’d have staked my word that no wind could blow at -70 degrees; that no more than a 5-mile wind could blow at -50; without causing warming due to friction with ground, snow and ice and the air itself.

  “We camped there on the lip of that ice-drowned mountain range for twelve days. We dug our camp into the blue ice
that formed the surface, and escaped most of it. But for twelve consecutive days the wind blew at 45 miles an hour. It went as high as 48, and fell to 41 at times. The temperature was -63 degrees. It rose to -60 and fell to -68. It was meteorologically impossible, and it went on uninterruptedly for twelve days and twelve nights.

  “Somewhere to the south, the frozen air of the South Polar Plateau slides down from that 18,000 foot bowl, down a mountain pass, over a glacier, and starts north. There must be a funneling mountain chain that directs it, and sweeps it away for four hundred miles to hit that bald plateau where we found the secondary pole, and 350 miles farther north reaches the Antarctic Ocean.

  “It’s been frozen there since Antarctica froze twenty million years ago. There never has been a thaw there.

  “Twenty million years ago Antarctica was beginning to freeze. We’ve investigated, though, and built speculations. What we believe happened was about like this.

  “Something came down out of space, a ship. We saw it there in the blue ice, a thing like a submarine without a conning tower or directive vanes, 280 feet long and 45 feet in diameter at its thickest.

  “Eh, Van Wall? Space? Yes, but I’ll explain that better later.” McReady’s steady voice went on.

  “It came down from space, driven and lifted by forces men haven’t discovered yet, and somehow—perhaps something went wrong then—tangled with Earth’s megnetic field. It came south here, out of control probably, circling the magnetic pole. That’s a savage country there; but when Antarctica was still freezing, it must have been a thousand times more savage. There must have been blizzard snow, as well as drift, new snow falling as the continent glaciated. The swirl there must have been particularly bad, the wind hurling a solid blanket of white over the lip of that now-buried mountain.