Together, Barclay’s powerful body and McReady’s giant strength struck the door. Inside, the bunk jammed against the door screeched madly and crackled into kindling. The door flung down from broken hinges, the patched lumber of the doorpost dropping inward.
Like a blue rubber ball, a Thing bounced up. One of its four tentacle-like arms looped out like a striking snake. In a seven-tentacled hand a six-inch pencil of winking, shining metal glinted and swung upward to face them. Its line-thin lips twitched back from snake-fangs in a grin of hate, red eyes blazing.
Norris’s revolver thundered in the confined space. The hate-washed face twitched in agony, the looping tentacle snatched back. The silvery thing in its hand a smashed ruin of metal, the seven-tentacled hand became a mass of mangled flesh oozing greenish-yellow ichor. The revolver thundered three times more. Dark holes drilled each of the three eyes before Norris hurled the empty weapon against its face.
The Thing screamed in feral hate, a lashing tentacle wiping at blinded eyes. For a moment it crawled on the floor, savage tentacles lashing out, the body twitching. Then it staggered up again, blinded eyes working, boiling hideously, the crushed flesh sloughing away in sodden gobbets.
Barclay lurched to his feet and dove forward with an ice-ax. The flat of the weighty thing crushed against the side of the head. Again the unkillable monster went down. The tentacles lashed out, and suddenly Barclay fell to his feet in the grip of a living, livid rope. The thing dissolved as he held it, a white-hot band that ate into the flesh of his hands like living fire. Frantically he tore the stuff from him, held his hands where they could not be reached. The blind Thing felt and ripped at the tough, heavy, windproof cloth, seeking flesh—flesh it could convert—
The huge blowtorch McReady had brought coughed solemnly. Abruptly it rumbled disapproval throatily. Then it laughed gurglingly, and thrust out a blue-white, three-foot tongue. The Thing on the floor shrieked, flailed out blindly with tentacles that writhed and withered in the bubbling wrath of the blowtorch. It crawled and turned on the floor, it shrieked and hobbled madly, but always McReady held the blowtorch on the face, the dead eyes burning and bubbling uselessly. Frantically the Thing crawled and howled.
A tentacle sprouted a savage talon—and crisped in the flame. Steadily McReady moved with a planned, grim campaign. Helpless, maddened, the Thing retreated from the grunting torch, the caressing, licking tongue. For a moment it rebelled, squalling in inhuman hatred at the touch of the icy snow. Then it fell back before the charring breath of the torch, the stench of its flesh bathing it. Hopelessly it retreated—on and on across the Antarctic snow. The bitter wind swept over it, twisting the torch-tongue; vainly it flopped, a trail of oily, stinking smoke bubbling away from it—
McReady walked back toward the shack silently. Barclay met him at the door. “No more?” the giant meteorologist asked grimly.
Barclay shook his head. “No more. It didn’t split?”
“It had other things to think about,” McReady assured him. “When I left it, it was a glowing coal. What was it doing?”
Norris laughed shortly. “Wise boys, we are. Smash magnetos, so planes won’t work. Rip the boiler tubing out of the tractors. And leave that Thing alone for a week in this shack. Alone and undisturbed.”
McReady looked in at the shack more carefully. The air, despite the ripped door, was hot and humid. On a table at the far end of the room rested a thing of coiled wires and small magnets, glass tubing and radio tubes. At the center a block of rough stone rested. From the center of the block came the light that flooded the place, the fiercely blue light bluer than the glare of an electric arc, and from it came the sweetly soft hum. Off to one side was another mechanism of crystal glass, blown with an incredible neatness and delicacy, metal plates and a queer, shimmery sphere of insubstantiality.
“What is that?” McReady moved nearer.
Norris grunted. “Leave it for investigation. But I can guess pretty well. That’s atomic power. That stuff to the left—that’s a neat little thing for doing what men have been trying to do with 100-ton cyclotrons and so forth. It separates neutrons from heavy water, which he was getting from the surrounding ice.”
“Where did he get all—oh. Of course. A monster couldn’t be locked in—or out. He’s been through the apparatus caches.” McReady stared at the apparatus. “Lord, what minds that race must have—”
“The shimmery sphere—I think it’s a sphere of pure force. Neutrons can pass through any matter, and he wanted a supply reservoir of neutrons. Just project neutrons against silica—calcium—beryllium—almost anything, and the atomic energy is released. That thing is the atomic generator.”
McReady plucked a thermometer from his coat. “It’s 120° in here, despite the open door. Our clothes have kept the heat out to an extent, but I’m sweating now.”
Norris nodded. “The light’s cold. I found that. But it gives off heat to warm the place through that coil. He had all the power in the world. He could keep it warm and pleasant, as his race thought of warmth and pleasantness. Did you notice the light, the color of it?”
McReady nodded. “Beyond the stars is the answer. From beyond the stars. From a hotter planet that circled a brighter, bluer sun they came.”
McReady glanced out the door toward the blasted, smoke-stained trail that flopped and wandered blindly off across the drift. “There won’t be any more coming. I guess. Sheer accident it landed here, and that was twenty million years ago. What did it do all that for?” He nodded toward the apparatus.
Barclay laughed softly. “Did you notice what it was working on when we came? Look.” He pointed toward the ceiling of the shack.
Like a knapsack made of flattened coffee-tins, with dangling cloth straps and leather belts, the mechanism clung to the ceiling. A tiny, glaring heart of supernal flame burned in it, yet burned through the ceiling’s wood without scorching it. Barclay walked over to it, grasped two of the dangling straps in his hands, and pulled it down with an effort. He strapped it about his body. A slight jump carried him in a weirdly slow arc across the room.
“Anti-gravity,” said McReady softly.
“Anti-gravity.” Norris nodded. “Yes, we had ’em stopped, with no planes, and no birds. The birds hadn’t come—but it had coffee-tins and radio parts, and glass and the machine shop at night. And a week—a whole week—all to itself. America in a single jump—with anti-gravity powered by the atomic energy of matter.
“We had ’em stopped. Another half hour—it was just tightening these straps on the device so it could wear it—and we’d have stayed in Antarctica, and shot down any moving thing that came from the rest of the world.”
“The albatross—” McReady said softly. “Do you suppose—”
“With this thing almost finished? With that death weapon it held in its hand?
“No, by the grace of God, who evidently does hear very well, even down here, and the margin of half an hour, we keep our world, and the planets of the system too. Anti-gravity, you know, and atomic power. Because They came from another sun, a star beyond the stars. They came from a world with a bluer sun.”
Theodore Sturgeon
. . . and my fear is great
Theodore Sturgeon was one of the finest and most influential science fiction and fantasy writers of the mid-twentieth century. He once claimed never to have written a story in the horror genre, but many of his stories, and one of his novels, the stunning Some of Your Blood (1961), are central to the development of genre horror between the 1930s and the 1980s. His early fantasy stories published in Unknown and Weird Tales were a seminal influence on Ray Bradbury’s early work—Bradbury wrote an introduction to Sturgeon’s first story collection, Without Sorcery (1949)—and were centrally in the horror mode, if not the genre. Many of his science fiction stories, for instance, the classic “Killdozer” (1944), concerning the possession of a discarded World War II bulldozer by an alien life-form—certainly an ancestor of Matheson’s “Duel”—also used the horror
mode to striking effect. The Penguin Encyclopedia describes him as a writer “whose frequent excursions into dark fantasy sought, with lambent lyrical prose, a unified vision of beauty and horror.” His story “It” (1940) is the ancestor of many images of crawling horrors later the province of 1950s comics, particularly “the heap.” Sturgeon’s literary and emotional range was wide, and he was particularly known as an experimenter in prose style, especially in his use of poetic meter in prose. The long quotation from William Butler Yeats in the present story is a clue to the metric underpinnings of Sturgeon’s own prose here. “. . . and my fear is great . . .” is certainly a story of the supernatural and the fantastic and certainly dramatizes material on the edge of repression, but is most comparable to Hardy’s “Barbara, of the House of Grebe” in the present collection in its use of horrific moments and investigation of evil.
He hefted one corner of the box high enough for him to get his knuckle on the buzzer, then let it sag. He stood waiting, wheezing. The door opened.
“Oh! You didn’t carry it up five flights!”
“No, huh?” he grunted, and pushed inside. He set the groceries down on the sink top in the kitchenette and looked at her. She was sixty something and could have walked upright under his armpit with her shoes on.
“That old elevator . . .” she said. “Wait. Here’s something.”
He wiped sweat out of his eyes and sensed her approach. He put out his hand for the coin but it wasn’t a coin. It was a glass. He looked at it, mildly startled. He wished it were beer. He tasted it, then gulped it down. Lemonade.
“Slow-ly, slow-ly,” she said, too late. “You’ll get heat cramps. What’s your name?” Her voice seemed to come from a distance. She seemed, in an odd way, to stand at a distance as well. She was small as a tower is small on the horizon.
“Don,” he grunted.
“Well, Donny,” she said, “sit down and rest.”
He had said, “Don,” not “Donny.” When he was in rompers he was “Donny.” He turned to the door. “I got to go.”
“Wait a bit.”
He stopped without turning.
“That’s a beautiful watch for a boy like you.”
“I like it.”
“May I see it?”
Breath whistled briefly in his nostrils. She had her fingers lightly on the heel of his hand before he could express any more annoyance than that.
Grudgingly, he raised his arm and let her look.
“Beautiful. Where did you get it?”
He looked at her, surlily. “In a store.”
Blandly she asked, “Did you buy it?”
He snatched his hand away. He swiped nervously, twice, with a hooked index finger at his upper lip. His eyes were slits. “What’s it to you?”
“Well, did you?”
“Look, lady. I brought your groceries and I got my lemonade. It’s all right about the watch, see? Don’t worry about the watch. I got to go now.”
“You stole it.”
“Whaddaya—crazy? I didn’t steal no watch.”
“You stole that one.”
“I’m gettin’ outa here.” He reached for the knob.
“Not until you tell me about the watch.”
He uttered a syllable and turned the knob. The door stayed closed. He twisted, pulled, pushed, twisted again. Then he whirled, his back thudding against the door. His gangly limbs seemed to compact. His elbows came out, his head down. His teeth bared like an animal’s. “Hey, what is this?”
She stood, small and chunky and straight, and said in her faraway voice, “Are you going to tell me?” Her eyes were a milky blue, slightly protruding, and unreadable.
“You lemme out, hear?”
She shook her head.
“You better lemme out,” he growled. He took two steps toward her. “Open that door.”
“You needn’t be frightened. I won’t hurt you.”
“Somebuddy’s goin’ to get hurt,” he said.
“Not—another—step,” she said without raising her voice.
He released an ugly bark of nervous laughter and took the other step. His feet came forward and upward and his back slammed down on the floor. For a moment he lay still, then his eyelids moved slowly up and down and up again while for a moment he gave himself over to the purest astonishment. He moved his head forward so that he could see the woman. She had not moved.
He sat up, clenching his jaw against pain, and scuttled backward to the door. He helped himself rise with the doorpost, never taking his eyes off her. “Jesus, I slipped.”
“Don’t curse in this house,” she said—just as mild, just as firm.
“I’ll say what I damn please!”
Wham! His shoulders hit the floor again. His eyes were closed, his lips drawn back. He lifted one shoulder and arched his spine. One long agonized wheeze escaped through his teeth like an extrusion.
“You see, you didn’t slip,” said the woman. “Poor child. Let me help you.”
She put her strong, small hand on his left biceps and another between his shoulder blades. She would have led him to a chair but he pulled away.
“I’m awright,” he said. He said it again, as if unconvinced, and, “What’d you . . . do?”
“Sit down,” she said solicitously. He cowered where he was. “Sit down,” she said again, no more sharply, but there was a difference.
He went to the chair. He sidled along the wall, watching her, and he did not go very fast, but he went. He sank down into it. It was a very low chair. His long legs doubled and his knees thrust up sharply. He looked like a squashed grasshopper. He panted.
“About the watch,” she prompted him.
He panted twice as fast for three breaths and whimpered, “I don’t want no trouble, lady, just lemme go, huh?”
She pointed at his wrist.
“Awright, you want the watch?” Hysterically he stripped it off and dangled it toward her. “Okay? Take it.” His eyes were round and frightened and wary. When she made no move he put the watch on her ancient gateleg table. He put his palms on the seat of the chair and his feet walked two paces doorward, though he did not rise, but swiveled around, keeping his face to her, eager, terrified.
“Where did you get it?”
He whimpered, wordless. He cast one quick, hungry look at the door, tensed his muscles, met her gaze again, and slumped. “You gonna turn me in?”
“Of course not!” she said with more force than she had used so far.
“You’re goin’ to, all the same.”
She simply shook her head, and waited.
He turned, finally, picked up the watch, snapped the flexible gold band. “I swiped it—off Eckhart,” he whispered.
“Who?”
“Eckhart on Summit Av-noo. He lives behind the store. It was just laying there, on the counter. I put a box of groceries on it and snagged it out from under. You gonna tell?”
“Well, Donny! Don’t you feel better, now you’ve confessed?”
He looked up at her through his eyebrows, hesitated. “Yeah.”
“Is that the truth, Donny?”
“Uh-huh.” Then, meeting those calm, imponderable eyes, he said, “Well, no. I dunno, lady. I dunno. You got me all mixed up. Can I go now?”
“What about the watch?”
“I don’t want it no more.”
“I want you to take it back where you got it.”
“What?” He recoiled, primarily because in shock he had raised his voice and the sound of it frightened him. “Je—shucks, lady, you want him to put me in the can?”
“My name is Miss Phoebe, not ‘lady.’ No, Donny, I think you’ll do it. Just a moment.”
She sat at a shaky escritoire and wrote for a moment, while he watched. Presently, “Here,” she said. She handed him the sheet. He looked at her and then at the paper.
Dear Mr. Eckhart,
Inside the clasp of this watch your name and address is stamped. Would you be good enough to see that it gets to its rightful
owner?
Yours very truly,
(Miss) Phoebe Watkins
She took it out of his hand, folded it. She put the watch in an envelope, folded that neatly into a square, dropped it in a second envelope with the note, sealed it and handed it to Don.
“You—you’re givin’ it right back to me!”
“Am I?”
He lowered his eyes, pinched the top edge of the envelope, pulled it through his fingers to crease the top edge sharply. “I know. You’re gonna phone him. You’re gonna get me picked up.”
“You would be no good to me in the reformatory, Donny.”
He looked quickly at her eyes, one, then the other. “I’m gonna be some good to you?”
“Tomorrow at four, I want you to come to tea,” she said abruptly.
“To what?”
“To tea. That means wash your face and hands, put on a tie and don’t be late.”
Wash your face and hands. Nobody had dared to order him around like that for years. And yet, instead of resentment, something sharp and choking rose up in his throat. It was not anger. It was something which, when swallowed, made his eyes wet. He frowned and blinked hard.
“You’d better go,” she said, before he could accept or refuse, “before the stores close.” She didn’t even say which stores.
He rose. He pulled his shoulder blades together and his back cracked audibly. He winced, shambled to the door and stood waiting—not touching it, head down, patient—like a farm horse before a closed gate.
“What is it, Donny?”
“Ain’tcha gonna unlock it?”
“It was never locked.”
For a long moment he stood frozen, his back to her, his eyes down. Then he put a slow hand to the knob, turned it. The door opened. He went out, almost but not quite pausing at the threshold, almost but not quite turning to look back. He closed the door quietly and was gone.
She put her groceries away.
He did not come at four o’clock.
He came at four minutes before the hour, and he was breathing hard.
Foundations of Fear Page 70