The cube was gone.
Chi Ling stood with her back to Shevlin, hands buried in her hair. Swiftly the hands worked, changing tresses, altering the coiffure. Her skin whitened, glowed. Her body altered, mistily and as in a haze; blurred, grew, shrank, flattened…
The girl turned, stood looking down at Shevlin from the height of the ebony steps.
It was Chi Ling, and it was not Chi Ling. The red mouth was there…and the green eyes framed by the raven hair…but the face was altered subtly, the eyebrows arched, a pixiness in the hollow of the white cheeks, mockery in the set of the full-lips, the slant of the eyes and the flaring of the thin nostrils.
Shevlin choked: “How’d you—do that?”
The woman laughed. “You would not understand. Unless—are you a scientist? Like Edison? Einstein? Lawrence?”
He shook his head. The shang-ti woman came down the steps, moving with facile grace. She said: “Chi Ling may have told you a little of me, of our kind. She calls us the shang-ti. It will do. We have come from a very far distance, across fifty million light years, from a galaxy a dozen times the size of your own milky way.”
Shevlin licked his-lips. He was an adventurer. He had faced a lot of odd things in the past, all the way from Nepal to northern Siberia. He told himself: Just another person, that’s all she is. Nothing else than that. Keep it in mind.
“We are different from your people. You are carbon life. We are a form of life based on efficiency of energy.”
Shevlin looked blank. The shang-ti woman laughed, crossed the room toward a row of ornate benches. Sank down on one, gesturing to Shevlin.
“I’ll try and explain. Your life form is based on matter, mine on energy. You know heat as energy, but to the shang-ti, there is no such thing as heat. We are energy incarnate. Within ourselves there is no matter at all, only energy. Many eons ago, our life-forms came into being on a very distant planet. Pressures, a fantastic outpouring of incredible power from a blasted twin-sun, the right conditions—” Chi Ling shrugged, smiling; said simply, “All that combined to form the shang-ti.
“We exist at what you would call absolute zero, two hundred and seventy degrees below Centigrade zero. Your men of science have never duplicated that temperature, can never hope to do so. It is at that temperature that all matter transforms into energy. Is energy, and not matter. At absolute zero there is no pressure, and no molecular movement. There can be no gas, no matter, nothing at that coldness except—energy alone! Anything added to it becomes only more energy.”
Shevlin blinked. He said slowly, “But if I were to use a flame-thrower on you, heat you—”
Her laughter caroled. “You can’t heat me, as you put it; You forget that I am nothingness. No gas, no flesh. Nothing. And—nothing will scarcely absorb heat, will it? You can’t multiply zero. Neither can you heat what does not exist. And nothing, exists within me except pure energy.”
“But that cube…the coldness…the whiteness… I saw you!”
“You saw only the frosting of the air that rimmed me. We allow that to be seen. We could always be invisible, if we chose. Permitting the air to frost also permits our intense cold to be felt.”
Shevlin leaned forward. “But Chi Ling! You entered her body. I saw that. If all that, cold touched her, she’d die!”
Chi Ling toyed with a rich black link of hair, smiling at Shevlin’s excited face. “Of course she would, if matter that cold touched her. But only pure energy touched her, took over her body!”
“And you use her body to—”
The woman brooded at him. “I am Chi Ling—at the moment. Her thoughts, her memories are mine. The shang-ti can enter any human body. While we waited here on Earth, we have amused ourselves from time to time by doing just that.”
Her green eyes mocked him. “Haven’t you ever wondered why science seems to spurt every once in a while? For a thousand years man will go along in the same old rut. There was Egypt, Crete and Phoenicia. Along came Athens with its brilliant upsurge of the arts and philosophy. The dark ages, and then—the Renaissance! DaVinci. Michelangelo. Bacon. Shakespeare.”
Her laughter was a tinkling triumph in the great ebony hall. “You never suspected. Not once! None of your so termed wise men ever guessed. Columbus! Napoleon! The age of science then began in the last century. Electricity! Airplanes! Even—the Manhattan Project!”
“It is something to do, to play chess with an entire world. To move races and nations like pawns—with a planet for a playing board!”
Shevlin thought: You can’t square a circle. An animal can’t eat itself. You can’t have a black white, or any other of a dozen or more paradoxes. He said: “But you—”
Chi Ling shrugged, glistening white shoulders. The shang-ti woman said, “Many millions of years ago, on our planet, a way was found. By Nature, in a subterranean vault where our first life forms were patterned. Cold life; Shevlin. So cold that we are perfect transmutants. In us, matter becomes energy simultaneously. There is no matter. Only energy.”
“And energy,” said Shevlin thoughtfully, “can’t be destroyed.”
Chi Ling stood up, twirled so that her skirts flew put around her legs.. She threw back her head, let the long hair float in a spray of black fire. She whispered, “No one can destroy me, Shevlin. And as long as there is any matter anywhere to feed my energy… I will live! Life and living is a fine thing, Shevlin. You like life. I can read it in your face, in your eyes. You like Chi Ling, too…”
Shevlin grinned. He stood up. The shang-ti woman slid away, laughing. “Shevlin, you might hate me if I told you why I am here, why others like me are here on Earth. Will you hate me, Shevlin?”
“No, I guess not. Not if there’s anything in it for me. I’m sorry. That’s the way I am. I try not to be honest about it. I was born in a city slum, grew up fighting and scratching for a piece of bread and a glass of water. It wasn’t easy. I hated the cities. When I found there were things like mountains and long stretches of steppe and tundra, and horses to carry me over them, I took adventure as my job. And I take what’s in it for me.”
The woman came close to Shevlin. Her green eyes flared at him. She whispered, “Soon I will let you know why we are here. And there will be something in it for you. Soon!”
Her arms were white fires around his neck. Her red mouth sank over him. She breathed, “It is fun to be human, Shevlin. I am almost sorry we are not…kiss me! Kiss me!”
* * * *
Shevlin was given the freedom of the underground caverns. He swam in the depths of the blue pool, lay in the cavern of the suns, his skin drinking in the bluish radiance. He drank of cool green wines and ate of tiny honey cakes that were a succulent mixture of meat and flour and vegetables.
He wandered amid great gardens where riotous blooms and bulbous flowers nodded swollen petals. He ran and exercised in a cavern where near-living vines fought him, wrestled and almost crushed him, before he could win free of them and stand panting, wet with sweat.
There was only one place he could not go. It was the last cavern, and there was an opaque veil across it that hid its interior. Once Shevlin touched that thin gossamer shroud: found it stone-hard and cool to his touch.
The shang-ti woman shared his days, laughing and mocking and gently loving.
He asked her: “You aren’t Chi Ling. Yet you’re in her body. How do you do-it?”
She lay on her back, a hand sheltering her eyes from the brilliance of the sun-balls above. She said softly, “All your carbon life forms are comprised of atoms. Building blocks. They’re held together by mesons. The binding stuff. Concrete between the blocks. At absolute zero, those mesons lose their adhesive strength…weaken…let the atoms separate…become other matter…or energy.”
“Being energy, we can merge in a form of osmosis with other energy as soon as the mesons have been weakened by the utter cold. Reshape that energy into material
form…appear as Chi Ling…or Newton…Bacon…”
Shevlin said dreamily, “Why me? How come I was allowed in here?”
The shang-ti woman rolled over, faced him. “You were after the yellow jade. We do not have enough of us to maintain an elaborate spy system on Earth. We have to be very careful. While we cannot be destroyed, we could be set back in our—work—for countless years.
“We make that yellow jade. It’s a byproduct of our—work. So we wanted to make sure…just why you were sent here, who sent you…if you were sent.”
“You never asked.”
Her laughter, tinkled. “There was no reason to ask. You were observed, followed, when Chi Ling first reported your interest in the jade. She had been arranging for certain needed materials in Paochi. We let you follow Chi Ling. We know that no one came after you from Paochi. And besides—
“You are hard! Different from the men we’ve known. I thought it might be fun to know you better before—”
Shevlin asked, “Before—what?”
She put out pink fingertips, ran them across Shevlin’s lips. “We will take you back with us, Shevlin. Back to our mother planet. You will not perish. You see, we are going to smash the Earth. An experiment. As your own nation made an experiment at Bikini. This will be a cosmic Bikini. But a few life forms we will take back with us. You will be one of them.”
“In a bio-plastic case?” he asked dryly.
“Alive,” she laughed. “What good are you to Chi Ling or me—dead?”
“Chi Ling goes back, too?”
“Of course. And a few others. You humans are very interesting, Shevlin. So serious. Like children, sometimes, at play. It is fun, this being a human. I have learned to like it. Others of the shang-ti will like it, too.”
Playthings. Toys. Animated slaves, to be inhabited and enjoyed as the spirit moves. Shevlin lay back and let the warm globes bathe him. So that was to be his fate! Transported across an unimaginable distance, to be a living toy. He would be bred to make more humans, more toys to be inhabited and used. Like pig or chicken!
Her slant green eyes were watching him. She mocked him softly, “Do you hate me very much?”
Easy, he told himself. Go easy here It’s a tight spot, like the time the snow leopard cornered you on a ledge of the Amne Ma-chin. His man-will had won against the snarling cat. He had not thought to come out of that alive. He knew the same dead, useless feeling now. You can’t kill pure energy as you do a snow leopard, he thought wearily.
He said, “I don’t know. I haven’t figured out my angle, yet. What do I get out of it?”
“You get immortality. And Chi Ling. And a life of ease or exploration with us. Adventure? I’ll take you with me to planets you haven’t dreamed of. I’ll show you sunsets on oceans wider than the sun. Or winters on planets that are rocks, where storms are so frightful they topple mountains. There are green planets like your Earth, without people. I’ll show you palaces built on planets so long ago, even the bones of the people who built them are dust.”
“Yes. That sounds good. That would be heaven for an adventurer. But destroying the Earth, now. Can’t you—”
“The Earth must be smashed! It is an experiment.”
He recognized the determination in the cold voice. Unshakable. He was only a pawn to her. An enjoyable pawn, but still only a toy. Shevlin shrugged—
And leaped!
His big hands went out and closed on Chi Ling’s throat, tightened and clung! The muscles on his arms and back bulged and rippled.
Chi Ling went limp.
And the brilliant cube of coldness that was the shang-ti stood sentient and brilliant, a few feet away. Flickering. Opalescent.
A voice in Shevlin’s brain mocked, “Let her be, Shevlin. She is only a carbon thing like you. She cannot hurt you. I am what you want to destroy—and can not!”
Shevlin moved a hand, dragged his revolver from its holster where he had flung it to bathe beneath the sun globes.
“Shoot!” ordered the voice.
He pumped three shells into the blinding cube. It glowed around them, absorbed them. Transformed them into energy as they ate into its heart of living cold.
“I could just as easily absorb the full fury of an atomic explosion, Shevlin. What do you know that can destroy me, Shevlin? Bullets? Explosives? Rays? Atomic blasts? Those things—all matter—I can blend with. Absorb! Make mine!”
Shevlin stood by the sprawled body of Chi Ling. He said hoarsely, “I’m licked. What do I do now? Die?”
The voice said, “I told you I want you alive, Shevlin. You have a strong body. A good body for breeding.”
Shevlin repressed a shudder of repulsion, staring at the eight-foot-high cube of coldness. That thing in Chi Ling! An indestructible mass of cold, of sexlessness, of brain. Ready to use him, like a toy, like entertainment.
* * * *
It was dark in the last cavern. The sun globes were far away: Here there was only a dim grayness, like a London fog. Shevlin clutched Chi Ling’s smooth wrist, drew her after him.
“Let me into that last room,” he told her. “Let me past that curtain! I have to see what’s in that room—what they’re going to do!”
“I’m afraid!”
“They’re going to smash the Earth. Don’t you understand that? You and I, we’ve got to stop them. Somehow. There must be a way.”
“They are indestructible! Haven’t my people tried? Years ago they tried. The tale came down to me. They used many ways. And the shang-ti only laughed at them. The shang-ti let them. Allowed it. As a lesson.”
“Energy,” whispered Shevlin. “They’re pure energy…matter turns into energy at absolute zero. That’s what she…it…said. But lift the veil. Let me see into the room…”
Chi Ling whimpered in the dimness. She stretched out a hand, touched the shrouding veil, moved her fingers in a queer pattern.
The veil moved, drew back…
It was not as large as the other chambers. It was plain, austere. It held nothing but empty bio-plastic casings, arranged in rows, one after another, stretching into the darkness.
Empty casings—
They were not empty!
Shevlin said hoarsely, “They each hold something…something alive! Yes, that’s it…each one has a shang-ti inside it! You see? Those whitish cores…very dim, as if the energy inside it were ebbing away…”
Chi Ling put a hand to her mouth. She shuddered. “Quick, Shevlin! Before it finds us here. Take one more look—”
Shevlin mused, “It wants to blow up the earth. Maybe create a tremendous unleashing, of energy. Sure, sure. To feed those things, to bring ’em back to full life again. They’re dying. Almost dead. Hundreds of ’em, waiting here like patients in a hospital for a blood transfusion!”
The veil closed over the cavern. Chi Ling’s fingers quivered in his hands as she drew him after her. They went back through the caverns like frightened children waiting for a bogeyman, hand in hand.
It was Chi Ling who felt its presence, as they stepped into the cavern of the ebony dais. She drew closer to Shevlin, whimpering, her unbound black hair a dark nimbus about her pale, wide-eyes face.
“It’s here, Shevlin. Shang-ti! I—I can sense it…feel it!”
Shevlin put a big hand on his gun; shrugged and let his fingers drop. You can’t kill pure energy, he thought wearily. He looked around the room. There was nothing visible.
A voice mocked him. “I told you I could move about unseen, Shevlin. I told you I was invisible, that I only allowed myself to be seen—like this!”
Ten feet in front of him the air swirled, stirred as by a cyclonic force. Waves of sheer cold beat and bellowed, whitened, frosted. Snow crystals formed. The cube was there, shimmering in its blinding brilliance.
“Chi Ling!”
The girl moved forward, slow step by slo
w step, as if drugged. The cube stood still, let her walk into the frost crystals; absorbed her.
Shevlin cried out in horror. He could see through the cube faintly, see the glowing globes and the mahogany carved walls beyond it.
Chi Ling was gone!
“Come, you too, Shevlin,” mocked the cube.
“No. I’ll be damned if I do!”
He choked out the words, taut with rage and the first fear that he had ever known. Even the snow leopard had never caused this fear. The scars on his left leg and arm tingled, as he remembered that battle, and the bloody claws of the giant white cat.
The cube was still, watching him. It said, “I am ready, Shevlin. Ready for the explosion that will smash your planet. The long years of planning, of preparing the planet for this moment—are over. I do not want you to die Shevlin. I want to save you, show you those other worlds. You said you were an adventurer. I can show you many planets besides this. I—”
It was then that Shevlin leaped. A crazy, insane idea had sprung into his brain, suggested by the tingle of his long-healed scars. Bullets would not kill this thing. Nothing would that was matter. But Shevlin had one weapon left, a weapon as intangible as pure energy. If that failed—well, there was nothing left for anyone.
He went through the frost crystals, expecting the sheer cold to freeze him solid. Instead, he felt only a slight wrench throughout his body. It was as if a million tiny hands tugged at all his atoms, throwing them apart. He was man in one moment, nothingness the next. Yet he was more than nothing. He was still himself, a mind united with a will.
A will!
In the shadow of a Burmese temple, Shevlin had seen a zealot transfix his skin with needles without pain. He knew that psychosomatic medicine was trying to unravel the mystery of the mind’s effect on bodily diseases. A man could will himself to health, just as he could will himself to die. Shevlin had seen too many cases in native huts to doubt. There were medical case histories of cancers come and gone, banished by nothing but sheer will. The x factor of will, sometimes subconscious, was the curative agent. Army doctors had told him much, during the war.
The Alien MEGAPACK® Page 34