"That's the question. Are those twisted things branching from their bodies legs or arms? Or are they tentacles?"
"How could they be legs and arms? The one nearest us has twenty."
"Five sprouting from each stub where an arm or leg should be. Fingers and toes. The next one has twenty-four, like some of those freaks we saw in the valley. This is the same sort of degeneracy gone several steps farther."
"Are they human?" she whispered in alarm.
"Why not? You can do worse things than this, comparatively, to insects and frogs by breeding them properly under the right dosage of rays. Here nature does the breeding and the dosing. These things were probably born in this pit, like their ancestors for hundreds of generations. I wonder if they can see or hear?"
Picking up a large fragment of luminous rock, he dashed it with all of his strength on the floor directly in front of the nearest lump's rudimentary face. The rock burst into a hundred pieces in a shower of brilliant sparks. The black lump of living matter took no notice. It neither saw the 'sudden light nor heard the crash within a foot of its face. The elliptical sockets in its shapeless face were without eyes, and the bare holes on the sides of its head were not ears.
A sharp splinter of rock had inflicted a slight gash near one of its front nostrils – a mere hole flush with the front of its face above the slit which was its mouth. A thick, purplish ooze, exuding from the gash, crept slowly down toward the thin, straight upper lip. The creature seemed to feel no pain; Vartan doubted whether it knew that it had been slightly wounded. At length, however, the sharp stimulus registered on the lump's rudimentary nervous system. A knot of its tentacles unwound clumsily, slowly groping for the place of pain. Unable to find it, the five supple fingers, like enormous black kelps, gave up the difficult quest and sprawled helplessly over the stone floor. The purplish ooze had reached the more sensitive nerves of the upper lip. A thick tongue like a cow's was lazily protruded to lick up the unexpected food. For the first time the inert monstrosity showed evidence of at least the beginnings of intelligence. Blood was not its proper food. It spat vigorously, and one long black tentacle moved, almost swiftly, to wipe the offensive matter off the lolling tongue.
"A vegetarian," Vartan observed. "Like those more human guides in the valley. Do you remember how they refused the condensed soup cube I offered them?"
"Don't," she begged. "I can't bear to think that these poor creatures are human beings like ourselves."
"Not like us," he corrected. "Like what our offspring may become, or like what our race may evolve into. I'm serious. I have seen just as repulsive monstrosities, hundreds of them, bred in a bottle. Only they were flies. That these are human doesn't make them any worse, intrinsically."
"But they are so utterly hideous! They have no minds."
"What of it? Neither have we, in the sense you mean. Try to explain thought, or consciousness, or any of the other so-called higher faculties, and see where you land. Who has explained them? Nobody. All of our mental processes are nothing more, in the last analysis, than fairly complicated elaborations of that dumb human brute's behavioristic reaction to the unsavory blood on its tongue. When I, or any other scientific men, elaborate a theory, I am merely cleaning my tongue. If evolution continues to go in the way it is headed now, a million years hence all of our art, literature and science – provided the record of any of it survives – will seem like just so many inefficient attempts of mindless animals trying to rid themselves of irritant, mechanical stimuli. In kind we are exactly like those black lumps. We differ only in degree. You are shocked, because they are several hundred steps, and not merely a yard or two, in advance of us.
"To me they are less repulsive than that bundle of human offal you told me to look at in the gutter in Bombay. It still had reason, and refused to follow the natural life for things having what we call reason. These have outgrown even the remotest parody of intellect. They live the perfect, unemotional life of pure instinct. I do not find them half so tragic as those mutated butterflies and beetles we found by the hot spring. Those were neither one thing nor the other. They had just started toward the next main plateau in their evolution back to unliving matter; these things have almost reached it, as our descendants may some day – unless we learn how to control mutations at will, and not merely to observe the unforeseen results of our blundering experiments."
"But those butterflies and beetles were beautiful," she protested.
"To you, yes. How would one of these lumps of protoplasm react to your conventional beauty? Ali," he broke off, "now we shall see them feed."
Dragging itself by its tentacles, one of the black lumps had moved slowly over toward its nearest neighbor. When the pair were all but touching, they began to feed, simultaneously. The twenty long tentacles of one began laboriously swabbing the black jelly off the other's back, and it, more efficiently endowed for the great end of self preservation, deployed all twenty eight of its boneless fingers and toes on the first feeder's body. Their clumsy efforts to lick the black jelly off their blundering tentacles made the process of obtaining sufficient nourishment for their bulky bodies long and perplexing. Over half of what was scooped off was wasted, and lay unregarded on the luminous floor. These creatures had one, and but one, set of fixed habits. Necessity for the slightest variation from these might well result in their extinction by starvation in the midst of plenty.
At last one was as clean of the black jelly as its brainless consort could make it. For several minutes it lay motionless, digesting, and slowly realizing that the fingers of its mate had ceased their caresses. Presently the black bag felt that it was no longer being loved. With a sickening attempt to be human, or even apelike, it endeavored to raise its belly off the stone floor by extending its stiffened tentacles. Then it tried to crawl. Its ancestors having lost the art of walking, even on all fours, hundreds of generations ago, the creature's instinctive attempt ended in a slapping collapse which belched the breath from its sagging body.
Having failed to respond to an all but eradicated instinct, it answered mechanically to the unintended stimulus of its fall. Slowly it began dragging itself by its tentacles, like a half-dead octopus, to the lip of the funnel. It was going down again, in its blundering, natural way, like a primitive miner descending his pit to wallow in the mire which supplied its food. Vartan followed it; Marjorie, overcome by the spectacle of the feeding, which had nauseated her, stood where she was.
The lump descended rapidly, clinging to the rough slope with its weaving tentacles.
"Come on," Vartan cried. "I'm going to see where it collects its food."
"Don't," Marjorie protested feebly. Nevertheless she followed.
The creature's intention soon became clear. It was heading, as straight as it could, for the first groove of the spiral in which the river raced down the funnel. Reaching it, the blundering mass at first tried to cross up over the rim of the groove. Five tentacles dangled to the black surface of the rushing water; one dipped, and was brushed sharply forward. The stimulus, evidently a familiar one, was recorded by the rudimentary nervous system. The creature lumbered away from the impassable barrier, and began feeling its way down the surface of the funnel, following the descending spiral of the river. Anticipating its objective, they hurried ahead of it, picking their perilous way through the misty light in an effort to reach the bottom of the pit.
As they descended, the funnel narrowed rapidly, and the spiral swept ever more steeply downward. Its initial complete circuit around the funnel was all of eight miles in circumference. By taking a steeper descent, they reached the second, half a mile vertically below the first, in a diagonal drift of only two or three miles.
After five hours' breathless scrambling, they found themselves circling the fifteenth turn of the spiral. The diameter of the funnel at this point had narrowed to less than half a mile, and the thunder of the fall, far below them, began to resolve itself into more than a distant, drumming echo.
"We shall have to stay her
e all night," Marjorie panted.
"Tomorrow too, probably," Vartan added cheerfully. "Come on. The light seems to be dying out of these rocks as we get down. Look out; here's a slippery bit."
Several times in their descent they had crossed smooth trails worn into the living rock by the passage of innumerable crawling bodies, ascending and descending the pit in search of food through countless generations. Some were little better than precipitous slides. Twice they had paused to observe the slow ascent of the human monsters, their bodies glistening with a thin paste of hard, black jelly, laboriously pulling and squeezing themselves up the smooth trails by their tentacles, the natural limbs for such a climb.
"I believe that horrible black stuff is growing on their bodies," Marjorie observed on one of these occasions. "The paste or jelly on those we saw first was at least two inches thick. This is a mere skin." Boldly approaching the creature, she examined the slimy substance.
"What do you make of it?" Vartan asked.
"I can't see properly in this light. But it looks like a paste of alga full of tiny black seeds or spores."
"Like the seeds James Brassey sent back?"
"Possibly. Would it be safe to strike a match?"
"It might, but I don't like to take the chance. The air is still rank with evaporated oil from the river."
"Never mind. We may strike a pocket of better light presently. Have you noticed a brightening of the rocks now and then?"
"Yes," he said. "Every once in a while we pass an outcrop of more highly radioactive material. Shall we go on?"
They continued, for seven hours in all, till the funnel narrowed to considerably less than a quarter of a mile in diameter. Their hope was gratified. For the past hour the phosphorescent glow had steadily brightened. Fissures in the side of the funnel, some dangerously near the spiral trough of the river, glowed like the interior of a white hot blast furnace.
"This must be where at least part of that splinter lodged," Vartan remarked.
"Which splinter?"
"The one from the projectile that bored out this funnel after splitting in two and leaving half of itself to form the dome of the main chamber. Probably this whole surface is studded with deeply buried chunks of the other half. What is that over there? The entrance to another chamber of light, or just an extra bright crack?"
"It must be something unusual," she replied. "See how all the stone trails converge toward the entrance. We can stay there tonight."
"I suppose we shall have to. It will take us at least twelve hours to climb out of this."
Vartan's guess proved right. They were about to enter the glowing cavern, when two of the slimy black monsters lumbered out on their way to the top. He stood watching them curiously. The hard, black jelly on their bodies was but little thicker than a good double coat of paint. Evidently it had just been applied. They were going up to the main chamber of radioactive light, possibly, to let their food grow and ripen on their bodies.
They entered the chamber. Roughly it resembled the first which they had seen, but it was on a much larger scale. The rushing of the river in its rocky groove was clearly audible as they passed under the lofty arch of the entrance.
"In another thousand or two years," Vartan remarked, "the roof will cave in. Then our human squids will be washed out for good. Do you see anything particular?"
"Is that a marsh over there to the right? The light is much dimmer in here than it was in the upper chamber."
Walking over to the supposed marsh, they had an uneasy feeling that they were not alone. Vartan expressed the opinion that their guards had returned to headquarters to report, and the proper police had hurried down, through safer channels, in the heart of the rock, to recapture them. The floor of the vast, dimly lit cavern was plentifully strewn with enormous fragments of rock behind which an observer might easily secrete himself to see without being seen. Presently Vartan gripped Marjorie's arm and dragged her behind a convenient rock.
"I heard footsteps. Human, normal steps. They've come for us."
The steps passed their hiding place less than twenty feet away. Peering out they saw a man, deformed, but not excessively so, making his way through the misty light toward the marsh. Over his shoulder he carried a long wooden blade, not unlike an oar. He seemed intent upon his own business. Curious to see what he was doing, they stole after him, flitting from the shelter of one rock to the next.
The "marsh" proved to be a wallow, miles in extent, of what looked like black mud. Around its margin, hundreds of the human octopi sprawled in clusters of inert stupidity. Approaching one school of the brainless monsters, the man with the wooden blade examined the dozen or so brutes critically for a few moments. Then, having satisfied himself that most were useless to him, he began slapping their black hides vigorously with his blade in an effort to rouse them into motion. Some, after many attempts, he succeeded in starting on their way toward the exit by which Vartan and Marjorie had entered; others he belabored till they wallowed far out into the shallow black mud. There remained but one to which he had not attended. Using his blade as a swab, he carefully scraped off every particle of the black slime which he could reach conveniently, wiping off what he collected with his foot. Having accumulated a sizable pile of the quivering stuff, which he seemed to consider precious, he prodded the quiescent brute into the slough.
"What on earth does he want that stuff for?" Vartan whispered.
"Seeds. The right, rare kind. Seeds from the depths of interstellar space," a voice from behind him replied, and burst into a maniacal laugh. "Seeds of madness. They are very rare."
They wheeled around to see who had spoken. For once in his Vartan felt a chill of fear over his whole body as he stared into the eyes of the suave maniac confronting them.
"May I ask," the man continued calmly, and in a well-modulated voice, "what you are doing in my garden without my permission?"
CHAPTER 17
THE LIBERATOR
Annibale Zanetti and his masters had agreed on Constantinople as the safest meeting place in case of important developments. Neither European nor Asiatic in character, although readily accessible from both Europe and Asia, the city with its fluctuating population of cosmopolites was an ideal rendezvous for statesmen or others who might wish to be inconspicuous. Zanetti, who looked more like a corpse than a living man, was taken for a persistent invalid with a grave affection of the heart, vainly pursuing health; his masters, for outlandish new-rich tourists. Their race unlike the baffling Zanetti's was hardly a matter of doubt. Still, as all races met and mingled freely in this cosmopolitan city, their presence aroused no curiosity, either in the minds of the Turks or in those of the numerous sightseers of all nations, including their own.
It was considered rather strange by some that the aged invalid should seem to derive pleasure from sitting at the cafe tables with these outlandish visitors whose French was so bad, for a strange friendship apparently had sprung up between them and him. They made no attempt at concealment, confident that their association would be construed, as indeed it was, at its obvious and false face value as a lapse of taste on the part of the aged and ailing Zanetti. Their garrulous lack of reserve in public was their best alibi, should one ever become desirable.
The business for which they had met was not discussed at cafe tables, but in the early hours of the morning in Zanetti's sickroom. Propped up on the pillows, his face like a waxen death's head, the old man would discourse for an hour at a time in a voice scarcely above a whisper, while his intent listeners, never interrupting by word or gesture, strained every nerve to follow what he was saying.
"Death is not far away," he began one morning. "I have finished my work, and I am ready to go. Now that it is all so nearly over, it seems small and trivial."
A murmur of dissent broke the thread of his thoughts. Seeing their mistake, his listeners became instantly silent, waiting for him to continue.
"Turn out all the lights but one," he resumed, "and raise the shade of the East w
indow. Thank you. Now I shall see the sun rise, and perhaps catch one last glimpse, far beyond your vision, of our beloved country.
"We are by nature a peace-loving people. Once we were great. War, unsought and unprovoked by us, was our ruin. Under the rule of our oppressors we have been powerless to throw off the yoke of virtual slavery. Their weapons, by which they held us in abject subjection, were inaccessible to us. I sought others, to render theirs as obsolete as were the lances and sabres of our glorious defenders who opposed their muskets and cannon. I am about to put into your hands the key to true freedom for our injured people and destruction for those who enslaved us. At last our great Society of the Liberators shall justify its name."
Noticing a shadow of doubt on the faces of some of his listeners, Zanetti roused himself to speak with great passion and obvious effort.
"I read your minds," he resumed, his voice harsh with scorn. "For you, our people are about to win their freedom from their oppressors, if indeed they have not already won it, without a blow being struck by the Liberators or by any human being but the oppressors themselves. I have implied that we are still oppressed. This, you, who have never felt the iron heel of arrogance grinding into your human dignity, have never felt. But the mark of the heel is sunk deeply into your minds. Some of you have the slave mentality – you, whose forefathers were free men and civilized human beings, when the oppressors were barbarians. The mark must be erased, or your descendants will be slaves for generation after generation, and our race rots. Slaves in the body? No; slaves in the mind, meekly obeying the dictates of the oppressors who are relinquishing their material grip on us, only the more firmly to govern our thoughts – our souls, if you still prefer that language. Freedom of the body without freedom of the mind is slavery. As long as the oppressors have the power and the will to dominate our minds – which they have – we shall not be free. Our ways of thought are not, by nature, theirs, and never were. We must return to our own spiritual homeland. But we cannot while the oppressors live to think, to reason consistently, and to infect our minds with a sanity which to us is a form of madness. All of this must be destroyed once and forever. With their insane wars, especially the last two, among themselves, our enemies have weakened themselves in the material world to the verge of exhaustion. So they plan graciously to grant us our freedom when they no longer have the material strength to enslave us. They hope that we ultimately will become as they, for the greater glory of their inhuman minds. Those minds must be conquered. In overcoming them, once and for all, we shall have discharged the debt of hatred our people have owed these aliens in body and mind for centuries. Is this revenge? Perhaps. I prefer to think of it as justice. Make your own judgment. Call my attack revenge or justice as you prefer, but do not sit down to decay in the sloth of a false freedom. Complete and lasting victory is in our hands. We must grasp it firmly, and without compassion. We have suffered too long and too much."
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