Flande’s coughing lessened. He was sitting up now on the couch. His eyes, fixed on the doorway and on Carcasilla beyond, were wide and filled with terror. He saw that the barrier was down.
“Stop him!” Sir Colin’s hoarse cry echoed from the walls of rain. Alan leaped forward, but his leap was a fraction of a second behind Flande’s. The soft body hurtling against his shoulder spun him off balance and he saw only a pale flash as die deposed godling shot by him toward the door. Mike Smith whirled, a grin of savage pleasure on his lips, and dived for the flying figure. His hand grazed Flande’s ankle, then he was stretched face down on the smooth pool of the floor, mouthing deep German curses. Flabby Flande might be, but he could run!
Mike scrambled up. The three of them jammed for a moment in the doorway. Then Mike broke through and sprang down the waterfall steps, tugging at his gun.
“Don’t shoot!” Sir Colin called. “We need him!”
THEN they had ho more breath to call.
The spiral steps seemed to whirl underfoot as Alan followed the scientist’s flying heels. When they reached the level Flande was far ahead, a pale figure flashing among the crystalline buildings, Mike’s dark bulk pounding in pursuit.
The chase led along the rim of an abyss that dropped away to swimming distances. Sir Colin’s age began to tell before they had run a hundred steps. Falling behind, he motioned Alan on.
Alan, rounding the edge of a great egg-shaped dome, saw that Flande was heading for the fountain. From here they could see it gushing up out of its basin, a great pillar of violet fire. Flande and Mike, dodging among the buildings below them, were drawing nearer and nearer to the wall of glassy multi-colors above which the basin loomed.
Flande reached the wall. Alan could see the flash of his terrified white face as he worked frantically at the wall. Mike Smith plunged toward him, head down. Then suddenly there was an arched opening twenty feet high gaping in the wall. Across its threshold stole a faint, quiet light that had in it something of the fountain’s radiance. Alan could not see what lay inside.
He heard a thin, high-pitched wail of despair and looked up to see Mike hurling himself forward at Flande, hands clawing out. Briefly their bodies struggled. Then Alan saw that Mike had the demi-god by one arm, twisting it viciously, a savage light of triumph on his face. He said something Alan could not hear.
“Easy, Mike,” he called, hurrying down the last stretch of blue ramp toward them. “You’ll break his arm.”
“Yeah, that’s right!” Mike grinned fiercely at him over one shoulder. “What about it?”
Flande, on his knees, was beating unavailingly against his captor’s hand, a stark, unreasoning horror in his eyes—fear, thought Alan, that did not involve Mike Smith. Instinctively he glanced back toward the Gateway, but its great circle stood empty in the wall.
Sir Colin came panting down the ramp.
“Mike!” he snapped. “Ye’ll have the mon fainting on us! Ease up now, like a guid laddie.”
Reluctantly Mike obeyed. He hoisted Flande to his feet, but kept a tight grip on the flabby wrist. He said contemptuously. “I could kill him with one hand.”
“No need now,” Alan said, with a queer conviction that he spoke the truth. “Flande can’t use his magic. Hell, he isn’t even using telepathy!”
It was true. Flande was pouring out frantic syllables in the trilling, bird-like tongue of Carcasilla. There was no trace of that vast calm on his face now; the demi-god had collapsed with a vengeance, leaving only a very terrified man in his place. It was hard to believe that the giant visage which had awed them so in the doorway had any connection with this babbling creature in Mike’s grip.
“Let me go!” he was crying now. “Quick! Quick, before it comes!”
“Calm down,” Alan said. “It isn’t here now. Maybe—”
“It will come! It knows the force-shell is gone. It will come swiftly now!”
MIKE SMITH’S bronze face gleamed with a sweat of sudden terror as Alan translated. “Damn it!” he stammered, fear and impotent rage in his voice. “Isn’t there any way of fighting the thing? Ask Flande, for God’s sake!”
“There is no way,” Flande wailed to Alan’s question. “I was safe in my tower until you forced your way in and strangled me. Now the force-shell’s broken, and—Let me go!”
Alan said, “What’s beyond there!” and nodded toward the archway behind Flande.
The demi-god averted his face stubbornly, not answering. Mike twisted his captive’s arm ruthlessly. Alan said nothing. This was no time for half-measures; anything was justified that gained an answer which might help them.
After a moment Flande cried out shrilly, “Stop him! Make him stop! I can’t stand this—”
“What’s inside the arch?”
“The—the power-source. I swear it! Now free me!”
“Why?”
Flande licked dry lips. “Look,” he said
abruptly. “If I tell you this, if I save you from the Light-Wearer, will you free me? Otherwise we die together here, where it comes.”
“All right,” Alan said, “What’s the answer?”
“Let’s go inside—”
“We’re staying right here until you talk.” An unpleasant chill was crawling down Alan’s back at the thought of the Light-Wearer flashing toward them along the Way of the Gods. But he dared make no concessions to Flande. He nodded at Mike, who applied a little more pressure. Flande cried out,
“I’ll tell you! But we must be quick. It—”
“What’s inside?”
“The power-source that gave me my magic,” Flande said, talking fast. “I came to it long ago, when I first found Carcasilla. This place is forbidden. None of them dare enter. But I dared, and I saw the birthplace of the fountain.” His voice changed timbre a little. “I saw the Source. You’ve bathed in the fountain—you know what it can do. It healed you when you were dying; it gave you immortality. But I have seen the Source! I have stood at the outer edge of its radiance and bathed in the terrible glory of that power . . .” His voice trailed away. Then he said simply, “It made me a god.”
“How?” Alan demanded curtly.
Flande gave him a burning look. “How could you understand? I have stood closer than any human creature ever dared stand to the heart and the source of immortality. Here in my body and my brain there dwells something of that same power now. The brain of man has many secret chambers—their locks flew open before the impact of that force and I knew—I saw—” Again his voice died. Then, wearily: “But I am drained now. Building the force-shell was harder than I knew. Now I must bathe again, to replenish the power. Let me go—let me go, and I will build the shield around us all.”
“What’s he saying?” Mike asked impatiently.
Alan told them in quick sentences.
“The Source is down there, all right,” he finished. “But it sounds like something too dangerous to tackle. If the mere radiation of the outer edges did that to Flande, what actual contact with the thing itself would do I—”
Flande’s flat, thin scream broke off the sentence. Their eyes followed his shaking finger.
At the top of the long slope, against the background of the city and of Flande’s pale tower of rain, something moved. A formless shape of shadow and blinding radiance, impossibly tall, and horribly graceful in its swift, stooping motion. Eyelessly it watched them.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Alien’s Embrace
MIKE’S reaction was shocking. He seemed to fall in upon himself, like an old man; a palsy of terror shook him, and the bronze face relaxed into a mask of imbecile fear. For an instant Alan forgot even the terrible thing that watched them, as he in turn watched Mike. The Nazi’s integral strength had collapsed like a balloon. All Mike’s strength had stood upon the basic fallacy of invincibility; when the Nazi learns its falsity he has no further strength to fall back on. Mike was falling now . . .
Flande’s thin squeak roused them from their paralysis. He twis
ted free from Mike’s flaccid grip and spun toward the tunnel behind them, moving fast.
The motion had an almost hypnotic effect on Mike as he whirled away from the terror above them. Here was a soft, frightened, fleeing thing—a thing that had offended the man’s pride and must be punished. Mike redeemed his terror of a moment ago in headlong pursuit of this creature which feared him. He flung himself after Flande with a hoarse shout.
Some premonition of what Mike intended galvanized Alan into action as he saw the Nazi’s first forward stride. Flande must not die yet. Alan hurled himself against Mike Smith’s shoulder with all his weight, sending the Nazi staggering. Before Mike could recover Alan was sprinting down the tunnel after Flande.
The tunnel slanted sharply down. Flande was a flying white shape outlined against golden brilliance as he plunged down the slope. Alan could hear the pounding feet of the others behind him, and for an instant wondered horribly if he could hear the Alien’s footsteps too, as it ran upon its nameless limbs.
To flee from a thing that could move with the Alien’s flashing strides was worse than futile—yet they ran. And except for Mike, perhaps, they ran more from the Alien itself than in pursuit of Flande.
Then Alan came within sight of what lay at the tunnel’s foot, and for a moment all memory even of the terror behind was washed away. For a great room opened out before him, brimming and blinding with a radiance he could not face. The eye could not measure the room’s size, for distance was warped and distorted here by the light that glowed in great rippling beats—from the Source.
Pure light had poured into these walls so long that even the rocks glowed now, translucent, permeated through and through with the strength of that golden violence. The walls were windows opening upon glowing distance; they were mirrors that gave back and refracted the light upon its Source. The whole room swam with it, so that Flande’s white figure, forging desperately ahead, seemed to advance against great waves of brilliance that beat through him as he ran.
In the center of the room a corona of light danced around the dazzling glory of the Source. Directly above it a circle of darkness drank in the swirling tides of energy. The fountain, then, must rise directly above this pool.
Toward it Flande was plunging, against intangible waves he had to fight like waves of a strong wind. But he had slowed his pace.
He was glancing over one shoulder now at his pursuers, at the tunnel beyond which the Alien must still be hovering. Now he had reached the outer circle of the corona and he paused there, hesitating between the danger behind him and the burning danger ahead. Farther than this he had never dared to go.
Alan paused too. The light was blinding, and he was not eager to come any nearer to that boiling heart of energy at which he could scarcely bear to look directly. Silent tongues of pure golden fire leaped out around it, and the room swam with the power of the Source.
FLANDE stood hesitating in that bath of flowing radiance. And Alan thought that a change was coming over the demigod’s face. A strange deepening of his eyes, as if godhood were distilling in his brain from the Source that burned beyond him.
Mike’s hoarse shout behind him broke the spell. Alan heard Sir Colin cry out something unintelligible in tire rolling echoes that woke along the cavern walls as Mike plunged shouting past him, brushing Alan to one side with his momentum, blind to everything except the presence of his quarry.
Alan’s own voice rose in a useless cry, mingling with the echoes that rolled from the radiant mirrors of the walls. Mike hurtled past him, head down, a black bulk in the cavern of luminous sunlight. In silhouette Alan saw him stretch out both hands in unseeing, heedless triumph.
Flande screamed, his voice strangely deeper and more resonant. There was a thud of body striking hard against body. Alan, squinting against the brilliance, could see them toppling, locked in an embrace of rage and terror, while the silent flood of sun-rays breathed rippling past them.
They fell together, Flande and Mike Smith, into the heart of the boiling maelstrom that was the Source.
For the beat of a second Alan could see them standing there together, still locked in that furious grip, while the pure, pale violence of the flame burned blindingly through their bodies. They were shadows against that light. Shadows that ceased. The light barely flickered. Its serene waves beat out from that heart of fire.
And Alan stood alone in the golden cavern . . .
Sir Colin’s heavy footsteps hurrying down the ramp broke the trance a little and Alan turned an unseeing face toward him. His mind was still too stunned to accept what had just happened. He stood in dumb incredulity, seeing the blaze burn on, radiant and powerful.
“God!” breathed Sir Colin softly. His face was drained of color. He must have seen enough to understand what had happened.
Then something flickered beyond Sir Colin’s head, and Alan stirred a little in his daze. He could look up the length of the tunnel from here, seeing a circle of Carcasilla framed in the opening, Flande’s tower shining in its center. And he could see something else—something that shimmered and swirled like blindness at the tunnel’s threshold.
“Sir Colin,” he said, in a voice that did not sound like his own. “Sir Colin! The—the Alien’s come!”
The Scotsman’s eyes shifted blankly from the Source’s blaze to meet Alan’s look. The bony shoulders moved in a shiver, and Sir Colin drew a long, shaken breath.
“Ah-h,” he said, and his voice was strange too. “The Alien. And we canna run any farther now. Mike may ha’ been luckier than we.” He turned. “Aye, I see it. But look, laddie! It isna’ comin’ in! I wonder—”
Alan looked, steeling himself to face the sight of that robed and terrible shape. It stood hesitating in the tunnel mouth, moving forward a little, then moving back, almost as if it were afraid.
“Could it be the Source it fears?” Sir Colin wondered aloud. “I doubt it. The Aliens themselves must ha’ brought the Source here. I’d say it’s much more dangerous to us than to—It. Poor Mike—”
“Forget about Mike now,” Alan said shortly. “Later we can think about that. Now—”
“Ye’re right, laddie.” Sir Colin’s shoulders squared. His voice was coming alive again now that he had a problem to solve—and solve quickly. “There must be a reason it’s hesitating—there must! But I canna think it’s the Source. Och, if I only had more time! That Source! With it I think we could defy even the Alien there. But we’ll need shields and tools. That thing in the fire’s too much for t-he like of us, barehanded. There’s a core of something in that basin. God, if we had the time! But that thing out there—”
“It’s coming,” Alan told him in a level voice, looking up. The tall shimmer of blindness was stooping down the passage toward them now. Hesitating, peering at them without eyes, retreating a pace or two—then coming on with that terrible, unearthly grace to devour them.
“It’s afraid,” Sir Colin said behind him, in a quiet voice. “Something about us worries it. Now what? What?”
THERE was something in that calm question that made Alan rally even in this moment of hopelessness. How great a man this was, who could speak so coolly while death marched down upon him! Sir Colin, knowing himself the helpless prey of a being that had already wiped earth nearly clean of human life, could reason quietly as he watched death come stooping down the tunnel toward him.
“It’s weakened, you know,” Sir Colin murmured, squinting up at the shimmer in the tunnel. “It’s starving. Perhaps it’s weaker than we think. It’s growing more desperate—and yet warier, at the same time. Now what—why—”
“Got it!” said Alan, and sudden hope made his voice shake. “The gun! The noise! Don’t you remember?”
“It’s afraid of sound, aye. But what good will—”
“This cavern isn’t so big. Fire a gun here and—you think it can reason that well? Does it know what echoes gunfire would raise? I know how it drew back and vibrated and waited when you fired at it by the gateway.”
&n
bsp; Sir Colin’s eyes were squinted under the tufted red brows. “I’m getting it. The Alien’s a thing of energy, a matrix of electronic forces, perhaps, held in a certain rigid balance. Vibration upsets the balance. Aye—the concussion of gunfire might hurt the thing enough. But it’ll only run back and wait for us at the tunnel mouth, where the echoes wouldn’t be so loud.”
“You think the concussion might actually disable it, if we could hold it here in the tunnel?”
“There’s a chance, laddie. The thing’s afraid of something. It may be that. But we canna hold it. I’ve thought of everything under the sun—” He laughed. “I’ve even thought of bathing in the corona back there and turning demi-god like Flande. But Flande was domned afraid o’ the Alien too, ye’ll remember. So that’s no help, except—” He looked down at his gun.
“I can hold the Alien,” Alan said. He spoke so softly that he had to repeat it before Sir Colin heard. Then the keen little eyes under the red brows pierced at him like needles.
The Scotsman shook his head slowly, lips compressed. “Ye canna mean that, laddie. The Source and the fire are a better choice than that. Or—” He glanced down again at his gun.
“It’s a chance,” Alan said stubbornly. “It’s worth the risk. We can’t lose more than our lives. I’d rather burn like Mike and Flande, if there were no hope. But there is! Listen now. The thing out there’s dying of hunger. Give a starving man food and he’ll hang on to it even if you use a whip on him. I saw that done once, in the Sahara, by Bedouins. And—well, this time I’m the entree. The whole damned course. But the Alien will have to pay for what he gets!”
“No, laddie. No!”
“Don’t forget, the Alien’s been in my mind before. I fought him. off, with your help. Maybe we can do it again. Don’t argue. Get your gun out!” He spun toward the passage where that shape of terror burned white and black, wavering toward them in its blindness. “Tins is it!” Alan said. “I’ll he right bade. Get ready!”
Collected Fiction Page 369