“We can run,” he said. “We can run very fast. Perhaps faster than the Destroyers. Perhaps we can find some other city to hide in. We must.”
Rising in the water a little, Ran shook out his fur and tightened his weary muscles for action. “We’re too tired to run,” he said. “The Destroyers are faster than we. They can level every city as they leveled this one. While they are still busy here, we may have a little time to escape. I am going down into the Deep. What lies there, no man knows. It may be death, but it is certain death here. Now, you may choose. I am going—now; you may follow if you will.”
They followed, reluctantly, uncertainly, full of terror of the unknown—but they followed. Dagon came last.
4
HERE WAS the edge of the world.
Behind them lay the open seas they were leaving forever. Clear green water netted with filtered sunlight, floored with sand tinted green by the color of the sea. Behind them rose jungles of swaying weed whose deep roots clutched the rocks and whose crowns floated upon the surface of the water. These were familiar places. As the seafolk looked longingly back, even the Destroyers seemed familiar by contrast with the unknown.
Before them was the edge of the world. The Great Deep fell away here into infinities too vast for human probing. A sheer cliffside vanishing into darkness, and beyond it only the bottomless sea that turned purple and then deep blue and then an unfathomable midnight far down.
Out of it, the great beats of “Thought” came slowly.
Ran shut his mind to the concept of what might lie below. He swam out over the verge of the cliff and hung there for a moment, casting his senses resolutely downward, testing the depths. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing at all. Only silence, and the leisurely upward rolling of a vast, incomprehensible “Thought” now and then. It might be the planet itself “thinking”.
“Follow me,” Ran said, and shutting his fur together, let himself sink . . .
The cliff was two miles high.
They went down slowly, cautiously, a long, wavering ribbon of silver shapes moving against the face of the cliff deeper and deeper into darkness. Light failed them early in the descent, but since vision was not a sense upon which they depended much, they missed it only subtly. Light meant warmth, familiarity, safety. Light meant the heritage of man, though of course they had no idea of that. They only knew the dark frightened them, even when they could explore it with their undersea senses and knew no tangible danger lurked in hiding.
The feel and the taste of the water changed intangibly as they went down and down. Now they were in foreign territory, and anything might happen. Nothing did, except that those vast “Thoughts” wavering upward strengthened until the descending humans were tossed this way and that, as if upon powerful currents, whenever they strayed into the course of an upward-flowing stream. They seemed to be filtering down between and among the “Thoughts”, sinking toward the root of all thinking.
By the time they realized this was a trap into which they sank, it was too late to turn back. At first Ran knew only that at some little distance away another rock wall facing the cliff rose paralleling their course. The walls drew together slowly. Ran decreased the rate of his sinking, stretching out senses in the dark to explore the closing rock walls, wondering if he should turn back.
Caution warned him to, and yet—and yet—No, there was something here in the Deeps that shaped his course. He thought, Go on, go a little farther, there’s something here . . .
The buttresses of the world were narrowing to a crevasse, a funnel down which the last tribe of man sank gently, following Ran with unthinking trust.
l
JUST WHEN the first Destroyer found their track none knew; not even Ran had been aware of stalkers behind them. In that duty he had failed. Or was even failure, now, only one strand of the enormous pattern in which they were enmeshed?
At any rate, someone glancing back the way they had come presently sent out a soundless cry of terror, and every mind leaped to see the cause. Above them, silhouetted against the remote light of day, which mankind was now forever leaving, an oval shape of darkness descended slowly, trailing long tendrils of perception that tested the water for the fleeing tribe.
Panic welded them all into an instant, furry huddle that englobed Ran. He spread his thoughts out like encircling arms to give what reassurance he could.
“They were sure to find us, sooner or later,” he said. “But down here, see how slow they are? Perhaps they’re too big to sink as far as we can. See? They’re frightened, too. They don’t know the Deep. Look—that ‘Thought’ made them waver. Swim now—follow me. I think we can escape them yet. I think—think—there is sanctuary somewhere below us. Swim!”
Now the passive sinking was ended. They heeled over and churned the water with urgent feet, burrowing heads down toward the heart of the planet. Above them a second Destroyer, and then another and another, loomed into shadowy substance from the upper waters.
Mankind sank, and the machines of the Alien sank after them. The rock walls closed until Ran’s expanded senses touched them everywhere, honeycombed rock overgrown with deep-sea creatures that were halfanimal and half-plant, veils of dim sentience wavering in the caves and along the cliff-sides. From just such dim flickers mankind may have risen in his long climb toward mastery of the air and the planet. Now, deeper and deeper, past the forgotten steps that made his species’ past, Ran led mankind backward and downward toward the circle’s close.
The vast “Thought,” majestically rising, shook them all, ignored them all.
The heirs of Earth, diving down toward the fountainhead of their world, plunged headlong into the trap of their own choosing, and things that were not of Earth, things that ruled it, pursued them to their death. Mankind’s last champion could only lead his people into oblivion. For how could the Earth-Born now cherish any illusions at all about the heritage of Earth?
Panic shook Ran as he felt rock walls close slowly in and knew there was no escape. And yet, beneath the panic, something held him steady; something hinted to him through senses too remote to name that defeat was not yet certain, that a purpose lay behind their coming—that somehow man’s ending was not quite yet.
The heritage remained. He must hold the tribe together, and hold them human, until the heritage could be passed on. The children, or the children’s children, might still rise and inherit Earth.
Now the rock walls narrowed almost to an end, and below them something vast moved majestically in the water.
The “Thoughts of the Deep” were rising stronger and stronger up this narrowing funnel of rock as they struggled down. In the seas above, they passed like a summer breeze, but here they rose straight up the shaft in powerful currents that tossed the swimmers like chaff when their minds strayed into the heart of the flowing columns. Even the Destroyers wavered. And now, down in the darkness, something tangible moved . . .
The clan faltered and began to draw out behind Ran in a lengthening column. Dagon, who had swam so far in a daze full of flickering anger and flickering terror, now came almost to a stop and said irresolutely, “There’s danger down below. I saw something move. I’m not going any farther—”
Voices echoed him. Ran could have named before they spoke exactly those who would always echo Dagon.
“Yes, something moved . . . I can’t make it out . . . it’s too big . . . shall we run? Shall we hide?”
Dagon’s mind cast out wildly, searching the cliff-sides. “This is a trap,” he said. “But there are caves here. We could hide in the caves. Shall we run? I think we should run—”
Only Ran hung silent, paying no attention. He was searching the Deep for the outline of that vast, dark, moving shape below. He said softly, “Wait here. All of you—wait. I must go down alone to find what this is. Watch the Destroyers, but don’t run until I give the word. There’s plenty of time yet. No matter what happens to me, I’ll have time to give you the word. Elders, keep the clan together . . .”
l
<
br /> THE TREMENDOUS columns of “Thought” rolling upward buffeted him from side to side as he sank. The funnel of rock narrowed. But it did not narrow to a close. Now he could feel and taste and sense fresh currents of seawater flowing gently upward past him, from some farther open space below.
This was not a dead end, after all. That much of his conviction was proved. It occurred to him uneasily, as he strained all his senses downward toward the vast shape below, that in his last, desperate fight to preserve mankind as a rational, thinking species, he had led them here by the blindest of instinctive convictions.
. . . That was a gateway in the rock, far down. His questing senses found the opening. But the gateway was blocked; something hung there, rolling a little in the waters.
He could see now the dark, gigantic outlines of the “Thinker.”
Stilling his thoughts, hugging the wall, Ran slipped quietly downward. But he need not have troubled to be quiet. The thoughts rolled upward, ignoring him as they ignored the dim lives of the sea-plants, and the lifeless rock itself. Serene as the planet they unfurled and rose, moving as majestically through water as the planet through space.
This was the guardian. It hung brooding in the gateway, thinking its own mighty thoughts and ignoring all things human and inhuman.
But it was alive. And Ran’s senses, testing the water delicately, told him that it was warm-blooded life, like his own. Also if it ignored him, at least It did not threaten. But it blocked the gateway, and the machines were sinking inexorably.
He did not want to go forward. His heart was thumping with awe and terror—terror of the unknown and awe for the sheer size of the “Thinker,” and for its majesty. He knew it, now.
But he had to go forward. He made himself sink, until the bulk of the “Thinker” rose like a mountain above him. Its head was a sloping cliff; the “Thoughts” rose unwaveringly out of its deeply-hidden “mind,” out of the infinitely deep and complex convolutions of its “brain”—so much deeper than man’s ever was, even in his greatest days.
It had no face at all. Leviathan has never had a face. Like his thoughts, he has always hidden his face. There has been only the vast, enigmatic, smooth brow with the eyes set on opposite sides, looking far out into separate fields of vision. Leviathan fronts two ways.
Ran sank until he hung level with the quiet eye set low down on the cliff-side of the head. He hesitated there, searching the silence of the unwinking gaze. If it saw him, it did not heed. With the nearer vision it regarded the water and Ran and the rocks as one, disinterestedly. With that farther eye, who could guess what unfathomable deeps Leviathan brooded upon?
Earth is a very old planet.
There are chronicles that relate creation’s story, and name Leviathan the first of all created beings. God created whales, and every living creature. Long ago, when the chronicles were new, Leviathan was the most awesome of all living things. His eyes, say the chronicle, are like the eyelids of the morning. His heart is as firm as a stone. Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear. And that was long ago. Mankind had changed greatly since then.
So had the whale.
Ran hung humbly before Leviathan, at the gateway to Leviathan’s hidden realm, looking up without hope into that unheeding eye in the mighty cliff of the brow.
He swam the seas, said Melville, before the continents broke water . . . In Noah’s flood he despised Noah’s Ark, and if ever the world is to be again flooded like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive . . .
5
THERE WAS a sudden tumult above, where the tribe waited. Ran laid all his senses backward and upward for a moment, as an animal lays back its ears without turning. Dagon’s strong, terrified cry came loudest. “They’re coming! They’ve cornered us! Look—when they pass that rock they’ll sight us. We must run! Run! What are you waiting for? Run, I tell you, run!”
A confusion of thoughts boiled up in answer to him. No one was sure, now, why they did not run; not even the elders could see escape, upward or downward, whether they ran or waited. Their leader had not offered them any hope they could recognize. Only Dagon’s urge to wild flight made very clear sense at this moment. Flight, at least, is easier than standing still while death comes closer and closer.
“The caves!” Dagon screamed. “Hide in the caves!”
Ran gathered himself in the water, turned and shot upward with powerful strokes, the surge of the mighty “Thoughts” bearing him buoyantly with them. The clan scattered wildly as he drove a headlong course into their center.
“The Destroyers!” they babbled at him. “Look up! When they pass that rock—” The thought dissolved into sheer wordless terror, but other minds took up the clamor. “Where can we go? What can we do? Tell us quickly, before we die!”
“We go down,” Ran said, making his thought as calm and powerful as he could, unconsciously trying to model it upon the strong tide of Leviathan’s “Thoughts” that tossed them all as they hung there. “Down. Follow me.”
Without waiting, he turned over in the water again and drove himself down with strong, determined strokes. He had no plan at all; he went by instinct as unreasoning as Dagon’s. He was sure of one thing only—this was the last choice left for man. While responsibility was his he must fulfill it, and his duty was keep the clan together, to keep it human, to hold stubbornly the burden of man’s heritage.
Waveringly the clan came after him, Dagon last, all their minds dim with terror but ready to seize upon even this frail hope until it proved quite futile.
The dark, tremendous “Thinker” still hung quietly in its gateway, one brooding eye turned toward them, one hidden in its other facade, gazing upon realms they could not even imagine. If the whale has a double mind to guide its double fields of vision, then neither mind dwelt even for an instant upon the exhausted little band of fugitives whose kind had once ruled the world.
They hung there, shivering in the water.
Ran swam forward, looked up grimly into the eye. He gathered together what power of the mind remained to him in his weariness and his fear. If he could only penetrate that vast abstraction, speak to Leviathan as one reasoning being to another.
“Our enemies drive us,” he told Leviathan in simplicity and directness. “May we pass?”
Leviathan’s eye did not change. The gigantic “Thought” rolled upward, unheeding.
Dagon screamed at it, a wild, shrill, animal cry. “Let us by! Let us by!”
He might have been a barracuda or a moray, for all the answer Leviathan gave.
The clan took up the screams, filling the water with a welter of incoherent, terrified thoughts, cries for help, cries for an open path, simple cries that were mindless with the fear of death. But they spoke to no listening ear. Leviathan had heard sea-beasts scream before.
So there was no escape. The clan could not go forward, and it could not go back. They could only hang there seething and shrieking in the trap to which Ran had led them, until the first of the Destroyers sank past the rock that hid them.
WHEN DAGON caught his first glimpse of that terrible shape above, his shriek drowned out every other cry. He whirled in the water, beating a froth of bubbles, darting wildly for the honeycombed wall.
“Run!” he screamed. “Hide! Hide!”
That command made clear sense to the tribe. Ran’s had not. They exploded after-him, scattering in all directions, mindlessly bumping against rocks, against each other, shrilling their terror without even knowing they shrilled. The panic of all driven things was on them, and they ran straight into the jaws of their pursuer.
Only Ran lingered, gathering up all the strength of his mind and all his urgent feeling of responsibility for the clan which he had so stubbornly led to their destruction, following an instinct he had never known before.
The power of his mind was tiny, contrasted with the tremendous latent power of the whale’s. But it was all he had. He drew every ounce of it into one point of urg
ency and hurled it against Leviathan. He tried to frame no words, no appeals. He was simply seeking to pierce that vast abstraction, to force Leviathan to recognize the operation of another thinking mind in another warm-blood brain.
Ever so slightly Leviathan stirred in the water. Its “Thought,” rising in a tremendous column like coiling smoke, wavered minutely sidewise, toward Ran. He felt the touch of it, burning with a power so mighty his whole mind reeled away from that scorching contact. He could not even be sure whether deep down in the incredible bulk the hidden “Thinker” turned slightly, contemplatively, toward Ran.
“Help us!” Ran said silently and with all the violence he could command.
The eye, like a window set low in the cliff-side of flesh, seemed to waken just a little. Ran could not guess if it saw him, or if it heeded what it saw. He knew it would not matter in a moment or two, for he could judge by the tumult above how close destruction was.
He hurled one last thought of violence and entreaty at the bulk which blocked the gateway. “Help us now!” he cried. “Help us now!”
Then he doubled in the water, drew his legs strongly beneath him and shot upward after his fleeing tribe. His shouting thoughts raced ahead of him, reaching feverishly for all the minds that could still hear him and obey.
“Come down!” he called. “Follow me! Come down!”
How could they hear him, with death so close above them? Dagon’s wild, strong shrillings of despair were easier to follow, high up the shaft near the level of the machines. Dagon was beyond reach now; Dagon had passed the threshold and laid humanity aside. But the clan—or much of it—could still be salvaged.
Ran hurled himself upward in a final burst of effort shouting his commands.
To the clansmen they were senseless commands; he ordered them to die, not to escape. Some made no reply at all, only fled blindly upward and away. Others wailed protest, whimpered in terror.
RAN PAID no heed to their cries.
He had to get them down to Leviathan, and he had to do it by sheer physical force, since there was no other way. They would not strike him no matter what blows he dealt, for he was—or had been—their leader. But they would not obey, either.
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