Vickrey and Kessel—Kessel who had been stout and old beyond his years with study, and who was now lean and timeless and altogether changed—had forgotten Comyn, whose business was not with them. They had turned again to the wonderful bright fire that gave no heat and were looking down into the depths from which it came. The people on the ledges stood unmoving, white shadows painted on the rock, and all their eyes were shining, shining in the light. Comyn cried out. He had not meant to; he had promised Vickrey he would not. But now that Paul was before him in this place the words came whether he would or not.
“Paul, come with me! Come back!”
Paul shook his head. He seemed upset for Comyn’s sake, and yet impatient with him too, as though he had committed an unforgivable intrusion.
“Not now, Arch. No time for you to think, no time to talk.” His hands pressed hard on Comyn’s chest, forcing him back. “I know you. You can’t fight them off. Some men, but not you. And you should have time to think first. Go now, hurry!”
Comyn braced his feet. The fire swirl leaped and rushed and quivered all about the jut of rock and in the air above his head. It was hypnotic, beautiful, inviting him as water invites the swimmer. He tried not to look at it. He kept his eyes on Paul, and it was sickening that Paul should be here, wild and naked like the others, his mind and heart both lost in the same quiet madness. It made him angry, and he shouted:
“I’ve come all the way from Earth to find you. I won’t leave you here!”
“Do you want to kill me, Arch?”
That made Comyn stop. He said, “You’d die…like Ballantyne? I thought Vickrey said—”
Paul glanced into the abyss and spoke, so rapidly now that Comyn could hardly understand through the helmet audio.
“Not that way. Ballantyne left too soon. I am whole now. But another way, a worse way—Arch, I can’t explain now, just go before you’re caught, as we were.”
“Will you come with me?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll stay.” Perhaps he’s still human enough to remember, Comyn thought, perhaps I can make him come that way.
Paul said, “Look.”
He pointed down into the abyss, drawing Comyn closer to the brink. The noiseless white fires whirled and rushed about him, and he stared into them, into a white and blinding glory. And suddenly the world dropped out from under him, and his head reeled with an awful vertigo.
The ledges he had thought were solid rock were only thin curved shells that arched out over a space below, a space that underlay the grotto as the mass of an iceberg underlies its visible small peak, spreading away in a mist of light into secret, unseen reaches. A vault of transuranic fires, burning as though some unknown sun had been caught there, held and treasured by the shielding rock to flame eternally for its own joy, its own wonder, lavishing itself in streams and bursts and torrents of white radiance. Something deep inside of Comyn stirred and woke. He leaned forward and the fear drained out of him, along with many other things that were in his mind. The fire soared and flowed and shifted in the depths of its private world. He could not follow all its motions, but it was beautiful and happy, and good to watch.
And then he yelled and sprang back, and there was no more beauty.
“Something moved!”
“Life,” said Paul softly. “Life without need and almost without end. Do you remember the old tale they taught us when we were children—about the people who once lived in a garden of innocence?”
Revulsion was swift and ugly. Comyn shrank back farther from the edge and said, “I’m way beyond that, Paul, and so are you. I think I get it now. This transuranic poisoning—you are poisoned, drugged, rotting away inside. You’re sinking to the level of these others, and pretty soon there won’t be any hope for you. I don’t know what the Transuranae do to you, exactly, but the end result is slavery.”
He looked up, where the eager ranks were waiting.
“You’re worshipping. That’s what you’re doing. I’ve seen it before on other worlds, but never quite like this. You’re worshipping some stinking nature-force that wrecks your minds while it pleasures your bodies.”
He turned, Paul was watching him with a kind of distant pity, his attention already slipping back to the bourne of visions from which Comyn had forced it, and Comyn saw him with disgust, almost with loathing.
“You gave them Strang’s body,” he said. “And now you’re waiting to be paid back.”
Paul Rogers sighed. “There is no time at all now, unless you’re very swift. Go on, Arch. Run.”
Those last commonplace words were inexpressibly shocking. Comyn could remember a thousand times they had been said before, in other places, a measureless time ago. He caught Paul roughly by the arm, this unfamiliar Paul who was lost out of humanity, the Paul of alien flesh and alien worship who could never possibly have been a child with him, and he said:
“You’re coming whether you want to or not.”
Paul answered quietly, “It’s too late.”
Strangely, he did not try to fight when Comyn drew him bodily off the jut of rock, away from Vickrey and Kessel. They came together onto the main ledge and took three steps down the long way to the entrance of the grotto. Then suddenly in that entrance there were men in radiation armor, men with loud voices and heavy boots, coming along the path—Peter Cochrane and the others from the ship, all armed.
Comyn blundered on, dragging Paul Rogers along the crowded ledge. He only wanted to get out and away from there. He was not sure yet what he was trying to escape from, only that the people were waiting for something and that the thing they waited for was evil and unnatural, and that his whole flesh recoiled from meeting it. The close-ranked bodies stood before him like a wall, between him and the clean outside. He flung himself against the wall and it broke, but it was like a wall of quicksand, flowing tight around him again, holding him fast. He began to sob inside his helmet, caught between the fruitless labor and the fear.
The voices of the men ahead rose up and echoed in the vault. And then there began to be other voices, the voices of the people who had no longer any need of speech to express the simplicity of their emotions. They surged forward a little on the ledges and cried out joyously, and the human sounds were drowned and washed away.
Comyn struggled to break through, but it was too late. It had been too late from the beginning, and he was caught now, caught as Paul had been. He let go of Paul’s unresisting arm and turned toward the chasm, bracing himself by sheer instinct to fight whatever came up out of it. And then, for a moment, he forgot even to be afraid.
For suddenly, the place was filled with stars.
There had been light before, enough to blind a man, but not like this. There had been motion before, in the rushing fires, but not like this. The eager pressing of the people bore him on almost to the edge, but he was beyond caring. The breath and the wits together were gone out of him, and he could only stare and wonder like a child.
In a cloud they came, whirling upward through the white aurora. And they were whiter; they were pure with primal radiance, and their raying arms were like the misty nebulae. Soaring they came, carried up on the waves of fire, and they paled it. Laughing they came, and their laughter was the laughter of young things fresh and new from the hand of God, not knowing any darkness.
These were strange thoughts for Comyn to be thinking, who had left all such imaginings behind with the first sprouting of his beard. But for some reason he thought them now. The laughter was soundless, but it was there. It was in the way they moved and shone and gave forth light.
White stars bursting through a sky of flame, and one last pealing cry of welcome from the ledges. And Paul Rogers spoke and said:
“These are the Transuranae.”
The forces that were in the beginning, the life seed, the fountainhead. Perhaps all men were their children, long removed. Comyn struggled to regain himself, but his head was full of scraps of forgotten things and tatters of old emotions. And he did not
know why this should be, except for the shining of the Transuranae and the happy way they danced.
The cloud of stars rushed upward, spread and widened; and their misty arms reached out to touch and twine. They wheeled about each other, spun and parted and rejoined, not with any reason or design except that they lived and it was pleasure. And the brightness was such that Comyn bowed beneath it, drugged also with a strange new pleasure.
Peter Cochrane moved slowly in toward the chasm, and with him came the other men in armor. Their eyes were on the Transuranae. Vaguely Comyn saw them, and he knew that they could not go away now, even though the path was clear. He knew that he could not have gone himself.
Paul’s hand was on him and his voice was in his ears. “You’ll understand now. In a minute you will understand.”
There was another surging forward of the people, a final motion that bore Comyn to the extreme edge. And now, upon the farther ledge, beyond the chasm, he saw an armored shape revealed by the shifting of the crowd. It was pressed back against the rock wall, and Comyn knew who it must be: Stanley, who had come there before all of them to find the place of the Transuranae; Stanley, who had found it, and whose rifle now trailed forgotten from his hands.
Paul’s hand tightened briefly on Comyn’s arm. Comyn looked at him. Paul was smiling and in his face was something of the shining of the Transuranae. He said, “I’m sorry you had no chance to decide. But Arch, I’m glad you came.”
That was the last he said. There was no more time for speech. Comyn looked up, dizzy with the wheeling of great stars. And then the stars fell, out of the burning vault.
Down they plunged in a rain of living fire, a galaxy dropping down the sky, rushing, leaping as meteors leap in curving flight, crashing down in glory upon the place below: on Comyn, stunned beneath that flaming fall; on the people standing naked, with their arms uplifted to receive delight.
And the Transuranae spread wide their own arms that were like the arms of nebulae and wrapped them round, and the people faded and were indistinct, lost each one in the heart of a star. Comyn was among them, cloaked in apocalyptic fire.
He stood transfixed for as long as his heart might beat three times. In him was something crying to break free, to welcome the magnificence that had so suddenly blotted out the world. And then the strong coarse part of Comyn that had been dazed a little while shook off its dreaming, and he voiced a strangled cry of horror. He struck out at the thing that held him, wrenching away in a perfect madness of revulsion.
He did not want to be like Ballantyne. He did not want to be like Paul, with the soul and the mind sapped out of him. He did not want to be Strang, cast still moving into the abyss to be an offering to the stars.
He clawed and tore at the supernal brilliance that covered him. And it was brilliance and nothing more, and his hands passed through it as through smoke. He tried again to run, and the close-packed bodies barred him in, locked him in some awful union with the Transuranae. There was no out.
He screamed to Paul for help, but Paul was gone behind a veil of light, and there was no help.
Trapped, beyond hope, Comyn waited. His armor was heavy, and it was strong, but these were transuranic forces that no one understood and their radiations were unknown. Already, faint and filtered through the ray-proof fabric, he could sense a power…
It grew. Comyn steeled himself, staring through the leaded helmet plate into a blinding nexus of beauty such as he had never dreamed, and the tremendous energies that poured out from that beauty began to touch and stir him.
It was a warming touch, like the first bright sun breaking through the chill of winter. He could feel it stealing through his body, into the fear-taut places of his mind, and where it went there was no more room for tension or for fear. The fire that held him in its misty arms flooded him with a white radiance, and gradually a very strange truth was revealed to Comyn. There was no evil in the Transuranae.
The tide of warmth, of life, surged through him—only the faint far edges of it, dammed back by the armor, but enough. The white glory beat upon him through the helmet plate, and he began to understand. He knew why Paul could never go back. He knew why the eyes of the people disturbed him, why Vickrey’s eyes had been so strange. He knew why these people no longer needed the ways of cities and of men. The forces that were in the beginning, the life seed, the fountainhead…
His body lifted and strained toward the light. His flesh desired the fiery clean brilliance that was there, the power that changed, that entered into every cell and drove out hunger and sickness and all need, and put life in its place. He wanted the full force of that power to surge through him, as it surged through the bodies of the people. He wanted to be free as Paul was free.
The forests are there and the plains, a world open and unfettered, unstained by blood or tortured by many harvests. No more hunger, no more lust, no more hard necessity. Only the sun by day and the copper moons by night, and time without end, without sorrow, and only the faintest shadow of a forgotten thing called death.
Some hard resistant core of mind that could still remember through all the vision of a new existence gave back his own words to him: You’re way beyond that. Innocence was too long ago and too well lost. This isn’t a man’s life. It may be better, but it isn’t for man. It’s alien. Don’t touch it.
But Comyn understood now that what he had called degeneracy was something far different, that what he had called worship was the welcoming of friends, that what he had thought of as an offering was only a giving back of life to the scouring fires whence it came. The world of the Transuranae was beckoning to him, and he would not listen to that one dissenting voice.
The star blaze that entered through his helmet plate was burning now within his brain, and all doubt was drowned in whiteness. He knew that he was not being tempted, but that he was being offered a gift unknown since Eden. He lifted his hands and laid them on the fastenings of his armor.
Someone caught his hands. Someone shouted, and he was dragged away, out of the misty arms that wrapped him, and the star blaze dimmed. He struggled, crying out, and Peter Cochrane’s face came close to his. He saw it distorted and wild behind the helmet glass. Peter Cochrane’s voice screamed at him. Wheeling stars were lifting all about him, and on either side the people gave back, some still folded in the bright arms. Behind him others lay stunned on the ledge, and there were armored men with rifles.
He fought to tear his armor off. In their blindness, they were afraid. Cochrane was afraid, as Ballantyne had been afraid. They feared, and they wanted to force him back to humanity and death.
“Comyn! Don’t you know what you’re doing? Look there!”
He looked across the chasm. Stanley was no longer pressed against the rock. He stood with the people and he had taken off his armor.
“He’s lost! Others too before we realized.” Sweat ran down on Peter’s face, and it was gray with some inner anguish. He was dragging at Comyn, trying to force him back, talking disjointedly about saving him. He had saved others with the rifles.
Across the abyss, Stanley raised his arms to a soaring star. It rushed down and Stanley was like the others, a white form half hidden in living fire.
“Lost—”
“Look at his face!” cried Comyn. “He’s not lost, but you are. You are! Let me go!”
“Crazy, I know. I can feel it myself.” Peter thrust him farther back, desperately, as one would thrust another from the pit. “Don’t fight me, Comyn. The others are beyond help, but—” He struck hard with his hand on Comyn’s helmet. “It isn’t life they offer. It’s negation, a pointless wandering—”
Comyn looked up at the Transuranae. There was a time before, in the far beginning, a time before labor and pain and fear…
They did not understand because they had too much fear in them. But he could not stay for them. He flung himself away from the restraining hands. He went out toward the chasm, wrenching at the stubborn closures of his armor. Behind him a rifle rose and flash
ed.
The armor was proof against radiation, but not proof at all against the different violence of the shock-guns. The fires of the grotto faded, and Comyn went out into the darkness, agonizing for the stars that he had touched and lost forever.
FIFTEEN
Comyn awoke to pain. It was not only the sharp stinging of his whole body but also the persistent gnawing in his ears and brain of a sound that was not quite sound.
He knew what it was. He didn’t want to know. He wanted to deny it and make it not, but he knew. The sound of the star-drive. The star-drive, the ship…
He had to open his eyes. He didn’t want to do that either, but he did. The metal ceiling of his cabin was above him, and against it was French’s face looking down.
“Well, Comyn.”
He was trying to be commonplace, casual, but he wasn’t a good actor and there was something in his expression.
“Well, Comyn, I think you’re clean. Roth and I have had to work. But luckily for you, you only got a touch of it, and I think we’ve sweated and purged the last poison out of you…”
Comyn said, “Get the hell out of here.”
“Now listen! You’ve had a shock, and it stands to reason—”
“Get out.”
French’s face went away, and there was a murmuring of voices and a door closing…and then nothing but the insidious, inaudible screech of the drive.
Comyn lay still and tried not to think about it, not to remember. But he had to remember. He couldn’t forget that rain of stars out of a sky of flame, that clean ecstasy, the shining around him and the joy…
He was nuts. He was lucky to get away; he might have become like Ballantyne. He told himself that. But he couldn’t help thinking of Paul, of the others on that world that was falling farther back with every second. Paul and the others were freed, living in a way nobody else could ever live, under a sky of copper moons.
He wanted to break down, to sob like a dame, but he couldn’t. He wanted to sleep, but he couldn’t do that either. After a time, Peter Cochrane came. Peter was not one to gentle people. He came and stood, looking down with no kindness in his dark, Indian face, and said:
The Big Jump Page 12