The Well of The Worlds

by Henry Kuttner

  “So,” he said, with an air of finality, “you’ll give me any further evidence you happen to run across. Meanwhile, you’ll report by radio to headquarters that this—this affair seems to be a false alarm. As for Klai, the safest thing she could do is leave Fortuna. If we can prove she has hallucinations—delusions of persecution—a year’s rest at some private sanitarium might be the best way to eliminate the risk of Nethe’s killing her. And Nethe will, if Klai persists in sticking her head in the lion’s mouth. Quite impersonally. Without malice. Nethe’s disinterest in ordinary human problems is—awkward, sometimes.”

  “Who is she?” Sawyer asked.

  Alper paused, frowned a little, and shook his head slowly, as though he were as puzzled as Sawyer.

  “No questions,” he said. “Action, now. I have the whip hand, and I intend to use it. If you got away from me, you might find a way to remove the transceiver from your head—what man has made, man can unmake, I suppose. But I warn you, Sawyer, that if you get out of my sight without permission, I can and will kill you. You can never get out of my hearing, with your—your built-in microphone. Now my energy’s low. I used up too much of it, and I’ve got to get more. That means closing the mine, as Nethe wishes. I’ve got to keep my part of the bargain before she’ll keep hers. So—”

  His cool gaze studied Sawyer calculatingly.

  “You’re a young man,” he said. “You want to live, don’t you? Well, I repeat my previous offer. I expect you to say no. But my offer of a job for life, working for me, holds good at any time you care to accept it. What have you to say now, young man?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “I was sent up here to do a job,” Sawyer said quietly. “Maybe I’ve failed. I’ve had failures before. Every man has.”

  “Not every man,” Alper said, with a sudden flash of curious pride.

  Sawyer shrugged slightly. “Okay,” he said. “Put it this way. I don’t mind failing when a job’s too big for me. But if that happens I figure it’s up to me to pass along the job to somebody good enough to handle it. Right now the Royal Commission’s depending on me to take care of what looked like a routine check-up. It isn’t routine. And maybe I’ve already failed. But if I have, it’s my responsibility to notify the Commissioner—”

  “I’d be fascinated to know just how you intend to go about that little matter without getting yourself killed,” Alper said, with an unpleasant grin. “If you’re sensible, you could collect two salaries—and the one I’d pay you would be considerably more than what you earn from the Commission.”

  “It would have to be a damned high salary,” Sawyer said, “to compensate for this—headgear!” He touched his head lightly.

  “I can remove it,” Alper said.

  He waited for Sawyer’s reaction, seemed disappointed, and went on:

  “I would even feel safe in removing it, under certain circumstances. Who would believe your story? But first, I’d make perfectly certain that you intended to remain cooperative.”

  Sawyer said thoughtfully, “How could you remove the transceiver? You said it had a ceramic-bone seal to my skull, didn’t you?”

  “Not yet—not for weeks. Until then, I can turn off the power entirely, and if I do that—and only if I do that—can you lift the transceiver from your head without committing suicide. Yes, I can turn off the power. There is a way. The secret is here, in the control case in my pocket—but I spent more time devising that shut-off switch than I spent on the rest of the work combined. So don’t waste time hoping you could find the way to turn off the power-switch, by examinging my control case. Houdini couldn’t find the way, and it would take a differential analyzer to find the—ah—combination. So I think you understand that you’ll do what I tell you. Yes, you’ll do that, my boy,” and here Alper smiled ferociously, “or you’ll die.”

  They were looking at each other with a measuring stare, each waiting for the other to make a definitive move, when from outside a sudden earsplitting din made the windows rattle.

  Both men wheeled toward the sound. A siren screamed its high, shuddering wail for three piercing beats and then subsided. A voice, amplified to hollow impersonality, spoke tremendously through the darkness of Fortuna’s noon.

  “Trouble in Level Eight!” the voice informed the little city and the cold, still night of the Pole. “Trouble in Level Eight!”

  Alper turned snarling to the younger man.

  “The little fool!” he said. “She went down! After all my warnings, Klai went down, and now Nethe’s got her!”

  III

  Like a man in a dream, Sawyer followed Alper’s stumping, fur-swathed figure through the turmoil of Fortuna toward the mine. In the distance he could see the bare, windswept ice of Little Slave Lake giving back reflections from the eternally lighted town. Fortuna was set down like a small medallion of humanity on the vast curve of the globe, clasped to it as the transceiver was clasped to Sawyer’s skull, and as alien to the rock as the transceiver to the head.

  They stumbled and slipped on icy planks as they made their way toward the mine. Fortuna had no streets. Plank steps and runways linked the buildings, which were anchored tight to the bedrock of the planet itself, for there was no soil here. Nothing grew except Fortuna. No roads led into it. The silence of the world’s end seemed to close it in. Whenever human noises faltered here, the vast silence of the Barrens closed over them like water.

  Slipping on ice, breathing the dry, incredible cold, Sawyer followed the stumping Alper. Out of bunk houses, offices, shack-like private homes, curious crowds were flocking. Alper thrust them aside, answering no questions. They passed the lighted commissary, the cook-house, the powerhouse, hearing the huge diesels that generated the lifeblood of Fortuna, lighted the houses, drove the mine machinery, pumped the waters of Little Slave Lake continually and forever out of the shafts where continually and forever they seeped.

  They passed the last of the ugly, utilitarian buildings which two hundred people needed for their encysted life above the pitchblende veins. And they came at last to the mouth of the great mine.

  Alper shouldered through the excited knot around the entrance. The voice had ceased to echo its alarm-signal from amplifiers spaced under eaves all along the streets, but other voices had taken it up now, a babble of them, excitedly predicting disaster.

  “The ghosts are loose!” Sawyer heard one miner say to another. “Down in Eight they’re busting through the walls!”

  “Miss Ford’s down there,” someone else volunteered as Alper passed. “The ghosts have got Miss Ford!”

  Alper shrugged them off. He had one purpose now and one only, and his strength was visibly lagging. Sawyer, following him into the lift, thought with grim amusement that at any rate, for the moment, they had one goal in common—neither wanted Klai Ford to die.

  There was always pandemonium underground at Fortuna. The noise of drills, carts, automatic muckers never ceased. Men’s voices echoed and re-echoed endlessly. It was a disorderly pandemonium now. All work seemed to have come to a full stop, and shouts from below made hollow reverberations that rebounded among the shafts. The lift passed opening after opening that swarmed with grimy faces with lights burning above every forehead. Abandoned drills and shovels leaned against the walls where shining ribbons of pitchblende showed the marks of labor, steel-hard stuff, heavy as lead and rich with uranium as a pudding with plums. Rich, that is, Sawyer thought, unless the ghosts have been at it…

  “They’re swarming like bees in Level Eight!” someone called warningly as the descending men passed. Alper only grunted. He had taken Sawyer’s arm as they stepped into the elevator, and now his weight was heavy against the younger man. As the mechanism ground toward a halt, he muttered thickly, his breath coming in uneven gusts:

  “Don’t—try anything. I warn you, Sawyer. Got to help me. Used up too much back there. My last energy—”

  “What you were saving to put this gimmick on Miss Ford?” Sawyer
asked. “You made a mistake, Alper. If any harm comes to her, the government’s going to ask some pretty close questions. Killing me won’t help. It won’t save you.”

  “Let me handle this,” Alper wheezed. “Do as you’re told. Come on.”

  They stepped out into the mouth of Level Eight, into a cluster of pale, excited men. Voices echoed dully here and the air felt thick and heavy, pressing upon the ears. Sawyer noticed an unexpected smell of—ozone?

  “She went in there,” one of the men at the shaft-mouth said, turning his helmet-light toward them as the two stepped out of the lift, Alper’s heavy weight sagging on Sawyer’s arm. “Here’s Joe, Mr. Alper. He was with her.”

  “What happened?” Sawyer asked crisply. The miners’ troubled, frightened faces swung round toward him, their lights moving in flickers across the wet walls. One of them stepped forward.

  “Miss Ford had Eddie and me come down with her,” he said. “She waited right here. Nobody else was around. We don’t work Level Eight any more, because—well, we don’t work it. Miss Ford sent Eddie in to get a camera she wanted.”

  A murmur from behind him made everyone look up. The tunnel twisted out of sight into the rock ten feet away. From beyond the bend, a faint flicker of light showed, faded, showed again. The air seemed to ring soundlessly, as if bells were swinging far away, sending out sound-waves that compressed the inner ear. The smell of ozone grew stronger.

  “Go on,” Alper grunted, shuffling forward. “Go on, I’m listening.” The miners made way for him. Sawyer let the grip on his arm pull him on. He was very alert, every sense straining for impressions.

  “Eddie got just around that bend, out of sight,” the miner told them. “Excuse me, Mr. Alper—I don’t feel like coming any farther.” He stood back stubbornly. “I’ll finish in a minute. There isn’t much to tell. Eddie started yelling. Then the ghosts came—Anyhow, we saw those lights begin to flash and Eddie yelled. Miss Ford said for me to come. She said we had to get the camera. We—well, she got ahead of me. And Eddie let out one awful scream and stopped, and—Miss Ford was around the bend, and I—I came back fast to set off the alarm.” The man’s voice was guiltily defiant.

  “Did Miss Ford scream?” Sawyer asked.

  “No sir. Not a sound.”

  Alper grunted again and lurched forward, toward the darkness and the flickering of unearthly lights around the bend of the tunnel. It was very silent there. The underground had swallowed up Klai Ford and the man named Eddie, and only the flicker seemed alive in there now. The miners’ faces, scared and awed, watched the two men around the bend and out of sight. No one made a move to follow.

  “Sawyer!” Alper wheezed, leaning heavily against him as they made their slow way forward. “Let me handle this. Don’t make any moves on your own. I’ll stop you if I have to. Understand? I’ve got my hand on the control of the transceiver right this minute. One touch and I could kill you in your tracks. I think Nethe has got the girl. I want to keep her alive if I can, but—”

  He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to. It was obvious that Nethe, with her mysterious energy-source, would survive if it came to a choice. Sawyer knew that the choice must not be left to Alper.

  They came to the first bend in the tunnel. A flicker of lights fled away from them between walls of shining rock around the next bend. Stubbornly Alper shuffled on, Sawyer supporting him. The smell of ozone was heady in the air…

  Then they saw the ghosts.

  A dead man lay prone on the wet floor of the tunnel just around the next bend. And swarming over his body, dancing, flickering, rising and falling in the air, a whirl of winged lights shimmered. It seemed to Sawyer that suddenly wide spaces had opened all around him. The indigo smell of ozone was sharp in his nostrils; he had a feeling of breathless delimitation, and an intangible wind roared soundlessly through the tunnel.

  The whirl of wings above the dead man were split flames, two by two, joined at the base in a V. Wheat-shaped, Klai had said. Like pale grain, dividing at the top into a fork of flickering light. The air seethed with them; flat, thin, dancing things shivering into fringes of light at the edges. They were beautiful. They were terrifying. They danced like vultures over the dead man, dipping, wheeling, with a dreadful eagerness stooping toward him and whirling high again. The whole tunnel dazzled with their motion.

  Alper paused. Sawyer felt a tremor of some violent emotion shake the ponderous body that leaned against him. Then in a suddenly thin voice the old man called aloud:

  “Nethe? Nethe, are you here?”

  A familiar ripple of laughter sounded out of the darkness beyond the dancing wings of fire. It was the only answer, but when Alper heard it he drew a deep breath and shuffled forward resolutely, keeping his face turned toward the wings of light.

  Sawyer asked softly, “What are they? Do you know? Did they kill the man?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care,” Alper said. “Hurry. All I do know is Nethe’s there and I can get energy again. Youth again! Hurry!”

  Sawyer hesitated. He thought, “Is this my chance? If he gets more energy it may be too late, but now, while he still wants something of me—”

  Without completing the thought, he sprang into sudden, violent action, leaping back away from Alper and the flames, disengaging his arm from Alper’s weight and clearing his own right hand for the quick sidewise blow that would free him, if he were lucky, from the tyranny of the old man’s power.

  “Last chance,” he told himself as he sprang. “Maybe he was lying. Maybe not. Maybe if he’s knocked out I can get the transceiver control away from him. Maybe—”

  Thunder and lightning crashed downward again in the familiar path through the center of his head. The tunnel wheeled dizzily, flashing with lights that were not all the winged ghosts. Alper’s heavy hand shut around Sawyer’s wrist before his brain cleared.

  “Come on! Hurry! Don’t make me do it again! There isn’t time!”

  Staggering and dazed, Sawyer let himself be pulled forward. The winged flames seemed to consider them as they stumbled past, to flutter a little and then subside again as if in some radiant feast upon the dead man on the floor. Shuddering and dizzy, Sawyer accepted the old man’s weight once more, let himself be urged on into the darkness beyond the flames.

  Before them the shaft widened. There was light again, a broad circle of it upon the wall, like the light of a distant flashbeam, pale and wide. Flattened against the light, Klai stood motionless, pressing her back to the rock and staring straight before her into the shadows.

  Sawyer stared, shook his head and stared again. The light came from behind the girl. It fell through the solid rock, from some point beyond. Klai was motionless, her head thrown back, her palms flat against the wall, and suddenly Sawyer realized that her immobility was deceptive, no choice of hers. For she was trying frantically to move.

  And she could not. Like a moth pinned upon the circle of light she stood, fought hard and could not stir a finger. Only her quick breath and the flash of her eyes and the glint of her white teeth beneath the pretty upper lip as she spoke showed that she was alive at all. Her voice sounded frantic.

  “You can’t do this!” she cried into the shadows. “You’re not allowed to! You’re not the Goddess!”

  Automatically Sawyer turned his head to follow her gaze. In the darkness a luminous shadow stirred. Nethe was a preternaturally tall figure clothed in shadows, holding them about her like a veil through which her face gleamed dimly. Try as he would, Sawyer could not focus upon the figure and the features under the veil. But the voice was clear, very strong and sweet, with such music latent in it as an angel might hold latent, not choosing to release the full volume in a world so limited as Earth.

  “I will be Goddess, soon enough,” Nethe said. “How do you know me, Khom? You are a Khom! A real Khom, not an earthling. How did you get here, girl?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know!” Klai’s voice wavered. “But you’re not the Goddess. You can’t be, without the D
ouble Mask. Oh, I wish I could remember—”

  Nethe’s voice broke in sharply, in a language full of curious double consonants that lisped like diphthongs. Her words crackled. Klai caught her breath in a sound like a sob.

  “I don’t understand you! I don’t remember! Who are you? Why—”

  Alper’s forward lurch cut off the words. From the corner of her eye she saw the motion, gasped, and tried in vain to turn her head.

  “Nethe—” Alper said.

  Klai’s blue eyes rolled sidewise. “Who is it? Alper, is it you?”

  “Be still, Klai,” the old man said. “If you want to live, be quiet.”

  “Why should the life of a Khom matter?” Nethe asked derisively. “Even to a Khom? I’m finished with you now, old Khom. I have the girl!”

  “Don’t do it, Nethe!” Alper’s voice was desperate. “I’ll lose the mine if you kill her! Then you won’t get the ore at all.”

  “Your little Khom troubles are so important to you Khom,” Nethe said. “But not really important at all.”

  “Her body will be found!” Alper cried. “They’ll get me for murdering her! Nethe, you can’t do it!”

  “Body?” Nethe said, contemptuously. “The body won’t be here. I must question this girl before she dies. She is a Khom. If I had known that before—but how could I? All you animals look so much alike, and the girl spoke your tongue until just now, when I was about to kill her. Well, by doing that she’s gained herself a reprieve—until she tells me how she passed through the Gate. I must understand that. But I had not intended… oh, it doesn’t matter. I know a way—a safe place to question this Khom. And this time I may never need to return to your bleak world. So—goodbye, old Khom.”