The Well of The Worlds

by Henry Kuttner

  Dead, empty, burned-out blankness, the Well lay charred upon the glassy floor. Sawyer’s dazzled eyes still held the after-image of its final blaze as it died, and that glitter upon his eyelids was the last thing he saw as all memory failed him.

  Thunder in his head shocked him to life. He stood on glass, above golden emptiness. He had been standing here a long time, facing a Mask.

  He could not remember clearly.

  But a masked figure was coming toward him slowly through the breach in the glass wall where a thousand years ago, it seemed to him, he had watched the Sselli pouring. He knew now why he stood motionless, and what he awaited.

  From beyond the broken wall a murmur and a rising chorus of men’s voices was beginning to echo higher and higher in a crescendo of triumph. He heard bells far off begin to swing, not in alarm now but in paeans of thanksgiving.

  Only here inside the sanctum of the vanished gods was it not yet time for triumph. Peace had not yet come here. Everywhere else upon the hollow world it dwelt, but a masked man walked slowly toward Sawyer, and with him came death.

  But he came unsteadily, upon failing legs. For the last energy of the Firebird was beginning to flicker out in Alper’s ponderous body.

  Ten feet away he paused, braced himself. It was strange, Sawyer thought, to be looking at an Isier mask out of whose eyes no streams of killing violence poured. Alper’s small grey eyes gazed dully instead from the empty sockets of the Isier-face; he must have picked it up from the battlefield of Armageddon, as he came—

  “It’s gone,” he said, “You let the Firebird go!”

  “Earth’s gone too,” Sawyer heard his own voice answer. He drew a deep, dazed breath. “There’s no way back. Killing me won’t help. We can live—I suppose—in Khom’ad—”

  “Alper!” a voice called. “Alper, wait!” Zatri’s portly, masked figure was scrambling through the avalanche of shattered glass toward them, the echoes of his voice rolling under the great vault. Zatri too still wore his mask. What had been happening outside while the Armageddon of the Isier went on Sawyer did not even wonder. If Alper and the Khom had worked together during the crisis in masked communication, it made no difference now. There was still one last battle to be fought, and no one could help Sawyer but himself.

  “Live here?” Alper said bitterly. “Without the Firebird? How long would I last? You’ve got time! You’ll find some damned plodding job and work at it all your life. You’ll marry. You’ll raise a family. But what about me? How can I rule—”

  “You can’t,” Sawyer said calmly. “You’re through ruling. There are jobs here you could do well, but ruling isn’t one of them.”

  “Alper!” Zatri shouted. “Wait!”

  “Wait?” Alper snarled in his mask. “What for? So you can noose me again? Oh no!” He sprang toward Sawyer, his clenched fists lifting. “You threw away the Firebird! Without it I’ll die. I’ll die!” The smiling mask roared suddenly, “But you’ll die first!”

  The fists unfolded. The right hand dropped toward that pocket where the transceiver control lay.

  Knowing he was too late, still Sawyer leaped.

  The turbulent lightnings crashed through his brain, mounted to a deadly crescendo. Now it was his own skull that was the chamber of a cyclotron, driving violence faster and faster, louder and louder as he stumbled blindly toward the serenely smiling mask…

  His hands flew up to hold his skull together, and he knew dimly that he too wore a mask. He had wholly forgotten that. It had not even seemed strange to him that he understood Zatri’s words. Zatri—

  Dimly he saw Zatri doing something very strange. Zatri too was clasping his temples with both hands, and in the moment Sawyer’s gaze touched him the old man tore off his mask and sent it clashing and rolling across the glass floor. His face was convulsed with surprise and pain as he stared from Sawyer to Alper.

  All of it happened between two halves of the same second, while Sawyer leaped toward the man who was doing his best to split his skull in two. In the middle of the leap, in the middle of the second, as he saw Zatri’s uncovered face, Sawyer quite suddenly realized the truth. He laughed with a choke of triumph, and in mid-air ripped off the mask he wore—

  Then he struck Alper and the old man went down, hand still pressing the control. But this time Sawyer wanted it pressed. For he knew why Zatri had torn off the mask, and he knew what was happening in Alper’s own skull.

  Alper made one useless guesture toward his own mask in the instant before Sawyer struck him. For he too had realized in the same instant, what was wrong.

  The masks were transceivers too, in their own strange way. They were transmitters of sound and energy-waves, creating their own carrier-beams. And they were tremendously powerful amplifiers. Sight and sound perceived through them were the sights and sounds a god might know, vivider than human senses ever receive. And the ultra-sonic vibrations that roared now through Sawyer’s skull were roaring many times magnified through Alper’s—while he wore his mask!

  Sawyer’s impact rolled the old man over on the floor, and Sawyer with one hand pressed the back of Alper’s head hard to hold his masked face down upon the glass, fixing the mask in place. With the other hand he groped for Alper’s on the transceiver control, found it, closed hard…

  Alper screamed.

  Under Sawyer’s grip his fingers fumbled wildly at the control. Thunder beat blindingly in both heads alike, deafening Sawyer, dazing him, but roaring with killing force through Alper’s head behind the mask. Alper must be hearing ten times the fury of lightning and thunder that pounded through Sawyer’s skull.

  Now Alper’s only thought was to release the pressure upon the control, to stop that thunder in Sawyer’s head and the infinitely worse vibrations of his own. But Sawyer’s grip would not let go. Stunned and dizzy, he crushed the old man’s hand still harder upon the controls. There was one hope for him now and only one. If Alper could find the hidden release which Sawyer could not find, and spring it before this thunder killed them both…

  If Alper died before he found it, Sawyer was doomed too. For while the transceiver linked them, Alper’s death meant Sawyer’s.

  Desperately the old man’s fingers fumbled at the control. Sawyer dared not let go fully, but he released the pressure a little—just a little—and the fingers under his twisted purposefully at the disc they clasped…

  Then, without any warning at all, it was over.

  Dazed by the suddenness of his release, by the echoing silences in his own brain, Sawyer crouched over the old man’s body and heard something tinkle on the glass beside him without at first realizing what it was. His dulled eyes saw it roll—a little disc tiny as an aspirin tablet, shining metal, curved inward on the underside—

  The transceiver.

  Hardly daring to believe it, he released Alper with one hand and pressed his palm to his head. It was gone. He was free.

  Very slowly, as Sawyer’s hands released him, Alper rolled sidewise on the floor, straightened and was still. The heavy head rolled back until the Isier mask stared up at Sawyer with its eternal, serene smile. The grey eyes behind it were no less empty than the mask, staring up into Sawyer’s face and seeing nothing at all. Age had been Alper’s terror—and he would never be older now.

  After what seemed a long, long time, Sawyer lifted his gaze from the dead man’s.

  Zatri was coming toward him across the glass floor. Beyond him, by the broken wall, Klai stood watching. She lifted an unsteady hand when her eyes met Sawyer’s, and he smiled without moving. He could not move. He was too tired.

  But it was all over now. He glanced sidewise once, for the last time, at the ruined Well that was nothing but fused metal now. Beyond it, beyond dimensions of space and time, his own lost world spun eternally severed from Khom’ad. That was irrevocable. He had done the best he could. He had done his job.

  An infinity away through the vastness of other-space, someone in an office in Toronto would write “Closed” across a folder a
nd file it in a steel cabinet. Sawyer shook his head hard. Now there was only Khom’ad. There could be a good life on Khom’ad too—but that was up to him.

  He turned toward Klai, waiting in the portal. Moving heavily, he got to his feet.

  A man can find a job in any world. He knew he would not forget Earth. Wryly he thought that when he drank too much he would talk of it. If there was liquor on Khom’ad, he would certainly drink too much, at first—and babble, he told himself—of green fields. There would be at least one time more when Earth came back to his thoughts and his speech more vividly than when he had dwelt on Earth—the last time a man ever speaks of anything at all.

  But he was young, now. He had a long life ahead of him. It could be good, if he made it good.

  The serenely smiling mask on Alper’s face watched him walking steadily over the swimming golden void toward Zatri, and toward Klai.

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