by R. E. Klein
The science fair dissolved. She was in the spaceship in her seat next to Richard’s. The lights were off, but the faint starlight through the windows outlined the figure seated at the controls. She turned to the seat beside her.
“They got me away into their ship,” she said. “But I’m back now.” She took his hand. “They’re gone.” She squeezed the hand held out to her. “They said I wouldn’t see you because I had to be alone. What did they mean by that, Richard? Did you get all that? Richard, why don’t you answer?” The angle of the helmet prevented her seeing the face. But she knew, even before the lights came on, that Gordon sat at the controls.
• • •
He is safe in the ship with me, her inner voice told her, tucked away in a corridor or crawl space. He is safe because he is part of this mission, and they said he would be safe and on board. She glanced around the tiny cockpit chamber but saw only darkness. Richard is here with me, somewhere.
She gazed straight ahead to lose herself through the window. Streams of light shot toward her and past her as the spaceship plummeted on. Richard is safe, and I am safe; and whatever this thing is that pilots the ship, it is safe, too.
From her position in the adjoining seat she could see only the profile, slightly glistening in the subdued light, squatting like a limp crab over the controls. The vast dark head lay mercifully in shadow. Outside, the lights streaked by.
“Why us?” she asked the lights. “Richard and Gordon—and me? Why did those horrors choose us? Why couldn’t they do whatever had to be done?”
You heard them, Ellen: they explode.
Yes, she thought, they explode, even inside their glass cylinders, and I suppose we don’t explode. “Maybe we don’t,” she said aloud. All she knew for certain was that she was rushing out to meet something the horrors feared. Whatever it was must be worse still.
She felt them long before they came into view, the way one feels a disease. First the depression that precedes a malaise. Then the sick headache turning to nausea. At last the wrenching illness that all but threw her stomach out of her mouth.
“I thought the worst thing was that you died!” She screamed. A wash of memories overflowed her from the science fair.
“But you don’t die,” she remembered. “You don’t die at all. They keep you alive—forever. They hurt you and hurt you—forever.”
Now she saw them. Through the window. Streamlined bodies dashing at her. Not spaceships, as in all the science-fiction movies—but things with fish eyes and fish faces, trailing streamers of whipcord appendages, flinging a kind of palpable atmosphere as they streamed past her.
Fear that doesn’t end. Forever. Shrieking fear that goes on and on. And sadness and being alone. And terrible things happening to people you love, and you can’t do anything about it. All the things that drive people screaming mad.
Dying is not the worst thing, her insides screamed. Nor is it the pain—the body can faint with pain. It is that other thing—being helpless in fear. They keep coming. It would take an army—an air force—to defeat them. No, nothing could defeat them. They were all around her, dragging her through panic fears to which she couldn’t even put a name.
I’m exploding like the Grider, she thought, but inside where no one can see it. They’re killing me with fear.
Whose fear? said something like Richard’s voice. Whose fear is it, Ellen?
Fear? Her fear, of course. Whose else could it be?
No, Ellen. It couldn’t all be your fear.
It couldn’t be all her fear.
Then whose fear am I feeling? She gazed out at the things swarming around her—and her eyes met something beyond them, pursuing them like a shadow. Only the seat belt kept her from collapsing out of the seat.
It is their fear I am feeling. Their fear. They are afraid. They are not advancing. They are fleeing. They are fleeing something they fear. That is why they will destroy whatever is in their path. In their haste to get away they will destroy us because there is no weapon to stop them.
Fear is a weapon. Richard’s voice. Fear rules the universe. Get more fear.
More fear?
Much more fear. What gives you fear?
Something looking in the window. Being buried alive. No.
She turned to the thing at the controls. Deliberately she put her face into its, their plastic bubbles almost touching—like a kiss—and stared long into the bulging eyes.
The scream inside her nearly tore her head off. “No!” she screamed. “No! No!” She screamed till she thought she would die, then screamed again, her screams shooting round the cabin till the whole ship was one scream of fear.
“Fear rules the universe,” she sobbed. “And God knows I have fear.”
Put all your fear into a thought, said Richard’s voice. The Grider have an instrument aboard to concentrate your thought. I am that instrument.
Something touched her shoulder; Gordon’s face was thrust into hers. She reeled as thoughts ripped from her mind, her heart, her spine. Her body shook with terror. Excruciating shocks burst from her screaming mind.
Outside the procession stopped. Thousands of lidless eyes trained on her. Thousands of eyes locked with microscopic precision on her. They hit her back with a despair that nearly sent her gasping her lungs out.
Through the glass one creature emerged distinctly, a hair-covered length hurling quill after quill of fear into her heart, her lungs, her stomach. That thing outside, is it large like a building, she wondered, or tiny like a gnat? Inside the spaceship Gordon’s helmet looked bigger than the universe. How big is the universe? she asked. What is size, anyway? Does it really matter? She knew only that she had never hurt so much, and that she could not faint or die. Maybe, just maybe, they would let her die now, though she did wonder if the quilled thing that swarmed past her was small and close or large and far.
She sought the answer in Gordon’s eyes. The shocks exploding from her tore her across like gauze. She wrenched her head around to focus on the creatures just outside.
They swirled around the spaceship, turning, fleeing back upon the advancing shadow. Like squid swarming in millions. Like squid bursting into parts. Expanding. Exploding. Popping. Destroying themselves in a panic of suicide, caught between her throbbing thoughts and the shadow driving them on. Suddenly she was through them.
Beyond was the shadow, a writhing wave of fingers—or worms. More soulless monsters, she said. Already they were working on her, piercing her chest with shadows of fear, invading her brain.
“Worms, what do you fear?” She laughed. “Ha. You fear me!” This time she had no need for Gordon. She burned the worms to red confetti as the spaceship streaked on.
Nobody had ever told her of the cosmic graces of little people. Somehow she remembered a line her high school teacher had said. “I am a little world made cunningly,” she quoted. It made sense now, for the whole world was within her.
The spaceship tore through a panorama she could never have imagined. Vast red clouds rose about her, unfolding into shapes like crenellated walls. All her life she had been told the universe was empty space. The ones who told her were wrong. The spreading red walls momentarily expanded to a complex, multiturreted castle; then, for an instant, they shifted to take on the contours of her own apartment, before they transformed again. She would remember this the next time she sat in her tiny apartment with the windows open to the stars. The universe is crammed with good things, she decided. She was at home in the universe.
She laughed. The Grider—for all their scientific gadgetry—what did they know of the universe? Nobody could know all about the universe. They can’t even begin to comprehend people like Richard or Gordon or me. We are too deep for them. They lack—what was that word her teacher had used?—ethics. And the highest ethics are the theological virtues that Dr. Bradley had talked about, whatever they were. It was something to think about. A new thought struck her. Maybe all the things they said about God are true.
Suddenly she thought of Earth, their p
ark bench, and her one-room apartment.
“Let’s go home, Gordon,” she said aloud. “I am weary of the stars. Richard, wherever you are in the ship, I want to go home. I want to have supper at home!”
• • •
Through the window the stars came up suddenly, as a great wall of red cloud shifted out of vision. The spaceship must be turning. She abandoned herself to gazing beyond the window as the spacecraft quit the remnants of the red cloud to shoot through a dazzle of meteors that glittered like sequins on a sky-blue gown. She was going home. She knew it. She was going home.
Home? What of Gordon?
She looked to see Gordon draped limply over the controls, like a flabby stingray, ropes of skin protruding from his underside to manipulate switches.
“You can’t ever go home, Gordon. You are changed into something that doesn’t belong in the world.” A thought struck her. “Maybe I am too changed to ever go home.”
Outside, the meteors shimmered with silver flashes.
“I got drunk on the universe, Gordon, and I’ve killed—living creatures. I killed them with my thoughts. I’ve been so far away, if I ever get home, can I go back to just being me?
“Fear does rule the universe, Gordon, because life goes on forever. That’s what I learned at the science fair. Life doesn’t stop. That’s why the Grider feared the ones that chased them across the galaxy, and those creatures feared the shadows that pursued them. Life goes on forever, and you can’t stop it, even if you’re in agony.
“I’m changed like you, Gordon, but inside. Maybe I’m too changed to go home. But I am going home, whatever I am changed to. That planet ahead of me. That can only be Earth.”
It was only a small speck near the shining splendor that must be the sun. Nearer was a fleet of floating things.
She smiled. The Grider, hovering by hundreds in their absurd cylindrical spacecraft with odd, long appendages protruding, looking for all the world like something spawned in contaminated pools. Maybe they had a planet or maybe they dwelled permanently in those spaceships of theirs; she didn’t much care either way.
She saw nothing now but the dead bodies of all the other little girls who had been abducted to the science fair.
Her mind was opened. She remembered all she had learned as a small girl, the first time they took her. All they had made her forget. Till now.
Fear rules the universe. That is the law of the Grider. They could not withstand the things that made them explode with fear, so they went searching for something that could. All those terrible stories about alien abductions. It was the Grider experimenting to learn how much fear we can take. She looked at Gordon and wondered how long it took them to discover our horror of the living corpse.
She was nearly upon them, the jointed appendages from their cylindrical spacecraft extending and distending like the mandibles of some crustacean.
New thoughts crowded into her mind. Richard’s. Richard was in her mind and remembering, too, everything the principal had told him. Richard’s memories merged with hers.
You, Grider, her thoughts raced, you kidnapped and tortured us till your experiments showed you that Earth people can tolerate fear on a level that makes you explode. So you chose Gordon as a fear factory, and Richard as the instrument to focus the fear. And you chose me because I was the one little child who did not die with fright with what you did to her. You prepared us, Grider, to do the thing you could not do, and we succeeded and killed all your enemies, which you convinced our government are ours, too.
I have one more task to perform. She was very close to the flotilla now. “I wish you could hear me, Grider,” she said aloud. “It is not nice to inflict gruesome experiments on innocent people. It is not nice to terrify children with appalling figures in dark closets.”
Gordon had risen from the controls and stood erect, nodding, swinging his arms up and down.
“You terrorized Richard,” she said to the Grider. “And made this thing of Gordon. You know so much, do you?
“You can’t begin to understand Gordon or Richard or me. We have kindness and humor. That’s why we are people. And you are shallow monsters that can only invent things.
“Enjoy yourselves, Grider.” She hugged Gordon, putting her face close to the one inside the helmet.
The fleet tried to scatter before it exploded. She felt the panic reflect back upon her. But all that was left were burning remnants of their jointed spaceships.
She turned away from the window because Gordon’s body began to shake, swayed back and forth, the mouth to make sounds. Gordon was laughing. The worst sight in the world was to see Gordon laughing. The body made violent jerks, slamming against the bulkhead, doubling, twitching till it began to fall apart. She watched in terrible fascination as Gordon’s body exploded with laughter. A moment more and it was over. Only the bubble helmet, empty, lay a few feet away. Gordon had disintegrated.
The Grider were wrong, Ellen said to the expanding Earth and to the dazzling sun radiating through the window. Fear rules only part of the universe. She contemplated the empty helmet on the floor. Laughter rules another part. And something else. She leapt to throw her arms around Richard, who now sat smiling beside her in the pilot’s seat. Something far more wonderful rules the universe.
Ashes Fall on Timberlake
I
I laid my pen down early that hot, moonless night. All day I had been at work piling up manuscript; now to relax I slipped from the cabin and hiked to a little clearing where I could recline among boulders and try to guess the secrets of the stars. Everything felt almost supernaturally still; not a pine needle stirred. The night was a vacuum, empty of air, sound, and motion.
Around me rose the pines of Timberlake Mountain, where I came to write my book. It was June when I moved into my isolated cabin; and all was so pleasant, so placid and productive, that I stayed on into September, then into October.
Now it was October on Timberlake Mountain that I stood among pines, far from the rural activity of the Village, where Joe the fix-it man hung out at the dry goods store waiting for things to break, and Walt in his restaurant imparted homespun wisdom from behind the zinc counter. Timberlake Village, the vacation place that never quite succeeded as a resort.
But I was miles from there. I was deep in the forest and exhilarated because I had written most of my book and cared only for the sheer wonder of existence. I peered about the clearing in the hot, still night, till I found a likely boulder for a chair and settled in to stare up at the sky.
Above me shone a cosmic ocean, its silver lights a host of tinsel islets. You view but fragments, my excited fancy whispered, as when you stand upon the shore to gaze across the waters. Though all seems bottomless ocean, you stare at shallows, seeing nothing of the great seas beyond. Surely in the skies, too, you see but coastal waters.
My mind was so charmed with this notion that I fancied our planet an island in a cosmic sea. I lowered my gaze to take in the forest about me. The very clearing in which I sat was an island, too, washed by an ocean of dark pine. Then I looked skyward again and nearly fell from my boulder, for marvelous things were happening in the sky.
Incandescent fireballs exploded into streaks and bubbles of colored light—bursts of the purest silvers and greens—dazzling electrical showers. Fireball after fireball hurled across the sky to erupt into a Vesuvius of dazzling silver sparks. I watched openmouthed as the display increased in magnitude until the blaze of light was almost too much for my unprotected eyes.
It was no mere meteor shower; it was an exaltation of comets, a vast celestial pyrotechnic that had the skies almost singing with light. I had no notion of the passage of time; I knew only that I was in some way a part of this splendor, and I told myself that whatever was happening in the sky was what man was made for.
And as, overhead, star burst upon star, gradually, very gradually, I became aware of sound all around me, as of the softest of soft rains, and felt the eyelash flutter of ashes gently descending; and I saw
that the sky rained ash that fell in delicate soft flakes. This I saw by the green-and-silver light as the glowing balls burst to fragments overhead. And I heard other sounds, a pop-pop-popping as from far away.
The ashes piled in drifts around my feet, but harder to see now, for the spectacle was dying. The lights waned rapidly till all was washed a sickly green.
Then it was I heard a dull thud, so near me that I started, as something heavy fell among the tufted ashes at my feet. And in the waning, sickly light I looked down to behold a demon hand with an enormous ring flashing purple fire. The last of the stars must have burned out, for all was darkness except the purple fire.
Then I knew what the lights meant, and I knew, too, the significance of the ashes. And I realized I must take that demon hand as proof that I had witnessed a terrible battle in the skies. As one possessed, I seized that hand and ran with it in the silence of that haunted night, through the forest of clinging pines, back to the safety of my lonely cabin.
II
I arrived gasping for breath and set the hand on the table. I bolted the door and pulled down the window shade. Only then did I light the oil-burning lamp. Only then did I gaze upon the hand.
It was dark green, twice the size of a man’s hand. Wide it was and flat, studded with bony knobs, with six spatulate fingers ending in black claws. The hand had been neatly severed at the wrist, which was dry and shiny, as though cauterized by smoking iron.
But the ring it wore enthralled me. Silver, it was, with a perpendicular disc sparkling with purple flashes. It was impossible to look anywhere but at those purple flashes. The color seemed to get inside my head and gather in a pool at the bottom of my brain.
Suddenly my brain exploded with tremendous thoughts, reeled on the threshold of vistas splendid and terrible. I plunged through corridors of light ringed to infinity, more light than I could bear. I tore my gaze away and staggered back. And when I looked up in wonder to see the ring’s reflected sparkle on the walls and floor and ceiling, it seemed I stood inside an immense refracting jewel. Spellbound, I lowered my eyes.