The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 20 Classic Science Fiction Tales

by Frank Belknap Long

  Gregg’s brooding gaze hovered between his superior and the glowing tip of his cigar.

  “Well, nothing inside that ship can come out and descend to our peaceful little Utopia unless it suits our convenience. She may or may not have an antimagnetic hull, but the force-field she’s nesting against couldn’t be busted open by a runaway star with a core of pure deuterium.”

  “Go on.”

  Gregg blew a smoke ring and watched it ascend toward the ceiling. “We built that field up as a protection against piracy. If the crew refused to image themselves in on the disk, we won’t dissolve the field. We’ll be within our rights unless—” Gregg hesitated. “Unless their papers are in order, and a human face comes through. Even then we could tell them we’re in quarantine. I’ve often thought that a human face could be simulated. On the disk, I mean—”

  Hanley passed a hand over his brow. “Maybe we’d better start making arrangements now,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “Your incarceration.”

  Gregg watched his superior swing about. This time Hanley did not pause or look back.

  He’s not telling me, Gregg thought, but he’ll be inside that ship in ten minutes.

  He started toward the door and then—inertia enfolded him like a winding sheet. Lord, how he hated to act, to make decisions, to do anything which went counter to the immense indolence which was his most outstanding character trait.

  In some respects he was like those pioneer fossil amphibians, the lobefins. Not as good as reptiles, better than fishes, the lobefins had been caught up in a backwash of inertia on the eve of what might have been their greatest evolutionary triumph.

  Compared to men of really vibrant energies he was a lobefin. He couldn’t quite climb up over the bank because he liked to stretch himself out in the tidal muck, and bask in the warm sunlight.

  He moved in a radiant little orbit of his own inside the immense, bustling beehive of activity which homo sapiens had set up.

  Some day anthropologists were going to discover that the genus homo embraced six distinct species of men. Extinct were homo heidelbergensis, homo neanderthalensis, homo rhodesiensis and homo soloensis. Living were homo sapiens, and—homo indolensis.

  Fortunately very few people suspected the existence of homo indolensis.

  Gregg moved languidly to a bookcase and pulled out Hargrave’s “Third Stage of Interstellar Expansion.” It was a fascinating book because Hargrave, too, had been capable of deriving the most intense emotional satisfaction from just sitting sprawled out in a chair and letting his imagination run riot.

  There could be no doubt that the impulse to sit and dream, to forego all exertion, was a progressive, specialized derivation from a much earlier attempt on the part of primitive man to shuffle off the immense responsibility of—fire and flint making, the pursuit of game, and the upbringing of a family.

  An artist who could sit and paint lovely pink bison on the walls of the communal rock cavern didn’t have to worry much about any of those things. When game was plentiful his needs were supplied by other, less imaginative members of the tribe. But when the development became too specialized—A bitterness tightened Gregg’s lips. He could, of course, have forcibly prevented Hanley from sticking out his neck. He had the edge on Hanley in physical strength and could have restrained him with very little effort. Why hadn’t he?

  Within the scope of his inertia he was not incapable of exerting himself in a dramatic, forceful way. He shrank only from making long-range decisions, from shouldering great, dull burdens, from becoming enmeshed in aggressive arguments with people who did not possess enough intelligence to argue imaginatively about anything.

  A lobefin? Why did he persist in kidding himself? He was in all respects the exact opposite of a lobefin. His inertia was the inertia of a tremendous creativeness anchored in the pleasure principle, a creativeness that had to be stimulated in just the right way, or—it wouldn’t play ball. It was a physiological fact that when creative impulses were thwarted inertia enveloped the body, a sluggishness crept into the brain.

  He didn’t feel exactly sluggish now, however. Not mentally sluggish. He had a feeling that out in the mist something might very well be taking place which would have stripped his inertia from him—could he have but seen it.

  His head felt suddenly cold. Not just his face, but his entire head, the top of his skull especially.

  Why hadn’t he tried to stop Hanley? Was it because, subconsciously, he’d known that Hanley feared nothing he could not come to physical grip with? The one thing Hanley couldn’t do was sit and dream. And when a practical man goes forth to take a bull by the horns, half-expecting to be gored, a practical man, a dreamer, had no right to interfere.

  Gregg opened “The Third State of Interstellar Expansion,” and removed the bookmark he’d placed opposite Chapter 2. He began, slowly, to read: “As for the possibility of life on other worlds—”

  He has taken the first step. There were two. Why did the other not come?

  The thought moved slowly along the passageway, and hovered above Hanley. The thought pulsed, and moved down the wall and across the floor of the passageway. It hovered above Hanley from the opposite wall, comprehending him.

  Hanley stood just inside the air lock examining a passageway which seemed covered with the dust of centuries, his heart thudding against his ribs.

  In the narrow swath of radiance cut by his glow torch he could see the dust clearly. It was greenish-yellow, mildewed over with moist threads of fungus growth which adhered to his shoes when he lifted first his right foot, then his left.

  He does not need the light he is carrying. Surely he can see without the light.

  A dull radiance suffused the passageway, so that when Hanley clicked off the torch he was not in darkness.

  There was a musty smell in the passageway, and in the wider corridor which branched off from it. The walls of the ceiling were covered with mildew, and when he moved, his head felt suddenly cold. Not just his face, but his entire head, the top of his skull especially.

  The corridor startled Hanley, not because it was empty, but because it was so full of strange, angular shadows. The room at the end of the corridor startled him still more.

  The room wasn’t empty. In the dim light Hanley could make out a circular metal chair, and the dim outlines of a seated figure. The chair was faintly luminous, and seemed not so much an article of furniture as an extension of the floor which had mushroomed into a chilling circularity in the precise middle of the room.

  Touch him. He was once like yourself.

  The seated figure bore an unmistakable resemblance to a shrunken old man with thinning hair and a greenish-yellow beard. But when Hanley reached out and touched the beard, it crumpled, leaving a dampness on his palm. Mildew, dust came away, revealing a gleaming clavicle, and hollow eye sockets which seemed to be staring past Hanley at something on the opposite wall.

  The wall. If you would know more, scrape—scrape away the dust.

  For a terrifying instant Hanley had an apprehension that something in the room was trying to communicate with him. It was as though there were a living presence in the room which could force him to obey its unspoken commands.

  Could force him? With a convulsive shudder Hanley turned, and stumbled from the room. Out in the corridor another heart-stopping spasm shook him. For an instant he was on the verge of giving way completely to his terror.

  Then—anger flooded into his brain. Nothing he couldn’t see could force him to do something he didn’t want to do. Nothing—nothing—

  He was standing in another room. The chair was larger and more disturbingly circular, more disturbingly shaped than the chair in the room from which he had fled. The seated figure was larger too.

  He is beginning to understand. This was a very ancient one
of his own kind. Will he scrape away the dust?

  The seated figure was vaguely humanoid in appearance, but its teeth were very large, and enormous brow ridges arched above its hollow eyes. Sweat was trickling down Hanley’s face, and something seemed to be pressing against his mind, blurring his thought processes. Like a skull he’d seen somewhere. Unutterably remote, behind glass in a dim shadowed hall. A pug-faced ape that had decided to become a man, in the vaguest way shambling through a forest primeval. Ugly, snarling—

  Hanley forced his mind back to awareness. He wasn’t standing in a museum on Terra. All through his body he could feel a tension mounting. There was a dense coating of dust on the creature’s heavy, almost chinless jaw and its limbs were so thickly coated with dust they seemed enmeshed in the cobwebs.

  Scrape—scrape away the dust.

  Hanley turned, and stumbled from the room.

  It was a very large and silent room, and the light was so dim that Hanley had to strain to see the back of the seated figure’s head. The chair was squarish rather than circular, and so high that the figure’s short, spindly legs barely touched the floor. The skull was massive—more birdlike than apelike.

  Hanley groped his way out of the room.

  It was a skeleton, but the head grew out from the middle of the squat torso, and long, translucent talons curved about the arms of the chair.

  The crusted suns spawned him/her in the night of a long begetting. The wall. Scrape away the dust.

  When at last Hanley found himself scraping away the dust on the wall of a very dim, circular chamber deep within the bowels of the ship his lips were twitching, and he could no longer control the trembling of his hands.

  Behind him loomed a chair which had seemingly mushroomed up out of the floor in a frenzied attempt to support and contain a growth so prolific that not even death could prevent it from sprawling. The many-tubed occupant of the chair was not a skeleton. There were no articulations, nothing but a dotted mass of tendrils spilling over the arms of the chair, and snaking out across the floor. Its young lay scattered about the chamber—tiny medusa-heads, desiccated and loathsome.

  A chair in which to sit and dream.

  Hanley started, for the words had come unbidden into his mind, and had no relation at all to the frantic scrapings he was making with his pocket knife on the smooth metal wall.

  The design, when it came into view, did not startle him as much as he had anticipated it would.

  He was conscious that his palms were sweating. How—how had he known he was going to uncover a design? He hadn’t known, couldn’t have known.

  It wasn’t important anyway. Only the design was important. It was engraved deeply on the metal and almost it seemed geometrical, an overlapping series of circles superimposed on triangles.

  He has taken the second step. A chair in which to dream and die.

  The design was sharply-etched, and yet it seemed to possess a kind of physi-mathematical mobility. As Hanley stared the corners of the triangles blurred, and the circles dissolved into a pinwheeling blur of radiance.

  Then—

  Gaze deeply on that which is now a stillness, now a dreaming—forever and forever a dreaming and a stillness.

  Hanley was shivering convulsively when he left the room.

  The room was quite brightly illumed, and there was no dust at all on the wall. And the chair was like the first chair he’d seen, designed to support and contain not an alien inhabitant of a planet encircling some distant sun, but a man of about his own height and weight—

  Hanley knew that he had found the right chair even as he seated himself. There was no dust on the wall, and he could see the design clearly. At first he saw only the design and then—a strange beauty danced on the wall. A beauty and a growing wonder that he could have so quickly progressed from a childish reluctance, a childish drawing back to the all-embracing glory of—

  The music was faint at first, but gradually, as Hanley stared, it grew louder. But even when it filled the room it seemed to come from distances immeasurably remote.

  It was like no music Hanley had ever heard. It throbbed and it pulsed, and there were times when it seemed cruel, almost torturing, and times when it was a sweetness ineffable which kept company with his thoughts as he voyaged mathematically afar, through stellated caverns of stillness and aisles of incredibly converging prisms—

  Thomas Gregg sat on the edge of the cot, with “The Third Stage of Interstellar Expansion” spread out on his knees. It was a very large and bulky book, and one of the folding illustrations had come unhinged, so that a filmy tar field seemed to float between his waist and the floor. He was reading aloud, in a voice that trembled a little with the intensity of his emotion.

  “We are far too prone to think of life as exclusively a biological phenomenon. If a creature moves about and absorbs nourishment and reproduces itself, we say that it is alive. But pure form, pure design, may also be a manifestation of life.

  “In the dim infancy of our race, when it was believed that the soul of a dead man could leave the buried body by night to suck the blood of living persons, a curious expression gained currency, the blood is the life.

  “In a coldly scientific sense it may be said that even the most primitive superstitions bear a casual relation to reality, for without their aid certain ideas could not be easily expressed or explained, or a satisfying mind picture built up. For instance, a thing is shaped in a certain way, and it lives. Destroy the pattern and it dies. How can we be sure that on some far planet that has not yet known the tread of man the form may not be the life?

  “The form is the life!

  “…neither should we assume that such a life would stay confined to the planet of its origin, for it is not in the nature of life to forego all questing. In the course of ages a decorative-locomotive synthesis would doubtless be built up. In the course of ages a far-voyaging synthesis—perhaps in certain superficial aspects not unlike the slender stellar craft which have carried our own kind to the farthest star—might well seek out new worlds to conquer.

  “As to what form that questing would take, who can say? A life that is decorative, a life that is pure form, pure design, would have a tendency, perhaps, to seek above all things appreciation.”

  Gregg snapped the book shut, stood up, yawned, and walked to the door of the star station.

  It was a beautiful morning. The mist had come up deep and blue, the air was not too cold and out of the blueness a great ship loomed, its hull outlined in garish radiance against a shimmer of light so vast and tumultuous it seemed to span the Galaxy.

  On a Betelgeuse System refueling station a million light-years from nowhere time could hang heavy with uneventfulness.

  But now somehow Gregg was strangely stirred.

  Not that the ship was even remotely like the one he’d dragged a babbling and completely demoralized Hanley from a decade before. But somehow, just reading Hargrave’s book, of course, with that very memorable passage inserted after he, Gregg, had explored three or four of the rooms inside the vessel.

  Shutting his eyes, Gregg could see again the great ship regurgitating her mooring cables, slipping out into the void with a vibrant droning.

  It seemed only yesterday that he’d proved to himself that an impractical man, a dreamer, could be stronger inwardly than a hard-bitten extrovert. He’d saved Hanley without succumbing himself, and now soon he’d be going back to Terra to bask in the affluence which “The Third Stage of Interstellar Expansion” had brought him.

  After ten years of lonely exile, five under Rigel, five under Betelgeuse, the world had at last discovered that William Hargrave, alias Thomas Gregg, poet, musician, painter, and, in his more energetic moments, star station grease monkey par excellence, was an astra-historian of the first rank, and a man of tremendous creative energies.

 
Smiling a little, Gregg passed through the narrow doorway and out across the landing strip with his arms upraised, partly as a welcoming gesture to the crew of the incoming vessel, partly in sheer exuberance because the dawn was so beautiful.

  GUEST IN THE HOUSE

  Originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, March 1946.

  Roger Shevlin set down his bags, shook the rain from his umbrella and wondered just how long it would be before he found himself consulting a psychiatrist. He’d made mistakes before—plenty of them. But he was essentially a man of sound judgment, and it was hard to believe he could have allowed himself to be talked into renting a twenty-room house.

  He was amazed at his own incredible stupidity; the lack of judgment he’d shown right up to the instant he’d signed the lease and returned the pen to the renting agent with a complacent smirk.

  A huge and misshapen ogre of a dwelling it was, with ivy-hung eaves and a broken-down front porch, and as Shevlin stood in the lower hallway staring up the great central staircase a shudder went through him. There was always a chance, of course, that the place would shed some of its ugliness amidst the changing colors of autumn and the sweet-warbled songs of meadowlarks and grasshopper sparrows.

  But Shevlin knew that no one would ever refer to the place he’d leased as a “house.” It would always be “that place the Shevlins settled in—the poor chumps!” or “Johnny, run over to the Shevlin place and see if Mrs. Shevlin has any butter to spare.”

  To add to Shevlin’s woes, the children had brushed right past him, and were losing no time in making themselves at home. Children could take root and sprout almost anywhere and the Shevlin youngsters were hardy perennials six and nine respectively. Already the house was beginning to resound with yells, shrieks and blood-curdling whoops.

  A man should be proud to be the father of two such sturdy youngsters, Shevlin thought, and glared at his wife.