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

by Frank Belknap Long

  “Welcome to Riddle Manor, Donald Brewster,” she said. “It may be a long time before we see Earth again. I’m glad we’re not alone, as we feared.”

  “I’m glad too,” Brewster said.

  “Where are you from, Donald?” Helen asked.

  “New York,” Brewster said.

  A roaring seemed to fill his ears as he spoke. He saw sunlight bright on gigantic metal buildings, heard the scream of jet planes, the deep, never-ceasing drone of the underground. He saw the bright waters of New York Harbor, the tangled maze of shipping in the harbor, and the spaceports of New Jersey hugging the shores of the outer bay. He blinked, and the bright, tremendous vision was gone.

  “I’m from Boston,” Helen Emery said. “The Charles must be beautiful now. In the autumn, when the leaves start to fall, and you can see the golden dome of the capitol—”

  * * * *

  Emery put his arm about his wife’s shoulder and together they entered the tower. Brewster followed—and halted abruptly. With a shock that almost made him doubt his sanity he stared up at a series of ascending platforms, each circular and slightly overlapping, the entire structure towering to the roof.

  The staircase—if it were a staircase—rose like a burst of frozen energy, its summit a snowy disk, the individual platforms grooved and notched and scooped out in weirdly symmetrical fashion. Emery and his wife paused on the third platform, and Brewster saw two rude couches fashioned of boughs, an ammunition box, and another gun, its barrel, gleaming blue-black in the shadows. Scattered about were other articles of camping equipment—a tiny magnetic stove, metal eating utensils, and even a charred and badly-dented camera.

  Helen turned, her eyes sweeping the platform. “This is all we could save from the wreckage,” she said, with a wry grimace. “Luckily we’ve had good shooting. I’ve decided that Jim is the best marksman in the Survey, barring some white-mustached old colonel I’ve never even met.” Emery laughed. “I’m no better marksman than she is a cook, Donald.” He patted her shoulder. “She’ll have dinner ready before this place can really start to haunt you.” Emery never forgot his first dinner in the tower. It was like nothing he could have imagined, its goodness matching the hospitality of Jim and Helen—friends completely new. As they ate they talked.

  “What’s it like to be a rare-metal prospector, Donald?”

  He told them, keeping many things back but wishing that he could find courage to be completely honest, for once in his life. He told them about the narrow escapes, the loneliness of the extragalactic planets, and the moments of wild joy and triumph when a ruined humanoid city or desolate crater yielded minerals unknown on Earth.

  He matched shining stories with Emery, fire mountain with fire mountain, strange animal with strange animal, morning mist with sunset splendor. But fie forgot to mention how he had cheated and lied his way to wealth, how he had won and lost and won again with loaded dice. He was silent about the disloyalties and betrayals, the false salvage claims, the ships deliberately wrecked. Finally the shadows of evening crept into the tower, and the setting sun dyed the ascending spiral red, and they knew it was time to put an end to talk.

  Brewster stood up. “Are the nights cool?” he asked.

  “Cool enough,” Emery said. “Why, Donald?”

  “I was thinking it might be a good idea to bunk near the top. If you don’t mind climb up and look.”

  “Sure, go ahead,” Emery said. “Helen and I just picked a platter at random.” He smiled. “We’ve got into the habit of calling those platforms `platters.’ Just imagine how nice it would be to have one set before you at mealtime, filled to the brim with a steak-and-mushroom dinner.” His smile increased in volume. “I can’t promise you a bat won’t fly in and wake you up. But it’s cool and comfortable enough at any level. If it’s privacy you’re worried about—these overlapping, scallop-shell edges guarantee that.”

  “If you were right up above you couldn’t see us,” Helen said, laughingly. “We’d be hidden away in our own jungle paradise.”

  “You’re making it tough for a lonely bachelor,” Brewster complained. He drew a deep breath, and picked up his ration kit. Then he turned and looked up. “I might as well climb to the top anyway. If I don’t like it up there I’ll descend a few platters.”

  Emery chuckled. “Prefer to be lord of all you survey, eh?” Brewster started, and looked at the survey officer closely. He saw at once that there was no hidden meaning in the other’s merriment and to hide his confusion he started quickly up the spiral. He turned once to call back. “That dinner was really special! Thanks again!”

  “Glad you enjoyed it!” Emery shouted. “See you at breakfast.” It took Brewster a full minute to reach the heights. The disk at the top was enormous, its edges curving upward. Breathing heavily, he sat down on a projecting limestone shelf, and dropped his ration kit. He looked up in awe. It was curious, but the oddly-fashioned grooves and hollows in the walls of the tower made him think of an old nursery story from childhood. Even a few of the words came back, although he wasn’t sure of the exact phrasing.

  And she slept in each of the three beds, and ate from each of the three bawls. The first bed was very small, and tine second not large at all. But the third bed was enormous.

  * * * *

  Brewster unlaced his boots, and leaned back with a weary sigh. The shadows were growing darker, and they seemed to cluster about him as if seeking to drain warmth from his body and mind. The sun no longer bathed the roof of the tower in a rosy light.

  He shut his eyes and relaxed completely.

  There is an interval between sleeping and waking which can be sensed by the dreamer even as the long night can be sensed. But Brewster could not even remember the numbing drowsiness which usually warned him of the approach of sleep. He had experienced neither the long night nor the surprise of awakening from a borderland state of half-slumber in which the firm contours of reality remained elusively remote.

  Was it a dream that he was having, a terrifyingly dream? Or was he awake and in the grip of some strange power, some alien intelligence, which had seized control of his mind?

  Of one thing only could he be sure. He was in another world. It was a world of tremendous contrasts, of sea and jungle, of rain and scorching sunlight. He seemed to be walking through it, but more slowly than he had ever walked before. He seemed almost to glide, to crawl over the ground. It was a world of thunder and tumult. You could stand by a sea-wall and stare out over rocky headland separated by miles of blowing spray. You could swing about, and glide inland through a flowering wilderness over paths of snow-white coral.

  In the inland world there was no thunder and no tumult. If you listened carefully you could hear the furtive movements of little animals, the whir and drone of invisible insect life. But unless you were skilled in Nature’s ways you might suppose yourself in a garden of enchantment, with each fruit-bearing tree and blue-and-vermilion flower artificially designed to create delight.

  “The spaceship was a tiny dot at first in the depths of the sky. But it grew swiftly larger, sweeping straight down toward the sea wall like sweeping a wind-buffeted cocoon. It circled and wheeled and swept ever lower, the sunlight glistening on its cylindrical hull.

  Then it was resting motionless in the garden wilderness, and all about it the startled wild life of the region was protesting the intrusion. Sea birds shrieked and circled, dipped and wheeled, and outraged lizards hissed and slithered like clockwork automatons into their burrows on the landward side of the sea wall. The ship burst suddenly into flame.

  He watched the conflagration, saw the tremendous sheets of fire darting skyward. He watched, alone and appalled, and the slowness of his movement toward the ship was like the slowness which afflicts the terror-stricken in dreams.

  Yet now more than ever he felt himself to be awake. The feeling remained wh
en the immense white buildings and the glittering instruments of science came to replace what he had seen by the sea-wall, and he heard voices whispering hi his mind.

  “I knew that we could heal them. But they were so close to death when we removed them from the wreckage I feared our task would be a difficult one.”

  “Even if they had died—we could have healed them,” a second voice said. “Every living tissue carries within itself the somatic pattern of the organism as a whole. We could have restored and revitalized their bodies and their brains from a single living cell.”

  The voice paused, then went on. “Somatic death is never instantaneous. The brain dies more slowly than the body, as energy-discharge tests have shown, and there are always a few cells which survive for an incredible length of time. Even without the aid of a nutrient fluid we could have kept a few cells alive.”

  “That is true,” the first voice agreed. “Had they died the vast complexity of their brains would have continued to survive in rudimentary form in a single neural filament. From a tiny living fragment of damaged brain tissue teeming with neurograms—the basic patterns of memory and inheritance—we could have reconstructed all of the perished stimulus-response circuits and linked memory-chains which are the wellsprings of thought, of imagination and desire.

  “Life would have returned in all of its stormy splendor, for intelligent life is like a great sea in its restlessness. It may seem to have ebbed forever, but the slightest under-surge will lash it to hurricane violence and send it crashing across the beaches of eternity.

  “You cannot confine life to a single planet of a single star, and even as it perishes it lights torch after torch on its stormy crests and hurls them afar to dazzle other worlds with its dreams of survival.

  “Fortunately these two did not die, even though their injuries would have resulted in death if we had not healed them by a combined application of surgical techniques and somatic revitalizing rays.

  “Every such victory over death is a milestone in the progress which science must make if intelligence is to increase its mastery over the blind forces of Nature. We have built a great and enduring civilization by holding fast to that one aim—the conquest of Nature by patient research alone. But we must never forget that our greatest victories lie ahead.”

  There was a swirl of brightness and Brewster became aware that he was inside one of the buildings, staring at moving shapes that loomed semitransparent in the gloom.

  Standing side by side in what appeared to be a high-walled laboratory glittering with instruments of

  ‘science such as he had never before seen were two white limestone slabs, each supporting an unmoving human form. Behind the slabs towered gleaming transparencies of metal and crystal, and a circular, mirror-like object which reflected spots of light down ward on a man’s drawn face and a woman’s tousled, dark hair.

  The man and the woman were naked in the glow. For a moment the downstreaming rays penetrated the shadows in steady shafts. Then they lit filaments of darting flame upon the woman’s head and shoulders, and traced out a fiery circle about the torso of the man.

  Slowly the light weaved back and forth, assuming changing patterns, and from behind the mirrorlike object something arose in the flame-streaked gloom that was not a machine. Something huge and white with protruding eyes and sluglike horns projecting from its head. It was quickly joined by another of its kind.

  On the slab Helen Emery stirred and opened her eyes.

  Then brightness again and the scene changed. There were dark clouds across the entire sky, obscuring the outlines of the white buildings. Lightning forked down, shafts of blinding radiance circled the sky. Did the radiance come from the buildings themselves? Brewster was never to know, for he fell at last into a deep sleep and did not awaken until dawn came to the tower.

  Awakening, he felt for an instant a sense of unreality, a suspension of reason that made his temples throb. He arose in alarm, and stared down the enormous spiral that sloped away beneath him. In the cold gray dawn what had seemed merely incredible took’ on a nightmare quality of fantastic madness. How could his mind interpret thoughts from a nonhuman brain? How could he see images and hear voices his memory had never recorded?

  Did something dwell in the tower that could physically implant itself on its surroundings, as the sea could be tinted red by a sunset, or the jungle darkened by the shadow of a dangerous beast? Everything was quiet now. Everything was completely peaceful. Yet what he had seen and experienced could not have been a dream.

  He knew what psychologists had discovered about the nature of dreams. It was a peculiarity of dreams that inner experiences were expressed in such a way that the mind was freed from the necessity of feeling deep concern for others. That had been positively established. Tests had been made which left no room for doubt. And in dreams the events which took place were subject to a special logic of their own which could seldom be justified on awakening.

  But then—could the logic of what he had seen and heard be justified? Could an alien science cheat death on the planet of a distant star, light-years from Earth across the great curve of the universe? Could a greater science than man’s restore the mortally injured to warmth and life and fire?

  They’ll know, he thought. If their ship circled a sea-wall they’ll remember. I’ll ask Jim and Helen to take me to the wreckage.

  He looked up, and saw the dawn warming the sky through a window high in the tower. The sky was as bright as any dawn sky on Earth, and deep in the forest birds were singing. They’ll know; they’ll tell me.

  * * * *

  Helen Emery was bent above the tiny magnetic stove, her hair aureoled by the dawn light. She looked up quickly when she heard Brewster descending.

  “Is that you, Donald?” she called out. “You’re up early, aren’t you?” He appeared suddenly before her, his face drawn.

  “I hardly slept at all,” he lied. “I was too tired, I guess. More badly shaken up than I realized. Where’s Jim?”

  “Taking an early morning dip,” she said, brushing back a strand of hair that had fallen across her forehead. Dark hair, that had lain in a tumbled mass beneath shifting lights and shadows. She seemed embarrassed by his stare, and added quickly: “It’s only a ten-minute walk to the sea-wall, I wish I enjoyed bathing in the sea as much as Jim does. I was born inland, on a farm, and I never saw the sea until I was eighteen.”

  The sea-wall!

  He never quite remembered how he persuaded her to take him to the wreckage. The shock of her words had started a whirring in his brain, and he had only a confused recollection of giving her some very logical and plausible reason for wanting to make the trip. More sharply impressed on his mind was her quick nod of agreement.

  It was an easy journey they made, along a path previously cleared. There was silence between them, broken only by the occasional crackle of a twig underfoot. They saw no birds or reptiles, but once a tiny mole-like creature darted across their path and vanished in the underbrush with an eerie screeching. A few minutes later they heard the roar and crash of the sea. The vegetation thinned and fell away, and they emerged into the open.

  A startled cry burst from Helen Emery’s lips. She stood staring, the blood draining from her face, her eyes wide with stark disbelief.

  Suddenly she was running—running straight toward the bright new ship which stood by the sea-wall.

  “It’s our ship!” she cried. “Donald, it’s the ship that brought us here! What could have happened? How could it have been rebuilt?”

  Brewster stared at her still in motion, shouting the questions as she ran. Without replying he joined her beside the ship, a stunned horror in his eyes. He reached out and felt the cool, shining metal of the port locks. He looked in through a gleaming view-pane at an intricate cluster of navigational instruments. Fear came and stood beside him, and for a moment his
eyes wondered to the sea-wall and came to rest on the shadows lurking there.

  The dawn of understanding. It touched his mind, and retreated, and came back again. An intelligence so powerful that it could impress its thoughts on its surroundings would not find it difficult to rebuild a wrecked spaceship—even a ship gutted by fire. An intelligence of such power equipped with instruments of science could do…almost anything it wanted to do.

  A trembling seized him and he could hardly trust himself to speak. The ship had been rebuilt for a purpose. What purpose? To study its construction, as human scientists would have studied a strange ship wrecked on Earth.

  He had to be alone. To think—and reach a decision. An opportunity had presented itself and with opportunity had come a choice he would have to make. It was a decision which could not be put off, could not be delayed another instant.

  He tried to speak calmly, tried to keep his voice from betraying him. “Get Jim,” he said. “Jim must be back by now. He’ll know if this is really your ship.”

  “I’ll bring him as quickly as I can,” she promised. “But I’m sure it’s our ship. The instant I saw it I knew, I could tell.”

  She looked at him steadily for a long moment, as if trying to read his mind.

  “I won’t be satisfied until Jim is sure too,” he said. “It means—there is intelligent life on this planet. It means that we’re not alone, as we thought. We’re being watched—studied.” Her eyes widened in sudden alarm. “You really think that?”