Heretofore we have never given thought to protect ourselves against them, for we have considered them, in general, as amusing entities and little else. Whether or not the cat in the refrigerator was the Candle or Mathilde I do not know, but it was the cat in the refrigerator that gave me the idea of using liquid oxygen. Undoubtedly there are better ways. Anything that would swiftly deprive them of energy would serve. Convinced they will try again, even if they have to wait another five hundred years, I urgently suggest—
He stopped and laid down the pen.
The wastebasket in the comer moved slightly and Mathilde slunk out, tail at half mast. With a look of contempt at Craig, she stalked to the door and down the ramp.
Creepy was tuning up his fiddle, but only halfheartedly. Creepy felt badly about Knut. Despite their checker arguments, the two had been good friends.
Craig considered the things he’d have to do. He’d have to go out and bring in Knut’s body, ship it back to Earth for burial. But first he was going to sleep. Lord, how he needed sleep!
He picked up the pen and proceeded with his writing:
—that every effort be bent to the development of some convenient weapon to be used against them. But to be used only in defense. A program of extermination, such as has been carried out on other planets, is unthinkable.
To do this it will be necessary that we study them even as they have studied us. Before we can fight them we must know them. For the next time their method of attack undoubtedly will be different.
Likewise we must develop a test, to be applied to every person before entering the Center, that will reveal whether he is a Candle or a man.
And, lastly, every effort should be made to develop some other source of universal power against the day when Mercury may become inaccessible to us.
He reread the report and put it down.
“They won’t like that,’’ he told himself. “Especially that last paragraph. But we have to face the truth.”
For a long time Craig sat at his desk, thinking. Then he arose and went to the port.
Outside, on the bitter plains of Mercury, the Candles had paired off, two and two, were monstrous dice, rolling in the dust. As far as the eye could see, the plains were filled with galloping dominos.
And every pair, at every toss, were rolling sevens!
Lord of a Thousand Suns
By Poul Anderson
“YES, YOU’LL FIND almost anything man has ever imagined, somewhere out in the Galaxy,” I said. “There are so damned many millions of planets, and such a fantastic variety of surface conditions and of life evolving to meet them, and of intelligence and civilization appearing in that life. Why, I’ve been on worlds with fire-breathing dragons, and on worlds where dwarfs fought things that could pass for the goblins our mothers used to scare us with.”
Laird nodded. “Uh-huh,” he answered, in that oddly slow and soft voice of his. “I once let a genie out of a bottle.”
“Eh? What happened?”
“It killed me.”
I opened my mouth to laugh, and then took a second glance at him and shut it again. He was just too dead-pan serious about it. Not poker-faced, the way a good actor can be when he’s slipping over a tall one—no, there was a sudden misery behind his eyes, and somehow it was mixed with the damnedest cold humor.
I didn’t know Laird very well. Nobody did. He was out most of the time on Galactic Survey, prowling a thousand eldritch planets never meant for human eyes. He came back to the Solar System more rarely and for briefer visits than anyone else in his job, and had less to say about what he had found.
A huge man, six-and-a-half feet tall, with dark aquiline features and curiously brilliant greenish-gray eyes, he was middle-aged now though it didn’t show except at the temples. He was courteous enough to everyone, but short-spoken and slow to laugh. Old friends, who had known him thirty years before when he was the gayest and most reckless officer in the Solar Navy, thought something during the Revolt had changed him more than any psychologist would admit was possible. But he had never said anything about it, merely resigning his commission after the war and going into Survey.
We were sitting alone in a comer of the lounge. The Lunar branch of the Explorers’ Club maintains its building outside the main dome of Selene Center, and we were sitting beside one of the great windows, drinking Centaurian sidecars and swapping the inevitable shop-talk.
“Come again?” I said.
He laughed, without much humor. “I might as well tell you,” he said. “You won’t believe it, and even if you did it’d make no difference. Sometimes I tell the story—alcohol makes me feel like it. I start remembering old times …”
He settled farther back in his chair. “Maybe it wasn’t a real genie,” he went on. “More of a ghost, perhaps. That was a haunted planet. They were great a million years before man existed on Earth. They spanned the stars and they knew things the present civilization hasn’t even guessed at. And then they died. Their own weapons swept them away in one burst of fire, and only broken ruins were left—ruins and desert, and the ghost who lay waiting in that bottle.
“It was—let me see—thirty-three years ago now, when I was a bright young lieutenant with bright young ideas. The Revolt was in full swing then, and the Janyards held all that region of space, out Sagittari way, you know. Things looked bad for Sol then—I don’t think it’s ever been appreciated how close we were to defeat. They were poised to drive right through our lines with their battlefleets, slash past our frontiers, and hit Earth itself with the rain of hell that had already sterilized a score of planets. We were fighting on the defensive, spread over several million cubic light-years, spread horribly thin. Oh, bad!
“Vwyrdda—New Egypt—had been discovered and some excavation done shortly before the war began. We knew about as much then as we do now. Especially, we knew that the so-called Valley of the Gods held more relics than any other spot on the surface. I’d been quite interested in the work, visited the planet myself, even worked with the crew that found and restored that gravitomagnetic generator—the one which taught us half of what we know now about g-m fields.
“It was my young and fanciful notion that there might be more to be found, somewhere in that labyrinth. And from study of the reports I even thought I knew about what and where it would be: one of the weapons that had novaed suns, a million years ago.
“The planet was far behind the Janyard lines, but militarily valueless. They wouldn’t garrison it, and I was sure that such semibarbarians wouldn’t have my idea, especially with victory so close. A one-man sneakboat could get in readily enough—it just isn’t possible to blockade a region of space; too damned inhumanly big. We had nothing to lose but me, and maybe a lot to gain, so in I went.
“I made the planet without trouble and landed in the Valley of the Gods and began work. And that’s where the fun started.”
Laird laughed again, with no more mirth than before.
There was a moon hanging low over the hills, a great scarred shield thrice the size of Earth’s, and its chill white radiance filled the Valley with colorless light and long shadows. Overhead flamed the incredible sky of the Sagittarian regions, thousands upon thousands of great blazing suns swarming in strings and clusters and constellations strange to human eyes, blinking and glittering in the thin cold air. It was so bright that Laird could see the fine patterns of his skin, loops and whorls on the numbed fingers that groped against the pyramid. He shivered in the wind that streamed past him, blowing dust devils with a dry whisper, searching under his clothes to sheathe his flesh in cold. His breath was ghostly white before him, the bitter air felt liquid when he breathed.
Around him loomed the fragments of what must have been a city, now reduced to a few columns and crumbling walls held up by the lava which had flowed. The stones reared high in the unreal moonlight, seeming almost to move as the shadows and the drifting sand passed them. Ghost city. Ghost planet. He was the last life that stirred on its bleak surface. But so
mewhere above that surface—
What was it, that descending hum high in the sky, sweeping closer out of stars and moon and wind? Minutes ago the needle on his gravitomagnetic detector had wavered down in the depths of the pyramid. He had hurried up and now stood looking and listening and feeling his heart turn stiff.
No, no, no. Not a lanyard ship, not now. It was the end of everything if they came.
Laird cursed with a hopeless fury. The wind caught his mouthings and blew them away with the scudding sand, buried them under the everlasting silence of the valley. His eyes traveled to his sneakboat. It was invisible against the great pyramid—he’d taken that much precaution, shoveling a low grave of sand over it—but if they used metal detectors the deception was valueless. He was fast, yes, but almost unarmed; they could easily follow his trail down into the labyrinth and locate the vault.
Lord, if he had led them here—if his planning and striving had only resulted in giving the enemy the weapon which would destroy Earth—
His hand closed about the butt of his blaster. Silly weapon, stupid popgun—what could he do? Decision came. With a curse, he whirled and ran back into the pyramid.
His flash lit the endless downward passages with a dim bobbing radiance, and the shadows swept above and behind and marched beside—the shadows of a million years closing in to smother him. His boots slammed against the stone floor, thud-thud-thud. The echoes caught the rhythm and rolled it boomingly ahead of him. A primitive terror rose to drown his dismay; he was going down into the grave of a thousand millennia, the grave of the gods, and it took all the nerve he had to keep running and never look back. He didn’t dare look back.
Down and down and down, past this winding tunnel, along this ramp, through this passageway into the guts of the planet —a man could easily get lost here. A man could wander in the cold and the dark and the echoes till he died. It had taken him weeks to find his way into the great vault, and only the clues given by Murchison’s report had made it possible at all. Now— ‘
He burst into a narrow antechamber. The door he had blasted open leaned drunkenly against a well of night. It was fifty feet high, that door. He fled past it like an ant and came into the pyramid storehouse.
His flash gleamed off metal, glass, substances he could not identify that had lain sealed against a million years till he came to wake the machines. What they were, he did not know. He had energized some of the units, and they had hummed and flickered, but he had not dared experiment. His idea had been to rig an antigrav unit which would enable him to haul the entire mass of it up to his boat. Once he was home, the scientists would take over. But now—
He skinned his teeth in a wolfish grin and switched on the big lamp he had installed. White light flooded the tomb, shining darkly back from the monstrous bulks of things he could not use, the wisdom and techniques of a race which had spanned the stars and moved planets and endured for fifty ‘ million years. Maybe he could puzzle out the use of something before the enemy came. Maybe he could wipe them out in one demoniac sweep—just like a stereofilm hero, jeered his mind—or maybe he could simply destroy it all, keep it from Janyard hands.
He should have provided against this. He should have rigged a bomb, to blow the whole pyramid to hell—
With an effort, he stopped the frantic racing of his mind and looked around. There were paintings on the walls, dim with age but still legible, pictographs meant perhaps for the one who finally found this treasure. The men of New Egypt were shown, hardly distinguishable from humans: dark of skin and hair, keen of feature, tall and stately and robed in living light. He had paid special attention to one representation. It showed a series of actions, like an old time comic-strip: a man taking up a glassy object, fitting it over his head, throwing a small switch. He had been tempted to try it, but— gods, what would it do?
He found the helmet and slipped it gingerly over his skull. It might be some kind of last-ditch chance for him. The thing was cold and smooth and hard: it settled on his head with a slow massiveness that was strangely … living. He shuddered and turned back to the machines.
This thing now with the long coil-wrapped barrel—an energy projector of some sort? How did you activate it? Hell-fire, which was the muzzle end?
He heard the faint banging of feet, winding closer down the endless passageways. Gods, his mind groaned. They didn’t waste any time, did they?
But they hadn’t needed to. A metal detector would have located his boot, told them that he was in this pyramid rather than one of the dozen others scattered through the valley. And energy tracers would spot him down here.
He doused the light and crouched in darkness behind one of the machines. The blaster was heavy in his hand.
A voice hailed him from outside the door. “It’s useless, Sol-man. Come out of there!”
He bit back a reply and lay waiting.
A woman’s voice took up the refrain. It was a good voice, he thought irrelevantly, low and well modulated, but it had an iron ring to it. They were hard, these Janyards, even their women led troops and piloted ships and killed men.
“You may as well surrender, Solman. All you have done has been to accomplish our work for us. We suspected such an attempt might be made. Lacking the archeological records, we couldn’t hope for much success ourselves, but since my force was stationed near this sun I had a boat lie in an orbit around the planet with detectors wide open. We trailed you down, and let you work, and now we are here to get what you have found.”
“Go back,” be bluffed desperately. “I planted a bomb. Go back or I’ll set it off.”
The laugh was hard with scorn. “Do you think we wouldn’t know it if you had? You haven’t even a space suit on. Come out with your hands up or well flood the vault with gas.”
Laird’s teeth flashed in a snarling grin. “All right,” he shouted, only half aware of what he was saying. “All right, you asked for it!”
He threw the switch on his helmet.
It was like a burst of fire in his brain, a soundless roar of splintering darkness. He screamed, half crazy with the fury that poured into him, feeling the hideous thrumming along every nerve and sinew, feeling his muscles cave in and his body hit the floor. The shadows closed in, roaring and rolling, night and death and the wreck of the universe, and high above it all he heard—laughter.
He lay sprawled behind the machine, twitching and whimpering. They had heard him, out in the tunnels, and with slow caution they entered and stood over him and watched his spasms jerk toward stillness.
They were tall and well-formed, the Janyard rebels—Earth had sent her best out to colonize the Sagittarian worlds, three hundred years ago. But the long cruel struggle, conquering and building and adapting to planets that never were and never could be Earth, had changed them, hardened their metal and frozen something in their souls.
Ostensibly it was a quarrel over tariff and trade rights which had led to their revolt against the Empire; actually, it was a new culture yelling to life, a thing born of fire and loneliness and the great empty reaches between the stars, the savage rebellion of a mutant child. They stood impassively watching the body until it lay quiet. Then one of them stooped over and removed the shining brass helmet.
“He must have taken it for something he could use against us,” said the Janyard, turning the helmet in his hands; “but it wasn’t adapted to his sort of life. The old dwellings here looked human, but I don’t think it went any deeper than their skins.”
The woman commander looked down with a certain pity. “He was a brave man,” she said.
“Wait—he’s still alive, ma’m! He’s sitting up!”
Daryesh forced the shaking body to hands and knees. He felt its sickness, wretched and cold in throat and nerves and muscles, and he felt the roiling of fear and urgency in the brain. These were enemies. There was death for a world and a civilization here. Most of all, he felt the horrible numbness of the nervous system, deaf and dumb and blind, cut off in its house of bone and peering ou
t through five weak senses.
Vwyrdda, Vwyrdda, he was a prisoner in a brain without a telepathy transceiver lobe. He was a ghost reincarnated in a tiling that was half a corpse!
Strong arms helped him to his feet. “That was a foolish thing to try,” said the woman’s cool voice.
Daryesh felt strength flowing back as the nerves and muscular and endocrine systems found a new balance, as his mind took over and fought down the gibbering madness which had been Laird. He drew a shuddering breath. Air in his nostrils after—how long? How long had he been dead?
His eyes focused on the woman. She was tall and handsome. Ruddy hair spilled from under a peaked cap, wide-set blue eyes regarded him frankly out of a face sculptured in clean lines and strong curves and fresh young coloring. For a moment he thought of Ilorna, and the old sickness rose … then he throttled it and looked again at the woman and smiled.
It was an insolent grin, and she stiffened angrily. ‘Who are you, Solman?” she asked.
The meaning was clear enough to Daryesh, who had his— host’s—memory patterns and linguistic habits as well as those of Vwyrdda. He replied steadily, “Lieutenant John Laird of the Imperial Solar Navy, at your service. And your name?”
“You are exceeding yourself,” she replied with frost in her voice. “But since I will wish to question you at length … I am Captain Joana Rostov of the Janyard Fleet. Conduct yourself accordingly.”
Daryesh looked around him. This wasn’t good. He hadn’t the chance now to search Laird’s memories in detail, but it was clear enough that this was a force of enemies. The rights and wrongs of a quarrel ages after death of all that had been Vwyrdda meant nothing to him, but he had to learn more of the situation, and be free to act as he chose. Especially since Laird would presently be reviving and start to resist.
Adventures in the Far Future Page 25