The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology

by John W. Campbell Jr.

  And, struggling against horror, Parelli chased it, his knees weak and trembling from sheer funk and incredulity. His arm reached out, and plucked at the disintegrating trousers. A piece came away in his hand, a cold, slimy, writhing lump like wet clay.

  The feel of it was too much. His gorge rising in disgust, he faltered in his stride. He heard the pilot shouting ahead:

  “What’s the matter?”

  Parelli saw the open door of the storeroom. With a gasp, he dived in, came out a moment later, wild-eyed, an ato-gun in his fingers. He saw the pilot, standing with staring, horrified brown eyes, white face and rigid body, facing one of the great windows.

  “There it is!” the man cried.

  A gray blob was dissolving into the edge of the glass, becoming glass. Parelli rushed forward, ato-gun poised. A ripple went through the glass, darkening it; and then, briefly, he caught a glimpse of a blob emerging on the other side of the glass into the cold of space.

  The officer stood gaping beside him; the two of them watched the gray, shapeless mass creep out of sight along the side of the rushing freight liner.

  Parelli sprang to life. “I got a piece of it!” he gasped. “Flung it down on the floor of the storeroom.”

  It was Lieutenant Morton who found it. A tiny section of floor reared up, and then grew amazingly large as it tried to expand into human shape. Parelli with distorted, crazy eyes scooped it up in a shovel. It hissed; it nearly became a part of the metal shovel, but couldn’t because Parelli was so close. Changing, fighting for shape, it slobbered and hissed as Parelli staggered with it behind his superior officer. He was laughing hysterically. “I touched it,” he kept saying, “I touched it.”

  A large blister of metal on the outside of the space freighter stirred into sluggish life, as the ship tore into the Earth’s atmosphere. The metal walls of the freighter grew red, then white-hot, but the creature, unaffected, continued its slow transformation into gray mass. Vague thought came to the thing, realization that it was time to act.

  Suddenly, it was floating free of the ship, falling slowly, heavily, as if somehow the gravitation of Earth had no serious effect upon it. A minute distortion in its electrons started it falling faster, as in some alien way it suddenly became more allergic to gravity.

  The Earth was green below; and in the dim distance a gorgeous and tremendous city of spires and massive buildings glittered in the sinking Sun. The thing slowed, and drifted like a falling leaf in a breeze toward the still-distant Earth. It landed in an arroyo beside a bridge at the outskirts of the city.

  A man walked over the bridge with quick, nervous steps. He would have been amazed, if he had looked back, to see a replica of himself climb from the ditch to the road, and start walking briskly after him.

  Find the—greatest mathematician!

  It was an hour later; and the pain of that throbbing thought was a dull, continuous ache in the creature’s brain, as it walked along the crowded street. There were other pains, too. The pain of fighting the pull of the pushing, hurrying mass of humanity that swarmed by with unseeing eyes. But it was easier to think, easier to hold form now that it had the brain and body of a man.

  Find—mathematician!

  “Why?” asked the man’s brain of the thing; and the whole body shook with startled shock at such heretical questioning. The brown eyes darted in fright from side to side, as if expecting instant and terrible doom. The face dissolved a little in that brief moment of mental chaos, became successively the man with the hooked nose who swung by, the tanned face of the tall woman who was looking into the shop window, the—

  With a second gasp, the creature pulled its mind back from fear, and fought to readjust its face to that of the smooth-shaven young man who sauntered idly in from a side street. The young man glanced at him, looked away, then glanced back again startled. The creature echoed the thought in the man’s brain: “Who the devil is that? Where have I seen that fellow before?”

  Half a dozen women in a group approached. The creature shrank aside as they passed, its face twisted with the agony of the urge to become woman. Its brown suit turned just the faintest shade of blue, the color of the nearest dress, as it momentarily lost control of its outer atoms. Its mind hummed with the chatter of clothes and “My dear, didn’t she look dreadful in that awful hat?”

  There was a solid cluster of giant buildings ahead. The thing shook its human head consciously. So many buildings meant metal; and the forces that held metal together would pull and pull at its human shape. The creature comprehended the reason for this with the understanding of the slight man in a dark suit who wandered by dully. The slight man was a clerk; the thing caught his thought. He was thinking enviously of his boss who was Jim Brender, of the financial firm of J. P. Brender & Co.

  The overtones of that thought struck along the vibrating elements of the creature. It turned abruptly and followed Lawrence Pearson, bookkeeper. If people ever paid attention to other people on the street, they would have been amazed after a moment to see two Lawrence Pearsons proceeding down the street, one some fifty feet behind the other. The second Lawrence Pearson had learned from the mind of the first that Jim Brender was a Harvard graduate in mathematics, finance and political economy, the latest of a long line of financial geniuses, thirty years old, and the head of the tremendously wealthy J. P. Brender & Co. Jim Brender had just married the most beautiful girl in the world; and this was the reason for Lawrence Pearson’s discontent with life.

  “Here I’m thirty, too,” his thoughts echoed in the creature’s mind, “and I’ve got nothing. He’s got everything—everything while all I’ve got to look forward to is the same old boardinghouse till the end of time.”

  It was getting dark as the two crossed the river. The creature quickened its pace, striding forward with aggressive alertness that Lawrence Pearson in the flesh could never have managed. Some glimmering of its terrible purpose communicated itself in that last instant to the victim. The slight man turned; and let out a faint squawk as those steel-muscled fingers jerked at his throat, a single, fearful snap.

  The creature’s brain went black with dizziness as the brain of Lawrence Pearson crashed into the night of death. Gasping, whimpering, fighting dissolution, it finally gained control of itself. With one sweeping movement, it caught the dead body and flung it over the cement railing. There was a splash below, then a sound of gurgling water.

  The thing that was now Lawrence Pearson walked on hurriedly, then more slowly till it came to a large, rambling brick house. It looked anxiously at the number, suddenly uncertain if it had remembered rightly. Hesitantly, it opened the door.

  A streamer of yellow light splashed out, and laughter vibrated in the thing’s sensitive ears. There was the same hum of many thoughts and many brains, as there had been in the street. The creature fought against the inflow of thought that threatened to crowd out the mind of Lawrence Pearson. A little dazed by the struggle, it found itself in a large, bright hall, which looked through a door into a room where a dozen people were sitting around a dining table.

  “Oh, it’s you, Mr. Pearson,” said the landlady from the head of the table. She was a sharp-nosed, thin-mouthed woman at whom the creature stared with brief intentness. From her mind, a thought had come. She had a son who was a mathematics teacher in a high school. The creature shrugged. In one penetrating glance, the truth throbbed along the intricate atomic structure of its body. This woman’s son was as much of an intellectual lightweight as his mother.

  “You’re just in time,” she said incuriously. “Sarah, bring Mr. Pearson’s plate.”

  “Thank you, but I’m not feeling hungry,” the creature replied; and its human brain vibrated to the first silent, ironic laughter that it had ever known. “I think I’ll just lie down.”

  All night long it lay on the bed of Lawrence Pearson, bright-eyed, alert, becoming more and more aware of itself. It thought:

  “I’m a machine, without a brain of my own. I use the brains of other people, but
somehow my creators made it possible for me to be more than just an echo. I use people’s brains to carry out my purpose.”

  It pondered about those creators, and felt a surge of panic sweeping along its alien system, darkening its human mind. There was a vague physiological memory of pain unutterable, and of tearing chemical action that was frightening.

  The creature rose at dawn, and walked the streets till half past nine. At that hour, it approached the imposing marble entrance of J. P. Brender & Co. Inside, it sank down in the comfortable chair initialed L. P.; and began painstakingly to work at the books Lawrence Pearson had put away the night before.

  At ten o’clock, a tall young man in a dark suit entered the arched hallway and walked briskly through the row after row of offices. He smiled with easy confidence to every side. The thing did not need the chorus of “Good morning, Mr. Brender” to know that its prey had arrived. Terrible in its slow-won self-confidence, it rose with a lithe, graceful movement that would have been impossible to the real Lawrence Pearson, and walked briskly to the washroom. A moment later, the very image of Jim Brender emerged from the door and walked with easy confidence to the door of the private office which Jim Brender had entered a few minutes before.

  The thing knocked and walked in—and simultaneously became aware of three things: The first was that it had found the mind after which it had been sent. The second was that its image mind was incapable of imitating the finer subtleties of the razor-sharp brain of the young man who was staring up from dark-gray eyes that were a little startled. And the third was the large metal bas-relief that hung on the wall.

  With a shock that almost brought chaos, it felt the overpowering tug of that metal. And in one flash it knew that this was ultimate metal, product of the fine craft of the ancient Martians, whose metal cities, loaded with treasures of furniture, art and machinery, were slowly being dug up by enterprising human beings from the sands under which they had been buried for thirty or fifty million years.

  The ultimate metal! The metal that no heat would even warm, that no diamond or other cutting device, could scratch, never duplicated by human beings, as mysterious as the ieis force which the Martians made from apparent nothingness.

  All these thoughts crowded the creature’s brain, as it explored the memory cells of Jim Brender. With an effort that was a special pain, the thing wrenched its mind from the metal, and fastened its eyes on Jim Brender. It caught the full flood of the wonder in his mind, as he stood up.

  “Good lord,” said Jim Brender, “who are you?”

  “My name’s Jim Brender,” said the thing, conscious of grim amusement, conscious, too, that it was progress for it to be able to feel such an emotion.

  The real Jim Brender had recovered himself. “Sit down, sit down,” he said heartily. “This is the most amazing coincidence I’ve ever seen.”

  He went over to the mirror that made one panel of the left wall. He stared, first at himself, then at the creature. “Amazing,” he said. “Absolutely amazing.”

  “Mr. Brender,” said the creature, “I saw your picture in the paper, and I thought our astounding resemblance would make you listen, where otherwise you might pay no attention. I have recently returned from Mars, and I am here to persuade you to come back to Mars with me.”

  “That,” said Jim Brender, “is impossible.”

  “Wait,” the creature said, “until I have told you why. Have you ever heard of the Tower of the Beast?”

  “The Tower of the Beast!” Jim Brender repeated slowly. He went around his desk and pushed a button.

  A voice from an ornamental box said: “Yes, Mr. Brender?”

  “Dave, get me all the data on the Tower of the Beast and the legendary city of Li in which it is supposed to exist.”

  “Don’t need to look it up,” came the crisp reply. “Most Martian histories refer to it as the beast that fell from the sky when Mars was young—some terrible warning connected with it—the beast was unconscious when found—said to be the result of its falling out of sub-space. Martians read its mind; and were so horrified by its subconscious intentions they tried to kill it, but couldn’t. So they built a huge vault, about fifteen hundred feet in diameter and a mile high—and the beast, apparently of these dimensions, was locked in. Several attempts have been made to find the city of Li, but without success. Generally believed to be a myth. That’s all, Jim.”

  “Thank you!” Jim Brender clicked off the connection, and turned to his visitor. “Well?”

  “It is not a myth. I know where the Tower of the Beast is; and I also know that the beast is still alive.”

  “Now, see here,” said Brender good-humoredly, “I’m intrigued by your resemblance to me; and as a matter of fact I’d like Pamela—my wife—to see you. How about coming over to dinner? But don’t, for Heaven’s sake, expect me to believe such a story. The beast, if there is such a thing, fell from the sky when Mars was young. There are some authorities who maintain that the Martian race died out a hundred million years ago, though twenty-five million is the conservative estimate. The only things remaining of their civilization are their constructions of ultimate metal. Fortunately, toward the end they built almost everything from that indestructible metal.”

  “Let me tell you about the Tower of the Beast,” said the thing quietly. “It is a tower of gigantic size, but only a hundred feet or so projected above the sand when I saw it. The whole top is a door, and that door is geared to a time lock, which in turn has been integrated along a line of ieis to the ultimate prime number.”

  Jim Brender stared; and the thing caught his startled thought, the first uncertainty, and the beginning of belief.

  “Ultimate prime number!” Brender ejaculated. “What do you mean?” He caught himself. “I know of course that a prime number is a number divisible only by itself and by one.”

  He snatched at a book from the little wall library beside his desk, and rippled through it. “The largest known prime is—ah, here it is—is 230584300921393951. Some others, according to this authority, are 77843839397, 182521213001, and 78875943472201.”

  He frowned. “That makes the whole thing ridiculous. The ultimate prime would be an indefinite number.” He smiled at the thing. “If there is a beast, and it is locked up in a vault of ultimate metal, the door of which is geared to a time lock, integrated along a line of ieis to the ultimate prime number—then the beast is caught. Nothing in the world can free it.”

  ‘To the contrary,” said the creature. “I have been assured by the beast that it is within the scope of human mathematics to solve the problem, but that what is required is a born mathematical mind, equipped with all the mathematical training that Earth science can afford. You are that man.”

  “You expect me to release this evil creature—even if I could perform this miracle of mathematics.”

  “Evil nothing!” snapped the thing. “That ridiculous fear of the unknown which made the Martians imprison it has resulted in a very grave wrong. The beast is a scientist from another space, accidentally caught in one of his experiments. I say ‘his’ when of course I do not know whether this race has a sexual differentiation.”

  “You actually talked with the beast?”

  “It communicated with me by mental telepathy.”

  “It has been proven that thoughts cannot penetrate ultimate metal.”

  “What do humans know about telepathy? They cannot even communicate with each other except under special conditions.” The creature spoke contemptuously.

  “That’s right. And if your story is true, then this is a matter for the Council.”

  ‘This is a matter for two men, you and I. Have you forgotten that the vault of the beast is the central tower of the great city of Li—billions of dollars’ worth of treasure in furniture, art and machinery? The beast demands release from its prison before it will permit anyone to mine that treasure. You can release it. We can share the treasure.”

  “Let me ask you a question,” said Jim Brender. “What is
your real name?”

  “P-Pierce Lawrence!” the creature stammered. For the moment, it could think of no greater variation of the name of its first victim than reversing the two words, with a slight change on “Pearson.” Its thoughts darkened with confusion as the voice of Brender pounded:

  “On what ship did you come from Mars?”

  “O-on F4961,” the thing stammered chaotically, fury adding to the confused state of its mind. It fought for control, felt itself slipping, suddenly felt the pull of the ultimate metal that made up the bas-relief on the wall, and knew by that tug that it was dangerously near dissolution.

  “That would be a freighter,” said Jim Brender. He pressed a button. “Carltons, find out if the F4961 had a passenger or person aboard, named Pierce Lawrence. How long will it take?”

  “About a minute, sir.”

  “You see,” said Jim Brender, leaning back, “this is mere formality. If you were on that ship, then I shall be compelled to give serious attention to your statements. You can understand, of course, that I could not possibly go into a thing like this blindly. I—”

  The buzzer rang. “Yes?” said Jim Brender.

  “Only the crew of two was on the F4961 when it landed yesterday. No such person as Pierce Lawrence was aboard.”

  “Thank you.” Jim Brender stood up. He said coldly, “Good-by, Mr. Lawrence. I cannot imagine what you hoped to gain by this ridiculous story. However, it has been most intriguing, and the problem you presented was very ingenious indeed—”

  The buzzer was ringing. “What is it?”

  “Mr. Gorson to see you, sir.”

  “Very well, send him right in.”

  The thing had greater control of its brain now, and it saw in Brender’s mind that Gorson was a financial magnate, whose business ranked with the Brender firm. It saw other things, too; things that made it walk out of the private office, out of the building, and wait patiently until Mr. Gorson emerged from the imposing entrance. A few minutes later, there were two Mr. Gorsons walking down the street.