Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  When he looked down at the city he could not pick out the building in which he had worked. There was nothing in any feature of the landscape. Nothing. If his position, clinging to a girder high above the city, made no sense, it did not make less sense than the position of a man, or a Dewforth, sitting in a blind cell among thousands of other blind cells down there, drawing tiny lines. Nothing bound him to the drafting room nor even to the Dewforth of the drafting room--not so much as a spider web or a shaft of light. The light pointed to itself. The wind got under his shirt and chilled his navel, a poignant reminder of disconnectedness.

  An eagle glided close and screamed at him. It was like the laughter of his wife. He resumed his climb, looking down no more.

  The last few yards of the climb were the worst. Some bolts holding the ladder in place were shapeless little masses of rust. The eleventh rung from the top broke under his weight, and for the last ten steps he had to lighten his body by means of a technique of autosuggestion and will-projection which he invented on the spot, demonstrating what could be done under pressure of extreme necessity. He could see above his head a tiny balcony not more than a yard square, at which the ladder terminated. The floor of this balcony appeared to be made of long, weatherbeaten cigars which reason told him were badly corroded iron bars. Reason also told him that there would be a door there.

  He could not see a door through the skeleton floor of the balcony, but the idea that there would not be a door there was, under the circumstances, insupportable. There would be a door, he told himself as he made his way upwards by means of levitation and the most tentative of steps. It would probably have an inhospitable sign on it--NO TRESPASSING, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, DANGER or perhaps HIGH VOLTAGE. It might prove to be locked. If so, he would pound on it until some one opened it, he decided.

  There was even an outside possibility that no one would be inside. He had never considered that possibility before that time. He decided that it was not time to consider it now.

  When Dewforth heaved himself up onto the small projecting platform he felt the ladder give under his feet. It was not just another rung. He saw the entire ladder go curling away into the emptiness like a huge broken spring. Then he lay on the platform face down with his eyes closed, fingers clutching the sill of the door, for a long time.

  New sounds invaded his personal darkness as he lay there. He heard bells, buzzers, klaxons, whistles and slamming relays. There were voices from loudspeakers--imperious and hopeless, angry and feeble, impassioned and monotonous, arrogant and anguished--in a synthetic language made up of odd phonemes long since discarded from a thousand other languages. When he looked up he saw no door but only a rectangle of darkness with erratic flashes of colored light.

  Having no choice, he entered on his hands and knees.

  IV

  Dewforth wandered in a labyrinth of control panels which reached almost to the ceiling, but did not entirely shut out the light. This light was like skimmed milk diffused in shadow. He reasoned that it came from windows, but when he tried to remember whether the control cab had windows he could not be sure. He had no visual image of windows seen from the outside, but he had supposed that such an edifice would hardly be blind. Somewhere beyond this maze of control panels, he also reasoned, there must be an area like the bridge of an enormous ship where the clamor of the bells, buzzers, klaxons and whistles and the silent warnings and importunings of dials, gauges, colored lights, ticker-tapes which spewed from metal mouths, the palsied styles which scribbled on creeping scrolls, were somehow collated and made meaningful, where the yammering loudspeakers could be answered, and where the operators could look out and down and see what they were doing.

  Where were the operators?

  The noise was deafening. Unlike the noise of machinery in a factory it was not homogeneous. Each sound was intended to attract attention and to evoke a certain response, but what response and from whom? Long levers projecting from the steel deck wagged back and forth spastically like the legs of monstrous insects struggling on their backs. Several times Dewforth was temporarily blinded by an explosion of blue light as a fuse blew or something short-circuited among the rows of knife-switches and rheostats on the panels. One would never really get used to the sporadic sound or to the lights. There was no knowable pattern about them--about what they did or said. When he closed his eyes and tried to compose himself the words Out of Control flashed red against the back of his eyelids, but he told himself that this was foolish. How was one to adjudge a situation to be Out of Control when one did not know what constituted control, over what, or by whom? Furthermore, he rebuked himself, if the panels--never mind how many or how forbidding--with their lights, bells, buzzers, switches, relays, dials, gauges, styles, tapes, pointers, rheostats and buttons had any meaning, and in fact if the Tower itself had any meaning at all, that meaning was Control. How arrogant it had been of him to imagine, even briefly, that because he--a green intruder in that high place--had not immediately comprehended what it was all about, the situation must be out of control. Absurd!

  * * * * *

  There were hundreds--perhaps thousands--of little labels attached to the control panels, presumably indicating the functions of the buttons, switches and other controls. Dewforth leaned close and studied these, but found only mute combinations of letters and numbers, joined by hyphens or separated by virgules.... They made him feel somewhat more fragile, more round-shouldered and colder, but he resisted despair. It was getting a little darker, though. The skimmed-milk light above him was taking on a bluish tint. He had no way of knowing how long he had wandered among the control panels. His time-sense had always been dependent upon clocks and bells--and upon the arrivals and departures of trains.

  It was a sound which finally led Dewforth out of the maze of control panels.

  It was not a louder sound, not more emphatic, imperative or clear than the others; it was formless, feeble and ineffably pathetic. It was its utter incongruity which reached Dewforth through the robotic clamor, and which touched him ... a mewing, as of a kitten trapped in a closet.

  It came, as he discovered, from The Operator.

  He was quite alone among his levers, wheels, switches, buttons, cranks, gauges, lights, bells, buzzers, horns, ticker-tapes, creeping scrolls, barking loudspeakers and cryptic dials. Dewforth saw him sharply silhouetted against a long window through which bluish-gray light poured but through which nothing could be clearly seen from where he stood. The Operator sat on a high, one-legged stool. His head was drawn into his shoulders, which were crumpled things of birdlike bones. His head was bald on top but the fringe was long and wild. He had big simian ears set at right angles to his head and the light shone through them, not pink but yellowish. There was an aureole of fine hairs about them which gave them the appearance of angel's wings. With enlarged hands at the ends of almost fleshless arms he clutched at the knobs of rheostats and the cranks of transformers, hesitantly, spasmodically, and without ever quite reaching anything. Each time he withdrew his hands quickly as though he had been on the point of touching something very hot. His arms might have been elongated by a lifetime of such aborted movement.

  Just as Dewforth began to wonder how his sudden appearance there would affect the old man, feeble and distraught as he already was, the Operator whirled on his stool and stared at Dewforth with eyes so round, so huge and so terrified that the rest of his face was not noticeable at all.

  He shouted something that sounded like "Huzzah!" but almost certainly was not, then stiffened, then fell to the steel deck with no more fuss than a bag of corn-husks would have made, and died.

  * * * * *

  One would think that a windowed control cab or wheelhouse atop the loftiest structure in a city, or in an entire landscape, would afford a man an Olympian view of the world below, and of its people and their activities.

  Dewforth must have believed this at one time, but he found that it was not so. The entire lower portion of the windows was covered with thin page
s of typescript, mostly yellowed, dusty and curled at the edges--orders, instructions, directives, memoranda, all Urgent, For Immediate Action, Important, Priority, On No Account, or At All Costs.

  The texts of these orders, instructions, directives or memoranda consisted of mute combinations of letters and numbers, joined by hyphens or separated by virgules.

  Through the upper portion of the windows Dewforth could just make out the horizon and a narrow strip of darkening sky, which were silent and which demanded nothing of him. Amid the continuing clamor of all the signal devices, he tried to recapture the last utterance of the Operator--the former Operator.

  "Huzzah!" was out of the question. "Who's there?" or "Who's that?" were more likely, but, as he thought of it, weren't "Whose what?", "What's where?", "Where's what?" or even "Who's where?" just as likely?

  Of these possible last words, "Who's where?" echoed most persistently in his memory.

  Dewforth might have torn away the pages of meaningless orders and looked down upon lights as darkness fell, but he did not.

  Opaque as they were in form and content alike, there was something reassuringly familiar in the lines of inane symbols. And they were all that stood between him and the approaching tidal wave of night, and beyond the night, the winter with its storms.

  * * *

  Contents

  THE CHALLENGE FROM BEYOND

  C.L. Moore, Abraham Merritt, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Frank Belknap Long

  [C. L. Moore]

  George Campbell opened sleep-fogged eyes upon darkness and lay gazing out of the tent flap upon the pale August night for some minutes before he roused enough even to wonder what had wakened him. There was in the keen, clear air of these Canadian woods a soporific as potent as any drug. Campbell lay quiet for a moment, sinking slowly back into the delicious borderlands of sleep, conscious of an exquisite weariness, an unaccustomed sense of muscles well used, and relaxed now into perfect ease. These were vacation's most delightful moments, after all -- rest, after toil, in the clear, sweet forest night.

  Luxuriously, as his mind sank backward into oblivion, he assured himself once more that three long months of freedom lay before him -- freedom from cities and monotony, freedom from pedagogy and the University and students with no rudiments of interest in the geology he earned his daily bread by dinning into their obdurate ears. Freedom from --

  Abruptly the delightful somnolence crashed about him. Somewhere outside the sound of tin shrieking across tin slashed into his peace. George Campbell sat up jerkily and reached for his flashlight. Then he laughed and put it down again, straining his eyes through the midnight gloom outside where among the tumbling cans of his supplies a dark anonymous little night beast was prowling. He stretched out a long arm and groped about among the rocks at the tent door for a missile. His fingers closed on a large stone, and he drew back his hand to throw.

  But he never threw it. It was such a queer thing he had come upon in the dark. Square, crystal smooth, obviously artificial, with dull rounded corners. The strangeness of its rock surfaces to his fingers was so remarkable that he reached again for his flashlight and turned its rays upon the thing he held.

  All sleepiness left him as he saw what it was he had picked up in his idle groping. It was clear as rock crystal, this queer, smooth cube. Quartz, unquestionably, but not in its usual hexagonal crystallized form. Somehow -- he could not guess the method -- it had been wrought into a perfect cube, about four inches in measurement over each worn face. For it was incredibly worn. The hard, hard crystal was rounded now until its corners were almost gone and the thing was beginning to assume the outlines of a sphere. Ages and ages of wearing, years almost beyond counting, must have passed over this strange clear thing.

  But the most curious thing of all was that shape he could make out dimly in the heart of the crystal. For imbedded in its center lay a little disc of a pale and nameless substance with characters incised deep upon its quartz-enclosed surface. Wedge-shaped characters, faintly reminiscent of cuneiform writing.

  George Campbell wrinkled his brows and bent closer above the little enigma in his hands, puzzling helplessly. How could such a thing as this have imbedded in pure rock crystal? Remotely a memory floated through his mind of ancient legends that called quartz crystals ice which had frozen too hard to melt again. Ice -- and wedge-shaped cuneiforms -- yes, didn't that sort of writing originate among the Sumerians who came down from the north in history's remotest beginnings to settle in the primitive Mesopotamian valley? Then hard sense regained control and he laughed. Quartz, of course, was formed in the earliest of earth's geological periods, when there was nothing anywhere but beat and heaving rock. Ice had not come for tens of millions of years after this thing must have been formed.

  And yet -- that writing. Man-made, surely, although its characters were unfamiliar save in their faint hinting at cuneiform shapes. Or could there, in a Paleozoic world, have been things with a written language who might have graven these cryptic wedges upon the quartz-enveloped disc he held? Or -- might a thing like this have fallen meteor-like out of space into the unformed rock of a still molten world? Could it --

  Then he caught himself up sharply and felt his ears going hot at the luridness of his own imagination. The silence and the solitude and the queer thing in his hands were conspiring to play tricks with his common sense. He shrugged and laid the crystal down at the edge of his pallet, switching off the light. Perhaps morning and a clear head would bring him an answer to the questions that seemed so insoluble now.

  But sleep did not come easily. For one thing, it seemed to him as he flashed off the light, that the little cube had shone for a moment as if with sustained light before it faded into the surrounding dark. Or perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps it had been only his dazzled eyes that seemed to see the light forsake it reluctantly, glowing in the enigmatic deeps of the thing with queer persistence.

  He lay there unquietly for a long while, turning the unanswered questions over and over in his mind. There was something about this crystal cube out of the unmeasured past, perhaps from the dawn of all history, that constituted a challenge that would not let him sleep.

  [A. Merritt]

  He lay there, it seemed to him, for hours. It had been the lingering light, the luminescence that seemed so reluctant to die, which held his mind. It was as though something in the heart of the cube had awakened, stirred drowsily, become suddenly alert ... and intent upon him.

  Sheer fantasy, this. He stirred impatiently and flashed his light upon his watch. Close to one o'clock; three hours more before the dawn. The beam fell and was focused upon the warm crystal cube. He held it there closely, for minutes. He snapped it out, then watched.

  There was no doubt about it now. As his eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness, he saw that the strange crystal was glimmering with tiny fugitive lights deep within it like threads of sapphire lightnings. They were at its center and they seemed to him to come from the pale disk with its disturbing markings. And the disc itself was becoming larger ... the markings shifting shapes ... the cube was growing ... was it illusion brought about by the tiny lightnings....

  He heard a sound. It was the very ghost of a sound, like the ghosts of harp strings being plucked with ghostly fingers. He bent closer. It came from the cube....

  There was squeaking in the underbrush, a flurry of bodies and an agonized wailing like a child in death throes and swiftly stilled. Some small tragedy of the wilderness, killer and prey. He stepped over to where it had been enacted, but could see nothing. He again snapped off the flash and looked toward his tent. Upon the ground was a pale blue glimmering. It was the cube. He stooped to pick it up; then obeying some obscure warning, drew back his hand.

  And again, he saw, its glow was dying. The tiny sapphire lightnings flashing fitfully, withdrawing to the disc from which they had come. There was no sound from it.

  He sat, watching the luminescence glow and fade, glow and fade, but steadily becoming dimmer. It c
ame to him that two elements were necessary to produce the phenomenon. The electric ray itself, and his own fixed attention. His mind must travel along the ray, fix itself upon the cube's heart, if its beat were to wax, until ... what?

  He felt a chill of spirit, as though from contact with some alien thing. It was alien, he knew it; not of this earth. Not of earth's life. He conquered his shrinking, picked up the cube and took it into the tent. It was neither warm nor cold; except for its weight he would not have known he held it. He put it upon the table, keeping the torch turned from it; then stepped to the flap of the tent and closed it.

  He went back to the table, drew up the camp chair, and turned the flash directly upon the cube, focusing it so far as he could upon its heart. He sent all his will, all his concentration, along it; focusing will and sight upon the disc as he had the light.

  As though at command, the sapphire lightnings burned forth. They burst from the disc into the body of the crystal cube, then beat back, bathing the disc and the markings. Again these began to change, shifting, moving, advancing, and retreating in the blue gleaming. They were no longer cuneiform. They were things ... objects.

  He heard the murmuring music, the plucked harp strings. Louder grew the sound and louder, and now all the body of the cube vibrated to their rhythm. The crystal walls were melting, growing misty as though formed of the mist of diamonds. And the disc itself was growing ... the shapes shifting, dividing and multiplying as though some door had been opened and into it companies of phantasms were pouring. While brighter, more bright grew the pulsing light.

  He felt swift panic, tried to withdraw sight and will, dropped the flash. The cube had no need now of the ray ... and he could not withdraw ... could not withdraw? Why, he himself was being sucked into that disc which was now a globe within which unnameable shapes danced to a music that bathed the globe with steady radiance.