But there was no need for him to tell me to look. I was staring already with starting eyes, while my heart began to hammer in my chest like a sledge.
As the faint, luminous spot in the concrete grew larger it also took recognizable form. And the form that appeared in the depths of the stuff was that of a human!
Human? Well, yes, if you can think of a thing no bigger than an eighteen-inch doll as being human.
A mannikin a foot and a half high, embedded in the concrete! But not embedded—for it was moving! Toward us!
In astounded silence, Belmont and I stared. It didn’t occur to us then to be afraid. Nothing occurred to us save indescribable wonder at the impossible vision we saw.
I can close my eyes and see the thing now: a manlike little figure walking toward us through solid concrete. It bent forward as though shouldering a way against a sluggish tide, off a heavy wind; it moved as a deep-sea diver might move in clogging water. But that was all the resistance the concrete seemed to offer to it, that sluggish impediment to its forward movement.
Behind it there was a faint swirl of luminosity, like phosphorescent water moving in the trail of a tiny boat. And the luminosity surrounded the thing like an aura.
And now we could see its face; and I heard Belmont’s whispered exclamation. For the face was as human as ours, with a straight nose, a firm, well-shaped mouth, and eyes glinting with intelligence.
With intelligence—and something else!
There was something deadly about those eyes peering at us through the misty concrete. Something that would have sent our hands leaping for our guns had not the thing been so little. You can’t physically fear a doll only a foot and a half high.
“What on earth is it—and how can it move through solid concrete?” breathed Belmont.
I couldn’t even guess the answer. But I had a theory that sprang full grown into my mind at the first sight of the little figure. It was all I had to offer in the way of explanation later, and I gave it to Belmont for what it was worth at the time.
“We must be looking at a hitherto unsuspected freak of evolution,” I said, instinctively talking in a whisper. “It must be that millions of years ago the human race split. Some of it stayed on top of the ground; some of it went into deep caves for shelter. As thousands of years passed, the latter went ever deeper as new rifts leading downward were discovered. But far down in the earth is terrific pressure, and heat. Through the ages their bodies adapted themselves. They compacted—perhaps in their very atomic structure.
“Now the density of their substance, and its altered atomic character, allows them to move through stuff that is solid to us. Like the concrete and the mush rock behind it, which is softer than the terrifically compressed stone around it.”
“But the thing has eyes,” murmured Belmont. “Anything living for generations underground would be blind.”
“Animals, yes. But this is human; at least it has human intelligence. It has undoubtedly carried light with it.”
The little mannikin was within a few inches of the surface of the wall now. It stood there, staring out at us as intently as we stared in at it. And I could see that Steve Boland had added no imaginative detail in his description of what he had seen.
The tiny thing was dressed in some sort of shiny stuff, like metal, that crisscrossed it in strips. It reminded me of something, and finally I got it. Our early airmen, trying for altitude records high in the stratosphere, had laced their bodies with heavy canvas strips to keep them from disrupting outward in the lessened pressure of the heights. The metallic-looking strips lacing this little body looked like those.
“It must be that the thing comes from depths that make this forty-thousand-foot level seem high and rarefied,” I whispered to Belmont. “Hundreds of thousands of feet, perhaps. They’ve heard us working at the ore, and have come far up here to see what was happening.”
“But to go through solid concrete—” muttered Belmont, dazed.
“That would be due to the way the atoms of their substance have been compressed and altered. They might be like the stuff on Sirius’s companion, where substance weighs a ton to the cubic inch. That would allow the atoms of their bodies to slide through far-spaced atoms of ordinary stuff, as lead shot could pour through a wide-meshed screen….”
Belmont was so silent that I stared at him. He was paying no attention to me, probably hadn’t even heard me. His eyes were wild and wide.
“There’s another of them. And another! Frank—we’re mad. We must be!”
Two more luminous swirls had appeared in the depths of the concrete. Two more tiny little human figures slowly appeared as, breasting forward like deep-sea divers against solid water, they plodded toward the face of the wall.
And now three mannikins, laced in with silvery-looking metal strips, stared at us through several inches of the milky-appearing concrete. Belmont clutched my arm again.
“Their eyes!” he whispered. “They certainly don’t like us, Frank! I’m glad they’re like things you see under a low-powered microscope instead of man-sized or bigger!”
Their eyes were most expressive—and threatening. They were like human eyes—and yet unlike them. There was a lack of something in them. Perhaps of the thing we call, for want of a more definite term, soul. But they were as expressive as the eyes of intelligent children.
I read curiosity in them as intense as that which filled Belmont and me. But over and above the curiosity there was—menace.
Cold anger shone from the soulless eyes. Chill outrage, such as might shine from the eyes of a man whose home has been invaded. The little men palpably considered us trespassers in these depths, and were glacially infuriated by our presence.
And then both Belmont and I gasped aloud. For one of the little men had thrust his hands forward, and hands and arms had protruded from the wall, like the hands of a person groping a way out of a thick mist. Then the tiny body followed it. And as if at a signal, the other two little men moved forward out of the wall too.
The three metal-laced mannikins stood in the open air of the tunnel, with their backs to the wall that had offered no more resistance to their bodies than cheese offers to sharp steel. And behind them there were no holes where they had stepped from. The face of the concrete was unbroken.
The atomic theory must be correct, I thought. The compacted atoms of which they were composed slid through the stellar spaces between ordinary atoms, leaving them undisturbed.
But only a small part of my mind concerned itself with this. Nine-tenths of it was absorbed by a growing, indefinable fear. For now the three little men were walking slowly toward us. And in every line of their tiny bodies was a threat.
Belmont looked at me. Our hands went uncertainly toward our revolvers. But we did not draw them. You don’t shoot at children; and the diminutive size of the three figures still made us consider them much as harmless children. Though in the back of my mind, at least, if not in Belmont’s, the indefinable fear was spreading….
The three stopped about a yard from us. Belmont was standing, and I was still seated, almost in a paralysis of wonder, on my rock fragment. They looked far up at Belmont and almost as far up at me. Three little things that didn’t even come up to our knees!
And then Belmont uttered a hoarse cry and dragged out his gun at last. For one of the three slid his tiny hand into the metal lacing of his body and brought it out with a sort of rod in it about the size of a thick pin, half an inch long. And there was something about the look in the mannikin’s eyes that brought a rush of frank fear to our hearts at last, though we couldn’t even guess at the nature of the infinitesimal weapon he held.
The mannikin pointed the tiny rod at Belmont, and Belmont shot. I didn’t blame him. I had my own gun out and trained on the other two. After all, we knew nothing of the nature of these fantastic creatures who had come up from unguessable depths below. We couldn’t even approximate the amount of harm they might do—but their eyes told us they’d do whatever they c
ould to hurt us.
An exclamation ripped from my lips as the roar of the shot thundered down the tunnel.
The bullet had hit the little figure. It couldn’t have helped but hit it; Belmont’s gun was within a yard of it, and he’d aimed point-blank.
But not a mark appeared on the mannikin, and he stood there apparently unhurt!
Belmont fired again, and to his shot I added my own. The bullets did the little men no damage at all.
“The slugs are going right through the things!” yelled Belmont, pointedly.
Behind the mannikins, long scars in the rock floor told where the lead had ricocheted. But I shook my head in a more profound wonder than that of Belmont’s.
“The bullets aren’t going through them! They’re going through the bullets! The stuff they’re made of is denser than lead!”
The little man with the tiny rod took one more step forward. And then I saw something that had been lost for the time in the face of things even more startling. I saw how the tiny tracks had been made.
As the mannikin stepped forward, I saw his advancing foot sink into the rock of the floor till the soles of his metallic-looking shoes were buried!
That small figure weighed so much that it sank into stone as a man would sink into ooze!
And now the microscopic rod flamed a little at the tip. And I heard Belmont scream—just once.
He fell, and I looked at him with a shock too great for comprehension, so that I simply stood there stupidly and saw without really feeling any emotion.
The entire right half of Belmont’s chest was gone. It was only a crater—a crater that gaped out, as holes gape over spots where shells bury themselves deep and explode up and out.
There had been no sound, and no flash other than the minute speck of flame tipping the mannikin’s rod. At one moment Belmont had been whole; at the next he was dead, with half his chest gone. That was all.
I heard myself screaming, and felt my gun buck in my hand as I emptied it. Then the infinitesimal rod turned my way, and I felt a slight shock and stared at my right wrist where a hand and a gun had once been.
I heard my own yells as from a great distance. I felt no pain; there are nerve shocks too great for pain-sensation. I felt only crazed, stupefied rage.
I leaped at the three little figures. With all my strength I swung my heavily booted foot at the one with the rod. There was death in that swing. I wanted to kill these three. I was berserk, with no thought in mind other than to rend and tear and smash. That kick would have killed an ox, I think.
It caught the little man in the middle of the back. And I screamed again and sank to the floor with the white-hot pain of broken small bones spiking my brain. That agony, less than the shock of losing a hand, I could feel all right. And in a blind haze of it I saw the little man smile bleakly and reach out his tiny hand toward Belmont, disregarding me as utterly as though I no longer existed.
And then through the fog of my agony I saw yet another wonder. The little man lifted Belmont’s dead body.
With the one hand, and apparently with no more effort than I would have made to pick up a pebble, he swung the body two inches off the floor, and started toward the concrete wall with it.
I tried to follow, crawling on my knees, but one of the other little men dashed his fist against my thigh. It sank in my flesh till his arm was buried to the shoulder, and the mannikin staggered off-balance with the lack of resistance. He withdrew his arm. There was no mark in the fabric of my clothing and I could feel no puncture in my thigh.
The little man stared perplexedly at me, and then at his fist. Then he joined the other two. They were at the face of the concrete wall again.
I saw that they were beginning to look as though in distress. They were panting, and the one with the rod was pressing his hand against his chest. They looked at each other and I thought a message was passed among them.
A message of haste? I think so. For the one picked up Belmont again, and all three stepped into the concrete. I saw them forge slowly ahead through it. And I saw Belmont, at arm’s length of the little man who dragged him, flatten against the smooth side of the stuff.
I think I went a little mad, then, as I understood at last just what had happened.
The little men had killed Belmont as a specimen, just as a man might kill a rare insect. They wanted to take him back to their own deep realms and study him. And they were trying to drag him through the solid concrete. It offered only normal resistance to their own compacted tons of weight, and it didn’t occur to them that it wouldn’t to Belmont’s body.
I flung myself at the wall and clawed at it with my left hand. The body of my friend was suspended there, flattened against it as the little man within tried to make solid matter go through solid matter, ignorant of the limitations of the laws of physics as we of Earth’s surface know them.
They were in extreme distress now. Even in my pain and madness I could see that. Their mouths were open like the mouths of fish gasping in air. I saw one clutch the leader’s arm and point urgently downward.
The leader raised his tiny rod. Once more I saw the infinitesimal flash at its tip. Then I saw a six-foot hole yawn in the concrete around Belmont’s body. What was their ammunition? Tiny pellets of gas, so compressed at the depths they inhabited that it was a solid, and which expanded enormously when released at these pressures? No one will ever know—I hope!
In one last effort, the leader dragged the body of my friend into the hole in the concrete. Then, when it stubbornly refused to follow into the substance through which they could force their own bodies, they gave up.
One of the three staggered and fell, sinking in the concrete as an overcome diver might sink through water to the ocean’s bed. The other two picked him up and carried him. Down and away.
Down and away…down from the floor of the forty-thousand-foot level, and away from the surface of the concrete wall.
I saw the luminous trails they left in the concrete fade into indistinct swirls, and finally die. I saw my friend’s form sag back from the hole in the concrete, to sink to the floor.
And then I saw nothing but the still form, and the ragged, six-foot crater that had been blown soundlessly into the solid concrete by some mysterious explosive that had come from a thing no larger than a thick pin, and less than half an inch long….
—
They found me an hour later—men who had come down to see why neither Belmont nor I answered the ring of the radio phone connecting the low level with the surface.
They found me raving beside Belmont’s body, and they held my arms with straps as they led me to the shaft.
They tried me for murder—and sabotage. For, next day, I got away from the men long enough to sink explosive into the forty-thousand-foot level and blow it up so that none could work there again. But the verdict was not guilty in both cases.
Belmont had died and I had lost my right hand in an explosion the cause of which was unknown, the martial court decided. And I had been insane from shock when I destroyed the low level, which, even with the world famished for copper, was almost too far down to be commercially profitable anyway.
They freed me, and I wrote in my report—and some filing clerk has, no doubt, shrugged at its impossibility and put it in a steel cabinet where it will be forever ignored.
But there is one thing that cannot be ignored. That is, those mannikins, those microscopic giants—if ever they decide to return by slow stages of pressure acclimation to the earth’s surface!
Myriads of them, tiny things weighing incredible tons, forging through labyrinths composed of soft veins of rock like little deep-sea divers plodding laboriously but normally through impeding water! Beings as civilized as ourselves, if not more so, with infinitely deadly weapons, and practically invulnerable to any weapons we might try to turn against them!
Will they tunnel upward someday and decide calmly and leisurely to take possession of a world that is green and fair, instead of black and buried? If the
y do, I hope it will not be in my lifetime!
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Translated by Andrew Hurley
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet, and translator noted in science fiction circles for his often fantastical short fiction work (he never wrote a novel). Beyond Latin America, he is most influential for his fiction, written from the 1930s to the 1980s and conveniently assembled as Collected Fictions (1998). Many of his famous stories were published in the 1940s, especially in the well-known and influential journal Sur—but his first known English-language translation appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1948. His work also appeared in genre publications like The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Borges’s influence on twentieth-century literature has been deep and pervasive since about 1960, especially for fictions whose structure or arguments question or play with the nature of reality—or that make fantastic use of images of a labyrinth, a mirror, a library, or a book that informs the world. Another enduring trait of most Borges stories is a feat of compression whereby use of summary and adherence to conventions common to essays are used to illuminate often mind-bending fantastical or science-fictional elements. His fiction has had the effect of a map of the unknown: other writers find the same territory mysterious and want to traverse it, not realizing that the map may close up all around them. Successful “cooking” of Borges’s influence can be found in the works of such writers as Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, and Gene Wolfe. The mind-bending aspect of his stories shares an affinity with the contractions/expansions of space and time that make J. G. Ballard’s fiction so effective.
“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” formed part of a famous 1941 collection of stories titled El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths) but was first published in Sur (May 1940). Sur was an Argentine literary magazine published by Victoria Ocampo, sister of Silvina Ocampo (herself married to Adolfo Bioy Casares; both writers are included in this anthology). It has since been translated into English and published many times in many places, the first being in 1961. Such diverse creators as British writer W. G. Sebald, Colombian musician/composer Diego Vega, and Italian artist-designer Luigi Serafini have been influenced by the story.
The Big Book of Science Fiction Page 31