by C. L. Moore
After five minutes of search Smith's eyes finally located the outline of what might, millions of years ago, have been a street. It led straight away from the slope at the cave-mouth, and the blocks of hewn stone, the crevices and folded ruins of earthquake choked it, but the course it once had run was not entirely obliterated even yet. Palaces and temples must have lined it once. There was no trace of them now save in the blocks of marble lying shattered among the broken stones.
Time had erased the city from the face of Mars almost as completely as from the memories of man. Yet the trace of this one street was all they needed now to guide them.
The going was rough. Once down among the ruins it was difficult to keep in the track, and for almost an hour they clambered over broken rock and jagged spikes of stone, leaping the crevices, skirting great mounds of ruin. Both were scratched and breathless by the time they came to the first landmark they recognized — a black, leaning needle of stone, half buried in fragments of broken marble. Just beyond it lay two blocks of stone, one upon the other, perhaps the only two in the whole vast ruin which still stood as the hands of man had laid them hundreds of centuries ago.
Smith paused beside them and looked at Yarol, breathing a little heavily from exertion.
“Here it is,” he said. “The old boy was telling the truth after all.”
“So far,” amended Yarol dubiously, drawing his heat-gun. “Well, we'll see.” The blue pencil of flame hissed from the gun's muzzle to splatter along the crack between the stones. Very slowly Yarol traced that line, and in spite of himself excitement quickened within him. Two-thirds of the way along the line the flame suddenly ceased to spatter and bit deep. A blackening hole appeared in the stone. It widened swiftly, and smoke rose, and there came a sound of protesting rock wrenched from its bed of eons as the upper stone slowly ground half around on the lower, tottered a moment and then fell.
The lower stone was hollow. The two bent over curiously, peering down. A tiny breath of unutterable antiquity rose in their faces out of that darkness, a little breeze from a million years ago. Smith flashed his light-tube downward and saw level stone a dozen feet below.
The breeze was stronger now, and dust danced up the shaft from the mysterious depths — dust that had lain there undisturbed for unthinkably long ages.
“We'll give it awhile to air out,” said Smith, switching off his light. “Must be plenty of ventilation, to judge from that breeze; and the dust will probably blow away before long. We can be rigging up some sort of ladder while we wait.”
By the time a knotted rope had been prepared and anchored about a near-by needle of rock the little wind was blowing cleanly up the shaft, still laden with that indefinable odor of ages, but breathable. Smith swung over first, lowering himself cautiously until his feet touched the stone. Yarol, when he came down, found him swinging the Tomlinson-beam about a scene of utter lifelessness. A passageway stretched before them, smoothly polished as to walls and ceiling, with curious, unheard-of-frescoes limned in dim colors under the glaze. Antiquity hung, almost tangibly in the air. The little breeze that brushed past their faces seemed sacrilegiously alive in this tomb of dead dynasties.
That glazed and patterned passageway led downward into the dark. They followed it dubiously, feet stirring in the dust of a dead race, light-beams violating the million-years night of the underground. Before they had gone very far the circle of light from the shaft disappeared from sight beyond the up-sloping floor behind them, and they walked through antiquity with nothing but the tiny, constant breeze upon their faces to remind them of the world above.
They walked a very long way. There was no subterfuge about the passage, no attempt to confuse the traveler. No other halls opened from it — it led straight forward and down through the stillness, the dark, the odor of very ancient death. And when at long last they reached the end, they had passed no other corridor-mouth, no other openings at all save the tiny ventilation holes at intervals along the ceiling.
At the end of that passage a curving wall of rough, unworked stone bulged like the segment of a sphere, closing the corridor. It was a different stone entirely from that under the patterned glaze of the way along which they had come. In the light of their Tomlinson-tubes they saw a stone door set flush with the slightly bulging wall that held it. And in the door's very center a symbol was cut deep and vehement and black against the gray background. Yarol, seeing it, caught his breath.
“Do you know that sign?” he said softly, his voice reverberating in the stillness of the underground, and echoes whispered behind him down the darkness, “— know that sign . . . know that sign? ”—
“I can guess,” murmured Smith, playing his light on the black outline of it.
“The symbol of Pharol,” said the Venusian in a near-whisper, but the echoes caught it and rolled back along the passage in diminishing undertones, “— Pharol . . . Pharol . . . Pharol! ”
“I saw it once carved in the rock of an asteroid,” whispered Yarol. “Just a bare little fragment of dead stone whirling around and around through space. There was one smooth surface on it, and this same sign was cut there. The Lost Planet must really have existed, N.W., and that must have been a part of it once, with the god's name cut so deep that even the explosion of a world couldn't wipe it out.”
Smith drew his gun. “We'll soon know,” he said. “This will probably fall, so stand back.” The blue pencil of heat traced the door's edges, spattering against the stone as Yarol's had in the city above. And as before, in its course it encountered the weak place in the molding and the fire bit deep. The door trembled as Smith held the beam steady; it uttered an ominous creaking and began slowly to tilt outward at the top. Smith snapped off his gun and leaped backward, as the great stone slab tottered outward and fell. The mighty crash of it reverberated through the dark, and the concussion of its fall shook the solid floor and flung both men staggering against the wall.
They reeled to their feet again, shielding blinded eyes from the torrent of radiance that poured forth out of the doorway. It was a rich, golden light, somehow thick, yet clear, and they saw almost immediately, as their eyes became accustomed to the sudden change from darkness, that it was like no light they had ever known before. Tangibly it poured past them down the corridor in hurrying waves that lapped one another and piled up and flowed as a gas might have done. It was light which had an unnamable body to it, a physical, palpable body which yet did not affect the air they breathed.
They walked forward into a sea of radiance, and that curious light actually eddied about their feet, rippling away from the forward motion of their bodies as water might have done.
Widening circles spread away through the air as they advanced, breaking soundlessly against the wall, and behind them a trail of bright streaks steamed away like the wake of a ship in water.
Through the deeps of that rippling light they walked a passage hewn from ragged stone, a different stone from that of the outer corridor, and somehow older. Tiny speckles of brightness glinted now and again on the rough walls, and neither could remember ever having seen just such mottled, bright-flecked rock before.
“Do you know what I think this is?” demanded Smith suddenly, after a few minutes of silent progress over the uneven floor. “An asteroid! That rough wall bulging into the corridor outside was the outer part of it. Remember, the three gods were supposed to have been carried away from the catastrophe on the other world and brought here. Well, I'll bet that's how it was managed — a fragment of that planet, enclosing a room, possibly, where the gods' images stood, was somehow detached from the Lost Planet and hurled across space to Mars. Must have buried itself in the ground here, and the people of this city tunneled in to it and built a temple over the spot. No other way, you see, to account for that protruding wall and the peculiar formation of this rock. It must have come from the lost world — never saw anything like it anywhere, myself.”
“Sounds logical,” admitted Yarol, swinging his foot to start an eddy of light
toward the wall.
“And what do you make of this funny light?”
“Whatever other-dimensional place those gods came from, we can be pretty sure that light plays funny tricks there. It must be nearly material — physical. You saw it in that white thing in the cave, and in the dark that smothered our tubes. It's as tangible as water, almost. You saw how it flowed out into the passage when the door fell, not as real light does, but in succeeding waves, like heavy gas. Yet I don't notice any difference in the air. I don't believe — say! Look at that!”
He stopped so suddenly that Yarol bumped into him from behind and muttered a mild Venusian oath. Then across Smith's shoulder he saw it too, and his hand swept downward to his gun. Something like an oddly shape hole opening onto utter dark had appeared around the curve of the passage. And as they stared, it moved. It was a Something blacker than anything in human expenence could ever have been before — as black as the guardian of the cave had been white — so black that the eye refused to compass it save as a negative quality, an emptiness. Smith, remembering the legends of Pharol the No-God of utter nothingness, gripped his gun more firmly and wondered if he stood face to face with one of the elder gods.
The Thing had shifted is shape, flowing to a stabler outline and standing higher from the floor. Smith felt that it must have form and thickness — at least three dimensions and probably more — but try though he would, his eyes could not discern it save as a flat outline of nothingness against the golden light.
And as from the white dweller in darkness, so from this black denizen of the light there flowed a force that goaded the brain to madness. Smith felt it battering in blind waves at the foundations of his mind — but he felt more than the reasonless urge in this force assailing him. He sensed a struggle of some sort, as if the black guardian were turning only a part of its attention to him — as if it fought against something unseen and powerful. Feeling this, he began to see signs of that combat, in the black outlines of the thing. It rippled and flowed, its shape shifted fluidly, it writhed in protest against something he could not comprehend.
Definitely now he felt that it fought a desperate battle with some unseen enemy, and a little shudder crawled down his back as he watched.
Quite suddenly it dawned upon him what was happening. Slowly, relentlessly, the black nothingness was being drawn down the passage. And it was — it must be — the flow of the golden radiance that drew it, as a fish might be carried forward down a stream. Somehow the opening of the door must have freed the pent-up lake of light, and it was flowing slowly out down the passage as water flows, draining the asteroid, if asteroid it was. He could see now that though they had halted, the wake of rippling illumination behind them did not cease. Past them in a bright tide streamed the light. And on that outflowing torrent the black guardian floated, struggling but helpless.
It was closer now, and the beat of insistent impulses against Smith's brain was stronger, but he was not greatly alarmed by it. The panic of the thing must be deep, and the waves of force that washed about him were dizzying but not deep-reaching. Because of this increasing dizziness, as the thing approached, he was never sure afterward just what had happened.
Rapidly it drew nearer, until he could have put out his hand and touched it — though instinctively he felt that, near as it seemed, it was too far away across dimensional gulfs for him ever to lay hand upon it. The blackness of it, at close range, was stupefying, a blackness that the eye refused to comprehend — that could not be, and was.
With the nearness of it his brain seemed to leave its moorings and plunge in mad, impossible curves through a suddenly opened space wherein the walls of the passage were shadows dimly seen and his own body no more than a pillar of mist in a howling void. The black thing must have rolled over him in passing, and engulfed him in its reasonless and incredible dark.
He never knew. When his plunging brain finally ceased its lunges through the void and returned reluctantly to his body, the horror of nothingness had receded past them down the corridor, still struggling, and the waves of its blinding force weakened with the distance.
Yarol was leaning against the wall, wide-eyed and gasping. “Did it get you, too?” he managed to articulate after several attempts to control his hurrying breath.
Smith found his own lungs laboring. He nodded breathless.
“I wonder,” he said when he had recovered a measure of normality, “if that thing would look as white in the dark as it did in the light? I'll bet it would. And do you suppose it can't exist outside the light? Reminded me of a jelly-fish caught in a mill-race. Say, if the light's flowing out that fast, d'you think it may go entirely? We'd better be moving.” Under their feet the passage sloped downward still. And when they reached the end of their quest, it came very suddenly. The curve of the passage sharpened to an angle, and round the bend the corridor ended abruptly at the threshold of a great cavity in the heart of the asteroid.
In the rich golden light it glittered like the center of a many-faceted diamond — that vast crystal room. The light brimmed it from wall to wall, from floor to ceiling. And it was strange that in this mellow flood of radiance the boundaries of the room seemed hard to define — somehow it looked limitless, though the walls were clear to be seen.
All this, though, they were realizing only subconsciously. Their eyes met the throne in the center of the crystal vault and clung there, fascinated. It was a crystal throne, and it had been fashioned for no human occupant. On this the Mighty Three of measureless antiquity had sat.
It was not an altar — it was a throne where incarnate godhood reigned once, too long ago for the mind to comprehend. Roughly triform, it glittered under the great arch of the ceiling.
There was no knowing from the shape of it now, what form the Three had worn who sat upon it. But the forms must have been outside modern comprehension — nothing the two explorers had ever seen in all their wanderings could have occupied it.
Two of the pedestals were empty. Saig and Lsa had vanished as completely as their names from man's memory. On the third — the center and the highest. . . . Smith's breath caught in his throat suddenly. Here then, on the great throne before them, lay all that was left of a god — the greatest of antiquity's deities. This mound of gray dust. The oldest thing upon three worlds — older than the mountains that held it, older than the very old beginnings of the mighty race of man.
Great Pharol — dust upon a throne.
“Say, listen,” broke in Yarol's matter-of-fact voice.
“Why did the image turn to dust when the room and the throne didn't? The whole room must have come from that crystal temple on the other world. You'd think—”
“The image must have been very old long before the temple was built,” said Smith softly. He was thinking how dead it looked, lying there in a soft gray mound on the crystal. How dead!
how immeasurably old! — yet if the little man spoke truly, life still dwelt in these ashes of forgotten deity. Could he indeed forge from the gray dust a cable that would reach out irresistibly across the gulfs of time and space, into dimensions beyond man's understanding, and draw back the vanished entity which had once been Great Pharol? Could he? And if he could — suddenly doubt rose up in Smith's mind. What man, with a god to do his bidding, would stop short of domination over the worlds of space — perhaps of godhood for himself?
And if that man were half mad? . . .
He followed Yarol across the shining floor in silence. It took them longer to reach the throne than they had expected — there was something deceptive about the crystal of that room, and the clarity of the brimming golden light.
The translucent heights of the triumvirate structure that had enthroned gods towered high over their heads. Smith looked upward toward that central pedestal bearing its eon-old burden, wondering what men had stood here before him at the foot of the throne, what men of nameless races and forgotten worlds, worshipping the black divinity that was Pharol. On this crystal floor the feet of— A scrambling
sound interrupted his wondering. The irreverent Yarol, his eyes on the gray dust above them, was climbing the crystal throne. It was slippery, and never meant for mounting, and his heavy boots slid over the smoothness of it. Smith stood watching with a half-smile. For long ages no living man had dared approach this place save in reverence, on his knees, not venturing so much as to lift his eyes to that holy of holies where sat incarnate godhood. Now— Yarol's foot slipped on the last step of the ascent and he muttered under his breath, reaching out to clutch the pedestal, where Great Pharol, first of the living gods, had ruled a mightier world than any men inhabit now.
At the summit he paused, looking down from an eminence whence no eyes save those of gods had ever looked before. And he frowned in a puzzled way as he looked.
“Something wrong here, N.W.,” he said. “Look up. What's going on around the ceiling?” Smith's pale gaze rose. For a moment he stared in utter bewilderment. For the third time that day his eyes were beholding something so impossible that they refused to register the fact upon an outraged brain. Something dark and yet not dark was closing down upon them. The roof seemed to lower — and panic stirred within him briefly. The ceiling, coming down to crush them? Some further guardian of the gods descending like a blanket over theft heads?
What?
And then understanding broke upon him, and his laugh of sheer relief echoed almost blasphemously in the silence of the place.
“The light's running out,” he said. “Like water, just draining away. That's all.” And the incredible thing was true. That shining lake of light which brimmed the crystal hollow was ebbing, pouring through the door, down the passage, out into the upper-air, and darkness, literally, was flowing in behind it. And it was flowing fast.