by Anthology
By the amazement in the unwinking eyes it was plain that not till now had the eunuch taken cognizance of us. The amazement fled, was replaced with a black fire of malignancy, of hatred--jealousy.
"Augh!" he snarled; leaped to his feet; thrust an arm toward Ruth. She gave a little cry, cowered against Drake.
"None of that!" He struck down the clutching arm.
"Yuruk!" There was a hint of anger in the bell-toned voice. "Yuruk, these belong to me. No harm must come to them. Yuruk--beware!"
"The goddess commands. Yuruk obeys." If fear quavered in the words, beneath was more than a trace of a sullenness, too, sinister enough.
"That's a nice little playmate for her new playthings," muttered Drake. "If that bird gets the least bit gay--I shoot him pronto." He gave Ruth a reassuring hug. "Cheer up, Ruth. Don't mind that thing. He's something we can handle."
Norhala waved a white hand; Yuruk sidled over to one of the curtained ovals and through it, reappearing almost instantly with a huge platter upon which were fruits, and a curdly white liquid in bowls of thick porcelain.
"Eat," she said, as the gnarled black arms placed the platter at our feet.
"Hungry?" asked Drake. Ruth shook her head violently.
"I'm going out for the saddlebags," said Drake. "We'll use our own stuff--while it lasts. I'm taking no chances on what the Yuruk lad brings--with all due respect to Norhala's good intentions."
He started for the doorway; the eunuch blocked his way.
"We have with us food of our own, Norhala," I explained. "He goes to get it."
She nodded indifferently; clapped her hands. Yuruk shrank back, and out strode Drake.
"I am weary," sighed Norhala. "The way was long. I will refresh myself--"
She stretched out a foot toward Yuruk. He knelt, unlaced the turquoise bands, drew off the sandals. Her hands sought her breast, dwelt for an instant there.
Down slipped her silken veils, clingingly, slowly, as though reluctant to unclasp her; whispering they fell from the high and tender breasts, the delicate rounded hips, and clustered about her feet in soft petalings as of some flower of pale amber foam. Out of the calyx of that flower arose the gleaming miracle of her body crowned with glowing glory of her cloudy hair.
Naked she was, yet clothed with an unearthly purity, the purity of the far-flung, serene stars, of the eternal snows upon some calm, high-flung peak, the tranquil, silver dawns of spring; protected by some spell of divinity which chilled and slew the flame of desire. A maiden Ishtar, a virginal Isis; a woman--yet with no more of woman's lure than if she had been some exquisite and breathing statue of mingled ivory and milk of pearls.
So she stood, indifferent to us who gazed upon her, withdrawn, musing, as though she had forgotten us. And that serene indifference, with its entire absence of what we term sex consciousness, revealed to me once more how great was the abyss between us and her.
Slowly she raised her arms, wound the floating tresses into a coronal. I saw Drake enter with the saddlebags; saw them drop from hands relaxing under the shock of this amazing tableau; saw his eyes widen and fill with wonder and half-awed admiration.
Now Norhala stepped out of her fallen robes and moved toward the further wall, Yuruk following. He stooped, raised an ewer of silver and began gently to pour over her shoulders its contents. Again and again he bent and filled the vessel, dipping it into a shallow basin from which came the bubbling and chuckling of a little spring. And again I marveled at the marble smoothness and fineness of her skin on which the caressing water left tiny silvery globules, gemming it. The eunuch slithered to one side, drew from a quaint chest clothes of white floss; patted her dry with them; threw over her shoulders a silken robe of blue.
Back she floated to us; hovered over Ruth, crouching with her brother's head upon her knees.
She made a motion as though to draw the girl to her; hesitated as Ruth's face set in a passion of denial. A shadow of kindness drifted through the wide, mysterious eyes; a shadow of pity joined it as she looked curiously down on Ventnor.
"Bathe," she murmured, and pointed to the pool. "And rest. No harm shall come to any of you here. And you--" A hand rested for a moment lightly on the girl's curly head. "When you desire it--I will again give you--peace!"
She parted the curtains, and the eunuch still following, was hidden beyond them.
CHAPTER XIII
"VOICE FROM THE VOID"
Helplessly we looked at each other. Then called forth perhaps by what she saw in Drake's eyes, perhaps by another thought, Ruth's cheeks crimsoned, her head drooped; the web of her hair hid the warm rose of her face, the frozen pallor of Ventnor's.
Abruptly, she sprang to her feet. "Walter! Dick! Something's happening to Martin!"
Before she had ceased we were beside her; bending over Ventnor. His mouth was opening, slowly, slowly--with an effort agonizing to watch. Then his voice came through lips that scarcely moved; faint, faint as though it floated from infinite distances, a ghost of a voice whispering with phantom breath out of a dead throat.
"Hard--hard! So hard!" the whispering complained. "Don't know how long I can keep connection--with voice.
"Was fool to shoot. Sorry--might have gotten you in worse trouble--but crazy with fear for Ruth--thought, too, might be worth chance. Sorry--not my usual line--"
The thin thread of sound ceased. I felt my eyes fill with tears; it was like Ventnor to flay himself like this for what he thought stupidity, like him to make this effort to admit his supposed fault and crave forgiveness --as like him as that mad attack upon the flaming Disk in its own temple, surrounded by its ministers, had been so bafflingly unlike his usual cool, collected self.
"Martin," I called, bending closer, "it's nothing, old friend. No one blames you. Try to rouse yourself."
"Dear," it was Ruth, passionately tender, "it's me. Can you hear me?"
"Only speck of consciousness and motionless in the void," the whisper began again. "Terribly alive, terribly alone. Seem outside space yet--still in body. Can't see, hear, feel--short-circuited from every sense--but in some strange way realize you--Ruth, Walter, Drake.
"See without seeing--here floating in darkness that is also light--black light--indescribable. In touch, too, with these--"
Again the voice trailed into silence; returned, word and phrase pouring forth disconnected, with a curious and turbulent rhythm, like rushing wave crests linked by half-seen threads of the spindrift, vocal fragments of thought swiftly assembled by some subtle faculty of the mind as they fell into a coherent, incredible message.
"Group consciousness--gigantic--operating within our sphere--operating also in spheres of vibration, energy, force--above, below one to which humanity reacts--perception, command forces known to us--but in greater degree--cognizant, manipulate unknown energies--senses known to us--unknown--can't realize them fully--impossible cover, only impinge on contact points akin to our senses, forces--even these profoundly modified by additional ones--metallic, crystalline, magnetic, electric-- inorganic with every power of organic--consciousness basically same as ours--profoundly changed by differences in mechanism through which it finds expression--difference our bodies--theirs.
"Conscious, mobile--inexorable, invulnerable. Getting clearer--see more clearly--see--" the voice shrilled out in a shuddering, thin lash of despair--"No! No--oh, God --no!"
Then clearly and solemnly:
"And God said: let us make men in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over all the earth, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."
A silence; we bent closer, listening; the still, small voice took up the thread once more--but clearly further on. Something we had missed between that text from Genesis and what we were now hearing; something that even as he had warned us, he had not been able to articulate. The whisper broke through clearly in the middle of a sentence.
"Nor is Jehovah the God of myriads of millions who through those same centuries, and centuries upon centuries
before them, found earth a garden and grave--and all these countless gods and goddesses only phantom barriers raised by man to stand between him and the eternal forces man's instinct has always warned him are ever in readiness to destroy. That do destroy him as soon as his vigilance relaxes, his resistance weakens--the eternal, ruthless law that will annihilate humanity the instant it runs counter to that law and turns its will and strength against itself--"
A little pause; then came these singular sentences:
"Weaklings praying for miracles to make easy the path their own wills should clear. Beggars who whine for alms from dreams. Shirkers each struggling to place upon his god the burden whose carrying and whose carrying alone can give him strength to walk free and unafraid, himself godlike among the stars."
And now distinctly, unfalteringly, the voice went on:
"Dominion over all the earth? Yes--as long as man is fit to rule; no longer. Science has warned us. Where was the mammal when the giant reptiles reigned? Slinking hidden and afraid in the dark and secret places. Yet man sprang from these skulking beasts.
"For how long a time in the history of earth has man been master of it? For a breath--for a cloud's passing. And will remain master only until something grown stronger wrests mastery from him--even as he wrested it from his ravening kind--as they took it from the reptiles--as did the reptiles from the giant saurians--which snatched it from the nightmare rulers of the Triassic-- and so down to whatever held sway in the murk of earth dawn.
"Life! Life! Life! Life everywhere struggling for completion!
"Life crowding other life aside, battling for its moment of supremacy, gaining it, holding it for one rise and fall of the wings of time beating through eternity--and then --hurled down, trampled under the feet of another straining life whose hour has struck.
"Life crowding outside every barred threshold in a million circling worlds, yes, in a million rushing universes; pressing against the doors, bursting them down, overwhelming, forcing out those dwellers who had thought themselves so secure.
"And these--these--" the voice suddenly dropped, became thickly, vibrantly resonant, "over the Threshold, within the House of Man--nor does he even dream that his doors are down. These--Things of metal whose brains are thinking crystals--Things that suck their strength from the sun and whose blood is the lightning.
"The sun! The sun!" he cried. "There lies their weakness!"
The voice rose in pitch, grew strident.
"Go back to the city! Go back to the city! Walter-- Drake. They are not invulnerable. No! The sun--strike them through the sun! Go into the city--not invulnerable --the Keeper of the Cones--strike at the Cones when-- the Keeper of the Cones--ah-h-h-ah--"
We shrank back appalled, for from the parted, scarcely moving lips in the unchanging face a gust of laughter, mad, mocking, terrifying, racked its way.
"Vulnerable--under the law--even as we! The Cones!
"Go!" he gasped. A tremor shook him; slowly the mouth closed.
"Martin! Brother," wept Ruth. I thrust my hand into his breast; felt the heart beating, with a curious suggestion of stubborn, unshakable strength, as though every vital force had concentrated there as in a beleaguered citadel.
But Ventnor himself, the consciousness that was Ventnor was gone; had withdrawn into that subjective void in which he had said he floated--a lonely sentient atom, his one line of communication with us cut; severed from us as completely as though he were, as he had described it, outside space.
And Drake and I looked at each other's eyes, neither daring to be first to break the silence of which the muffled sobbing of the girl seemed to be the sorrowful soul.
CHAPTER XIV
"FREE! BUT A MONSTER!"
The peculiar ability of the human mind to slip so readily into the refuge of the commonplace after, or even during, some well-nigh intolerable crisis, has been to me long one of the most interesting phenomena of our psychology.
It is instinctively a protective habit, of course, acquired through precisely the same causes that had given to animals their protective coloration--the stripes, say, of the zebra and tiger that blend so cunningly with the barred and speckled shadowings of bush and jungle, the twig and leaflike shapes and hues of certain insects; in fact, all that natural camouflage which was the basis of the art of concealment so astonishingly developed in the late war.
Like the animals of the wild, the mind of man moves through a jungle--the jungle of life, passing along paths beaten out by the thought of his countless forefathers in their progress from birth to death.
And these paths are bordered and screened, figuratively and literally, with bush and trees of his own selection, setting out and cultivation--shelters of the familiar, the habitual, the customary.
On these ancestral paths, within these barriers of usage, man moves hidden and secure as the animals in their haunts--or so he thinks.
Outside them lie the wildernesses and the gardens of the unknown, and man's little trails are but rabbit-runs in an illimitable forest.
But they are home to him!
Therefore it is that he scurries from some open place of revelation, some storm of emotion, some strength-testing struggle, back into the shelter of the obvious; finding it an intellectual environment that demands no slightest expenditure of mental energy or initiative, strength to sally forth again into the unfamiliar.
I crave pardon for this digression. I set it down because now I remember how, when Drake at last broke the silence that had closed in upon the passing of that still, small voice the essence of these thoughts occurred to me.
He strode over to the weeping girl, and in his voice was a roughness that angered me until I realized his purpose.
"Get up, Ruth," he ordered. "He came back once and he'll come back again. Now let him be and help us get a meal together. I'm hungry."
She looked up at him, incredulously, indignation rising.
"Eat!" she exclaimed. "You can be hungry?"
"You bet I can--and I am," he answered cheerfully. "Come on; we've got to make the best of it."
"Ruth," I broke in gently, "we'll all have to think about ourselves a little if we're to be of any use to him. You must eat--and then rest."
"No use crying in the milk even if it's spilt," observed Drake, even more cheerfully brutal. "I learned that at the front where we got so we'd yelp for food even when the lads who'd been bringing it were all mixed up in it."
She lifted Ventnor's head from her lap, rested it on the silks; arose, eyes wrathful, her little hands closed in fists as though to strike him.
"Oh--you brute!" she whispered. "And I thought--I thought--Oh, I hate you!"
"That's better," said Dick. "Go ahead and hit me if you want. The madder you get the better you'll feel."
For a moment I thought she was going to take him at his word; then her anger fled.
"Thanks--Dick," she said quietly.
And while I sat studying Ventnor, they put together a meal from the stores, brewed tea over the spirit-lamp with water from the bubbling spring. In these commonplaces I knew that she at least was finding relief from that strain of the abnormal under which we had labored so long. To my surprise I found that I was hungry, and with deep relief I watched Ruth partake of food and drink even though lightly.
About her seemed to hover something of the ethereal, elusive, and disquieting. Was it the strangely pellucid light that gave the effect, I wondered; and knew it was not, for as I scanned her covertly, there fell upon her face that shadow of inhuman tranquillity, of unearthly withdrawal which, I guessed, had more than anything else maddened Ventnor into his attack upon the Disk.
I watched her fight against it, drive it back. White lipped, she raised her head and met my gaze. And in her eyes I read both terror and--shame.
It came to me that painful as it might be for her the time for questioning had come.
"Ruth," I said, "I know it's not necessary to remind you that we're in a tight place. Every fact and every scrap of knowledge that
we can lay hold of is of the utmost importance in enabling us to determine our course.
"I'm going to repeat your brother's question--what did Norhala do to you? And what happened when you were floating before the Disk?"
The blaze of interest in Drake's eyes at these questions changed to amazement at her stricken recoil from them.
"There was nothing," she whispered--then defiantly-- "nothing. I don't know what you mean."
"Ruth!" I spoke sharply now, in my own perplexity. "You do know. You must tell us--for his sake." I pointed toward Ventnor.
She drew a long breath.
"You're right--of course," she said unsteadily. "Only I--I thought maybe I could fight it out myself. But you'll have to know it--there's a taint upon me."
I caught in Drake's swift glance the echo of my own thrill of apprehension for her sanity.
"Yes," she said, now quietly. "Some new and alien thing within my heart, my brain, my soul. It came to me from Norhala when we rode the flying block, and--he-- sealed upon me when I was in--his"--again she crimsoned, "embrace."
And as we gazed at her, incredulously:
"A thing that urges me to forget you two--and Martin --and all the world I've known. That tries to pull me from you--from all--to drift untroubled in some vast calm filled with an ordered ecstasy of peace. And whose calling I want, God help me, oh, so desperately to heed!
"It whispered to me first," she said, "from Norhala-- when she put her arm around me. It whispered and then seemed to float from her and cover me like--like a veil, and from head to foot. It was a quietness and peace that held within it a happiness at one and the same time utterly tranquil and utterly free.
"I seemed to be at the doorway to unknown ecstasies --and the life I had known only a dream--and you, all of you--even Martin, dreams within a dream. You weren't --real--and you did not--matter."
"Hypnotism," muttered Drake, as she paused.
"No." She shook her head. "No--more than that. The wonder of it grew--and grew. I thrilled with it. I remember nothing of that ride, saw nothing--except that once through the peace enfolding me pierced warning that Martin was in peril, and I broke through to see him clutching Norhala and to see floating up in her eyes death for him.