Then and Now: Another Collection of Science Fiction

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  Perhaps Jack Vickers was being mastered by some ultra-hypnotic power which Dr. Athelstane had discovered and had learned to use. Perhaps the presence of those Hexagon Lights—flickering and trembling out there beyond the window in a thousand patterns of living fire—had something to do with the distortion of the newscast man’s normal viewpoint.

  His face stern, he turned toward the rosy-cheeked, amiable scientist. “I will help you fulfill your intentions, Dr. Athelstane,” he said.

  The little student of the Moon beamed joyfully. “Thank you, my friend!” he enthused. “Thank you! And now—shall we start at once? There is a certain device which we must finish constructing. It is more than half completed now. But you must do most of the remaining work. My hands are no longer steady enough. Never fear that you lack skill or knowledge, for I shall be with you always, guiding you, directing you. However, certain circumstances prevent the operations being carried on in this building. We must don space armor and toil out in the open.”

  Jack Vickers arose from his chair with a swift, mechanical animation. He knew that pain still lanced through his skull; but the presence of that pain seemed to be pushed far away from his conscious attention so that it no longer troubled him. He moved with deliberate, concentrated efficiency, taking no more note of his surroundings than was necessary to accomplish what he must do.

  Presently, clad in a space armor once more, Vickers was striding out of the building, carrying a heavy box under his arm. Athelstane, similarly attired, followed him closely, giving sharp, precise orders through the communicator phones that operated by means of a cable which now joined the two space suits.

  “Here is a good place. Set the box down. Open it. There are tools and supplies inside. The apparatus is partly assembled—”

  Jack went to work. Never had he labored before with such feverish, calm singleness of purpose, setting intricate, though roughly made pieces of crystal and metal together and fastening them into place.

  Around him, in the slowly advancing shadows of afternoon, trembled the Hexagon Lights—glorious, hideous, geometric. But he paid no attention to them at all. He listened only to the commands of Dr. Athelstane, the Magician of Dream Valley, the champion of the unknown.

  HE WORKED on and on, even after the dense, black terror of the Lunar night, two weeks in length, had settled down upon him. The lamp attached to the crest of his helmet provided adequate illumination.

  He did not sleep until weariness had exhausted him. Then he did so in his space armor, its length sprawled upon the ashy ground. Food was within reach. There would be no need to return to the Athelstane laboratory building at all.

  Sleep periods and periods of toil, with the Hexagon Lights seeming to look on like dancing ghosts, much more brilliant now, in the gloom. A tiny welder torch flaming.

  Athelstane did no manual work himself; he only advised and explained and directed, like a guiding genius of this magical, silent place of ruined walls and saw-tooth crags.

  It wasn’t till the wingtip of the solar corona, first herald of the Lunar dawn, thrust a finger of white light over the horizon, that the wicked apparatus was completed. It was conical in form, plain and crystalline on its exterior, but housing a maze of carefully balanced parts that was a marvel of intricacy. Bizarrely suggestive of another science, there was something as wickedly threatening about it as the gaze of a demon of hell.

  “We are ready,” said Athelstane, who had long ago shed his benignant air. “Pick up the apparatus. We must go now to Imbrium City.”

  Vickers felt weak and wasted, but that unholy concentration of energy was still within him, and he obeyed without question. He strapped the conical device to the small ringbolts at the back of his armor. Then, with Athelstane following him, he started out.

  They climbed up the rugged slope, leaving Dream Valley, the haunted, the mysterious, behind them. They moved along the gloomy pass that wound down through the jagged mountains toward the undulating reaches of Mare Imbrium. And all around them, traveling like an escort of ghouls, was a host of Hexagon Lights, their forms changing constantly, their colors shifting from soft rose, through orange, yellow, green and blue, to softest violet, and back again.

  Once the two men had reached Mare Imbrium, the going should have been easy and swift. But twelve hours out on its surface, the motor of one of the tractor-boots of Jack’s armor suffered a breakdown. It took two Earth-days to make tentative repairs, and after that it was only possible to continue on at half speed.

  The journey was dragged out all through that blazing Lunar day, each moment of which seemed to take its toll of weariness and strain. By this time Jack’s supply of concentrated rations was exhausted.

  The Sun was setting when the phosphorescent green sky-glow over Imbrium City hove into view above the abrupt horizon. It was several hours more before the stupendous slag heaps of the fuel plant loomed like small mountains in the gathering shadows.

  BY THEN, Jack Vickers, after a month of unnatural, driving effort, was almost dead on his feet. And Dr. Athelstane seemed to be in an even worse condition. His voice, coming through the connecting phone line, had faded away to a thin thread of insistence and determination.

  “Just a little farther we must go for the best and quickest results!” he was saying. “The Hexagon Lights will repeople the Moon swiftly, once the men are destroyed and the functioning of the plant gradually dies out. Then let human colonists try to rebuild their interests at Imbrium City! The Hexagon Lights had no adequate means of defense before—they had not developed, by a cryptic science of their own, the means to fight their enemies. But now they lack only numbers! Madness is in the emanations of their forms—madness to men! You know that, don’t you? You know that they are sentient beings don’t you? I have tricked you, my young friend! I have tricked you! On! On—”

  Jack had long ago sensed the definitely sinister something which animated Athelstane, but he could do nothing about it now. There was a spell in his brain, his nerves, and his muscles, that was like a surging, unbreakable habit. He could only know now that his vague intimations of something nameless had had grotesque fact hiding behind it: Madness! He must go on and on—

  The hovering Hexagon Lights were all but gone now, most of them having retreated from the lethal rays of the fuel plant. But a few, dim and colorless, still hung on grimly, as though they knew that the mission of these two humans was one of salvation for their kind.

  Night was near. In the sky the huge, green Earth glowed, a mottled monster.

  “Here, my friend!” Athelstane whispered. “Here is close enough! Set the apparatus of vengeance on the ground! Press the control boss!”

  And once more Jack moved to obey. But then, from one of the smouldering stacks of the rocket fuel plant, there was a brief, brilliant puff of greenish smoke. Just a trifling irregularity of the functioning of the equipment below. The green halo in the sky brightened.

  Jack heard Athelstane give a thin scream: “Quick! Act as I have told you, you fool! At once! I—”

  The tenuous voice faded away.

  JACK VICKERS did not respond as he always had before. For a moment he felt dazed and empty, like a marionette when the strings are dropped by its operator. Utter exhaustion gripped him, and he sagged limply within his space suit. The driving force that had held him in thrall was at an end.

  Then fear came—the fear of the unknown brought to him by reasoning that was independent at last. And in this compelling emotion there was a new driving force.

  Jack forced himself to look around. He was alone. Athelstane, in his bulky armor, had vanished utterly! So had the few, faint Hexagon Lights, as if they had been mysteriously snuffed out!

  The newscast man didn’t know what to make of it all at first. But the sharp, dagger-like terror that came with his release from a spell gave a keener edge to his wits. He noticed for one thing that the cable of the communicator phone was not dragging behind him as would have been the case had it been broken or disconnected from Athelstan
e’s space armor. Instead—it was neatly coiled at the hip of his suit!

  Almost instantly he patched the scattered fragments of evidence together, arriving at an incredible conclusion! A people beyond human dreams, wielding a miraculous science that was all their own! Vickers couldn’t be sure as to how it had all been accomplished, but he knew now that he had been tricked in a manner far more subtle than he could have supposed!

  His urges centered on a new objective. The Hexagon Lights! Back there in Dream Valley. Everywhere that they might be on the Lunar surface! They must be wiped out swiftly, before any further treachery could emanate from them! Young Vickers thought of the conical apparatus of mystery on his back, and wondered in what hellish way it was meant to inflict death.

  There was only one means that Jack knew of to accomplish his purpose. It was a dangerous, destructive means. But when a threat of such vital significance loomed, you didn’t think too much of the price.

  He waited until the thick, astral darkness came, just to be more sure that his operations would not be interfered with by members of his own kind. Then he struggled on between the slag heaps. He climbed a stair over a massive wall. He worked a little service airlock that had been left unfastened. He entered the nearest building of the plant.

  This was a sleep period, and there was no one about in the great room. But in a colossal, shallow vat a super-heated liquid smouldered, giving off glowing radioactive vapors.

  Vickers moved purposefully to a switch panel and moved a dial. Exciter rays poured down from a projector, striking the molten contents of the vat with increased force. The viscous, lava-like stuff began to seethe. In approximately fifteen minutes there would be an eruption of atomic force—one whose radioactive rays would penetrate far and wide, whose gases, pouring out similar rays, would envelop the Moon briefly, insuring the complete extinction of the Hexagon Lights in a matter of a few hours.

  Nor was there any possibility of preventing the explosion now, with the exciter beams turned to full as they were. In a moment the automatic alarm gongs would be ringing in Imbrium City. The populace would be rushing to underground refuges, shielded and safe.

  Vickers hurried out of the building the way he had come, seeking the shelter of a vast pile of slag. The radiations of the eruption might burn him a little here, but he would be safe. Those radiations were not sure death to men as they were to the Hexagon Lights.

  Though, in the scope of science, there might exist other waves of the ether that would wipe out human life while scarcely affecting beings like the Hexagon Lights at all—

  TWO LUNAR DAYS later—more than two Earth months.

  No one had discovered Jack Vickers’ part in the disaster at Imbrium City. All evidence of his tampering had been blotted out by the blast. Now, the process of reconstruction was in progress.

  But Jack himself was far away—once more in Dream Valley, which was stripped now of its eerie people. The vacuum between the towering, black-shadowed crags was crystal clear with desertion.

  Vickers had come back to penetrate the last doors of a grotesque, romantic enigma—the last doors that would ever be open to him or any other man.

  Half fearfully he searched for the low, metal dwelling of Dr. Athelstane. But as he had expected, it was nowhere to be found.

  There was no evidence of human intrusion here, except for the ageless footprints in the dust, and one prostrate space armor, around which were crude pieces of apparatus. Beyond the armor’s face panel of darkened glass, Jack Vickers saw the withered visage of a little man. That man had been a lifeless mummy for a long time, a thing of sunken eyes and shrivelled cheeks.

  "I think I almost understand it all now,” Jack muttered. ‘‘The Hexagon Lights really were living entities—entities woven of the imperceptible fabric of the ether!

  “This corpse was the real Athelstane. He came here to study the Hexagon Lights, but—they studied him instead! The waves they created beat upon his brain, and they mastered him almost at once, using a new projection of their strange science! Somehow they must have learned how to design the apparatus—the cone of death—even though, being so tenuously constituted, they could not fabricate material things themselves. Perhaps the science which enabled them to do this was entirely theoretical. Perhaps they had means of experiment and research both unknown and inconceivable to men.

  “They made Athelstane begin construction of the cone. He worked with his own tools, making the needed parts with the aid of makeshift equipment that enabled him to draw the needed substances, metal and so forth, from the soil of the Moon!

  “But Athelstane died, worn out, before the job was completed. Then I came here! The laboratory, and the Athelstane I saw and talked to, were both just myths induced in my brain by means of something which must have been a kind of telepathic projection of pictures, sounds, and other sensory impressions. Perhaps this hoax was used to help win my confidence. The Hexagon Lights knew all about Athelstane, and could duplicate his personality easily enough. Certainly, too, though I seemed to remove my space suit on entering the mythical lab, I did not do so at all, but only submitted to suggestion of some kind, and imagined I did!

  “Well, I finished the conical device meant to radiate death to every man in the vicinity of Imbrium City! It was natural that the Hexagon Lights, being creatures of the ether, should employ etheric waves to accomplish their purposes. They lived and worked and died by such vibrations.

  “When I approached Imbrium City with the cone, the emanations of the fuel plant became stronger and stronger, driving all but the hardiest of the Hexagon Lights back. Then came that minor flicker from the vapor chimney. The emanations increased in intensity, and those Hexagon Lights near me were destroyed. Of course, the mirage that was Athelstane vanished with the minds that produced it.

  “The Magician of Dream Valley! No wonder that vision of a man was called that! No wonder his perfectly tangible, though nonexistent, form left no permanent tracks in the dust! No wonder I did not see the laboratory when I first looked down into Dream Valley! It was not till my arrival was discovered that the vision was produced!

  “What a story, if I could spill it all! Lord, what a narrow squeak it was! Those devilish, half-real ghosts of hell! Who knows what they might have done, even on Earth!”

  Suddenly, though, Jack Vickers felt somehow a trifle sad. A unique and wonderful people had fought a valiant battle to live, and—had lost.

  The End

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  The Shadow of the Veil,

  by Raymond Z. Gallun

  Astounding Feb. 1939

  Short Story - 4300 words

  A man made himself a brutal god—

  But a god should know the strange properties of his subjects!

  GRUD lifted himself out of the waves. His ponderous bulk stood there in the surf, its massive, horn-plated head hunched down sullenly, its sloping, walrus-like shoulders dripping brine. In the acrid volcanic murk that floated out to sea from beyond the crags of the coast, Grud looked like some legendary demon come to life.

  But there was no one to observe except the great nautilus-squids that rolled on the beach with every surging beat of the ocean. Unless, of course, Ree-Jaar-Env somehow saw too—

  Grud’s Gargantuan frame stiffened in reminiscence, and he paused momentarily, as if to seek concealment. But no, that was not the way, now that he was trying to work up the courage needed to act on a wild plan. He must appear submissive. He must be careful as never before, even though to do so imposed a painful burden of self-control.

  Grud let his huge, flipper-like paws, adapted both for swimming and for the handling of objects, dangle limply at his sides, in direct contradiction to the hatred and fury that blazed within him.

  Ree-Jaar-Env was the black god who had recently come to Karud, Grud’s world, oppressing, demanding tribute, showing at every turn that his magic was greater than any possible defiance. Death was his lash—death spat from the mouth of his image. Death s
pat, invisibly too, from the depths of the sky. There seemed no way to fight such a taskmaster.

  Still, Grud was full of memories of the old peace. Not long ago his clan had dwelt comfortably there, in the sea-washed caves of the coastal cliffs. They had hunted food in the blue depths. They had played their simple games together. They had reared their offspring. They had conceived and worshiped their own gods—the big blue sun that blazed through the mists, and Leedaav, the ghostly veil that shifted and waxed and dwindled there in the heavens, working an awful, periodic wonder.

  Grud did not know the nature of Leedaav, the Veil. Astronomy was beyond his grasp. He was not aware that that whirling, silvery miracle was a cloud of cosmic dust that followed an immense planetary path around the giant blue sun, and just within the orbit of Karud itself. Perhaps that nebulous mass, many millions of miles in extent, was the wreckage of two planets that had collided. But to Grud’s primitive mind, such things were inconceivable. He was unaware, even that Karud was a globe, or that it had an orbit.

  For the present he had forgotten that old divinity of fear, Leedaav, the Veil. It was time to go to the worshiping place to confer with Ree-Jaar-Env, who was far more terrible. If Grud delayed even for a moment, there was danger.