Alien Archives, page 31
We went forward. The creature had disappeared up ahead, though we caught occasional glimpses of the blue-white light as it passed between the low little buildings of the town. We reached the man who had tripped; he had not arisen, but lay face down, shivering, covering his head with his hands. A low rumbling moan of fear came steadily from him. From in front of us, hoarse cries of terror drifted to us from here and there as this villager or that encountered the thing that was passing through their town, and now and again we could see that cool bright light, rising steadily above us until finally it was shining down from the upper levels of Ayasuluk Hill.
“You really want to go up there?” I asked him.
He didn’t offer me an answer, nor did he stop moving forward. I wasn’t about to turn back either, I realized. Willy-nilly I followed him to the end of the street, around a half-ruined mosque at the base of the hill, and up to a lofty metal gate tipped with spikes. Stoned on our own adrenaline, we swarmed up that gate like Crusaders attacking a Saracen fortress, went over the top, dropped down in the bushes on the far side. I was able to see, by the brilliant gleam of the full moon, the low walls of the destroyed Basilica of St. John just beyond, and, behind it, the massive Byzantine fortification that crowned the hill. Together we scrambled toward the summit.
“You go this way, Tim. I’ll go the other and we’ll meet on the far side.”
“Right.”
I didn’t know what I was looking for. I just ran, leftward around the hill. Along the ramparts, into the church, down the empty aisles, out the gaping window-frames. Suddenly I caught a glimpse of something up ahead. Light, cool white light, an unearthly light very much like moonlight, only concentrated into a fiercely gleaming point hovering a couple of yards above the ground, thirty or forty feet in front of me.
“Charlie?” I called. My voice was no more than a hoarse gasp. I edged forward. The light was so intense now that I was afraid it might damage my eyes. But I continued to stare, as if the thing would disappear if I were to blink for even a millionth of a second.
I heard the wailing music again.
Soft, distant, eerie. Cables rubbing together in a dark shaft. This time it seemed to be turned outward, rising far beyond me, reaching into distant space or perhaps some even more distant dimension. Something calling, announcing its regained freedom, summoning—whom? What?
“Charlie?” I said. It was a barely audible croak. “Charlie?”
I noticed him now, edging up from the other side. I pointed at the source of the light. He nodded.
I moved closer. The light seemed to change, to grow momentarily less fierce. And then I was able to see her.
She wasn’t exactly identical to the statues in the museum. Her face wasn’t really a face, at least not a human one. She had beady eyes, faceted the way an insect’s are. She had an extra set of arms, little dangling ones, coming out at her hips. And, though the famous breasts were there, at least fifty of them and maybe the hundred of legend, I don’t think they were actual breasts because I don’t think this creature was a mammal. More of a reptile, I would guess: leathery skin, more or less scaly the way a snake’s is, and tiny dots of nostrils, and a black slithery tongue, jagged like a lightning bolt, that came shooting quickly out between her slitted slips again and again and again, as though checking on the humidity or the ambient temperature or some such thing.
I saw, and Charlie saw. For a fraction of a second I wanted to drop down on my knees and rub my forehead in the ground and give worship. And then I just wanted to run.
I said, “Charlie, I definitely think we ought to get the hell out of—”
“Cool it, bro,” he said. He stepped forward. Walked right up to her, stared her in the face. I was terrified for him, seeing him get that close. She dwarfed him. He was like a doll in front of her. How had a thing this big managed to fit in that opening in the tunnel wall? How had those ancient Greeks ever managed to get her in there in the first place?
That dazzling light crackled and hissed around her like some sort of electrical discharge. And yet Charlie stood his ground, unflinching, rock-solid. The expression on my brother’s face was a nearly incomprehensible mixture of anger and fear.
He jabbed his forefinger through the air at her.
“You,” he said to her. It was almost a snarl. “Tell me what the hell you are.”
They were maybe ten feet apart, the man and the—what? The goddess? The monster?
Charlie had to know.
“You speak English?” he demanded. “Turkish? Tell me. I’m the one who let you out of that hole. Tell me what you are. I want to know.” Eye to eye, face to face. “Something from another planet, are you, maybe? Another dimension? An ancient race that used to live on the Earth before humans did?”
“Charlie,” I whispered.
But he wouldn’t let up. “Or maybe you’re an actual, literal goddess,” he said. His tone had turned softer, a mocking croon now. “Diana of Ephesus, is that who you are? Stepping right out of the pages of mythology in all your fantastic beauty? Well, do me some magic, goddess, if that’s who you are. Do a miracle for me, just a little one.” The angry edge was back in his voice. “Turn that tree into an elephant. Turn me into a sheep, if you can. What’s the matter, Diana, you no spikka da English? All right. Why the hell should you? But how about Greek, then? Surely you can understand Greek.”
“For Christ’s sake, Charlie—”
He ignored me. It was as if I wasn’t there. He was talking to her in Greek, now. I suppose it was Greek. It was harsh, thick-sounding, jaggedly rhythmic. His eyes were wild and his face was flushed with fury. I was afraid that she would hurl a thunderbolt of blue-white light at him, but no, no, she just stood there through all his whole harangue, as motionless as those statues of her in the little museum, listening patiently as my furious brother went on and on and on at her in the language of Homer and Sophocles.
He stopped, finally. Waited as if expecting her to respond.
No response came. I could hear the whistling sound of her slow steady breathing; occasionally there was some slight movement of her body; but that was all.
“Well, Diana?” Charlie said. “What do you have to say for yourself, Diana?”
Silence.
“You fraud!” Charlie cried, in a great and terrible voice. “You fake! Some goddess you are! You aren’t real at all, and that’s God’s own truth. You aren’t even here. You’re nothing but a fucking hallucination. A projection of some kind. I bet I could walk up to you and put my hand right through you.”
Still no reaction. Nothing. She just stood there, those faceted eyes glittering, that little tongue flickering. Saying nothing, offering him no help.
That was when he flipped out. Charlie seemed to puff up as if about to explode with rage, and went rushing toward her, arms raised, fists clenched in a wild gesture of attack. I wanted desperately to stop him, but my feet were frozen in place. I was certain that he was going to die. We both were.
“Damn you!” he roared, with something like a sob behind the fury. “Damn you, damn you, damn you!”
But before he could strike her, her aura flared up around her like a sheath, and for a moment the air was full of brilliant flares of cold flame that went whirling and whirling around her in a way that was too painful to watch. I caught a glimpse of Charlie staggering back from her, and I backed away myself, covering my face with my forearm, but even so the whirling lights came stabbing into my brain, forcing me to the ground. It seemed then that they all coalesced into a single searing point of white light, which rose like a dagger into the sky, climbing, climbing, becoming something almost like a comet, and—then—
Vanishing.
And then I blanked out.
It was just before dawn when I awakened. My eyes fluttered open almost hesitantly. The moon was gone, the first pink streaks of light beginning to appear. Charlie sat beside me. He was already awake. “Where is it?” I asked immediately.
“Gone, bro.”
“Gone?”
He nodded. “Without a trace. If it ever was up here with us at all.”
“What do you mean, if?”
“If, that’s what I mean. Who the hell knows what was going on up here last night? Do you?”
“No.”
“Well, neither do I. All I know is that it isn’t going on anymore. There’s nobody around but me and thee.”
He was trying to sound like the old casual Charlie I knew, the man who had been everywhere and done everything and took it all in his stride. But there was a quality in his voice that I had never heard in it before, something entirely new.
“Gone?” I said, stupidly. “Really gone?”
“Really gone, yes. Vanished. You hear how quiet everything is?” Indeed the town, spread out below us, was silent except for the crowing of the first roosters and the far-off sound of a farm tractor starting up somewhere.
“Are you all right?” I asked him.
“Fine,” he said. “Absolutely fine.”
But he said it through clenched teeth. I couldn’t bear to look at him. A thing had happened here that badly needed explanation, and no explanations were available, and I knew what that must be doing to him. I kept staring at the place where that eerie being had been, and I remembered that single shaft of light that had taken its place, and I felt a crushing sense of profound and terrible loss. Something strange and weirdly beautiful and utterly fantastic and inexplicable had been loose in the world for a little while, after centuries of—what? Imprisonment? Hibernation?—and now it was gone, and it would never return. It had known at once, I was sure, that this was no era for goddesses. Or whatever it was.
We sat side by side in silence for a minute or two.
“I think we ought to go back down now,” I said finally.
“Right. Let’s go back down,” Charlie said.
And without saying another word as we descended, we made our way down the hill of Ayasuluk, the hill of St. John the Apostle, who was the man who wrote the Book of Revelations.
***
MR. GLADSTONE WAS HAVING BREAKFAST in the hotel coffee shop when Charlie and I came in. He saw at once that something was wrong and asked if he could help in any way, and after some hesitation we told him something of what had happened, and then we told him more, and then we told him the whole story right to the end.
He didn’t laugh and he didn’t make any sarcastic skeptical comments. He took it all quite seriously.
“Perhaps the Seal of Solomon was what was on that marble slab,” he suggested. “The Turks would say some such thing, at any rate. King Solomon had power over the evil jinn, and locked them away in flasks and caves and tombs, and put his seal on them to keep them locked up. It’s in the Koran.”
“You’ve read the Koran?” I asked, surprised.
“I’ve read a lot of things,” said Mr. Gladstone.
“The Seal of Solomon,” Charlie said, scowling. He was trying hard to be his old self again, and almost succeeding. Almost. “Evil spirits. Magic. Oh, Jesus Christ!”
“Perhaps,” said Mr. Gladstone.
“What?” Charlie said.
The little man from Ohio or Indiana or Iowa put his hand over Charlie’s. “If only I could help you,” he said. “But you’ve been undone, haven’t you, by the evidence of things seen.”
“You have the quote wrong,” said Charlie. “‘The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ Book of Hebrews, 11:1.”
Mr. Gladstone was impressed. So was I.
“But this is different,” he said to Charlie. “This time, you actually saw. You were, I think, a man who prided himself on believing in nothing at all. But now you can no longer even believe in your own disbelief.” Charlie reddened. “Saw what? A goddess? Jesus! You think I believe that that was a goddess? A genuine immortal supernatural being of a higher order of existence? Or—what?—some kind of actual alien creature? You want me to believe it was an alien that had been locked up in there all that time? An alien from where? Mars? And who locked it up? Or was it one of King Solomon’s jinn, maybe?”
“Does it really matter which it was?” Mr. Gladstone asked softly.
Charlie started to say something; but he choked it back. After a moment he stood. “Listen, I need to go now,” he said. “Mr. Gladstone—Timmo—I’ll catch up with you later, is that all right?”
And then he turned and stalked away. But before he left, I saw the look in his eyes.
His eyes. Oh, Charlie. Oh. Those eyes. Those frightened, empty eyes.
SUNRISE ON MERCURY
That curious ancient custom—now extinct, I think—of having writers construct stories around cover paintings, rather than having covers painted to illustrate scenes in stories that had already been written—brought “Sunrise on Mercury” into existence in the hyperactive November of 1956, when I was beginning to enter my most prolific years as a writer. In that vanished era, the pulp-magazine chains liked to print their covers four issues at once, which meant that there was usually no time to go through the process of buying a story, sending it out to an artist to be illustrated, making plates from the artist’s painting, etc. Instead the artists thought up ideas for illustrations—a scene conceived for its qualities of vivid and dramatic visual excitement, but not necessarily embodying any sort of plausibility—and it went to press right away, while some reliable writer was hired to work it, by hook or by crook, into a story that could be published to accompany it. It’s a measure of how quickly things had changed for me at this point that I was already being given such assignments, here in the second year of my career. But the editors had come to see that I could be depended on to utilize the illustration in some relatively plausible way and to turn my cover story in on time.
So Bob Lowndes, the editor of Science Fiction Stories and Future Science Fiction, would hand me proofs of two or three upcoming covers, and I would go home and write stories of five or six thousand words to accompany each one. The money wasn’t much—a cent or maybe a cent and a half a word, cut-rate stuff even in those days—but it was a guaranteed sale, and so speedy was I at turning out the stories that even at $60 for 6,000 words, which is what I was paid for “Sunrise on Mercury,” I did all right. (I could write a short story in a day, four of them a week with the fifth day reserved for visiting editorial offices to deliver stories and pick up new assignments, back then. $60 for a day’s pay was nothing contemptible in 1956, when annual salaries in the mid-four-figure range were the norm.)
The cover that inspired this one, by Ed Emshwiller, showed the bleak landscape of Mercury with the sun rising ominously in the upper left-hand corner, a transparent plastic dome melting in Daliesque fashion in the upper right, and two harassed-looking men in spacesuits running for their lives below. Obviously something unexpected was going on, like sunrise happening a week ahead of schedule; so all I had to do was figure out a reason why that might occur, and I would have my sixty bucks. And so I conjured up a really alien life-form, as anything living on inhospitable Mercury would have to be, and wrote a story around it. The result, all things considered, wasn’t half bad; and the story, which Lowndes used in the May 1957 Science Fiction Stories, has been frequently anthologized over the past fifty years.
NINE MILLION MILES TO THE sunward of Mercury, with the Leverrier swinging into the series of spirals that would bring it down on the solar system’s smallest world, Second Astrogator Lon Curtis decided to end his life.
Curtis had been lounging in a webfoam cradle waiting for the landing to be effected; his job in the operation was over, at least until the Leverrier’s landing jacks touched Mercury’s blistered surface. The ship’s efficient sodium-coolant system negated the efforts of the swollen sun visible through the rear screen. For Curtis and his seven shipmates, no problems presented themselves; they had only to wait while the autopilot brought the ship down for man’s second landing on Mercury.
Flight Commander Harry Ross was sitting near Curtis when he noticed the sudden momentary stiffening of the astrogator’s jaws. Curtis abruptly reached for the control nozzle. From the spinnerets that had spun the webfoam came a quick green burst of dissolving fluorochrene; the cradle vanished. Curtis stood up.
“Going somewhere?” Ross asked.
Curtis’s voice was harsh. “Just—just taking a walk.”
Ross returned his attention to his microbook for a moment as Curtis walked away. There was the ratchety sound of a bulkhead dog being manipulated, and Ross felt a momentary chill as the cooler air of the superrefrigerated reactor compartment drifted in.
He punched a stud, turning the page. Then—
What the hell is he doing in the reactor compartment?
The autopilot would be controlling the fuel flow, handling it down to the milligram, in a way no human system could. The reactor was primed for the landing, the fuel was stoked, the compartment was dogged shut. No one—least of all a second astrogator—had any business going back there.
Ross had the foam cradle dissolved in an instant, and was on his feet a moment later. He dashed down the companionway and through the open bulkhead door into the coolness of the reactor compartment.
Curtis was standing by the converter door, toying with the release-tripper. As Ross approached, he saw the astrogator get the door open and put one foot into the chute that led downship to the nuclear pile.
“Curtis, you idiot! Get away from there! You’ll kill us all!”
The astrogator turned, looked blankly at Ross for an instant, and drew up his other foot. Ross leaped.
He caught Curtis’ booted foot in his hands, and despite a barrage of kicks from the astrogator’s free boot, managed to drag Curtis off the chute. The astrogator tugged and pulled, attempting to break free. Ross saw the man’s pale cheeks quivering. Curtis had cracked, but thoroughly.
Grunting, Ross yanked Curtis away from the yawning reactor chute and slammed the door shut. He dragged him out into the main section again and slapped him, hard.
“Why’d you want to do that? Don’t you know what your mass would do to the ship if it got into the converter? You know the fuel intake’s been calibrated already; 180 extra pounds and we’d arc right into the sun. What’s wrong with you, Curtis?”
