Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1 Read online

  "When I remembered those stories they fell into place alongside a lot of others from different countries and times--the Sirens, for instance, and the Lorelei. Those legends are ancient. But perhaps here in the Amazon basin, in the forests that have never been cut and the swamps that have never been drained, the currupira is still real and alive. I hope so!"

  "Why?"

  "I want to meet it. I want to show it that men can destroy it with all its unholy power." Thwaite bore down viciously on the file and the bright flakes of lead glittered to the floor beside his feet.

  Dalton watched him with eyes of compassion. He heard the frog music swelling outside, a harrowing reminder of ultimate blasphemous insult, and he felt the futility of argument.

  "Remember, I heard it too," Dalton said. "And I sensed what you did. That voice or some combination of frequencies or overtones within it, is resonant to the essence of evil--the fundamental life-hating self-destroying evil in man--even to have glimpsed it, to have heard the brainless beast mocking, was an outrage to humanity that a man must...."

  Dalton paused, got a grip on himself. "But, consider--the outrage was wiped out, humanity won its victory over the monster a long time ago. What if it isn't quite extinct? That record was fifty thousand years old."

  "What did you do with the record?" Thwaite looked up sharply.

  "I obliterated that--the voice and the pictures that went with it from the film before I returned it to the Museum."

  Thwaite sighed deeply. "Good. I was damning myself for not doing that before I left."

  The linguist said, "I think it answered my question as much as I want it answered. The origin of speech--lies in the will to power, the lust to dominate other men by preying on the weakness or evil in them.

  "Those first men didn't just guess that such power existed--they knew because the beast had taught them and they tried to imitate it--the mystagogues and tyrants through the ages, with voices, with tomtoms and bull-roarers and trumpets. What makes the memory of that voice so hard to live with is just knowing that what it called to is a part of man--isn't that it?"

  Thwaite didn't answer. He had taken the heavy rifle across his knees and was methodically testing the movement of the well-oiled breech mechanism.

  Dalton stood up wearily and picked up his suitcase. "I'll check into the hotel. Suppose we talk this over some more in the morning. Maybe things'll look different by daylight."

  But in the morning Thwaite was gone--upriver with a hired boatman, said the natives. The note he had left said only, Sorry. But it's no use talking about humanity--this is personal.

  Dalton crushed the note angrily, muttering under his breath, "The fool! Didn't he realize I'd go with him?" He hurled the crumpled paper aside and stalked out to look for a guide.

  * * * * *

  They chugged slowly westward up the forest-walled river, an obscure tributary that flowed somewhere into the Xingú. After four days, they had hopes of being close on the others' track. The brown-faced guide, Joao, who held the tiller now, was a magician. He had conjured up an ancient outboard motor for the scow-like boat Dalton had bought from a fisherman.

  The sun was setting murkily and the sluggish swell of the water ahead was the color of witch's blood. Under its opaque surface a mae dágua, the Mother of Water, ruled over creatures slimy and razor-toothed. In the blackness beneath the great trees, where it was dark even at noon, other beings had their kingdom.

  Out of the forest came the crying grunting hooting voices of its life that woke at nightfall, fiercer and more feverish than that of the daytime. To the man from the north there seemed something indecent in the fertile febrile swarming of life here. Compared to a temperate woodland the mato was like a metropolis against a sleepy village.

  "What's that?" Dalton demanded sharply as a particularly hideous squawk floated across the water.

  "Nao é nada. A bicharia agitase." Joao shrugged. "The menagerie agitates itself." His manner indicated that some bichinho beneath notice had made the noise.

  But moments later the little brown man became rigid. He half rose to his feet in the boat's stern, then stooped and shut off the popping motor. In the relative silence the other heard what he had--far off and indistinct, muttering deep in the black mato, a voice that croaked of ravenous hunger in accents abominably known to him.

  "Currupira," said Joao tensely. "Currupira sai á caçada da noite." He watched the foreigner with eyes that gleamed in the fading light like polished onyx.

  "Avante!" snapped Dalton. "See if it comes closer to the river this time."

  It was not the first time they had heard that voice calling since they had ventured deep into the unpeopled swampland about which the downriver settlements had fearful stories to whisper.

  Silently the guide spun the engine. The boat sputtered on. Dalton strained his eyes, watching the darkening shore as he had watched fruitlessly for so many miles.

  But now, as they rounded a gentle bend, he glimpsed a small reddish spark near the bank. Then, by the last glimmer of the swiftly fading twilight, he made out a boat pulled up under gnarled tree-roots. That was all he could see but the movement of the red spark told him a man was sitting in the boat, smoking a cigarette.

  "In there," he ordered in a low voice but Joao had seen already and was steering toward the shore.

  The cigarette arched into the water and hissed out and they heard a scuffling and lap of water as the other boat swayed, which meant that the man in it had stood up.

  He sprang into visibility as a flashlight in Dalton's hand went on. A squat, swarthy man with rugged features, a caboclo, of white and Indian blood. He blinked expressionlessly at the light.

  "Where is the American scientist?" demanded Dalton in Portuguese.

  "Quem sabe? Foi-se."

  "Which way did he go?"

  "Nao importa. O doutor é doido; nao ha-de-voltar," said the man suddenly. "It doesn't matter. The doctor is crazy--he won't come back."

  "Answer me, damn it! Which way?"

  The caboclo jerked his shoulders nervously and pointed.

  "Come on!" said Dalton and scrambled ashore even as Joao was stopping the motor and making the boat fast beside the other. "He's gone in after it!"

  The forest was a black labyrinth. Its tangled darkness seemed to drink up the beam of the powerful flashlight Dalton had brought, its uneasy rustlings and animal-noises pressed in to swallow the sound of human movements for which he strained his ears, fearing to call out. He pushed forward recklessly, carried on by a sort of inertia of determination; behind him Joao followed, though he moved woodenly and muttered prayers under his breath.

  Then somewhere very near a great voice croaked briefly and was silent--so close that it poured a wave of faintness over the hearer, seemed to send numbing electricity tingling along his motor nerves.

  Joao dropped to his knees and flung both arms about a tree-bole. His brown face when the light fell on it was shiny with sweat, his eyes dilated and blind-looking. Dalton slammed the heel of his hand against the man's shoulder and got no response save for a tightening of the grip on the treetrunk, and a pitiful whimper, "Assombra-me--it overshadows me!"

  Dalton swung the flashlight beam ahead and saw nothing. Then all at once, not fifty yards away, a single glowing eye sprang out of the darkness, arched through the air and hit the ground to blaze into searing brilliance and white smoke. The clearing in which it burned grew bright as day, and Dalton saw a silhouetted figure clutching a rifle and turning its head from side to side.

  He plunged headlong toward the light of the flare, shouting, "Thwaite, you idiot! You can't--"

  And then the currupira spoke.

  Its bellowing seemed to come from all around, from the ground, the trees, the air. It smote like a blow in the stomach that drives out wind and fight. And it roared on, lashing at the wills of those who heard it, beating and stamping them out like sparks of a scattered fire.

  Dalton groped with one hand for his pocket but his hand kept slipping a
way into a matterless void as his vision threatened to slip into blindness. Dimly he saw Thwaite, a stone's throw ahead of him, start to lift his weapon and then stand frozen, swaying a little on his feet as if buffeted by waves of sound.

  Already the second theme was coming in--the insidious obbligato of invitation to death, wheedling that this way ... this way ... was the path from the torment and terror that the monstrous voice flooded over them.

  Thwaite took a stiff step, then another and another, toward the black wall of the mato that rose beyond the clearing. With an indescribable shudder Dalton realized that he too had moved an involuntary step forward. The currupira's voice rose triumphantly.

  With a mighty effort of will Dalton closed fingers he could not feel on the object in his pocket. Like a man lifting a mountain he lifted it to his lips.

  A high sweet note cut like a knife through the roll of nightmare drums. With terrible concentration Dalton shifted his fingers and blew and blew....

  Piercing and lingering, the tones of the pipes flowed into his veins, tingling, warring with the numbing poison of the currupira's song.

  Dalton was no musician but it seemed to him then that an ancestral instinct was with him, guiding his breath and his fingers. The powers of the monster were darkness and cold and weariness of living, the death-urge recoiling from life into nothingness.

  But the powers of the pipes were life and light and warmth, life returning when the winter is gone, greenness and laughter and love. Life was in them, life of men dead these thousand generations, life even of the craftsmen on an alien planet who had preserved their form and their meaning for this moment.

  Dalton advanced of his own will until he stood beside Thwaite--but the other remained unstirring and Dalton did not dare pause for a moment, while the monster yet bellowed in the blackness before them. The light of the flare was reddening, dying....

  After a seeming eternity he saw motion, saw the rifle muzzle swing up. The shot was deafening in his ear, but it was an immeasurable relief. As it echoed the currupira's voice was abruptly silent. In the bushes ahead there was a rending of branches, a frantic slithering movement of a huge body.

  They followed the noises in a sort of frenzy, plunging toward them heedless of thorns and whipping branches. The flashlight stabbed and revealed nothing. Out of the shadows a bass croaking came again, and Thwaite fired twice at the sound and there was silence save for a renewed flurry of cracking twigs.

  Along the water's edge, obscured by the trees between, moved something black and huge, that shone wetly. Thwaite dropped to one knee and began firing at it, emptying the magazine.

  They pressed forward to the margin of the slough, feet squishing in the deep muck. Dalton played his flashlight on the water's surface and the still-moving ripples seemed to reflect redly.

  Thwaite was first to break the silence. He said grimly, "Damned lucky for me you got here when you did. It--had me."

  Dalton nodded without speaking.

  "But how did you know what to do?" Thwaite asked.

  "It wasn't my discovery," said the linguist soberly. "Our remote ancestors met this threat and invented a weapon against it. Otherwise man might not have survived. I learned the details from the Martian records when I succeeded in translating them. Fortunately the Martians also preserved a specimen of the weapon our ancestors invented."

  He held up the little reed flute and the archeologist's eyes widened with recognition.

  Dalton looked out across the dark swamp-water, where the ripples were fading out. "In the beginning there was the voice of evil--but there was also the music of good, created to combat it. Thank God that in mankind's makeup there's more than one fundamental note!"

  * * *

  Contents

  THE ROTIFERS

  By Robert Abernathy

  Beneath the stagnant water shadowed by water lilies Harry found the fascinating world of the rotifers--but it was their world, and they resented intrusion.

  Henry Chatham knelt by the brink of his garden pond, a glass fish bowl cupped in his thin, nervous hands. Carefully he dipped the bowl into the green-scummed water and, moving it gently, let trailing streamers of submerged water weeds drift into it. Then he picked up the old scissors he had laid on the bank, and clipped the stems of the floating plants, getting as much of them as he could in the container.

  When he righted the bowl and got stiffly to his feet, it contained, he thought hopefully, a fair cross-section of fresh-water plankton. He was pleased with himself for remembering that term from the book he had studied assiduously for the last few nights in order to be able to cope with Harry's inevitable questions.

  There was even a shiny black water beetle doing insane circles on the surface of the water in the fish bowl. At sight of the insect, the eyes of the twelve-year-old boy, who had been standing by in silent expectation, widened with interest.

  "What's that thing, Dad?" he asked excitedly. "What's that crazy bug?"

  "I don't know its scientific name, I'm afraid," said Henry Chatham. "But when I was a boy we used to call them whirligig beetles."

  "He doesn't seem to think he has enough room in the bowl," said Harry thoughtfully. "Maybe we better put him back in the pond, Dad."

  "I thought you might want to look at him through the microscope," the father said in some surprise.

  "I think we ought to put him back," insisted Harry. Mr. Chatham held the dripping bowl obligingly. Harry's hand, a thin boy's hand with narrow sensitive fingers, hovered over the water, and when the beetle paused for a moment in its gyrations, made a dive for it.

  But the whirligig beetle saw the hand coming, and, quicker than a wink, plunged under the water and scooted rapidly to the very bottom of the bowl.

  Harry's young face was rueful; he wiped his wet hand on his trousers. "I guess he wants to stay," he supposed.

  The two went up the garden path together and into the house, Mr. Chatham bearing the fish bowl before him like a votive offering. Harry's mother met them at the door, brandishing an old towel.

  "Here," she said firmly, "you wipe that thing off before you bring it in the house. And don't drip any of that dirty pond water on my good carpet."

  "It's not dirty," said Henry Chatham. "It's just full of life, plants and animals too small for the eye to see. But Harry's going to see them with his microscope." He accepted the towel and wiped the water and slime from the outside of the bowl; then, in the living-room, he set it beside an open window, where the life-giving summer sun slanted in and fell on the green plants.

  ----

  The brand-new microscope stood nearby, in a good light. It was an expensive microscope, no toy for a child, and it magnified four hundred diameters. Henry Chatham had bought it because he believed that his only son showed a desire to peer into the mysteries of smallness, and so far Harry had not disappointed him; he had been ecstatic over the instrument. Together they had compared hairs from their two heads, had seen the point of a fine sewing needle made to look like the tip of a crowbar by the lowest power of the microscope, had made grains of salt look like discarded chunks of glass brick, had captured a house-fly and marvelled at its clawed hairy feet, its great red faceted eyes, and the delicate veining and fringing of its wings.

  Harry was staring at the bowl of pond water in a sort of fascination. "Are there germs in the water, Dad? Mother says pond water is full of germs."

  "I suppose so," answered Mr. Chatham, somewhat embarrassed. The book on microscopic fresh-water fauna had been explicit about Paramecium and Euglena, diatomes and rhizopods, but it had failed to mention anything so vulgar as germs. But he supposed that which the book called Protozoa, the one-celled animalcules, were the same as germs.

  He said, "To look at things in water like this, you want to use a well-slide. It tells how to fix one in the instruction book."

  He let Harry find the glass slide with a cup ground into it, and another smooth slip of glass to cover it. Then he half-showed, half-told him how to scrape gently along t
he bottom sides of the drifting leaves, to capture the teeming life that dwelt there in the slime. When the boy understood, his young hands were quickly more skillful than his father's; they filled the well with a few drops of water that was promisingly green and murky.

  Already Harry knew how to adjust the lighting mirror under the stage of the microscope and turn the focusing screws. He did so, bent intently over the eyepiece, squinting down the polished barrel in the happy expectation of wonders.

  Henry Chatham's eyes wandered to the fish bowl, where the whirligig beetle had come to the top again and was describing intricate patterns among the water plants. He looked back to his son, and saw that Harry had ceased to turn the screws and instead was just looking--looking with a rapt, delicious fixity. His hands lay loosely clenched on the table top, and he hardly seemed to breathe. Only once or twice his lips moved as if to shape an exclamation that was snatched away by some new vision.

  "Have you got it, Harry?" asked his father after two or three minutes during which the boy did not move.

  Harry took a last long look, then glanced up, blinking slightly.

  "You look, Dad!" he exclaimed warmly. "It's--it's like a garden in the water, full of funny little people!"

  Mr. Chatham, not reluctantly, bent to gaze into the eyepiece. This was new to him too, and instantly he saw the aptness of Harry's simile. There was a garden there, of weird, green, transparent stalks composed of plainly visible cells fastened end to end, with globules and bladders like fruits or seed-pods attached to them, floating among them; and in the garden the strange little people swam to and fro, or clung with odd appendages to the stalks and branches. Their bodies were transparent like the plants, and in them were pulsing hearts and other organs plainly visible. They looked a little like sea horses with pointed tails, but their heads were different, small and rounded, with big, dark, glistening eyes.

  All at once Mr. Chatham realized that Harry was speaking to him, still in high excitement.