Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1 Read online

  Neena pressed her face against Var's shoulder, hiding her eyes. In her mind as it groped for his there was a confusion of horror and pity. Var looked grimly at the Watcher, and would have spoken; but the Watcher seemed suddenly a very long way off, and Var could no longer feel his own limbs, his face was a numb mask. Dully he heard the old man say, "You are tired. Best sleep until morning."

  Var strove to cry out that there was no time, that Groz was near and that sleep was for infants and the aged, but his intention sank and drowned under wave upon wave of unconquerable languor. The bright cave swam and dissolved; his eyelids closed.

  * * * * *

  Var woke. Daylight glimmered through the ice of the cave mouth. He had been unconscious, helpless, for hours! At the thought of that, panic gripped him. He had not slept since childhood, and he had forgotten how it was.

  He came to his feet in one quick movement, realizing in that action that sleep had refreshed his mind and body--realizing also that a footstep had wakened him. Across the cave he faced a young man who watched him coolly with dark piercing eyes that were familiar though he did not know the face.

  Neena sat up and stifled a cry of fright. Var growled, "Who are you? Where's the Watcher?"

  The other flashed white teeth in a smile. "I'm the Watcher," he answered. "Often I become a youth at morning, and relax into age as the day passes. A foolish amusement, no doubt, but amusements are few here."

  "You made us fall asleep. Groz will be on us--"

  "Groz and his people could not detect your thoughts as you slept. They were all night chasing elusive dreams on the high ridges, miles away."

  Var passed a hand across bewildered eyes. Neena said softly, "Thank you, Watcher."

  "Don't thank me. I take no sides in your valley feuds. But now you are rested, your minds are clear. Do you still mean to go on to the Ryzga mountain?"

  Not looking at the Watcher, Var muttered unsteadily, "We have no alternative."

  There was a liquid tinkling as the ice-curtain collapsed; the fresh breeze of morning swept into the cave. The youth beckoned to them, and they followed him outside.

  The glacial slope on which the cavern opened faced toward the mountain. It rose black and forbidding in the dawn as it had by sunset. To right and left of it, the grand cliffs, ocher and red, were lit splendidly by the morning sun, but the mountain of the Ryzgas drank in the light and gave nothing back.

  Below their feet the slope fell away into an opaque sea of fog, filling a mile-wide gorge. There was a sound of turbulent water, of a river dashed from rock to rock in its struggle toward the plain, but the curling fog hid everything.

  "You have an alternative," said the Watcher crisply. The two took their eyes from the black mountain and gazed at him in sudden hope, but his face was unsmiling. "It is this. You, Var, can flee up the canyon to the north, by a way I will show you, disguising your thoughts and masking your presence as well as you are able, while the girl goes in the other direction, southward, without seeking to conceal herself. Your pursuers will be deceived and follow her, and by the time they catch her it will be too late for them to overtake Var."

  That possibility had not occurred to them at all. Var and Neena looked at one another. Then by common consent they blended their minds into one.

  They thought, in the warm intimacy of unreserved understanding: "It would work: I-you would make the sacrifice of shame and mockery--yet these can be borne--that I-you might be saved from death--which is alone irreparable.... But to become I and you again--that cannot be borne."

  They said in unison, "No. Not that."

  The Watcher's face did not change. He said gravely, "Very well. I will give you what knowledge I have that may help you when you enter the Ryzga mountain."

  Quickly, he impressed on them what he had learned of the structure of the mountain and of its guardian machines. Var closed his eyes, a little dizzied by the rapid flood of detail.

  "You are ready to go," said the Watcher. He spoke aloud, and his voice was cracked and harsh. Var opened his eyes in surprise, and saw that the Watcher had become again the hoary ancient of last night.

  Var felt a twinge of unfamiliar emotion; only by its echo in Neena's mind did he recognize it as a sense of guilt. He said stiffly, "You don't blame us?"

  "You have taken life in your own hands," rasped the Watcher. "Who does that needs no blessing and feels no curse. Go!"

  * * * * *

  They groped through the fog above blank abysses that hid the snarling river, crept hand in hand, sharing their strength, across unstable dream bridges from crag to crag. Groz and his pack, in their numbers, would cross the gorge more surely and swiftly. When Var and Neena set foot at last on the cindery slope of the great volcanic cone, they sensed that the pursuit already halved their lead.

  They stood high on the side of the Ryzga mountain, and gazed at the doorway. It was an opaque yet penetrable well of darkness, opening into the face of a lava cliff, closed only by an intangible curtain--so little had the Ryzgas feared those who might assail them in their sleep.

  Var sent his thoughts probing beyond the curtain, listened intently, head thrown back, to their echoes that returned. The tunnel beyond slanted steeply downward. Var's hands moved, molding a radiant globe from the feeble sunshine that straggled through the fog-bank. With an abrupt motion he hurled it. The sun-globe vanished, as if the darkness had drunk it up, but though sight did not serve they both sensed that it had passed through to light up the depths beyond. For within the mountain something snapped suddenly alert--something alive yet not living, seeing yet blind. They felt light-sensitive cells tingle in response, felt electric currents sting along buried, long-idle circuits....

  The two stood shivering together.

  The morning wind stirred, freshening, the fog lifted a little, and they heard a great voice crying, "There they are!"

  Var and Neena turned. Far out in the sea of fog, on a dream bridge that they could not see, stood Groz. He shook the staff he carried. It was too far to discern the rage that must contort his features, but the thought he hurled at them was a soundless bellow: "Young fools! I've caught you now!"

  Behind Groz the figures of his followers loomed up as striding shadows. Neena's hand tightened on Var's. Var sent a thought of defiance: "Go back! Or you'll drive us to enter the mountain!"

  Groz seemed to hesitate. Then he swung his staff up like a weapon, and for the two on the mountainside the world turned upside down, the mountain's black shoulder hung inverted above them and the dizzy gulf of sky was beneath. Var fought for footing with his balance gone, feeling Neena reel against him until, summoning all his strength, he broke the grip of the illusion and the world seemed to right itself. The mist billowed again and Groz was out of sight, but they could hear him exhorting his men to haste.

  Neena's face was deadly pale and her lips trembled, but her urgent whisper said, "Come on!"

  Together they plunged into the curtain of darkness.

  * * * * *

  At Var's thought command Neena froze instantly. "Feel that!" he muttered, and she, listening, sensed it too: the infinitesimal trickle of currents behind what appeared to be a blank tunnel wall, a rising potential that seemed to whisper Ready ... ready....

  The sun-globe floated behind them, casting light before them down the featureless tunnel that sloped always toward the mountain's heart. Var summoned it, and it drifted ahead, a dozen feet, a little more--

  Between wall and wall a blinding spindle of flame sprang into being, pulsed briefly with radiant energy that pained the eyes, and went out. The immaterial globe of light danced on before them.

  "Forward, before the charge builds up again!" said Var. A few feet further on, they stumbled over a pile of charred bones. Someone else had made it only this far. It was farther than the Watcher had gone into these uncharted regions, and only the utmost alertness of mind and sense had saved them from death in traps like this. But as yet the way was not blocked....

  Then they felt the
mountain begin to tremble. A very faint and remote vibration at first, then an increasingly potent shuddering of the floor under their feet and the walls around them. Somewhere far below immense energies were stirring for the first time in centuries. The power that was in the Earth was rising; great wheels commenced to turn, the mechanical servitors of the Ryzgas woke one by one and began to make ready, while their masters yet slept, for the moment of rebirth that might be near at hand.

  From behind, up the tunnel, came a clear involuntary thought of dismay, then a directed thought, echoing and ghostly in the confinement of the dark burrow:

  "Stop!--before you go too far!"

  Var faced that way and thought coldly: "Only if you return and let us go free."

  In the black reaches of the shaft his will groped for and locked with that of Groz, like the grip of two strong wrestlers. In that grip each knew with finality that the other's stubbornness matched his own--that neither would yield, though the mountain above them and the world outside should crumble to ruin around them.

  "Follow us, then!"

  They plunged deeper into the mountain. And the shaking of the mountain increased with every step, its vibrations became sound, and its sound was like that of the terrible city which they had seen in the dream. Through the slow-rolling thunder of the hidden machines seemed to echo the death-cries of a billion slaves, the despair of all flesh and blood before their monstrous and inhuman power.

  Without warning, lights went on. Blinking in their glare, Var and Neena saw that fifty paces before them the way opened out into a great rounded room that was likewise ablaze with light. Cautiously they crept forward to the threshold of that chamber at the mountain's heart.

  Its roof was vaulted; its circular walls were lined with panels studded with gleaming control buttons, levers, colored lights. As they watched light flicked on and off in changing patterns, registering the progressive changes in the vast complex of mechanisms for which this must be the central control station. Behind those boards circuits opened and closed in bewildering confusion; the two invaders felt the rapid shifting of magnetic fields, the fury of electrons boiling in vacuum....

  For long moments they forgot the pursuit, forgot everything in wonder at this place whose remotest like they had never seen in the simplicity of their machineless culture. In all the brilliant space there was no life. They looked at one another, the same thought coming to both at once: perhaps, after two thousand years, the masters were dead after all, and only the machines remained? As if irresistibly drawn, they stepped over the threshold.

  There was a clang of metal like a signal. Halfway up the wall opposite, above a narrow ramp that descended between the instrument panels, a massive doorway swung wide, and in its opening a figure stood.

  Var and Neena huddled frozenly, half expecting each instant to be their last. And the Ryzga too stood motionless, looking down at them.

  * * * * *

  He was a man of middle height and stocky build, clad in a garment of changing colors, of fabric delicate as dream-stuff. In his right hand, with the care one uses with a weapon, he grasped a gleaming metal tube; his other hand rested as for support against the frame of the doorway. That, and his movements when he came slowly down the ramp toward them, conveyed a queer suggestion of weariness or weakness, as if he were yet not wholly roused from his two millenia of slumber. But the Ryzga's manner and his mind radiated a consciousness of power, a pride and assurance of self that smote them like a numbing blow.

  With a new shock, Var realized that the Ryzga's thoughts were quite open. They had a terse, disconnected quality that was strange and unsettling, and in part they were couched in alien and unintelligible symbols. But there was no block. Apparently the Ryzga felt no need to close his mind in the presence of inferior creatures....

  He paused with his back to the central control panel, and studied the interlopers with the dispassionate gaze of a scientist examining a new, but not novel, species of insect. His thoughts seemed to click, like metal parts of a mechanism falling into places prepared for them. The image occurred oddly to Var, to whom such a comparison would ordinarily have been totally strange.

  "Culture: late barbarism. Handwork of high quality--good. Physically excellent stock...." There was a complicated and incomprehensible schemata of numbers and abstract forms. "The time: two thousand years--more progress might have been expected, if any survivors at all initially postulated; but this will do. The pessimists were mistaken. We can begin again." Then, startlingly super-imposed on the cool progression of logical thought, came a wave of raw emotion, devastating in its force. It was a lustful image of a world once more obedient, crawling, laboring to do the Ryzgas' will--toward the stars, the stars! The icy calculation resumed: "Immobilize these and the ones indicated in the passage above. Then wake the rest...."

  Var was staring in fascination at the Ryzga's face. It was a face formed by the custom of unquestioned command; yet it was lined by a deeply ingrained weariness, the signs of premature age--denied, overridden by the driving will they had sensed a moment earlier. It was a sick man's face.

  The Ryzga's final thought clicked into place: Decision! He turned toward the switchboard behind him, reaching with practised certainty for one spot upon it.

  Neena screamed.

  Between the Ryzga and the control panel a nightmare shape reared up seven feet tall, flapping black amorphous limbs and flashing red eyes and white fangs. The Ryzga recoiled, and the weapon in his hand came up. There was an instantaneous glare like heat lightning, and the monster crumpled in on itself, twitched briefly and vanished.

  But in that moment a light of inspiration had flashed upon Var, and it remained. As the Ryzga stretched out his hand again, Var acted. The Ryzga froze, teetering off balance and almost falling, as a numbing grip closed down on all his motor nerves.

  Holding that grip, Var strode across the floor and looked straight into the Ryzga's frantic eyes. They glared back at him with such hatred and such evil that for an instant he almost faltered. But the Ryzga's efforts, as he strove to free himself from the neural hold, were as misdirected and unavailing as those of a child who has not learned to wrestle with the mind.

  Var had guessed right. When Neena in her terror had flung a dream monster into the Ryzga's way--a mere child's bogey out of a fairy tale--the Ryzga had not recognized it as such, but had taken it for a real being. Var laughed aloud, and with great care, as one communicates with an infant, he projected his thoughts into the other's mind. "There will be no new beginning for you in our world, Ryzga! In two thousand years, we've learned some new things. Now at last I understand why you built so many machines, such complicated arrangements of matter and energy to do simple tasks--it was because you knew no other way."

  Behind the hate-filled eyes the cold brain tried to reason still. "Barbarians...? Our party was wrong after all. After us the machine civilization could never rise again, because it was a fire that consumed its fuel. After us man could not survive on the Earth, because the conditions that made him great were gone. The survivors must be something else--capacities undeveloped by our science--after us the end of man, the beginning.... But those of us who chose to die were right."

  The tide of hate and sick desire rose up to drown all coherence. The Ryzga made a savage, wholly futile effort to lift the weapon in his paralyzed hand. Then his eyes rolled upward, and abruptly he went limp and fell in a heap, like a mechanical doll whose motive power has failed.

  Var felt Neena beside him, and drew her close. As she sobbed her relief, he continued to look down absently at the dead man. When at last he raised his head, he saw that the drama's end had had a further audience. In the outer doorway, backed by his clansmen, stood Groz, gazing first in stupefaction at the fallen Ryzga, then with something like awe at Var.

  Var eyed him for a long moment; then he smiled, and asked, "Well, Groz? Is our feud finished, or does your ambition for a worthy son-in-law go beyond the conqueror of the Ryzgas?"

  * * *
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  WORLD OF THE DRONE

  by Robert Abernathy

  The beetle woke from a dreamless sleep, yawned, stretched cramped limbs and smiled to himself. In the west the sunset's last glow faded. Stars sprang out in the clear desert sky, dimmed only by the white moon that rose full and brilliant above the eastern horizon.

  Methodically, suppressing impatience, he went through every evening's ritual of waking. He checked his instruments, scanned the mirrors which gave him a broad view of moonlit desert to his left. To the right he could see nothing, for his little armored machine lay half-buried, burrowed deep into the sheltering flank of a great dune; all day long it had escaped the notice of prowling diurnal machines of prey. He listened, too, for any sound of danger which his amplifiers might pick up from near or far.

  The motor, idling as it had all day while its master slept, responded to testing with a smooth, almost noiseless surge of power. The instruments were in order; there was plenty of water in the condenser, and though his food supply was low that shouldn't matter--before tonight was done he would be once more among his people.

  Only the fuel gauge brought an impatient frown to his face. It was menacingly near the empty mark--which meant he would have to spend time foraging before he could continue his journey. Well ... no help for it. He opened the throttle.

  The beetle's name was Dworn, and he was twenty-one years old. The flesh and blood of him, that is. The rest, the steel-armored shell, the wheels and engine and hydraulic power-system, the electric sensory equipment--all of which was to his mind as much part of his identity as his own skin, muscles, eyes and ears--was only five years old.

  Dworn's face, under his sleep-tousled thatch of blond hair, was boyish. But there were hard lines of decision there, which the last months had left.... Tonight by the reckoning of his people, he was still a youth; but when tomorrow dawned, the testing of his wanderyear would be behind him, and he would be adult, a warrior of the beetle horde.