EIGHT
David Loring only knew at first that the room in which he found himself was enormous. He could see the high walls towering up into shadows, and the great distance which separated wall from wall, shadow from shadow.
He saw the room in fitful flashes, between sleeping and waking. He saw it as a prison and a sanctuary, the ward of a hospital, a waiting room at the hub of some intricate and planet-engirdling web of communication. He saw it even as a quite simple, peaceful place, soothing to the eye, where a man could sleep and dream with a beautiful woman at his side, their bodies completely at ease in the dawn light, relaxed and languorous.
Finally, after what may have been days, or only hours, he saw the room as it really was. He saw it as a prison on an alien world, and the woman who shared it with him as a captive like himself who had to live with the shattering knowledge that what she saw in his eyes he saw in hers. "Janice," he whispered.
She was nodding at him and trying hard to smile and when he saw the tenderness and warmth in her eyes, tears started to gather beneath his burning eyelids and suddenly he was weeping unashamedly.
She got up quickly and came to him and settled herself at his side, pressing her scantily clad body close to him in womanly solicitude, reaching up and touching his face.
She was wearing the strangest of costumes; a band of golden-textured cloth which completely encircled her hips and the lower part of her torso, but left her breasts exposed. There were sandals on her feet, and her red-gold hair had been cut short, and was caught up in an entrancing way by a ribbon. She had never seemed more beautiful in his sight or more feminine and desirable.
"I thought you'd never wake up, darling," she whispered, her lips brushing his throat and passing upwards until their moist warmth came to rest against his mouth and stopped his breath for an instant.
"I've been waiting for you to look at me," she said, when he could breathe again. "To really look at me as you did just now. I was afraid to wake you up too abruptly. You seemed so close to exhaustion, so desperately in need of sleep. Oh, David, hold me close. At least we're together again."
"Everything is so strange," Loring said, his hand going out to stroke her hair. "So confused, mixed up. I remember struggling to free myself from a very horrible kind of net—a net with strands that seemed to move and cling to me, strands that seemed almost to have a life of their own. Then I was imprisoned, shut away in the darkness. I saw nothing, heard nothing, for hours. Then I saw a light moving slowly back and forth in front of me. I tried to rise, tried to get to my feet. But something seemed to lift me up and hurl me further back into the darkness.
"There were times when I could hardly breathe, when I seemed to be suffocating. I know that I slept a great deal. The passage of time—that was the most frightening thing of all. Days must have passed and yet I was only obscurely aware of their passing. But I knew that we were no longer on Earth, that we were traveling through space to another world. I had no way of knowing through observation, because I was in total darkness and felt nothing, heard nothing. The knowledge must have been implanted in my mind."
"It was," Janice said. "I know, because a strange cold voice spoke to me just once, and told me that when I woke up I would see you again, but that neither of us would remember what happened after you left me alone in your apartment waiting for you to return. Do you remember, David, or was the voice telling the truth? Do you remember what happened after that? If you do—"
Loring shook his head. "No," he said. "It's all a complete blank. I remember going out on MacDougal Street and hailing a cab. I even remember getting into the cab and riding to your apartment. But after that it's as if I had blacked out. I can only remember struggling to free myself from that ghastly web and how the blackness closed in on me, almost smothering me."
"And you remembered nothing more until you woke up here? Think hard, David. Are you sure about that? Completely sure?"
"Just what I've told you—nothing more. The feeling that I was in space, traveling through space. No, it was more than a feeling. It was certain knowledge. But it was nothing that I could have found out for myself."
"It frightens me, David. If you could remember even a part of what happened...."
"I don't think they want us to remember," Loring said. "Whatever their purpose was in bringing us here, they don't want us to know too much about them. That's pretty obvious."
"We've been here a long time, David. I spoke to you once, but you didn't answer, didn't seem to hear me. Your eyes were half closed and your face looked strange, as if everything in the room had gone far away from you. Then everything went far away from me too. I fell into a deep sleep and just woke up a few minutes ago."
Loring was staring about the room, a look of mounting apprehension in his eyes. But he heard her when she said: "I wanted to put my arms around you, and draw you close and bring my lips down hard on yours. But I was afraid, as I said, to wake you up too abruptly. The sudden shock...."
"We'll make up for that right now," Loring said. He clasped her firmly and kissed her until they were both out of breath. "I'm not as exhausted as you might think," he said.
He realized suddenly that he was as scantily clad as she was and was amazed that he had not realized it immediately upon awakening. A Greek athlete in the days of Pericles might have worn less clothing while discus-throwing, but he seriously doubted it. He was not a man who liked to strut his maleness and he had no particular liking for exhibitionists. It embarrassed him a little, even in the presence of a woman who had often seen him wearing far less clothing.
"They took away our clothes," she whispered, as if aware of his thoughts. "I don't know how they undressed me and put this ridiculous sash around me but I'll have to make the best of it. I don't really mind too much. Do you?"
"I think it might be a good idea if you removed the sash," he said. "It isn't becoming to you."
"If you wish," she said, and unwound the strange garment.
She stood before him completely unclothed and for an instant his breath caught in his throat. Then she was in his arms again, covering his face with kisses.
After a moment she put the strange garment back on, smiling a little. "If it was just you I wouldn't mind at all," she said. "But we don't know who we'll be meeting."
Her face turned suddenly sober, all of the levity leaving her eyes.
"The window," she whispered. "We'd better—see what's outside. Just the thought of looking terrifies me, but we may as well get it over with."
Loring nodded. "If we had any real sense we'd have looked out immediately," he said. "We'd have let nothing stand in the way."
"David! What kind of talk is that? Think of what you would have missed. A completely undraped female, distinctly on the shameless side."
The taunting levity was back in her eyes again, as if she dreaded the thought of walking to the window even now and wished to put it off as long as possible with a whistling-in-the-dark bravado.
"You're right," Loring said. "Forgive me, darling. I spoke without thinking and I didn't mean it in quite that way. I'm glad we waited. It isn't just what I saw. It's what I—"
"David, please don't make me blush now. Shut up, damn you."
"All right, Gorgeous. I won't say another word."
They walked to the window together. Janice cried out, and Loring drew in his breath sharply. A tiny vein at his temple bulged and began to pulsate.
The city which stretched out for miles beyond the pane transcended in height and depth and grandeur anything Man's creative genius had conceived on Earth, or was perhaps capable of conceiving, even in the realm of imaginative prophecy. Human history supplied no parallels which would have brought such a soaring architectural miracle within the scope of pictorial art at its most prophetic.
William Blake alone might have been capable of portraying it on canvas, if he had been born at a later period in human history and had been familiar with space-age technology and the intricacies of the twentieth century's non-Euclidean mathematics. But even then his vision might have faltered and his palette, lacking the full range of colors, dropped from his hand.
The Martian city was so large it would have completely dwarfed the largest city on Earth. If New York, London and Paris could have been combined in one great wonder city there might have been a few points of superficial resemblance to the metropolis of white buildings beyond the pane. But a few points only, for in a sober and completely realistic sense all comparisons broke down.
It was a city of spiderweb traceries against a sunrise sky, of buildings so enormous that their pinnacles seemed to blend with the clouds. It was a city of floating gardens agleam with vermillion-tongued flowers that seemed to sway and dance in response to some gigantic and invisible baton, so that they resembled myriads of tiny ballet dancers constantly in motion, voluptuously a-twirl, bending first to the left and then to the right and then swooningly backwards.
It was a city of parks and lakes with tree-fringed borders and of column-supported terraces bridged by aerial traffic lanes, where vehicles that resembled gold beetles darted back and forth with a speed so great that the eye could scarcely follow them.
It was a city of clean, strong lines, without elaborate ornamentation to mar a perfection which its builders must have kept constantly before their minds. There was no visible areas of new construction or areas where the buildings seemed to be crumbling. No wrecking instruments at work, or skeleton structures black against the sunrise. Not the slightest sign anywhere of demolition or repair. It was as if the city had been built to endure for centuries, with every stone in place, a monument to the creative genius of a race that had somehow found a means to create a vision of splendor which time or the elements could not mar or efface.
It was a breathtakingly beautiful city and yet, in some strange way, it seemed to be enveloped in an aura of cruelty and wickedness. There was a lewdness about some of its contours—a lewdness that could be physically sensed. It stirred the imagination in a strange way, as a woman utterly abandoned, lost to all shame, may cease to be a capricious wanton, given to light-hearted amours and become so coldly lascivious that she repels the most passionate of men.
And suddenly, as Loring stared, he saw the woman-shape. He saw that the city, its entire circumference, its central mass, was shaped like a recumbent female with great wanton knees and flame-tipped breasts.
Janice saw it too, and retreated from the window with a gasp, her face and throat darkened by a quickly spreading flush.
Loring stared for an instant longer and then turned and drew her to him, holding her tightly for a moment and saying nothing at all.
There were no words that could have eased the shock of what they both had seen, and silence was better, Loring felt. After a moment her breathing steadied and the flush vanished from her cheeks.
"What are we going to do, David?" she asked. "Just stay here and let the builders of that city visit us? Kill us perhaps, or insist that we accompany them on a sight-seeing tour? I don't think we'd like what we'd see."
"I don't think so either," Loring said. "And I don't think we're staying if that window isn't locked and opens outward. Or inward, for that matter. I'm going to find out right now. If necessary, we'll conduct our own sight-seeing tour. If we can get out fast we may be able to hide somewhere before they realize we've had the quickness of mind to outsmart them."
"Not quickness of mind alone, David. Courage enough to act quickly and descend those stairs."
"You saw the stairs?"
Janice nodded. "Yes, I saw them. A flight of stone steps leading downward, starting just below the window and leading straight down. I was going to push on the window, to see if it would move. You do it, David. Hurry. We've no time to lose."
"All right," Loring said. He returned to the window and pressed firmly on the pane. For a moment the pane held and then, as he increased the pressure, it swung slowly outward.
Janice ran to him with an exultant cry.
They emerged from the room cautiously. The steps began just beneath the window but they were not directly joined to the ledge. They had to take a short leap to reach them. What purpose they had been designed to serve Loring did not know and had difficulty in imagining. The topmost step was very broad and flared slightly, and it occurred to him that a very small flying machine—a midget helicopter or an auto-gyro—would have encountered no difficulty in making use of it as a landing platform. Perhaps there were hundreds of such structures scattered throughout the city, directly adjacent to the windows of tall buildings. He had no way of knowing and no time to puzzle over it.
The stone stairway was very steep and contained at least three hundred steps. It led to a flaring, disk-shaped expanse of shining metal several hundred feet in diameter. Directly below the disk the tiny moving vehicles which Loring had observed from the window darted to and fro, obscurely visible through its translucent glimmering.
Loring took Janice's arm and supported her firmly, and they started down with a heightened sense of togetherness. "Remember this," he said, with quiet reassurance. "It's some comfort, at least. There are few situations which areabsolutelyhopeless. They may look that way, but they're not. Escapes take place when every door to freedom seems bolted down tight. Not only in fiction—in real life. The deadliest diseases often fail to kill. The patient survives and lives for many years. And men condemned to death can always hope for a last-minute reprieve."
"But how often are they reprieved?"
"More often than the average person realizes. There are always possibilities of escape. A failure of intelligence at any point can reverse an advantage. And we've no reason to believe that the minds that planned and built this city, tremendous as it is, are infallible. The slightest flaw in their thinking could give us an advantage which would even the score."
"But this is their world, their home, David. We are aliens here, imprisoned in a web so dark and terrible we can't even begin to understand it. It's like a blind maze with no familiar landmarks, nothing to guide us—"
"It may not be quite as blind a maze as you think," Loring whispered, tightening his hold on her arm. "In another hundred years we'll be building cities on Earth just as tremendous. We use the same basic patterns, and we'll eventually acquire just as much engineering skill."
"It's still a blind maze to me," Janice said. "We may be walking into a trap. Did you think of that, David?"
"I thought of it. But staying in that room would have put us completely at their mercy. Steady now. We'll soon be at the bottom."
"Just looking down makes me dizzy."
"Don't look down then," he cautioned. "Move slowly and stay close to me."
The stairway was enveloped in a faint radiance which grew swiftly brighter as they descended. They were soon caught up in the brightness, the steps beneath them becoming a descending series of polished stone mirrors which reflected the more diffuse and distant brightness of the sunrise. Their shadows flickered across the brightness, sometimes elongating and becoming immense, sometimes contracting into wavering small replicas of themselves.
They moved arm in arm through a kaleidoscope of shimmering curves and angles, a constantly increasing steepness keeping them constantly on guard, making them feel at times that they were descending an upright ladder teetering precariously in some unimaginable abyss of emptiness.
They were almost at the bottom now and could see the shining surface of the disk which they had seen from above without being able to determine its precise configuration. It spread out from the base of the stairs in a translucent glimmering, a surface of smooth, almost glass-like texture that spiraled slightly downwards for perhaps a hundred feet and then became completely horizontal. Where it rose to a level gradient it widened out so that its faintly luminous edges graded off into shadows.
There was a pylon-shaped structure at the far extremity of the sloping section. It could have been either a gateway or a small building, but Loring was almost sure that it was a building.
He did not pause when he reached the bottom. He tightened his hold on Janice's waist and then released her, gesturing out across the brightness.
"Walk fast, but don't run," he cautioned. "They may be watching us. That small tower could be anything: a communication control structure, a guardhouse, even a dwelling. We won't know until we get to it."
He nodded and left the stone stairway, moving out across the glass-like surface of the disk without looking back. Janice kept almost abreast of him, quickening her steps but not quite running.
Loring studied the structure appraisingly as he drew near to it. It was smooth-surfaced and completely featureless, a massive block of metal that rose to a height of about eighty feet.
He halted directly in front of it and waited for Janice to join him before he reached out and ran his hand over a square foot of its smooth metal surface. The metal was yellowish with a burnished copper sheen to it.
"What do you suppose it is?" Janice asked breathlessly.
Loring shook his head. "I wish I knew. It could be a guardhouse or a signal tower or something of the sort. There's no entrance on this side, but there may be an entrance in back. It could have been erected here as a kind of sentry barrier to guard this particular part of the city. It could even be a remotely controlled robot structure, equipped with detective devices and destructive weapons."
"You really think—"
"I don't know what to think. I'd like to pound on the metal to see if it gives off a hollow sound. But I'm afraid to risk it. Even raising our voices might be dangerous and activate some delicately balanced instrument of destruction."
A look of decision came into Loring's eyes. "You stay here," he said. "Don't move or touch that wall. If there's an entrance I don't want you to be with me until I've made sure there's nothing dangerous inside."
Janice looked at him, startled. "You're not going inside?"
"I will if there's an entrance."
"But darling, don't you see? If anything happened to you I wouldn't want to go on living. You think of what could happen and all that unrealistic nonsense about shielding a woman, not letting her share a danger with a man she loves more than her own life, breaks down."
"It hasn't broken down with me," Loring said. "I'm sorry, darling, but you're staying here."
"Please, David—"
"No chance. You're staying right here."
Before she could protest again he kissed her and turned quickly, not trusting himself to prolong the embrace. He walked to the edge of the building, rounded it and moved forward cautiously, keeping a short distance from the wall. The side of the structure was as wide as the facade, quite possibly a little wider.
The vague fear, the sense of danger, remained with him, but so far he had encountered nothing alarming. His uneasiness angered him a little, made him impatient with his own perhaps wholly unjustified caution. He came to a sudden decision. If there was an entrance at the rear of the building he would not hesitate but would go immediately inside.
There was an entrance at the rear of the building; an unlighted, oblong-shaped opening without ornamentation, twice the width of a man's body and eight or nine feet in height. Although the structure was metallic, the entrance had a stone-carven look, as if it had been chiseled with precision from a block of solid granite.
Having come to a decision, the swift dwindling of his dread surprised him. It was as if a point of pressure had been removed from his mind, leaving him free to walk without restraint into the structure.
The falling away of tension gave him no satisfaction. He mistrusted it, feared it, for it strengthened his belief that his thoughts were under scrutiny and an effort was being made to influence his emotions. Had he won a momentary victory or was that, too, an illusion?
The tension started mounting again the instant he had passed through the aperture. The darkness was just as bad as he had imagined it might be, totally unrelieved by the faintest glimmer of light. It was a smothering blackness, shroudlike and all-engulfing.
He stood very still a few feet within the entrance. The aperture was faintly filmed with light, but the dim glow did not penetrate for more than a foot or two into the darkness. Beyond that slight penumbra of light there was an impenetrable wall of darkness hemming him in on all sides.
The odor which came to his nostrils was equally unnerving. It was sharp, acrid, but with a faint mustiness about it which made him think of tomb rot.
For a moment there was no sound at all, no faintest stir of movement. Then he heard a rustling sound that seemed to come from deep within the darkness. A rustling, a shuffling, the kind of sound that could have been made by a snake unwinding its coils, or someone dragging a heavy sack over a stone floor, or by nothing more unnerving than the slow backward and forward movements of a broom.
Loring did not think it was a broom. The fear which came upon him was primitive, elemental. In some respects it was the kind of fear which a man in a dark wood would experience if he came upon a nest of copperheads while exploring a foliage-choked crevice in search of edible mushrooms. Expecting to find some poisonous varieties perhaps, but hardly death staring up at him out of the opaque eyes of a snake poised to strike.
He moved slowly backwards, keeping the same distance from the entrance but putting as much space as possible between himself and the shuffling. He kept backing away until he came up against a firm metal barrier which he quickly explored with his hands. It had the solid feel of a wall.
His breathing became a little less strained. With a wall at his back he was at least in no danger of being attacked from two directions. And if the wall made further retreat impossible the danger had not increased, for he was still the same distance from the entrance and could still, if he wished, make a very swift dash for it.
He had no immediate intention of doing so. He stood listening, motionless and alert, his shoulders barely touching the wall. The shuffling sound did not seem to be coming any nearer. It even stopped for an instant. The silence closed in about him and he became aware of the over-loud beating of his heart. When the sound started up again it seemed to come from another direction, closer to the entrance.
Now itwasnearer. Unmistakably louder and nearer, very close to him in the darkness. He strained his eyes, but could see nothing. He had to depend on his hearing alone, and hearing, he knew, could be deceptive. It was often very difficult to determine the precise location of a sound, to pinpoint it with any certainty.
Suddenly his heart skipped a beat, and his breathing quickened. His throat turned cold as he swallowed, and tightened as well, the muscles stiffening, cording into knots. Unconsciously he gripped his leg, just above the knee, and dug his fingers into the flesh, as if physical pain alone could keep reality from taking on an aspect so nightmarish that his sanity would be imperiled.
The creature was passing directly across the entrance. It was moving so slowly that he could see it distinctly in the sharply sheared-off glow from outside the building. The glow penetrated the darkness hardly at all, but when the creature paused and half turned about even that abruptly curtailed illumination was strong enough to bring it into stark relief.
He saw the monstrous shape clearly. Saw the long, insectlike legs with their tapering hairs, and the very slender, flylike body. Saw its gauzy, tightly folded wings, the metallic glitter of its immense, many-faceted eyes and the slow turning of the eyes as they sought him out in the darkness.
The enormous flying insect framed for an instant in the glow was a shape of terror. It was not its size alone which was making his flesh crawl and his chest heave as his eyes remained fastened upon it in the swimming darkness. He was quite sure of that.
There was something rapacious about it, a deadliness that could be instantly sensed. It seemed intent on his destruction, its enormous eyes filmed with a malignancy that made his blood run cold.
Its attitude was just as terrifying, the body poised as if for attack, a rapier sharpness in the writhing mandibles, a wire-tight tension in the rhythmically vibrating thorax, the slender abdomen, and the long, hairy legs which terminated in rust-colored, cuplike disks.
Loring's thoughts went into a mind-chilling whirl. The human mind does not associate ferocity with an ordinary fly. A house fly, a fruit fly, even a blue-bottle fly hovering over carrion and evoking no more than a slight, momentary shiver of disgust. But wasps and hornets are flylike in aspect and they are equally graceful in flight. Winged insects of great beauty, delicately constructed and the opposite of revolting. Yet wasps and hornets can inflict stings that can paralyze and kill.
A long blue hornet in a drowsy woodland glade can be a flying torpedo, a death-dealing precision instrument, as billions of fat, sluggish caterpillars have discovered over a very long period of geologic time. And if a hornet could become large enough....
A gigantic hornet might well find a man more to its liking on an alien world, a far more delectable feast for its larvae when paralyzed with care and stored in a clay-constructed hive. Or a metal-constructed hive.
The solitary wasps. The mud builders. Every schoolboy was familiar with them, every young naturalist exploring the countryside near his home, the autumn leaves turning red and yellow, the tang of woodsmoke in the air. The small, gray, skillfully cemented-over openings to their nests deep underground where unspeakable acts of insect vampirism took place. The paralyzed caterpillar shrinking, turning sere, losing its substance but remaining tormentingly alive while the gnawing, insatiable grubs waxed fat and strong. Dying in the end, its substance liquefying.... And a human caterpillar?
Despite his terror Loring knew that he was letting his imagination get out of control. He was taking too much for granted, letting his thoughts lead him into a dark abyss which probably had no basis in reality. The hideous thought had leapt unbidden into his mind and he had elaborated upon it, filling in the total blankness of the unknown with images so ghastly that they glowed blood-red. It was exactly what an expressionistic artist might have been forced to do if his morbidity became a genius-inspired flame and he could no longer restrain an impulse to torture himself to win immortality for what could be, at best, a purely symbolical vision of madness completely remote from reality.
Again he was merely a very frightened man with no particular liking for morbidity who had been trapped in total darkness on an alien planet and had everything to lose by abandoning himself to wild conjecture when only clear, logical, determined thinking could save him.
If he had thought at all of wasps and hornets, if he had instantly seized upon such a comparison—there had to be a reason behind such a forceful, almost irresistible distortion of thought.
He was almost sure that it was a distortion. The mere appearance of a flylike creature close to him in the darkness, huge and malignant as it appeared to be, would not ordinarily have started such a train of thought in his mind and opened up vistas so specifically ghastly.
In all probability his thoughts had been deliberately guided. The paralyzed caterpillar-feasting grub comparison had been firmly implanted in his mind by a skillful mental manipulation of his imagination.
And if his mind was being manipulated, if the alien city dwellers were—
Loring straightened, cold sweat breaking out on his forehead, his eyes darting to the entrance. The entrance was darkening again. A shadow had fallen across it, partly blotting out the radiance from outside the building.
It was not a massive shadow and he knew that it could not have been cast by the flylike creature moving about in the darkness. It was an advancing, not a retreating shadow, and it was very slender. It cut off a portion of the light for only a fraction of the time it had taken the insect to pass from the glow into the darkness. It was accompanied by footsteps, quick, uncertain and a brief flurry of movement. Then the slender intruder was inside the building, silhouetted against the glow a few feet from the entrance.