The Edmond Hamilton Megapack: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales (90 page)

Curt Newton bent over the keys. “I haven’t forgotten,” he whispered to himself. “How could anyone ever forget?” He touched the gleaming keys, not pressing them, just touching them lightly and feeling the power that was in them, the unimaginable control of matter.

Ezra said hoarsely, “What are you going to do?”

Curt looked upward to where the little suns swam in the golden haze, the little suns that could create havoc in this cosmic womb where only the seed of matter belonged.

“Watch,” he said. “I am going to dissolve what Garrand created.”

Ezra watched. Slowly, carefully, Curt pressed a certain pattern on the keys and around a ruby star waves and bands of golden force began to flicker like faint auroras. They grew and strengthened and became streams of raw electrons, pouring their substance into the little Sun.

Ezra shielded his eyes, but not soon enough. The star had become a nova, but without the second, the collapsed stage of novas. The fury of electronic force launched upon it from outside in this universal vortex of such forces had swept away each fragment of the exploding atoms to return them to the parent cloud.

The ruby star had ceased to exist and its worlds had vanished with it.

Swifter now, more surely, Curt’s hands flashed across the keys. And Ezra Gurney cowered beside the altar, blinded, stunned, shaken by the savage explosions of far-distant matter, riven and burst apart.

How long he crouched there while the great lights flared in the sky and the cosmic hammers beat he never knew. But there came a time when everything was still and he looked up and saw Curt standing there with his hands motionless on the keys and his head strained back so that he could search the farthest reaches of the sky.

He spoke and Curt did not answer. He touched him and spoke again, and it was like speaking to a statue except that under his fingers he could feel the subtle tremors of Curt’s hard flesh, the taut quivering.

“Curt!” he cried out. And Curt very slowly lowered his head and looked at him with a kind of amazement in his eyes, as though he had forgotten Ezra Gurney.

“Is it finished, Curt?”

“Yes. It’s finished.”

“Then come away.”

Newton’s gaze, the unfamiliar gaze that did not see small things like men but looked on larger distances, slipped away to the banks of keys and upward to the sky again.

“In a moment,” he said. “In just a moment.”

Two red bars burned across the bones of his cheeks and the rest of his face was like marble. Ezra saw in it the beginning of the exaltation, the terrible beauty that had marked the face of Garrand. Curt smiled and the sinews of his hands moved delicately as he stroked his fingers across the keys.

“The worlds that I could make,” he whispered. “Garrand was only a little man. I could create things he never dreamed of.”

“Curt!” cried Ezra in a panic. “Come away!” But his voice was swallowed up in dreams and Curt whispered very softly, “I wouldn’t keep them. I would dissolve them afterward. But I could create…”

His fingers were forming a pattern on the keys. Ezra looked down at his gnarled old hands and knew that they were not strong enough. He looked at his gun and knew that he could not use it in any way. Searching desperately for a way to pierce through the dreams he cried, “Could you create another Earth?”

For awhile he was not sure that Curt had heard him, not sure but that he was beyond hearing. Then a vaguely startled look came into Curt’s eyes and he said, “What?”

“Could you create another Earth, Curt? Could you put the mountains and the seas together and build the cities and fill them with men and women and the voices of children? Could you create another Otho or Grag or Simon?”

Curt slowly looked down at his fingers, curved and hungry on the waiting keys, and a kind of horror flashed across his face. He snatched his hands away and spun around, turning his back to the altar. He looked sick, and shamed, but the dreams were no longer shadowing his face, and Ezra began to breathe again.

“Thanks, Ezra,” he said hoarsely. “Now let’s go. Let’s go, while I can.”

THE black cloud lay behind them and the Comet fled away from it like a frightened thing, back through the great blazing clusters of Suns that had now no terrors for them. Curt Newton sat silently at the controls and his face was so brooding that Ezra Gurney did not venture to speak.

Ezra looked ahead because he did not want to look back into the main cabin. He knew that what Simon was doing there was perfectly harmless and utterly necessary but there was something so uncanny about it that he did not want to see it being done.

He had looked in once and seen Simon hovering over the strange projector that Grag and Otho had rigged above the heads of the drugged unconscious Garrand and Herrick. He had come away from there quickly.

He sat unspeaking beside Curt, watching the great clusters wheel slowly past them until at last Simon Wright came gliding into the control-room.

“It is done,” said Simon. “Garrand and Herrick will not wake for many hours. When they do they won’t remember.”

Curt looked at him. “You’re sure that you expunged every memory of the Birthplace?”

“Absolutely sure. I used the scanner to block every memory-path on that subject—and checked by questioning them hypnotically. They know nothing of the Birthplace. You’ll have to have a story ready for them.”

Curt nodded. “We picked them up out here in deep space when their ship cracked up in cosmic ray research. That fits the circumstances—they’ll never doubt it.” Ezra shivered a little. Even now the blocking of part of a man’s memories, the taking away forever of a bit of his experience, seemed an eerie thing to do.

Curt Newton saw his shiver and understood it. He said, “It doesn’t harm them, Ezra—and it’s necessary.”

“Very necessary, if the secret of the Birthplace is not to get out again,” said Simon.

There was a little silence among them and the ship crawled on and on through the cosmic glare and gloom. Ezra saw that the somber shadow on Newton’s face deepened as he looked out through the wilderness of Suns and nebulae toward the far, far spark of Sol.

“But someday,” Curt said slowly, “someday not too far in the future, many men will be pushing out through these spaces. They’ll find the Birthplace sooner or later. And then what?”

Simon said, “We will not be here when that happens.”

“But they’ll do it. And what will happen when they do?”

Simon had no answer for that nor had Ezra Gurney. And Curt spoke again, his voice heavy with foreboding.

“I have sometimes thought that life, human life, intelligent life, is merely a deadly agent by which a stellar system achieves its own doom in a cosmic cycle far vaster and stranger than anyone has dreamed. For see—stars and planets are born from primal nothingness and they cool and the cooling worlds spawn life and life grows to ever higher levels of intelligence and power until…”

There was an ironical twist to Curt’s lips as he paused and then went on “…until the life of that world becomes intelligent enough to tap the energies of the cosmos! When that happens is it inevitable that fallible mortals should use those energies so disastrously that they finally destroy their own worlds and stars? Are life and intelligence merely a lethal seed planted in each universe, a seed that must inevitably destroy that universe?”

Simon said slowly, “That is a terrible thought, Curtis. But I deny its inevitability. Long ago the Watchers found the Birthplace, yet they did not try to use its powers.”

“We are not like the Watchers, we men,” Curt said bitterly. “You saw what it did to Garrand and to me.”

“I know,” said Simon. “But perhaps men will be as wise as the Watchers were by the time they find the Birthplace. Perhaps they too will then be powerful enough to renounce power. We can only hope.”

CORRIDORS OF THE STARS

If the shadow trailing him was danger, Vance Evers wanted to know it now. He stood, the hand in his pocket clutching the sweaty hilt of his gun, and peered back along the street.

It was night, but the unpaved street was not dark. There was no artificial illumination, for Valloa was too backward and barbaric a world for that. But the jungles of that world are rich in crystalline outcrops, and the squat and oddly-architectured houses and shops and taverns were all built of shimmering crystal blocks, a fairy-like glass town flashing back the radiance of the River of Stars in the sky.

Evers felt desperately uncertain. There were many Valloan men and women in the street back there, going about their own affairs. Yet he could not shake off the conviction that one of them was following him. He felt suddenly too tired and numb to cope with another danger now—too crushed down by the weight of the past weeks, by the weight of the most perilous secret in the galaxy.

“
Too far
,” thought Evers. “
The dark between the galaxies, the dark that universes drown in, and oh God, to go all that way and come back to this—”

A chime of intolerable sweetness sounded across the shimmering town. The men of Valloa make many things of crystal, and the music of their bells is famous. But the rising, tinkling chorus of carillons only clawed at Evers’ taut nerves.

He stood, backed against a glassy wall, his dishevelled blond hair and weary, copper-tanned face making him a stand-out among the white-skinned, flame-haired Valloans. He looked back for minutes, while the bells talked in sweet and complex chimings above his head.

Nothing. Yet he was still sure that someone had followed him almost from the time he had come into the town.

He had to go on. There was nothing else he could do. Out in their ship, which they had landed with such secrecy in the jungle, his two comrades were waiting—Straw hurt, and Lindeman near a physical breakdown. And he, Evers, was their one hope now.

He went on abruptly, down the dusty street between the fairy crystal houses, with the singing of the bells all about him and the great belt of light lying like a sword across the black sky. Valloa was a fringe world, on the very rim of the galaxy, and because of that its people forever saw the galaxy edge-on, and called it the River of Stars. And also because it was a fringe world, it had only lately been touched by galactic civilization, and its hunters and thieves and crystal-miners had not much altered their ancient ways. Only a brassy neon glare of limited extent far ahead of Evers proclaimed the whereabouts of the Galactic Federation spaceport and offices and schools.

Evers went that way. He knew very well how risky it was, but there was a man he knew, a man named Garrow who was in the scientific mission that had been sent to this fringe world. If he could find Garrow without letting himself be caught, he might be able to pass on the explosive secret that they three had brought back from the shores of infinity.

He had had to argue that out with Lindeman before he left the
Phoenix
. Lindeman, his face drawn and yellow with fatigue so that he looked like a starved marmoset, had been against it.

“We know that the Galactic Control all over the galaxy will be on the lookout for us,” he had said. “
And
Schuyler’s agents.”

“Which means,” Evers had pointed out, “that we’ve got to get word up to the top brass at Earth, before we dare come out in the open. Garrow can do it, if I can contact him.”

And so he had left them in the ship in the jungle, and had trudged into the crystal town, and that big “if” was coming up fast now.

Again, Evers looked back uneasily. There were fewer people in the street now, as he approached the edge of the Valloan town and the limits of the Federation area. The only near one was a Valloan girl with hair like a torch, sauntering along with her hips wiggling in her skin-tight silken pants, pure provocation to all male eyes that might be watching. He could see no one else within a block, and he decided that he was starting at shadows.

He went beyond the last crystal house, and the glaring lighted buildings and starport of the compound rose up ahead of him. And over the crystal chiming, a harsh voice spoke suddenly behind him.

“Just a minute, mister—do I know you?”

It was an Earthman’s voice, and it had Galactic Control in every timbre of it. Evers swung around frantically, his fist balled.

The GC patrolman who had spoken from the deep doorway was too fast for him. He leaped back, and his energy-gun was in his hand as he finished the movement.

“Thought so,” he said with satisfaction. “Know every Earthman on Valloa. We’ll just have a look at your ident—”

His voice trailed off. He looked at Evers’ coppery, sweating face, illumined by the soft radiance of the River of Stars. And the patrolman suddenly stiffened.

“Just hold still, mister,” he said, his voice now low and even. “I
wouldn’t
move if I were you.”

The gun in his hand still covered Evers. The patrolman fished a little plastic gadget out of his pocket, with the other hand. He touched it, and a pinpoint of light shone from it. He stared into it, holding it up so that his view would also include Evers.

Evers knew very well what it was. A microfilm file with its own magnifier. Every GC patrolman carried one, and in it would be—