The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Tree of Life, by Catherine Lucille Moore
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Title: The Tree of Life
Author: Catherine Lucille Moore
Release Date: June 17, 2010 [EBook #32850]
Language: English
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The Tree of Life
By C. L. MOORE
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Weird Tales October
1936. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.]
[Sidenote: _A gripping tale of the planet Mars and the terrible
monstrosity that called its victims to it from afar--a tale of Northwest
Smith_]
Over time-ruined Illar the searching planes swooped and circled.
Northwest Smith, peering up at them with a steel-pale stare from the
shelter of a half-collapsed temple, thought of vultures wheeling above
carrion. All day long now they had been raking these ruins for him.
Presently, he knew, thirst would begin to parch his throat and hunger to
gnaw at him. There was neither food nor water in these ancient Martian
ruins, and he knew that it could be only a matter of time before the
urgencies of his own body would drive him out to signal those wheeling
Patrol ships and trade his hard-won liberty for food and drink. He
crouched lower under the shadow of the temple arch and cursed the
accuracy of the Patrol gunner whose flame-blast had caught his dodging
ship just at the edge of Illar's ruins.
Presently it occurred to him that in most Martian temples of the ancient
days an ornamental well had stood in the outer court for the benefit of
wayfarers. Of course all water in it would be a million years dry now,
but for lack of anything better to do he rose from his seat at the edge
of the collapsed central dome and made his cautious way by still intact
corridors toward the front of the temple. He paused in a tangle of
wreckage at the courtyard's edge and looked out across the sun-drenched
expanse of pavement toward that ornate well that once had served
travelers who passed by here in the days when Mars was a green planet.
It was an unusually elaborate well, and amazingly well preserved. Its
rim had been inlaid with a mosaic pattern whose symbolism must once have
borne deep meaning, and above it in a great fan of time-defying bronze
an elaborate grille-work portrayed the inevitable tree-of-life pattern
which so often appears in the symbolism of the three worlds. Smith
looked at it a bit incredulously from his shelter, it was so
miraculously preserved amidst all this chaos of broken stone, casting a
delicate tracery of shadow on the sunny pavement as perfectly as it must
have done a million years ago when dusty travelers paused here to drink.
He could picture them filing in at noontime through the great gates
that----
The vision vanished abruptly as his questing eyes made the circle of the
ruined walls. There had been no gate. He could not find a trace of it
anywhere around the outer wall of the court. The only entrance here, as
nearly as he could tell from the foundations that remained, had been the
door in whose ruins he now stood. Queer. This must have been a private
court, then, its great grille-crowned well reserved for the use of the
priests. Or wait--had there not been a priest-king Illar after whom the
city was named? A wizard-king, so legend said, who ruled temple as well
as palace with an iron hand. This elaborately patterned well, of
material royal enough to withstand the weight of ages, might well have
been sacrosanct for the use of that long-dead monarch. It might----
* * * * *
Across the sun-bright pavement swept the shadow of a plane. Smith dodged
back into deeper hiding while the ship circled low over the courtyard.
And it was then, as he crouched against a crumbled wall and waited,
motionless, for the danger to pass, that he became aware for the first
time of a sound that startled him so he could scarcely credit his
ears--a recurrent sound, choked and sorrowful--the sound of a woman
sobbing.
The incongruity of it made him forgetful for a moment of the peril
hovering overhead in the sun-hot outdoors. The dimness of the temple
ruins became a living and vital place for that moment, throbbing with
the sound of tears. He looked about half in incredulity, wondering if
hunger and thirst were playing tricks on him already, or if these broken
halls might be haunted by a million-years-old sorrow that wept along the
corridors to drive its hearers mad. There were tales of such haunters in
some of Mars' older ruins. The hair prickled faintly at the back of his
neck as he laid a hand on the butt of his force-gun and commenced a
cautious prowl toward the source of the muffled noise.
Presently he caught a flash of white, luminous in the gloom of these
ruined walls, and went forward with soundless steps, eyes narrowed in
the effort to make out what manner of creature this might be that wept
alone in time-forgotten ruins. It was a woman. Or it had the dim
outlines of a woman, huddled against an angle of fallen walls and veiled
in a fabulous shower of long dark hair. But there was something
uncannily odd about her. He could not focus his pale stare upon her
outlines. She was scarcely more than a luminous blot of whiteness in the
gloom, shimmering with a look of unreality which the sound of her sobs
denied.
* * * * *
Before he could make up his mind just what to do, something must have
warned the weeping girl that she was no longer alone, for the sound of
her tears checked suddenly and she lifted her head, turning to him a
face no more distinguishable than her body's outlines. He made no effort
to resolve the blurred features into visibility, for out of that
luminous mask burned two eyes that caught his with an almost perceptible
impact and gripped them in a stare from which he could not have turned
if he would.
They were the most amazing eyes he had ever met, colored like moonstone,
milkily translucent, so that they looked almost blind. And that magnetic
stare held him motionless. In the instant that she gripped him with that
fixed, moonstone look he felt oddly as if a tangible bond were taut
between them.
Then she spoke, and he wondered if his mind, after all, had begun to
give way in the haunted loneliness of dead Illar; for though the words
she spoke fell upon his ears in a gibberish of meaningless sounds, yet
in his brain a message formed with a clarity that far transcended the
halting communication of words. And her milkily colored eyes bored into
his with a fierce intensity.
"I'm lost--I'm lost----" wailed the voice in his brain.
A rush of sudden tears brimmed the compelling eyes, veiling their
brilliance. And he was free again with that clouding of the moonstone
surfaces. Her voice wailed, but the words were meaningless and no
knowledge formed in his brain to match them. Stiffly he stepped back a
pace and looked down at her, a feeling of helpless incredulity rising
within him. For he still could not focus directly upon the shining
whiteness of her, and nothing save those moonstone eyes were clear to
him.
The girl sprang to her feet and rose on tiptoe, gripping his shoulders
with urgent hands. Again the blind intensity of her eyes took hold of
his, with a force almost as tangible as the clutch of her hands; again
that stream of intelligence poured into his brain, strongly, pleadingly.
"Please, please take me back! I'm so frightened--I can't find my
way--oh, please!"
He blinked down at her, his dazed mind gradually realizing the basic
facts of what was happening. Obviously her milky, unseeing eyes held a
magnetic power that carried her thoughts to him without the need of a
common speech. And they were the eyes of a powerful mind, the outlets
from which a stream of fierce energy poured into his brain. Yet the
words they conveyed were the words of a terrified and helpless girl. A
strong sense of wariness was rising in him as he considered the
incongruity of speech and power, both of which were beating upon him
more urgently with every breath. The mind of a forceful and
strong-willed woman, carrying the sobs of a frightened girl. There was
no sincerity in it.
"Please, please!" cried her impatience in his brain. "Help me! Guide me
back!"
"Back where?" he heard his own voice asking.
"The Tree!" wailed that queer speech in his brain, while gibberish was
all his ears heard and the moonstone stare transfixed him strongly. "The
Tree of Life! Oh, take me back to the shadow of the Tree!"
A vision of the grille-ornamented well leaped into his memory. It was
the only tree symbol he could think of just then. But what possible
connection could there be between the well and the lost girl--if she was
lost? Another wail in that unknown tongue, another anguished shake of
his shoulders, brought a sudden resolution into his groping mind. There
could be no harm in leading her back to the well, to whose grille she
must surely be referring. And strong curiosity was growing in his mind.
Much more than met the eye was concealed in this queer incident. And a
wild guess had flashed through his mind that perhaps she might have come
from some subterranean world into which the well descended. It would
explain her luminous pallor, if not her blurriness; and, too, her eyes
did not seem to function in the light. There was a much more incredible
explanation of her presence, but he was not to know it for a few minutes
yet.
"Come along," he said, taking the clutching hands gently from his
shoulders. "I'll lead you to the well."
She sighed in a deep gust of relief and dropped her compelling eyes from
his, murmuring in that strange, gabbling tongue what must have been
thanks. He took her by the hand and turned toward the ruined archway of
the door.
Against his fingers her flesh was cool and firm. To the touch she was
tangible, but even thus near, his eyes refused to focus upon the cloudy
opacity of her body, the dark blur of her streaming hair. Nothing but
those burning, blinded eyes were strong enough to pierce the veil that
parted them.
She stumbled along at his side over the rough floor of the temple,
saying nothing more, panting with eagerness to return to her
incomprehensible "tree." How much of that eagerness was assumed Smith
still could not be quite sure. When they reached the door he halted her
for a moment, scanning the sky for danger. Apparently the ships had
finished with this quarter of the city, for he could see two or three of
them half a mile away, hovering low over Illar's northern section. He
could risk it without much peril. He led the girl cautiously out into
the sun-hot court.
* * * * *
She could not have known by sight that they neared the well, but when
they were within twenty paces of it she flung up her blurred head
suddenly and tugged at his hand. It was she who led him that last
stretch which parted the two from the well. In the sun the shadow
tracery of the grille's symbolic pattern lay vividly outlined on the
ground. The girl gave a little gasp of delight. She dropped his hand and
ran forward three short steps, and plunged into the very center of that
shadowy pattern on the ground. And what happened then was too incredible
to believe.
The pattern ran over her like a garment, curving to the curve of her
body in the way all shadows do. But as she stood there striped and laced
with the darkness of it, there came a queer shifting in the lines of
black tracery, a subtle, inexplicable movement to one side. And with
that motion she vanished. It was exactly as if that shifting had moved
her out of one world into another. Stupidly Smith stared at the spot
from which she had disappeared.
Then several things happened almost simultaneously. The zoom of a plane
broke suddenly into the quiet, a black shadow dipped low over the
rooftops, and Smith, too late, realized that he stood defenseless in
full view of the searching ships. There was only one way out, and that
was too fantastic to put faith in, but he had no time to hesitate. With
one leap he plunged full into the midst of the shadow of the tree of
life.
Its tracery flowed round him, molding its pattern to his body. And
outside the boundaries everything executed a queer little sidewise dip
and slipped in the most extraordinary manner, like an optical illusion,
into quite another scene. There was no intervention of blankness. It was
as if he looked through the bars of a grille upon a picture which
without warning slipped sidewise, while between the bars appeared
another scene, a curious, dim landscape, gray as if with the twilight of
early evening. The air had an oddly thickened look, through which he saw
the quiet trees and the flower-spangled grass of the place with a queer,
unreal blending, like the landscape in a tapestry, all its outlines
blurred.
In the midst of this tapestried twilight the burning whiteness of the
girl he had followed blazed like a flame. She had paused a few steps
away and stood waiting, apparently quite sure that he would come after.
He grinned a little to himself as he realized it, knowing that curiosity
must almost certainly have driven him in her wake even if the necessity
for shelter had not compelled his following.
She was clearly visible now, in this thickened dimness--visible, and
very lovely, and a little unreal. She shone with a burning clarity, the
only vivid thing in the whole twilit world. Eyes upon that blazing
whiteness, Smith stepped forward, scarcely realizing that he had moved.
Slowly he crossed the dark grass toward her. That grass was soft
under-foot, and thick with small, low-blooming flowers of a shining
pallor. Botticelli painted such spangled swards for the feet of his
angels. Upon it the girl's bare feet gleamed whiter than the blossoms.
She wore no garment but the royal mantle of her hair, sweeping about her
in a cloak of shining darkness that had a queer, unreal tinge of purple
in that low light. It brushed her ankles in its fabulous length. From
the hood of it she watched Smith coming toward her, a smile on her pale
mouth and a light blazing in the deeps of her moonstone eyes. She was
not blind now, nor frightened. She stretched out her hand to him
confidently.
"It is my turn now to lead you," she smiled. As before, the words were
gibberish, but the penetrating stare of those strange white eyes gave
them a meaning in the depths of his brain.
Automatically his hand went out to hers. He was a little dazed, and her
eyes were very compelling. Her fingers twined in his and she set off
over the flowery grass, pulling him beside her. He did not ask where
they were going. Lost in the dreamy spell of the still, gray, enchanted
place, he felt no need for words. He was beginning to see more clearly
in the odd, blurring twilight that ran the outlines of things together
in that queer, tapestried manner. And he puzzled in a futile, muddled
way as he went on over what sort of land he had come into. Overhead was
darkness, paling into twilight near the ground, so that when he looked
up he was staring into bottomless deeps of starless night.
Trees and flowering shrubs and the flower-starred grass stretched
emptily about them in the thick, confusing gloom of the place. He could
see only a little distance through that dim air. It was as if they
walked a strip of tapestried twilight in some unlighted dream. And the
girl, with her lovely, luminous body and richly colored robe of hair was
like a woman in a tapestry too, unreal and magical.
After a while, when he had become a little adjusted to the queerness of
the whole scene, he began to notice furtive movements in the shrubs and
trees they passed. Things flickered too swiftly for him to catch their
outlines, but from the tail of his eye he was aware of motion, and
somehow of eyes that watched. That sensation was a familiar one to him,
and he kept an uneasy gaze on those shiftings in the shrubbery as they
went on. Presently he caught a watcher in full view between bush and
tree, and saw that it was a man, a little, furtive, dark-skinned man who
dodged hastily back into cover again before Smith's eyes could do more
than take in the fact of his existence.
After that he knew what to expect and could make them out more easily:
little, darting people with big eyes that shone with a queer, sorrowful
darkness from their small, frightened faces as they scuttled through the
bushes, dodging always just out of plain sight among the leaves. He
could hear the soft rustle of their passage, and once or twice when they
passed near a clump of shrubbery he thought he caught the echo of little
whispering calls, gentle as the rustle of leaves and somehow full of a
strange warning note so clear that he caught it even amid the murmur of
their speech. Warning calls, and little furtive hiders in the leaves,
and a landscape of tapestried blurring carpeted with Botticelli
flower-strewn sward. It was all a dream. He felt quite sure of that.
* * * * *
It was a long while before curiosity awakened in him sufficiently to
make him break the stillness. But at last he asked dreamily,
"Where are we going?"
The girl seemed to understand that without the necessity of the bond her
hypnotic eyes made, for she turned and caught his eyes in a white stare
and answered,
"To Thag. Thag desires you."
"What is Thag?"
In answer to that she launched without preliminary upon a little
singsong monolog of explanation whose stereotyped formula made him
faintly uneasy with the thought that it must have been made very often
to attain the status of a set speech; made to many men, perhaps, whom
Thag had desired. And what became of them afterward? he wondered. But
the girl was speaking.
"Many ages ago there dwelt in Illar the great King Illar for whom the
city was named. He was a magician of mighty power, but not mighty enough
to fulfill all his ambitions. So by his arts he called up out of
darkness the being known as Thag, and with him struck a bargain. By that
bargain Thag was to give of his limitless power, serving Illar all the
days of Illar's life, and in return the king was to create a land for
Thag's dwelling-place and people it with slaves and furnish a priestess
to tend Thag's needs. This is that land. I am that priestess, the latest
of a long line of women born to serve Thag. The tree-people are his--his
lesser servants.
"I have spoken softly so that the tree-people do not hear, for to them
Thag is the center and focus of creation, the end and beginning of all
life. But to you I have told the truth."
"But what does Thag want of me?"
"It is not for Thag's servants to question Thag."
"Then what becomes, afterward, of the men Thag desires?" he pursued.
"You must ask Thag that."
She turned her eyes away as she spoke, snapping the mental bond that had
flowed between them with a suddenness that left Smith dizzy. He went on
at her side more slowly, pulling back a little on the tug of her
fingers. By degrees the sense of dreaminess was fading, and alarm began
to stir in the deeps of his mind. After all, there was no reason why he
need let this blank-eyed priestess lead him up to the very maw of her
god. She had lured him into this land by what he knew now to have been a
trick; might she not have worse tricks than that in store for him?
She held him, after all, by nothing stronger than the clasp of her
fingers, if he could keep his eyes turned from hers. Therein lay her
real power, but he could fight it if he chose. And he began to hear more
clearly than ever the queer note of warning in the rustling whispers of
the tree-folk who still fluttered in and out of sight among the leaves.
The twilight place had taken on menace and evil.
Suddenly he made up his mind. He stopped, breaking the clasp of the
girl's hand.
"I'm not going," he said.
She swung round in a sweep of richly tinted hair, words jetting from her
in a gush of incoherence. But he dared not meet her eyes, and they
conveyed no meaning to him. Resolutely he turned away, ignoring her
voice, and set out to retrace the way they had come. She called after
him once, in a high, clear voice that somehow held a note as warning as
that in the rustling voices of the tree-people, but he kept on doggedly,
not looking back. She laughed then, sweetly and scornfully, a laugh that
echoed uneasily in his mind long after the sound of it had died upon the
twilit air.
After a while he glanced back over one shoulder, half expecting to see
the luminous dazzle of her body still glowing in the dim glade where he
had left her; but the blurred tapestry-landscape was quite empty.
He went on in the midst of a silence so deep it hurt his ears, and in a
solitude unhaunted even by the shy presences of the tree-folk. They had
vanished with the fire-bright girl, and the whole twilight land was
empty save for himself. He plodded on across the dark grass, crushing
the upturned flower-faces under his boots and asking himself wearily if
he could be mad. There seemed little other explanation for this hushed
and tapestried solitude that had swallowed him up. In that thunderous
quiet, in that deathly solitude, he went on.
* * * * *
When he had walked for what seemed to him much longer than it should
have taken to reach his starting-point, and still no sign of an exit
appeared, he began to wonder if there were any way out of the gray land
of Thag. For the first time he realized that he had come through no
tangible gateway. He had only stepped out of a shadow, and--now that he
thought of it--there were no shadows here. The grayness swallowed
everything up, leaving the landscape oddly flat, like a badly drawn
picture. He looked about helplessly, quite lost now and not sure in what
direction he should be facing, for there was nothing here by which to
know directions. The trees and shrubs and the starry grass still
stretched about him, uncertainly outlined in that changeless dusk. They
seemed to go on for ever.
But he plodded ahead, unwilling to stop because of a queer tension in
the air, somehow as if all the blurred trees and shrubs were waiting in
breathless anticipation, centering upon his stumbling figure. But all
trace of animate life had vanished with the disappearance of the
priestess' white-glowing figure. Head down, paying little heed to where
he was going, he went on over the flowery sward.
An odd sense of voids about him startled Smith at last out of his
lethargic plodding. He lifted his head. He stood just at the edge of a
line of trees, dim and indistinct in the unchanging twilight. Beyond
them--he came to himself with a jerk and stared incredulously. Beyond
them the grass ran down to nothingness, merging by imperceptible degrees
into a streaked and arching void--not the sort of emptiness into which a
material body could fall, but a solid _nothing_, curving up toward the
dark zenith as the inside of a sphere curves. No physical thing could
have entered there. It was too utterly void, an inviolable emptiness
which no force could invade.
He stared up along the inward arch of that curving, impassable wall.
Here, then, was the edge of the queer land Illar had wrested out of
space itself. This arch must be the curving of solid space which had
been bent awry to enclose the magical land. There was no escape this
way. He could not even bring himself to approach any nearer to that
streaked and arching blank. He could not have said why, but it woke in
him an inner disquiet so strong that after a moment's staring he turned
his eyes away.
Presently he shrugged and set off along the inside of the line of trees
which parted him from the space-wall. Perhaps there might be a break
somewhere. It was a forlorn hope, but the best that offered. Wearily he
stumbled on over the flowery grass.
How long he had gone on along that almost imperceptibly curving line of
border he could not have said, but after a timeless interval of gray
solitude he gradually became aware that a tiny rustling and whispering
among the leaves had been growing louder by degrees for some time. He
looked up. In and out among the trees which bordered that solid wall of
nothingness little, indistinguishable figures were flitting. The
tree-men had returned. Queerly grateful for their presence, he went on a
bit more cheerfully, paying no heed to their timid dartings to and fro,
for Smith was wise in the ways of wild life.
Presently, when they saw how little heed he paid them, they began to
grow bolder, their whispers louder. And among those rustling voices he
thought he was beginning to catch threads of familiarity. Now and again
a word reached his ears that he seemed to recognize, lost amidst the
gibberish of their speech. He kept his head down and his hands quiet,
plodding along with a cunning stillness that began to bear results.
From the corner of his eye he could see that a little dark tree-man had
darted out from cover and paused midway between bush and tree to inspect
the queer, tall stranger. Nothing happened to this daring venturer, and
soon another risked a pause in the open to stare at the quiet walker
among the trees. In a little while a small crowd of the tree-people was
moving slowly parallel with his course, staring with all the avid
curiosity of wild things at Smith's plodding figure. And among them the
rustling whispers grew louder.
Presently the ground dipped down into a little hollow ringed with trees.
It was a bit darker here than it had been on the higher level, and as he
went down the slope of its side he saw that among the underbrush which
filled it were cunningly hidden huts twined together out of the living
bushes. Obviously the hollow was a tiny village where the tree-folk
dwelt.
He was surer of this when they began to grow bolder as he went down into
the dimness of the place. The whispers shrilled a little, and the
boldest among his watchers ran almost at his elbow, twittering their
queer, broken speech in hushed syllables whose familiarity still
bothered him with its haunting echo of words he knew. When he had
reached the center of the hollow he became aware that the little folk
had spread out in a ring to surround him. Wherever he looked their
small, anxious faces and staring eyes confronted him. He grinned to
himself and came to a halt, waiting gravely.
None of them seemed quite brave enough to constitute himself spokesman,
but among several a hurried whispering broke out in which he caught the
words "Thag" and "danger" and "beware." He recognized the meaning of
these words without placing in his mind their origins in some tongue he
knew. He knit his sun-bleached brows and concentrated harder, striving
to wrest from that curious, murmuring whisper some hint of its original
root. He had a smattering of more tongues than he could have counted
offhand, and it was hard to place these scattered words among any one
speech.
But the word "Thag" had a sound like that of the very ancient dryland
tongue, which upon Mars is considered at once the oldest and the most
uncouth of all the planet's languages. And with that clue to guide him
he presently began to catch other syllables which were remotely like
syllables from the dryland speech. They were almost unrecognizable, far,
far more ancient than the very oldest versions of the tongue he had ever
heard repeated, almost primitive in their crudity and simplicity. And
for a moment the sheerest awe came over him, as he realized the
significance of what he listened to.
* * * * *
The dryland race today is a handful of semi-brutes, degenerate from the
ages of past time when they were a mighty people at the apex of an
almost forgotten glory. That day is millions of years gone now, too far
in the past to have record save in the vaguest folklore. Yet here was a
people who spoke the rudiments of that race's tongue as it must have
been spoken in the race's dim beginnings, perhaps a million years
earlier even than that immemorial time of their triumph. The reeling of
millenniums set Smith's mind awhirl with the effort at compassing their
span.
There was another connotation in the speaking of that tongue by these
timid bush-dwellers, too. It must mean that the forgotten wizard king,
Illar, had peopled his sinister, twilight land with the ancestors of
today's dryland dwellers. If they shared the same tongue they must share
the same lineage. And humanity's remorseless adaptability had done the
rest.
It had been no kinder here than in the outside world, where the ancient
plains-men who had roamed Mars' green prairies had dwindled with their
dying plains, degenerating at last into a shrunken, leather-skinned
bestiality. For here that same race root had declined into these tiny,
slinking creatures with their dusky skins and great, staring eyes and
their voices that never rose above a whisper. What tragedies must lie
behind that gradual degeneration!
All about him the whispers still ran. He was beginning to suspect that
through countless ages of hiding and murmuring those voices must have
lost the ability to speak aloud. And he wondered with a little inward
chill what terror it was which had transformed a free and fearless
people into these tiny wild things whispering in the underbrush.
The little anxious voices had shrilled into vehemence now, all of them
chattering together in their queer, soft, rustling whispers. Looking
back later upon that timeless space he had passed in the hollow, Smith
remembered it as some curious nightmare--dimness and tapestried
blurring, and a hush like death over the whole twilight land, and the
timid voices whispering, whispering, eloquent with terror and warning.
He groped back among his memories and brought forth a phrase or two
remembered from long ago, an archaic rendering of the immemorial tongue
they spoke. It was the simplest version he could remember of the complex
speech now used, but he knew that to them it must sound fantastically
strange. Instinctively he whispered as he spoke it, feeling like an
actor in a play as he mouthed the ancient idiom,
"I--I cannot understand. Speak--more slowly----"
A torrent of words greeted this rendering of their tongue. Then there
was a great deal of hushing and hissing, and presently two or three
between them began laboriously to recite an involved speech, one
syllable at a time. Always two or more shared the task. Never in his
converse with them did he address anyone directly. Ages of terror had
bred all directness out of them.
"Thag," they said. "Thag, the terrible--Thag, the omnipotent--Thag, the
unescapable. Beware of Thag."
For a moment Smith stood quiet, grinning down at them despite himself.
There must not be too much of intelligence left among this branch of the
race, either, for surely such a warning was superfluous. Yet they had
mastered their agonies of timidity to give it. All virtue could not yet
have been bred out of them, then. They still had kindness and a sort of
desperate courage rooted deep in fear.
"What is Thag?" he managed to inquire, voicing the archaic syllables
uncertainly. And they must have understood the meaning if not the
phraseology, for another spate of whispered tumult burst from the
clustering tribe. Then, as before, several took up the task of
answering.
"Thag--Thag, the end and the beginning, the center of creation. When
Thag breathes the world trembles. The earth was made for Thag's
dwelling-place. All things are Thag's. Oh, beware! Beware!"
This much he pieced together out of their diffuse whisperings, catching
up the fragments of words he knew and fitting them into the pattern.
"What--what is the danger?" he managed to ask.
"Thag--hungers. Thag must be fed. It is we who--feed--him, but there are
times when he desires other food than us. It is then he sends his
priestess forth to lure--food--in. Oh, beware of Thag!"
"You mean then, that she--the priestess--brought me in for--food?"
A chorus of grave, murmuring affirmatives.
"Then why did she leave me?"
"There is no escape from Thag. Thag is the center of creation. All
things are Thag's. When he calls, you must answer. When he hungers, he
will have you. Beware of Thag!"
Smith considered that for a moment in silence. In the main he felt
confident that he had understood their warning correctly, and he had
little reason to doubt that they knew whereof they spoke. Thag might not
be the center of the universe, but if they said he could call a victim
from anywhere in the land, Smith was not disposed to doubt it. The
priestess' willingness to let him leave her unhindered, yes, even her
scornful laughter as he looked back, told the same story. Whatever Thag
might be, his power in this land could not be doubted. He made up his
mind suddenly what he must do, and turned to the breathlessly waiting
little folk.
"Which way--lies Thag?" he asked.
A score of dark, thin arms pointed. Smith turned his head speculatively
toward the spot they indicated. In this changeless twilight all sense of
direction had long since left him, but he marked the line as well as he
could by the formation of the trees, then turned to the little people
with a ceremonious farewell rising to his lips.
"My thanks for----" he began, to be interrupted by a chorus of
whispering cries of protest. They seemed to sense his intention, and
their pleadings were frantic. A panic anxiety for him glowed upon every
little terrified face turned up to his, and their eyes were wide with
protest and terror. Helplessly he looked down.
"I--I must go," he tried stumblingly to say. "My only chance is to take
Thag unawares, before he sends for me."
He could not know if they understood. Their chattering went on
undiminished, and they even went so far as to lay tiny hands on him, as
if they would prevent him by force from seeking out the terror of their
lives.
"No, no, no!" they wailed murmurously. "You do not know what it is you
seek! You do not know Thag! Stay here! Beware of Thag!"
* * * * *
A little prickling of unease went down Smith's back as he listened. Thag
must be very terrible indeed if even half this alarm had foundation. And
to be quite frank with himself, he would greatly have preferred to
remain here in the hidden quiet of the hollow, with its illusion of
shelter, for as long as he was allowed to stay. But he was not of the
stuff that yields very easily to its own terrors, and hope burned
strongly in him still. So he squared his broad shoulders and turned
resolutely in the direction the tree-folk had indicated.
When they saw that he meant to go, their protests sank to a wail of
bitter grieving. With that sound moaning behind him he went up out of
the hollow, like a man setting forth to the music of his own dirge. A
few of the bravest went with him a little way, flitting through the
underbrush and darting from tree to tree in a timidity so deeply
ingrained that even when no immediate peril threatened they dared not go
openly through the twilight.
Their presence was comforting to Smith as he went on. A futile desire to
help the little terror-ridden tribe was rising in him, a useless
gratitude for their warning and their friendliness, their genuine
grieving at his departure and their odd, paradoxical bravery even in the
midst of hereditary terror. But he knew that he could do nothing for
them, when he was not at all sure he could even save himself. Something
of their panic had communicated itself to him, and he advanced with a
sinking at the pit of his stomach. Fear of the unknown is so poignant a
thing, feeding on its own terror, that he found his hands beginning to
shake a little and his throat going dry as he went on.
* * * * *
The rustling and whispering among the bushes dwindled as his followers
one by one dropped away, the bravest staying the longest, but even they
failing in courage as Smith advanced steadily in that direction from
which all their lives they had been taught to turn their faces.
Presently he realized that he was alone once more. He went on more
quickly, anxious to come face to face with this horror of the twilight
and dispel at least the fearfulness of its mystery.
* * * * *
The silence was like death. Not a breeze stirred the leaves, and the
only sound was his own breathing, the heavy thud of his own heart.
Somehow he felt sure that he was coming nearer to his goal. The hush
seemed to confirm it. He loosened the force-gun at his thigh.
In that changeless twilight the ground was sloping down once more into a
broader hollow. He descended slowly, every sense alert for danger, not
knowing if Thag was beast or human or elemental, visible or invisible.
The trees were beginning to thin. He knew that he had almost reached his
goal.
He paused at the edge of the last line of trees. A clearing spread out
before him at the bottom of the hollow, quiet in the dim, translucent
air. He could focus directly upon no outlines anywhere, for the
tapestried blurring of the place. But when he saw what stood in the very
center of the clearing he stopped dead-still, like one turned to stone,
and a shock of utter cold went chilling through him. Yet he could not
have said why.
For in the clearing's center stood the Tree of Life. He had met the
symbol too often in patterns and designs not to recognize it, but here
that fabulous thing was living, growing, actually springing up from a
rooted firmness in the spangled grass as any tree might spring. Yet it
could not be real. Its thin brown trunk, of no recognizable substance,
smooth and gleaming, mounted in the traditional spiral; its twelve
fantastically curving branches arched delicately outward from the
central stem. It was bare of leaves. No foliage masked the serpentine
brown spiral of the trunk. But at the tip of each symbolic branch
flowered a blossom of bloody rose so vivid he could scarcely focus his
dazzled eyes upon them.
This tree alone of all objects in the dim land was sharply distinct to
the eye--terribly distinct, remorselessly clear. No words can describe
the amazing menace that dwelt among its branches. Smith's flesh crept as
he stared, yet he could not for all his staring make out why peril was
so eloquent there. To all appearances here stood only a fabulous symbol
miraculously come to life; yet danger breathed out from it so strongly
that Smith felt the hair lifting on his neck as he stared.
* * * * *
It was no ordinary danger. A nameless, choking, paralyzed panic was
swelling in his throat as he gazed upon the perilous beauty of the Tree.
Somehow the arches and curves of its branches seemed to limn a pattern
so dreadful that his heart beat faster as he gazed upon it. But he could
not guess why, though somehow the answer was hovering just out of reach
of his conscious mind. From that first glimpse of it his instincts
shuddered like a shying stallion, yet reason still looked in vain for an
answer.
* * * * *
Nor was the Tree merely a vegetable growth. It was alive, terribly,
ominously alive. He could not have said how he knew that, for it stood
motionless in its empty clearing, not a branch trembling, yet in its
immobility more awfully vital than any animate thing. The very sight of
it woke in Smith an insane urging to flight, to put worlds between
himself and this inexplicably dreadful thing.
* * * * *
Crazy impulses stirred in his brain, coming to insane birth at the
calling of the Tree's peril--the desperate need to shut out the sight of
that thing that was blasphemy, to put out his own sight rather than gaze
longer upon the perilous grace of its branches, to slit his own throat
that he might not need to dwell in the same world which housed so
frightful a sight as the Tree.
* * * * *
All this was a mad battering in his brain. The strength of him was
enough to isolate it in a far corner of his consciousness, where it
seethed and shrieked half heeded while he turned the cool control which
the spaceways life had taught him to the solution of this urgent
question. But even so his hand was moist and shaking on his gun-butt,
and the breath rasped in his dry throat.
Why--he asked himself in a determined groping after steadiness--should
the mere sight of a tree, even so fabulous a one as this, rouse that
insane panic in the gazer? What peril could dwell invisibly in a tree so
frightful that the living horror of it could drive a man mad with the
very fact of its unseen presence? He clenched his teeth hard and stared
resolutely at that terrible beauty in the clearing, fighting down the
sick panic that rose in his throat as his eyes forced themselves to
dwell upon the Tree.
Gradually the revulsion subsided. After a nightmare of striving he
mustered the strength to force it down far enough to allow reason's
entry once more. Sternly holding down that frantic terror under the
surface of consciousness, he stared resolutely at the Tree. And he knew
that this was Thag.
It could be nothing else, for surely two such dreadful things could not
dwell in one land. It must be Thag, and he could understand now the
immemorial terror in which the tree-folk held it, but he did not yet
grasp in what way it threatened them physically. The inexplicable
dreadfulness of it was a menace to the mind's very existence, but surely
a rooted tree, however terrible to look at, could wield little actual
danger.
As he reasoned, his eyes were seeking restlessly among the branches,
searching for the answer to their dreadfulness. After all, this thing
wore the aspect of an old pattern, and in that pattern there was nothing
dreadful. The tree of life had made up the design upon that well-top in
Illar through whose shadow he had entered here, and nothing in that
bronze grille-work had roused terror. Then why----? What living menace
dwelt invisibly among these branches to twist them into curves of
horror?
A fragment of old verse drifted through his mind as he stared in
perplexity:
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
And for the first time the true significance of a "fearful symmetry"
broke upon him. Truly a more than human agency must have arched these
subtle curves so delicately into dreadfulness, into such an awful beauty
that the very sight of it made those atavistic terrors he was so sternly
holding down leap in a gibbering terror.
A tremor rippled over the Tree. Smith froze rigid, staring with startled
eyes. No breath of wind had stirred through the clearing, but the Tree
was moving with a slow, serpentine grace, writhing its branches
leisurely in a horrible travesty of voluptuous enjoyment. And upon their
tips the blood-red flowers were spreading like cobra's hoods, swelling
and stretching their petals out and glowing with a hue so eye-piercingly
vivid that it transcended the bounds of color and blazed forth like pure
light.
But it was not toward Smith that they stirred. They were arching out
from the central trunk toward the far side of the clearing. After a
moment Smith tore his eyes away from the indescribably dreadful
flexibility of those branches and looked to see the cause of their
writhing.
A blaze of luminous white had appeared among the trees across the
clearing. The priestess had returned. He watched her pacing slowly
toward the Tree, walking with a precise and delicate grace as liquidly
lovely as the motion of the Tree. Her fabulous hair swung down about her
in a swaying robe that rippled at every step away from the moon-white
beauty of her body. Straight toward the Tree she paced, and all the
blossoms glowed more vividly at her nearness, the branches stretching
toward her, rippling with eagerness.
Priestess though she was, he could not believe that she was going to
come within touch of that Tree the very sight of which roused such a
panic instinct of revulsion in every fiber of him. But she did not
swerve or slow in her advance. Walking delicately over the flowery
grass, arrogantly luminous in the twilight, so that her body was the
center and focus of any landscape she walked in, she neared her horribly
eager god.
Now she was under the Tree, and its trunk had writhed down over her and
she was lifting her arms like a girl to her lover. With a gliding
slowness the flame-tipped branches slid round her. In that incredible
embrace she stood immobile for a long moment, the Tree arching down with
all its curling limbs, the girl straining upward, her head thrown back
and the mantle of her hair swinging free of her body as she lifted her
face to the quivering blossoms. The branches gathered her closer in
their embrace. Now the blossoms arched near, curving down all about her,
touching her very gently, twisting their blazing faces toward the focus
of her moon-white body. One poised directly above her face, trembled,
brushed her mouth lightly. And the Tree's tremor ran unbroken through
the body of the girl it clasped.
* * * * *
The incredible dreadfulness of that embrace was suddenly more than Smith
could bear. All his terrors, crushed down with so stern a self-control,
without warning burst all bounds and rushed over him in a flood of blind
revulsion. A whimper choked up in his throat and quite involuntarily he
swung round and plunged into the shielding trees, hands to his eyes in a
futile effort to blot out the sight of lovely horror behind him whose
vividness was burnt upon his very brain.
Heedlessly he blundered through the trees, no thought in his
terror-blank mind save the necessity to run, run, run until he could run
no more. He had given up all attempt at reason and rationality; he no
longer cared why the beauty of the Tree was so dreadful. He only knew
that until all space lay between him and its symmetry he must run and
run and run.
What brought that frenzied madness to an end he never knew. When sanity
returned to him he was lying face down on the flower-spangled sward in a
silence so deep that his ears ached with its heaviness. The grass was
cool against his cheek. For a moment he fought the back-flow of
knowledge into his emptied mind. When it came, the memory of that horror
he had fled from, he started up with a wild thing's swiftness and glared
around pale-eyed into the unchanging dusk. He was alone. Not even a
rustle in the leaves spoke of the tree-folk's presence.
For a moment he stood there alert, wondering what had roused him,
wondering what would come next. He was not left long in doubt. The
answer was shrilling very, very faintly through that aching quiet, an
infinitesimally tiny, unthinkably far-away murmur which yet pierced his
ear-drums with the sharpness of tiny needles. Breathless, he strained in
listening. Swiftly the sound grew louder. It deepened upon the silence,
sharpened and shrilled until the thin blade of it was vibrating in the
center of his innermost brain.
And still it grew, swelling louder and louder through the twilight world
in cadences that were rounding into a queer sort of music and taking on
such an unbearable sweetness that Smith pressed his hands over his ears
in a futile attempt to shut the sound away. He could not. It rang in
steadily deepening intensities through every fiber of his being,
piercing him with thousands of tiny music-blades that quivered in his
very soul with intolerable beauty. And he thought he sensed in the
piercing strength of it a vibration of queer, unnamable power far
mightier than anything ever generated by man, the dim echo of some
cosmic dynamo's hum.
* * * * *
The sound grew sweeter as it strengthened, with a queer, inexplicable
sweetness unlike any music he had ever heard before, rounder and fuller
and more complete than any melody made up of separate notes. Stronger
and stronger he felt the certainty that it was the song of some mighty
power, humming and throbbing and deepening through the twilight until
the whole dim land was one trembling reservoir of sound that filled his
entire consciousness with its throbbing, driving out all other thoughts
and realizations, until he was no more than a shell that vibrated in
answer to the calling.
For it was a calling. No one could listen to that intolerable sweetness
without knowing the necessity to seek its source. Remotely in the back
of his mind Smith remembered the tree-folk's warning, "When Thag calls,
you must answer." Not consciously did he recall it, for all his
consciousness was answering the siren humming in the air, and, scarcely
realizing that he moved, he had turned toward the source of that
calling, stumbling blindly over the flowery sward with no thought in his
music-brimmed mind but the need to answer that lovely, power-vibrant
summoning.
Past him as he went on moved other shapes, little and dark-skinned and
ecstatic, gripped like himself in the hypnotic melody. The tree-folk had
forgotten even their inbred fear at Thag's calling, and walked boldly
through the open twilight, lost in the wonder of the song.
Smith went on with the rest, deaf and blind to the land around him,
alive to one thing only, that summons from the siren tune.
Unrealizingly, he retraced the course of his frenzied flight, past the
trees and bushes he had blundered through, down the slope that led to
the Tree's hollow, through the thinning of the underbrush to the very
edge of the last line of foliage which marked the valley's rim.
* * * * *
By now the calling was so unbearably intense, so intolerably sweet that
somehow in its very strength it set free a part of his dazed mind as it
passed the limits of audible things and soared into ecstasies which no
senses bound. And though it gripped him ever closer in its magic, a sane
part of his brain was waking into realization. For the first time alarm
came back into his mind, and by slow degrees the world returned about
him. He stared stupidly at the grass moving by under his pacing feet. He
lifted a dragging head and saw that the trees no longer rose about him,
that a twilit clearing stretched away on all sides toward the forest rim
which circled it, that the music was singing from some source so near
that--that----
The Tree! Terror leaped within him like a wild thing. The Tree,
quivering with unbearable clarity in the thick, dim air, writhed above
him, blossoms blazing with bloody radiance and every branch vibrant and
undulant to the tune of that unholy song. Then he was aware of the
lovely, luminous whiteness of the priestess swaying forward under the
swaying limbs, her hair rippling back from the loveliness of her as she
moved.
Choked and frenzied with unreasoning terror, he mustered every effort
that was in him to turn, to run again like a mad-man out of that
dreadful hollow, to hide himself under the weight of all space from the
menace of the Tree. And all the while he fought, all the while panic
drummed like mad in his brain, his relentless body plodded on straight
toward the hideous loveliness of that siren singer towering above him.
From the first he had felt subconsciously that it was Thag who called,
and now, in the very center of that ocean of vibrant power, he knew.
Gripped in the music's magic, he went on.
All over the clearing other hypnotized victims were advancing slowly,
with mechanical steps and wide, frantic eyes as the tree-folk came
helplessly to their god's calling. He watched a group of little, dusky
sacrifices pace step by step nearer to the Tree's vibrant branches. The
priestess came forward to meet them with outstretched arms. He saw her
take the foremost gently by the hands. Unbelieving, hypnotized with
horrified incredulity, he watched her lead the rigid little creature
forward under the fabulous Tree whose limbs yearned downward like hungry
snakes, the great flowers glowing with avid color.
[Illustration: "The priestess led the rigid little creature forward
under the fabulous tree."]
He saw the branches twist out and lengthen toward the sacrifice,
quivering with eagerness. Then with a tiger's leap they darted, and the
victim was swept out of the priestess' guiding hands up into the
branches that darted round like tangled snakes in a clot that hid him
for an instant from view. Smith heard a high, shuddering wail ripple out
from that knot of struggling branches, a dreadful cry that held such an
infinity of purest horror and understanding that he could not but
believe that Thag's victims in the moment of their doom must learn the
secret of his horror. After that one frightful cry came silence. In an
instant the limbs fell apart again from emptiness. The little savage had
melted like smoke among their writhing, too quickly to have been
devoured, more as if he had been snatched into another dimension in the
instant the hungry limbs hid him. Flame-tipped, avid, they were dipping
now toward another victim as the priestess paced serenely forward.
* * * * *
And still Smith's rebellious feet were carrying him on, nearer and
nearer the writhing peril that towered over his head. The music shrilled
like pain. Now he was so close that he could see the hungry
flower-mouths in terrible detail as they faced round toward him. The
limbs quivered and poised like cobras, reached out with a snakish
lengthening, down inexorably toward his shuddering helplessness. The
priestess was turning her calm white face toward his.
* * * * *
Those arcs and changing curves of the branches as they neared were
sketching lines of pure horror whose meaning he still could not
understand, save that they deepened in dreadfulness as he neared. For
the last time that urgent wonder burned up in his mind why--_why_ so
simple a thing as this fabulous Tree should be infused with an
indwelling terror strong enough to send his innermost soul frantic with
revulsion. For the last time--because in that trembling instant as he
waited for their touch, as the music brimmed up with unbearable,
brain-wrenching intensity, in that one last moment before the
flower-mouths seized him--he saw. He understood.
* * * * *
With eyes opened at last by the instant's ultimate horror, he saw the
real Thag. Dimly he knew that until now the thing had been so frightful
that his eyes had refused to register its existence, his brain to
acknowledge the possibility of such dreadfulness. It had literally been
too terrible to see, though his instinct knew the presence of infinite
horror. But now, in the grip of that mad, hypnotic song, in the instant
before unbearable terror enfolded him, his eyes opened to full sight,
and he saw.
That Tree was only Thag's outline, sketched three-dimensionally upon the
twilight. Its dreadfully curving branches had been no more than Thag's
barest contours, yet even they had made his very soul sick with
intuitive revulsion. But now, seeing the true horror, his mind was too
numb to do more than register its presence: Thag, hovering monstrously
between earth and heaven, billowing and surging up there in the
translucent twilight, tethered to the ground by the Tree's bending stem
and reaching ravenously after the hypnotized fodder that his calling
brought helpless into his clutches. One by one he snatched them up, one
by one absorbed them into the great, unseeable horror of his being.
That, then, was the reason why they vanished so instantaneously, sucked
into the concealing folds of a thing too dreadful for normal eyes to
see.
The priestess was pacing forward. Above her the branches arched and
leaned. Caught in a timeless paralysis of horror, Smith stared upward
into the enormous bulk of Thag while the music hummed intolerably in his
shrinking brain--Thag, the monstrous thing from darkness, called up by
Illar in those long-forgotten times when Mars was a green planet.
Foolishly his brain wandered among the ramifications of what had
happened so long ago that time itself had forgotten, refusing to
recognize the fate that was upon himself. He knew a tingle of respect
for the ages-dead wizard who had dared command a being like this to his
services--this vast, blind, hovering thing, ravenous for human flesh,
indistinguishable even now save in those terrible outlines that sent
panic leaping through him with every motion of the Tree's fearful
symmetry.
* * * * *
All this flashed through his dazed mind in the one blinding instant of
understanding. Then the priestess' luminous whiteness swam up before his
hypnotized stare. Her hands were upon him, gently guiding his mechanical
footsteps, very gently leading him forward into--into----
* * * * *
The writhing branches struck downward, straight for his face. And in one
flashing leap the moment's infinite horror galvanized him out of his
paralysis. Why, he could not have said. It is not given to many men to
know the ultimate essentials of all horror, concentrated into one
fundamental unit. To most men it would have had that same paralyzing
effect up to the very instant of destruction. But in Smith there must
have been a bed-rock of subtle violence, an unyielding, inflexible
vehemence upon which the structure of his whole life was reared. Few men
have it. And when that ultimate intensity of terror struck the basic
flint of him, reaching down through mind and soul into the deepest
depths of his being, it struck a spark from that inflexible barbarian
buried at the roots of him which had force enough to shock him out of
his stupor.
* * * * *
In the instant of release his hand swept like an unloosed spring, of its
own volition, straight for the butt of his power-gun. He was dragging it
free as the Tree's branches snatched him from its priestess' hands. The
fire-colored blossoms burnt his flesh as they closed round him, the hot
branches gripping like the touch of ravenous fingers. The whole Tree was
hot and throbbing with a dreadful travesty of fleshly life as it whipped
him aloft into the hovering bulk of incarnate horror above.
In the instantaneous upward leap of the flower-tipped limbs Smith fought
like a demon to free his gun-hand from the gripping coils. For the first
time Thag knew rebellion in his very clutches, and the ecstasy of that
music which had dinned in Smith's ears so strongly that by now it seemed
almost silence was swooping down a long arc into wrath, and the branches
tightened with hot insistency, lifting the rebellious offering into
Thag's monstrous, indescribable bulk.
But even as they rose, Smith was twisting in their clutch to maneuver
his hand into a position from which he could blast that undulant tree
trunk into nothingness. He knew intuitively the futility of firing up
into Thag's imponderable mass. Thag was not of the world he knew; the
flame blast might well be harmless to that mighty hoverer in the
twilight. But at the Tree's root, where Thag's essential being merged
from the imponderable to the material, rooting in earthly soil, he
should be vulnerable if he were vulnerable at all. Struggling in the
tight, hot coils, breathing the nameless essence of horror, Smith fought
to free his hand.
The music that had rung so long in his ears was changing as the branches
lifted him higher, losing its melody and merging by swift degrees into a
hum of vast and vibrant power that deepened in intensity as the limbs
drew him upward into Thag's monstrous bulk, the singing force of a thing
mightier than any dynamo ever built. Blinded and dazed by the force
thundering through every atom of his body, he twisted his hand in one
last, convulsive effort, and fired.
He saw the flame leap in a dazzling gush straight for the trunk below.
It struck. He heard the sizzle of annihilated matter. He saw the trunk
quiver convulsively from the very roots, and the whole fabulous Tree
shook once with an ominous tremor. But before that tremor could shiver
up the branches to him the hum of the living dynamo which was closing
round his body shrilled up arcs of pure intensity into a thundering
silence.
Then without a moment's warning the world exploded. So instantaneously
did all this happen that the gun-blast's roar had not yet echoed into
silence before a mightier sound than the brain could bear exploded
outward from the very center of his own being. Before the awful power of
it everything reeled into a shaken oblivion. He felt himself falling....
* * * * *
A queer, penetrating light shining upon his closed eyes roused Smith by
degrees into wakefulness again. He lifted heavy lids and stared upward
into the unwinking eye of Mars' racing nearer moon. He lay there
blinking dazedly for a while before enough of memory returned to rouse
him. Then he sat up painfully, for every fiber of him ached, and stared
round on a scene of the wildest destruction. He lay in the midst of a
wide, rough circle which held nothing but powdered stone. About it,
rising raggedly in the moving moonlight, the blocks of time-forgotten
Illar loomed.
But they were no longer piled one upon another in a rough travesty of
the city they once had shaped. Some force mightier than any of man's
explosives seemed to have hurled them with such violence from their beds
that their very atoms had been disrupted by the force of it, crumbling
them into dust. And in the very center of the havoc lay Smith, unhurt.
He stared in bewilderment about the moonlight ruins. In the silence it
seemed to him that the very air still quivered in shocked vibrations.
And as he stared he realized that no force save one could have wrought
such destruction upon the ancient stones. Nor was there any explosive
known to man which would have wrought this strange, pulverizing havoc
upon the blocks of Illar. That force had hummed unbearably through the
living dynamo of Thag, a force so powerful that space itself had bent to
enclose it. Suddenly he realized what must have happened.
Not Illar, but Thag himself had warped the walls of space to enfold the
twilit world, and nothing but Thag's living power could have held it so
bent to segregate the little, terror-ridden land inviolate.
Then when the Tree's roots parted, Thag's anchorage in the material
world failed and in one great gust of unthinkable energy the warped
space-walls had ceased to bend. Those arches of solid space had snapped
back into their original pattern, hurling the land and all its dwellers
into--into----His mind balked in the effort to picture what must have
happened, into what ultimate dimension those denizens must have
vanished.
Only himself, enfolded deep in Thag's very essence, the intolerable
power of the explosion had not touched. So when the warped space-curve
ceased to be, and Thag's hold upon reality failed, he must have been
dropped back out of the dissolving folds upon the spot where the Tree
had stood in the space-circled world, through that vanished world-floor
into the spot he had been snatched from in the instant of the dim land's
dissolution. It must have happened after the terrible force of the
explosion had spent itself, before Thag dared move even himself through
the walls of changing energy into his own far land again.
Smith sighed and lifted a hand to his throbbing head, rising slowly to
his feet. What time had elapsed he could not guess, but he must assume
that the Patrol still searched for him. Wearily he set out across the
circle of havoc toward the nearest shelter which Illar offered. The dust
rose in ghostly, moonlit clouds under his feet.
[Illustration]
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