The Moon Pool Part 43

There was a choking rattle at my feet; half the head of a dwarf raised out of vacancy; beat twice upon the floor in death throes; fell back.

Lakla s.h.i.+vered; gave a command. The frog-men moved about; peering here and there; lifting unseen folds revealing in stark rigidity torn form after form of the priestess's men.

Lakla had been right--her _Akka_ were thorough fighters!

She called, and to her came the frog-woman who was her attendant. To her the handmaiden spoke, pointing to the batrachians who stood, paws and forearms melted beneath the robes they had gathered. She took them and pa.s.sed out--more grotesque than ever, shattering into streaks of vacancies, reappearing with flickers of s.h.i.+ning scale and yellow gems as the tattered pennants of invisibility fluttered about her.

The frog-men reached down, swung each a dead dwarf in his arms, and filed, booming triumphantly away.

And then I remembered the cone of the _Keth_ which had slipped from Yolara's hand; knew it had been that for which her wild eyes searched.

But look as closely as we might, search in every nook and corner as we did, we could not find it. Had the dying hand of one of her men clutched it and had it been borne away with them? With the thought Larry and I raced after the scaled warriors, searched every body they carried. It was not there. Perhaps the priestess had found it, retrieved it swiftly without our seeing.

Whatever was true--the cone was gone. And what a weapon that one little holder of the shaking death would have been for us!

CHAPTER XXVIII

In the Lair of the Dweller

It is with marked hesitation that I begin this chapter, because in it I must deal with an experience so contrary to every known law of physics as to seem impossible. Until this time, barring, of course, the mystery of the Dweller, I had encountered nothing that was not susceptible of naturalistic explanation; nothing, in a word, outside the domain of science itself; nothing that I would have felt hesitancy in reciting to my colleagues of the International a.s.sociation of Science. Amazing, unfamiliar--_advanced_--as many of the phenomena were, still they lay well within the limits of what we have mapped as the possible; in regions, it is true, still virgin to the mind of man, but toward which that mind is steadily advancing.

But this--well, I confess that I have a theory that is naturalistic; but so abstruse, so difficult to make clear within the short confines of the s.p.a.ce I have to give it, so dependent upon conceptions that even the highest-trained scientific brains find difficult to grasp, that I despair.

I can only say that the thing occurred; that it took place in precisely the manner I am about to narrate, and that I experienced it.

Yet, in justice to myself, I must open up some paths of preliminary approach toward the heart of the perplexity. And the first path is the realization that our world _whatever_ it is, is certainly _not_ the world as we see it! Regarding this I shall refer to a discourse upon "Gravitation and the Principle of Relativity," by the distinguished English physicist, Dr. A. S. Eddington, which I had the pleasure of hearing him deliver before the Royal Inst.i.tution.[1]

I realize, of course, that it is not true logic to argue--"The world is not as we think it is--therefore everything we think impossible is possible in it." Even if it _be_ different, it is governed by _law_. The truly impossible is that which is outside law, and as nothing _can_ be outside law, the impossible _cannot_ exist.

The crux of the matter then becomes our determination whether what we think is impossible may or may not be possible under laws still beyond our knowledge.

I hope that you will pardon me for this somewhat academic digression, but I felt it was necessary, and it has, at least, put me more at ease. And now to resume.

We had watched, Larry and I, the frog-men throw the bodies of Yolara's a.s.sa.s.sins into the crimson waters. As vultures swoop down upon the dying, there came sailing swiftly to where the dead men floated, dozens of the luminous globes. Their slender, varicoloured tentacles whipped out; the giant iridescent bubbles _climbed_ over the cadavers.

And as they touched them there was the swift dissolution, the melting away into putrescence of flesh and bone that I had witnessed when the dart touched fruit that time I had saved Rador--and upon this the Medusae gorged; pulsing lambently; their wondrous colours s.h.i.+fting, changing, glowing stronger; elfin moons now indeed, but satellites whose glimmering beauty was fed by death; alembics of enchantment whose glorious hues were sucked from horror.

Sick, I turned away--O'Keefe as pale as I; pa.s.sed back into the corridor that had opened on the ledge from which we had watched; met Lakla hurrying toward us. Before she could speak there throbbed faintly about us a vast sighing. It grew into a murmur, a whispering, shook us--then pa.s.sing like a presence, died away in far distance.

"The Portal has opened," said the handmaiden. A fainter sighing, like an echo of the other, mourned about us. "Yolara is gone," she said, "the Portal is closed. Now must we hasten--for the Three have commanded that you, Goodwin, and Larry and I tread that strange road of which I have spoken, and which Olaf may not take lest his heart break--and we must return ere he and Rador cross the bridge."

Her hand sought Larry's.

"Come!" said Lakla, and we walked on; down and down through hall after hall, flight upon flight of stairways. Deep, deep indeed, we must be beneath the domed castle--Lakla paused before a curved, smooth breast of the crimson stone rounding gently into the pa.s.sage. She pressed its side; it revolved; we entered; it closed behind us.

The room, the--hollow--in which we stood was faceted like a diamond; and like a cut brilliant its sides glistened--though dully. Its shape was a deep oval, and our path dropped down to a circular polished base, roughly two yards in diameter. Glancing behind me I saw that in the closing of the entrance there had been left no trace of it save the steps that led from where that entrance had been--and as I looked these steps _turned_, leaving us isolated upon the circle, only the faceted walls about us--and in each of the gleaming faces the three of us reflected--dimly. It was as though we were within a diamond egg whose graven angles had been turned _inward_.

But the oval was not perfect; at my right a screen cut it--a screen that gleamed with fugitive, fleeting luminescences--stretching from the side of our standing place up to the tip of the chamber; slightly convex and crisscrossed by millions of fine lines like those upon a spectroscopic plate, but with this difference--that within each line I sensed the presence of mult.i.tudes of finer lines, dwindling into infinitude, ultramicroscopic, traced by some instrument compared to whose delicacy our finest tool would be as a crowbar to the needle of a micrometer.

A foot or two from it stood something like the standee of a compa.s.s, bearing, like it a cradled dial under whose crystal ran concentric rings of prisoned, lambent vapours, faintly blue. From the edge of the dial jutted a little shelf of crystal, a keyboard, in which were cut eight small cups.

Within these cups the handmaiden placed her tapering fingers. She gazed down upon the disk; pressed a digit--and the screen behind us slipped noiselessly into another angle.

"Put your arm around my waist, Larry, darlin', and stand close," she murmured. "You, Goodwin, place your arm over my shoulder."

Wondering, I did as she bade; she pressed other fingers upon the shelf's indentations--three of the rings of vapour spun into intense light, raced around each other; from the screen behind us grew a radiance that held within itself all spectrums--not only those seen, but those _unseen_ by man's eyes. It waxed brilliant and ever more brilliant, all suffusing, pa.s.sing through me as day streams through a window pane!

The enclosing facets burst into a blaze of coruscations, and in each sparkling panel I saw our images, shaken and torn like pennants in a whirlwind. I turned to look--was stopped by the handmaiden's swift command: "Turn not--on your life!"

The radiance behind me grew; was a rus.h.i.+ng tempest of light in which I was but the shadow of a shadow. I heard, but not with my ears--nay with _mind_ itself--a vast roaring; an _ordered_ tumult of sound that came hurling from the outposts of s.p.a.ce; approaching--rus.h.i.+ng--hurricane out of the heart of the cosmos--closer, closer. It wrapped itself about us with unearthly mighty arms.

And brilliant, ever more brilliant, streamed the radiance through us.

The faceted walls dimmed; in front of me they melted, diaphanously, like a gelatinous wall in a blast of flame; through their vanis.h.i.+ng, under the torrent of driving light, the unthinkable, impalpable tornado, I began to move, slowly--then ever more swiftly!

Still the roaring grew; the radiance streamed--ever faster we went.

Cutting down through the length, the _extension_ of me, dropped a wall of rock, foreshortened, clenched close; I caught a glimpse of the elfin gardens; they whirled, contracted, into a thin--slice--of colour that was a part of me; another wall of rock shrinking into a thin wedge through which I flew, and that at once took its place within me like a card slipped beside those others!

Flas.h.i.+ng around me, and from Lakla and O'Keefe, were nimbuses of flickering scarlet flames. And always the steady hurling forward--appallingly mechanical.

Another barrier of rock--a gleam of white waters incorporating themselves into my--_drawing out_--even as were the flowered moss lands, the slicing, rocky walls--still another rampart of cliff, dwindling instantly into the vertical plane of those others. Our flight checked; we seemed to hover within, then to sway onward--slowly, cautiously.

A mist danced ahead of me--a mist that grew steadily thinner. We stopped, wavered--the mist cleared.

I looked out into translucent, green distances; shot with swift prismatic gleamings; waves and pulsings of luminosity like midday sun glow through green, tropic waters: dancing, scintillating veils of sparkling atoms that flew, hither and yon, through depths of nebulous splendour!

And Lakla and Larry and I were, I saw, like shadow shapes upon a smooth breast of stone twenty feet or more above the surface of this place--a surface spangled with tiny white blossoms gleaming wanly through creeping veils of phosph.o.r.escence like smoke of moon fire. We were shadows--and yet we had substance; we were incorporated with, a part of, the rock--and yet we were living flesh and blood; we stretched--nor will I qualify this--we _stretched_ through mile upon mile of s.p.a.ce that weirdly enough gave at one and the same time an absolute certainty of immense horizontal lengths and a vertical concentration that contained nothing of length, nothing of s.p.a.ce whatever; we stood _there_ upon the face of the stone--and still we were _here_ within the faceted oval before the screen of radiance!

"Steady!" It was Lakla's voice--and not beside me _there_, but at my ear close before the screen. "Steady, Goodwin! And--see!"

The sparkling haze cleared. Enormous reaches stretched before me.

s.h.i.+mmering up through them, and as though growing in some medium thicker than air, was ma.s.s upon ma.s.s of verdure--fruiting trees and trees laden with pale blossoms, arbours and bowers of pallid blooms, like that sea fruit of oblivion--grapes of Lethe--that cling to the tide-swept walls of the caverns of the Hebrides.

Through them, beyond them, around and about them, drifted and eddied a horde--great as that with which Tamerlane swept down upon Rome, vast as the myriads which Genghis Khan rolled upon the califs--men and women and children--clothed in tatters, half nude and wholly naked; slant-eyed Chinese, sloe-eyed Malays, islanders black and brown and yellow, fierce-faced warriors of the Solomons with grizzled locks fantastically bedizened; Papuans, feline Javans, Dyaks of hill and sh.o.r.e; hook-nosed Phoenicians, Romans, straight-browed Greeks, and Vikings centuries _beyond_ their lives: scores of the black-haired Murians; white faces of our own Westerners--men and women and children--drifting, eddying--each stamped with that mingled horror and rapture, eyes filled with ecstasy and terror entwined, marked by G.o.d and devil in embrace--the seal of the s.h.i.+ning One--the dead-alive; the lost ones!

The loot of the Dweller!

Soul-sick, I gazed. They lifted to us visages of dread; they swept down toward us, glaring upward--a bank against which other and still other waves of faces rolled, were checked, paused; until as far as I could see, like billows piled upon an ever-growing barrier, they stretched beneath us--staring--staring!

Now there was a movement--far, far away; a concentrating of the lambency; the dead-alive swayed, oscillated, separated--forming a long lane against whose outskirts they crowded with avid, hungry insistence.

First only a luminous cloud, then a whirling pillar of splendours through the lane came--the s.h.i.+ning One. As it pa.s.sed, the dead-alive swirled in its wake like leaves behind a whirlwind, eddying, twisting; and as the Dweller raced by them, brus.h.i.+ng them with its spirallings and tentacles, they shone forth with unearthly, awesome gleamings--like vessels of alabaster in which wicks flare suddenly.

And when it had pa.s.sed they closed behind it, staring up at us once more.

The Dweller paused beneath us.

Out of the drifting ruck swam the body of Throckmartin! Throckmartin, my friend, to find whom I had gone to the pallid moon door; my friend whose call I had so laggardly followed. On his face was the Dweller's dreadful stamp; the lips were bloodless; the eyes were wide, lucent, something like pale, phosph.o.r.escence gleaming within them--and soulless.

He stared straight up at me, unwinking, unrecognizing. Pressing against his side was a woman, young and gentle, and lovely--lovely even through the mask that lay upon her face. And her wide eyes, like Throckmartin's, glowed with the lurking, unholy fires. She pressed against him closely; though the hordes kept up the faint churning, these two kept ever together, as though bound by unseen fetters.