The World Turned Upside Down Part 72

There came a time when we lost touch with the world outside. Three of us, in a world of our own, forgot that there was an outside, that there was anything but the one great purpose that drove us on through the dark and the damp. We had no word of the world, nor the world of us. Nasuki grew impatient, and the man who was in Gonzales' place. The work of the Golden Cross was progressing, its ring of Rebellion strengthening. To Rasmussen, to Moorehead, they cried for action. The brooding stillness that lay over Svadin's palace, the brutal coldness of the orders that issued through Heinrich Sturm's lips, shaping the civilization of a world as a sculptor would chisel granite, drove them to the edge of madness. Revolution flamed again-and this time brother was pitted against brother all across the face of the planet-fear against fury-Svadin against the Four.

I have seen pictures of the Svadin whom that flame of war drew to the balcony of his palace, to shout his thunderous command of death above the kneeling throng. The disease, if disease it was that changed him, was progressing swiftly. There was little resemblance to the man who lay dead a handful of years before, and on whom life fell out of an empty sky. He was huge, misshapen, monstrous, but so utter was their fear and awe that those groveling thousands questioned no word of his and cut down their kin as they would reap corn. The looped cross was an emblem of certain death. Men cast it from them, forswore its pledge, betrayed others who were faithful. At least one desperate, embattled horde stormed the grim castle above Budapest, while the sullen ring of the faithful closed in around them. Under their feet, ignorant of what was happening above us, we three dug and tapped, tapped and dug-and found!

I remember that moment when I knelt in the stuffy darkness of the tunnel, digging my fingers into thecracks on either side of that ma.s.sive block. For hours, two sleeping while one worked we had chiseled at it, widening the crevices, carving a grip, loosening it from the bed in which it had been set a lifetime before. My numbed fingers seemed to become part of the cold stone. Dunard was tugging at me, begging me to give him his chance. Then the great block s.h.i.+fted in its bed, tilted and slid crus.h.i.+ngly against me.

Barely in time I slipped out from under it, then I was leaning over its slimy ma.s.s, Smirnoff's torch in my hand, peering into the black cavern beyond. The round beam of the torch wavered across mouldering straw-across dripping, fungus-feathered walls. It centered on a face, huge-nosed, topped with matted red hair.

It was Donegan!

We fed him while Dunard hacked at the gyves that held him spread-eagled against the wall. As he grew stronger he talked-answering my questions-telling of things that grew too horribly clear in the light of past happenings. At last we parted, Dunard and Smirnoff to carry word to the Brotherhood of the Cross-Donegan and I into the donjon-keep of Nicholas Svadin!

The guard at the cell door died as other guards have died before; we had no choice. I remembered those voices which were only fingers tap, tap, tapping through stone. I knew what those buried men would do if only they could-and gave them their chance. We were a little army in ourselves when we charged up the great central staircase of Svadin's castle against the grim line of faithful guards. At the landing they held us-and outside, battling in the gardens beyond the great doors, we could hear the gunfire of that last stand of our Brotherhood against ignorance and fear. We thought then that Dunard and Smirnoff had won through, had given their message to those who could light the flame of revolt. We did not know that they were cut down before they could reach our forces. But armed with what we could find or wrest from the men who opposed us, we charged up that broad staircase into the face of their fire, burst over them and beat them down as a peasant flails wheat, turned their machine gun on their fleeing backs and mowed them down in a long, heaped windrow strewn down the length of the corridor to Svadin's door.

We stood there at the head of the stairs, behind the gun, staring at that door-half-naked, filthy, caked with blood. There was a great, breathless silence broken only by the patter of gunfire in the courtyard outside, m.u.f.fled by the walls. Then Donegan picked up the gun and stepped over the crumpled body of a guard. His bare feet slapped on the cold stone of the hall and behind him our footsteps echoed, in perfect time, drumming the death-roll of Nicholas Svadin. We came to the door-and it opened!

Heinrich Sturm stood there. Sturm-grown bent and little. Sturm with horror in his eyes, with horror twisting his face and blood streaming down his chest from a ripped-out throat. Sturm-babbling blood-choked German words, tottering, crumpling at our feet, who stood staring over him into the great, dark room beyond, at Svadin, red-mouthed, standing beside the great canopied bed, at the ten foul things that stood behind him!

Donegan's machine-gun sprayed death over the bleeding body of Zoologist Heinrich Wilhelm Sturm.

Soft slugs ploughed into the soft body of Nicholas Svadin, into the bodies of the ten things at his feet. He shook at their impact, and the pallid flesh ripped visibly where they hit, but he only stood and laughed-laughed as the G.o.d of Gold had laughed, in a voice that meant death and doom to the human race!

Laughed and came striding at us across the room with his h.e.l.l-pack trotting at his heels.

There are fears that can surpa.s.s all courage. That fear drenched us then. We ran-Donegan with his gun like a child in his arms, I with old Heinrich Sturm dragging like a wet sack behind me, the others likeragged, screaming ghosts. We stumbled over the windrows of dead in the corridor, down those sweeping stairs into the lower hall, through the open doors into the courtyard. We stood, trapped between death and death.

A hundred men remained of the Brotherhood of the Cross. They were huddled in a knot in the center of the court, surrounded by the host who were faithful to fear, and to Svadin. As we burst through the great doors of the castle, led by the naked, haggard, flaming-haired figure of Jim Donegan, every eye turned to us-every hand fell momentarily from its work of killing. Then miraculously old Heinrich Sturm was struggling up in my arms, was shouting in German, in his babbling, blood-choked voice, and in the throng other voices in other languages were taking up his cry, translating it-sending it winging on: "He is no G.o.d! He is from h.e.l.l-a fiend from h.e.l.l! Vampire-eater of men! He-and his cursed sp.a.w.n!"

They knew him, every one. They knew him for Svadin's intimate-the man who spoke with Svadin's voice and gave his orders to the world. They heard what he said-and in the doorway they saw Svadin himself.

He was naked, as he had stood when that door swung open and Sturm came stumbling through. He was corpse-white, blotched with the purple-yellow of decay, bloated with the gases of death.

Svadin-undead-unhuman-and around his feet ten gibbering simulacra of himself-ten pulpy, fish-white monsters of his flesh, their slit-mouths red with the lapped blood of Heinrich Sturm!

He stood there, spread-legged, above the crowd. His gla.s.sy eyes stared down on the b.l.o.o.d.y, upturned faces, and the stump of his hacked arm pounded on his hairless breast where the line of bullet-marks showed like a purple ribbon. His vast voice thundered down at them, and it was like the bellowing of a l.u.s.ting bull: "I am Nicholas Svadin!"

And in hideous, mocking echo the ten dwarfed horrors piped after him: "I am Nicholas Svadin!"

In my arms old Heinrich Sturm lay staring at the Thing whose slave and more than slave he had been, and his old lips whispered five words before his head sagged down in death. Red Jim Donegan heard them and shouted them for the world to hear. Svadin heard, and if that dead-man's face could show expression, fear sloughed over it, and his thick red lips parted in a grin of terror over yellowed fangs.

"Burn him! Fire is clean!"

I caught up the body of Heinrich Sturm and ran with it, out of the path of the mob that surged up the castle steps, Jim Donegan at their head. Svadin's splayed feet sounded across the floor of the great hall, his h.e.l.l-brood pattering after him. Then the crowd caught them and I heard the spat of clubbed fists on soft flesh, and a great roaring scream of fury went up over the yammer of the mob.

They tore the little fiends to shreds and still they lived. They bound the Thing that had been Svadin and carried him, battered and twisting, into the courtyard. They built a pyre in the streets of Budapest, and when the flames licked high they cast him in, his h.e.l.l-sp.a.w.n with him, and watched with avid eyes as he writhed and crisped, and listened to his screaming. The beast is in every man when hate and fear are roused. Far into the night, when Svadin and his brood were ashes underfoot, the mad crowd surged andfought through the streets, looting, burning, ravening.

When Svadin died, four men had ruled the world. Today four men rule a world that is better because Svadin rose from the dead that day in Budapest, that is free because of his inhuman tyranny.

Moorehead-Nasuki-Rasmussen-Corregio. Red Jim Donegan is a hero, and I and a hundred other living men, but none pays homage to dead old Heinrich Wilhelm Sturm. He was too long identified with Nicholas Svadin for men to love him now.

What we know of Svadin, and of other things, Sturm had learned, little by little, through the years. He told certain things to Donegan, before Svadin grew suspicious and ordered the American's death. It was Heinrich Sturm's mercy that won Donegan a cell instead of a bullet or the knife, or even worse. For somewhere during his a.s.sociation with the perverted dregs of Europe's royal courts the reborn Svadin had acquired, among other things, a taste for human blood and human flesh.

"All I know is what Sturm told me," Donegan says. "The old man was pretty shrewd, and what he didn't know he guessed-and I reckon he guessed close. It was curiosity made him stay on with Svadin-first off, anyway. Afterwards he knew too much to get away.

"There must have been spores of life, so Sturm said. There was a Swede by the name of Arrhenius-back years ago-who thought that life might travel from planet to planet in spores so small that light could push them through s.p.a.ce. He said that a spore-dust from ferns and moss and fungus, and things like bacteria that were very small, could pa.s.s from world to world that way. And he figured there might be spores of pure life drifting around out there in s.p.a.ce between the stars, and that whenever they fall on a planet, life would start there.

"That's what happened to us, according to the old man. There were three spores that fell here, all within a short time of each other. One fell in the sea, and it brought the Sea-Thing to life, made mostly of complex molecules of colloidal water and salts out of the sea-ooze where the spore fell. It could grow by sucking up water, but it needed those salts from decomposed, organic things too. That's why it attacked cities, where there was plenty of food for it.

"The second spore fell on quartz-maybe in some kind of colloidal gel, like they find sometimes in the hard stuff. There was gold there, and the Thing that came alive was what I saw, and what the Indians thought was one of their old G.o.ds come to life again-the G.o.d of gold and crystal. Svadin killed it with some radium compound that he invented.

"The third seed fell on Svadin and brought him to life. He wasn't a man, really, but he had all the organs and things that a man would have. He had the same memories in his brain, and the same traits of character, until other things rooted them out. He came to life-but to stay alive he had to be different from other men. He had embalming fluid instead of blood, and wax in his skin, and things like that, and he had to replace them the way we eat food to replace our tissues. When he changed, it was in ways a dead man would change, except that he used his brain better and more logically than any live man ever did. He had to learn how a man would act, and he had some willing enough teachers to show him the rotten along with the good.

"Those other things grew as they fed, and so did Svadin, but he was more complex than they were-more nearly like men. Where they grew, he reproduced, like the simplest kinds of living things, by budding off duplicates of himself, out of his own flesh. It was like a hydra-like a vegetable-like anything but a man. Maybe you noticed, too-a couple of those things that grew after he lost his arm in Rio, had only one arm too. They were him, in a way. They called his name when he did, there at the last .

. ." The sweat is standing out on his weather-beaten forehead as he remembers it. I see the vision that he does-those ten miniature Svadins growing, budding in their turn, peopling the Earth anew with a race of horrors made in mockery of man. He reaches for the bottle at his elbow: "We've seen Nature-the Universe-sp.a.w.ning," he says. "Maybe it's happened on Earth before; maybe it'll happen again. Probably we, and all the other living things on Earth got started that way, millions of years ago. For a while, maybe, there were all kinds of abortive monsters roaming around the world, killing each other off the way Svadin killed the Sea-Thing and the G.o.d of Gold. They were new and simple-they reproduced by dividing, or budding, or crystallizing, and it was hard to kill them except with something like fire that would destroy the life-germs in them. After a while, when the seed of life in them would be pretty well diluted, it would be easier. Anyway, that's how I figure it.

"Svadin looked human, at first, but he wasn't-ever. What he was, no one knows. Not even old Sturm.

It's pretty hard to imagine what kind of thoughts and feelings a living dead man would have. He had some hang-over memories from the time he was really Svadin, so he started in to fix over the world. Maybe he thought men were his own kind, at first-at least, they looked like him. He fixed it, all right-only, after a while there wasn't anything human left in him, and he began to plan things the way a machine would, to fit him and the race he was sp.a.w.ning. It's no more than we've done since Time began-killing animals and each other to get what we want, eating away the Earth to get at her metals, and oil, and so on. The G.o.d of Gold was kin to the Earth, in a way, and I guess he resented seeing her cut up by a lot of flesh and blood animals like us.

"I said he learned some of our perversions. Once someone had taught him a thing like that, and he liked it, it became part of the heritage that he pa.s.sed down to future generations. Somehow he got the taste for flesh-raw flesh-humans were just like another animal to him. After Sturm stopped being useful to him, he attacked the old man too.

"You see-he had a human brain, and he could think like a man, and scheme and sense danger to his plans. Only-he didn't ever really understand human psychology. He was like an amoeba, or a polyp, and I don't guess they have emotions. He didn't understand religion, and the feeling people had that he was a kind of G.o.d. He used it-but when awe turned into hate, and people thought of him as a devil instead of a G.o.d, they treated him like one. They burned him the way their ancestors burned witches!"

He tosses down a shot of rye and wipes his lips. "Next time it happens," he says, "I'm going to be drunk.

And this time I'll stay drunk!"

Afterword by David Drake P. Schuyler Miller was very important to the SF field in two ways. The generally known fas.h.i.+on is that he was the first regular reviewer in an SF magazine, holding that position atAstounding , latera.n.a.log , from the late '40s to his death in 1974. The less familiar aspect is that Tom Doherty, when he was a salesman for other publishers, would arrange his route so that he could have lunch with Miller in Pittsburgh. Tom put Miller's encyclopedic knowledge of the field to good use when he became publisher of Ace in 1977 and in 1981 founded Tor Books.From 1930 through 1947 Miller also sold SF stories. He was never a major writer, though some of his stories were reprinted often enough to be easily found in old anthologies. "Sp.a.w.n" (whichisn't generally available) had a major impact on me, however, when I read Miller's single-author collectionThe t.i.tan in the Clinton Public Library.

Since then I've read all or nearly all of Miller's published fiction, and I can say with certainty that he never wrote anything else even remotely like "Sp.a.w.n." In form it's less a story than a prose poem or a drama in blank verse. It really is SF-Miller had a degree in chemistry, and if you read carefully you'll note underlying the lush color and imagery that there's a degree of scientific rigor very unusual for 1939-but it appeared inWeird Tales rather than in an SF magazine (generallyAstounding by that point) as most of Miller's other published stories did. (Miller had several stories in Campbell'sUnknown , but "Sp.a.w.n"

would've been even more out of place there than inAstounding .) "Sp.a.w.n" demonstrates highly unusual stylistic touches-tricks, I'd say, but that would imply they were conscious and that the author could repeat them. Miller never did, making me suspect that the process of creation here wasn't completely intellectual.

The reader views the action as though it were on a movie screen or he were looking through multiple layers of gla.s.s, insulating her from vivid, horrific events. The narrator tells his story as though you were face to face with him. He doesn't bother to give his name, nor often enough does he name other men the first time they appear. He doesn't describe events in sequence; they rise in momentary importance, then sink back like porpoises into the sea of narrative.

Like porpoises, or like whales. Oh, yes: "Sp.a.w.n" is a horror story.

And everything is in place for the climax, including the fact that the story opens and closes not in Berlin or Vienna or Warsaw, but in Budapest.

In addition to leaving me numb with horror at the infinite possible, "Sp.a.w.n" showed me that there is no proper form or technique for a story: there is the proper form and technique ofthe story before you at this moment. That's why I picked "Sp.a.w.n" for this anthology.

St. Dragon and the George

by Gordon R. d.i.c.kson

Preface by David Drake Shortly after my parents gave me a subscription toThe Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in October 1959, the magazine offered back issues at the rate of fifteen for three dollars or twenty-five for five dollars. I sent three dollars; among the delights I found when the magazines arrived was "St. Dragon and the George." (There weremany delights. I immediately sc.r.a.ped up another five dollars and sent it off.

Thirteen of the twenty-five additional magazines were duplicates, but I didn't complain.) Gordy d.i.c.kson at his peak was one of the best writers in the field. For my money (literally, in this case), "St. Dragon and the George" is the best thing he ever wrote. It's both funny and witty, but if those were its only virtues, I wouldn't have picked it for this anthology. The humor and wit overlie a series of very profound ideas:There is evil; It is the duty of human beings to stand firm against evil, even if evil most likely will destroy them; And human beings come in all shapes and sizes.

If more people took those ideas to heart, the world would be a better place. Because I read "St. Dragon and the George," the world is at least slightly better than it might be if I hadn't.

I.

A trifle diffidently, Jim Eckert rapped with his claw on the blue-painted door.

Silence.

He knocked again. There was the sound of a hasty step inside the small, oddly peak-roofed house and the door was s.n.a.t.c.hed open. A thin-faced old man with a tall pointed cap and a long, rather dingy-looking white beard peered out, irritably.

"Sorry, not my day for dragons!" he snapped. "Come back next Tuesday." He slammed the door.

It was too much. It was the final straw. Jim Eckert sat down on his haunches with a dazed thump. The little forest clearing with its impossible little pool tinkling away like Chinese gla.s.s wind chimes in the background, its well-kept greensward with the white gravel path leading to the door before him, and the riotous flower beds of asters, tulips, zinnias, roses and lilies-of-the-valley all equally impossibly in bloom at the same time about the white finger-post labeled s. carolinus and pointing at the house-it all whirled about him. It was more than flesh and blood could bear. At any minute now he would go completely insane and imagine he was a peanut or a c.o.c.ker spaniel. Grottwold Hanson had wrecked them all. Dr.

Howells would have to get another teaching a.s.sistant for his English Department. Angie . . .

Angie!

Jim pounded on the door again. It was s.n.a.t.c.hed open.

"Dragon!" cried S. Carolinus, furiously. "How would you like to be a beetle?"

"But I'm not a dragon," said Jim, desperately.

The magician stared at him for a long minute, then threw up his beard with both hands in a gesture of despair, caught some of it in his teeth as it fell down and began to chew on it fiercely.

"Now where," he demanded, "did a dragon acquire the brains to develop the imagination to entertain the illusion that he isnot a dragon? Answer me, O Ye Powers!" "The information is psychically, though not physiologically correct," replied a deep ba.s.s voice out of thin air beside them and some five feet off the ground. Jim, who had taken the question to be rhetorical, started convulsively.

"Is that so?" S. Carolinus peered at Jim with new interest. "Hmm." He spat out a hair or two. "Come in, Anomaly-or whatever you call yourself."

Jim squeezed in through the door and found himself in a large single room. It was a clutter of mismatched furniture and odd bits of alchemical equipment.

"Hmm," said S. Carolinus, closing the door and walking once around Jim, thoughtfully. "If you aren't a dragon, what are you?"

"Well, my real name's Jim Eckert," said Jim. "But I seem to be in the body of a dragon named Gorbash."

"And this disturbs you. So you've come to me. How nice," said the magician, bitterly. He winced, ma.s.saged his stomach and closed his eyes. "Do you know anything that's good for a perpetual stomach-ache? Of course not. Go on."

"Well, I want to get back to my real body. And take Angie with me. She's my fiancee and I can send her back but I can't send myself back at the same time. You see this Grottwold Hanson-well, maybe I better start from the beginning."

"Brilliant suggestion, Gorbash," said Carolinus. "Or whatever your name is," he added.

"Well," said Jim. Carolinus winced. Jim hurried on. "I teach at a place called Riveroak College in the United States-you've never heard of it-"

"Go on, go on," said Carolinus.

"That is, I'm a teaching a.s.sistant. Dr. Howells, who heads the English Department, promised me an instructors.h.i.+p over a year ago. But he's never come through with it; and Angie-Angie Gilman, my fiancee-"

"You mentioned her."

"Yes-well, we were having a little fight. That is, we were arguing about my going to ask Howells whether he was going to give me the instructor's rating for next year or not. I didn't think I should; and she didn't think we could get married-well, anyway, in came Grottwold Hanson."

"Inwhere camewho? "

"Into the Campus Bar and Grille. We were having a drink there. Hanson used to go with Angie. He's a graduate student in psychology. A long, thin geek that's just as crazy as he looks. He's always getting wound up in some new odd-ball organization or other-"

"Dictionary!" interrupted Carolinus, suddenly. He opened his eyes as an enormous volume appeared suddenly poised in the air before him. He ma.s.saged his stomach. "Ouch," he said. The pages of the volume began to flip rapidly back and forth before his eyes. "Don't mind me," he said to Jim. "Go on."

"-This time it was the Bridey Murphy craze. Hypnotism. Well-" "Not so fast," said Carolinus. "Bridey Murphy . . . Hypnotism. . . yes . . ."

"Oh, he talked about the ego wandering, planes of reality, on and on like that. He offered to hypnotize one of us and show us how it worked. Angie was mad at me, so she said yes. I went off to the bar. I was mad. When I turned around, Angie was gone. Disappeared."

"Vanished?" said Carolinus.

"Vanished. I blew my top at Hanson. She must have wandered, he said, not merely the ego, but all of her. Bring her back, I said. I can't, he said. It seemed she wanted to go back to the time of St. George and the Dragon. When men were men and would speak up to their bosses about promotions. Hanson'd have to send someone else back to rehypnotize her and send her back home. Like an idiot I said I'd go.

Ha! I might've known he'd goof. He couldn't do anything right if he was paid for it. I landed in the body of this dragon."

"And the maiden?"

"Oh, she landed here, too. Centuries off the mark. A place where there actually were such things as dragons-fantastic."

"Why?" said Carolinus.

"Well, I mean-anyway," said Jim, hurriedly. "The point is, they'd already got her-the dragons, I mean.

A big brute named Anark had found her wandering around and put her in a cage. They were having a meeting in a cave about deciding what to do with her. Anark wanted to stake her out for a decoy, so they could capture a lot of the local people-only the dragons called peoplegeorges- "

"They're quite stupid, you know," said Carolinus, severely, looking up from the dictionary. "There's only room for one name in their head at a time. After the Saint made such an impression on them his name stuck."

"Anyway, they were all yelling at once. They've got tremendous voices."

"Yes, you have," said Carolinus, pointedly.