Before the Universe Read online

  But the odds were still extreme, and the built-in blasters of the robots were coming uncomfortably close.

  Stanton saw that, and shifted his tactics. Holstering his heavy blaster, he grabbed Annamarie and shoved her into the Mars-Tube, crying to Josey to follow. Josey came slowly after them, turning to fire again and again at the robots, but with little effect. A quick look at the charge-dial on the butt of his heat-gun showed why; the power was almost exhausted.

  He shouted as much to Stanton. “I figured that would be happening—now we run!” Stanton cried back, and the three sped along the Mars-Tube, leaping the hoops as they came to them.

  “What a time for a hurdle race!” gasped Annamarie, bounding over the rings, which were raised about a foot from the ground. “You’d think we would have known better than to investigate things that’re supposed to be private.”

  “Save your breath for running,” panted Josey. “Are they following us in here?”

  Stanton swivelled his head to look, and a startled cry escaped him. “They’re following us—but look!”

  The other two slowed, then stopped running altogether and stared in wonder. One of the robots had charged into the Mars-Tube—and had been levitated! He was swinging gently in the air, the long metal legs squirming fiercely, but not touching anything.”

  “How —?”

  “They’re metal!” Annamarie cried. “Don’t you see—they’re metal, and the hoops are charged. They must have some of the same metal as the Tube cars are made of in their construction—the force of the hoops acts on them, too!”

  That seemed to be the explanation. “Then we’re safe!” gasped Josey, staggering about, looking for a place to sit.

  “Not by a long shot! Get moving again!” And Stanton set the example.

  “You mean because they can still shoot at us?” Josey cried, following Stanton’s dog-trot nonetheless. “But they can’t aim the guns—they seem to be built in, only capable of shooting directly forward.”

  “Very true,” gritted Stanton. “But have you forgotten that this subway is in use? According to my calculations, there should be another car along in about thirty seconds or less –and please notice, there isn’t any by-path anymore. It stopped back a couple of hundred feet. If we get caught here by a car, we get mashed. So – unless you want to go back and sign an armistice with the robots? I thought not – so we better keep going. Fast!”

  The three were lucky – very lucky. For just when it seemed certain that they would have to run on and on until the bullet-fast car overtook them, or go back and face the potent weapons of the guard robots, a narrow crevice appeared in the side of the tunnel-wall. The three bolted into it and slumped to the ground.

  CRASH!

  “What was that?” cried Annamarie.

  “That,” said Josey slowly, “was what happens to a robot when the fast express comes by. Just thank God it wasn’t us.”

  Stanton poked his head gingerly into the Mars-Tube and stared down. “Say,” he muttered wonderingly, “when we wreck something we do it good. We’ve ripped out a whole section of the hoops – by proxy, of course. When the car hit the robot they were both smashed to atoms, and the pieces knocked out half a dozen of the suspension rings. I would say, offhand, that this line has run its last train.”

  “Where do you suppose this crevice leads?” asked Annamarie, forgetting the damage that couldn’t be undone.

  “I don’t know. The station ought to be around here somewhere – we were running toward it. Maybe this will lead us into the station if we follow it. If it doesn’t, maybe we can drill a tunnel from here to the station with my blaster.”

  Drilling wasn’t necessary. A few feet in, the scarcely passable crevice widened into a broad fissure, through which a faint light was visible. Exploration revealed that the faint light came from a wall-chart showing the positions and destinations of the trains. The chart was displaying the symbol of a Zeta train – the train that would never arrive.

  “Very practical people, we are,” Annamarie remarked with irony. “We didn’t think to bring lights.”

  “We never needed them anywhere else on the planet – we can’t be blamed too much. Anyway, the code-panel gives us a little light.”

  By the steady, dim red glow cast by the code-panel, the three could see the anteroom fairly clearly. It was disappointing. For all they could tell, there was no difference between this and any other station on the whole planet. But why all the secrecy? The dead Martians surely had a reason for leaving the guard-robots so thick and furious. But what was it?

  Stanton pressed an ear to the wall of the anteroom. “Listen!” he snapped. “Do you hear —?”

  “Yes,” said the girl at length. “Scuffling noises – a sort of gurgling too, like running water passing through pipes.” “Look there!” wailed Josey.

  “Where?” asked the archaeologist naturally. The dark was impenetrable. Or was it? There was a faint glimmer of light, not a reflection from the code-panel, that shone through a continuation of the fissure. It came, not from a single source of light, but from several, eight or ten at least. The lights were bobbing up and down. “I’d swear they were walking!” marvelled Ray.

  “Ray,” shrieked the girl faintly. As the lights grew nearer, she could see what they were – pulsing domes of a purplish glow that ebbed and flowed in tides of dull light. The light seemed to shine from behind a sort of membrane, and the outer surfaces of the membrane were marked off with faces –terrible, savage faces, with carnivorous teeth projecting from mouths that were like ragged slashes edged in writhing red.

  “Ray!” Annamarie cried again. “Those lights – they’re the luminous heads of living creatures!”

  “God help us – you’re right!” Stanton whispered. The patterns of what he had read in the bobbin-books began to form a whole in his mind. It all blended in – “Under-Eaters,” “Fiends from Below,” “Raging Glows.” Those weirdly cryptic creatures that were now approaching. And – “Good Lord!” Stanton ejaculated, feeling squeamishly sick. “Look at them – they look like human beings!”

  It was true. The resemblance was not great, but the oncoming creatures did have such typically Terrestrial features as hairless bodies, protruding noses, small ears, and so forth, and did not have the unmistakable hour-glass silhouette of the true Martians.

  “Maybe that’s why the Martians feared and distrusted the first Earthmen they saw. They thought we were related to these – things!” Stanton said thoughtfully.

  “Mooning over it won’t help us now,” snapped Annamarie. “What do we do to get away from them? They make me nervous!”

  “We don’t do anything to get away. What could we do? There’s no place to go. We’ll have to fight – get out your guns!”

  “Guns!” sneered Josey. “What guns? Mine’s practically empty, and Annamarie threw hers away!”

  Stanton didn’t answer, but looked as though a cannon-shell had struck him amidships. Grimly he drew out his blaster. “Then this one will have to do all of us,” was all he said. “If only these accursed blasters weren’t so unmanageable – there’s at least an even chance that a bad shot will bring the roof down on us. Oh, well –“I forgot to mention,” he added casually, “that, according to the records, the reason that the true Martians didn’t like these things was that they had the habit of eating their victims. Bearing that in mind, I trust you will not mind my chancing a sudden and unanimous burial for us all.” Ht drew the blaster and carefully aimed it at the first of the oncoming group. He was already squeezing the trigger when Josey grabbed his arm. “Hold on, Ray!” Josey whispered. “Look what’s coming.”

  The light-headed ones had stopped their inexorable trek toward the Terrestrials. They had bunched fearfully a few yards within the fissure, staring beyond the three humans, into the Mars-Tube.

  Three of the spider-robots, the Tube-tenders, were there. Evidently the destruction of one of their number, and the consequent demolition of several of the hoops, had short-circu
ited this section of the track so that they could enter it and walk along without fear.

  There was a deadly silence that lasted for a matter of seconds. The three from Earth cowered as silently as possible where they were, desirous of attracting absolutely no attention from either side. Then – Armageddon!

  The three robots charged in, abruptly, lancing straight for the luminous-topped bipeds in the crevasse. Their metal legs stamped death at the relatively impotent organic creatures, trampling their bodies until they died. But the cave-dwellers had their methods of fighting, too; each of them carried some sort of instrument, hard and heavy-ended, with which they wreaked havoc on the more delicate parts of the robots.

  More and more “Raging Glows” appeared from the crevasse, and it seemed that the three robots, heavily outnumbered, would go down to a hard-fought but inevitable “death” – if that word could be applied to a thing whose only life was electromagnetic. Already there were more than a score of the strange bipeds in the cavern, and destruction of the metal creatures seemed imminent.

  “Why don’t the idiotic things use their guns?” Annamarie shuddered.

  “Same reason I didn’t – the whole roof might come down. Don’t worry – they’re doing all right. Here come some more of them.”

  True enough. From the Mars-Tube emerged a running bunch of the robots – ten or more of them. The slaughter was horrible – a carnage made even more unpleasant by the fact that the dimness of the cavern concealed most of the details. The fight was in comparative silence, broken only by the faint metallic clattering of the workings of the robots, and an occasional thin squeal from a crushed biped. The cave-dwellers seemed to have no vocal organs.

  The robots were doing well enough even without guns. Their method was simply to trample and bash the internal organs of their opponents until the opponent had died. Then they would kick the pulped corpse out of the way and proceed to the next.

  The “Hot-Heads” had had enough. They broke and ran back down the tunnel from which they had come. The metal feet of the robots clattered on the rubble of the tunnel-floor as they pursued them at maximum speed. It took only seconds for the whole of the ghastly running fight to have traveled so far from the humans as to be out of sight and hearing. The only remnants to show it had ever existed were the mangled corpses of the cave-dwellers, and one or two wrecked robots.

  Stanton peered after the battle to make sure it was gone. Then, mopping his brow, he slumped to a sitting position and emitted a vast “Whew!” of relief. “I have seldom been so sure I was about to become dead,” he said pensively. “Divide and rule is what I always say – let your enemies fight it out among themselves. Well, what do we do now? My curiosity is sated –let’s go back.”

  “That,” said the girl sternly, “is the thing we are most certainly not going to do. If we’ve come this far we can go a little farther. Let’s go on down this tunnel and see what’s there. It seems to branch off farther down; we can take the other route .from that of the robots.

  Josey sighed. “Oh, well,” he murmured resignedly. “Always game, that’s me. Let’s travel.”

  “It’s darker than I ever thought darkness could be, Ray,” Annamarie said tautly. “And I just thought of something. How do we know which is the other route – the one the robots didn’t take?”

  “A typical question,” snarled Stanton. “So you get a typical answer: I don’t know. Or, to phrase it differently, we just have to put ourselves in the robots’ place. If you were a robot, where would you go?”

  “Home,” Ogden answered immediately. “Home and to bed. But these robots took the tunnel we’re in. So let’s turn back and take the other one.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Observation and deduction. I observed that I am standing in something warm and squishy, and I deduced that it is the corpse of a recent light-head.”

  “No point in taking the other tunnel, though,” Annamarie’s voice floated back. She had advanced a few steps and was hugging the tunnel wall. “There’s an entrance to another tunnel here, and it slopes back the way we came. I’d say, offhand, that the other tunnel is just an alternate route.”

  “Noise,” said Stanton. “Listen.”

  There was a scrabbling, chittering, quite indescribable sound, and then another one. Suddenly terrific squalling noises broke the underground silence and the three ducked as they sensed something swooping down on them and gliding over their heads along the tunnel.

  “What was that?” yelped Josey.

  “A cat-fight, I think,” said Stanton. “I could hear two distinct sets of vocables, and there were sounds of battle. Those things could fly, glide or jump – probably jump. I think they were a specialized form of tunnel life adapted to living, breeding, and fighting in a universe that was long, dark, and narrow. Highly specialized.”

  Annamarie giggled hysterically. “Like the bread-and-butter-fly that lived on weak tea with cream in it.”

  “Something like,” Stanton agreed.

  Hand in hand, they groped their way on through the utter blackness. Suddenly there was a grunt from Josey, on the extreme right. “Hold it,” he cried, withdrawing his hand to finger his damaged nose. “The tunnel seems to end here.”

  “Not end,” said Annamarie. “Just turns to the left. And take a look at what’s there!”

  The men swerved and stared. For a second no one spoke; the sudden new vista was too compelling for speech.

  “Ray!” finally gasped the girl. “It’s incredible ! It’s incredible!”

  There wasn’t a sound from the two men at her sides. They had rounded the final bend in the long tunnel and come out into the flood of light they had seen. The momentary brilliance staggered them and swung glowing spots before their eyes.

  Then, as the effects of persistence of vision faded, they saw what the vista actually was. It was a great cavern, the hugest they’d ever seen on either planet—and by tremendous odds the most magnificent.

  The walls were not of rock, it seemed, but of slabs of liquid fire—liquid fire which, their stunned eyes soon saw, was a natural inlay of incredible winking gems.

  Opulence was the rule of this drusy cave. Not even so base a metal as silver could be seen here; gold was the basest available. Platinum, iridium, little pools of shimmering mercury dotted the jewel-studded floor of the place. Stalactites and stalagmites were purest rock-crystal.

  Flames seemed to glow from behind the walls colored by the emerald, ruby, diamond, and topaz. “How can such a formation occur in nature?” Annamarie whispered. No one answered.

  ” ‘There are more things in heaven and under it —’ ” raptly misquoted Josey. Then, with a start, “What act’s that from?”

  It seemed to bring the others to. “Dunno,” chorused the archaeologist and the girl. Then, the glaze slowly vanishing from their eyes, they looked at each other.

  “Well,” breathed the girl.

  In an abstracted voice, as though the vision of the jewels had never been seen, the girl asked, “How do you suppose the place is lighted?”

  “Radioactivity,” said Josey tersely. There seemed to be a tacit agreement—if one did not mention the gems neither would the others. “Radioactive minerals and maybe plants. All this is natural formation. Weird, of course, but here it is.” There was a feeble, piping sound in the cavern.

  “Can this place harbor life?” asked Stanton in academic tones.

  “Of course,” said Josey, “any place can.” The thin, shrill piping was a little louder, strangely distorted by echoes.

  “Listen,” said the girl urgently. “Do you hear what I hear?”

  “Of course not,” cried Stanton worriedly. “It’s just my—I mean our imagination. I can’t be hearing what I think I’m hearing.”

  Josey had pricked his ears up. “Calm down, both of you,” he whispered. “If you two are crazy—so am I. That noise is something—somebody—singing Gilbert and Sullivan. “A Wand’ring Minstrel, I”, I believe the tune is.”


  “Yes,” said Annamarie hysterically. “I always liked that number.” Then she reeled back into Stanton’s arms, sobbing hysterically.

  “Slap her,” said Josey, and Stanton did, her head rolling loosely under the blows. She looked up at him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, the tears still on her cheeks.

  “I’m sorry, too,” echoed a voice, thin, reedy, and old; “and I suppose you’re sorry. Put down your guns. Drop them. Put up your hands. Raise them. I really am sorry. After all, I don’t want to kill you.”

  IV Marshall Ellenbogan

  They turned and dropped their guns almost immediately, Stanton shrugging off the heavy power-pack harness of his blaster as Josey cast down his useless heat-pistol. The creature before them was what one would expect as a natural complement to this cavern. He was weird, pixyish, dressed in fantastic points and tatters, stooped, wrinkled, whiskered, and palely luminous. Induced radioactivity, Stanton thought.

  “Hee,” he giggled. “Things!”

  “We’re men,” said Josey soberly. “Men like – like you.” He shuddered.

  “Lord,” marvelled the pixy to himself, his gun not swerving an inch. “What won’t they think of next! Now, now, you efts –you”re addressing no puling creature of the deep. I’m a man and proud of it. Don’t palter with me. You shall die and be reborn again – eventually, no doubt. I’m no agnostic, efts. Here in this cavern I have seen – oh the things I have seen.” His face was rapturous with holy bliss.

  “Who are you?” asked Annamarie.

  The pixy started at her, then turned to Josey with a questioning look. “Is your friend all right?” the pixy whispered confidentially. “Seems rather effeminate to me.”

  “Never mind,” the girl said hastily. “What’s your name?”

  “Marshall Ellenbogan,” said the pixy surprisingly. “Second Lieutenant in the United States Navy. But,” he snickered, “I suspect my commission’s expired.”