Short Fiction

“I’m glad you came,” said Chalmers. He was sitting by the window and his face was very pale. Two tall candles guttered at his elbow and cast a sickly amber light over his long nose and slightly receding chin. Chalmers would have nothing modern about his apartment. He had the soul of a medieval ascetic, and he preferred illuminated manuscripts to automobiles and leering stone gargoyles to radios and adding-machines.

As I crossed the room to the settee he had cleared for me I glanced at his desk and was surprised to discover that he had been studying the mathematical formulae of a celebrated contemporary physicist, and that he had covered many sheets of thin yellow paper with curious geometric designs.

“Einstein and John Dee are strange bedfellows,” I said as my gaze wandered from his mathematical charts to the sixty or seventy quaint books that comprised his strange little library. Plotinus and Emanuel Moscopulus, St. Thomas Aquinas and Frenicle de Bessy stood elbow to elbow in the somber ebony bookcase, and chairs, table and desk were littered with pamphlets about medieval sorcery and witchcraft and black magic, and all of the valiant glamorous things that the modern world has repudiated.

Chalmers smiled engagingly, and passed me a Russian cigarette on a curiously carved tray. “We are just discovering now,” he said, “that the old alchemists and sorcerers were two-thirds right, and that your modern biologist and materialist is nine-tenths wrong.”

“They scented me in time,” he moaned. “I went too far.”

“What were they like?” I said, to humor him.

He leaned forward and gripped my arm. He was shivering horribly. “No word in our language can describe them!” He spoke in a hoarse whisper. “They are symbolized vaguely in the myth of the Fall, and in an obscene form which is occasionally found engraven on ancient tablets. The Greeks had a name for them, which veiled their essential foulness. The tree, the snake and the apple⁠—these are the vague symbols of a most awful mystery.”

His voice had risen to a scream. “Frank, Frank, a terrible and unspeakable deed was done in the beginning. Before time, the deed, and from the deed⁠—”

He had risen and was hysterically pacing the room. “The seeds of the deed move through angles in dim recesses of time. They are hungry and athirst!”

“Chalmers,” I pleaded to quiet him. “We are living in the third decade of the Twentieth Century.”

“They are lean and athirst!” he shrieked. “The Hounds of Tindalos!”

“Chalmers, shall I phone for a physician?”

You’ve seen them⁠—the old ships, the battered and ruined ships, the ships that have made one voyage too many, and are so ancient you can’t remember their names or the reputations they’ve earned for themselves in deep space! Sure you’ve seen them! Black hulls stretching away for miles into the red sunset⁠—ships that can be bought for a song if you’ve a song left in you and still want to go adventuring on the rim of the System.

Do you know how it feels not to have a song left in you? Do you know how it feels to be a legend without substance⁠—the lad who broke the bank at Callisto City and walked out two days later without a penny to his name?

Pete knew and he kept harping on it. “If you’d quit that first night, Jim, instead of pushin’ it all back across the board!”

There was awe in his eyes when he looked at me, and then he’d look at the ships, and I could guess what he was thinking. Good old Pete! When he shut his eyes I was still wearing a golden halo.

Lucky Jim Sanders, strong as an ox and coming along fine⁠—born lucky and loving life too much to worry his head about the future. But when life rises up and wallops you and lays you out flat you forget the good times and your own recklessness, and the inner strength and the laughing girls, and you just want to sit down and never get up!

Charley Grimes was a big man who had been everywhere in the Solar System and collected trophies which were as strange and shining as the stories he liked to tell.

His face was as gaunt as the jungle mask and, when he lit a pipe and smoked it, you watched to see where the smoke would drift. It wasn’t hard to picture it drifting over the mountains of the moon or across the flat red plains of Mars.

We were sitting around a campfire in the Rockies just as our ancestors must have sat five hundred years in the past. We were swapping yarns to get Charley started, and watching the sun sink to rest on clouds shaped like wild mustangs when the talk drifted to the dark side of the moon.

You know what it’s like on the dark side. The brittle stars shine down and the great craters loom up, but when you’re flying low in a rocket ship about all you can see through the viewpane is a circle of radiance spotlighting a desolation as bleak as the Siberian Steppes.

You miss so many things you don’t dare even think about the earth. If you’re an escapist you cover your bunk with pictures of the lush Venusian jungles and pretend you’re somewhere else. But if you’re a realist you go outside and come to grips with the bleakness in one way or another.

Charley was a realist.

“So I went wandering off just to see what I could find!” Charley said.

They were within five yards of the dwelling when a door opened and a child of ten or twelve emerged. She was blue-eyed, golden-haired, and she stood for a moment blinking in the evening light, her hair whipped by the wind.

“Mary Sweeney!” Cynthia exclaimed, catching hold of Ned’s arm. Then, in a stunned whisper: “Oh, but it can’t be! She’d be a grown woman!”

The child straightened at the sound of the voice, looking about. She saw Ned and Cynthia, and blank amazement came into her eyes. Then she gave a little glad cry, and ran toward them, her arms reaching out in welcome.

“You’ve come back!” she exclaimed. “Mom and dad thought it would be a long time. But I knew you’d come soon! I knew! I was sure!”

Nowhere any sign that this was not the child they had known ten years before! Her voice, the peaches-and-cream color that flooded her cheeks, the way her hair clung in little ringlets to her temples, all struck memory chords from long ago.

And now she was beckoning them into the dwelling, having moved a little away from them. She was balancing herself in elfin lightness on one toe, and smiling in warm gratefulness, the sun all blue and gold behind her.

She had always seemed an elfin and mischievous child.

“What can it mean, Ned?”

White-lipped, Ned shook his head. “I⁠—I don’t know! We’d better go inside!”