Night & Demons (13 page)

His first attempts were based on radio-telescopes and were complete failures. Then he began to work from the opposite end, modifying an encephalograph, and with this relatively crude instrument he caught the first hints of those terrible whispers from the stars, and that night he held all the knowledge of this primal mystery that he later only reinforced. All, that is, but its underlying meaning.

Later improvements had followed, far simpler than that final result that hung above the bed on which I sat, but just as effective for listening to the minds of our ancestors. Denkirch had earlier noted that different historical periods were grouped in recognizable parts of the sky, although there was considerable overlapping. Meaningful names were rare, of course, but many occupations gave keys to determine their dating. For instance, an auto mechanic had to be fairly recent, and a private of the Iron Brigade was just as useful as Abraham Lincoln. In general the most recent names were clustered on or in the direction of Deneb in Orion, while those of the period around World War I could be expected to be heard when the antenna was directed toward the Pleiades, and so on. It seemed probable that with the death of each occupied body, the human mind marched one more step in a slow, majestic procession around the universe.

This knowledge, this proof of his contentions, was soon not enough for Denkirch. He had a list of names, but what he now wanted was first-hand knowledge of the universe.

I can still remember how Denkirch looked that night as he talked, unconsciously pacing the room and waving his arms, the glitter in his eyes far brighter than that the soft fluorescents could give them. “Johnnie, you used to tell me that death would be oblivion. Now I can prove to you that it’s not oblivion, it’s the universe in all its wonder and glory! Think of it, Johnnie—thundering nitrogen cataracts under a pale green sun. Night in the dazzling center of a globular cluster! What have you ever wanted to see? You will—just wait for it. And now with this”—he waved toward the great cone waiting silently above me—
“
we won’t even have to wait.”

With that last sentence—his declaration of triumph—my spirits, which had been caught up despite themselves by his wild enthusiasm, sagged again into blind despair. I knew there was something wrong. Not in the theories, for they had been confirmed by the instruments; not in the instruments, for Denkirch was far too logical even in his fanaticism to accept his results without duplicating them in numerous cross-checks; still, somewhere. . . .

“Do you mean the cones are matter transmitters?” I asked as the full significance of Denkirch’s words sank in.

“Well, not transmitters, at least,” he answered, “and I only designed them to receive minds, but I dare say they’d work quite well for matter, too, if it could somehow be sent to them. Basically, though, they’re designed to do a job similar to that of my earlier passive receivers and they will do everything the earlier ones would, as you heard. They go just one step farther. Not throwing a body across the universe, but pulling a mind back, and that’s all that’s necessary.”

As Denkirch went on to explain his masterpiece I felt the same awe at its magnitude of conception as I had when he recounted the steps leading up to it, but under the soft cushion of marvel lay the same rending claws of fear, and my stomach knotted as I listened.

The difference between the cones and their forerunners lay in their ability to actively snatch a mind back from wherever it had gone when it left its original body. Lack of this feature, Denkirch thought, had prematurely exiled many ancient mystics to far worlds. If they, by sheer force of will, directed their spirits to another already occupied body, they would quickly be forced back into their own again. If instead they freed their minds without giving them any basic direction, as was probably the more common occurrence, they would be pulled irresistibly to Deneb just as though their bodies had died, unable to return without the same spiritual discipline by means of which they had come and which the alien environment might well make impossible until after their terran bodies had slipped into a mindless death.

The cones, keyed to Denkirch’s mind when it was released from his body (also an electronic process, since Denkirch was a scientist rather than a mystic), would pull it back from Deneb when they were activated. Between the time his mind was severed from his brain by what he described as an interference field and the time I turned on the cones, Denkirch would have as much freedom on some strange planet as his newborn body would give him; freedom to run or burrow or fly or perhaps just to sit and absorb the newness of his surroundings.

At this point he stopped pacing and returned to the control console, motioning me to join him. Most of its eight-foot length was covered with dials, but to one end a helmet much like the one on the bed was connected. There were only two other things built into the three feet of the console nearest the helmet, a large three-position switch and a small red indicator light similar to the generator lights of most new cars.

“You’ll wear this helmet,” Denkirch said. “With it on you’ll be in perfect contact with all my senses as long as the switch is in the second position. That is, as long as I’m on Deneb everything I experience in any way will be as clear to you as if it were you who were undergoing it. The only difference is that you won’t be able to control the new body, as I will. In ten minutes or so—you’ll be able to use your own eyes when they’re open, though things may look like a double exposure—make sure the red light isn’t on and pull the switch to the third position to turn on the cones. The light is connected to the radar, and if it’s on, a plane is nearly overhead. Just wait till it blinks out before pulling the switch.”

Then, always a scientist, his mind picked up the puzzling thread it had brushed and he asked a simple, musing question that caused me to break out into a sweat again, “I wonder why I can only pick up the identities of the dead? You’d think that either all the surface thoughts would come through, or none at all. Surely members of other races don’t spend all their time repeating their human names, do they?”

But this seemed only a minor matter, soon to be clarified along with much greater mysteries, and Denkirch returned to the business at hand.

“All you have to do,” he repeated, “is put your helmet on, move the switch to the second jog to free my mind, and then to the third in ten minutes to bring me back.”

I waited a moment, locking my hands across my knees to keep them from shaking, and asked the question whose answer I already feared: “When do you plan to try it out?”

“When?” he echoed, surprised. “Why tonight, of course. The sky is clear, the static level is low—what more could we ask?”

For the next forty-five minutes I waited in silent resignation as Denkirch gave his equipment a final check, until at last he stepped back, and regarded it for a moment, arms akimbo, and said, “Well, I guess all that remains is to turn it on and let it warm up.”

He touched a switch on the far end of the console and the room shook as the nearby generator picked up speed. The shaking died away again to a low purr after a few minutes and Denkirch explained, “That was just the capacitors charging. The cones will soak up a lot of power when they kick in. There’s a light switch above the console that you ought to flip before you turn on the apparatus. It turns off everything but the necessary instruments, to keep the load down when you turn on the cones. The dial lights will be enough for you to see by when your eyes adjust, and besides, most of what you’ll see will be through my eyes.”

With that Denkirch sat down on the bed, slipped on the helmet there, and lay down full length with his arms at his sides.
“
Would you strap me in, Johnnie?” he said with his words somewhat muffled by the chinstrap of the helmet. “I doubt that it makes much difference, but there is a slim chance that my body might move a little after my mind is disconnected, and I wouldn’t want to damage my helmet and keep you from seeing what is going on, you know.”

The clasp clicked shut and I walked from the bed to the consul trying to think of words to explain to Denkirch what I feared. But it wasn’t a fear that could be explained; it was too basic for that.

The helmet leads were too short for me to reach the light switch with the helmet on, so I turned out the lights and then sat down to wait until I could see again before attempting to put the cumbersome thing on . . . perhaps more, and in a way that minute was the most horrible thing I underwent that night. It was as if I had awakened an instant before my alarm went off in the morning, still comfortably composed in bed but knowing the strident clamor would burst out at any moment. This and more, for it was the ultimate blissful dream that was about to be shattered, and my subconscious knew it though it could not speak.

Denkirch called out from the darkness behind me, “Are you ready?”

The hours of fear I had been feeling finally broke through my dignity and I cried, “Denny, this is wrong! For God’s sake forget about this and just publish the rest of your findings. Those alone are enough to make you as rich and famous as you could want.”

“No,” he answered, “I already am as rich and famous as I want to be. I just want truth. I’m not taking a wild risk, but even if I were it would be worth it for the chance of advancing human understanding as much as this will. Pull the switch, Johnnie.”

Just as he finished, the red aircraft-warning light winked on in front of me.

“There’s a plane overhead,” I said eagerly, certain now of at least a short delay. If we had delayed. . . . But it might have made no difference.

“That doesn’t matter for the first stage and it will be gone before I come back. Pull the switch.”

And, God help me, I did. But there is no god, is there? No god, no heaven, only the hells that glitter down on us every clear night. It was obvious as soon as I closed the switch that Denkirch had been perfectly correct. What neither of us had realized until then was how completely powerless the terran ego would be in the new body. I had not even begun to move my hand before it yanked down the switch almost of its own accord and I sat, quivering in the darkness with my own and Denkirch’s screams still echoing through my mind.

Can you imagine—can you begin to imagine!—what it is to be totally alien? Your body, your world, even your mind except for that tiny, impotent speck of ego that screams, “This is not I,” and screams the louder for knowing that it is and it will be forever, body after body, eon after eon, until space and time are no more! And that is why I no longer sleep on cloudless nights, for the stars in their myriads greet me in my dreams whispering, “Soon you will be with us, every one of us,” and a high, thin scream from the Pleiades tells me where Denkirch is now.

An unlikely story, I know, and I myself might have thought it a dream had I not turned and seen in the green witchlight of the glowing dials the last earthly remains of Samuel Denkirch. Then I hurled my helmet into the console and fled from the cellar that blazed behind me as sputtering arcs from the shattered instruments ignited the frame walls; nor do I remember anything afterwards but my own screams until a highway patrol car stopped me in Indiana. Perhaps the return itself had been fatal, but I rather think it was the atmosphere; for Denkirch had returned to Earth as the tentacled abomination he had become on Deneb. . . .

DRAGON,
THE BOOK

In the summer of 1987 I went to Iceland with my wife and son. The trip wasn’t my idea—travel rarely is, as my PTSD made airports very uncomfortable environments even before 9/11—but I gained a great deal from it.

Partly I saw a lot of really neat things. Some of these were obvious: glaciers and volcanoes and geysers (including Geyser itself) and waterfalls and similar sorts of things that are featured in tourist brochures. Others were a lot less obvious. For example, once the driver carrying us to a glacier stopped, rushed out of the van, and came back cradling between his hands the plover that he’d seen hiding in the tundra. (Yes, he put the plover back.)

Besides the things I saw, however, I got books and pamphlets which took me deeper into Iceland’s unique physical and cultural environment. These weren’t all unique to the country: probably the most valuable single book I brought back was Hollander’s translation of
The Poetic Edda,
published by the University of Texas Press. But I also bought many small volumes on Icelandic history and culture, as well as translations of lesser known sagas; books that I wouldn’t have found back home.

Iceland is one thread of this story’s background. The other thread is Andre Norton, who may have been the SF writer who most influenced me and the other writers of my generation.

The first SF book I bought (for 35 cents) was Andre’s
The Stars Are Ours.
Through the ad pages in the back of that volume I ordered more of her books. In addition to being exciting stories, Andre’s work made me think. My
Ranks of Bronze
grew directly out of
Star Guard,
and
The Last Planet
provided a glimpse of a recognizable human future in which my present was a myth lost in shadow. As well as being marvelously entertaining to a 14-year-old, her works were subtly educational.

In 1998 one of my friends was in correspondence with Andre, who commented that she was putting together a new volume in her
Catfantastic
anthology series. Did my friend suppose that Mr. Drake might be interested in doing a story for her? (She separately commented that she loved her fans, but that the book could use a greater leavening of professionals and of males.)

I became a writer by doing short stories, and I continued writing stories for a quite while after I learned to write novels. (A process which took twelve years after my first story sale.) After the length of my novels increased in the ’90s, however, I simply didn’t have time for stories except in exceptional circumstances.

A request from Andre Norton was as exceptional as circumstances come.

A notion had been kicking around in the back of my mind for the decade since I read the collection of Icelandic folklore. I reread the folktale and checked a few other references for visuals. (I like to have a picture of the setting in front of me when I’m describing a scene). With that background, I wrote the story and sent it to Andre, who told me in a handwritten note how much she liked it.