The Door to Saturn (7 page)

“Good Lord!” said Roverton in an awed voice. “That was how they saw us coming. That optical instrument must have been a sort of long-range X-ray apparatus.”

Even as he spoke, the picture faded. An enormous chamber was now disclosed, in which stood a labyrinthine mechanism of shining cubes and lozenges ramifying from a tall central cone of black, lusterless metal. The roof of the chamber became transparent, revealing the diaphanous vault of the heavens and the vessel itself once more as it still hung in outer ether. A dozen of the globe-headed people were grouped around the mechanism and were adjusting certain of its parts. Then one of them pulled a spiral lever, and a beam of some indescribable color, visible only for a moment, shot upward from the cone until it reached the space-vessel and curved around it like a grappling-hook. Then the
Alcyone
was seen to descend through a clear shaft in the vault, and was drawn down to the roof of the building in which the cone-mechanism was located.

“Well, that’s plain enough,” commented Volmar. “He—or it—is showing us how we were captured. The cone-machine must be the generator of some force that is infinitely more powerful than gravitation, though probably akin to it. Amazing—but the pictures themselves are even more astounding, for they must be thought-images rendered visible by the lens-apparatus attached to that creature’s forehead. Who ever dreamed of a moving-picture machine capable of using the mind itself for a film?”

Other views now succeeded the one of the space-vessel’s capture. They were plainly meant to depict the manner of hospitality which would be shown to the earthlings during their sojourn on the red planet: for the figures of Volmar and his crew were conspicuous in all of them, and were represented in the act of visiting many of the Babelian towers and viewing all sorts of mechanical wonders and marvellous plant or animal forms as they travelled throughout the world with their compulsory hosts. They were afterwards to remember and recognize many of these scenes. In one of them, a prodigious open shaft in the ground was shown, with people ascending and descending by thousands; and the impression was somehow conveyed that the shaft penetrated the entire diameter of the world, perhaps from pole to pole; and that those who sank into it at one end would arise to the surface at the other. Hundreds of titan towers, which apparently took the place of cities on the red world, were also shown; and the realm-wide agricultural fields, botanical gardens of forest-like extent, and breeding-pens of inconceivably monstrous animals, were likewise flashed on the wall together with many interior glimpses of the life led by this unique race.

Then, in rapid alternation, came another series of scenes that were plainly historical, and which seemed to unfold the chronicles of the red world from remotest time. The beings who were shown in the first of them were not sharded in metal; though they displayed forms that were recognizably similar, with all the features of the globe-headed type, they possessed a more usual integument of hairless animal skin. The world in which they lived was vaulted with a greenish sky, in which the sun Polaris burned like any other solar luminary. It was a fertile and flourishing world; and the long epochs of its evolution, and the evolution of its peoples, were rapidly hinted in brief flashes. Anon, a period of racial and planetary decadence was denoted; the seas dried up, the fertile zones were blotched with ever-spreading deserts, the atmosphere became cloudless and rarified and almost irrespirable; and the people themselves grew senescent, they no longer reproduced their kind, and were dying one by one. But among them were scientists who had attained a well-nigh supreme knowledge of natural laws and a mastery of many forces both familiar and obscure. These scientists gathered in conclave to determine some method of racial salvation; and the result of their conference, as shown in the next pictures, was beyond conception or belief. Several bodies, duplicating in every detail the physical formation of the race, were constructed of various metals. The minutest cells and nerves were somehow reproduced; and only the brain-space in the heads was left vacant. Then some of the scientists submitted to an unusual operation: their brains were removed and transferred to the metal heads, where they swam in a bath of some ruddy fluid that must have had elixir-like properties; for after an interval the artificial bodies moved and arose to their feet; and were manifestly controlled and animated by the living brains within them. Then more bodies were made; some of aberrant or whimsical types, according to the taste of their future occupants; and others of the dying race underwent the same operation; till within an incredibly short length of time all of them had discarded their perishable anatomies of flesh and were inhabiting corporeal forms that were virtually indestructible. The red fluid, which was replaced at certain intervals, preserved and nourished their brains till they grew wise with an accumulated knowledge of out-lived aeons. Invention progressed with colossal paces; and machines of many types and sizes were builded for the use and control of every cosmic or planetary power, from refracted and magnified rays to the force released by exploding atoms. Towers were reared from heaps of desert sand by some of these machines, which could integrate and organize the molecules of matter in any desired pattern; and plants and animals were artificially created by a chemical duplication of the processes of life. There was no limit to the scientific genius of this people, who, in their metal bodies, retained no needs and passions other than those which were wholly intellectual. By a series of enormous magnetic engines, situated in every longitude of their world at regular intervals, they even enclosed their entire planet with a vault of metallic atoms in a zone of super-electric force, which served to insulate it from the encroaching cold of space, and also to conserve the remnants of the atmosphere, which was now gradually enriched and renewed by the addition of the necessary elements in gaseous form.

Thus, in short flashes, a pictorial account of the planet and its history was presented to the earthlings. They were dumbfounded by such revelations; and their amazement grew with every scene. The unearthliness of the things and events, of the alien peoples and epochs shadowed forth, was beyond the most extravagant vagaries of imagination.

The long display of images came to an end; and the lens-apparatus was removed from the brow of its user, who then vacated his chair. Volmar was motioned to come forward and seat himself on the tripod. Then, by a contraction of its circlet, which was formed in a series of regulable segments, the machine was fitted to his forehead.

Volmar concentrated on various ideas which he wished to express; but the results were unsatisfactory. The pictures that formed on the wall were too dim and shapeless and chaotic to be intelligible. Obviously his brain was not powerful enough in its thought-vibrations to effect the desired visualization. And when the apparatus was tried by Roverton, Jasper, and the others, the resultant images were equally negligible and disappointing.

IV

T
he being with the vast moon-like head made a gesture of dismissal; and the earth-men were now conducted by their guides along another hall which led to the exterior of the building.

The scene outside was overwhelmingly strange, and offered little resemblance in any detail to earthly landscapes or to those of other planets which the
Alcyone
’s crew had visited. Around the looming edifice with its innumerable stories and terrace-like balconies, there stretched a winding space of open pavement bordered with a park of vegetable growths that were no less variegated than extraordinary. Most of them, it was probable, were the synthetic creations of the metal-bodied beings; for they presented only a vague and distant likeness to the simpler flora that Volmar and his men had seen shadowed forth in the earlier historical tableau. They testified to a limitless horticultural ingenuity, with an inclination toward the grotesque, the ornate, and the recherché. Some of them seemed to imitate in their stems, foliage, and blossoms the forms of novel animals, birds, and insects; others had apparently derived their inspiration from the crystallizations of unthinkably elaborate minerals; others resembled structures of coral flowering with many-chaliced shells; and some were suggestive of outlandish sculptures and arabesques, of the mad and demon-wrought vagaries of unimaginable art. There were titan fungi which bore an architectural resemblance in their cinnabar or malachite or azurite tiers, to pagodas and ziggurats. There were cacti that offered the appearance of immense and complicated machines. Most of the plants were not associable even in a superficial degree to any mundane genus. Some were rooted in an ashen-blue soil; but others were rootless, and wherever allowed, they had spread to the pavements and were sprawling or standing about as if they might creep or stalk away at any moment. They gleamed with unearthly textures, and colors denotive of a transidereal spectrum, in the sultry and shadowless effulgence that flamed upon them from horizon to zenith on all sides.

The senses of the earthlings reeled in this blaze of inundating torrential light, this delirious riot of ultramundane form and supersolar iridescence. Their nerves were exasperated and then stunned by the continual impact of sensations which the human system was never meant to sustain. The vegetation seemed to dance like a sabbat of demons and witches; and the building they had left, and the further edifices that overtowered the plain, all staggered in drunken unison before their eyes as the metal guides conducted them along the pavement; and they heard as in a doubtful nightmare the voices of these beings, who were pointing out and apparently naming one object after another, in an effort to begin some sort of linguistic tuition. It was difficult to reduce their tones to a phonetic basis and to approximate them with the human vocal chords, but, by careful attention and tireless experiment, Volmar and the others were able to achieve a partial articulation and a remote likeness to some of the words and syllables. In pointing to themselves the beings uttered many times a vocable which sounded like
tloong,
which was plainly the generic name of their species. And they repeatedly called the earthlings
ongar,
which doubtless meant something like “alien” or “outsider.” In this way, a few words were approximately mastered, and the rudiments of a sort of communication were established. But, under the nervous tax that the earth-men suffered, the attempt to hear, comprehend, and reproduce the sounds correctly was a further addition to the nightmare tension and feeling of unbearable delirium.

Many of the metal people were passing to and fro; the scene was one of perpetual activity; and certain air-vessels of novel types were continually embarking or disembarking their passengers on the pavement about the edifice, or upon the roof of its atlantean balconies. These vehicles were flat discs or oblong platforms of varying size, some of them large as the decks of ocean liners, which sailed through the air at any required speed with no visible enginery or ascertainable mode of levitation or locomotion.

After a large portion of the park had been inspected, one of the air-vessels was chartered by the guides, who motioned Volmar and his crew to accompany them. A lever was pressed, and the huge machine arose with unbelievable buoyancy, and floated through the cloudless, glaring atmosphere toward a horizon remotely dentilated with prodigious towers. The platform flew at no great elevation, apparently in order that the earth-men might view the topographical details of the landscapes above which they were journeying. But the speed which the air-vessel attained, and the ease, comfort, and lack of atmospheric resistance, was most amazing.

The scene below shifted and changed with a kaleidoscopic rapidity. Everything, even to the wide spaces of uncultivated and wholly barren soil or stone, was marked by a perfectly symmetrical arrangement of squares, diamonds, ovals, triangles, and other geometric forms, like tessellations in a mosaic floor of transtellar giants. There were canals that ran in straight lines or systematic meanderings, from lakes and seas of an artificial regularity. And even certain jungles in which the primitive plant forms of the red world were recognized by the earthlings as they passed, were laid out within metes and bounds like vast botanical gardens.

They were skimming the very top branches of one of these jungles, when a singular incident occurred. Though the air was utterly still and windless, a small area of the foliage below was oddly agitated as the platform neared it. Trees crashed down, there was a wild tossing of leaves and branches; and then, with fearful expedition, the foliage began to disappear and was interspersed with formless crawling masses of a loathsome livid grey mottled with black and red. Soon, in a spreading tract of devastation, these masses had devoured and supplanted all the vegetation, and were steadily increasing in size and number.

Volmar and his men were astounded by the living masses, and also by the actions of their conductors, who had brought the platform to a full halt in mid-air as soon as they sighted the area of tossing foliage. Then, as the monstrous crawling creatures began to replace the obliterated jungle with their swelling and multiplying bulks, the earth-men heard a clangorous gong-like sound of intolerable acuity which was being emitted from the concave disks on the cerebral antennae of their guides. The sound was connotive of alarm and warning, and doubtless had a vibratory range like that of radio; for a few minutes later, as if in response, a score of air-vessels appeared from all sides and gathered above the spreading patch of devastation. All of them were crowded with Tloongs, and carried weapons emitting visible or invisible rays of deadly potency, which were turned upon the growing masses, causing them to dissolve one by one like vapor.

As if for the edification of the earth-men, their guides flew lower still, where the monsters could be studied in detail ere all of them were wiped out by the lethal rays. They possessed no visible organs except the round, sucker-like mouths with which they were entirely covered; their substance was extremely elastic and without any rudiments of a bony framework; and they took from minute to minute a multitude of forms, turning themselves into gibbous globes, or lengthening like serpents, or developing numerous projections like the trunks of elephants, or flattening themselves along the ground in horrible mats. They were ineffably weird and hideous, their vitality was more than sinister, and their activity was supremely terrifying. Their innumerable mouths dripped continually with a colorless semi-viscid fluid; and the plants to which they applied themselves seemed literally to melt away beneath the assiduous suckers.