Henry Kuttner - The Well of The Worlds

Sawyer, listening tensely, his eyes closed, heard Mai begin to murmur something in a voice of drowsy alarm and opened his eyes long enough to see, through the crawl of colors, the girl lifting her head and staring around dazedly. Zatri hushed her with a gentle shake of the shoulder.

“You’ll go into the ceremony,” he went on. “But not helpless. Not hypnotized into blind obedience. Because when you feel yourself slipping, you must call on Alper to touch the control of the transceiver, gently, very gently, I’ll make sure of that. He explained enough of it so that I feel sure the lightest shaking of sound in your head will be enough to break the hypnosis.

“What happens in the ceremony no one knows exactly. But it is known that the victims must be hypnotized before the Firebirds can feed. Before your time comes, my Khom may be able to save you. I told you we have explosives. I hope to destroy enough of the Temple to let the Sselli in. That’s our plan. If it works in time, you’ll be safe.

“The Temple towers will be a blaze of light before tonight’s ceremony ends, and the Sselli will be flocking around the walls, battering to get in. If we’re lucky we’ll breach the walls of the Hall of the Worlds itself, and turn the Sselli in upon the Isier.

“Then there’ll be fighting!” The old man’s eyes glowed behind the mask. “Then the Isier will have to unleash their last weapons. It’s our hope the Sselli will succeed in turning them against the Isier. But if the Sselli fail, there’s one chance left. It all depends on you.” He hesitated.

“Do you hear me?” he asked. “Open your eyes for a moment. I want to be sure. Yes, yes. Then listen—if you see the Isier winning, judge your time. When it seems right to you—somehow you must reach the Well. Somehow you must drop the Firebird down—and drop it open .”

Sawyer for the first time was moved to speech.

“But—Alper said—”

“Alper was right. It means danger. But the immortality of the Isier depends on the Well. We can’t kill them. But—I think we can kill the Well itself. True, that may also wipe out the whole city. It may send the Upper Shell crashing through to the Under-Shell. But—” Zatri chuckled grimly. “If the Isier win, you die! Would you rather die a victim, or a conqueror? Alone, or with a race of gods to go with you? And knowing that what men remain alive afterward will owe their freedom and their future to what you did?”

Zatri was silent after that, breathing rather hard through his mask. Presently he said, “There isn’t much time. You’d better tell Alper as much as you think suitable. It might be better not to mention the final plan, if everything else fails—about the Firebird, I mean. If he realizes it’s lost to him, he may not cooperate.” He coughed gently.

“Look at me, young man,” he said. “Just for a second. I don’t ask your forgiveness, but I want to say again I’m doing this because I must. If you die, we all die. If you win, we win with you. I wish I could do the job myself. Do you believe me?”

Sawyer met his eyes through the coiling spectra in the glass.

“I believe you. I don’t mention forgiveness. If I come out of this alive, you’ll answer for what you’ve done. But I believe you.” He turned his head. “Alper, I—” He stared. “Alper! Zatri, wake him up!”

The big old man was lolling half helpless against the glass at Zatri’s side, peering through the cell walls with their irresistible hypnosis of motion and color. Zatri jumped to shake him awake. Klai watched them with drowsy wonder. Sawyer kept calling, over and over, as loudly as he dared, “Alper! Alper, do you hear me! Alper, wake up!”

“I’m awake,” the big man snarled abruptly fighting Zatri off. “I’m all right. But—Sawyer! Have you looked! Do you realize what they’ve got in there?”

Sawyer had not looked. After his first glimpse of infinite, whirling space beyond the wall of cells, and the lashing, twining coils of fire that spun in it, he had had no attention to spare.

“You’ve got to listen,” he said. “If you want the Firebird, you’ve got to. Alper, do you hear me?”

“Yes, yes,” Alper said, his attention only half fixed. “What’s the matter?”

Sawyer told him, speaking fast and glossing over the question of the Firebird as well as he could. But Alper was muttering to himself.

“The heart of the atom,” he was saying. “The atomic dance! Electrons in—yes, seven shells! And the—the fire circles inside the chamber they’re weaving. Sawyer, do you realize what they’ve got in there? I half guessed it before, but it took this to make me realize—”

Sawyer blinked and looked at Alper through an incomprehensible blurring haze he could not understand. What was wrong? His own eyes? The cell walls had begun to shimmer a little. Alper’s voice came through it shaken too, as if both sound and light waves vibrated in tune with the shaking walls.

“It’s a cyclotron!” Alper said. “A cosmotron, a synchrotron, whatever you like. Something inside there is serving as an oscillator to drive forces around and around the chamber the electrons make. A planetary cyclotron! Somewhere there must be a focusing aperture to release the pencil of high-energy rays, because—you see the green beams? Sawyer, do you see?”

The voice blurred, the face with it, Zatri’s anxious eyes peering through the smiling Isier mask, Klai’s slowly wakening figure behind them. Pure vibration made every molecule of his body shiver in unison with the shivering walls. The colors were moving inward from the walls toward the center of his brain, and with the last despairing flicker of awareness he called to Alper for help…

The smallest of sounds whispered delicately through the chambers of Sawyer’s brain. The whisper grew louder. The blood-beat began to roar like a far-away lion…

Sawyer struggled up to the surface of consciousness and called into the golden blur that hemmed him in, “That’s enough. Alper, that’s enough!” Miraculously, at that, the roar began swiftly to fade until it was only a whisper again of breath rustling through chambers of bone and blood beating deep and full in the arteries that keep the mind alive.

The cell walls no longer surrounded him. He was closed inside a shell of light and he knew the shell was the turning walls of the hexagon, though he himself felt no sensation of turning. He was the hub. The walls pivoted upon him. And the blur of their turning was a thousand times more hypnotic than the blur of colors had been. His mind tugged eagerly to spin with them, into the blurring of oblivion. Only that quiver of constant sound kept him in control.

He remembered what Alper had been saying when the cell walls shut out the sight of him. Atoms. The atomic dance, and the whirl of the cyclotron. The cell walls were an electronic shell closing him in, he thought, and he was the nucleus they turned around. He was growing light-headed with motion…

Far away, hanging head downward in a golden sky, a crescent of Isier were sitting on thrones of gold, upside down in the firmament. But Isier reduced to the size of dolls. Vertigo seized Sawyer violently as sight came slowly back to him. The crescent that floated in space expanded and whirled before him until its ends joined in a circle, but a circle so vast his mind could not accept it. This was what he had glimpsed through the cell-wall in the great, whirling void beyond. He tried in vain to coerce his mind back to reason. He could only stare.

The ranks of solemn angels were ranged in one tremendous circle, facing inward, supported upon nothing at all. They floated free in swimming golden space, and—no, was that a reflection glimmering here and there around their feet? Was it a flat platform under the thrones, invisible, made of clear glass?