Henry Kuttner - The Well of The Worlds

Something was wrong about their heads. And he could not quite make out the strangely shaped weapons they held shoulder-high between their hands as they faced each other.

Then with a shock he realized what had happened. They had removed their masks. Below the fiercely glaring faces they turned to one another, the masks glared as fiercely. With hands spread upon the cheeks of the masks so that the pale smiles, the empty eyes fronted their replicas across the Well like faces in a mirror, the two Isier swayed and panted, waiting…

The hesitating sacrifice dropped into the Well, and the waiting ended.

The well flared high. Up out of it shot enormous bending streamers of white fire, lashing toward the zenith of this golden firmament. But the whirl of the electronic shells intercepted their course, bent them and blew them sidewise as if in the grip of a hurricane, whirled them around and around in intricate, interlacing spiral patterns that seemed to drive the fiery beams faster and faster, endlessly accelerated—What was it Alper had been saying so incoherently, as he stared half dazed into this golden holocaust?

“A cyclotron! Something drives forces around and around the chamber the electrons make!”

And it was true—or an analogy of the truth. The likeness was too clear to miss. Power streamed out of the Well when the sacrifices were fed into it. But the power did not now expend itself outward in invisible waves like a carrier-beam which conveyed energy to the Isier and whatever mysterious receiving-sets and transformers their godlike bodies bid. Power here and now was being confined and driven back upon itself as a cyclotron drives an ion stream faster and faster around wider and wider spirals. What oscillator-force drove it Sawyer could not guess, but the axis it spun on was the same axis the cyclotron uses, pure magnetic force pouring between continua from Earth’s Pole itself.

And it was unmistakably clear what purpose this wild spiral served. In a cyclotron the accelerated stream of ions pours at last through an opening that focuses it down to a narrow pencil of tremendously high-energy particles. In the planetary cyclotron of the Hall of Worlds, there was no opening in the artificial chamber the whirling electrons wove. But the pencil of killing energy escaped, none the less. That opening must exist perhaps in a dimensional warp the eye could not follow, but where the beam came out no one could mistake. The deflecting plates that captured it began to light up gloriously.

For now the eyes of the two masks the Isier Goddesses held were filling with solid beams of green fire. Twin rays of it flashed like two drawn blades from each glaring mask—Gorgon glares that crossed in the dazzling air above the well. Their color was the pale green glow of the cathode fluorescent tube, but bright with a terrible brilliance the human gaze could not touch.

And it was doubly terrible to see those pale, serene smiles still fixed upon the masks as the eyes shot out that killing violence. The cyclotron of the worlds whirled more and more furiously as victims dropped down the Well of bubbling flame.

Ring by ring, as the sacrifices dropped, Sawyer was drawn nearer and nearer to the Well. But he forgot his own danger. He forgot the orbit he whirled on, up and over and down again around the nucleus that slowly sucked him in.

All he could see or think of in this moment was the conflict between Goddess and Goddess-elect, fought across the pool where fire instead of water bubbled, and pale beams lashed and clashed like swords more terrible than any blade ever forged.

They were well matched. Endlessly the sweeping slashes caught in midair and hung harmless for a moment before they fell apart and swept treacherously over or under one another at the vulnerable bodies behind the masks.

For to these blades alone the Isier were vulnerable. He saw that now. He saw Nethe suddenly shoot her mask up high above her head at arms’ full length, tilt the beams downward and shear across the Goddess’s left shoulder with a terrible slash of the green beams from the masks.

The cut bit deep. A dazzling glare sprang out at the impact—the same glare infinitely intensified which had sprung out between Nethe’s head and the rock the Sselli hurled at her on the floating island. That protective flare of energy still functioned, then. But it was of no avail, even when stepped up to such blinding power as this, against the slash of the green beams from the masks.

The Goddess reeled. Her mask-guard dropped for a second, the Gorgon flash from its eyes cutting emptiness. Her black robe parted along an emerald-glowing slash and through it a stream of golden blood poured sluggishly…

Golden blood, Sawyer thought. Golden blood! A single, shattering roar went up from the ring of watching angels as that luminous flood gushed over the midnight robe. Nethe screamed, a wild, high, ringing cry of triumph—

There was a jolt that made Sawyer’s head swim as he dropped again down the stairsteps of the orbits, this time into the ring only second from the innermost ring of all. He paid no attention. He was only irritated because the jolt made him lose his focus for an instant upon the battle.

For Nethe had overreached herself. She had counted too heavily on dealing a killing stroke, and her mask was too high overhead to parry the Goddess’s snake-like twist of recovery. The golden blood still poured, and one black-robed arm hung useless, but with the other hand the Goddess flashed her mask sidewise in a treacherous spiraling sweep. It was an intricate motion, executed with consummate skill, for it seemed to follow exactly and at tremendous speed the spiraling of the power-streams around the cyclotron, to ride with them and perhaps for one brief instant to force more violence out of them through the deflecting-plates which were the eyes of the mask.

She spun her mask to face Nethe’s. Eye to eye, face to face, the two Gorgon glares poured their killing energy into one another’s smiling faces. Fire flared up from that square, head-on meeting of terrible beams. Nethe’s shriek of maniacal fury heralded what had happened even before the blaze faded between the masks. When it cleared, a long, low cry went up from the circling watchers. For one eye of Nethe’s mask was blind. The beam had burned out.

With half her fighting strength destroyed, she whirled in redoubled rage at the crippled Goddess, her single beam weaving a net of green fire all about that swaying, parrying figure in black robes. Desperately the Goddess, one-handed but quicker than lightning, wove her own net of defense against the onslaught. And the drain upon the power in the Well grew heavier…

Electrons dropped like snow now out of the innermost ring. The Well flared, sank, flared again as the lives of the sacrifices fed it briefly, pouring violence into the cyclotron for the Goddesses to wield like flaming swords.

Jolt! Sawyer dropped again. For the penultimate time he dropped. Now he rode the innermost ring, and the next drop would be into the fire.

The fire? He looked down. He looked straight into the Well. And it was bright, bright, bright…

It burned the eye and the brain behind it.

It was not bright at all.

That painful glare transmuted suddenly as he neared it into a beauty that ensnared the very soul. The Well was a wide ring around a flatness and a glassiness like a mirror that reflected only the golden glow of the sky. In the ring glimmered a whirling, spinning, tumbling tumult of—was it molten light, bubbling up from the heart of the world? Bubbling up out of Earth’s Pole? Was it a tossing fountain? He could put no name to it. But the tumble and tumult of the fiery pool drew the eye and the mind irresistibly. That tossing motion burned inward to his brain, fusing with it, drawing him down along a chord of his own vision.