Part 1

Against the Stone Beasts

By JAMES BLISH

Down the time-track tumbled Andreson, to land in a continuum of ghastly matter-and-space reversal--and find a love that shattered the very laws of life!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1948. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The letters on the fly-specked glass were simple, almost dogmatic. Andreson eyed them with some amusement. Art agents seldom have any taste, he thought; can't afford to.

The sign repeated, _Special Showing of Surrealist Paintings_, and declined to offer further information. Andreson started to walk on, then hovered indecisively. Modern arts of all kinds were his province in preparation for a doctorate thesis. It wouldn't do to let the smallest example go by without inspection. He went in.

The improvised gallery was musty with the odor of departed vegetables, and very cold. Like the sign, the show had been set up with a braggart simplicity. No programs, no furniture, no eager guides--there were not even any guards. Andreson wondered what was to stop a thief from stooping under the heavy rayon rope, which kept the frames out of reach of curious or greedy fingers, and making off with the whole collection.

With his first look at the paintings themselves, Andreson was blessing his good daemon fervently for having guided his footsteps. He could not place the works in any specific category; they certainly were _not_ surrealistic, unless the word had been used in its original meaning of "super-realistic." The artist had used fantasy for his sources, true enough, but the results were not the usual shapelessness.

He angled his long body over the rope and inspected the nearest one. It was a huge canvas, reaching almost to the floor, and it depicted a building or similar structure like a glistening glass rod, rising from a forest of lesser rods toward a red sun of almost tangible hotness. A single figure, man-like, but borne aloft on taut, delicate wings which suggested a bat rather than a human, floated over the nearest of the towers. A quick glance revealed that all the paintings but one contained several of these shapes; the one exception was a field of stars with a torpedo streaking across it.

His quick glance confirmed another suspicion. The scenes were in deliberate order, as if attempting a pictorial history of the flying people. He felt vaguely disappointed. This stuff was garden-variety fantasy, verging on the conceptions of science-fiction. Still, there was a magnificent technique behind it all--a blending and effacing of brush-strokes which made the Dutch look like billboard-splashers, and a mastery of glaze which made each scene glow like an illuminated transparency.

This last painting by the door, for instance. It showed the translucent city again, with approximately the same details--but with a barely-perceptible dimming of the red sunlight, a single tower jaggedly shattered, a few other tiny touches, the artist had given it an atmosphere of almost unbearable desolation. It was the same fabulous metropolis--but it was tragic, deserted, lost. Peering hopelessly from the summit of the broken tower was a tiny face, looking directly upward at Andreson.

He allowed himself an appreciative shudder, and methodically went around the gallery, following the history the pictures built up. It seemed commonplace enough: a race of space-travellers who had colonized the Earth, perhaps some time in the dim past, had built a civilization, and had finally succumbed to some undepicted doom. What was amazing was the utterly convincing way the well-worn story was told. It was real--super-real, indeed, for it commanded more belief and sympathy than the everyday human tragedies.

Andreson took out his fountain pen and an unopened letter and walked toward the door. He must get the address of this place and attempt to locate the artist. John Kimball's inscription on the envelope reminded him that Johnny, though a scientist, dabbled in the arts and would be interested. He ripped open the flap, then stopped in mid-stride, ducked under the rayon cord to look at the spaceship scene.

In many ways this was the most wonderful of the lot. Even a night sky or a telescope field has no depth; it is merely a black surface containing spots of light; but the picture surpassed nature. It had a stereoscopic quality, all the more startling because it was impossible to ascertain how it was done. Andreson noted with a chuckle that the agent had placed the paintings in such order that there was a strong draft blowing toward the picture, as if being drained away into that awesome vacuum. A strictly phony trick, but clever nonetheless. Curious in spite of his better instincts, he put out a tentative finger to the surface of the scene--

The fountain pen clattered to the floor.

He gaped idiotically, and stirred with his finger at the nothingness where the picture still seemed to be. In his shock-numbed mind two words burned fiercely:

_It's real._

Ridiculous. Tensely he forced himself to move his hand in deeper, against the yelling of his nerves. It struck a slight, tingling resistance, like a curtain of static electricity--and then the blood was pounding in each finger as if trying to burst through the skin. He snatched the hand back. There _was_ a vacuum there; cut off from the room by some unseen force through which the air was leaking rapidly.

Teetering on the edge of panic, he struggled to make better sense of the facts. The prickly pounding he had felt in his fingers might well have been electrical and only that, and Johnny Kimball had once demonstrated for him the "static jet" which might explain the draft of air. Three-dimensional television, perhaps--

He shook his head. No inventor would set up a demonstration like this, in an abandoned grocery, without any announcement or literature; nor would there be likely to be eighteen screens, each one showing a motionless and quite impossible scene. No; it was insane, but these garish things were--

Windows.

Into what? Clutching at his frayed emotions, he took a step toward the next frame. His foot crunched on the forgotten fountain pen. For a second he flailed in terror at nothing, and then pitched head foremost over the low ledge.

* * * * *

After a moment the sweet piping spoke again. "You are not hurt. The mental shock will pass shortly."

Andreson said nothing and stared fixedly at the crimson glow underneath his eyelids. Physically he was unhurt, but his sanity was precarious. In his mind, behind the closed lids, it happened over and over again: the long twisting fall, with the great city spinning and growing beneath him in a riot of color, and damp hot air gushing past him, the sudden swooping of the dark figure and the thrum of wings. He tried to pass out again and awaken on the floor of the gallery, but the cold, chiming voice jabbed him awake again.

"This is quite real. You are intelligent enough to accept it--stop thinking like an infant."

The motherly reprimand under such circumstances planted a small germ of amusement somewhere in his mind, and he grasped it frantically and began to laugh, still keeping his eyes clenched shut. Even without seeing its face, he could feel the creature's alarm at his hysteria, but he allowed the shaking to exhaust him into a sort of calmness. Only when his breathing had become controlled and even did he allow himself a second look.

Red sunlight played harshly in upon him through the translucent walls of the small room, and burned sullenly within the crystal bar which crossed above his head. One wall was recessed with what seemed to be bookshelves, and odd articles of furniture stood here and there; but evidently none of them had been designed for humans, for he was lying on the smooth floor, his jacket bunched under his head. The cowled shape still arched over him with Satanic solicitude, black against the glare, and somehow smaller than he had expected it to be. He hoped that that cape would not expand into wings--not yet--for his new calm still stood at the shimmering verge of madness.

"Thank you," he said carefully. "I owe you my life."

The silhouetted head moved as if to dismiss the matter. "Your sudden appearance in mid-air was startling. We were fortunate that I happened to be in flight at the time."

With a whispering sound, like the rustling of heavy cloth, the figure moved out of the direct rays of the sun and settled gracefully against one of the furniture-like things. The light struck it full, and Andreson gasped and sat bolt upright.

She was winged, no doubt about that. But the bat-like impression those wings had given him seemed to have been only a product of distance. Seen in closeup, the wings were tawny and delicate, and traced with intricate veins, their ribs were close-set, the webbing like the sheerest silk. They rose from the girl's back where her shoulderblades should have been, and at rest curved around her sides and made a backdrop for her legs and feet.

Except for those gorgeous pinions, which set her off like two great Japanese fans, she might have been human, or close to it. She no more suggested the rodent than the goddess Diana would have suggested a female gorilla. The wings, something about the bony structure underlying her face, a vague _otherness_ about her proportions--except for these minute differences she could have passed anywhere for a strikingly lovely human girl. Her clothing was brief and simple, and not weighted with ornaments, for she needed free limbs and no useless baggage for flight.

Andreson realized that he was goggling and rearranged his face as best he could. She did not seem to take his amazed inspection as anything but normal, however. "Are you a time-traveller?" she asked, tilted her head curiously. "We could think of no other explanation. Are you from our track?"

"I don't know," Andreson confessed. "My trip was accidental, and the mechanism is a mystery to me." He considered asking about the gallery, but the girl's questions had already told him it would be fruitless.

He masked his emotions in the mechanism of locating and lighting a cigarette, while the girl waited with polite patience. It was hard to forget that there was an obscure doom prophesied--or had it been merely narrated, as historical fact?--for this exquisite creature and her whole civilization, and he was determined to say nothing about it until he knew what he was talking about.

"I discovered in my time a sort of gateway to your time, and to seventeen other nearly synchronous moments, set up by a scientist unknown to me. Each of the gates seems to open upon one single specific instant. For instance: before I fell into the one which brought me here, I saw a figure I'm sure was yours. And it was motionless above the city, all the time that I was watching it."

He broke off suddenly. "Wait a minute. If this is another time--well, suppose you tell me: am I speaking your language, or do you know mine? Or are you a telepath?"

* * * * *

She laughed, each sound a clear, musical tone, as if she had been struck by a desire to sing the _Bell Song_. "Don't you know your own language when you hear it? No, the Varese are not telepathic--few races are. But a truly telepathic race allied with us has provided our culture with a good stock of equipment for tapping various parts of the mind. We use it for education. We simply tapped your language centers while you were unconscious."

A shadow passed across the glowing wall, and he heard the already-familiar hum of wings. A moment later a newcomer was outlined in the sunlight in a low doorway which seemed to open on empty space. It was a man, this time, a figure almost exactly Andreson's height, and perhaps a little older, though it was hard to judge. He smiled unpleasantly at the human, revealing two upper incisors which were slightly larger than the rest of his teeth, and demanded, "Well, what time is he?"

"What time are you?" Andreson countered. "We've no record of you in our history. You could have flourished, died, or moved on a dozen times without our knowing it--our records go back only three thousand years."

"Well taken," the Varan said, making himself comfortable on one of the odd "chairs." "We're not native, here, of course. But so far we've found no mammals on this planet, except a few egg-laying ones that aren't even entirely warm-blooded yet; so you _must_ be a considerable distance in our future. Furthermore, you're a time-traveller, which means that you know more than we do, for time is a problem we have never broken."

The girl shook her head slowly, all traces of her former laughter vanished. "It's no use, Atel. He's here by accident, and isn't a scientist."

"What's the matter?" Andreson said. Both faces looked so somber that he nearly forgot his own problem. "Are you in trouble?"

"We're at war," the girl said softly. "And we shall probably be exterminated, all of us, before the year is over."

Andreson remembered again the picture of the deserted city, and despite the hot sun he felt the same chill.

"This planet you call Earth," Atel said, "has no life on its surface now with enough intelligence to count up to three. But after we had been here fifty-three of its years, we discovered that Earth has a civilization of its own all the same--_inside_."

A dozen legends chased through Andreson's mind at once. "Cave-dwellers of some sort? It hardly seems credible."

"No, not cave-dwellers. These aren't even solid, and they couldn't live in caves. They live _in_ the Earth--in the rock itself, and all the way down to the core. They are--space-beasts. They move through solid matter just as you and I move through space, and are stopped by space as we are stopped by a solid wall. In the air, for instance, we're safe from them, for what is to us a thin gas is for them a viscous, almost rigid medium. In the oceans, we meet on equal terms; but true solids are their natural medium."

"How did you discover them?"

"They discovered us," the girl said. "They have besieged the city ever since the fifty-third year after our landing. They're invisible, of course, but we can see them as openings in the earth. The openings change shape as they move, and of course no natural pit does that. In their own universe, the hollow Earth bounded by its solid atmosphere, they are flying creatures, and their sense of gravity is the reverse of ours."

Her clear, fluting voice became steadily duller, losing its inflection as the tale went on. "Before we came here," she said, "we had encountered what our scientists call counter-matter--matter of opposite electrical nature to ours. But this complete inversion of space-matter relationships was unknown to us. The space-beasts knew about it. They are bent on driving us from the Earth...."

* * * * *

Andreson felt his mind reeling into hysteria again. It was difficult enough to accept the spotless, shining glass chamber and the two winged Varese--but this story of an inside-out universe and its air-treading masters--if only John Kimball had been the one to hear it--

"Sometimes," Atel said reflectively, "I think the Varese have earned their defeat. There was a time when we were carrying the fight into the enemy's own cosmos. But it was their cosmos, not ours, and they knew it very well! Our change of state, while it enabled us to see our foes, could not change our mental orientation. We were lost in that hollow darkness. We could not forget that each great gulf was actually a mountain, the sudden chasms were buildings we ourselves had built,--and the things like tiny burrows which kept opening and closing all about our feet were the footfalls of our brothers. And the space-beasts swooped upon us, each of them with six tiers of wings muttering against the solid magma of the Earth, and our weapons were crude and worthless...."

Andreson's mind tasted the concept and rejected it with a shudder. "But surely," he said as steadily as he could, "you must have better weapons, now."

"Oh, yes, we have the weapons. But we are decadent, and have lost the initiative to be the aggressors. The machines that accomplished the reversal of state for our ancestors have lain idle for a century in the bowels of our city. We no longer understand them. We are dying, first of all, of old age--the space-beasts are the accident that speeds us along the way. Shall I tell you what we use against them now?"

The girl stirred protestingly. Andreson looked at her, but she would not return the glance. Atel went on relentlessly.

"Look." From under his tunic he produced a heavy, long metal rod.

"A club? But--I don't see how--"

"It's hollow," Atel said succinctly. "The metal, of course, is useless, but the vacuum inside is steel-hard to them. Space crushing into space, and gouts of hard radiation bursting like blood from the contact. That's all we have now, that and a feeble energising process which sometimes seals off the foundations of the city. Walls, and clubs! Our last miserable recourses--and then--

"Then the space-beasts will own the Earth again."

II

By the time John Kimball had finished disconnecting the leads to the multiple screen and rewiring the master converter he was nearly blind with fatigue and his fingertips jerked and danced uncontrollably on the verniers. The sleepless nights of the previous week, and the emotional strain under which he had been working throughout was taking its toll now. After the wave-splitting effect had first suggested it to him, he had spent most of the week erecting the demonstration, and quite probably the triumphant letter he had mailed to Andreson afterwards had been a little crazy.

As soon as he had posted the letter he had managed to get in about twenty hours of deathlike slumber. It was hardly enough, but there was no help for that now. Except for the first, sickening shock--for the discarded, empty envelope on the floor, the splintered fountain pen, and the one screen featureless and flickeringly gray, had told him what had happened in instant detail--he had wasted no time cursing himself for his grandiose "gallery" stunt. The Colossus in the cellar would need many hours of weary, desperate work before the cauterized scars of Andreson's cannoning fall through the tissues of Time would open enough to permit Kimball to follow.

A tumbler clicked in the pre-dawn silence, and a flood of magnetons sped through the primary coils. The ensuing process was quiet and invisible, but Kimball could feel it--the familiar, nauseating strain which had first led him to the basic principle. It meant that tiny lacunae were being born in the fabric of Time, spreading and merging as the spinning magnetic field tore at them. He slumped on his stool and waited. He was not sure that the last hour's work had been even approximately right, but his gibbering nerves would no longer permit calculation or delicate mechanical correction. The die was cast, and wherever the nascent achronic gateway led, he would have to follow.

After a moment he discovered that the climbing dial needles were hypnotizing him. Getting up from the stool, he proceeded to collect his equipment, moving like a zombie. It was futile to wish he had studied the period more closely, but at least it was clear that the age of the winged colonists had been warfare; best to be armed, though there was a good chance that his pistol would be far outclassed. A flashlight clipped to his belt, and an alcohol compass tuned to the machine's field rather than the Earth's, and he was ready.

He stepped into the heavy torus coil which terminated the series--there had been no time to set up a new frame--and turned out the cellar light.

The machine made no sound, and in the blackness no one could have seen that after a few moments it was alone.

* * * * *

The light of the red sun ran back and forth along the catwalk in quivering lines, and all around it the city glistened in faery-like beauty. Andreson regarded the bridge dubiously; it was little more than a thread of crystal.

"It will bear your weight," the girl said, mistaking his trepidation. Masking his thoughts, he set out across it.

"They have come through several times, just recently," Atel continued evenly. "In a sort of borer--I suppose they thought of it as that--whose walls were invisible, its machinery a contorted group of vacancies in a solid interior. But we destroyed the solid part, and they were crushed. It is hard to imagine how empty space could crush. But we have the law that two objects may not exist in the same space at the same time, and this seems to be its converse."

Andreson tried it out: two spaces cannot exist in the same--in the same what? Abruptly his head was whirling and in the vast distance the earth reeled and shuddered; the glassy thread under his feet seemed to swivel back and forth like a tightrope. He was going over--

Behind him, powerful vanes cracked open, and lean hands grappled his shoulders firmly. "Thanks," he gasped, flailing with his feet at the landing of the next building. Atel grinned contemptuously and leaned him against the wall like a manikin.

"Nevertheless," the winged man proceeded as imperturbably as ever, "they learn rapidly. If they ever find out the secret of reversing their condition, we can close the book on Varan history." He jerked open the door to which the platform led, and Andreson and the girl followed him through.

From the level upon which they were standing all the way up to the summit of this new tower there was a vast chamber, domed with a clear roof. Around the base of the dome proper a ledge or platform ran, upon which was more of the furniture-like stuff--evidently a sort of solarium. Extending outside the walls as well as inside, it gave the building the look of a giant in a plastic helmet. At the apex of the dome a gem, like a giant's diamond, was fixed, rotating slowly, catching the sunlight and sending a parade of rainbow hues over the seats banked far below.

"Starstone Chamber," the girl said. "Our council hall."

"It's beautiful. Not a place for stuffy-minded men, I'd say."

They walked down through the tiers of seats toward the bottom of the arena, where what appeared to be the head of a spiral staircase was visible.

"Where are we bound?"

"To Goseq, one of our senior psychologists," Atel said. "We want to see what we can dredge up about the sciences of your period. Doubtless your observation, being untrained, missed most of the essentials, but there ought to be _some_ kind of residuum in your subconscious."

"Why don't you fly me back to where I fell out of?" Andreson suggested stiffly. "I realize that you can't expect to remember the exact spot, but those 'windows' must look both ways, and should be findable. I could send you a more suitable specimen--a friend of mine who's a scientist--"

"We do know the exact spot," Atel interrupted. "We have detectors in operation at all times--naturally! But a thorough search of that area revealed nothing."

Andreson sighed. "I was afraid of that. The apparatus evidently wasn't intended to be used for an airplane; I suppose I blew it out."

The girl, who had been preceding them, stopped at the top of the stairwell and levelled a dainty finger at Atel. "Why don't you stop tormenting him because he's not a scientist?" she demanded angrily. "It isn't his fault! He's doing his best for us!"

Atel's eyebrows would have shot up, had he had any. "Certainly," he purred, with an ironical gesture. "I'm sure you understand my attitude, Mr. Andreson. As a non-scientist, you are more of a curiosity than a gift, and that is a disappointment to us. We shall try to make your stay here as comfortable--_and as short_--as possible."