Northwest of Earth (16 page)

A little man sitting alone at the next table had bent forward to fix them with a particularly bright stare. They met it in silence, hostile and waiting, until the husky half-whisper spoke again.

“May I join you? I couldn’t help overhearing that—that you were open for business.”

Without expression Smith’s colorless eyes summed up the speaker, and a puzzlement clouded their paleness as he looked. Rarely does one meet a man whose origin and race are not apparent even upon close scrutiny. Yet here was one whom he could not classify. Under the deep burn of the man’s skin might be concealed a fair Venusian pallor or an Earthman bronze, canal-Martian rosiness or even a leathery dryland hide. His dark eyes could have belonged to any race, and his husky whisper, fluent in the jargon of the spaceman, effectively disguised its origin. Little and unobtrusive, he might have passed for native on any of the three planets.

Smith’s scarred, impassive face did not change as he looked, but after a long moment of scrutiny he said, “Pull up,” and then bit off the words as if he had said too much.

The brevity must have pleased the little man, for he smiled as he compiled, meeting the passively hostile stare of the two without embarrassment. He folded his arms on the table and leaned forward. The husky voice began without preamble,

“I can offer you employment—if you’re not afraid. It’s dangerous work, but the pay’s good enough to make up for it—if you’re not afraid.”

“What is it?”

“Work they—those two—failed at. They were—hunters—until they found what they hunted. Look at them now.”

Smith’s no-colored eyes did not swerve from the speaker’s face, but he nodded. No need to look again upon the fear-ridden faces of the neighboring pair. He understood.

“What’s the job?” he said.

The little man hitched his chair closer and sent a glance round the room from under lowered lids. He scanned the faces of his two companions half doubtfully. He said, “There have been many gods since time’s beginning,” then paused and peered dubiously into Smith’s face.

Northwest nodded briefly. “Go on,” he said.

Reassured, the little man took up his tale, and before he had gone far enthusiasm drowned out the doubtfulness in his husky voice, and a tinge of fanaticism crept in.

“There were gods who were old when Mars was a green planet, and a verdant moon circled an Earth blue with steaming seas, and Venus, molten-hot, swung round a younger sun. Another world circled in space then, between Mars and Jupiter where its fragments, the planetoids, now are. You will have heard rumors of it—they persist in the legends of every planet. It was a mighty world, rich and beautiful, peopled by the ancestors of mankind. And on that world dwelt a mighty Three in a temple of crystal, served by strange slaves and worshipped by a world. They were not wholly abstract, as most modern gods have become. Some say they were from beyond, and real, in their way, as flesh and blood.”

“Those three gods were the origin and beginning of all other gods that mankind has known. All modern gods are echoes of them, in a world that has forgotten the very name of the Lost Planet. Saig they called one, and Lsa was the second. You will never have heard of them—they died before your world’s hot seas had cooled. No man knows how they vanished, or why, and no trace of them is left anywhere in the universe we know. But there was a Third—a mighty Third set above these two and ruling the Lost Planet; so mighty a Third that even today, unthinkably long afterward, his name has not died from the lips of man. It has become a byword now—his name, that once no living man dared utter! I heard you call upon him not ten minutes past—Black Pharol!”

His husky voice sank to a quiver as it spoke the hackneyed name. Yarol gave a sudden snort of laughter, quickly hushed, and said, “Pharol! Why—”

“Yes, I know. Pharol, today, means unmentionable rites to an ancient no-god of utter darkness. Pharol has sunk so low that his very name denotes nothingness. But in other days—ah, in other days! Black Pharol has not always been a blur of dark worshipped with obscenity. In other days men knew what things that darkness hid, nor dared pronounce the name you laugh at, lest unwittingly they stumble upon that secret twist of its inflection which opens the door upon the dark that is Pharol. Men have been engulfed before now in that utter blackness of the god, and in that dark have seen fearful things. I know”—the raw voice trailed away into a murmur—“such fearful things that a man might scream his throat hoarse and never speak again above a whisper …”

Smith’s eyes flicked Yarol’s. The husky murmur went on after a moment.

“So you see the old gods have not died utterly. They can never die as we know death: they come from too far Beyond to know either death or life as we do. They came from so very far that to touch us at all they had to take a visible form among mankind—to incarnate themselves in a material body through which, as through a door, they might reach out and touch the bodies and minds of men. The form they chose does not matter now—I do not know it. It was a material thing, and it has gone to dust so long ago that they very memory of its shape has vanished from the minds of men. But that dust still exists. Do you hear me? That dust which was once the first and the greatest of all gods, still exists! It was that which those men hunted. It was that they found, and fled in deadly terror of what they saw there. You look to be made of firmer stuff. Will you take up the search where they left it?”

Smith’s pale stare met Yarol’s black one across the table. Silence hung between them for a moment. Then Smith said,

“Any objection to us having a little talk with those two over there?”

“None at all,” answered the hoarse whisper promptly. “Go now, if you like.”

Smith rose without further words. Yarol pushed back his chair noiselessly and followed him. They crossed the floor with the spaceman’s peculiar, shifting walk and slid into opposite chairs between the huddling two.

The effect was startling. The Earthman jerked convulsively and turned a pasty face, eloquent with alarm, toward the interruption. They drylander stared from Smith’s face to Yarol’s in dumb terror. Neither spoke.

“Know that fellow over there?” inquired Smith abruptly, jerking his head toward the table they had quitted.

After a moment’s hesitation the two heads turned as one. When they faced around again the terror on the Earthman’s face was giving way to a dawning comprehension. He said from a dry throat, “He—he’s hiring you, eh?”

Smith nodded. The Earthman’s face crumpled into terror again and he cried,

“Don’t do it. For God’s sake, you don’t know!”

“Know what?”

The man glanced furtively round the room and licked his lips uncertainly. A curious play of conflicting emotions flickered across his face.

“Dangerous—” he mumbled. “Better leave well enough alone. We found that out.”

“What happened?”

The Earthman stretched out a shaking hand for the
segir
bottle and poured a brimming glass. He drained it before he spoke, and the incoherence of his speech may have been due to the glasses that had preceded it.

“We went up toward the polar mountains, where he said. Weeks … it was cold. The nights get dark up there … dark. Went into the cave that goes through the mountain—a long way … Then our lights went out—full-charged batteries in new super-Tomlinson tubes, but they went out like candles, and in the dark—in the dark the white thing came …”

A shudder went over him strongly. He reached out shaking hands for the
segir
bottle, and poured another glass, the rim clicking against his teeth as he drank. Then he set down the glass hard and said violently,

“That’s all. We left. Don’t remember a thing about getting out—or much more than starving and freezing in the saltlands for a long time. Our supplies ran low—hadn’t been for him”—nodding across the table—“we’d both have died. Don’t know how we did get out finally—but we’re out, understand? Out! Nothing could hire us to go back—we’ve seen enough. There’s something about it that—that makes your head ache—we saw … never mind. But—”

He beckoned Smith closer and sank his voice to a whisper. His eyes rolled fearfully.

“It’s after us. Don’t ask me what … I don’t know. But—feel it in the dark, watching—watching in the dark …”

The voice sank to a mumble and he reached again for the
segir
bottle.

“It’s here now—waiting—if the lights go out—watching—mustn’t let the lights go out—more
segir
…”

The bottle clinked on the glass-rim, the voice trailed away into drunken mutterings.

Smith pushed back his chair and nodded to Yarol. The two at the table did not seem to notice their departure. The drylander was clutching the
segir
bottle in turn and pouring out red liquid without watching the glass—an apprehensive one-eyed stare turned across his shoulder.

Smith laid a hand on his companion’s shoulder and drew him across the room toward the bar. Yarol scowled at the approaching bartender and suggested,

“Suppose we get an advance for drinks, anyhow.”

“Are we taking it?”

“Well, what d’you think?”

“It’s dangerous. You know, there’s something worse than whisky wrong with those two. Did you notice the Earthman’s eyes?”

“Whites showed all around,” nodded Yarol. “I’ve seen madmen look like that.”

“I thought of that, too. He was drunk, of course, and probably wouldn’t be so wild-sounding, sober—but from the looks of him he’ll never be sober again till he dies. No use trying to find out anything more from him. And the other—well, did you ever try to find out anything from a drylander? Even a sober one?”

Yarol lifted expressive shoulders. “I know. If we go into this, we go blind. Never dig any more out of those drunks. But something certainly scared them.”

“And yet,” said Smith, “I’d like to know more about his. Dust of the gods—and all that. Interesting. Just what does he want with this dust, anyhow?”

“Did you believe that yarn?”

“Don’t know—I’ve come across some pretty funny things here and there. He does act half-cracked, of course, but—well, those fellows back there certainly found
something
out of the ordinary, and they didn’t go all the way at that.”

“Well, if he’ll buy us a drink I say let’s take the job,” said Yarol. “I’d as soon be scared to death later as die of thirst now. What do you say?”

“Good enough,” shrugged Smith. “I’m thirsty, too.”

The little man looked up hopefully as they reseated themselves at the table.

“If we can come to terms,” said Smith, “we’ll take it. And if you can give us some idea of what we’re looking for, and why.”

“The dust of Pharol,” said the husky voice impatiently. “I told you that.”

“What d’you want with it?”

“We’re risking our necks for it, aren’t we?”

Again the bright, small eyes bored into the Earthman’s. The husky voice fell lower, to the very echo of a whisper, and he said, secretly,

“I’ll tell you, then. After all, why not? You don’t know how to use it—it’s of no value to anyone but me. Listen, then—I told you that the Three incarnated themselves into a material form to use as a door through which they could reach humanity. They had to do it, but it was a door that opened both ways—through it, if one dared, man could reach the Three. No one dared in those days—the power beyond was too terrible. It would have been like walking straight through a gateway into hell. But time has passed since then. The gods have drawn away from humanity into farther realms. The terror that was Pharol is only an echo in a forgetful world. The spirit of the god has gone—but not wholly. While any remnant of that shape which was once incarnate Pharol exists, Pharol can be reached. For the man who could lay hands on that dust, knowing the requisite rites and formulae, all knowledge, all power would lie open like a book. To enslave a god!”

The raw whisper rasped to a crescendo; fanatic lights flared in the small, bright eyes. He had forgotten them entirely—his piercing stare fixed on some shining future, and his hands on the table clenched into white-knuckled fists.

Smith and Yarol exchanged dubious glances. Obviously the man was mad …

“Fifty thousand dollars to your account in any bank you choose,” the hoarse voice, eminently sane, broke in abruptly upon their dubiety. “All expenses, of course, will be paid. I’ll give you charts and tell you all I know about how to get there. When can you start?”

Smith grinned. Touched the man might be, but just then Smith would have stormed the gates of hell, at any madman’s request, for fifty thousand Earth dollars.

“Right now,” he said laconically. “Let’s go.”

II

Northward over the great curve of Mars, red slag and red dust and the reddish, low-lying dryland vegetation gave way to the saltlands around the Pole. Scrub grows there, and sparse, coarse grass, and the snow that falls by night lies all the cold, thin day among the tough grass-roots and in the hillocks of the dry salt soil.

“Of all the God-forsaken countries,” said Northwest Smith, looking down from his pilot seat at the gray lands slipping past under the speed of their plane, “this must be the worst. I’d sooner live on Luna or one of the asteroids.”

Yarol tilted the
segir
bottle to his lips and evoked an eloquent gurgle from its depths.