The World Turned Upside Down (106 page)

They tore the little fiends to shreds and still they lived. They bound the Thing that had been Svadin and carried him, battered and twisting, into the courtyard. They built a pyre in the streets of Budapest, and when the flames licked high they cast him in, his hell-spawn with him, and watched with avid eyes as he writhed and crisped, and listened to his screaming. The beast is in every man when hate and fear are roused. Far into the night, when Svadin and his brood were ashes underfoot, the mad crowd surged and fought through the streets, looting, burning, ravening.

When Svadin died, four men had ruled the world. Today four men rule a world that is better because Svadin rose from the dead that day in Budapest, that is free because of his inhuman tyranny. Moorehead—Nasuki—Rasmussen—Corregio. Red Jim Donegan is a hero, and I and a hundred other living men, but none pays homage to dead old Heinrich Wilhelm Sturm. He was too long identified with Nicholas Svadin for men to love him now.

What we know of Svadin, and of other things, Sturm had learned, little by little, through the years. He told certain things to Donegan, before Svadin grew suspicious and ordered the American's death. It was Heinrich Sturm's mercy that won Donegan a cell instead of a bullet or the knife, or even worse. For somewhere during his association with the perverted dregs of Europe's royal courts the reborn Svadin had acquired, among other things, a taste for human blood and human flesh.

"All I know is what Sturm told me," Donegan says. "The old man was pretty shrewd, and what he didn't know he guessed—and I reckon he guessed close. It was curiosity made him stay on with Svadin—first off, anyway. Afterwards he knew too much to get away.

"There must have been spores of life, so Sturm said. There was a Swede by the name of Arrhenius—back years ago—who thought that life might travel from planet to planet in spores so small that light could push them through space. He said that a spore-dust from ferns and moss and fungus, and things like bacteria that were very small, could pass from world to world that way. And he figured there might be spores of pure life drifting around out there in space between the stars, and that whenever they fall on a planet, life would start there.

"That's what happened to us, according to the old man. There were three spores that fell here, all within a short time of each other. One fell in the sea, and it brought the Sea-Thing to life, made mostly of complex molecules of colloidal water and salts out of the sea-ooze where the spore fell. It could grow by sucking up water, but it needed those salts from decomposed, organic things too. That's why it attacked cities, where there was plenty of food for it.

"The second spore fell on quartz—maybe in some kind of colloidal gel, like they find sometimes in the hard stuff. There was gold there, and the Thing that came alive was what I saw, and what the Indians thought was one of their old gods come to life again—the god of gold and crystal. Svadin killed it with some radium compound that he invented.

"The third seed fell on Svadin and brought him to life. He wasn't a man, really, but he had all the organs and things that a man would have. He had the same memories in his brain, and the same traits of character, until other things rooted them out. He came to life—but to stay alive he had to be different from other men. He had embalming fluid instead of blood, and wax in his skin, and things like that, and he had to replace them the way we eat food to replace our tissues. When he changed, it was in ways a dead man would change, except that he used his brain better and more logically than any live man ever did. He had to learn how a man would act, and he had some willing enough teachers to show him the rotten along with the good.

"Those other things grew as they fed, and so did Svadin, but he was more complex than they were—more nearly like men. Where they grew, he reproduced, like the simplest kinds of living things, by budding off duplicates of himself, out of his own flesh. It was like a hydra—like a vegetable—like anything but a man. Maybe you noticed, too—a couple of those things that grew after he lost his arm in Rio, had only one arm too. They were him, in a way. They called his name when he did, there at the last . . ."

The sweat is standing out on his weather-beaten forehead as he remembers it. I see the vision that he does—those ten miniature Svadins growing, budding in their turn, peopling the Earth anew with a race of horrors made in mockery of man. He reaches for the bottle at his elbow:

"We've seen Nature—the Universe—spawning," he says. "Maybe it's happened on Earth before; maybe it'll happen again. Probably we, and all the other living things on Earth got started that way, millions of years ago. For a while, maybe, there were all kinds of abortive monsters roaming around the world, killing each other off the way Svadin killed the Sea-Thing and the God of Gold. They were new and simple—they reproduced by dividing, or budding, or crystallizing, and it was hard to kill them except with something like fire that would destroy the life-germs in them. After a while, when the seed of life in them would be pretty well diluted, it would be easier. Anyway, that's how I figure it.

"Svadin looked human, at first, but he wasn't—ever. What he was, no one knows. Not even old Sturm. It's pretty hard to imagine what kind of thoughts and feelings a living dead man would have. He had some hang-over memories from the time he was really Svadin, so he started in to fix over the world. Maybe he thought men were his own kind, at first—at least, they looked like him. He fixed it, all right—only, after a while there wasn't anything human left in him, and he began to plan things the way a machine would, to fit him and the race he was spawning. It's no more than we've done since Time began—killing animals and each other to get what we want, eating away the Earth to get at her metals, and oil, and so on. The God of Gold was kin to the Earth, in a way, and I guess he resented seeing her cut up by a lot of flesh and blood animals like us.

"I said he learned some of our perversions. Once someone had taught him a thing like that, and he liked it, it became part of the heritage that he passed down to future generations. Somehow he got the taste for flesh—raw flesh—humans were just like another animal to him. After Sturm stopped being useful to him, he attacked the old man too.

"You see—he had a human brain, and he could think like a man, and scheme and sense danger to his plans. Only—he didn't ever really understand human psychology. He was like an amoeba, or a polyp, and I don't guess they have emotions. He didn't understand religion, and the feeling people had that he was a kind of god. He used it—but when awe turned into hate, and people thought of him as a devil instead of a god, they treated him like one. They burned him the way their ancestors burned witches!"

He tosses down a shot of rye and wipes his lips. "Next time it happens," he says, "I'm going to be drunk. And this time I'll stay drunk!"

Afterword by David Drake

P. Schuyler Miller was very important to the SF field in two ways. The generally known fashion is that he was the first regular reviewer in an SF magazine, holding that position at
Astounding
, later
Analog
, from the late '40s to his death in 1974. The less familiar aspect is that Tom Doherty, when he was a salesman for other publishers, would arrange his route so that he could have lunch with Miller in Pittsburgh. Tom put Miller's encyclopedic knowledge of the field to good use when he became publisher of Ace in 1977 and in 1981 founded Tor Books.
From 1930 through 1947 Miller also sold SF stories. He was never a major writer, though some of his stories were reprinted often enough to be easily found in old anthologies. "Spawn" (which
isn't
generally available) had a major impact on me, however, when I read Miller's single-author collection
The Titan
in the Clinton Public Library.
Since then I've read all or nearly all of Miller's published fiction, and I can say with certainty that he never wrote anything else even remotely like "Spawn." In form it's less a story than a prose poem or a drama in blank verse. It really is SF—Miller had a degree in chemistry, and if you read carefully you'll note underlying the lush color and imagery that there's a degree of scientific rigor very unusual for 1939—but it appeared in
Weird Tales
rather than in an SF magazine (generally
Astounding
by that point) as most of Miller's other published stories did. (Miller had several stories in Campbell's
Unknown
, but "Spawn" would've been even more out of place there than in
Astounding
.)

"Spawn" demonstrates highly unusual stylistic touches—tricks, I'd say, but that would imply they were conscious and that the author could repeat them. Miller never did, making me suspect that the process of creation here wasn't completely intellectual.
The reader views the action as though it were on a movie screen or he were looking through multiple layers of glass, insulating her from vivid, horrific events. The narrator tells his story as though you were face to face with him. He doesn't bother to give his name, nor often enough does he name other men the first time they appear. He doesn't describe events in sequence; they rise in momentary importance, then sink back like porpoises into the sea of narrative.
Like porpoises, or like whales. Oh, yes: "Spawn" is a horror story.
And everything is in place for the climax, including the fact that the story opens and closes not in Berlin or Vienna or Warsaw, but in Budapest.
In addition to leaving me numb with horror at the infinite possible, "Spawn" showed me that there is no proper form or technique for a story: there is the proper form and technique of
the
story before you at this moment. That's why I picked "Spawn" for this anthology.

Preface by David Drake

Shortly after my parents gave me a subscription to
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
in October 1959, the magazine offered back issues at the rate of fifteen for three dollars or twenty-five for five dollars. I sent three dollars; among the delights I found when the magazines arrived was "St. Dragon and the George." (There were
many
delights. I immediately scraped up another five dollars and sent it off. Thirteen of the twenty-five additional magazines were duplicates, but I didn't complain.)
Gordy Dickson at his peak was one of the best writers in the field. For my money (literally, in this case), "St. Dragon and the George" is the best thing he ever wrote. It's both funny and witty, but if those were its only virtues, I wouldn't have picked it for this anthology. The humor and wit overlie a series of very profound ideas:
There is evil;
It is the duty of human beings to stand firm against evil, even if evil most likely will destroy them;
And human beings come in all shapes and sizes.
If more people took those ideas to heart, the world would be a better place. Because I read "St. Dragon and the George," the world is at least slightly better than it might be if I hadn't.

A trifle diffidently, Jim Eckert rapped with his claw on the blue-painted door.

Silence.

He knocked again. There was the sound of a hasty step inside the small, oddly peak-roofed house and the door was snatched open. A thin-faced old man with a tall pointed cap and a long, rather dingy-looking white beard peered out, irritably.

"Sorry, not my day for dragons!" he snapped. "Come back next Tuesday." He slammed the door.

It was too much. It was the final straw. Jim Eckert sat down on his haunches with a dazed thump. The little forest clearing with its impossible little pool tinkling away like Chinese glass wind chimes in the background, its well-kept greensward with the white gravel path leading to the door before him, and the riotous flower beds of asters, tulips, zinnias, roses and lilies-of-the-valley all equally impossibly in bloom at the same time about the white finger-post labeled s. carolinus and pointing at the house—it all whirled about him. It was more than flesh and blood could bear. At any minute now he would go completely insane and imagine he was a peanut or a cocker spaniel. Grottwold Hanson had wrecked them all. Dr. Howells would have to get another teaching assistant for his English Department. Angie . . .

Angie! 

Jim pounded on the door again. It was snatched open.

"Dragon!" cried S. Carolinus, furiously. "How would you like to be a beetle?"

"But I'm not a dragon," said Jim, desperately.

The magician stared at him for a long minute, then threw up his beard with both hands in a gesture of despair, caught some of it in his teeth as it fell down and began to chew on it fiercely.

"Now where," he demanded, "did a dragon acquire the brains to develop the imagination to entertain the illusion that he is
not
a dragon? Answer me, O Ye Powers!"

"The information is psychically, though not physiologically correct," replied a deep bass voice out of thin air beside them and some five feet off the ground. Jim, who had taken the question to be rhetorical, started convulsively.

"Is that so?" S. Carolinus peered at Jim with new interest. "Hmm." He spat out a hair or two. "Come in, Anomaly—or whatever you call yourself."

Jim squeezed in through the door and found himself in a large single room. It was a clutter of mismatched furniture and odd bits of alchemical equipment.

"Hmm," said S. Carolinus, closing the door and walking once around Jim, thoughtfully. "If you aren't a dragon, what are you?"

"Well, my real name's Jim Eckert," said Jim. "But I seem to be in the body of a dragon named Gorbash."

"And this disturbs you. So you've come to me. How nice," said the magician, bitterly. He winced, massaged his stomach and closed his eyes. "Do you know anything that's good for a perpetual stomach-ache? Of course not. Go on."

"Well, I want to get back to my real body. And take Angie with me. She's my fiancée and I can send her back but I can't send myself back at the same time. You see this Grottwold Hanson—well, maybe I better start from the beginning."