The Third Science Fiction Megapack Read online

  The flower mat carries me to the center of the glade. The two warriors are nowhere to be seen. I try to watch Ximb with scientific curiosity. It stands before me and for the first time opens its wings. I’m breathless—they’re bigger than they seem when gathered together on its back. And on their upper surface, they’re strongly colored with patterns of red, white, black, and yellow—predominantly red with a black pattern, the white and yellow only accents on the black areas. It starts flapping its wings in a definite rhythm, joining that with movement of its arms. The geometric pattern on the wings continues along the undersides of its arms and over its chest. It rises gracefully into the air in a sort of aerial dance, darting about like an animal pursued by predators.

  From the flower mat rises the heavy scent of crushed petals. I feel a little dizzy. The dance quickens, although I have the impression that in fact my perception has altered. I notice, somewhat alarmed, that the flowers’ scents numb my senses and distort my perception of the surrounding reality.

  Ximb’s dance is much too fast now to be followed. It seems to open unseen doors in the air, passages through which slink shaking and horrible hairy shapes with torn wings and fiery tongues. It’s hot, difficult to breathe. My eyes sting. The static crackle in my brain has a hallucinating cadence. I feel something flowing down my cheeks. I raise my hands to wipe my eyes, and blink in pain. Everything is foggy.

  The noise has stopped, as has the flutz’s aerial ballet. I regain my breath and notice that my hands are smudged with blood from my cheeks. Blood that came out of my eyes, I realize with an uncharacteristic calm.

  Now you will see the truth.

  I keep my feet inside the floating floral carpet as it takes me back to the glade’s edge. The whole depression has filled with a motley crowd. I swallow hard at the sight. The paradise is gone; in its place is a gigantic war camp, populated by thousands and thousands of fantastic creatures that move among the tents, the hastily built barracks, the stallions and beasts of burden, the huge fires where chunks of meat cook, burning black circles in the luxuriant vegetation of the flutzan world.

  Do you recognize them? Ximb’s rattle surprises me.

  “How could I?”

  Richard, even if you don’t believe, you must have heard stories containing at least some of them.

  And then I begin recognizing them. The revelation crushes me. Indeed, there is the Olympian gods’ camp, on a rocky summit. In a corner of the valley, elves’ detachments are arranged in perfect order, their guards keeping back dwarves and nasty gnomes. Dragons circle in the sky. A few steps lower than where we are, an ogre gang fights over a flutz corpse with a few trolls with blue skin and red fur.

  There are a thousand times more on the other side of the mountain and in the surrounding valleys and hills, Ximb’s thoughts whisper.

  “This is an illusion,” I answer, dizzy.

  Oh, no, I can assure you, all these are as real as you and me. If you step outside the protection of the flowers, now that you have witnessed their preparations, you’ll be noticed, smelled, sensed by all these divinities and creatures, and you’ll have to face them.

  “But, it’s not possible! They’re only stories—”

  I stop mumbling when I see again the bloody writing covering my right arm. There’s a new line: Stories that have forgiven you for the blasphemy of not believing in them. I inhale deeply and avoid the flutz’s eyes.

  The flutz continues, unruffled. Now, look to your left, beyond the city.

  I perceive a crowd similar to the one around me, but I can’t distinguish the details. “What should I see there?”

  The flutz sorcerer makes a discreet sign and my eyes shed tears again, then suddenly I can zoom in on distant targets. I study the expanse of fields on the other side of the city, where a swarm of bodies moves, mandibles clacking—beasts born from the most despicable nightmares.

  For now, I have limited yours to this side of the city. The wizardry still works because it is alien to the Earth deities. But not for long. The others, though, the ones that you saw on the far side, they’re our gods and creatures. They started gathering there last night. And we can’t hold them there.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Richard, even if you decide not to believe in gods or fairy tales, all of these will continue to exist in the shadows deep in your soul. You take them with you everywhere you go. And now you have brought your entire mythological existence to this side of the universe. Even if you have banished them from your consciousness, you have still worn them permanently in your being and now they’re here, in our world, ready to take it by force.

  The flutz pauses to let these ideas sink in.

  Our world is too small and crowded for such an invasion. What you see beyond the city is our divine army preparing to confront the invaders.

  “That’s insane,” I protest, terrified by the implications.

  It will be a bloodbath, a slaughter of cataclysmic proportions that we, the flutzi, cannot watch from the sidelines. It will be our apocalypse, to use one of your terms. The flutzan world will cease to exist after this confrontation. Our civilization will fall into ruin; we cannot know if there will be any survivors left to rise and start all over again. It is the End of the World War. I know in detail all the prophecies, and I recognize the signs now.

  I remain silent, overwhelmed by all these revelations. The scientist in me keeps saying that everything I’ve heard and seen is impossible. And yet, on a different level, a deeper one, I begin to believe.

  We killed your envoy hoping that once the only humans among us were dead, everything they brought with them would vanish as well. We were wrong, and we are sorry for the crime we committed. But the truth is that we’re desperate. And you, Richard, you’re our last chance.

  “What could I do?”

  There’s only one solution left—you need to make the final step in the evolution of the human species. Give up for good and forever everything that is divine and magic in you, uproot faith, abandon creation, and they will all disappear into nothingness.

  “Is such a thing possible?” I ask without thinking.

  I’ll give you a magic potion that you must distribute to all humans. Tomorrow morning, when you awaken, everything will be forgotten.

  I look again at the valley that bustles with creatures from fairy tales, legends, and myths. Human culture and civilization, in the flesh. Deicide or apocalypse? What right do we, humans, have to destroy a world? But how to choose? How can we choose?

  “All right,” I agree to gain some time. “Give me the potion.”

  Ximb leads me back to the shuttle. The two warriors join us. This time I see the forest around teeming with fantastic beings, for whom I do not exist as long as I don’t leave the flowers’ protection.

  A few steps from the entrance I stop, surprised. On the metallic hood, above the cockpit, a character waits, leaning on his sword. I know him as the archangel Michael. His eyes, searching the surroundings, pass over me—I am as invisible to him as I am to all the others. And yet, he suddenly seems startled; somehow, he can sense me. Like a blind man, he gazes blankly at the general area where I’m standing.

  What happened? the flutz sorcerer asks me anxiously.

  I swallow and try to answer, but I can’t take my eyes or thoughts off the angel. I’ve seen a lot of movies and cartoons containing dragons, elves, and dwarves. But how many times in life does one have the chance to see a real live angel? And even more, the archangel Michael himself! “Help the angels fly,” I remember Dr. Henderson telling me before my departure. Now, I understand.

  Don’t look. Close your eyes and go! Ximb commands me.

  But I can’t move. The angel deposits his gigantic sword on the shuttle’s metal hull, and kneels. His white and shining wings stretch to the right and to the left; he puts his hands together in prayer and lowers his eyes. He remains in that position, mutely imploring me, the man, the mortal, the sinner Richard. I feel tears flowing down my cheeks.


  The flutzan emperor’s emissary makes a sign. The two moth-warriors jump onto the hull next to Michael. They cut down God’s messenger with their arm-blades as if he’s only a wax doll. I try to scream, but everything happens too fast.

  Richard! I perceive the sinister rattle of the sorcerer’s thoughts.

  In the heat of the moment I can’t control my feelings and I look at it with hate, then I breath deeply and calm down. Ximb is not doing anything but protecting its world. My decision has nothing to do with it, or its deeds. The choice is still between deicide and the flutzi apocalypse.

  * * * *

  “I’ll go back to the planet and let them taste their own medicine. They’ve infected me with a virus that would have created an epidemic on board Odyssey. They’re very advanced; we won’t have too many chances against them. So my advice is, leave orbit as soon as possible and never come back to their world.”

  The Chief of Security is quiet for almost a minute, then replies, “The president agrees with your solution. He wants you to know that the people of Odyssey are profoundly grateful. You will live forever in our conscience, as the first hero of our colony. God bless you.”

  The transmission ends. The shuttle is silent again.

  “I expected an ending like this.” A woman’s voice.

  Startled, he turns to the cockpit’s entrance, then smiles. “Eve, I told you to stay on the ship. Now you’ve condemned yourself to exile.”

  “Story of my life.” She grins and sits in the copilot’s chair. Then she looks at the corpse lying behind the chairs. “He didn’t make the right decision?”

  “I don’t know what decision he would eventually have made,” Adam replies, casting a disgusted look at Richard Cambry’s body. “He vacillated between us and them, until the very last moment. Even after we all forgave his sins, even after Michael sacrificed himself in front of him, he still had his doubts. People are weak.”

  SECOND LANDING, by Murray Leinster

  CHAPTER ONE

  “The exploring ship Franklin made its first landing on a remarkable wide beach on the western coast of Chios, the largest land mass on Thalassia. Using the longest axis of the continent as a base, and the pointed end as seen from space as 0̊, this beach bears 246° from the median point of the base line…The Franklin later berthed inland some four miles 360̊ from Firing Plaza One on the chart. There is a pleasant savannah here, with a stream of water apparently safe for drinking…

  Astrographic Bureau Publication 11297,

  Appendix to Space Pilot Vol. 460, Pp. 58-59.

  * * * *

  It was not plausible that Brett Carstairs should find a picture of a girl, to all appearances human, in millenia-old ruins on a planet some hundreds of light years from Earth. But the whole affair was unlikely, beginning with the report of the exploring ship which caused the Thalassia-Aspasia Expedition in the first place. If it hadn’t been for photographs and the ceramic artifacts, nobody would have believed that report. It simply was not credible that another intelligent race should ever have existed in the galaxy. In two centuries of exploration, no hint of extraterrestrial reasoning beings had been found before. But the exploration ship’s narrative didn’t stop at one impossibility about the twin worlds Thalassia and Aspasia, revolving perpetually about each other as they trailed the satellite sun Rubra on its course. The report wasn’t content to claim one intelligent race to have existed. It claimed two. And it offered evidence that some thousands of years before they had fought each other bitterly and mercilessly, and that they had exterminated each other in an interplanetary war which lasted only days or even hours—which was hard to believe.

  But the picture of the girl was more impossible than anything else. Brett didn’t believe it, even when he held it in his hand. He didn’t dare mention it until the thing was all over.

  He didn’t find it at the actual beginning, of course. There were preliminaries. The Thalassia-Aspasia Expedition worked under handicaps. It was based on the exploring ship’s report and had to be organized by the Records Division of the Astrographic Survey—which never has any money to spare—and there had to be much skimping in every way and only volunteers could be afforded for the job. Even a ship couldn’t be hired for it. The general public was much more excited about the colonization of nearby planetary systems than in research on a planet that wouldn’t be needed for colonization in a thousand years. So the Expedition was very small—no more than a dozen members altogether—and it would be landed on Thalassia from an Ecology Bureau ship and left there. It would probably be called for in six months or so. Probably. Even then, what it found out might not matter to anybody else.

  Brett joined up because it was his only chance for adventure and because his hobby warranted his inclusion in the staff. He could drive a flier of course—everybody could—but he’d specialized in paleotechnology, the study of ancient industrial processes. If there really had been an intelligent race or races out in space, he could make better guesses than most at how the alien machinery worked and how its factories produced. But his personal reason for going was an odd, anticipatory feeling of excitement at the idea of being left with a small group of human beings on a planet where not even the skies were familiar, from which Sol itself was invisible, and where they would be more terribly alone in a waste of emptiness than any similar group had ever been before.

  That excitement lasted during the long journey in overdrive and during the almost-as-long approach to planetary landing distance after the Ecology Bureau ship was back in normal space in the Elektra system. When it went into atmosphere on Thalassia and its repulsors droned above the illimitable waters of Thalassia’s ocean, Brett watched with fascinated eyes. Waves of this ocean had a twenty thousand mile reach in which to build up to mountainous heights. At this season of the twin planets’ year, they had the equivalent of trade winds to urge them on. When they reached the shores of Chios, the planet’s only continent, the waves were three hundred feet high, and they seemed to fling spray and spume almost out to space itself. Brett watched the swirling maelstroms and dramatic tumult of the struggle between sea and land. He remembered that at the very edge of the wave-washed area there were to be found the only moving living things on the continent. They were marine forms like crabs, which scuttled out of the water to forage and darted back to the monstrously tumultuous coastal foam.

  Watching from the Ecology ship, Brett heard the report that the radar beacon on Chios wasn’t working, and he watched as the ship found Firing Plaza Number One and the ruined refugee-settlement nearby, and hovered there to make quite sure of its position before it descended gently at the landing place the exploring ship had advised for later visitors.

  It was a pleasant savannah, and the stream ran as clear as crystal. But the Ecology Bureau ship had been grudgingly loaned, and it had urgent business elsewhere. Its cargo ports opened and the Expedition’s supplies went out to ground in a swiftly flowing stream. They piled up mountainously, so it seemed, and at that they weren’t too complete. The biggest crates were two atmosphere fliers and a short range rocket. The fuel for the rocket made a bigger heap than all the rest of the equipment together. There were plastic tarpaulins to cover everything. There were houses to be unloaded and braced back—but at least they weren’t inflatable shelters!—and there was a spare beacon. But there wasn’t much else but food. The unloading took less than two hours.

  Then the skipper of the Ecology Bureau ship asked politely if there were anything else. Minutes later the cargo ports closed and the personnel lock shut, and the ship’s repulsors began to drone. It heaved up slowly until it was a few thousand feet up and then went into interplanetary drive and plummeted toward the sky. It would come back in six months, most likely, or another ship would come in its stead. And the Expedition would have to be ready to leave.

  That was when Brett Carstairs realized the silence on Thalassia. The Expedition’s members set to work to make camp. There was a breeze and the vegetation was reasonably familiar in smell, a
t least—chlorophyl and its associated compounds are found on the oxygen planets of all sol-type stars—and the tree leaves rustled naturally enough. The small stream at the landing place made pleasant liquid sounds. But that was all. No insect stirred or whirred or stridulated. No bird sang. No squirrel barked. No reasonable facsimile of any noise made by any living creature came to the ears of the Thalassia-Aspasia Expedition. The only noises were the voices of the Expedition members themselves, and the bumpings they made with the boxes and crates, and the breeze and the dull booming of the mountainous surf to the westward. Brett caught himself listening uneasily.

  “I didn’t realize,” he said ruefully to Kent, on the other end of a crate that would be a chair presently, “that it was going to sound so lonely.”

  “It’s been lonely here for a good many thousand years,” said Kent phlegmatically, “since the race on this planet and the characters on the other one killed each other off.”

  He put down his end of the crate. He and Brett opened it. They began to assemble the furnishings of the Expedition’s housing. All about them was jungle. The clearing in which they worked had a ground cover like ivy running on the ground. It was broad-leaved instead of narrow-leaved as grasses are, and Brett had a feeling that there should be crawling things under it.

  But there weren’t. The report of the exploring ship was explicit. There bad been a very high civilization here, once. And another on the from-here-invisible twin planet Aspasia. Some eight thousand years ago they’d fought each other terribly across the half million miles of space that separated them. Fission bombs with cobalt cases poisoned the air of Thalassia, at the same time that fusion bombs from Thalassia blasted the oasis cities of its twin world to lakes of molten glass. There wasn’t a single, air-breathing creature left alive on Thalassia. Not any more.