Futuria Fantasia, Winter 1940 by Ray Bradbury (e reader txt) đź“•
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- Author: Ray Bradbury
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"What of old legends? Of the serpent who shall one day devour the sun. That legend dates back to Mu and Atlantis. Who, man, was and is Satan? Christ? And Jehovah? benevolent and all-saving, were but a monstrous jest fostered by THEY to keep man blindly content, and keep him divided among himself so that he strove not to unravel the stars?"
"Man, in my foolish youth I studied by candleflame secrets that would scorch your very soul. Of women who with their own bare hands have strangled the children they bore so that the world might not know.... Disease and sickness at which physicians throw up their hands in helpless bafflement. When strong men tear at their limbs and heads and agony—seeking to drive forth alien forces that have netted themselves into their bodies. I need scarcely recount them all, each with its own abominable significance. It is THEM. Who are eternal and nameless, who send their scouts down to test earth-man. Don't you realize that they have watched man creep out of primal slimes, take limbs and shamble, and finally walk? And that they are waiting, biding their time...." I shivered with a fear beyond name. I tried to laugh and could not. Then, bold with stark horror, I shouted quite loudly: "How do you know this? Are you one of THEM?" He shook his head violently. "No, no!" I made as to go, feeling an aching horror within me.
"Stay only a moment more, man. I will have pity on you and will not tell you all. I will not describe them. And I will not assay that which, when upon first seeing you here by the sea, I first intended...." I listened. Not daring to look at him; as in the grip of daemonaic dream. My fingers clutched at the edges of the bench so tightly that I have been unable to write with them until now. He concluded thus:
"So you see that I am everywhere a worldless alien. Sometimes this secret is too great for one mind to contain, and I must talk. I must feel the presence of someone human near me, else I shall attempt to commit suicide and again fail. It is without end—my horror. Have pity on me, man of earth, as I have had pity on you."
It was then that I gripped him by the shoulders and looked with pleading desperation into his staring eyes. "Why have you told me? What—" My voice broke. My hands fell to my sides. I shuddered.
He understood. Shrieked one word: "PITY!" into my insensible ear, and was gone.
That was 3 nites ago and each nite since has been hell. I cannot remember how long it was after the STRANGER left that I found myself able to move, to rise, hobble home, suddenly ancient with knowledge. And I cannot—WILL NOT—reveal to you all that I heard.
I thot myself insane, but after an examination, a physician pronounced me that I had been strained mentally. I am competent. But I wonder if he is wrong.
I view the silken stars tonight with loathing. HE sought to master their inscrutable secret meaning, and succeeded. He imagined, he dreamed; and he fed his sleep with potions, so that he might learn where his mind might be during sleep, and himself probe into the mind that wandered from space into his resting body-shell. I am no scientist, no bio-chemist, so I learned little of his methods. Only that he did succeed in removing his mind from Earth, and soaring to some remote world over and beyond this universe—where THEY dwell. And THEY knew him to be a mind of Earth, he told me. He but hinted of the evil he beheld, so potent with dread that it shattered his mind. And THEY cured him, and sent him back to earth.... "They are waiting!" he shrieked, in his grating skeleton of a voice. "They are contemptuous of man and his feeble colonies. But they fear that some day, like an overgrown idiot child, he may do them harm. But before this time—when Man has progressed into a ripeness—THEY will descend! Then they will come in hordes to exploit the world as THEY did before!"
Of his return, and his assuming the role of a man, the Alien spoke evasively. It was to be assurred that this talk of his was not some repulsive caprice; to know that all of it was true, that I gripped him and beheld him. To my everlasting horror, I must know. Little in itself, what I saw, but sufficient to cause me to sink down on the stone bench in a convulsive huddle of fear. Never again in life can I tear this clutching terror from my soul. Only this: That when I looked into his staring eyes in the dimness of murky twilight, and before he understood and quickly avaunted, I glimpsed with astoundment and repugnance that between the muffling of his coat and black scarf the INTRUDER wore a meticulously painted metal mask—to hide what I must not see....
Where is ever heard the bark
Of monstrous ebon hounds of hell,
In a dreadful fearsome knell,
Never fading, ever bright,
With a weird and spectral light,
Blooms a flower of ancient days,
Shining in a crimson maze;
When the black bat shrilly screams
Asphodel, you haunt my dreams—
Steals the perfume of your breath:
Saffron seeds to fall and grow
By my casement window, where,
Sleeps my loved one, still and fair;
Then, the night you are to bloom
I shall creep from out my room,
From your blossom by the wall
Shall I hear her dear voice call:
Mournfully the wind will cry,
And shadows cover all the sky—
My lips will touch the loved dead
When where you nod I lay my head....
MARMOK by Emil Pataja
Whence come the fingers that beckoned and led
My dream-stung soul from my canopied bed—
Whither dost take me, ere I am dead?
Beyond the skull-grinning mid-March moon
Over the phosphorous-lit lagoon
Out past the darkest pits of the night,
Fast thru the stars in this evil flight;
Lead thee me out past the rim of space,
Show me that ravenous, pain-black face,
Marmok, whose myrmidons ever are questing
For souls who wander at nite, unresting.
Then shall I know an ultimate bliss
Tasting the fury of that cosmic kiss,
Whilst my earth-cloak lies limply on the floor
To waken and gibber forevermore.
What is the dim monstrosity that shimmers across the stars, what hand is that to cradle planets, earth and mars. What misshapen gargantuan of nebulous formed flesh, hurls out its flood of darkness, the systems to enmesh. What is it walks across the universes chanting cosmic choruses with endless verses—what thing unutterable has visited our Earth long years ago, and now, tonite, returns, in the shadows lurking glow. What ancient fear is with me, cold and terrible? Is that the shape of man upon the constellations, blotting out the light—or something gasping in hideous delight, plucking at the planets in insanity, at play, causing suns to boil like cauldrons, meteors to sing upon their way with mournful voices, lost ghosts upon lonely trails—wailing—wailing. Is tonight our rendezvous with the Cosmos Thing, the Colossus bigger than Andromeda that sits upon the throne of space—or are these fantasies upon my aged eyes?
HADESTHE BEST WAYS TO GET AROUND
I don't mean socially; I mean off the Earth and between the planets. There are a few really good ways, as invented by perspiring authors in science-fiction magazines. And if I miss any, which is extremely doubtful, remember that I'm writting from memory, that I hadn't read all the scientifiction magazines from 1926 and on, and that I am not going to go researching through the tremendous stacks of old scientifiction magazines that I now have in my possession.
Now, what DO I mean by THE BEST WAYS TO GET AROUND? Briefly, by the word BEST, I mean so pseudo-logical that you could almost leave off the "pseudo". See? (No)
For instance, Jack Williamson's geodesic machinery, wherein he warps space around, appeals to me as being pure fairy tale stuff. He just gives a lot of verbal hocus-pocus, and runs off reams of litterary fertilizer until we throw up our hands in disgust and say; "O.K., O.K., Jack, to hell with that, let's get on with the 'story'. We'll grant you that you can get around."—And we're willing to grant E.E. Smith the same privilege. He DOES get around—anybody disagree? The question is; how? Oh, by useing "X", and the inertialess drive. The same with brother Burroughs. What do we care if dear old John Carter "yearns" himself to Mars? He gets there, and we are happy, or were happy.
So, we exclude all those from THE BEST WAYS TO GET AROUND. They are very nice and convenient to get people places; but, when we run across one of the "BEST WAYS" we often wonder if it REALLY WOULDN'T be possible, provided——. Of course, that word "provided" is the catch—the reason why we really aren't going around that way.
Again—So, way back there, Edmond Hamilton, and a hundred others, have used the idea of light-preasure in an attempt to get away from rockets. But he didn't tell us how, scientifictionaly. In direct contrast to vauge statements made regarding the use of light-preasure as propulsion, I remember the MOON CONQUORS, by R.H. Romans, in a 1931 (I think) (You're right, 4SJ) quarterly. You've seen radiometers. The things with black and white vanes placed in a vacuum. The theory is that the opposite shades cause unbalanced light preasure, so that the vanes go around and around. Romans invented a pseudo-scientifically logical way to use light-preasure, once he got his ship in space. His scientist invented a compound of absolute black. (Which is also obtainable in a darkroom) A small square of darkroom—or, I mean, absolute black painted on the posterior of the ship, and regulated at will, gave the same ship quite respectable speeds. Certainly it won't work outside of a story—but, I'm talking scientifictionally. Romans used his imagination, and we all had fun.
In the same story, Romans used a swell device to get the ship off the earth. He used a mile-long tube, composed of circular magnets. It was a magnetic gun. Each magnet pulled the ship towards it, and then, as the ship passed it, the magnet's poles were reversed, and made to repel the ship. With each magnet at maximum charge, either pulling or pushing the ship, according to whether it was in front or behind the latter, the same erupted from the tube with the necessary 7 M.P.S. velocity of escape, and so was off on the way to the moon. What's wrong with the idea? I dunno.
John W. Campell (Jr.) used to have brainstorms: in fact, he invented two of THE BEST WAYS TO GET AROUND. One, in the first of the ARCOT, MOREY, and WADE stories, "PIRACY PREFERRED", was that of molecular motion. All the little molecules in a bar of metal go madly around in every possible direction. If you could invent, as Campbell did in the story, an electro-magnetic vibration that would force all the mollecules to go in the same direction, then the bar of metals would go in that direction, since it would be them. So Mr. Campbell hooked the thing up to his ship, and off he went to Venus, or some other planet. Well, it would work, wouldn't it, provided (ah yes!) you could make all the mollecules go into one directional flow.
And the other brainstorm was when Aarn Munro, in the MIGHTIEST MACHINE, decided that momentum
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