It had taken the wizardry of the Solar System’s best band of scientists to open the door that led into the world beyond.
And yet people in unknown, savage ages had talked of things like these … of goblin and incubus and imp. Perhaps men in Atlantis might have found the way, even as Nevin and Cartwright had found the way. In that long-gone day letting loose upon the world a flood of things that for ages after had lived in chimney-corner stories to chill one to the marrow.
And the pictures he had seen?
Ancestral memory, perhaps. Or a weird imaging that happened to be true. Or had the writers of those stories, the painters of those pictures …
West shuddered from the thought.
What was it Cartwright had said? The work is started on the other planets.
The work of passing along the knowledge, the principles, the psychology of the alien things of otherwhere. Education by remote control … involuntary education. Stella, the telepathic Stella, singing back on Earth, darling of the airways. And she was an agent for these things … she passed along the knowledge and a man would think it was his own.
That was it, of course, the thing that Nevin and Cartwright had planned. Remake the world, they’d said. Sitting out on Pluto and pulling strings that would remake the world.
Superstitions once. Hard facts now. Stories once to make the blood run cold. And now—
With the source dried up, with the screen empty, with the Pluto gang wiped out, the cults would die and Stella would sing on, but there would come a time when the listeners would turn away from Stella, when her novelty wore off, when the strangeness and the alienness of her had lost their appeal.
The Solar System would go on thinking imp and incubus were no more than shuddery imagery from the days when men crouched in caves and saw a supernatural threat in every moving shadow.
But it had been a narrow squeak.
From a dark corner a thing mouthed at West in a shrill sing-song of hate.
So this was it, thought West.
Here he was, at the end of the Solar System’s trail, in an empty house. And it was, finally, as he had hoped it would be. No one around. A storehouse full of food. Adequate shelter. A shop where he could work. A place guarded by the patrol against unwelcome callers.
Just the place for a man who might be hiding. Just the place for a fugitive from the human race.
There were things to do … later on. Two bodies to be given burial. A screen to be cleaned up and thrown on a junk heap. A few chittering things to be hunted down and killed.
Then he could settle down.
There were robots, of course. One had brought in the dinner.
Later on, he said.
But there was something else to do … something to do immediately, if he could just remember.
He stood and looked around the room, cataloguing its contents.
Chairs, drapes, a desk, the table, the imitation fireplace …
That was it, the fireplace.
He walked across the room to stand in front of it. Reaching up, he took down the bottle from the mantel, the bottle with the black silk bow tied around its neck. The bottle for the last man’s club.
And he was the last man, there was no doubt of it. The very last of all.
He had not been in the pact, of course, but he would carry out the pact. It was melodrama, undoubtedly, but there are times, he told himself, when a little melodrama may be excusable.
He uncorked the bottle and swung around to face the room. He raised the bottle in salute—salute to the gaping, blackened frame that had held the painting, to the dead man on the floor, to the thing that mewed in a far, dark corner.
He tried to think of a word to say, but couldn’t. And there had to be a word to say, there simply had to be.
“Mud in your eye,” he said, and it wasn’t any good, but it would have to do.
He put the bottle to his lips and tipped it up and tilted back his head.
Gagging, he snatched the bottle from his lips.
It wasn’t whisky and it was awful. It was gall and vinegar and quinine, all rolled into one. It was a brew straight from the Pit. It was all the bad medicine he had taken as a boy, it was sulphur and molasses, it was castor oil, it was—
“Good God,” said Frederick West.
For suddenly he remembered the location of a knife he had lost twenty years before. He saw it where he had left it, just as plain as day.
He knew an equation he’d never known before, and what was more, he knew what it was for and how it could be used.
Unbidden, he visualized, in one comprehensive picture, just how a rocket motor worked … every detail, every piece, every control, like a chart laid out before his eyes.
He could capture and hold seven fence posts in his mental eye and four was the best any human ever had been able to see mentally before.
He whooshed out his breath to air his mouth and stared at the bottle.
Suddenly he was able to recite, word for word, the first page from a book he had read ten years ago.
“The hormones,” he whispered. “Darling’s hormones!”
Hormones that did something to his brain. Speeded it up, made it work better, made more of it work than had ever worked before. Made it think cleaner and clearer than it had ever thought before.
“Good Lord,” he said.
A head start to begin with. And now this!
The man who has it could rule the Solar System. That was what Belden had said about it.
Belden had hunted for it. Had torn this place apart. And Darling had hunted for it, too. Darling, who had thought he had it, who had played a trick on Nevin and Cartwright so he could be sure he had it, who had drank himself to death trying to find the bottle he had it in.
And all these years the hormones had been in this bottle on the mantel!
Someone else had played a trick on all of them. Langdon, maybe. Langdon, who had been given away as a pet to a thing so monstrous that even Cartwright had shrunk from naming it.
With shaking hand, West put the bottle back on the mantel, placed the cork beside it. For a moment he stood there, hands against the mantel, gripping it, staring out the vision port beside the fireplace. Staring down into the valley where a shadowy cylinder tilted upward from the rocky planet, as if striving for the stars.
The Alpha Centauri—the ship with the space drive that wouldn’t work. Something wrong … something wrong. …
A sob rose in West’s throat and his hands tightened on the mantel with a grip that hurt.
He knew what was wrong!
He had studied blueprints of the drive back on Earth.
And now it was as if the blueprints were before his eyes again, for he remembered them, each line, each symbol, as if they were etched upon his brain.
He saw the trouble, the simple adjustment that would make the space drive work. Ten minutes … ten minutes would be all he needed. So simple. So simple. So simple that it seemed beyond belief it had not been found before, that all the great minds which had worked upon it should not have seen it long ago.
There had been a dream—a thing that he had not even dared to say aloud, not even to himself. A thing he had not dared even to think about.
West straightened from the mantel and faced the room again. He took the bottle and for a second time raised it in salute.
But this time he had a toast for the dead men and the thing that whimpered in the corner.
“To the stars,” he said.
And he drank without gagging.