"No. Something else. Something laughing at us."
"Shut up, Avery," said Sheila. "We can't go to pieces now."
"And we can't just stand here glaring." Falken looked out through the
rainbow dazzle. "We may as well explore. Perhaps there's another way
out."
Avery chuckled, without mirth. "And perhaps there isn't. Perhaps there
was never a way in. What happened to it, Falken?"
"Control yourself," said Falken silkily, "or I'll rip off your oxygen
valve. All right. Let's go."
They went a long way across the plain in the airless, unechoing
silence, slipping on glassy rock, dazzled by the wheeling colors.
Then Falken saw the castle.
It loomed quite suddenly--a bulk of squat wings with queer, twisted
turrets and straggling windows. Falken scowled. He was sure he hadn't
seen it before. Perhaps the light....
They hesitated. Icy moth-wings flittered over Falken's skin. He would
have gone around, but black walls seemed to stretch endlessly on
either side of the castle.
"We go in," he said, and shuddered at the thought of meeting folk like
those who hunted the flaming-eyed colossus.
Blasters ready, they went up flat titanic steps. A hall without doors
stretched before them. They went down it.
* * * * *
Falken had a dizzy sense of _change_. The walls quivered as though with
a wash of water over them. And then there were doors opening out of a
round hall.
He opened one. There was a round hall beyond, with further doors. He
turned back. The hall down which they had come had vanished. There were
only doors. Hundreds of them, of odd shapes and sizes, like things
imperfectly remembered.
Paul Avery began to laugh.
Falken struck him, hard, over the helmet. He stopped, and Sheila caught
Falken's arm, pointing.
Shadows came, rushing and wheeling like monstrous birds. Cold dread
caught Falken's heart. Shadows, hunting them....
He choked down the mad laughter rising in his own throat. He opened
another door.
Halls, with doors. The shadows swept after them. Falken hurled the
doors open, faster and faster, but there was never anything beyond but
another hall, with doors.
His heart was gorged and painful. His clothing was cold on his sweating
body. He plunged on and on through black halls and drifting shards of
light, with the shadows dancing all around and doors, doors, doors.
Paul Avery made a little empty chuckle. "It's laughing," he mumbled and
went down on the black floor. The shadows leaped.
Sheila's eyes were a staring fire in her starved white face. Her terror
shocked against Falken's brain and steadied it.
"Take his feet," he said harshly. "Take his feet."
They staggered on with their burden. And presently there were no more
doors, and no roof overhead. Only the light and the glassy walls, and
the dancing shadows.
The walls were thin in places. Through them Falken saw the dark
colossus with its flaming eyes, straining through the spangled light.
After it came the hounds and hunters, not gaining nor falling back,
riding in blind absorption.
The walls faded, and the shadows. They were alone in the center of the
black plain. Falken looked back at the castle.
There was nothing but the flat and naked rock.
He laid Avery down. He saw Sheila Moore fall beside him. He laughed,
one small, mad chuckle. Then he crouched beside the others, his scarred
gypsy face a mask of living stone.
Whether it was then, or hours later that he heard the voice, Falken
never knew. But it spoke loudly in his mind, that voice. It brought him
up, his futile blaster raised.
"You are humans," said the voice. "How wonderful!"
Falken looked upward, sensing a change in the light.
Something floated overhead. A ten-foot area of curdled glory, a core of
blinding brilliance set in a lacy froth of fire.
The beauty of it caught Falken's throat. It shimmered with a sparkling
opalescence, infinitely lovely--a living, tender flame floating in
the rainbow light. It caught his heart, too, with a deep sadness that
drifted in dim, faded colors beneath the brilliant veil.
It said, clearly as a spoken voice in his mind:
"Yes. I live, and I speak to you."
Sheila and Avery had risen. They stared, wide-eyed, and Sheila
whispered, "What are you?"
The fire-thing coiled within itself. Little snapping flames licked from
its edges, and its colors laughed.
"A female, isn't it? Splendid! I shall devise something very special."
Colors rippled as its thoughts changed. "You amaze me, humans. I cannot
read your minds, beyond thoughts telepathetically directed at me, but I
can sense their energy output.
"I had picked the yellow one for the strongest. He appeared to be so.
Yet he failed, and you others fought through."
Avery stared at Falken with the dawn of an appalled realization in his
amber eyes. Falken asked of the light:
"What are you?"
The floating fire dipped and swirled. Preening peacock tints rippled
through it, to be drowned in fierce, proud scarlet. It said:
"I am a child of the Sun."
* * * * *
It watched them gape in stunned amazement, and laughed with mocking
golden notes.
"I will tell you, humans. It will amuse me to have an audience not of
my own creating. Watch!"
A slab of the glassy rock took form before them. Deep in it, a spot of
brilliance grew.
It was a Sun, in the first blaze of its virile youth. It strode the
path of its galactic orbit alone. Then, from the wheeling depths of
space, a second Sun approached.
It was huge, burning with a blue-white radiance. There was a mating,
and the nine worlds were born in a rush of supernal fire.
And there was life. Not on the nine burning planets. But in free space,
little globes of fire, bits of the Sun itself shocked somehow to
intelligence in the vast explosion of energy.
The picture blurred. The colors of the floating light were dulled and
dreamy.
"There were many of us," it sighed. "We were like tiny Suns, living on
the conversion of our own atoms. We played, in open space...."
Dim pictures washed the screen, glories beyond human comprehension--a
faded vision of splendor, of alien worlds and the great wheeling Suns
of outer space. The voice murmured:
"Like Suns, we radiated our energy. We could draw strength from our
parent, but not enough. We died. But I was stronger than the rest, and
more intelligent. I built myself a shell."
"Built it!" whispered Avery. "But how?"
"All matter is built of raw energy, electron and proton existing in
a free state. With a part of my own mass I built this world around
myself, to hold the energy of the Sun and check the radiation of my
own vitality.
"I have lived, where my race died. I have watched the planets cool and
live and die. I am not immortal. My mass grows less as it drains away
through my shell. But it will be a long, long time. I shall watch the
Sun die, too."
The voice was silent. The colors were ashes of light. Falken was
stricken with a great poignant grief.
Then, presently, the little malicious flames frothed to life again, and
the voice said:
"My greatest problem is amusement. Here in this black shell I am forced
to devise pleasures from my own imagination."
Falken gasped. "The hunters, the cleft that vanished, and that hellish
castle?" He was suddenly cold and hot at once.
"Clever, eh? I created my hunt some eons ago. According to my plan the
beast can neither escape nor the hunters catch him. But, owing to the
uncertainty factor, there is one chance in some hundreds of billions
that one or the other event may occur. It affords me endless amusement."
"And the castle?" said Falken silkily. "That amused you, too."
"Oh, yes! Your emotional reactions.... Most interesting!" Falken raised
his blaster and fired at the core of the light.
Living fire coiled and writhed. The Sun-child laughed.
"Raw energy only feeds me. What, are there no questions?"
Falken's voice was almost gentle. "Do you think of nothing but
amusement?"
Savage colors rippled against the dim, sad mauves. "What else is there,
to fill the time?"
Time. Time since little frozen Pluto was incandescent gas.
"You closed the opening we came through," said Avery abruptly.
"Of course."
"But you'll open it again? You'll let us go?"
The tone of his voice betrayed him. Falken knew, and Sheila.
"No," said Sheila throatily. "It won't let us go. It'll keep us up here
to play with, until we die."
Ugly dark reds washed the Sun-child. "Death!" it whispered. "My
creatures exist until I bid them vanish. But death, true death--that
would be a supreme amusement!"
* * * * *
A desperate, helpless rage gripped Falken. The vast empty vault mocked
him with his dead hopes. It jeered at him with solid walls that were
built and shifted like smoke by the power of this lovely, soulless
flame.
Built, and shifted....
Sudden fire struck his brain. He stood rigid, stricken dumb by the
sheer magnificance of his idea. He began to tremble, and the wild hope
swelled in him until his veins were gorged and aching.
He said, with infinite care, "You can't create real living creatures,
can you?"
"No," said the Sun-child. "I can build the chemicals of their bodies,
but the vital spark eludes me. My creatures are simply toys activated
by the electrical interplay of atoms. They think, in limited ways, and
they feel crude emotions, but they do not live in the true sense."
"But you can build other things? Rocks, soil, water, air?"
"Of course. It would take a great deal of my strength, and it would
weaken my shell, since I should have to break down part of the rock to
its primary particles and rebuild. But even that I could do, without
serious loss."
There was silence. The blue distant fires flared in Falken's eyes. He
saw the others staring at him. He saw the chances of failure bulk over
him like black thunderheads, crowned with madness and death.
But his soul shivered in ecstasy at the thing that was in it.