DUST OF GODS

“Pass the whisky, N.W.,” said Yarol the Venusian persuasively.
Northwest Smith shook the black bottle of Venusian segir whisky tentatively, evoked a slight gurgle, and reached for his friend’s glass. Under the Venusran’s jealous dark gaze he measured out exactly half of the red liquid. It was not very much.
Yarol regarded his share of the drink disconsolately.
“Broke again,” he murmured. “And me so thirsty.” His glance of cherubic innocence flashed along the temptingly laden counters of the Martian saloon wherein they sat. His face with its look of holy innocence turned to Smith’s, the wise black gaze meeting the Earthman ‘s pale-steel look questioningly. Yarol lifted an arched brow.
“How about it?” he suggested delicately. “Mars owes us a drink anyhow, and I just had my heat-gun recharged this morning. I think we could get away with it.”
Under the table he laid a hopeful hand on his gun. Smith grinned and shook his head.
“Too many customers,” he said. “And you ought to know better than to start anything here. It isn’t healthful.”
Yarol shrugged resigned shoulders and drained his glass with a gulp.
“Now what?” he demanded.
“Well, look around. See anyone here you know? We’re open for business—any kind.”
Yarol twirled his glass wistfully and studied the crowded room from under his lashes. With those lashes lowered he might have passed for a choir boy in any of Earth’s cathedrals. But too dark a knowledge looked out when they rose for that illusion to continue long.
It was a motley crowd the weary black gaze scrutinized— hard-faced Earthmen in space-sailors’ leather, sleek Venusians with their sideboog—dangerous eyes, Martian drylanders muttering the blasphemous gutturals of their language, a sprinkling of outlanders and half-brutes from the wide-flung borders of civilization. Yarol ‘s eyes returned to the dark, scarred face across the table. He met the pallor of Smith’s no-colored gaze and shrugged.
“No one who’d buy us a drink, “he sighed. “I’ve seen one or two of ‘em before, though. Take those two space-rats at the next table: the little rca-faced Earthman—the one looking over his shoulder—and the drylander with an eye gone. See? I’ve heard they’re hunters.”
“What for?”
Yarol lifted his shoulders in the expressive Venusian shrug. His brows rose too, quizzically.
“No one knows what they hunt—but they run together.”
“Hm-m.” Smith turned a speculative stare toward the neighboring table. “They look more hunted than hunting, if you ask me.”
Yarol nodded. The two seemed to share one fear between them, if over-the shoulder glances and restless eyes spoke truly. They huddled together above their segir glasses, and though they had the faces of hard men, inured to the space-way dangers, the look on those faces was curiously compounded of many unpleasant things underlying a frank, unreasoning alarm. It was a look Smith could not quite fathom—a haunted, uneasy dread with nameless things behind it.
“They do look as if Black Pharol were one jump behind,” said Yarol. “Funny, too. I’ve always heard they were pretty tough, both of ‘em. You have to be in their profession.”
Said a husky half-whisper in their very ears,
‘Perhaps they found what they were hunting.”
It produced an electric stillness. Smith moved almost imperceptibly sidewise in his chair, the better to clear his gun, and Yarol’s slim fingers hovered above his hip. Theyturned expressionless faces tGward the speaker.
A little man sitting alone at the next table had bent forward to fix them with a particularly bright stare. They met kin silence, hostile and waiting, until the husky half-whisper spoke again.
“May I join you? I couldn’t help overhearing that—that you were open for business.”
Without expression Smith’s colorless eyes summed up the speaker, and a puzzlement clouded their paleness. as be looked. Rarely does one meet a man whose origin and race are not apparent even upon close scrutiny. Yet here was one whom he could not classify: Under the deep burn of the man’s skin might be concealed a fair Venusian pallor or an Earthman bronze, canal-Martian rosiness or even a leathery dryland hide. His dark eyes could have belonged to any race, and his husky whisper, fluent in the jargon of the spaceman, effectively disguised its origin. Little and unobtrusive, he might have passed for native on any of the three planets.
Smith’s scarred, impassive face did not change as he looked, but after a long mOment of scrutiny he said, “Pull up,” and then bit off the words as if he had said too much.
The brevity must have pleased the little man, for he smiled as he complied, meeting the passively hostile stain of the two without embarrassment. He folded his arms on the table and leaned forward. The husky voice began without preamble,
“I can offer you employment—if you ~re-not afraid. It’s dangerous work, but the pay’s good enough to make up for it—if you’re not afraid.”
“Wha~t is it?”
“Work they—those two.—failed at. They were— hunters—until they found ‘What they hunted. Look at them
now.”	-
Smith’s no-colored eyea did not swerve from the speaker’s face, but he nodded. No need to look again upon the fear-ridden faces of the neighboring pair. He understood.
“What’s the job?” he asked.
The little man hitched his chair closer and sent a glance round the room from under lowered lids. Ije scanned the faces of his two companions half dotIbtfully. He said, “There have beer~ many gods since time’s beginning,” then paused and peered dubiously into Smith’s face.
Northwest nodded briefly. “Go on,” he said.
Reassured, the little man took up his tale, and before he had gone far enthusiasm drowned out the doubtfulness in his j-husky voice, and a tinge of fanaticism crept in.
“There were gods who were old when Mars was a green planet, and a verdant moon circled an Earth blue with steaming seas, and Venus, mo1ten~hot, swung round a younger sun. Another world circled in space then, between-Mars and Jupiter where its fragments, the planetoids, now are. You will have heard rumors of it—they persist in the legends of every planet. It was a mighty, world, rich and beautiful, peopled by the ancestors in mankind. And on that world dwelt a mighty Three in a temple of crystal, served by strange slaves and worshipped by a world. They were not wholly abstract, as most modern gods have become. Some say they were frombeyond, and real, in their way, as flesh and blood.
“Those three gods were the origin and beginning of all other gods that mankind has known. All modern gods are echoes of them, in a world that has forgotten the very name of the Lost Planet. Saig they called one, and Lsa was the second. You will never have beard of them—they lied before
your world’s hot seas had cooled. No man knows bow they vanished, or why, and no trace of them is left anywhere in the universe we know. But there was a Third—a mighty Thmi set above these two and ruling the Lost Planet; so mighty a Third that even today, unthinkably long afterward, his name has not died from the lips of man. It has become a byword now— his name; that once no living man dared utter! I heard you call upon him not ten minutes past—Black Pharol!”
His husky voice sank to a quiver as it spoke the hackneyed name. Yarol gave a sudden snort of laughter, quickly hushed, and said, “Pharol! Why—”
“Yes, I know. Pharol, today, means unmentionable rites to an ancient no-god of utter darkness. Pharol has tunk So low that his very name denotes nothingness. -But in other days— ah, in other days! Black Pharol has not always been a blur of dark worshipped with obscenity. In other days men knew what things that darkness hid, nor dared pronounce the name you laugh at, lest unwittingly they stumble upon that secret twist of its inflection which opens the door upon the dark that is Pharol. Men have been engulfed before now in that utter blackness of the god, and in that dark have seen fearful things. I know”—theraw voice trailed away into a murmur—’ ‘such featful things that a man might scream his throat hoarse and never speak again above a whisper. . . .“
Smith’s eyes flicked Yarol’s. The husky murmur went on after a moment.
“So you see the old gods have not died utterly. They can never die as we know death: they come from too far Beyond to know either death or life as we do. They came from so very
- far that to touch us at all they had to take a visible form among mankind—to incarnate themselves in a material body through which, as through a door, they might reach out and touch the bodies and minds of men. The form they chose does not matter now—I do not know it. It was a material thing, and it has gone to dust so long ago that the very memory of its shape has vanished from the minds of men. But that dust still exists. Do you hear me? That dust which was once the fbet
and the greatest of all gods, still exists! It was that which those men hunted. It was that they found, and fled in deadly terror of what they saw there. You look to be made of firmer stuff. Will you take up the search where they left it?”
Smith’s pale stare met Yaipl’s black one across the table. Silence hung between them forit moment. Then Smith said,
“Any objection to us having a little talk with those two over there?”
“None at all,” answered the hoarse whisper promptly. “Go now~ if you like.”
Smith rose without further words. Yarol pushed back his chair noiselessly and followed him. They crossed the floor -with the spaceman’s peculiar, shifting walk and slid into opposite chairs between the huddling two.
The effect was startling. The Earthman jerked convulsively and i~ned a pasty face, eloquent with alarm, toward the interruption. The drylander stared from Smith’s face to Yarol’s in dumb terror. Neither spoke.
“Know that felloW over there?” inquired Smith abruptly, jerking his head toward the table they. had quitted..
After a moment’s hesitation the two heads turned as one. When they faced around ~aia the terror on the Earthman’s face was giving way to a dawning comprehension. He said from a dry throat, “He—he’s hiring you, eh?” -
Smith nodded. The Earthman ‘s face crumpled into terror again and he cried,
“Don’t do it. For God’s sake, you don’t know!”
“Know what?”
The man glanced furtively round the room and licked his lips uncertainly. A curious play of conflicting emotions flickered across his face. .
“Dangerous—:” he mumbled. “Better leave well enough alone. We found that out.”
	“What happened?”	-
The Earthman stretched out a shaking hand for the segir bottle and poured a brimming glass. He drained it before he spoke, and the incoherenceof his speech may have been due to the glasses that had preceded it.
“We went up toward the polar mountains, where be said. Weeks.. . it was cold. The nights get dark up there... dark. Went into the cave that goes through the mountain—a long way. . . . Then our lights went out—full-charged batteries in new super-Toinlinson tubes, but they went out like candles, and in the dark—in the dark the white thing came. . . .“ -
A shudder went over him strongly. He reached out shaking hands for the segir bottle and poured another glass, the rim clicking against his teeth as he drank. Then he set down the glass hard and said violently,
“That’s all. We left. Don’t remember a thing about getting out—or much more than starving and freezing in thç saltiands for a long time. Our supplies ran low—hadn’t been for him’ ‘—nodding across the table—’ ‘we’d both have died. Don’t know how we did get out fmally—but we’re out, understand? Out! Nothing could hire us to go back—we’ve seen enough. There’s something about it that—that makes your head ache—we saw . . . never mind. But—’:
He beckoned Smith closer and sank his voice to a whisper. His eyes rolled fearfully.
“It’s after us. Don’t ask me what . . . I don’t know. But—feel it in the dark, watching—watching in the
dark....”	-
The voicC sank to a mumble and he reached again for the
segir bottle. .		-
“It’s here now—waiting—if the lights go out— watching—mustn’t let the lights go out—more segir     
The bottle clinked on the glass-rim, the voice trailed away into drunken mutter ngs.
Smith pushed back his chair and nodded to Yarol. The two at the table did not seem to notice their departure. The drylander was clutching the segir bottle in turn and pouring out red liquid without watching the glass—an apprehensive one-eyed stare turned across his shoulder.
Smith laid a hand on his companion’s shoulder and drew him across the room toward the bar. Yarol scowled at the approaching bartender and suggested,
“Suppose wç get an advance for drinks, anyhow.”
	“Arewetakingit?”	-
“Well, what d’you think?”
“It’s dangerous; You know, there’s something worse than whisky wrong with those two. Did you notice the Earthman’s eyes?”
“Whites showed all around,” nodded Yarol. “I’ve seen madmen look like that.”
“I thought of that, too. He was drunk, of course, and probably wouldn’t be so wild-sounding, sober—but from the looks of him he’ll never be sober again till he dies. No use trying to find out anything more from him. And the other— well, did you ever try to find out anything from a drylander? Even a sober one?”
Yarol lifted expressive shoulders. “I know. If we go into this, we go blind. Never dig any more out of those drunks.
But something certainly scared them.”
“And yet, “said Smith, “I’d like to know more about this. Dust of thegods—and all that. Interesting. Just what does he Want with this dust, anyhow?”
“Did you believe that yarn?”
“Don’t know—I’ve comeacross some pretty funny things here and there. He does ~t half-cracked, of course, but— well, those fellows back there certainly found something Out of the ordinary, and they didn’t go all the way at that.”
“Well, it~he’ll buy us ‘a drink I say let’s take the job, “said Yarol. “I’d as soon be scared to death later as die of thirst now. What do you say?”
“Good enough,” shrugged Smith. “I’m thirsty, too.”
The little man looked up hopefully as they reseated themselves at the table.
“If we can come to terms,” tuid Smith, “we’ll take it.
And if you can give us some idea of what we’re looking for,
and why.”
“The dust of Pharol,” said the husky voice impatiently. “I told you that.”
“What d’you want with it?”
The little bright eyes stared suspiciously across the table into Smith’s calm gaze.
“What business is it of yours?”
“We’re risking our necks for it, aren’t we?”
Again the bright, small eyes bored into the Earthman’s. The husky voice fell lower, to the very echo of a whisper, and he said, secretly. -
“I’ll tell you, then. After all, why not? You don’t know how to use it—it’s of no value to anyone but me. Listen, then—I told you that the Three incarnated themselves into a material form to use as a door through which they could reach humanity. They had to do it, but it was a door that opened both ways—through it, if one dared, man could reach the Three. No one dared in those days—the power beyond’was too terrible. It would have been like walking straight through a gateway into hell. But time has passed since then. The gods have drawn away from humanity into farther realms. The terror that was Pharol is only an echo in a forgetful world. The spirit of the god has gone—but not wholly. While any remnant of that shape which was once incarnate Pharol cxists, Pharol can be reached. For the man who could lay hands on that dusk, knowing the requisite rites and formulae, all knowledge, all power would lie open like a book. To enslave a god!”
The raw - whisper rasped to a crescendo; fanatic lights flared in the small, bright eyes. He had forgotten them entirely—his piercing stare fixed on some shining future, and his hands on the table clenched into white-knuckled fists. - .
Smith and Yarol exchanged dubious glances. Obviously the man was mad. .. .
“Fifty thousand dollars to your account in any bank you choose,” the hoarse voice, eminently sane, broke in abruptly upon their dubiety. “All expenses, of course, will be paid. I’ll give you charts and tell you all I know about how to get there. When can you start?”
Smith grinned. Touched the man might be, but just then
Smith would have stormed the gates of hell, at any madman’s request, for fifty thousand Earth dollars.
“Right nqw,”he said laconically. “Let’s go.”
	LI	-

Northward over the great curve of Mars, red slag and red dust and the reddish, low-lying dryland vegetation gave way to the saltlands around the Pole. Scrub grows there, and sparse, coarse grass, and the snow that falls by night lies all the cold, thin day among the tough grass-roots and in~-the hillocks of the dry salt soil.
“Of all the God-forsaken countries,” said Northwest Smith, looking down from his pilot seat at the gray lands slipping past under the speed of their plane, “this must be the-Worst. I’d sooner live on Luna oi~ one of the asteroids.”
Yarol tilted the segir bottle to his lips and evoked an eloquent gurgle from its depths.
“Five days of flying over this scenery would give anyone (he jitters,” he pronounced. “I’d never have thought I’d be glad to see a mountain range as ugly as that, but it looks like Paradise now,” and he nodded toward the black, jagged slopes of the polar mountails that marked their journey ‘send so far as flying was concerned; for despite their great antiquity the peaks were jagged and rough as mountains new-wrenched frOm a heaving world.
Smith brought the plane down at the foot of the rising black slopes. There was a triangular gap there with a streak of white down its side, a landmark he had been watching for, and the plane slid quietly into the shelter to lie protected under the shelving rock. From here progress must be made afoot and painfully through the mountains. Thete was no landing-place any nearer their goal than this. Yet in measure of distance they had not far to go.
The two climbed stiffly out. Smith stretched his long legs and sniffed the air. It was bitterly cold, and tingedwith that nameless, dry salt smell of eon-dead seas which is encoun
tered nowhere in the known universe save in the northern saltiands of Mars. He faced the mountains doubtfully. From their beginnings here, he knew, they rolled away, jagged and black and deadly, to the very Pole. Snow lay thickly upon them in the brief Martian winter, unmarked by any track until it melted for the canals, carving deeper runnels into the already jig-sawed peaks.
Once in the very long-past days, so the little whispering fanatic had said, Mars was a green world. Seas had spread here, lapping the feet of gentler mountains, and in the slopes. of those hills a mighty city once lay—a nameless city, so far as the present generations of man remembered, and a nameless star shone down upon it from a spot in the heavens now empty—the Lost Planet, shining on a lost city. The dwellers there must have seen the catastrophe which blasted that sister planet from the face of the sky. And if the little man were right, the gods of that Lost Planet had been saved from the wreckage and spirited across the void to a dwelling-place in this greatly honored city of the mountains that is not even a memory today.
And time passed, so the story went. The city aged—the gods aged—the planet aged. At last, in some terrible catas-. trophe, the planet heaved under the city’s foundations, the mountaihs shook it into ruins and folded themselves into new and dreadful shapes. The seas receded, the fertile soil sluffed away from the rocks and time swallowed up the very memory of that city which once had been the dwelling-place of gods—which was still, so the hoarse whisper had told them, the dwelling-place of gods.
“Must have been right around here somewhere,” said Smith, “that those two found the cave.”
“Out around the slope to the left,” agreed Yarol. “Let’s go,” He squinted up at the feeble sun. “Not very long past dawn. We ought to be back again by dark if things go right.”
They left the ship in its shelter and struck out across the salt drylands, the harsh scrub brushing about their knees and their breath clouding the thin air as. they advanced. The slope
curved away to the left, rising in rapid ascent to black peaks that wete unscalable and forbidding. The only hope of pene.trating that wall lay in-finding the cavern that their predecessors had fled. .. . and in that cavern—Smith loosened the heat-gun in its holster at his~side.
They had plodded for fifteen minutes through the scrub, dry snow rising under their feet and the harsh salt air frosting their breath, before the mouth of the cave they were hunting appeared darkly under the overhanging rock they had been told of.
The two peered in doubtfully. That jagged floor might never have known the tread of human feet, so far as one might know by the look of it. Powdered snow lay undisturbed in the deep crannies, and daylight did nOt penetrate very far into the forbidding dark beyond.’ Smith drew his gun, took a deep breath and plunged into the blackness and the cold, with Yarol at his heels.
It was like leaving everything human and alive for some frosty limbo that had never known life. The cold struck sharply through their leather garments. They took out their Tomlinson tubes before they had gone more than twenty paces, and the twin bearn~ illumined a scene of utter desola-. lion, more dead than death, for it seemed -never to have
known life.	-
For perhaps fifteen minutes they stumbled through the cold dark. Smith kept his beam focused on the floor beneath them; Yarol’s roved the walls and pierced the blackness ahead. Rough walls and ragged ceiling and teeth of broken stone projecting from the floor to slash at their boots—no sound but their footsteps, nothing but the dark and the frost and the silence. Then Yarol said, “It’s foggy in here,” and something clouded the clear beams of the lights fOr an instant; then~ darkness folded round them as suddenly and completely as the folds of a cloak.
Smith stopped dead-still, tense and listening. No sound. He felt the lens of his light-tube and knew that it still burned—it was warm, and the faint vibration under the glass
told him that the tubes still functione~l. But somethiñ~ intangible and strange blotted it out at the source. . . a thick, stifling blackness that seemed to muffle their senses. It was like a bandage over the eyes—Smith, holding the burning lightiens to his eyes, could flot detect even its outline in that ali-cloaking dark.
For perhaps five minutes that dead blackness held them. Vaguely they knew what to expect, but when it came, the shock of it took their breath away. There was no sound, but quite suddenly around a bend of the cavern came a figure of utter whiteness, seen at first fragmentarily through a screen of rock-toothed jags, then floating full into view against the bao~cground of the dark. Smith thought he had never seen whil~ness before until his incr~dulous eyes beheld this creature—if creature it could be. Somehow he thought it must be partly below the level of the floor along which it moved; for though in that blind black he had no way of gauging elevation, it seemed to hfln that the apparition, moving with an effortless glide, advanced unopposed through the sglid rock of the floor. And it was whiter than anything living or dead had ever been before.—so white that it sickened him, sofliehow, and the flesh crept along his spine. Like a cut-out figure of paper, it blazed against the flat black beyond. The dark did not affect it, no shadows lay upon its surface; in two arbitrary dimensions only, blind white superimposed upon blind dark, it floated toward them. And it was tall, and somehow man-formed, but of no shape that
words could describe.	-
Smith’lieard Yarol catch his breath in a gasp behind him. He heard no other sound, though the whiteness floated swiftly forward through the rocky floor. He was sure of that now—a part of it extended farther down than his feet, and they were planted upon solid rock. And though his skin crawled with unreasoning terror, and the hair on his neck prickled with the weird, impossible approach of the impossible thing, he kept his head enough to see that it was apparently solid, yet somehow milkijy translucent that it had
form and depth, though no shadows of that darkness lay upon
it; that from where no face should have been a blind, eyeless
visage fronted him impassively. It was very close now, and though the extremities of it trailed below the floor line, its height lifted far above his head. -
And a nameless, blind foree beat out from it and assailed him, a force that somehow seemed to be driving him into unnamable things—an urge to madness, beating at his brain
with the reasonless buffeting of insanity, but a wilder, more incomprehensible insanity than the sane mind could understand.
Something frantic within him clamored for nstant, headlong flight—he heard Yarol ‘s breathing panicky behind him and knew that he too wavered on the verge of bolting—but something insistent at the roots of his brain held him firm before the whiteness bearing down in its aura of madness— something that denied the peril, that hinted at solution..
Scarcely realizing that he had moved, he found the heatgun in ~üs hand, and on a sudden impulse jerked his. arm up and sent a long, blue-hot streamer of flame straight at the advancing apparition. For the briefest of instants tfe blue dazzle flashed a light-blade through the dark. It struck the floating whiteness full—vanished——Smith heard a faint crackle of sparks on the invisible floor beyond and knew that it had passed through the creature without meeting resistance. And in that flashing second *hile the blue gaze split the thickness of the dark be saw it shine luridly upon a splinter of rock in its path, but not upon the white figure. No blaze of blueness affected the deathly pallor of it—he had a sudden conviction that though a galaxy of colored lights were played upon it no faintest hint of color could ever tinge it with any of man’s hues. Fighting the waves of madness that buffeted at~his brain, he realized painfully that it must be beyond the reach of men—and therefore— He laughed unsteadily and holstered his gun.
“Come on,” he yelled to Yarol, reaching out blindly to grasp his comrade’s arm, and—suppressing a tingle of
terror—plunged straight through that towering horror.
There was an instant of blaze and blindii~g whiteness, a moment of turmoil while dizziness swirled round him and the floor rocked under his feet and a maelstrom of mad impulses battered through his brain; then everything was black again and he was plunging recklessly ahead through the dark, dragging a limply acquiescent Yarol behind him.
After a while of stumbling progress, punctuated with falls, while the white horror dropped away behind them, not following, though the muffling dark still sealed their eyes—the almost forgotten light in Smith’s hand suddenly blazed forth again. In its light he faced Yarol, blinking at the abrupt illumination. The Venusian’s face was a mask of question, his black eyes bright with inquiry.
“What happened? What was it? How did you—how could we—”
“Itcan’thavebeenreal,” said Smith with ashaky grin. “I mean, not material in the sense that we know. Looked awful enough, but—well, there were too many things about it that didn’t hitch up. Notice how it seemed ~ trail through the solid floor? And neither light nor dark affected it—it had no shadows, even in that blackness, and the flash of my gun didn’t even give i~ a blue tinge. Then I remembered what that little fellow had told us about his three gods: that, though they had real existence, it was on such a widely different plane from ours that they couldn’t touch us except by providing themselves with a material body. I think his thing was like that also: visible, but too otlWr-dimensional .to reach us except through sight. And when! saw that the floor didn’t offer any resistance to it I thought that maybe, conversely, it wouldn’t affect us either. And it didn’t. We’re through.”
Yarol drew a deep breath.
“The master-mind,” he gibed affectionately. “Wonder if anyone else ever figured that out, or are we the first to get through?” .
“Don’t know. Don’t get the idea it was just a scarecrow, though. I think we moved none too soon. A minute or two
longer and—and—I felt as if someone were stirring my brains with a stick. Nothing seemed—right. I think I know now what was wrong with those other two—they waited too.
long before they ran. Good thing we moved when we did.”
“But what about that darkness?”
“I suppose we’ll nevOri~ally know. Must have had some
relation to the other—the white thing, possibly some force or eltment out of that other dimension; because just as dark:
couldn’t touch the whiteness of that thing, so light had no effect on the dark. I got the impression, somehow, that the dark space is a fixed area there, as if a section out of the other world has been-set down in the .cave, for the white thing to roam about in—a bather of blackness across the way. And I
don’t suppose that it can move outside the darkness. But I may be wrong—let’s go!”
“Right behind you!” said Yarol. “Get along.”
The cave extended for another fifteen-minute walk, cold and silent and viciously rough underfoot, but. no further mishap broke the journey. Tomlinson4ights gleaming, they traversed it, and the glow of cold day at the far end looked like the gleam of paradise after that journey through the heart of the dead rock.
They looked-out up~n the ruins of that city where once the gods had dwelt—Tagged rock, great splintered teeth of stone upflung, the bare black mountainside folded and tortured into wild shapes of desolation. Here and there, buried in the debris of ages, lay huge six-foot blocks of hewn stone, the only reminder that here had stood Mars’ holiest city, once, very long ago.
After five minutes of search Smith’s eyes finally located the outline of what might, millions of years ago, have been a
street. It led strait away from the slope at the cave-mouth, and the blocks of hewn stone, the crevices and folded ruins of eaithquake choked it, but the course it once had run was not entirely obliterated even yet. Palaces and temples must have lined it once. There was no trace of them now save in the blocks of marble lying -shattered among the broken stones.
Time had erased the city from the face of Mars almost as completely as from the memories of man. Yet the trace of this one street was all they needed now to guide them.
The going was rough. Once down among the ruins it was difficult to keep in the track, and for almost an hour they clambered overbroken rock and jagged spikes of stone, leaping the crevices, skirting great mounds of ruin. Both were scratched and breathless by the time they came to the first landmark they recognized—a black, leaning needle of stone, half buried infragments of broken marble. Just beyond it lay two blocks of stone, one upon the other, perhaps the only two in the whole vast ruin which still stood as the hands of man had laid them hundreds of centuries ago. -- -
Smith paused beside them and looked at Yarol, breathing a little heavily from exertion.
“Here it is,” he said. “The old boy was telling the truth after all.” - -
“So far,” amended Yarol dubiously, drawing his heat-gun. “Well, we’ll see.”
The blue pencil of flame hissed from the gun’s muzzle to
- splatter along the crack between the stones. Very slowly Yarol traced that line, and in spite of himself excitement quickened within him. Two-thirds of the way along the line the flame suddenly ceased to spatter and bit deep. A blackening hole appeared in the stone. It widened swiftly, and smoke rose, and there came a sound of protesting rock wrenched from its bed of eons as the upper stone slowly ground half around. on the lower, tottered a moment and then fell.
The lower stone was hollow. The two bent over curiously, peering down. A tiny breath of unutterable antiquity rose in their faces out of that darkness, a little breeze from a million ~years ago. Smith flashed his light-tube downward and saw level stone a dozen feet below. The breeze was stronger now, and dust danced up-the shaft from- the mysterious depths— dust that had lain there undisturbed for unthinkably long
ages.	-
“We’ll give it awhile to air out,” said Smith, switching
off his light. “Must be plenty of ventilation, to judge from that breeze; and the dust will probably blow away before long. We can be. rigging up some sort of ladder while- we wait.” -, -
By the time a knotted m~e had been prepared and anchored about a near-by needle of rOck the little wind was blowing cleanly up the shaft, still laden with that indefinable odor of ages, but breathable. Smith swung over first, lowering himself cautiously until his feet touched the stone. Yarol, when he came down, found him swinging the Tomlinson-beam about a scene of utter lifelessness. A passageway stretched before them, smoothly polished as to walls and ceiling, with curious, unheard-of-frescoes limned in dim colors under the glaze. Antiquity hung, almost tangibly in the air. The little breeze that brushed past their faces seemed sacrilegiously alive in this tomb of dead dynasties~
That glazed and patterned passageway led downward into the dark. They followed it dubiously, feet stirring in the dust of a dead race, light-beams violating the million-years night of the underground. Before they had gone very far the circle of light from the shaft disappeared from sight beyond the up-sloping floor behind them, and they walked through antiquity with nothing bid the tiny, constant breeze upon their faces to remind them of the world above.
They walked a very long way. There was no subterfuge about the passage, no attempt to confuse the traveler. No other halls opened from it—it led straight forward and down through the stillness, the dark, the odor of very ancient death. And when at long last they reached the end, they had passed no other corridor-mouth, no other openings at all save the tiny ventilation holes at intervals along the ceiling.
At the end of that passage a curving wall of rough, unworked stone bulged like the segment of a sphere, closing the corridor. It was a different stone entirely froth that under the patterned glaze of the way along which they had come. In the light of their Tomlinson-tubes they saw a stone door set flush with the slightly bulging wall that held it. And in the door’s
very center a symbol was cut deep and vehement and black against the gray background. Yarol, seeing it, caught his breath.
“Do you know that sign?” he said soffly, his voice reverberating in the stillness5 of the underground, and echoes whispered behind him down the darkness, “-know that sign
	know that sign?”	-
“I can guess,.” murmured Smith, playing his light on the black outline of it.
“The symbol of Pharol,” said the Venusian in a near-whisper, but the echoes caught it and rolled back along the passage in diminishing undertones, “—Pharol. . . Pharol
	Pha roll”		-
“I saw it once carved in the rock of an asteroid,” whispered Yarol. “Just a bare little fragment of dead stone whirling around and around through space. There was one smooth surface on it, and this same sign was cut thete. The Lost Planet must really have existed, N.W., and that must have been a part of it once, with the god’s name cut so deep that
even the explosion of a world couldn’t wipe it out.”
Smith drew his gun. “We’ll soon know,” he said. “This will probably fall, so stand back.” -
The blue pencil of heat traced the door’s edges, spattering against the stone as Yarol ‘s had in the city above. And as before, in its course it encountered the weak place in the molding and the fire bit deep. The door trembled as Smith held the beam steady; it uttered an ominous creaking and began slowly to tilt outward at the top. Smith snapped off his gun and leaped backward, as the great stone slab tottered outward and fell. The mighty crash of it reverberated through the dark, and the concussion of its fall shook the solid floor and flung both men staggering against the wall.
They reeled to their feet again, shielding blinded eyes from
the torrent of radiance that poured forth out of the doorway. It’ was a rich, -golden light, somehow thick, yet clear, and they saw almost immediately, as their eyes became accustomed to the sudden change from darkness, that it was like no light
they had ever known before. Tangibly it poured ~st them down the corridor in hurrying waves that lapped one another and piled up and flowed as a gas nu~ght have done. It was light which had an unnamable body to it, a physical, palpable body which yet did not affect the air they breathed.
They walked forward ifito a sea of’ radiance, ,and that curious light actually eddied about their feet, rippling away from the forward motion of their bodies as water might have done. Widening circles spread away through the’ air as they advanced, breaking soundlessly against the wall, and behind them a trail of bright streaks steamed away like the wake of a ship in water.
Through the deeps of that rippling light they walked a passage hewn from ragged stone, a different stone from that of the. outer corridor, and somehow older. Tiny speckles of brightness glinted now and again on the rough walls, and neither could remember ever having seen just such mottled, bright-flecked rock before.
“Do you know what I think this is?” demanded Smith suddenly, after a few minutes of silent progress over the uneven floor. “An asteroid! That rough wall bulging into the corridor outside was th~ outer part of it. Remember, the three gods were supposed to have been carried away from the catastrophe on the other world and brought here. Well, I’ll bet that’s how it was managed—a fragment of that planet, enclosing a room, possibly, where the gods’ images stood, was somehow detached from the Lost Planet and hurled across space to Mars. Must have buried itself in the ground here, and the people of this city tunneled in to it and built a temple over the spot. No other way, you see, to account for that protruding wall and the peculiar formation of this rock. It must have come from the lost world—never saw anything like it anywhere, myself.”
“Sounds logical,” admitted Yarol, swinging his foot to start an eddy of light toward the wall. “And what do you make of this funny light?”
“Whatever other-dimensional ‘place those gods came
from, we can be pretty sure that light plays funny tricks there~. It must be nearly material—physical. You saw it in that white thing in the cave, and in the dark that smothered our tubes. It’s as tangible as water, almost. You saw how it flowed out into the passage when the door fell, not as real light does, but in succeeding waves, like heavy gas. Yet I don’t notice any difference in the air. I don’t believe—say! Look at that!”
He stopped so suddenly that Yarol bumped into him from behind and muttered a mild Venusian oath. Then across-Smith’s shoulder he saw it too, and his hand swept downward to his gun. Something like an oddly shape hole opening onto utter dark had appeared around the curve of the passage. And as they stared, it moved. It was a Something blacker-than anything in human expenence could ever have been before—as black as the guardian of the cave had been white—so black that the eye refused to compass it save as a negative quality, an emptiness. Smith, remembering the legends of Pharol the No-God of utter nothingness, gripped his gun more firmly and wondered if he stood face to face with one of the elder gods.
The Thing had shifted is shape, flowing to a stabler oUtline and standing higher from the floor. Smith. felt thatit must haye form and thickness—at least three dimensions and probably more—but try though he would, his eyes could not discern it save as a flat Outhne of nothingness against the
golden light.	- -
And as from the white dweller in darkness, so from this black denizen of the light there flowed a force that goaded the brain to madness. Smith felt it battering in blind waves at the foundations of his mind—but he felt more than the reasonless urge in this force assailing him. He sensed a struggle of some sort, as if the black guardian were turning only a part of its attention to him—as if it fought against something unseen and powerful. Feeling this, be began to see signs of that combat, in -the black outlin~s of the thing. It rippled and flowed, its shape shift~d’fluidly, it writhed in protest against something he could not comprehend. Definitely now he felt
tht it fought a desperate battle with some unseen enemy, and a little shuddei~ crawled down his back as he watched.
Quite suddenly it dawned upon him what was happening. Slowly, rolentlessly, the black nothingness was being drawn down the passage. And i~was—it must be—the flow of the golden radiance that drew it, as a fish might be carried forward down-a stream. Somehow the opening of the door must have freed the pent-up lake of light, and it was flowing slowly out down the passage as water flows, draining the asteroid, if asteroid it was. He could see now that though they had halted the wake of rippling illumination behind them did not cease. Past them in a bright tide streamed the light. And on that outflowing torrent the black guardian floated, struggling but helpless. -
It was closer now, and the beat of insistent impulses against Smith’s brain was stronger, but he was not greatly alarmed by it. The panic of the thing must be deep, and the waves of force that washed about him were dizzying but not deep-reaching. Because of this increasing dizziness, as the thing approached, he was never sure afterward just what had happened. Rapidly it drew nearer, until he could have put out his hand and touched4 it—though instinctively he felt that, near as it seemed, it was too far -away across- dimensional gulfs for him-ever to lay hand upon it. The blackness of it, at -
-close range, was stupefying, a blackness that the eye refused to comprehend—that could not be, and was. -
With the nearness of it his brain seemed to leave its moorings and plunge in mad, impossible curves through ~ suddenly opened space wherein the walls of the passage were shadows dimly seen and his own body no more than a pillar of mist in a howling void. The black thing must have rolled over him in passing, and engulfed him in its reasonless and incredible dark. He never-knew. When his plunging brain finally ceased its lunges through the void and returned reluctantly to his body, the horror of nothingness had receded past them down -the corridor, still struggling, and the waves of its blinding force weakened with the distance. -
Yarol was leaning against the wall, wide-eyed and gasping. “Did it get you, too?” he managed to articulate after
several attempts to control his hurrying breath.		-
Smith found his own lungs laboring. He nodded breath
less.	-
“I wonder,” he said when he had recovered a measure of normality, “if that thing-would look as white in the dark as it did in the light? I’ll bet it would. And do you suppose it can’t exist outside the light? Reminded me of a jelly-fish caught in a mill-race. Say, itthe light’s flowing out that fast, d’you think it may go entirely? We’d better be moving.” -
Under their feet the passage sloped downward still. And when they reached the end of their quest, it came very suddenly. The curve of the passage sharpened to an angle, and round the bend the corridor ended abruptly at the threshold of a great cavity in the heart of the asteroid.
In the rich golden light it glittered like the ceilter of a many-faceted diamond—that vast crystal room. The light brimmed it from wall to wall, from floor to ceiling. And it was strange that in thit mellow flood of radiance the boundaries of the room seemed hard to define—somehow it looked limitless, though the walls were clear to be seen.
All this, though, they were realizing only subconsciously. Their eyes met the throne in the center of the crystal vault and clung there, fascinated. It was a crystal throne, and it ‘had been fashioned for no human occupant. On this thelnighty Three of measureless antiquity had sat. It was not-an altar—it was a throne where incarnate godhood reigned once, toolong ago for the mind to comprehend. Roughly triform, it glittered under the great arch of the ceiling. There was no knowing from the shape of it now, what form the Three had worn who sat upon it. But the forms must have been outside modern comprehension—nothing the two explorers had ever seen in all their wanderings could have occupied it.
Two of-the pedestals were empty. Saig and- Lsa had vanished as completely as their names from man’s memory. On the third—the center and the highest. . . Smith’s breath
caught in his throat suddenly. Here then, ~n the great throne before them, lay all that was left of a god—the greatest of antiquity’s deities. This mound of gray dust. The oldest thing upon three worlds—older than the mountains that held it, older than the very old beginnings of the mighty race of man.
Great Pharol—dust upon a throne.
“Say, listen,” broke in Yarol’s matter-of-fact voice.
“Why did the image turn to dust when the room and the throne didn’t? The whole room must have come from that
crystal temple on the other world. You’d think—.”
-“The image must have been very old long before the temple was built,” said Smith softly. He was thinking how dead it looked, lying there in a soft gray mound on the crystal. How dead! how immeasurably old!—yet- if the little man
spoke truly, life still dwelt in these ashes of forgotten deity. Could he indeed forge from the gray dust a cable that would
reach out irresistibly across the gulfs of time and space, into dimensions beyond man’s understanding, and draw back the vanished entity which had once been Great Pharol? Could he? And if be could—suddenly doubt rose up in Smith’s mind. What man, with a god to do his bidding, would stop short of domination over the worlds of space—perhaps of godhood for himself? ~nd if that man were half mad?...
He followed Yarol across the shining floor in silence. It took them longer to reach the throne than they had expected—there was something deceptive about the crystal of that room, and the clarity of the brimming golden light.
The translucent heights of the triumvirate structure that had enthroned gods towered high over their heads. Smith looked upward toward that central pedestal bearing its eon-old burden, wondering what men had stood here before him at the foot of the throne, what men of nameless races and forgotten-worlds, worshipping the black divinity that was Pharol. On this crystal floor the feet of— A scrambling sound interrupted his wondering. The irreverent Yarol~ his eyes on -the gray dust above them, was climbing the crystal throne. It was slippery, and never meant
for mounting, and his heavy boots slid over the smoothness of it. Smith stood watching with a half-smile. For long ages no living man had dared approach this place save- in reverence, on his knees, not venturing so much as to lift his eyes to -that holy of holies where sat incarnate godhood. Now— Yarol ‘s foot slipped on the last step of the ascent and he muttered under his breath, reaching out to clutch the pedestal, ~where Great Pharol, first of the living gods, had ruled a mightier world than any men inhabit now.
At the summit he paused, looking down from an eminence whence no eyes save those of gods had ever looked before. And he frowned in a puzzled way as he looked.
“Something wrong here, N.W.,” he said. “Look up. What’s going on around the ceiling?”
Smith’s pale gaze rose. For a moment he stared in utter bewilderment. For the third time that day his eyes were beholding something so impossible-that they refused to register the fact upon an outraged brain. Something dark and yet not dark was closing dOwn upon them. The roof seemed to lower—and panic stirred within him briefly. The ceiling, coming down to crush them? Some further guardian of the gods descending like a blanket over theft heads? What?’
And then understanding broke upon him, and his laugh of sheer relief echoed almost blasphemously in the silence of the place.
“The light’s running out,” he said. “Like water, just draining away. That’s all.”
And the incredible thing was true. That shining lake of light which brimmed the crystal hollow was ebbing, pouring through the door, down the passage, out into the upper--air, and darkness, literally, was flowing in~behind it. And it was flowing fast.
“Well,” said Yarol, casting an imperturbable glance up- -ward, “we’d better be moving before it all runs out. Hand me up the box, will you?” -
Hesitantly, Smith unslung the little lacquered steel box they had been given. Suppose they brought him back the dust
to weld it from—what then? Such limitless power even in the
hands of an eminently wise, eminently sane and balanced
man would surely be dangerous. And-in the hands of the little whispering fanatic— Yarol, looking down frqm his height, met the troubled eyes and was silent for a moment. Then he whis led softly and said, though Smith had not spoken,“I never thought of that. - . - D’you suppose it really
could be done? Why, the man’s half crazy!”
“I don’t know,” said Smith. “Maybe he couldn’t—but he told us the way here, didn’t he? He knew this much—I don’t think we’d better risk his not knowing any more. And suppose he did succeed, Yarol—suppose he found some way to
- bring this—this monster of the dark—through into our
dimension—turned it loose on our worlds. Do you think he could hold it? He talked about enslaving a god, but could he? I haven’t much doubt that he knows sonic way of opening a door between dimensions to admit the thing that used to be
- Pharol—it can be done. It has been done. But once he gets it opened, can he close it? Could he keep the thing under control? You know he couldn’t! You know it’d break loose, and—well, anything could happen then.”
“1-hadn’t thought of that,” said Yarol- again. “Gods!
Suppose—”	-
He broke off, staring in fascination at the gray dust that held such terrible potentialities. And there was silence for a while in the crystal place.
Smith, looking upward at the throne and his frimid, saw that the dark was flowing in faster and faster. And the light thinned about them, and long streaks of brilliance wavered out behind him -as the light ebbed by a racing torrent.
“Suppose we don’t take it back, then,” said Yarol saddenly. “Say we couldn’t find the place—or that it was buried under debris or something. Suppose we—gods, but it’s getting dark in here!” -
The line of light was far down the walls now. Above them the black night of the underground brimmed in relentlessly.
They watched in half-incredulous wonder as the tidemark of radiance ebbed down and down along the crystal. Now it touched the level of the throne, and Yarol gasped as be was plunged head and shoulders into blackness, starring down as into a sea of light in which his own lower limbs moved shimmeringly, sending long ripples outward as they stirred.
Very swiftly the tide-race ran. Fascinated, they watched it ebb away, down Yarol’s legs, down beyond him entirely, so that he perched in darkness above the outrunning tide, down the heights of the throne, down to touch Smith’s tall head with blackness. Uncannily he stood in the midst of a receding sea, shoulder-deep—waist-deep-—knee-deep...
The light that so short a time before—for so many count-less ages before—had brimmed this chamber lay in a shallow, gleaming sea ankle-deep on the floor.. For the first tin~e in eons the throne of the Three stood in darkness. -
Not until the last dregs of illumination were snaking along a black floor in rivulets that ran swiftly, like fiery snakes, toward the door, did the two men awake from their wonder. The last of the radiance that must have been lighted on a lost world millions of years ago, perhaps by the hands of the first gods—ebbed doorward. Smith drew a deep breath and turned in the blackness toward the spot where the throne must be standing in the first dark it had known for countless ages.
- Those snakes of light along-the floor did not seem to give out any radiance—the place was blacker than any night above ground. Yarol’s light-tube suddenly stabbed downward, and Yarol ‘s voice said - from the dark,
“Whew! Should have bottled some of that to take home. Well, what d’you say, N.W,? Do we leave with the dust or
without it?” -	- -
“Without-it,” said South slowly. “I’m sure of that much, anyhow. But we cáh’t leave it here. The man would simply send others, you know. With blasting material, maybe, if we’ said the place was buried. But he’d get it.”
Yarol’s beam shifted, a white blade in the dark, to the gray, - enigmatic mound beside him. In the - glare of the
Tomlinson-tube it lay inscrutably, just as it had lain for all the eons since the god forsook it—waiting, perhaps, for this moment. And Yarol drew his gun.
“Don’t know what that image was made of,” he said, ‘~but rock or metal or anything else will melt into nothing in the full-power heat of a gun.”
And in a listening silence he flicked the catch. Bluewhite and singing, the flamO Leaped irresistibly from is muzzle— struck full in an intolerable violence of heat upon that gray mound which had- been a god. Rocks would have melted under the blast. Rocket-tube steel would have glowed molten. Nothing that the hands of man can fashion could have resisted the heat-blast-of a ray-gun at full strength. But in its full blue glare the mound of dust lay motionless.
Above the hissing of the flame Smith heard Yarol ‘s muttered “SharI” of ama2ement. The gun muzzle thrust closer into the gray heap, until the crystal began to glow in the reflected heat and blue sparks spattered through the darkness. And very slowly the edges of the mound began to turn red and sullen. The redness spread. A little blue flame licked up; another.
Yarol flipped off th~gun.catch and sat watching as the dust began to blaze. Presently, as the brilliance of it grew stronger, he slid down from his pedestal and made his precarious~way along the slippery crystal to the floor. Smith scarcely realized tha-t he had come. His eyes were riveted on the clear, burning flame that was once a god. It burned with a
fierce, pale light flickering with nameless evanesceht -colors—the dust that had been Pharol of the utter darkness burning slowly away in a flame of utter light.
And as theminutes passed and the fia~ne grew stronger, the reflections of it began to dance eerily in the crystal walls and ceiling, sending long wavers downward until the floor was carpeted with dazzles of flame. An odor of unnamable things very faintly spread upon the air—smoke of dead gods. . . - It went to Smith’s head dizzily, and the reflections wavered and ran together until he seemed to be sus~
pended in a space while all about him pictures of flame went writhing through the dark—pictures of flame—nebulous, unreal pictures waving across the walls and vanishing— flashing by uncertainly overhead, running under his feet, circling him round from wail to wall in reeling patterns, asif reflections made eons ago on another world had buried deep in the crystal were waking to life at the magsc touch of the burning god.
With the smoke eddying dizzily in his nostrils he
watched—and all about him, overhead, underfoot, the strange, wild pictures ran blurrily through the crystal and vanished. He thought he saw mighty landscapes ringed by such mountains as none of today’s world know . . . he thought he saw a whiter sun than has shone for eons, lighting a land where rivers thundered between green banks
thought he saw many moons parading across a purple night wherein shone constellations that haunted him with familiarity in the midst of their strangeness. . . saw a green star where red Mars should be, and a far pin-prick of white where the green point ,that is Earth hangs. Cities reeled past across the crystal darkness in shapes stranger than any that history records. Peaks and spires and angled domes towered high and shining under the hot white sun—strange ships riding the airways.. . . He saw battles—weapons that have no names today blasting the tall towers into ruins, wiping great smears of blood across the crystal—saw triumphant marches where creatures that might have been the forerunners of men paraded in - a blaze of color through shining streets .
strange, sinuous creatures, half seen, that were men, yet not men. . . . Nebulously the history of a dead and forgotten world flared by him in the dark. -
He saw the man-things in’ their great shining cities bowing down before a—something—-of darkness that spread monstrously across the white-lit heavens. . . saw the beginnings of Great Pharol - . . saw the crystal throne in a room of crystal where the sinuous, man-formed beings lay face down in worshipping windrows about a great triple pedestal toward
which, for the dazzle and the darkness of it, he could not turn his eyes. Ai~d then without warning, in a mighty blast of violence, all the wild pictures in the flickering flamelight ran together and shivered before his dizzied eyes, and a great burst of blinding light leapdd&across the walls until the whole great chamber once more ‘for an instant blazed with râdiance—but a radiance so searing that it did not illuminate but stunned, blinded, exploded in the very brains of the two men who watched. .
- In the flash of an instant before oblivion overtook him, Smith knew they had looked upon the death of a world. Then, with blinded eyes and reeling brain, he stumbled and sank into darkness. -
Blackness was all about them ~hen they opened their eyes again. The fire on the throne had burnt away into eternal darkness. Stumblingly they followed the white guidance of their tube-lights down the long passage and out into the upper air. The pale Martian day was darkening over the mountains.