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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d7b82bc --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +*.txt text eol=lf +*.htm text eol=lf +*.html text eol=lf +*.md text eol=lf diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6312041 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4eee451 --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #65086 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/65086) diff --git a/old/65086-0.txt b/old/65086-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 01a3772..0000000 --- a/old/65086-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,1316 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg eBook of World of the Mad, by Poul Anderson - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and -most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms -of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you -will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before -using this eBook. - -Title: World of the Mad - -Author: Poul Anderson - -Release Date: April 14, 2021 [eBook #65086] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed - Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net - -*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORLD OF THE MAD *** - - - - - WORLD OF THE MAD - - By Poul Anderson - - Langdon had found immortality on the planet - Tanith. Naturally he wanted his wife to share it--if - he could prevent her from going insane first.... - - [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from - Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy - February 1951 - Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that - the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] - - -He walked slowly through the curling purple mists, feeling the ground -roll and quiver under his feet, hearing the deep-voiced rumble of -shifting strata far underground. There were voices in the fog, singing -in high unhuman tones, and no man had ever learned what it was that -sang--for could the wind utter sounds so elfishly sweet, almost words -that haunted you with half understanding of something you had forgotten -and needed desperately to remember? - -A face floated through the swirling mist. It was not human, but it -was very beautiful, and it was blind. He looked away as it mouthed -voiceless murmurs at him. - -Somewhere a crystal tree was chiming, a delicate pizzicato of -glass-like leaves vibrating against each other. The man listened to it -and to the low muttering of the earth, for those at least were real and -he was not at all sure whether the other things were there or not. - -Even after two hundred years, he wasn't sure. - -He went on through the mist. Flowers grew up around him, great fragile -laceries of shining crystalline petals that budded and bloomed and -died even as he walked by. Some of them reached hungrily for him, but -he sidestepped their groping mouths with the unthinking ease of long -habit. - -Compasses didn't work on Tanith, and only a few men could even operate -a radio direction finder, but Langdon knew his way and walked steadily -ahead. His sense of direction kept rotating crazily; it insisted he was -going the wrong way, no, now the house lay over to the right--no, the -left, and a few paces straight up.... But by now he had compensated for -that; he didn't need eyes or kinesthetic sense to find his way home. - -There was a new singing in the violet air. Langdon checked his stride -with a sudden eerie prickling along his spine. The mist eddied about -him, thick and blinding, but now the city was growing out of it; he saw -the towers and streets and thronging airways come raggedly into being. - -Suddenly he stood in the middle of the city. It was complete this time, -not the few fragmentary glimpses he ordinarily had. The mist flowed -through the ghostly spires and pylons but somehow he could see anyway, -the city lay for kilometers around. - - * * * * * - -It was not a human city. It lay under three hurtling moons, lit only by -their brilliant silver. But it lived, it pulsed with life about him; -the shining dwellers soared past and seemed to leave a trail of little -sparks luminous against the night. They were not men, the old folk of -Tanith, but they were beautiful. - -There was no sound. Langdon stood in a well of silence while the city -lay around him, and he thought that perhaps he was the ghost, alone and -excommunicated on a world which lay beyond even the dreams of man. - -But that was nonsense, he thought, angry with himself. It was simply -that temporal mirages transmitted only light, not sound. He was here, -now, alive, and the city was dust these many million years. - -Two dwellers flew past him, male and female with arms linked, laughing -soundlessly into each other's golden eyes. The male's great glowing -wings brushed through Langdon's body. He stood briefly in a shower of -whirling light-motes--and they didn't heed him, they didn't know he was -there. They were only for each other, those two, and he was a ghost out -of an unreal and unthinkably remote future. - -The mirage faded. Slowly, in bits and patches, it dissolved back into -the purple fog. He was alone again. - -He shivered, and hastened his steps homeward. - -The mist began to break, raggedly, as he came out of the forest. He -went by a lake of life with only a passing glance at the strangeness -of the new shapes that seethed and bubbled, rose out of its slime and -took shifting form and sank back into chemical disintegration. There -was always something new, grotesque and horrible and sometimes eerily -lovely, to be seen at such a place, but spontaneous generation was an -old story to Langdon by now. And Eileen was waiting. - -He came out on the brow of a steep hill that slanted down into the -little cuplike valley where he had his dwelling. The hills were blue -around it, blue with grass that tomorrow might be gold or green or -gray, and the sky was currently blood-red. A grove of feather-like -trees hid the house, swaying where there was no wind and murmuring -to each other in their own language, and a few winged things hovered -darkly overhead. For a moment Langdon paused there, savoring the -richness of it. This was _his_ home. - -_His_ land. Back on Terra they had forgotten the fullness that came -with belonging to the earth, but the men who colonized among the stars -remembered. Looking back, Langdon thought that the real instability and -alienness was in the Solar System. Men had no roots there, and it was a -secret woe in them and made them feverish and restless, eager to taste -from all cups but shuddering away from draining any one. - -On Tanith, thought Langdon with a quiet sort of exultation, a man drank -his cup to the bottom, and there were many cups--or, if only one, it -was never the same and could never be emptied. - -For a man on Tanith did not grow old. - - * * * * * - -Suddenly he stiffened, and a psyche-feeder swooped low to absorb his -furiously radiated nervous energy. The reaction of it eddied in his -mind as a chilling fear. Angrily, without having to think about it, -he drove the creature off with a jaggedly pulsed mental vibration and -remained standing and listening. - -Someone had screamed. - -It came again, distorted by the wavering air, hardly recognizable to -one who had not had time to adjust to Tanith, and it was Eileen's -voice. "Joe, Joe, Joe--help--" - -He ran, scrambling down the unstable hillside with his mist-wet cloak -flapping behind him. A sword-plant slashed at him with its steely -leaves. He swerved and went on down into the valley, running, leaping, -a bounding black shadow against the burning sky. - -Static electricity discharged in crackling blue sheets as he tore -through the grove, hissing against his insulating clothes and stinging -his face and hands. Something floated through the dark air, long and -supple and dripping slime, grimacing at him with its horrible wet -mouth. Another illusion or mirage, he thought somewhere in the back of -his mind. They no longer bothered him--in fact, he'd have missed them -if they never showed up again--but--Eileen-- - -The cottage nestled under the tall whispering trees, a peak-roofed -stone building in the ancient style that Langdon had thought most -appropriate to the enchanted planet. There was little of Terra about -it after its century and a half of existence; it was covered with -fire-vines over which danced the seeming of little flames; luminous -flying creatures nestled against the doorway, and he had never found -the cause of the dim sweet singing he could always hear around it. - -The door stood ajar, and Eileen was sobbing inside. Langdon came in and -found her huddled on a couch before the fireplace, trembling so that it -seemed her body must be shaken apart, and crying, crying. - -He sat down and put his arms about her and let her cry herself out. -Then he remained for a while stroking her hair and saying nothing. - -She bit her lip to keep it steady. Her voice was like a small child's, -high and toneless and frightened. "It bit," she said. - -"It was an illusion," he murmured. - -"No. It bit at me. And its eyes were dead. It came out of the floor -there, and it was all in rags." - -"You had an illusion frighten you," he said. "A psyche-feeder flying -nearby caught your increased nervous output, drew on it, and that -of course frightened you still more ... they're easy to drive away, -Eileen. They don't like certain pulse patterns--you just think at them -the way I showed you--" - -"It was real," she insisted, quietly, with something of a child's -puzzlement that anything should have wanted to hurt her. "It was black, -but there were grays and browns and red too, and it was ragged." - - * * * * * - -He went over to the cupboard and got out a darkly glowing bottle and -poured two full glasses. "This'll help," he said, trying hard to smile -at her. "_Prosit._" - -"I shouldn't," said Eileen, still shakily but with some return of -saneness. "Junior--" - -"Junior won't take harm from a glass of wine," said Langdon. He sat -down beside her again and they clinked goblets and drank. The fire -wavered ruddily before them, filling the room with warm restless light -and with dancing shadows from which Eileen looked away. - -"I'll get an electronic range installed soon," said Langdon, trying to -fill the silence with trivia. "It can't be convenient for you cooking -on an ancient-style stove." - -"I thought they didn't work on Tanith--electronics, I mean," she -answered with the same effort of ordinariness. - -"Not at first, with the different laws prevailing here. In the first -few decades, we were forced back to the old chemical techniques like -fires. That's one reason so few colonists ever came, or stayed long -if they did come. But bit by bit, little by little, we're learning -the scientific laws and applying them. They've had all the standard -household equipment available here for a century, I guess, but by that -time I'd already built this place and liked my own things, fires and -stoves and all the rest, too well to change. But now that I've got a -wife to do my housekeeping, I ought to provide her with conveniences. -In fact, I should have done so right away." - -"It isn't that, Joe," she said. "I'd have squawked long ago if those -little things made any difference. I like handling things myself rather -than turning them over to some robot. It's fun to cook and get wood, -but Joe, it's no fun when a thing rises out of the steam and screams at -you. It's no fun when electric sparks jump over the house and all of a -sudden there's only fear, the whole place is choked with fear--" She -shuddered closer against him. - -"This planet is haunted," she whispered. - -"The laws of nature are a little different," he answered as calmly -as he could. "But they are still laws. Tanith seems like a chaos, -governed by living spirits and most of them malignant, only because you -don't see the regularity. Its pattern is too different from what you're -used to. Terra herself must have seemed that way to primitive man, -before he discovered order in nature. - -"Our scientists here are slowly finding out the answers. Talk to old -Chang sometime, he can tell you more about it than I. But I can see the -order now, a little of it, and it's a richer and deeper thing than the -rest of the universe. - -"And you live forever." He gripped her shoulders and looked into her -wide eyes. He had to expel the demons of terror from her. A woman five -months pregnant couldn't go on this way. He was suddenly shocked by how -thin she had grown, and she never stopped shivering under his hands. - -"You won't grow old," he said slowly. "We'll be together forever, -Eileen. And our children won't die either." - -She looked away from him, and sudden bitterness twisted her mouth. "I -wonder," she said thinly, "whether immortality is worth having--on this -planet." - -Suddenly she stiffened, and her lips opened to scream again. Langdon -forgot the hurt of her words and looked wildly about the room. But -there was only the furniture and the firelight and the weaving shadows. -Inside the blood-red windows, the room was sane and real and human. - -Eileen shrank against him. "It's over there," she gasped. "Over there -in that corner, creeping closer--" - -Langdon's face grew bleak, and there was a desolation rising in him. -Illusions of one sort or another were part of daily life on Tanith, -but they had reality in that they were produced by physical processes -and more than one person could perceive them. But hallucinations were -another story. - -He thought back over two hundred years to the first attempts to -colonize. Of an initial three hundred or so, over two-thirds had left -within the first three years. And many of them had been insane when the -ships took them home. - -Men came to Tanith and stayed if they could endure it. But if they -couldn't, and tried to stay anyway, they soon fled from the unendurable -madness of its reality to a safer and more orderly madness of their own. - -From what he had heard, few of them were cured again, even back on -Terra. - - * * * * * - -"I've got to see Chang," he said. - -The colonists on Tanith tended to live well apart from each other, and -unless they owned the new televisors designed especially for the planet -their only contact was physical. Once a month or so he would go to the -planet's one town for supplies and a mild spree, and somewhat oftener -he would spend a while at another house or have guests himself. But -most of the time he had been alone. - -And as a man grew older, without loss of physical and mental faculties, -he found more and more within himself, an unfolding inward richness -which none of the short-lived would ever appreciate or even comprehend. -He had less need of other men to prop him up. Or perhaps it was simply -that the wisdom, the fullness which came with immortality, made a -little of the other colonists' company go a long ways. - -There was no denying it, Eileen's twenty-three years of life could -not compare with Langdon's two hundred or more. She was like a child, -thoughtless, mentally and physically timid, ignorant, essentially -shallow. - -_But I love her. And I can afford to wait. In fifty or a hundred years -she'll begin to grow up. In two hundred or so we'll begin to understand -each other. As our ages increase, the absolute difference between them -will become proportionately insignificant._ - -_An immortal learns patience. I can wait--and meanwhile I love her very -dearly._ - -"What do you have to see him about?" asked Eileen. - -"Us," he answered bluntly. "Our situation. It isn't good." - -"No," she whispered. - -"Can't you learn that there's nothing to fear on Tanith?" he asked. -"Death itself, the greatest dread of all, is gone. We've eliminated all -actually dangerous life in the neighborhood of our settlements. There -are things that can be annoying--the sword-plants, the psyche-feeders, -the static discharges--but it's no trick to learn how to avoid them. -Nothing here can hurt you, Eileen." - -"I know," she said hopelessly. "But I'm still afraid. Day and night, -I'm afraid. There are worse things than death. Joe." - -"But afraid of _what_?" - -"I don't know. Fear itself, maybe. How do I know something won't -suddenly be deadly? But I'm not afraid of death. Even with the baby, I -wouldn't be afraid of wild beasts or plague or--anything that I could -understand." She shook her shining head, slowly. "That's just it, Joe. -I don't understand this planet. Nobody does. You don't.... You admit it -yourself." - -"Someday I'll know it." - -"When? A thousand years from now? A thousand years of horror.... Joe, -some of those things are so hideous I think I'll go mad when they -appear." - -"A deep-sea fish on Terra is hideous." - -"Not this way. These things aren't _right_. They can't exist, but still -there they are, and I can't forget them, and I never know when they'll -appear next or what they'll be this time--" She checked herself, -gulping. - -"This is a very beautiful world," he said stubbornly. "The colors, the -forms, the sounds--" - -"None of them are right. Grass may look just as well when it's red or -blue or yellow--but it shouldn't be all of them at different times. The -sky is wrong, the trees are wrong. Those hideous lakes of life and the -things in them, obscene--those voices singing out in the mists, nobody -knows what they are--those images of things a hundred million years -dead--and the faces, and the whisperings, and there's always something -watching and waiting and moving just a little outside the corner of -your eye.... Oh, Joe, Joe, this planet is haunted!" - - * * * * * - -She sobbed in his arms with a rising note of hysteria that she couldn't -quite suppress. He looked grimly over her shoulder. A swirling, chiming -mist of color formed on one corner of the room, amorphous stirrings -within it, a sudden shining birth that laughed and jeered and slipped -out through the wall. - -He remembered that he had been frightened and repelled when he first -came here. But not to this degree, and he soon got over it. Now, even -while Eileen wept, he admired the shifting pulse of colors and his -heart quickened to the elfin bells. Terran music sounded wrong to him -after two hundred years of the sounds of Tanith. - -He thought that all those voices and whisperings and singings, sliding -up and down an inhuman scale, and the dreams and the visions, had a -pattern, an overall immensity which some day he would grasp. And that -would be a moment of revelation, he would see and know the wholeness -of Tanith and there would be meaning in it. Not the chaotic jumble of -random events which made up the rest of the universe--death-doomed -universe tumbling blindly toward a wreck of level entropy and ashen -suns--but a glimpse of that ultimate purposefulness which some men -called God. - -Briefly, a temporal mirage showed beyond the window, a fragmentary -glimpse of a tower reaching for the sky. And it was no work of man, nor -could it ever be, but it was of a heartbreaking loveliness. - -He wondered about the ancient natives. Had they simply become extinct, -reached a point of declining evolutionary efficiency such as seemed -fated for all species and gone into limbo some millions of years -previously? Or had they, perhaps, finally seen the allness of the world -and gone--elsewhere? Privately, Langdon rather thought it was the -latter. _World without end_-- - -But Eileen was crying in his arms. - -He kissed her, and tasted salt on her lips that trembled under his. -Poor kid, poor kid, and with a baby on the way.... - - * * * * * - -Something of the magic of their first days together came back to him. -It was a disappointment in love which had sent him to Tanith in the -first place, and for all his time here he had lived without that sort -of affection. The women of the town served the casual needs of sex, -which seemed to become less and less frequently manifest as his own -undying personality grew in fullness and self-sufficiency, and that was -all. - -Still, a single man was incomplete. And a year ago one of the few -colony ships landed, and Eileen had been aboard, and a forgotten -springtime stirred within him. - -Now ... well.... - -She released herself, smiling with unsteady lips. "I'll be all right -now, dear," she said. "Let's go." - -_I have to talk this matter over privately with Chang. His wife can -take care of Eileen. Certainly I can't leave her here alone._ - -But sooner or later he would have to. It wasn't only that he had -to go out and oversee some of the fields on which grew the native -plants whose secretions, needed by Terran chemistry, gave them their -livelihood. Solitude and long walks through the misty forests and over -the whispering hills had become virtual necessities to him. He had to -get away and think, the mighty thoughts of an immortal which no Terran -could ever comprehend in his pathetic lifetime were being gestated in -his brain. Slowly, piece by piece, the coherent philosophy which is -necessary for sanity was coalescing within him, and he was gathering -into himself the essence of Tanith. Someday, perhaps a thousand years -hence, he would know what it was that haunted him now. - -He could not suppress a feeling of annoyance, however. Eileen had -had over a year to adjust now, and she was getting worse instead of -better. A brief sojourn in utter alienness might be merely pleasing and -interesting, but over a longer time one either got used to it or--She'd -have to learn, have to accept the sanity of Tanith and know it for a -deeper and more real one than the sanity of Terra. - -Others had done it, why couldn't she? - - * * * * * - -Chang Simon and his wife lived several hundred kilometers away, an -hour's flight by airjet. Their spacious house lay amid lawns and trees -sloping down to a broad river; it held a serenity and graciousness -which Terra had forgotten. Langdon was always glad to be there, and -even Eileen seemed to be soothed. She had screamed once on the flight -over, when the sky had suddenly seethed with hell-blue flame, and she -was still trembling when they arrived. Their hostess took her off for -one of those mysterious private conferences between women which no -merely male creature will ever understand, and Langdon and Chang sat -out on the veranda and talked. - -The Chinese had been in his fifties when he came, one of the first load -of colonists, and Tanith could not restore lost youth. But a healthy -middle age had its own advantages, it conferred a peace and depth of -mind more rapidly than an endlessly young body would permit. In the -Solar System, Chang had been a synthesist, taking all knowledge and its -correlation as his field of work, and he had come to Tanith in some -of Langdon's mood of abandonment--futile to attempt the knowing and -understanding of all things, when life had flickered out in a hundred -years. But as an immortal synthesist. - -The two men sat in the long twilight, saying little at first. It was -good just to sit, thought Langdon, to let a glass of wine and a cigar -relax tensed muscles while the dusk deepened toward night. At such -times he felt more than ever drawn into the secret whole which was -Tanith--almost, it seemed, he was on the verge of that revelation, -of seeing the manifold aspects of reality gather themselves into -one overwhelming entity of which he would be an integral part. The -philosophers and mystics of Terra had sought such identification, and -the scientists were still striving to build a unified picture of the -cosmic whole. Here, in this environment and with all the ages before -him, a man had a chance to reach that ancient goal, intellectual -understanding and emotional integration--someday, someday. - -The twilight was deep and blue and full of flitting ghostly lights. The -feathery trees murmured to each other in a language of their own, and -down under the long slope of dew-shining grass the river gleamed with -shifting phosphorescence. Something was singing in the night, an eerie -wavering scale that woke faint longings and dreads in men and set them -straining after something they had once known and forgotten. - - * * * * * - -Overhead the million thronging stars of Galactic center winked and -blazed through the flickering aurora. One of the moons rose, trailing -golden light through the sky. A wind blew through drifting clouds, and -it seemed as if the wind had language too and spoke to the men, if they -could but understand it. - -Chang said at last, slowly and heavily: "I don't know how she got past -the psychologists on Terra." - -"Eileen?" asked Langdon unnecessarily. - -"Of course." The older man was a shadow in the dusk, but the red -tip of his cigar waxed and waned as he drew on it for comfort. -"Somebody blundered. Or--wait--perhaps it was only that, while she was -fundamentally stable, the otherness of Tanith touched some deep-seated -psychological flaw in her, something that would never appear under any -other environment." - -"I don't quite know the system," said Langdon. "What do they do, back -at Sol?" - -"The first attempts at colonization showed that only the most stable -personalities could adapt to--or even survive--the apparent instability -of this planet. There aren't many who want to come here at all, of -course, but our planetary government maintains a psychological staff in -the more important worlds of the Galaxy to check those who do apply. -They're supposed to weed out all who couldn't take the strangeness, and -so far it's been very successful. Eileen is the first failure I know -of." - -Something cold seemed to close around Langdon. And then, he realized -wryly, he was skirting the main issue--afraid to face it. - -"I wonder if we really have the right to keep secret the fact that -there is no death here," he said. - -"It was a hard decision to make," answered Chang, "but leaving the -morals of it aside, it was the only practicable way. Suppose it were -generally known that this one place, in all the known universe, has -no age. Imagine all who would want to come here! The planet couldn't -hold a fraction of them. Even as it is, we have to space births very -carefully lest in a few centuries we crowd ourselves off the world. -Furthermore, the unstable social environment produced by such an influx -of colonists, most of whom couldn't stand the place anyway, would -delay, perhaps ruin, the research by which we hope to find out why life -does not grow old here. When we have that answer, and can apply it -outside this region of space, all the Galaxy will have immortality. But -until then, we must wait." He shrugged, a dim movement in the shining -night. "And immortals know how to wait." - -"So instead, we simply accept colonists who agree to stay here for -life--and then once they get here they're told how long that life will -be." - - * * * * * - -"Yes. Actually, the miracle is that the first colonists stayed at all, -after most had fled or gone insane. After all, it was ten or twenty -years before we even suspected the truth. A world as alien as this was -settled only because planets habitable to man and without aborigines -are hard to find. Since then, many more such worlds--normal ones--have -been discovered, and few people care to risk madness by coming here. -Tanith is an obscure dominion of the Galactic Union, having a certain -scientific interest because of its unique natural laws--but not too -great even there, when science has so many other things to investigate -just now. And we're quite content to remain in the shadow." - -"Of course." Langdon looked up to the swarming stars. A sheet of blue -auroral flame covered them for a moment. - -He asked presently: "How much further have our scientists gotten in -explaining the phenomenon?" - -"We've come quite a ways, but progress has been mostly in highly -technical fields of mathematical physics. You'll have to take a decade -or two off soon, Joseph, and learn that subject. Briefly, we do -know that this is a region of warped space, similar to those in the -neighborhood of massive bodies but of a different character. As you -know, natural constants are different in such regions from free space, -phenomena such as gravitation and the bending of light appear. This -is another sort of geometric distortion, but basically the same. It -produces differences in--well, in optics, in thermodynamics, in psi -functions, in almost everything. The very laws of probabilities are -different here. As a result, the curious phenomena we know appear. -Many of them, of course, are simply illusions produced by complex -refractions of light and sound waves: others are very real. The time -axis itself is subject to certain transformations which produce the -temporal mirages. And so it goes." - -"Yes, yes, I know all that. But what causes the warp itself?" - -"We're not sure yet, but we think it's an effect of our being near the -Galactic center of mass, together with--no, it would take me a week to -write out the equations, let alone explain them." - -There was a comfort in impersonal discourse, but it was a retreat from -more immediate problems. Langdon fairly rapped out the question: "How -close are you to understanding why we are immortal?" - -"Not at all close in detail," said Chang. "We think that it's due to -the difference in thermodynamic properties of matter I mentioned just -now, producing a balance of colloidal entropy. Well, elsewhere life is -metastable and can only endure so long. Here it is the natural tendency -of things, so much so indeed that life is generated spontaneously from -the proper chemical mixtures such as occur in many of the lakes and -pools hereabouts. In our own bodies, there is none of that tendency -toward chemical and colloidal degradation which I think lies at the -root of aging and death. - -"But that's just my guess, you know, and biological phenomena are -so extraordinarily complex that it will probably take us centuries -to work it out. After all, we haven't even settled all the laws of -Tanith's physics yet!" - -"Several centuries.... And there is no other planet where this might -also happen?" - - * * * * * - -"None have been found, and on the basis of our theory I'm inclined to -believe that Tanith is unique in the Galaxy--perhaps in the universe." -Langdon was aware of Chang's speculative gaze on him. "And if there -were others, they'd be just as foreign to Terra." - -"I see--" Langdon looked away, down to the streaming silver gleam of -the river. There was a ring of little lights dancing on the lawn; he -could hear the tinkle of elfland bells and he thought he could see -glowing wings and lithe light forms that were not human--but very -lovely. - -"You were thinking of moving away?" asked the synthesist at last. - -"Yes. I hated the thought, but Eileen--well--you saw her. And you -remember those first colonists." - -"I do. She is exhibiting all their symptoms. She can't stand the -unpredictability of her environment, and she can't adjust her scale of -values enough to see the beauty in what to her is wrong and horrible." -In the vague golden light, Langdon thought he glimpsed a grim smile on -the other man's face. "Perhaps she is right, Joseph. Perhaps it takes -someone not quite sane by the rest of the Galaxy's standards to adjust -to Tanith." - -"But--can't she see--I've told her--" - -"Intellectual understanding of a problem never solves it, though it may -help. Eileen takes your word for these being purely natural phenomena. -She's not superstitious. It might help if she were! Because explaining -the horror doesn't lessen it to her. Man is not a rational animal, -Joseph, though he likes to pretend he is." - -"Can't she be helped? Psychology?" - -"No." The old voice held pity, but it did not waver. "I've studied such -cases. If you keep her here much longer, she'll have a miscarriage and -go insane. The insanity might be curable, back at Sol, or it might not, -but as soon as she returned it would come again. Not that she could -ever stand to come back. - -"She is inherently unable to adapt herself to an utterly foreign -environment. You'll have to send her home, Joseph. Soon." - -"But--she's my _wife_...." - -Chang said nothing. A shining golden head swooped past in the darkness, -laughing at them, and the laughter was visible as red pulses in the -night. - -There came a step on the veranda. Langdon turned and saw Chang's wife -coming out with Eileen. The girl walked more steadily now. In the dim -radiance from the window, her face was calmer than it had been for some -time, and for an instant there was a flood of love and joy and relief -within Langdon. - -Chang was wrong. Eileen would learn. She was already starting to learn. -Tonight was the turning point. Tanith would take her to itself and they -would be together forever. - -"Eileen," he said, very softly, and got up and walked toward her. -"Eileen, darling." - -The atmosphere trembled between them. She saw the flesh run from his -bones, it was a skull that grinned at her, shining evilly green against -the dark, and the sounds that rasped from it were the mouthings of -nightmare. - -Somewhere, far back in the depths of her mind, a little cool voice -told her that there was nothing to be afraid of, that it was a brief -variation in optical and sonic constants which would pass away and then -Joe would be there. But the voice was drowned in her own screaming, she -was screaming for her mother to come and get her, it was a nightmare -_and she couldn't wake up_-- - -Langdon ran toward her, with the rags of flesh hanging from his -phosphorescent bones, until Chang grabbed him back with a violence he -had never known to be possible in the old man. - - * * * * * - -There was a storm outside; the cottage shook to a fury of wind and -was filled with its noise and power. They had a fire going, and its -restless glow played over the room and beat against the calm white -light of fluorotubes, but it could not drive out the luminousness -beyond the window. - -"Pull the shades," asked Eileen. "Please, Joe." - -He looked away from the window where he stood staring out at the storm. -Fire sleeted across the landscape, whirling heatless flames that hissed -and crackled around the wind-tossed trees, red and blue and yellow and -icy white. The wind roared and boomed, with a hollow voice that seemed -to shout words in some unknown tongue, and from behind the curtain of -flaming rain there was the crimson glow of an open furnace. As if, -thought Langdon, as if the gates of Hell stood open just beyond the -hills. - -"It won't hurt us," he said. "It's only a matter of phosphorescence and -static discharges." - -"Please, Joe." Her voice was very small in the racket of wind. - -He shrugged, and covered the wild scene. He used to like to go out in -fire-storms, he remembered, their blinding berserk fury woke something -elemental in him and he would go striding through them like a god -shouting back at the wind. - -Well, it wouldn't be long now. The _Betelgeuse Queen_ was due in a -couple of days on the intragalactic orbit that would take her back to -Sol. Eileen didn't have long to wait. - -He took a moody turn about the room. His wife had been very quiet since -her collapse of a week ago. Too quiet. He didn't like it. - -She looked wistfully up at his tall form. He thought that she looked -pathetically small and alone, curled up--almost crouched--in the big -armchair. Like a very beautiful child, too thin and hollow-eyed now but -beautiful. - -A child. - -_She has to go. She can't live here. And I--well--if she goes, it will -be like a death within me. I love her._ - -"I remember winter storms on Terra," said Eileen softly. "It would be -cold and dark, with a big wind driving snow against the house. We'd -come inside, cold but warm underneath with being out in it, and we'd -sit in front of a fire and have hot cocoa and cheese sandwiches. If it -was around Christmas time, we'd be singing the old songs--" - - * * * * * - -The wind yammered, banging on the door. A stealthy shape of light and -shadow wavered halfway between existence and nonexistence over in a -corner of the room. Eileen's voice trailed off and her eyes widened and -there was a small dry rattle in her throat. She gripped the arms of -her chair with an unnatural tension. - -Langdon saw it and came over to sit beside her on one arm of the chair. -Her hand closed tightly around his and she looked away from the weaving -shape in the corner. - -"You were always good to me, Joe," she murmured. - -"How could I be anything else?" he asked tonelessly. There was a new -voice in the storm now, a great belling organ was crying to him to come -out, Tanith was dancing in a sleet of fire just beyond the door. - -"I'll miss you," she said. "I'll miss you very much." - -"Why should you? I'll be along." - -"Will you. Joe? I wonder. I can't ask it of you. I can't ask you to -trade a thousand years of life, or ten thousand or a million, for the -little sixty or seventy you'll have left out there. I can't ask you to -leave your world for mine. You'll never be at home on Terra." - -He smiled, without much mirth. "It's a trite phrase," he said, "but you -know I'd die for you." - -"I don't doubt that. Joe. But would you--live for me?" - -He kissed her to avoid answering. _I don't know. I honestly don't know._ - -_It isn't so much a question of losing immortality, though God knows -that means a lot. It means more than any mortal will ever know. It's -that I'd be losing--Tanith._ - -He thought of Sol, Sirius, Antares, the great suns and planets of -the Galaxy, and could not keep from shuddering. Drabness, deadness, -colorlessness, meaninglessness! Life was a brief blind spasm of -accident and catastrophe, walled in by its own shortness and the barren -environment of a death-doomed cosmos. Too small to achieve any purpose, -too limited even to imagine a goal, it flickered and went out into an -utter dark. - - Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow - Creeps in this petty place from day to day - To the last syllable of recorded time, - And all our yesterdays have lighted fools - The way to dusty death.... - -The storm sang outside, and he heard music and lure and enchantment. -It was not a discord, after two centuries he could hear some of the -tremendous harmony--after another while, he might begin to understand -the song. - -If he stayed, if he stayed. - -_Eileen._ - -His face twisted. She saw it, and pain bit at her, but there was -nothing she could say. - -He began pacing, and his mind took up the weary track of the past week. -Logic--think it out like a rational being. - - * * * * * - -Eileen had to go. But he could stay, and she would understand insofar -as any mortal could. Somewhere else, back in the Solar system or on -some other of man's many planets, she would find another husband who -could give her all his heart. _Which I could never do, because I love -Tanith. She would come to think of me as dead, she would hold him dear -for the brief span of their lives. She'd be happy. And maybe someday -she'd send the child back to me._ - -As for himself--well, the initial pain of separation would be hard to -take, but he had an immortal's endurance. Sooner or later, the longing -would die. And there would be another woman someday on one of the -colony ships whom he could love and take to wife forever. He could -wait, he had all time before him.... - -And he would be on Tanith.... - -And there would be his friends. He thought of the utter loneliness that -waited for him in the Galaxy. Two hundred years was a sizeable draft -of eternity; he had acquired enough of the immortal's viewpoint and -personality to find the short-lived completely alien. He could never -know more than the most superficial comradeship with even the oldest of -those who were younger than he. He could never be close to his wife; -she would occupy only the smallest part of the emptiness within him. -Because before she had grown enough to match him, they would both be -dead. - -_We'll die, go down in the futility of the universe, and Tanith will go -on. I might have been a god, but I'll go down in dust and nothingness. -No one will have gotten any good of me. Unless I stay._ - -The wind called and called. - -_Eileen was right. I'm not afraid to die. But I am afraid to live, in -the way she must. Horribly afraid._ - -_But I love her._ - -_Fifty years hence there'll be another woman._ - -_But I love Eileen now!_ - -Round and round, a crazy roaring whirlpool swinging and crashing -toward madness. His thoughts were running in a meaningless circle, the -familiar landmarks flickered by with ghastly speed in that devil's -race, the room wavered before him. - -He snarled with sudden inarticulate rage and grabbed his insulating -cloak and rushed out the door. - - * * * * * - -Eileen shrank back in her chair. He was gone. She was alone now and all -the powers of Tanith were rising up against her. The wind hooted and -whistled, piping down the chimney and skirling under the eaves. The -blind lifted to an invisible force and she saw the red flames of Hell -blazing outside. The fluoroglobes flickered toward extinction, darkness -closed down; but it was full of dancing light and glimmering shapes -that gibed and jeered and spun closer to her. The room began to whirl, -faster and faster, a tipping tilting saraband on the edge of madness. - -All the old forgotten powers of night and dark and Hell were abroad, -whirling on the wind and slamming against the door and banging their -heels on the roof. They rose out of the floor and seeped from the walls -and the air. Fire danced around them, and they neared her, crying -something that she knew would drive her mad when she understood it. - -_Joe, Joe, Joe--Mother--God_--Joe was gone out into the storm. Mother -was dead these many years, God had forgotten. And the powers closed in -laughing at her and mocking and whispering what she could not stand to -hear and there and around and around and around and around and around -down, down, down, down, down into darkness-- - - * * * * * - -Langdon did not hear her scream the first time. He stood in the living -torrent of light. Fire streamed about him and dripped from his hands; -his hair crackled with static electricity and the wind sang to him. -It filled him, the song of the wind, the song of Tanith. He was lost -in it, whirled up in a great singing joyous laughter. He _knew_--in -another moment he would know, he would be part of the allness and have -peace within him. - -Fire, wind, the slender graceful trees laughing as the flames leaped -around them, a great exultant chant from the living forests and the -dancing hills, a glimpse of an ancient Tanithian across many million -years, flying in the storm with the red and gold and blue and bronze -rushing off his wings, Tanith, Tanith, Tanith. - -_Tanith, I love you, I am part of you. I can never go. This is the -thing other men do not know. More than immortality, more than all the -mighty dreams you give us, there is yourself. A day on Tanith is more -than a lifetime on Terra, but they will never know that because they -have never felt it. The strong love of a man for his home--but this is -passion, it is the whole of life, and Tanith gives it back. Here, and -here alone, is meaning and beauty and an unending splendid horizon. -Here alone a man can belong._ - -_See, see that bird with wings like molten silver!_ - -The second scream was wordless and crazy and horrible, but the dying -fragment of his own name went through him like a knife. For the barest -instant he stood there while the storm roared about him and the fire -rushed over the world. Then, quite simply, he ran back into the house. - -The blood and pain and screeching horror of the abortion left him -physically ill, but he managed to get her to bed and even, after a -long while, to sleep. Then he walked over to the window and drew the -blind. His shoulders sagged with the defeat and death and ruin that was -here.... - - * * * * * - -The captain of the _Betelgeuse Queen_ did not like Tanith and said as -much to his mate as they relaxed on the promenade deck. - -"The place gives you the blue willies," he declared. "Everything's -_wrong_ there. Praise the powers it's so backward and obscure we only -have to stop there once a year or so." - -"The colonists seem to like it," said the mate. - -"They would," snorted the captain. "Worst bunch of clannish provincials -I ever saw. Why, they hardly ever leave the planet, except maybe for a -year or so at a time on essential business, and they won't be friendly -with anybody. Takes a crazy man to stand that world in the first place." - -He pointed to a tall man who was half leading, half supporting a young -woman along the deck. She would have been beautiful had she not been -badly underweight. She smiled at the man, but her eyes were haunted, -and his answering smile was far-away. It went no deeper than his lips. - -"That fellow Langdon is the only long-time colonist I ever heard of who -left Tanith for good," said the captain. "He must have been there for -years. Maybe he was born there, but he's coming back to Sol now. His -wife couldn't take the place." - -"I think I remember her from a year or so ago," nodded the mate. -"Didn't we carry her out with a few other colonists? Pretty as a -picture then, and full of life and fun--now look at her. Tanith did -that to her." - -"Uh-huh," agreed the captain. "I heard a little of the story down by -the spaceport. She nearly went crazy--finally had a miscarriage. It -was all they could do to save her life and sanity. Only then would -that Langdon take her back. He let her go on that way for months." -The captain's mouth twisted with contempt. 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You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms -of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online -at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you -are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the -country where you are located before using this eBook. -</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: World of the Mad</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Poul Anderson</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: April 14, 2021 [eBook #65086]</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net</div> - -<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORLD OF THE MAD ***</div> - - -<div class="titlepage"> - -<h1>WORLD OF THE MAD</h1> - -<h2>By Poul Anderson</h2> - -<p>Langdon had found immortality on the planet<br /> -Tanith. Naturally he wanted his wife to share it—if<br /> -he could prevent her from going insane first....</p> - -<p>[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from<br /> -Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy<br /> -February 1951<br /> -Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that<br /> -the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]</p> - -</div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<p>He walked slowly through the curling purple mists, feeling the ground -roll and quiver under his feet, hearing the deep-voiced rumble of -shifting strata far underground. There were voices in the fog, singing -in high unhuman tones, and no man had ever learned what it was that -sang—for could the wind utter sounds so elfishly sweet, almost words -that haunted you with half understanding of something you had forgotten -and needed desperately to remember?</p> - -<p>A face floated through the swirling mist. It was not human, but it -was very beautiful, and it was blind. He looked away as it mouthed -voiceless murmurs at him.</p> - -<p>Somewhere a crystal tree was chiming, a delicate pizzicato of -glass-like leaves vibrating against each other. The man listened to it -and to the low muttering of the earth, for those at least were real and -he was not at all sure whether the other things were there or not.</p> - -<p>Even after two hundred years, he wasn't sure.</p> - -<p>He went on through the mist. Flowers grew up around him, great fragile -laceries of shining crystalline petals that budded and bloomed and -died even as he walked by. Some of them reached hungrily for him, but -he sidestepped their groping mouths with the unthinking ease of long -habit.</p> - -<p>Compasses didn't work on Tanith, and only a few men could even operate -a radio direction finder, but Langdon knew his way and walked steadily -ahead. His sense of direction kept rotating crazily; it insisted he was -going the wrong way, no, now the house lay over to the right—no, the -left, and a few paces straight up.... But by now he had compensated for -that; he didn't need eyes or kinesthetic sense to find his way home.</p> - -<p>There was a new singing in the violet air. Langdon checked his stride -with a sudden eerie prickling along his spine. The mist eddied about -him, thick and blinding, but now the city was growing out of it; he saw -the towers and streets and thronging airways come raggedly into being.</p> - -<p>Suddenly he stood in the middle of the city. It was complete this time, -not the few fragmentary glimpses he ordinarily had. The mist flowed -through the ghostly spires and pylons but somehow he could see anyway, -the city lay for kilometers around.</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>It was not a human city. It lay under three hurtling moons, lit only by -their brilliant silver. But it lived, it pulsed with life about him; -the shining dwellers soared past and seemed to leave a trail of little -sparks luminous against the night. They were not men, the old folk of -Tanith, but they were beautiful.</p> - -<p>There was no sound. Langdon stood in a well of silence while the city -lay around him, and he thought that perhaps he was the ghost, alone and -excommunicated on a world which lay beyond even the dreams of man.</p> - -<p>But that was nonsense, he thought, angry with himself. It was simply -that temporal mirages transmitted only light, not sound. He was here, -now, alive, and the city was dust these many million years.</p> - -<p>Two dwellers flew past him, male and female with arms linked, laughing -soundlessly into each other's golden eyes. The male's great glowing -wings brushed through Langdon's body. He stood briefly in a shower of -whirling light-motes—and they didn't heed him, they didn't know he was -there. They were only for each other, those two, and he was a ghost out -of an unreal and unthinkably remote future.</p> - -<p>The mirage faded. Slowly, in bits and patches, it dissolved back into -the purple fog. He was alone again.</p> - -<p>He shivered, and hastened his steps homeward.</p> - -<p>The mist began to break, raggedly, as he came out of the forest. He -went by a lake of life with only a passing glance at the strangeness -of the new shapes that seethed and bubbled, rose out of its slime and -took shifting form and sank back into chemical disintegration. There -was always something new, grotesque and horrible and sometimes eerily -lovely, to be seen at such a place, but spontaneous generation was an -old story to Langdon by now. And Eileen was waiting.</p> - -<p>He came out on the brow of a steep hill that slanted down into the -little cuplike valley where he had his dwelling. The hills were blue -around it, blue with grass that tomorrow might be gold or green or -gray, and the sky was currently blood-red. A grove of feather-like -trees hid the house, swaying where there was no wind and murmuring -to each other in their own language, and a few winged things hovered -darkly overhead. For a moment Langdon paused there, savoring the -richness of it. This was <i>his</i> home.</p> - -<p><i>His</i> land. Back on Terra they had forgotten the fullness that came -with belonging to the earth, but the men who colonized among the stars -remembered. Looking back, Langdon thought that the real instability and -alienness was in the Solar System. Men had no roots there, and it was a -secret woe in them and made them feverish and restless, eager to taste -from all cups but shuddering away from draining any one.</p> - -<p>On Tanith, thought Langdon with a quiet sort of exultation, a man drank -his cup to the bottom, and there were many cups—or, if only one, it -was never the same and could never be emptied.</p> - -<p>For a man on Tanith did not grow old.</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>Suddenly he stiffened, and a psyche-feeder swooped low to absorb his -furiously radiated nervous energy. The reaction of it eddied in his -mind as a chilling fear. Angrily, without having to think about it, -he drove the creature off with a jaggedly pulsed mental vibration and -remained standing and listening.</p> - -<p>Someone had screamed.</p> - -<p>It came again, distorted by the wavering air, hardly recognizable to -one who had not had time to adjust to Tanith, and it was Eileen's -voice. "Joe, Joe, Joe—help—"</p> - -<p>He ran, scrambling down the unstable hillside with his mist-wet cloak -flapping behind him. A sword-plant slashed at him with its steely -leaves. He swerved and went on down into the valley, running, leaping, -a bounding black shadow against the burning sky.</p> - -<p>Static electricity discharged in crackling blue sheets as he tore -through the grove, hissing against his insulating clothes and stinging -his face and hands. Something floated through the dark air, long and -supple and dripping slime, grimacing at him with its horrible wet -mouth. Another illusion or mirage, he thought somewhere in the back of -his mind. They no longer bothered him—in fact, he'd have missed them -if they never showed up again—but—Eileen—</p> - -<p>The cottage nestled under the tall whispering trees, a peak-roofed -stone building in the ancient style that Langdon had thought most -appropriate to the enchanted planet. There was little of Terra about -it after its century and a half of existence; it was covered with -fire-vines over which danced the seeming of little flames; luminous -flying creatures nestled against the doorway, and he had never found -the cause of the dim sweet singing he could always hear around it.</p> - -<p>The door stood ajar, and Eileen was sobbing inside. Langdon came in and -found her huddled on a couch before the fireplace, trembling so that it -seemed her body must be shaken apart, and crying, crying.</p> - -<p>He sat down and put his arms about her and let her cry herself out. -Then he remained for a while stroking her hair and saying nothing.</p> - -<p>She bit her lip to keep it steady. Her voice was like a small child's, -high and toneless and frightened. "It bit," she said.</p> - -<p>"It was an illusion," he murmured.</p> - -<p>"No. It bit at me. And its eyes were dead. It came out of the floor -there, and it was all in rags."</p> - -<p>"You had an illusion frighten you," he said. "A psyche-feeder flying -nearby caught your increased nervous output, drew on it, and that -of course frightened you still more ... they're easy to drive away, -Eileen. They don't like certain pulse patterns—you just think at them -the way I showed you—"</p> - -<p>"It was real," she insisted, quietly, with something of a child's -puzzlement that anything should have wanted to hurt her. "It was black, -but there were grays and browns and red too, and it was ragged."</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>He went over to the cupboard and got out a darkly glowing bottle and -poured two full glasses. "This'll help," he said, trying hard to smile -at her. "<i>Prosit.</i>"</p> - -<p>"I shouldn't," said Eileen, still shakily but with some return of -saneness. "Junior—"</p> - -<p>"Junior won't take harm from a glass of wine," said Langdon. He sat -down beside her again and they clinked goblets and drank. The fire -wavered ruddily before them, filling the room with warm restless light -and with dancing shadows from which Eileen looked away.</p> - -<p>"I'll get an electronic range installed soon," said Langdon, trying to -fill the silence with trivia. "It can't be convenient for you cooking -on an ancient-style stove."</p> - -<p>"I thought they didn't work on Tanith—electronics, I mean," she -answered with the same effort of ordinariness.</p> - -<p>"Not at first, with the different laws prevailing here. In the first -few decades, we were forced back to the old chemical techniques like -fires. That's one reason so few colonists ever came, or stayed long -if they did come. But bit by bit, little by little, we're learning -the scientific laws and applying them. They've had all the standard -household equipment available here for a century, I guess, but by that -time I'd already built this place and liked my own things, fires and -stoves and all the rest, too well to change. But now that I've got a -wife to do my housekeeping, I ought to provide her with conveniences. -In fact, I should have done so right away."</p> - -<p>"It isn't that, Joe," she said. "I'd have squawked long ago if those -little things made any difference. I like handling things myself rather -than turning them over to some robot. It's fun to cook and get wood, -but Joe, it's no fun when a thing rises out of the steam and screams at -you. It's no fun when electric sparks jump over the house and all of a -sudden there's only fear, the whole place is choked with fear—" She -shuddered closer against him.</p> - -<p>"This planet is haunted," she whispered.</p> - -<p>"The laws of nature are a little different," he answered as calmly -as he could. "But they are still laws. Tanith seems like a chaos, -governed by living spirits and most of them malignant, only because you -don't see the regularity. Its pattern is too different from what you're -used to. Terra herself must have seemed that way to primitive man, -before he discovered order in nature.</p> - -<p>"Our scientists here are slowly finding out the answers. Talk to old -Chang sometime, he can tell you more about it than I. But I can see the -order now, a little of it, and it's a richer and deeper thing than the -rest of the universe.</p> - -<p>"And you live forever." He gripped her shoulders and looked into her -wide eyes. He had to expel the demons of terror from her. A woman five -months pregnant couldn't go on this way. He was suddenly shocked by how -thin she had grown, and she never stopped shivering under his hands.</p> - -<p>"You won't grow old," he said slowly. "We'll be together forever, -Eileen. And our children won't die either."</p> - -<p>She looked away from him, and sudden bitterness twisted her mouth. "I -wonder," she said thinly, "whether immortality is worth having—on this -planet."</p> - -<p>Suddenly she stiffened, and her lips opened to scream again. Langdon -forgot the hurt of her words and looked wildly about the room. But -there was only the furniture and the firelight and the weaving shadows. -Inside the blood-red windows, the room was sane and real and human.</p> - -<p>Eileen shrank against him. "It's over there," she gasped. "Over there -in that corner, creeping closer—"</p> - -<p>Langdon's face grew bleak, and there was a desolation rising in him. -Illusions of one sort or another were part of daily life on Tanith, -but they had reality in that they were produced by physical processes -and more than one person could perceive them. But hallucinations were -another story.</p> - -<p>He thought back over two hundred years to the first attempts to -colonize. Of an initial three hundred or so, over two-thirds had left -within the first three years. And many of them had been insane when the -ships took them home.</p> - -<p>Men came to Tanith and stayed if they could endure it. But if they -couldn't, and tried to stay anyway, they soon fled from the unendurable -madness of its reality to a safer and more orderly madness of their own.</p> - -<p>From what he had heard, few of them were cured again, even back on -Terra.</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>"I've got to see Chang," he said.</p> - -<p>The colonists on Tanith tended to live well apart from each other, and -unless they owned the new televisors designed especially for the planet -their only contact was physical. Once a month or so he would go to the -planet's one town for supplies and a mild spree, and somewhat oftener -he would spend a while at another house or have guests himself. But -most of the time he had been alone.</p> - -<p>And as a man grew older, without loss of physical and mental faculties, -he found more and more within himself, an unfolding inward richness -which none of the short-lived would ever appreciate or even comprehend. -He had less need of other men to prop him up. Or perhaps it was simply -that the wisdom, the fullness which came with immortality, made a -little of the other colonists' company go a long ways.</p> - -<p>There was no denying it, Eileen's twenty-three years of life could -not compare with Langdon's two hundred or more. She was like a child, -thoughtless, mentally and physically timid, ignorant, essentially -shallow.</p> - -<p><i>But I love her. And I can afford to wait. In fifty or a hundred years -she'll begin to grow up. In two hundred or so we'll begin to understand -each other. As our ages increase, the absolute difference between them -will become proportionately insignificant.</i></p> - -<p><i>An immortal learns patience. I can wait—and meanwhile I love her very -dearly.</i></p> - -<p>"What do you have to see him about?" asked Eileen.</p> - -<p>"Us," he answered bluntly. "Our situation. It isn't good."</p> - -<p>"No," she whispered.</p> - -<p>"Can't you learn that there's nothing to fear on Tanith?" he asked. -"Death itself, the greatest dread of all, is gone. We've eliminated all -actually dangerous life in the neighborhood of our settlements. There -are things that can be annoying—the sword-plants, the psyche-feeders, -the static discharges—but it's no trick to learn how to avoid them. -Nothing here can hurt you, Eileen."</p> - -<p>"I know," she said hopelessly. "But I'm still afraid. Day and night, -I'm afraid. There are worse things than death. Joe."</p> - -<p>"But afraid of <i>what</i>?"</p> - -<p>"I don't know. Fear itself, maybe. How do I know something won't -suddenly be deadly? But I'm not afraid of death. Even with the baby, I -wouldn't be afraid of wild beasts or plague or—anything that I could -understand." She shook her shining head, slowly. "That's just it, Joe. -I don't understand this planet. Nobody does. You don't.... You admit it -yourself."</p> - -<p>"Someday I'll know it."</p> - -<p>"When? A thousand years from now? A thousand years of horror.... Joe, -some of those things are so hideous I think I'll go mad when they -appear."</p> - -<p>"A deep-sea fish on Terra is hideous."</p> - -<p>"Not this way. These things aren't <i>right</i>. They can't exist, but still -there they are, and I can't forget them, and I never know when they'll -appear next or what they'll be this time—" She checked herself, -gulping.</p> - -<p>"This is a very beautiful world," he said stubbornly. "The colors, the -forms, the sounds—"</p> - -<p>"None of them are right. Grass may look just as well when it's red or -blue or yellow—but it shouldn't be all of them at different times. The -sky is wrong, the trees are wrong. Those hideous lakes of life and the -things in them, obscene—those voices singing out in the mists, nobody -knows what they are—those images of things a hundred million years -dead—and the faces, and the whisperings, and there's always something -watching and waiting and moving just a little outside the corner of -your eye.... Oh, Joe, Joe, this planet is haunted!"</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>She sobbed in his arms with a rising note of hysteria that she couldn't -quite suppress. He looked grimly over her shoulder. A swirling, chiming -mist of color formed on one corner of the room, amorphous stirrings -within it, a sudden shining birth that laughed and jeered and slipped -out through the wall.</p> - -<p>He remembered that he had been frightened and repelled when he first -came here. But not to this degree, and he soon got over it. Now, even -while Eileen wept, he admired the shifting pulse of colors and his -heart quickened to the elfin bells. Terran music sounded wrong to him -after two hundred years of the sounds of Tanith.</p> - -<p>He thought that all those voices and whisperings and singings, sliding -up and down an inhuman scale, and the dreams and the visions, had a -pattern, an overall immensity which some day he would grasp. And that -would be a moment of revelation, he would see and know the wholeness -of Tanith and there would be meaning in it. Not the chaotic jumble of -random events which made up the rest of the universe—death-doomed -universe tumbling blindly toward a wreck of level entropy and ashen -suns—but a glimpse of that ultimate purposefulness which some men -called God.</p> - -<p>Briefly, a temporal mirage showed beyond the window, a fragmentary -glimpse of a tower reaching for the sky. And it was no work of man, nor -could it ever be, but it was of a heartbreaking loveliness.</p> - -<p>He wondered about the ancient natives. Had they simply become extinct, -reached a point of declining evolutionary efficiency such as seemed -fated for all species and gone into limbo some millions of years -previously? Or had they, perhaps, finally seen the allness of the world -and gone—elsewhere? Privately, Langdon rather thought it was the -latter. <i>World without end</i>—</p> - -<p>But Eileen was crying in his arms.</p> - -<p>He kissed her, and tasted salt on her lips that trembled under his. -Poor kid, poor kid, and with a baby on the way....</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>Something of the magic of their first days together came back to him. -It was a disappointment in love which had sent him to Tanith in the -first place, and for all his time here he had lived without that sort -of affection. The women of the town served the casual needs of sex, -which seemed to become less and less frequently manifest as his own -undying personality grew in fullness and self-sufficiency, and that was -all.</p> - -<p>Still, a single man was incomplete. And a year ago one of the few -colony ships landed, and Eileen had been aboard, and a forgotten -springtime stirred within him.</p> - -<p>Now ... well....</p> - -<p>She released herself, smiling with unsteady lips. "I'll be all right -now, dear," she said. "Let's go."</p> - -<p><i>I have to talk this matter over privately with Chang. His wife can -take care of Eileen. Certainly I can't leave her here alone.</i></p> - -<p>But sooner or later he would have to. It wasn't only that he had -to go out and oversee some of the fields on which grew the native -plants whose secretions, needed by Terran chemistry, gave them their -livelihood. Solitude and long walks through the misty forests and over -the whispering hills had become virtual necessities to him. He had to -get away and think, the mighty thoughts of an immortal which no Terran -could ever comprehend in his pathetic lifetime were being gestated in -his brain. Slowly, piece by piece, the coherent philosophy which is -necessary for sanity was coalescing within him, and he was gathering -into himself the essence of Tanith. Someday, perhaps a thousand years -hence, he would know what it was that haunted him now.</p> - -<p>He could not suppress a feeling of annoyance, however. Eileen had -had over a year to adjust now, and she was getting worse instead of -better. A brief sojourn in utter alienness might be merely pleasing and -interesting, but over a longer time one either got used to it or—She'd -have to learn, have to accept the sanity of Tanith and know it for a -deeper and more real one than the sanity of Terra.</p> - -<p>Others had done it, why couldn't she?</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>Chang Simon and his wife lived several hundred kilometers away, an -hour's flight by airjet. Their spacious house lay amid lawns and trees -sloping down to a broad river; it held a serenity and graciousness -which Terra had forgotten. Langdon was always glad to be there, and -even Eileen seemed to be soothed. She had screamed once on the flight -over, when the sky had suddenly seethed with hell-blue flame, and she -was still trembling when they arrived. Their hostess took her off for -one of those mysterious private conferences between women which no -merely male creature will ever understand, and Langdon and Chang sat -out on the veranda and talked.</p> - -<p>The Chinese had been in his fifties when he came, one of the first load -of colonists, and Tanith could not restore lost youth. But a healthy -middle age had its own advantages, it conferred a peace and depth of -mind more rapidly than an endlessly young body would permit. In the -Solar System, Chang had been a synthesist, taking all knowledge and its -correlation as his field of work, and he had come to Tanith in some -of Langdon's mood of abandonment—futile to attempt the knowing and -understanding of all things, when life had flickered out in a hundred -years. But as an immortal synthesist.</p> - -<p>The two men sat in the long twilight, saying little at first. It was -good just to sit, thought Langdon, to let a glass of wine and a cigar -relax tensed muscles while the dusk deepened toward night. At such -times he felt more than ever drawn into the secret whole which was -Tanith—almost, it seemed, he was on the verge of that revelation, -of seeing the manifold aspects of reality gather themselves into -one overwhelming entity of which he would be an integral part. The -philosophers and mystics of Terra had sought such identification, and -the scientists were still striving to build a unified picture of the -cosmic whole. Here, in this environment and with all the ages before -him, a man had a chance to reach that ancient goal, intellectual -understanding and emotional integration—someday, someday.</p> - -<p>The twilight was deep and blue and full of flitting ghostly lights. The -feathery trees murmured to each other in a language of their own, and -down under the long slope of dew-shining grass the river gleamed with -shifting phosphorescence. Something was singing in the night, an eerie -wavering scale that woke faint longings and dreads in men and set them -straining after something they had once known and forgotten.</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>Overhead the million thronging stars of Galactic center winked and -blazed through the flickering aurora. One of the moons rose, trailing -golden light through the sky. A wind blew through drifting clouds, and -it seemed as if the wind had language too and spoke to the men, if they -could but understand it.</p> - -<p>Chang said at last, slowly and heavily: "I don't know how she got past -the psychologists on Terra."</p> - -<p>"Eileen?" asked Langdon unnecessarily.</p> - -<p>"Of course." The older man was a shadow in the dusk, but the red -tip of his cigar waxed and waned as he drew on it for comfort. -"Somebody blundered. Or—wait—perhaps it was only that, while she was -fundamentally stable, the otherness of Tanith touched some deep-seated -psychological flaw in her, something that would never appear under any -other environment."</p> - -<p>"I don't quite know the system," said Langdon. "What do they do, back -at Sol?"</p> - -<p>"The first attempts at colonization showed that only the most stable -personalities could adapt to—or even survive—the apparent instability -of this planet. There aren't many who want to come here at all, of -course, but our planetary government maintains a psychological staff in -the more important worlds of the Galaxy to check those who do apply. -They're supposed to weed out all who couldn't take the strangeness, and -so far it's been very successful. Eileen is the first failure I know -of."</p> - -<p>Something cold seemed to close around Langdon. And then, he realized -wryly, he was skirting the main issue—afraid to face it.</p> - -<p>"I wonder if we really have the right to keep secret the fact that -there is no death here," he said.</p> - -<p>"It was a hard decision to make," answered Chang, "but leaving the -morals of it aside, it was the only practicable way. Suppose it were -generally known that this one place, in all the known universe, has -no age. Imagine all who would want to come here! The planet couldn't -hold a fraction of them. Even as it is, we have to space births very -carefully lest in a few centuries we crowd ourselves off the world. -Furthermore, the unstable social environment produced by such an influx -of colonists, most of whom couldn't stand the place anyway, would -delay, perhaps ruin, the research by which we hope to find out why life -does not grow old here. When we have that answer, and can apply it -outside this region of space, all the Galaxy will have immortality. But -until then, we must wait." He shrugged, a dim movement in the shining -night. "And immortals know how to wait."</p> - -<p>"So instead, we simply accept colonists who agree to stay here for -life—and then once they get here they're told how long that life will -be."</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>"Yes. Actually, the miracle is that the first colonists stayed at all, -after most had fled or gone insane. After all, it was ten or twenty -years before we even suspected the truth. A world as alien as this was -settled only because planets habitable to man and without aborigines -are hard to find. Since then, many more such worlds—normal ones—have -been discovered, and few people care to risk madness by coming here. -Tanith is an obscure dominion of the Galactic Union, having a certain -scientific interest because of its unique natural laws—but not too -great even there, when science has so many other things to investigate -just now. And we're quite content to remain in the shadow."</p> - -<p>"Of course." Langdon looked up to the swarming stars. A sheet of blue -auroral flame covered them for a moment.</p> - -<p>He asked presently: "How much further have our scientists gotten in -explaining the phenomenon?"</p> - -<p>"We've come quite a ways, but progress has been mostly in highly -technical fields of mathematical physics. You'll have to take a decade -or two off soon, Joseph, and learn that subject. Briefly, we do -know that this is a region of warped space, similar to those in the -neighborhood of massive bodies but of a different character. As you -know, natural constants are different in such regions from free space, -phenomena such as gravitation and the bending of light appear. This -is another sort of geometric distortion, but basically the same. It -produces differences in—well, in optics, in thermodynamics, in psi -functions, in almost everything. The very laws of probabilities are -different here. As a result, the curious phenomena we know appear. -Many of them, of course, are simply illusions produced by complex -refractions of light and sound waves: others are very real. The time -axis itself is subject to certain transformations which produce the -temporal mirages. And so it goes."</p> - -<p>"Yes, yes, I know all that. But what causes the warp itself?"</p> - -<p>"We're not sure yet, but we think it's an effect of our being near the -Galactic center of mass, together with—no, it would take me a week to -write out the equations, let alone explain them."</p> - -<p>There was a comfort in impersonal discourse, but it was a retreat from -more immediate problems. Langdon fairly rapped out the question: "How -close are you to understanding why we are immortal?"</p> - -<p>"Not at all close in detail," said Chang. "We think that it's due to -the difference in thermodynamic properties of matter I mentioned just -now, producing a balance of colloidal entropy. Well, elsewhere life is -metastable and can only endure so long. Here it is the natural tendency -of things, so much so indeed that life is generated spontaneously from -the proper chemical mixtures such as occur in many of the lakes and -pools hereabouts. In our own bodies, there is none of that tendency -toward chemical and colloidal degradation which I think lies at the -root of aging and death.</p> - -<p>"But that's just my guess, you know, and biological phenomena are -so extraordinarily complex that it will probably take us centuries -to work it out. After all, we haven't even settled all the laws of -Tanith's physics yet!"</p> - -<p>"Several centuries.... And there is no other planet where this might -also happen?"</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>"None have been found, and on the basis of our theory I'm inclined to -believe that Tanith is unique in the Galaxy—perhaps in the universe." -Langdon was aware of Chang's speculative gaze on him. "And if there -were others, they'd be just as foreign to Terra."</p> - -<p>"I see—" Langdon looked away, down to the streaming silver gleam of -the river. There was a ring of little lights dancing on the lawn; he -could hear the tinkle of elfland bells and he thought he could see -glowing wings and lithe light forms that were not human—but very -lovely.</p> - -<p>"You were thinking of moving away?" asked the synthesist at last.</p> - -<p>"Yes. I hated the thought, but Eileen—well—you saw her. And you -remember those first colonists."</p> - -<p>"I do. She is exhibiting all their symptoms. She can't stand the -unpredictability of her environment, and she can't adjust her scale of -values enough to see the beauty in what to her is wrong and horrible." -In the vague golden light, Langdon thought he glimpsed a grim smile on -the other man's face. "Perhaps she is right, Joseph. Perhaps it takes -someone not quite sane by the rest of the Galaxy's standards to adjust -to Tanith."</p> - -<p>"But—can't she see—I've told her—"</p> - -<p>"Intellectual understanding of a problem never solves it, though it may -help. Eileen takes your word for these being purely natural phenomena. -She's not superstitious. It might help if she were! Because explaining -the horror doesn't lessen it to her. Man is not a rational animal, -Joseph, though he likes to pretend he is."</p> - -<p>"Can't she be helped? Psychology?"</p> - -<p>"No." The old voice held pity, but it did not waver. "I've studied such -cases. If you keep her here much longer, she'll have a miscarriage and -go insane. The insanity might be curable, back at Sol, or it might not, -but as soon as she returned it would come again. Not that she could -ever stand to come back.</p> - -<p>"She is inherently unable to adapt herself to an utterly foreign -environment. You'll have to send her home, Joseph. Soon."</p> - -<p>"But—she's my <i>wife</i>...."</p> - -<p>Chang said nothing. A shining golden head swooped past in the darkness, -laughing at them, and the laughter was visible as red pulses in the -night.</p> - -<p>There came a step on the veranda. Langdon turned and saw Chang's wife -coming out with Eileen. The girl walked more steadily now. In the dim -radiance from the window, her face was calmer than it had been for some -time, and for an instant there was a flood of love and joy and relief -within Langdon.</p> - -<p>Chang was wrong. Eileen would learn. She was already starting to learn. -Tonight was the turning point. Tanith would take her to itself and they -would be together forever.</p> - -<p>"Eileen," he said, very softly, and got up and walked toward her. -"Eileen, darling."</p> - -<p>The atmosphere trembled between them. She saw the flesh run from his -bones, it was a skull that grinned at her, shining evilly green against -the dark, and the sounds that rasped from it were the mouthings of -nightmare.</p> - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<div class="figcenter"> - <img src="images/illus.jpg" alt=""/> -</div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<p>Somewhere, far back in the depths of her mind, a little cool voice -told her that there was nothing to be afraid of, that it was a brief -variation in optical and sonic constants which would pass away and then -Joe would be there. But the voice was drowned in her own screaming, she -was screaming for her mother to come and get her, it was a nightmare -<i>and she couldn't wake up</i>—</p> - -<p>Langdon ran toward her, with the rags of flesh hanging from his -phosphorescent bones, until Chang grabbed him back with a violence he -had never known to be possible in the old man.</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>There was a storm outside; the cottage shook to a fury of wind and -was filled with its noise and power. They had a fire going, and its -restless glow played over the room and beat against the calm white -light of fluorotubes, but it could not drive out the luminousness -beyond the window.</p> - -<p>"Pull the shades," asked Eileen. "Please, Joe."</p> - -<p>He looked away from the window where he stood staring out at the storm. -Fire sleeted across the landscape, whirling heatless flames that hissed -and crackled around the wind-tossed trees, red and blue and yellow and -icy white. The wind roared and boomed, with a hollow voice that seemed -to shout words in some unknown tongue, and from behind the curtain of -flaming rain there was the crimson glow of an open furnace. As if, -thought Langdon, as if the gates of Hell stood open just beyond the -hills.</p> - -<p>"It won't hurt us," he said. "It's only a matter of phosphorescence and -static discharges."</p> - -<p>"Please, Joe." Her voice was very small in the racket of wind.</p> - -<p>He shrugged, and covered the wild scene. He used to like to go out in -fire-storms, he remembered, their blinding berserk fury woke something -elemental in him and he would go striding through them like a god -shouting back at the wind.</p> - -<p>Well, it wouldn't be long now. The <i>Betelgeuse Queen</i> was due in a -couple of days on the intragalactic orbit that would take her back to -Sol. Eileen didn't have long to wait.</p> - -<p>He took a moody turn about the room. His wife had been very quiet since -her collapse of a week ago. Too quiet. He didn't like it.</p> - -<p>She looked wistfully up at his tall form. He thought that she looked -pathetically small and alone, curled up—almost crouched—in the big -armchair. Like a very beautiful child, too thin and hollow-eyed now but -beautiful.</p> - -<p>A child.</p> - -<p><i>She has to go. She can't live here. And I—well—if she goes, it will -be like a death within me. I love her.</i></p> - -<p>"I remember winter storms on Terra," said Eileen softly. "It would be -cold and dark, with a big wind driving snow against the house. We'd -come inside, cold but warm underneath with being out in it, and we'd -sit in front of a fire and have hot cocoa and cheese sandwiches. If it -was around Christmas time, we'd be singing the old songs—"</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>The wind yammered, banging on the door. A stealthy shape of light and -shadow wavered halfway between existence and nonexistence over in a -corner of the room. Eileen's voice trailed off and her eyes widened and -there was a small dry rattle in her throat. She gripped the arms of -her chair with an unnatural tension.</p> - -<p>Langdon saw it and came over to sit beside her on one arm of the chair. -Her hand closed tightly around his and she looked away from the weaving -shape in the corner.</p> - -<p>"You were always good to me, Joe," she murmured.</p> - -<p>"How could I be anything else?" he asked tonelessly. There was a new -voice in the storm now, a great belling organ was crying to him to come -out, Tanith was dancing in a sleet of fire just beyond the door.</p> - -<p>"I'll miss you," she said. "I'll miss you very much."</p> - -<p>"Why should you? I'll be along."</p> - -<p>"Will you. Joe? I wonder. I can't ask it of you. I can't ask you to -trade a thousand years of life, or ten thousand or a million, for the -little sixty or seventy you'll have left out there. I can't ask you to -leave your world for mine. You'll never be at home on Terra."</p> - -<p>He smiled, without much mirth. "It's a trite phrase," he said, "but you -know I'd die for you."</p> - -<p>"I don't doubt that. Joe. But would you—live for me?"</p> - -<p>He kissed her to avoid answering. <i>I don't know. I honestly don't know.</i></p> - -<p><i>It isn't so much a question of losing immortality, though God knows -that means a lot. It means more than any mortal will ever know. It's -that I'd be losing—Tanith.</i></p> - -<p>He thought of Sol, Sirius, Antares, the great suns and planets of -the Galaxy, and could not keep from shuddering. Drabness, deadness, -colorlessness, meaninglessness! Life was a brief blind spasm of -accident and catastrophe, walled in by its own shortness and the barren -environment of a death-doomed cosmos. Too small to achieve any purpose, -too limited even to imagine a goal, it flickered and went out into an -utter dark.</p> - -<div class="poetry"> - <div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse"><i>Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow</i></div> - <div class="verse"><i>Creeps in this petty place from day to day</i></div> - <div class="verse"><i>To the last syllable of recorded time,</i></div> - <div class="verse"><i>And all our yesterdays have lighted fools</i></div> - <div class="verse"><i>The way to dusty death....</i></div> -</div></div> - -<p>The storm sang outside, and he heard music and lure and enchantment. -It was not a discord, after two centuries he could hear some of the -tremendous harmony—after another while, he might begin to understand -the song.</p> - -<p>If he stayed, if he stayed.</p> - -<p><i>Eileen.</i></p> - -<p>His face twisted. She saw it, and pain bit at her, but there was -nothing she could say.</p> - -<p>He began pacing, and his mind took up the weary track of the past week. -Logic—think it out like a rational being.</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>Eileen had to go. But he could stay, and she would understand insofar -as any mortal could. Somewhere else, back in the Solar system or on -some other of man's many planets, she would find another husband who -could give her all his heart. <i>Which I could never do, because I love -Tanith. She would come to think of me as dead, she would hold him dear -for the brief span of their lives. She'd be happy. And maybe someday -she'd send the child back to me.</i></p> - -<p>As for himself—well, the initial pain of separation would be hard to -take, but he had an immortal's endurance. Sooner or later, the longing -would die. And there would be another woman someday on one of the -colony ships whom he could love and take to wife forever. He could -wait, he had all time before him....</p> - -<p>And he would be on Tanith....</p> - -<p>And there would be his friends. He thought of the utter loneliness that -waited for him in the Galaxy. Two hundred years was a sizeable draft -of eternity; he had acquired enough of the immortal's viewpoint and -personality to find the short-lived completely alien. He could never -know more than the most superficial comradeship with even the oldest of -those who were younger than he. He could never be close to his wife; -she would occupy only the smallest part of the emptiness within him. -Because before she had grown enough to match him, they would both be -dead.</p> - -<p><i>We'll die, go down in the futility of the universe, and Tanith will go -on. I might have been a god, but I'll go down in dust and nothingness. -No one will have gotten any good of me. Unless I stay.</i></p> - -<p>The wind called and called.</p> - -<p><i>Eileen was right. I'm not afraid to die. But I am afraid to live, in -the way she must. Horribly afraid.</i></p> - -<p><i>But I love her.</i></p> - -<p><i>Fifty years hence there'll be another woman.</i></p> - -<p><i>But I love Eileen now!</i></p> - -<p>Round and round, a crazy roaring whirlpool swinging and crashing -toward madness. His thoughts were running in a meaningless circle, the -familiar landmarks flickered by with ghastly speed in that devil's -race, the room wavered before him.</p> - -<p>He snarled with sudden inarticulate rage and grabbed his insulating -cloak and rushed out the door.</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>Eileen shrank back in her chair. He was gone. She was alone now and all -the powers of Tanith were rising up against her. The wind hooted and -whistled, piping down the chimney and skirling under the eaves. The -blind lifted to an invisible force and she saw the red flames of Hell -blazing outside. The fluoroglobes flickered toward extinction, darkness -closed down; but it was full of dancing light and glimmering shapes -that gibed and jeered and spun closer to her. The room began to whirl, -faster and faster, a tipping tilting saraband on the edge of madness.</p> - -<p>All the old forgotten powers of night and dark and Hell were abroad, -whirling on the wind and slamming against the door and banging their -heels on the roof. They rose out of the floor and seeped from the walls -and the air. Fire danced around them, and they neared her, crying -something that she knew would drive her mad when she understood it.</p> - -<p><i>Joe, Joe, Joe—Mother—God</i>—Joe was gone out into the storm. Mother -was dead these many years, God had forgotten. And the powers closed in -laughing at her and mocking and whispering what she could not stand to -hear and there and around and around and around and around and around -down, down, down, down, down into darkness—</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>Langdon did not hear her scream the first time. He stood in the living -torrent of light. Fire streamed about him and dripped from his hands; -his hair crackled with static electricity and the wind sang to him. -It filled him, the song of the wind, the song of Tanith. He was lost -in it, whirled up in a great singing joyous laughter. He <i>knew</i>—in -another moment he would know, he would be part of the allness and have -peace within him.</p> - -<p>Fire, wind, the slender graceful trees laughing as the flames leaped -around them, a great exultant chant from the living forests and the -dancing hills, a glimpse of an ancient Tanithian across many million -years, flying in the storm with the red and gold and blue and bronze -rushing off his wings, Tanith, Tanith, Tanith.</p> - -<p><i>Tanith, I love you, I am part of you. I can never go. This is the -thing other men do not know. More than immortality, more than all the -mighty dreams you give us, there is yourself. A day on Tanith is more -than a lifetime on Terra, but they will never know that because they -have never felt it. The strong love of a man for his home—but this is -passion, it is the whole of life, and Tanith gives it back. Here, and -here alone, is meaning and beauty and an unending splendid horizon. -Here alone a man can belong.</i></p> - -<p><i>See, see that bird with wings like molten silver!</i></p> - -<p>The second scream was wordless and crazy and horrible, but the dying -fragment of his own name went through him like a knife. For the barest -instant he stood there while the storm roared about him and the fire -rushed over the world. Then, quite simply, he ran back into the house.</p> - -<p>The blood and pain and screeching horror of the abortion left him -physically ill, but he managed to get her to bed and even, after a -long while, to sleep. Then he walked over to the window and drew the -blind. His shoulders sagged with the defeat and death and ruin that was -here....</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>The captain of the <i>Betelgeuse Queen</i> did not like Tanith and said as -much to his mate as they relaxed on the promenade deck.</p> - -<p>"The place gives you the blue willies," he declared. "Everything's -<i>wrong</i> there. Praise the powers it's so backward and obscure we only -have to stop there once a year or so."</p> - -<p>"The colonists seem to like it," said the mate.</p> - -<p>"They would," snorted the captain. "Worst bunch of clannish provincials -I ever saw. Why, they hardly ever leave the planet, except maybe for a -year or so at a time on essential business, and they won't be friendly -with anybody. Takes a crazy man to stand that world in the first place."</p> - -<p>He pointed to a tall man who was half leading, half supporting a young -woman along the deck. She would have been beautiful had she not been -badly underweight. She smiled at the man, but her eyes were haunted, -and his answering smile was far-away. It went no deeper than his lips.</p> - -<p>"That fellow Langdon is the only long-time colonist I ever heard of who -left Tanith for good," said the captain. "He must have been there for -years. Maybe he was born there, but he's coming back to Sol now. His -wife couldn't take the place."</p> - -<p>"I think I remember her from a year or so ago," nodded the mate. -"Didn't we carry her out with a few other colonists? Pretty as a -picture then, and full of life and fun—now look at her. Tanith did -that to her."</p> - -<p>"Uh-huh," agreed the captain. "I heard a little of the story down by -the spaceport. She nearly went crazy—finally had a miscarriage. It -was all they could do to save her life and sanity. Only then would -that Langdon take her back. He let her go on that way for months." -The captain's mouth twisted with contempt. 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