Earth's Last Citadel Read online

  Earth's Last Citadel

  Henry Kuttner

  & C.L. Moore

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1943 by C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition August 2014

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-402-8

  More from Henry Kuttner

  The Time Trap

  Book of Iod

  Elak of Atlantis

  Prince Raynor

  Murder of Eleanor Pope

  Murder of a Mistress

  Murder of a Wife

  Murder of Ann Avery

  The Best of Henry Kuttner

  Robots Have No Tails

  Ahead of Time

  Earth’s Last Citadel

  Mask of Circe

  Man Drowning

  Prologue

  Behind the low ridge of rock to the north was the Mediterranean. Alan Drake could hear it and smell it. The bitter chill of the North African night cut through his tom uniform, but sporadic flares of whiteness from the sea battle seemed to give him warmth, somehow. Out there the big guns were blasting, the battlewagons thundering their fury.

  This was it.

  And he wasn’t in it—not this time. His job was to bring Sir Colin safely out of the Tunisian desert. That, it seemed, was important.

  Squatting in the cold sand, Alan ignored the Scots scientist huddled beside him, to stare at the ridge as though his gaze could hurdle its summit and leap out to where the ships were fighting. Behind him, from the south, came the deep echoing noise of heavy artillery. That, he knew, was one jaw of the trap that was closing on him. The tides of war changed so swiftly—there was nothing for them now but heading blindly for the Mediterranean and safety.

  He had got Sir Colin out of one Nazi trap already, two breathless days ago. But Colin Douglas was too valuable a man for either side to forget easily. And the Nazis would be following. They were between the lines now, lost, trying desperately to reach safety and stay hidden.

  Somewhere in the night sky a nearing plane droned high. Moonlight glinted on Drake’s smooth blond head as he leaped for the shadow of a dune, signaling Sir Colin fiercely. Drake crouched askew, favoring his left side where a bullet gouge ran aslant up one powerful forearm and disappeared under his tom sleeve. He’d got that two nights ago in the Nazi raid, when he snatched Sir Colin away barely in time.

  Army Intelligence meant such work, very often. Drake was a good man for his job, which was dangerous. A glance at his tight-lipped poker-face would have told that. It was a face of curious contrasts. Opponents were at a loss trying to gauge his character by one contradictory feature or the other; more often than not they guessed wrong.

  The plane’s droning roar was very near now. It shook the whole sky with a canopy of sound. Sir Colin said impersonally, huddled against the dune:

  “That meteor we saw last night—must have fallen near here, eh?”

  There were stories about Sir Colin. His mind was a great one, but until the war he had detested having to use it. Science was only his avocation. He preferred the pleasures which food and liquor and society supplied. A decadent Epicurus with an Einstein brain—strange combination. And yet his technical skill—he was a top-rank physicist—had been of enormous value to the Allies.

  “Meteor?” Drake said. “I’m not worried about that. But the plane—” He glanced up futilely. The plane was drawing farther away. “If they spotted us…”

  Sir Colin scratched himself shamelessly. “I could do with a plane now. There seemed to be fleas in Tunisia—carnivorous sand-fleas, be damned to them.”

  “You’d better worry about that plane—and what’s in it.”

  Sir Colin glanced up thoughtfully. “What?”

  “A dollar to a sand-flea it’s Karen Martin.”

  “Oh.” Sir Colin grimaced. “Her again. Maybe this time we’ll meet.”

  “She’s a bad egg, Sir Colin. If she’s really after us, we’re in for trouble.”

  The big Scotsman grunted. “An Amazon, eh?”

  “You’d be surprised. She’s damned clever. She and her sidekick draw good pay from the Nazis, and earn it, too. You know Mike Smith?”

  “An American?” Sir Colin scratched again. “Americanized German. He’s got a bad history, too. Racketeer, I think, until Repeal. When the Nazis got going, he headed back for Germany. Killing’s his profession, and their routine suits him. He and Karen make a really dangerous team.”

  The Scotsman got laboriously to his feet, looking after the vanished plane.

  “Well,” he said, “if that was the team, they’ll be back.”

  “And we’d better not be here.” Drake scrambled up, nursing his arm.

  The Scotsman shrugged and jerked his thumb forward. Drake grinned. His blue eyes, almost black under the shadow of the full lids, held expressionless impassivity. Even when he smiled, as he did now, the eyes did not change.

  “Come on,” he said.

  The sand was cold; night made it pale as snow in the faint moonlight. Guns were still clamoring as the two men moved toward the ridge. Beyond it lay the Mediterranean and, perhaps, safety.

  Beyond it lay—something else.

  In the cup that sloped down softly to the darkened sea was—a crater. A shimmering glow lay half-buried in the up-splashed earth. Ovoid-shaped, that glow. Its mass was like a monstrous radiant coal in the dimness.

  For a long moment the two men stood silent. Then, “Meteor?” Drake asked.

  There was incredulity in the scientist’s voice. “It can’t be a meteor. They’re never that regular. The atmosphere heated it to incandescence, but see—the surface isn’t even pitted. If this weren’t war I’d almost think it was”—he brought out the words after a perceptible pause—“some kind of manmade ship from—”

  Drake was conscious of a strange excitement. “You mean, more likely it’s some Axis super-tank?”

  Sir Colin didn’t answer. Caution forgotten, he had started hastily down the slope. There was a faint droning in the air now. Drake could not be sure if it was a returning plane, or if it came from the great globe itself. He followed the Scotsman, but more warily.

  It was very quiet here in the valley. Even the shore birds must have been frightened away. The sea-battle had moved eastward; only a breeze stirred through the sparse bushes with a murmur of leaves. A glow rippled and darkened and ran like flame over the red-hot metal above them when the wind played upon those smooth, high surfaces. The air still had an oddly scorched smell.

  The night silence in the valley had been so deep that when Drake heard the first faint crackling in the scrubby desert brush he found that he had whirled, gun ready, without realizing it.

  “Don’t shoot,” a girl’s light voice said from the darkness. “Weren’t you expecting me?”

  Drake kept his pistol raised. There was an annoying coldness in the pit of his stomach. Sir Colin, he saw, from the corner of his eye, had stepped back into the dark.

  “Karen Martin, isn’t it?” Drake said. And his skin crawled with the expectation of a bullet from the night shadows. It
was Sir Colin they wanted alive, not himself.

  A low laugh in the dark, and a slim, pale figure took shape in the wavering glow from the meteor. “Right. What luck, our meeting like this!”

  Underbrush crashed behind her and another shape emerged from the bushes. But Drake was watching Karen. He had met her before, and he had no illusions about the girl. He remembered how she had fought her way up in Europe, using slyness, using trickery, using ruthlessness as a man would use his fists. The new Germany had liked that unscrupulousness, needed it—used it. All the better that it came packaged in slim, curved flesh, bronze-curled, blue-eyed, with shadowy dimples and a mouth like red velvet, the unstable brilliance of many mixed races shining in her eyes.

  Drake was scowling, finger motionless on the guntrigger. He was, he knew, in a bad spot just now, silhouetted against the brilliance of the—the thing from the sky. But Sir Colin was still hidden, and he had a gun.

  “Mike,” Karen said, “you haven’t met Alan Drake. Army Intelligence—American.”

  A deep, lazy voice from beyond the girl said, “Better drop the gun, buddy. You’re a good target.”

  Drake hesitated. There was no sign from Sir Colin. That meant,—what? Karen and Mike Smith were probably not alone. Others might be following, and swift action should be in order.

  He saw Karen’s eyes lifting past him to the glowing surface above. In its red reflection her face was very curious. Her voice, irritating sure of itself, carried on the ironic pretense of politeness.

  “What have we here?” she inquired lightly. “Not a tank? The High Command will be interested—” She stepped aside for a better look.

  Drake said dryly, “Maybe it’s a ship from outer space. Maybe there’s something inside—”

  There was.

  The astonishing certainty of that suddenly filled his mind, stilling all other thought. For an incredible instant the moonlit valley wavered around him as a probing and a questioning fumbled through his brain.

  Karen took two uncertain backward steps, the self-confidence wiped off her face by blank amazement, as if the questioning had invaded her mind too. Behind her Mike Smith swore abruptly in a bewildered undertone. The air seemed to quiver through the Mediterranean valley, as if an inconceivable Presence had suddenly brimmed it from wall to wall.

  Then Sir Colin’s voice spoke from the dark. “Drop your guns, you two. Quick. I can—”

  His voice died. Suddenly, silently, without warning, the valley all around them sprang into brilliant light. Time stopped for a moment, and Drake across Karen’s red head could see Mike hesitate with lifted gun, see the gangling Sir Colin tense a dozen feet beyond, see every leaf and twig in the underbrush with unbearable distinctness.

  Then the light sank. The glare that had sprung out from the great globe withdrew inward, like a tangible thing, and a smooth, soft, blinding darkness followed after.

  When sight returned to them, the globe was a great pale moon resting upon its crest of up-splashed earth. All heat and color had gone from it in the one burst of cool brilliance, and it rested now like a tremendous golden bubble in the center of the valley.

  A door was opening slowly in the curve of the golden hull.

  Drake did not know that his gun-arm was dropping, that he was turning, moving forward toward the ship with slow-paced steps.

  He was not even aware of the others crackling through the brush beside him toward that dark doorway.

  Briefly their reflections swam distorted in the golden curve of the hull. One by one they bent their heads under the low lintel of that doorway, in silence, without protest.

  The darkness closed around them all.

  Afterward, for a while, the great moon-globe lay quiet, shedding its radiance. Nothing stirred but the wind.

  Later an almost imperceptible quiver shook the reflections in the curved surfaces of the ship. The crest of earth that splashed like a wave against the sphere washed higher, higher. As smoothly as if through water, the ship was sinking into the sand of the desert. The ship was large, but the sinking did not take very long.

  Shortly before dawn armed men on camels came riding over the ridge. But by then earth had closed like water over the ship from space.

  I

  The Citadel

  It seemed to Alan Drake that he had been rocking here forever upon the ebb and flow of deep, intangible tides. He stared into grayness that swam as formlessly as his swimming mind, and eternity lay just beyond it. He was quite content to lie still here, rocking upon the long, slow ages.

  Reluctantly, after a long while, he decided that it was no longer infinity. By degrees the world came slowly into focus—a vast curve of a dim and glowing hollow rounded out before his eyes, mirrory metal walls, a ceiling shining and golden, far above. The rocking motion was imperceptibly ceasing, too. Time no longer cradled him upon its ebb and flow. He blinked across the vast hollow while memory stirred painfully. It was quiet as death in here; but he should not be alone.

  Karen lay a little way from him, her red hair showering across the bent arm pillowing her head. With a slow, impersonal pleasure he liked the way the curved lines of her caught shadow and low light as she sprawled there asleep.

  He sat up very slowly, very stiffly, like an old man. Memory was returning—there should be others. He saw them in a moment, relaxed figures dreaming on the shining floor.

  And beyond them all, in the center of the huge sphere, was the high, dark doorway, narrow and pointed at the top like an arrow, within which blackness would be lying curdled into faintly visible clouds of deeper and lesser darkness. That was the Alien. The name came painfully into his brain, and his stiff lips moved soundlessly, forming it. He remembered—what did he remember? It was all so long ago it really couldn’t matter much now, anyhow. He thought of the slow-swinging years upon which he had rocked so long.

  He frowned. Now how did he know it had been Time that rocked him in his sleep? Why was he so sure that years had ebbed like water through the darkness of this mirrory place and the silence of his dreams? Dreams! That must be it! He had dreamed—about the Alien, for instance. He had not known that name when he fell asleep. His mind was beginning to thaw a bit, and now there was a sharp distinction in it between the things that had happened before this sleep came upon him—and afterward.

  Afterward, in the long interval between sleeping and waking, the Alien was a part of that afterward. The things he dimly knew about it must have come floating into his mind from somewhere entirely outside the past he remembered. He closed his eyes and struggled hard to recall those dreams.

  No use. He shook his head dizzily. The memories swam formlessly just out of conscious reach. Later, they might come back—not now. He stretched, feeling the long muscles slip pleasantly along his shoulders. In a moment or two the others would be waking.

  It would be wiser if they woke unarmed. Whatever had been happening here in the dim time while Alan slept, Karen and Smith would wake enemies still. From here he could see that a revolver lay on the shining floor under Karen’s hand. He got up stiffly, conscious of an overwhelming lassitude, and leaned to take the gun from her relaxed fingers.

  Above her as he straightened he saw the high, arched doorway, and a sudden shock jolted him. For that dark and narrow portal was untenanted now. Nothing moved there, no curdled darkness, no swirl of black against black. The Alien was gone.

  Why he was so certain, he did not know. No power on earth, he thought, could have drawn him to that arrowshaped doorway to peer inside. But without it, he still knew they were alone now in the great empty shell of the ship.

  He knew they had all come in here, out of the desert night and the distant thunder of sea-fighting—come in silence and obedience to a command not theirs to question. They had slept. And in their sleeping, dreamed strangely. The Alien, hovering in the darkness of its doorway, must have controlled those dreams. And now the Alien had gone. Where, why, when?

  Karen stirred in her
sleep. The dreams were still moving through her brain, perhaps; perhaps she might remember when she woke, as he had not. But she would remember, too, that they were enemies. Alan Drake’s mind flashed back to the urgent present, and he stepped over her, past Sir Colin, to Mike Smith. He was lying on his side with a hand thrust under his coat as if even in the mindless lassitude which had attended their coming here, he had reached for his weapon.

  Mike Smith groaned a little as Alan rolled him over, searching for and finding a second gun. An instinctive antagonism flared in Alan as he looked down upon the big, bronzed animal at his feet. Mike Smith, soldier of fortune, had battled his way across continents to earn the reputation for which Nazi Germany paid him. A reputation for tigerish courage, for absolute ruthlessness. One glance at his blunt brown features told that.

  Karen sat up shakily. For a full minute she stared with blind blue eyes straight before her. But then awareness suddenly flashed into them and she met Alan’s gaze. Like a mask, wariness dropped over her face. Her finger closed swiftly, then opened to grope about the floor beside her. Simultaneously she glanced around for Mike.

  Alan laughed. The sound was odd, harshly cracked, as if he had not used his throat-muscles for a long time.

  “I’ve got the guns, Karen,” he said. A distant ghost mocked him from the high vaults above them. “Guns—Karen—guns—Karen…”

  She glanced up and then back again, and he wondered if a little shudder ran over her. Did she remember? Did she share this inexplicable feeling of strange nameless loss, of wrongness and disaster beyond reason? She did not betray it.

  Mike Smith was getting slowly to his feet, shaking his head like a big cat, groping for the guns that were not there. Deliberately Alan crossed to the curved wall. He wanted something solid at his back. Curiously, he noticed that his feet roused no echoes in all that vast, hollow place. Walking on steel as if he walked on velvet, he carried his load of guns toward the great circular crack in the outer wall that outlined the closed door they had entered through. Mike and Karen watched him dazedly. Beyond them, Sir Colin was sitting up, blinking.