Leigh Brackett Super Pack. Leigh Brackett

hesitated. Icy moth-wings flittered over Falken’s skin. He would have gone around, but black walls seemed to stretch endlessly on either side of the castle.

      “We go in,” he said, and shuddered at the thought of meeting folk like those who hunted the flaming-eyed colossus.

      Blasters ready, they went up flat titanic steps. A hall without doors stretched before them. They went down it.

      *

      Falken had a dizzy sense of change . The walls quivered as though with a wash of water over them. And then there were doors opening out of a round hall.

      He opened one. There was a round hall beyond, with further doors. He turned back. The hall down which they had come had vanished. There were only doors. Hundreds of them, of odd shapes and sizes, like things imperfectly remembered.

      Paul Avery began to laugh.

      Falken struck him, hard, over the helmet. He stopped, and Sheila caught Falken’s arm, pointing.

      Shadows came, rushing and wheeling like monstrous birds. Cold dread caught Falken’s heart. Shadows, hunting them....

      He choked down the mad laughter rising in his own throat. He opened another door.

      Halls, with doors. The shadows swept after them. Falken hurled the doors open, faster and faster, but there was never anything beyond but another hall, with doors.

      His heart was gorged and painful. His clothing was cold on his sweating body. He plunged on and on through black halls and drifting shards of light, with the shadows dancing all around and doors, doors, doors.

      Paul Avery made a little empty chuckle. “It’s laughing,” he mumbled and went down on the black floor. The shadows leaped.

      Sheila’s eyes were a staring fire in her starved white face. Her terror shocked against Falken’s brain and steadied it.

      “Take his feet,” he said harshly. “Take his feet.”

      They staggered on with their burden. And presently there were no more doors, and no roof overhead. Only the light and the glassy walls, and the dancing shadows.

      The walls were thin in places. Through them Falken saw the dark colossus with its flaming eyes, straining through the spangled light. After it came the hounds and hunters, not gaining nor falling back, riding in blind absorption.

      The walls faded, and the shadows. They were alone in the center of the black plain. Falken looked back at the castle.

      There was nothing but the flat and naked rock.

      He laid Avery down. He saw Sheila Moore fall beside him. He laughed, one small, mad chuckle. Then he crouched beside the others, his scarred gypsy face a mask of living stone.

      Whether it was then, or hours later that he heard the voice, Falken never knew. But it spoke loudly in his mind, that voice. It brought him up, his futile blaster raised.

      “You are humans,” said the voice. “How wonderful!”

      Falken looked upward, sensing a change in the light.

      Something floated overhead. A ten-foot area of curdled glory, a core of blinding brilliance set in a lacy froth of fire.

      The beauty of it caught Falken’s throat. It shimmered with a sparkling opalescence, infinitely lovely—a living, tender flame floating in the rainbow light. It caught his heart, too, with a deep sadness that drifted in dim, faded colors beneath the brilliant veil.

      It said, clearly as a spoken voice in his mind:

      “Yes. I live, and I speak to you.”

      Sheila and Avery had risen. They stared, wide-eyed, and Sheila whispered, “What are you?”

      The fire-thing coiled within itself. Little snapping flames licked from its edges, and its colors laughed.

      “A female, isn’t it? Splendid! I shall devise something very special.” Colors rippled as its thoughts changed. “You amaze me, humans. I cannot read your minds, beyond thoughts telepathetically directed at me, but I can sense their energy output.

      “I had picked the yellow one for the strongest. He appeared to be so. Yet he failed, and you others fought through.”

      Avery stared at Falken with the dawn of an appalled realization in his amber eyes. Falken asked of the light:

      “What are you?”

      The floating fire dipped and swirled. Preening peacock tints rippled through it, to be drowned in fierce, proud scarlet. It said:

      “I am a child of the Sun.”

      *

      It watched them gape in stunned amazement, and laughed with mocking golden notes.

      “I will tell you, humans. It will amuse me to have an audience not of my own creating. Watch!”

      A slab of the glassy rock took form before them. Deep in it, a spot of brilliance grew.

      It was a Sun, in the first blaze of its virile youth. It strode the path of its galactic orbit alone. Then, from the wheeling depths of space, a second Sun approached.

      It was huge, burning with a blue-white radiance. There was a mating, and the nine worlds were born in a rush of supernal fire.

      And there was life. Not on the nine burning planets. But in free space, little globes of fire, bits of the Sun itself shocked somehow to intelligence in the vast explosion of energy.

      The picture blurred. The colors of the floating light were dulled and dreamy.

      “There were many of us,” it sighed. “We were like tiny Suns, living on the conversion of our own atoms. We played, in open space....”

      Dim pictures washed the screen, glories beyond human comprehension—a faded vision of splendor, of alien worlds and the great wheeling Suns of outer space. The voice murmured:

      “Like Suns, we radiated our energy. We could draw strength from our parent, but not enough. We died. But I was stronger than the rest, and more intelligent. I built myself a shell.”

      “Built it!” whispered Avery. “But how?”

      “All matter is built of raw energy, electron and proton existing in a free state. With a part of my own mass I built this world around myself, to hold the energy of the Sun and check the radiation of my own vitality.

      “I have lived, where my race died. I have watched the planets cool and live and die. I am not immortal. My mass grows less as it drains away through my shell. But it will be a long, long time. I shall watch the Sun die, too.”

      The voice was silent. The colors were ashes of light. Falken was stricken with a great poignant grief.

      Then, presently, the little malicious flames frothed to life again, and the voice said:

      “My greatest problem is amusement. Here in this black shell I am forced to devise pleasures from my own imagination.”

      Falken gasped. “The hunters, the cleft that vanished, and that hellish castle?” He was suddenly cold and hot at once.

      “Clever, eh? I created my hunt some eons ago. According to my plan the beast can neither escape nor the hunters catch him. But, owing to the uncertainty factor, there is one chance in some hundreds of billions that one or the other event may occur. It affords me endless amusement.”

      “And the castle?” said Falken silkily. “That amused you, too.”

      “Oh, yes! Your emotional reactions....Most interesting!” Falken raised his blaster and fired at the core of the light.

      Living fire coiled and writhed. The Sun-child laughed.

      “Raw energy only feeds me. What, are there no questions?”

      Falken’s voice was almost gentle. “Do you think of nothing but amusement?”