99 Classic Science-Fiction Short Stories. Айзек Азимов

ran to the machine. leaped in and threw on the levers. The car jumped forward into the night-or rather the day, as it seemed to me. Its force was such as almost to hurl me from my seat. The missiles in the air rained like bullets upon my face. The lamps of the city blurred in one long, sideways streak of lightning. But the uproar of the night was drowned in the noise of the car. Quickly I put the machine at its top speed and darted like a demon through the night. I shall never forget that ride—roaring through the town at sixty miles an hour, yet seeming hardly to move. A policeman on a motor bicycle tried to stop me, but I raced him three miles and left him far behind. Out through the country I sped, tearing through quiet villages whose lights seemed like the halo around a lantern on a misty night, across bridges whose rumbling under the onslaught of the car sounded like the crash of artillery, through woodlands, over wide plains, around the shores of lakes sleeping in the blaze of the stars I whirled, until my jaded senses ceased to feel and weariness like a heavy hand descended upon me. My brain was numb. The desire to sleep overpowered all else.

      I ran the car into a field, staggered through the grass to a clump of trees and, finding a moss-grown hollow between some high rocks, threw myself upon my face and found oblivion.

      A piercing cry awoke me, shivering with terror. Day had come—the real day; for the burning rays of the rising sun broke incandescent through the trees and beat pitilessly upon my eyes. The cry was repeated. I started to my feet, and a crow, which had been sitting upon a bough above my head, flapped its wings and flew lazily away. Covering my eyes with my hands to exclude the light. I threw myself upon the earth again. The air was filled with the chorus of millions of insects, deep tones like the bassoons of an orchestra mingling with the sound of a thousand violins, in which were interspersed strange shrieks and cries of an unearthly character. For the first time, mortal ear recorded the pandemonium of insect life. To this nerve—varying accompaniment were added the bellowing of cattle and the organ-like notes of the birds which circled through the wood. The confusion of sound produced violent pain in my ears and, tearing my handkerchief in pieces, I plugged them as best I could.

      Soon, curiosity led me to remove my hands from my eyes and half closing them to keep out the light, I peered about me. To my astonishment, I saw that every inch of the atmosphere was crowded with flying insectivora of the most extraordinary shapes, like the "troubles" from Pandora's box; flies, beetles, insects of every conceivable variety that I had never seen before hovered and darted above me. The air was filled so thickly with them that there seemed hardly room for the other myriad atoms that floated beside them and swirled in the eddying haze. Out of this confusion of life came shrieks and cries as the insectivora preyed upon one another.

      Throwing my coat over my head to keep out as much as I could of light and sound I stumbled through the grove and out upon a hillside. A motor—going, I knew, at sixty miles an hour—moved along a distant highway. I could see every spoke of the lazily-turning wheels. I found that my eyesight had been so intensified that I could read the number of the car and distinguish a patch upon its tire.

      In place of the noisome stenches of the night before, however, I breathed the pungent odors of the fields and herbs, and this afforded me the only relief that I experienced throughout this awful period of time, for my clothes still seemed heavy as chain mail and my shirt chafed me as if made of horsehair.

      At last, after I had staggered around the hill for what seemed to me to be two or three days at least, I found, about noon, a little pool of water, and, kneeling beside it, I drank like one bereft, as indeed I was, of ordinary senses. As I raised my head I beheld in its placid surface the face of a man—my own, yet utterly changed. My hair was streaked with gray, my brow was seared with wrinkles, my cheeks sunken and marked by age. I was an old man! The sight drove me frantic. If death was coming, why should it not come without delay?

      In an utter abandonment of despair I cast aside my coat and, half blinded and dazed with pain, ran across the fields to where the motor still stood by the roadside. Resolved to die and to die quickly I cranked it and sprang in. A moment more and I was tearing down the road at fifty miles an hour. I threw on all the power. Ahead loomed a turn in the road and a huge boulder. At this I steered with a wild prayer in my teeth. There was a crash, an explosion, I felt myself whirling through the air and–

      "It's all right. Everything is all right!" I heard Migraine say reassuringly. Then voices chattered in Japanese.

      Out of the air or out of somewhere I tumbled sideways and found myself sitting in the old shabby chair in the doctor's study. I felt dizzy and a blur over my eyes prevented me at first from seeing clearly. A faint odor of heliotrope floated toward me and Migraine's big form loomed near by, a brandy and soda in his outstretched hand. But I brushed it aside and staggered to my feet. The doctor watched me curiously—could it be that in his eye lurked the sinister expression that I had seen, or thought that I had seen, there so short a time before? I shuddered and shakily felt my way to the mantel, over which hung a mirror. The face that greeted me was the face I had seen in the pool! With a sinking heart I gazed at the hollow cheeks—at the hair unmistakably streaked with gray.

      "I didn't bargain for this!" I thought hysterically.

      "No," came in quiet tones from behind me, more startling to my agitated spirit than anything that as yet had happened to me. "That is simply the price of your little excursion into the unknown." Then he added quite naturally: "How do you like the Nth power?"

      I gulped and pulled myself together as best I could, trying to be game to the end.

      "Not for mine!" I answered. "My little old brain will do me for a while yet. Do you mind calling me a cab?"

      5. The Black Abbot of Puthuum

      Clark Ashton Smith

      The Black Abbot of Puthuum

      Let the grape yield for us its purple flame,

      And rosy love put off its maidenhood:

      By blackening moons, in lands without a name,

      We slew the Incubus and all his brood.

-– Song of King Hoaraph's Bowmen

      Zobal the archer and Cushara the pikebearer had poured many a libation to their friendship in the sanguine liquors of Yoros and the blood of the kingdom's enemies. In that long and lusty amity, broken only by such passing quarrels as concerned the division of a wine-skin or the apportioning of a wench, they had served amid the soldiery of King Hoaraph for a strenuous decade. Savage warfare and wild, fantastic hazard had been their lot. The renown of their valor had drawn upon them, ultimately, the honor of Hoaraph's attention, and he had assigned them for duty among the picked warriors that guarded his palace in Faraad. And sometimes the twain were sent together on such missions as required no common hardihood and no disputable fealty to the king.

      Now, in company with the eunuch Simban, chief purveyor to Hoaraph's well-replenished harem, Zobal and Cushara had gone on a tedious journey through the tract known as Izdrel, which clove the western part of Yoros asunder with its rusty-colored wedge of desolation. The king had sent them to learn if haply there abode any verity in certain travelers' tales, which concerned a young maiden of celestial beauty who had been seen among the pastoral peoples beyond Izdrel. Simban bore at his girdle a bag of gold coins with which, if the girl's pulchritude should be in any wise commensurate with the renown thereof, he was empowered to bargain for her purchase. The king had deemed that Zobal and Cushara should form an escort equal to all contingencies: for Izdrel was a land reputedly free of robbers, or, indeed, of any human inhabitants. Men said, however, that malign goblins, tall as giants and humped like camels, had oftentimes beset the wayfarers through Izdrel, that fair but ill-meaning lamiae had lured them to an eldritch death. Simban, quaking corpulently in his saddle, rode with small willingness on that outward journey; but the archer and the pike bearer, full of wholesome skepticism, divided their bawdy jests between the timid eunuch and the elusive demons.

      Without other mishap than the rupturing of a wine-skin from the force of the new vintage it contained, they came to the verdurous pasture-lands beyond that dreary desert. Here, in low valleys that held the middle meanderings of the river Vos, cattle and dromedaries were kept by a tribe of herders who sent biannual tribute to Hoaraph from their teeming droves.