Can it be that of all the billions of probably planets, revolving around strange suns, in far corners of the Universe, ours is the only home of intelligent life? If life has managed to come into being elsewhere on some bizarre, grotesque world, just how strange and alien will that life be? What if its own planet is dying? It would need a new environment, and the questing ships of its explorers would traverse the void. What if they find Earth and decide that it suits their purpose perfectly... except for man? How would the battle be fought and who would win?
Release date:
December 30, 2013
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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ALAN VALDER was asleep. At least his body was asleep. His mind was undergoing the most hideous series of experiences in a realm of its own. Valder was in the middle of a ghastly nightmare. He could see himself, a not unusual dream experience, fleeing headlong down a precipitous path away from some strange nameless terror. What it was that pursued him he couldn’t say, he was just aware of this unending flight. The knowledge grew upon him as he ran that his pursuer was overtaking him. His feet seemed to be weighted down. He had the greatest difficulty in making any headway at all. Sometimes even in the worst of nightmares that little balancing factor of our everyday waking sanity tells us that after all this is only a nightmare, that we have had this rather unpleasant experience several times before in our lives. No doubt we shall have it many times in the future and that it’s nothing really to worry about. “It’s only a dream.” Nothing more than the regurgitation of various facts which the waking mind has assimilated; passed on to the unconscious, from whence they are confused, jumbled and reissued in a rather unpalatable form. The psychologist could also tell us that nightmares and dreams contain a reasonable proportion, an admixture, of symbolism, and that sometimes our primitive urges find expression in this sphere. … But no such consoling thoughts comforted Alan Valder as he tossed and turned in the grip of that terrifying dream. His breathing became heavy, desperate; long painful gasps sucked life-giving air into his famished lungs. Every nerve in his dream-body was screaming out for rest, and yet there seemed to be none. The deadly pursuer—whoever or whatever it was—was steadily gaining on him. He could sense—feel—rather than hear, its rapidly approaching movement. Whether it ran; whether it walked; whether it flew; whether it swam, he knew not. He only knew that it was terrible beyond belief and that he must—MUST, escape! As he ran down the path it wasn’t a path any more. It was a huge chart, such as he had often seen in museums or exhibitions. It seemed to be some kind of geological chart for as he ran he lost all sense of whether he ran horizontally, or vertically.
He could see that lines were drawn at short intervals. Lines of demarcation, that divided up that chart. … Whether they were real objects over which he ran or just images and reproductions he could not be sure, but here beneath his feet now as he ran were skeletons and complete reproductions of pliocene man. Low-browed, shaggy-haired, simian ape-like creatures, stared up implacably as his invisibly fettered feet bounded over their unresisting heads. He almost tripped over a stone spear; still he raced onwards. Forwards, forwards, forwards away from the nameless, pursuing, faceless horror behind him. The horror at which he dare not look. Physically his hands twisted and untwisted the sheets of his bed with such a violence that they almost tore, beads of sweat stood out on his forehead and his lips and facial muscles twitched nervously, with an outward sign of an inward stress. He continued to run wearily, desperately in his dream. The cavemen grew less simian and more human with each line that he crossed. The stone weapons less primitive and more utilitarian. Now stone had given way to bronze—bronze to iron, and the iron in its turn was giving way to newer and better alloys. And now they were not cavemen, now they were not even primitive, they were recognisable, perfectly recognisable, here were Greeks and Romans, Vikings and Danes, Anglo-Saxons. The Middle Ages passed by him in this strange pictorial representation. More lines. The Renaissance; more weary dragging steps and now the thing was almost breathing down his neck, if it did breathe. If there was any place for air in its terrifying metabolism. Still he ran on expecting, dreading, a claw, the extremity of the beast, to reach out; seize him; hold him fast and draw him back towards he knew not what unmentionable fate. He continued to run. Renaissance, 18th century, 19th century, 20th century. Like the illustration from a war encyclopaedia he seemed to see the dead and dying of the great international struggles of man. And then he caught his breath for the chart did not stop at modern man. It seemed to go on as though he was running upon not so much a chart of history as an unrevealed blueprint for the future of mankind.
Something touched the back of his coat and he was filled with the feeling of unparalleled nausea and horror. The creature had seized him! and yet even in that second of unbelievable terror and unspeakable dread he was still captivated by the pictures that were unfolding beneath his flying feet. There seemed a strange anxiety over-clouding this future as if it was an uncertain future—a threatened future, a future in which man faced a deadlier peril than any he had faced before and Valder knew, knew intuitively, that the thing which threatened him was nameless horror threatening all mankind He woke up in a cold sweat of fear, lay clutching the blankets, and staring up at the ceiling for a full ten minutes before he dared to rouse himself. Switch on the light He reached out a trembling hand for a detective novel that lay not far from him Half an hour’s reading and he was back to something like his old self. But his fingers still trembled a little as he put out the light once more and fell back into uneasy sleep Again his head had scarcely touched the pillow and the merciful mists of unconsciousness enfolded him before his subconscious was on the work again, guiding him along strange troubled paths.
The creature still held him; it was as if the dream had carried on from where it had been broken off The creature still held him. held him fast in an unbreakable grip with claws or hands or what other limbs it had. it was turning him inexorably round so he knew he would soon be forced to gaze upon it. He screamed then, screamed horribly, screamed with a loudness terrible to hear Screamed not only with his lips and his voice. but with his heart, his mind and his soul. It was a scream into which every facet of his being was concentrated, it was the crowning cry of a heart’s despair. It was Alan Valder’s refusal to face the inevitable.
He closed his eyes but the way of nightmare is strange and he found that closed or open the enemy was still visible There was nothing he could do to avoid the dreadful sight of it. No way in which he could hide his gaze from that revolting apparition. The creature that held him was like an enormous stick insect or praying mantis. It was a silvery grey from head to foot and from his position in its irresistibly strong fore-limbs Valder estimated that it must stand at least fifteen feet tall. The most hideous part about it was the head which was surmounted by a pair of jagged oscillating antennae beneath which two verdant eves radiated a terrifying light There was no nose, but the centre of the creature’s face, unlike the rest of its silver-greyness, was jet black and fashioned in the shape of a triangle that has been drawn upon a slightly convex surface. Valder got the impression that he was being scrutinized not only by the dreadful green eves but that in some unaccountable way the monster which held him was appraising him. perceiving him. by means of this black triangle. It was E.S.P It had in its physiology some weird element that enabled it to receive impressions completely independently of those with which we are familiar in this terrestrial life.
The eyes and the black triangle continued to study him carefully Alan felt like some microscopic living creature on the slide of a scientific enlarging device. There was no apparent sensitivity or feeling in those green eyes This creature had sentience but not sentiment: it was mind. but not heart. It was pure, stark. cold intelligence as innocent of the milk of human kindness as a machine. and yet there was more to it than a mere machine It was alive in every vibrant shade of the word’s meaning. In the nightmare Valder was held absolutely motionless for what seemed an eternity. Man and monster stared at each other The former in terror, the latter in apparent curiosity Then. as suddenly as its seizure of him, the creature released its hold. With a descending, sickening feeling Valder felt himself dropping to the terrain. The chart or map over which he had been running seemed to have disappeared and he now found himself enveloped in a mysterious velvet darkness which was everywhere. A suffocating stygian darkness, a thousand times more intense than the darkest darkness he had ever encountered before. It was worse than blindness, for even that, terrible though it is, can be alleviated by the memory of light, and sights that have been seen. It can be counteracted to some extent by the imagination, by the eyes of make-believe. Yet this darkness which enfolded Alan Valder was a darkness of the mind and the soul as well as of body. He was completely helpless. encompassed by it, there was nothing else in the universe but the being that called itself Alan Valder and the darkness. He felt that it was forcing its way into his lungs, into the pores of his skin. Everywhere. Seeking to turn him into a thing of darkness. His mind screamed out against it, protested, resisted and yet the darkness continued to stifle and extinguish not only the light that had been there in the dream, but the memories of light which he had in his mind. Try as he would he could now remember nothing but darkness. He forced all his attention to concentrate on a match, upon a candle: upon an electric light: but it was no use … there was nothing but darkness The darkness seeped in, strangling him; crushing: smothering him. … Again he tried to scream, but it was choked by the very velvet of the darkness. And then, suddenly, when he felt that his being could stand no more, that he must sim. . .
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