Against the Stone Beasts

Down the time-track tumbled Andreson, to land in a continuum of ghastly matter-and-space reversal--and find a love that shattered the very laws of life!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1948. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The letters on the fly-specked glass were simple, almost dogmatic. Andreson eyed them with some amusement. Art agents seldom have any taste, he thought; can't afford to.

The sign repeated, Special Showing of Surrealist Paintings, and declined to offer further information. Andreson started to walk on, then hovered indecisively. Modern arts of all kinds were his province in preparation for a doctorate thesis. It wouldn't do to let the smallest example go by without inspection. He went in.

The improvised gallery was musty with the odor of departed vegetables, and very cold. Like the sign, the show had been set up with a braggart simplicity. No programs, no furniture, no eager guides--there were not even any guards. Andreson wondered what was to stop a thief from stooping under the heavy rayon rope, which kept the frames out of reach of curious or greedy fingers, and making off with the whole collection.

With his first look at the paintings themselves, Andreson was blessing his good daemon fervently for having guided his footsteps. He could not place the works in any specific category; they certainly were not surrealistic, unless the word had been used in its original meaning of "super-realistic." The artist had used fantasy for his sources, true enough, but the results were not the usual shapelessness.

He angled his long body over the rope and inspected the nearest one. It was a huge canvas, reaching almost to the floor, and it depicted a building or similar structure like a glistening glass rod, rising from a forest of lesser rods toward a red sun of almost tangible hotness. A single figure, man-like, but borne aloft on taut, delicate wings which suggested a bat rather than a human, floated over the nearest of the towers. A quick glance revealed that all the paintings but one contained several of these shapes; the one exception was a field of stars with a torpedo streaking across it.

His quick glance confirmed another suspicion. The scenes were in deliberate order, as if attempting a pictorial history of the flying people. He felt vaguely disappointed. This stuff was garden-variety fantasy, verging on the conceptions of science-fiction. Still, there was a magnificent technique behind it all--a blending and effacing of brush-strokes which made the Dutch look like billboard-splashers, and a mastery of glaze which made each scene glow like an illuminated transparency.

This last painting by the door, for instance. It showed the translucent city again, with approximately the same details--but with a barely-perceptible dimming of the red sunlight, a single tower jaggedly shattered, a few other tiny touches, the artist had given it an atmosphere of almost unbearable desolation. It was the same fabulous metropolis--but it was tragic, deserted, lost. Peering hopelessly from the summit of the broken tower was a tiny face, looking directly upward at Andreson.

He allowed himself an appreciative shudder, and methodically went around the gallery, following the history the pictures built up. It seemed commonplace enough: a race of space-travellers who had colonized the Earth, perhaps some time in the dim past, had built a civilization, and had finally succumbed to some undepicted doom. What was amazing was the utterly convincing way the well-worn story was told. It was real--super-real, indeed, for it commanded more belief and sympathy than the everyday human tragedies.

Andreson took out his fountain pen and an unopened letter and walked toward the door. He must get the address of this place and attempt to locate the artist. John Kimball's inscription on the envelope reminded him that Johnny, though a scientist, dabbled in the arts and would be interested. He ripped open the flap, then stopped in mid-stride, ducked under the rayon cord to look at the spaceship scene.

In many ways this was the most wonderful of the lot. Even a night sky or a telescope field has no depth; it is merely a black surface containing spots of light; but the picture surpassed nature. It had a stereoscopic quality, all the more startling because it was impossible to ascertain how it was done. Andreson noted with a chuckle that the agent had placed the paintings in such order that there was a strong draft blowing toward the picture, as if being drained away into that awesome vacuum. A strictly phony trick, but clever nonetheless. Curious in spite of his better instincts, he put out a tentative finger to the surface of the scene--

The fountain pen clattered to the floor.

He gaped idiotically, and stirred with his finger at the nothingness where the picture still seemed to be. In his shock-numbed mind two words burned fiercely:

It's real.

Ridiculous. Tensely he forced himself to move his hand in deeper, against the yelling of his nerves. It struck a slight, tingling resistance, like a curtain of static electricity--and then the blood was pounding in each finger as if trying to burst through the skin. He snatched the hand back. There was a vacuum there; cut off from the room by some unseen force through which the air was leaking rapidly.

Teetering on the edge of panic, he struggled to make better sense of the facts. The prickly pounding he had felt in his fingers might well have been electrical and only that, and Johnny Kimball had once demonstrated for him the "static jet" which might explain the draft of air. Three-dimensional television, perhaps--

He shook his head. No inventor would set up a demonstration like this, in an abandoned grocery, without any announcement or literature; nor would there be likely to be eighteen screens, each one showing a motionless and quite impossible scene. No; it was insane, but these garish things were--

Windows.

Into what? Clutching at his frayed emotions, he took a step toward the next frame. His foot crunched on the forgotten fountain pen. For a second he flailed in terror at nothing, and then pitched head foremost over the low ledge.