"Moore, C L - Dust of Gods UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore C. L)

DUST OF GODS


“Pass the whisky, N.W.,” said Yarol the Venusian persuasively.
Northwest Smith shook the black bottle of Venusian segir- whisky tentatively, evoked a slight gurgle, and reached for his friend’s glass. Under the Venusran’s jealous dark gaze he measured out exactly half of the red liquid. It was not very much.
Yarol regarded his share of the drink disconsolately.
“Broke again,” he murmured. “And me so thirsty.” His glance of cherubic innocence flashed along the temptingly laden -counters of the Martian saloon wherein they sat. His face with its look of holy innocence turned to Smith’s, the wise black gaze meeting the Earthman ‘s pale-steel look questioningly. Yarol lifted an arched brow.
“How about it?” he suggested delicately. “Mars owes us a drink anyhow, and I just had my heat-gun recharged this morning. I thjnk we could get away with it.”
Under the table he laid a hopeful hand on his gun. Smith grinned and shook his head.
“Too many customers,” he said. “And you ought to know better than to start anything here. It isn’t healthful.”
Yarol shrugged resigned shoulders and drained his glass with a gulp.
“Now what?” he demanded.
“Well, look around. See anyone here you know? We’re open for business—any kind.”
Yarol twirled his glass wistfully and studied the crowded room from under his lashes. With those lashes lowered he might have passed for a choir boy in any of Earth’s cathedrals. But too dark a knowledge looked out when they rose for that illusion to continue long.
It was a motley crowd the weary black gaze scrutinized— hard-faced Earthmen in space-sailors’ leather, sleek Venusians with their sideboog,—dangerous eyes, Martian drylanders muttering the blasphemous gutturals of their language, a sprinkling of outlanders and half-brutes from the wide-flung borders of civilization. Yarol ‘s eyes returned to the dark, scarred face across the tble. He met the pallor of Smith’s no-colored gaze and shrugged. -
“No one who’d buy usa drink, “he sighed. “I’ve seen one or two of ‘em before, though. Take those two space-rats at the next table: the little rca-faced Earthman—the one looking over his shoulder—and the drylander with an eye gone. See? I’ve heard they’re hunters.”
“What for?”
Yarol lifted his shoulders in the expressive Venusian shrug. His brows rose too, quizzically.
“No one knows what they hunt—but they run together.”
- “Hm-m.” Smith turned a speculative stare toward the neighboring table. “They look more hunted than hunting, if you ask me.”
Yarol nodded. The two seemed to share one fear between them, if over-the shoulder glances and restless eyes spoke truly. They huddled together above their segir glasses, and though they had the faces of hard men, inured to the spaceway dangers, the look on those faces was curiously corn-
pounded of many unpleasant things underlying a frank, unreasoning alarm. It was a look Smith ~ouId not quite fathom—a haunted, uneasy dread with nameless things be-
-hind it.
“They do look as if Black Pharol were one jump behind,” said Yarol. “Funny, too. I’ve always heard they were pretty tough, both of ‘em. You have to be in their profession.”
Said a husky half-whisper in their very ears,
‘Perhaps they found what they were hunting.”
It produced an electric stillness. Smith moved almost imperceptibly sidewise in his chair, the better to clear his gun, and Yarol’s slim fingers hovered above his hip. Theyturned expressionless faces tGward the speaker.
A little man sitting alone at the next table had bent forward to fix them with a particularly bright stare. They met kin silence, hostile and waiting, until the husky half-whisper spoke again.
“May I join you? I couldn’t help overhearing that—that you were open for business.”
Without expression Smith’s colorless eyes summed up the speaker, and a puzzlement clouded their paleness. as be looked. Rarely does one meet a man whose origin and race are not apparent even upon close scrutiny. Yet here was one whom he could not classify: Under the deep burn of the man’s skin might be concealed a fair Venusian pallor or an Earthman bronze, canal-Martian rosiness or even a leathery dryland hide. His dark eyes could have belonged to any race, and his husky whisper, fluent in the jargon of the spaceman, effectively disguised its origin. Little and unobtrusive, he might have passed for native on any of the three planets.
Smith’s scarred, impassive face did not change as he looked, but after a long mOment of scrutiny he said, “Pull up,” and then bit off the words as if he had said too much.
The brevity must have pleased the little man, for he smiled as he complied, meeting the passively hostile stain of the two without embarrassment. He folded his arms on the table and leaned forward. The husky voice began without preamble,
“I can offer you employment—if you ~re-not afraid. It’s dangerous work, but the pay’s good enough to make up for it—if you’re not afraid.”
“Wha~t is it?”
“Work they—those two.—failed at. They were— hunters—until they found ‘What they hunted. Look at them
now.” -
Smith’s no-colored eyea did not swerve from the speaker’s face, but he nodded. No need to look again upon the fearridden faces of the neighboring pair. He understood.
“What’s the job?” he asked.
The little man hitched his chair closer and sent a glance round the room from under lowered lids. Ije scanned the faces of his two companions half dotIbtfully. He said, “There have beer~ many gods since time’s beginning,” then paused and peered dubiously into Smith’s face.
Northwest nodded briefly. “Go on,” he said.
Reassured, the little man took up his tale, and before he had gone far enthusiasm drowned out the doubtfulness in his j-husky voice, and a tinge of fanaticism crept in.
“There were gods who were old when Mars was a green planet, and a verdant moon circled an Earth blue with steaming seas, and Venus, mo1ten~hot, swung round a younger sun. Another world circled in space then, between-Mars and Jupiter where its fragments, the planetoids, now are. You will have heard rumors of it—they persist in the legends of every planet. It was a mighty, world, rich and beautiful, peopled by the ancestors in mankind. And on that world dwelt a mighty Three in a temple of crystal, served by strange slaves and worshipped by a world. They were not wholly abstract, as most modern gods have become. Some say they were frombeyond, and real, in their way, as flesh and blood.
“Those three gods were the origin and beginning of all other gods that mankind has known. All modern gods are echoes of them, in a world that has forgotten the very name of the Lost Planet. Saig they called one, and Lsa was the second. You will never have beard of them—they lied before
your world’s hot seas had cooled. No man knows bow they vanished, or why, and no trace of them is left anywhere in the universe we know. But there was a Third—a mighty Thmi set above these two and ruling the Lost Planet; so mighty a Third that even today, unthinkably long afterward, his name has not died from the lips of man. It has become a byword now— his name; that once no living man dared utter! I heard you call upon him not ten minutes past—Black Pharol!”
His husky voice sank to a quiver as it spoke the hackneyed name. Yarol gave a sudden snort of laughter, quickly hushed, and said, “Pharol! Why—”
“Yes, I know. Pharol, today, means unmentionable rites to an ancient no-god of utter darkness. Pharol has tunk So low that his very name denotes nothingness. -But in other days— ah, in other days! Black Pharol has not always been a blur of dark worshipped with obscenity. In other days men knew what things that darkness hid, nor dared pronounce the name you laugh at, lest unwittingly they stumble upon that secret twist of its inflection which opens the door upon the dark that is Pharol. Men have been engulfed before now in that utter blackness of the god, and in that dark have seen fearful things. I know”—theraw voice trailed away into a murmur—’ ‘such featful things that a man might scream his throat hoarse and never speak again above a whisper. . . .“
Smith’s eyes flicked Yarol’s. The husky murmur went on after a moment.
“So you see the old gods have not died utterly. They can never die as we know death: they come from too far Beyond to know either death or life as we do. They came from so very
- far that to touch us at all they had to take a visible form among mankind—to incarnate themselves in a material body through which, as through a door, they might reach out and touch the bodies and minds of men. The form they chose does not matter now—I do not know it. It was a material thing, and it has gone to dust so long ago that the very memory of its shape has vanished from the minds of men. But that dust still exists. Do you hear me? That dust which was once the fbet
and the greatest of all gods, still exists! It was that which those men hunted. It was that they found, and fled in deadly terror of what they saw there. You look to be made of firmer stuff. Will you take up the search where they left it?”