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- Herausgeber: Al-Mashreq eBookstore
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
Slaves of the Lamp by Arthur Leo Zagat is a haunting and imaginative tale that blends mystery, fantasy, and horror. In a world where an ancient lamp holds unimaginable power, those who fall under its spell become its unwilling servants, doomed to obey its dark commands. As the lamp passes from one unfortunate soul to another, the line between reality and nightmare blurs. When a determined investigator stumbles upon the cursed artifact, they must unravel its sinister history and break the cycle before the lamp claims another victim. Will they succeed, or will they too become a slave to its unholy power? Dive into this eerie and suspenseful story that will keep you captivated until the last page.
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Seitenzahl: 162
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Slaves of the Lamp
PART I.
CHAPTER I.
CHALLENGE
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
PART II.
SYNOPSIS OF PART I
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
Landmarks
Table of Contents
Cover
Slaves of the Lamp
PART I.
Astounding Science Fiction, August 1946
CHAPTER I.
Man shifts the great rivers and pens them, he bores the bowels of the Earth. He levels the mountains and raises dry lands where the green tides once rolled. At his will Man traces highways through the impalpable air, traverses the oceans' deep gloom. With the harnessed might of the atom he banishes the night and he makes the desert to bloom. Pigmy-bodied, giant-minded, Man shapes his world to his needs.
One thing alone defies Man's skill and his will. One sole thing Man cannot change, the fundamental nature of Man.
—Riis Narghil (2088-2163)
THE sentences glowed in cold light on a wall so vast that though each character was a half meter wide and proportionately high, they seemed very lonely on the dim expanse. Above the inscription, not so much entitling it as utterly altering its author's meaning, was the single word:
CHALLENGE
Natlane had never quite been able to bring himself to ask any of the other Lampmen whether they shared a certain strange experience with him.
Sometimes at once, sometimes only some minutes after his vigil had begun, he would become part of his Lamp's flame. There was never any definite transition. The globe would not expand to embrace him, nor would he seem to dwindle and sink through its shell.
One moment he would be crouched in the cubicle on the Peace Dome's Gallery. His visored gaze would be intent on the ball of transparent vitron, half again the diameter of a man's head, the sparks within it innumerable. They seemed a solid mass, their colors—violet, yellow, green, crimson—so exactly balanced, the lumisphere seemed from a little distance pure white. He would be perfectly aware of the Lamp as a separate entity, of the dim row of push buttons studding the metal base in which it was cupped, of the Gallery's shadowed sweep interminably away from him to either side.
One moment he would be Natlane, Chicago Lamp, Shift Three. The next he'd be a spark within the coruscant sphere, a mere crepitant point of brilliance among myriads.
The phenomenon did not at all interfere with his efficiency. Let the slightest chromatic imbalance occur and instantly Natlane was outside it again. Clear-brained, alert, he would be prepared instantly to evaluate the indicated aberration in the even temperament of the distant City and decide whether it warned of some threat to the Peace of the World, prepared if it did to signal the Experts and the Technicians on the Dome's Floor.
If, however, there had been no shift to the red of irritation or the blue of depression and when his trick ended he were still in this strange state—of autohypnosis he supposed it was—his relief's hand on Natlane's shoulder would wrench him back to normalcy with a violence that had him physically ill, for agonizing seconds.
As now.
"O.K., Mart," he mumbled, fighting waves of nausea more distressing than any before. "I... I'll get out of your way in two ticks." He swallowed hard, tried to dissemble his condition with, "You startled me. I didn't realize it was anywhere near four yet."
"It ain't." Struggling out of his seat, Natlane discerned that it wasn't Martadams, Shift Four, who slid into it but one of the extras who filled in when some personal emergency necessitated a Lampman's temporary absence from his cubicle. "It's eleven-thirteen."
"Eleven-thir—Vicdell! There's some mistake. I didn't buzz for a relief."
"No mistake," the other grunted, his hooded eyes already fixed on the Lamp. "You're wanted up top, by the chief of staff, no less."
A muscle knotted at the point of Natlane's gaunt jaw. "What does Van Gooch want of me?"
A shrug of bent shoulders. "He forgot to tell me, believe it or not. Look, brother," Vicdell went on, "it's none of my never mind but if I were you, I'd get up there fast as that gyrcar will take me."
"Yeh, yeh, I guess you're right."
As he moved across the Gallery to the slim aerbat hovering, gunwale against the broad rail, Natlane's thoughtful brow was furrowed and his lean frame tight strung with taut nerves. A summons from Rudolf van Gooch was too rare an event to be considered lightly but there was no good reason for apprehension.
Nevertheless, apprehension brooded darkly in the Lampman's dark eyes.
The Gallery from which the gyrcar whispered away was a long stretch of dimness relieved only by the opalescent glow of the Hoskins Lamps, before each a motionless shadow-shape, face eerily disembodied in the soft radiance. The Gallery was hushed, somnolent, but far below, the Dome's floor was electric with an antlike bustle.
From the soaring, unillumined roof, so high and so completely without visible prop it seemed a veritable sky, two white shafts of light struck vertically down through the gloom and made brilliant the giant semiglobes at the foci of the thousand hectare ellipse. Midget-seeming at worktables aligned radiant from and concentric to these shining hubs, the experts drew their graphs or collated tables of data on the temperament characteristics of their respective Cities. Rimming the vast oval and retreating beneath the cantilevered balcony, the technicians swarmed among their gauges and switchboards, their gleaming busbars and coiled serpent-jungles of cables more dangerous than serpents with the tremendous potentials of the Neural Currents that could lull a City to torpidity or fire it with human passions.
The force-field of Natlane's gyrcar thrummed as it fended off a one-seater. Flaunting the purple stripe of a Staffman of the Sociological Control Board, the other craft darted away, was lost in the innumerable gnat-dance of its kind. The Lampman's tiny car sighed to a halt.
The inverted turret that was the Peace Dome's nerve center hung from the roof, midway between the two light shafts. There was no visible break in its gleaming aludur wall, but almost at once an aperture soundlessly opened to admit Natlane.
As noiselessly, it shut again behind him and the hush was so profound his ears seemed abruptly stuffed with cotton wool. He stood rigid, pupils dilated for dimness dazzled by the brightness of artificial daylight.
He felt eyes on him. A hard knot tightened at the pit of his stomach. "Lampman Natlane," a toneless voice droned. "Chicago Lamp. Shift Three." His vision cleared and he saw a tawny-tressed girl behind a desk that barely left room for him in a narrow anteroom.
"You know me?"
Natty in a feminized version of his own blue-green uniform, she looked right through him. "Have him wait," the desk's blank surface murmured and it dawned on Nat that the girl had not greeted but announced him.
"I shall have Lampman Natlane wait," she acknowledged. Her fingers, long and slim and ruby-tipped, moved on the desk's edge. Her cool, gray eyes became aware of him, "I didn't know you," she smiled, her voice friendly now, "till the portal opened for you."
"You mean it wouldn't have opened for anyone else?"
"Right. It was set for your electroneural aura." From a slit in a boxlike contrivance set on legs beside her, she produced an eight by thirteen cm rectangle of plastic perforated in an apparently random pattern. "Your personnel card, Lampman." Mischief tugged at the corners of her generous mouth. "I can read it offhand, so don't ever get the notion you can kid me about you."
"I won't." Natlane promised, a bit grimly. "If you can read those punches, you know me far better than I do myself. Suppose you tell me about me while I'm waiting."
"Hm-m-m." The girl's eyes dropped to the slit into which she was inserting the card. "It wouldn't be good for you. But I can give you a little advice. Keep your temper in check when you get in there. Watch every syllable you say."
A vague sense of urgency in her tone prickled Nat's spine, but he realized it would be useless to demand an explanation. "Thanks," he smiled and then as she looked up at him, "You know my name. How about telling me yours?"
Golden flecks danced in the silvery gray of her irises. "Marilee," she told him. "And I'm a Chian too."
"I can still smell the lake winds in your hair. Marilee," Nat mused. "You would be Mary Lee back home. I—" A buzz cut him off and Marilee's fingers flew to the desk edge. "Sir?"
"Send in Lampman Natlane."
"Send in Lampman Natlane." She was once more coldly impersonal, all warmth gone from her voice. "To your right, please."
"What—?" To Natlane's right, a meter from his nose, was only blank metal, then a black spot appeared on the aludur surface, was swiftly expanding, irislike.
It was a hole piercing the barrier. It was an oval opening, just large enough to let him through. He stepped into a space little more than a meter square, the ceiling so low it seemed to press on his scalp. Another blank wall confronted him—
Darkness enveloped Natlane, so black it thumbed his eyeballs!
He whirled back, pawed at cold metal—the wall through which he'd entered, solid again. A dart of bluish light leaped eerily about and panic struck at him.
He wanted out. He wanted to get out of here. He wanted to get free of this trap.
CHAPTER II.
No use hammering at this wall with his fists, trinitrate wouldn't blast it open. Natlane got a grip on himself, was still, hands hard against the aludur that shut him in.
The bluish spark was motionless at the level of his chest, a little to the left.
The Lampman's lips twitched into a grimace half self-mockery at reasonless terror, half resentment of the invasion of his privacy the spatter of luminance betrayed. Thorium tetrachlor was fluorescent in ultra-spectral light; and some had dried on his wrist from a splash in the laboratory. The gammeta vibration, of course. Someone had a search ray on him!
They didn't have to scare him breathless to do that, even if the beam was more efficient in complete darkness. Queer that it should be turned on him at all.
The whole setup was queer, for that matter. In a co-operative society, why should this aerie be inaccessible except by aerbat? Why should its outer portal be ingeniously guarded against unaccredited intrusion, the inner entrance to the chief of staff's sanctum barred by iris shutters impregnable to anything short of an atomic blast?
Of what was Rudolf van Gooch, guardian of the world's peace, afraid?
The blue spark vanished! The search ray was off.
Behind Natlane was an almost inaudible whisper of sound. As he turned to it, light came back into the guard lock through an aperture in the inner wall that expanded in the same manner, and as swiftly, as that by which he'd come through the outer.
The room into which he stepped was surfaced, floor and walls and ceiling, with a single iridescent shimmer. Its planes melted into one another by sweeping curves so that it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. Soft radiance, sourced everywhere and nowhere, cast no shadows at all.
The chamber had a breathtaking quality of—limitlessness was the best word Nat could think of, knowing it to be inept.
The only furnishing was a high-backed armchair of silvery cryston. In this, far across the footfall-muffling floor, sat a completely insignificant little man, motionless, emaciated hands idly lax in a shawled lap, lashless lids drooped as if in sleep.
Rudolf van Gooch was very old. Pacing towards him, Natlane recalled that he'd been in his prime, seventy-five or thereabouts, when he'd succeeded Rad Hoskins as chief. That was almost forty years ago. Van Gooch, therefore, must be well on to the century and a quarter and still active. A remarkable achievement, even discounting the progress the endocrinologists and metabolists had made in lengthening useful life span.
Or was it? How much truth was there in the whispers that the Superannuation Committee was more lenient in their annual examinations of the Peace Dome's chief of staff than with lesser centenarians?
Nearing the shrunken small figure in the great thronelike seat, gray-yellow, hairless, skin drawn tight over a fine-boned skull, his measure of years obviously all but emptied, Natlane was poignantly aware of his own smooth flowing muscles, of the vibrant throb in his elastic arteries, of his youthful strength.
The blue-scrabbled lids opened within their sunken sockets.
An almost physical impact stopped Nat in his tracks.
It was he who was insignificant before the wisdom, the mental force, the drive implicit in the tiny eyes that seized his and drained his brain dry.
They neither blinked nor shifted, but they finished with Natlane and somehow had released him. He contrived to make his stiff lips form words. "I was directed to report to you, sir."
"Yes. I wished to talk with you. But sit down, my boy."
Sit down? Where? There was no—A chair was here, just behind Natlane and a little to his left. It must have come up through the floor, he decided as he sank into it, so smoothly and silently he had not noticed. "Somewhat theatrical, I agree," the old man responded to his unvoiced comment. "Nevertheless it has its purpose." A faint smile drifted across the almost human mask that was Van Gooch's face. "Some of my visitors need to be impressed so that even if I am alone with them, I am not altogether at their mercy."
Natlane's eyebrows lifted as he glanced at the guard lock and back to his chief. "No," the latter murmured. "No one can come in here with a weapon. But a pair of strong hands could break me in half, and there are those who find me in the way of their ambitions."
"Ambitions, sir?"
Again that half-shadow of a smile. "Housed within this Dome is the machinery that keeps the City States at peace through control of their people's emotions, very nearly of their will. What better instrument for world domination has ever existed? What more tempting prize for a ruthless man to seize?"
"But why should anyone want to seize it, sir?"
Van Gooch spread his skeleton hands. "Why should at least one among every group of laborers strive to become foreman of his gang? Why should certain citizens in every City connive and scheme and stultify themselves to be chosen Wardmen or Councilors? Why, in the old days did men flog themselves to accumulate wealth infinitely more than they could spend on the most luxurious living? Why in every era has some hitler made himself cursed by all men so that he might become master of all? What drives them to the sacrifices they make to gain—what?"
The ancient looked about the beautiful—and empty—room. "In the high places of the world there is loneliness and fear and gray regret. And one other thing—power."
"Power?" Natlane parroted.
"Power. Power over the lives and destinies of others. It is for this that the ambitious ones strive. It does not matter how it is used—for good or ill—so long as they may have it. So long as they have by that much made themselves"—the low and oddly sweet voice became almost inaudible—"demigods."
Van Gooch's lids drooped wearily and he withdrew into himself, left Natlane outside his awareness.
The Lampman listened to the rales of an old man's breathing, the crepitation of fabric against an old man's sere skin. The drooped lids lifted. "I understand, Lampman Natlane, that for the past six years you have devoted all your leisure hours to a certain research."
So he kept that close a check on his underlings, did he? "I have, sir."
"An attempt to divorce human behavior, is it not, from environmental influences?"
"To make the Rule of Reason in man's living possible of realization." A thrill of excitement came into Natlane's voice. "That's it, sir." Was the chief about to offer to make his voluntary study an official S.C.B. project with all that implied? "I think—No sir, I'm sure I've found the right experiment-line at last. It's only a case of development now."
"Hm-m-m." Van Gooch watched his bony fingers erect a tent. "I sent for you, my boy, to suggest that it might be wise if you were to divert your surplus energies into some other channel."
Muscles knotted in the Lampman's throat. "To—You mean you want me to drop it?"
"Precisely."
Natlane swallowed. "But why, sir? Why should you? It doesn't interfere with my job. I—"
"There have been no complaints."
"Then I don't understand why you should be concerned."
Van Gooch sighed. "I am deeply concerned with the welfare of every member of the organization I have the privilege of administering."
That. Natlane thought, is pure bunk. Aloud, he said. "We all know and appreciate that, sir, but I assure you I am fully capable of looking after my own welfare."
"And that of the others?"
"What has my research to do with the others?"
"More than you appear to realize." The chief separated his fingertips, fitted them together again one by one, as meticulously as though he were adjusting some mechanical device to precise tolerances. "Have you considered that we have been especially trained to specialized tasks in a very specialized organization? Were that organization to lose its reason for being and be dissipated, a few of us are still young enough to adapt to other lines of endeavor; but most of us would return to our Cities as pensioners, superannuated long before the end of our useful life."
"If I succeed in bringing about the rule of reason, wars will be unthinkable and so this elaborate setup to prevent them no longer necessary. Are you asking me to abandon the search for a more efficient way to accomplish the purpose for which the Peace Dome was established in order to preserve the Dome itself, for its own sake?"
"Certainly not!" the ancient murmured. "Although it would not be the first time in history something similar has been done."
"I am aware of that, sir. Harl Stanlund's 'Secret History of Global Economics' was prescribed reading at school. May I remind you that Stanlund points out that such tactics never succeed in averting social changes, but merely delay them?"
"Until the social structure has been prepared to withstand the change," Van Gooch agreed. "In the meantime the pioneers have known the agonies of frustration. I want to spare you that, my son."
"Thanks." Nat could not help noticing the ironic intonation. "I'll take my chances. Maybe I'll never see the results of my work; nevertheless I intend to keep at it."
"And if I forbid you?"
