He cast a long look around the dim-lit room, lined by row on row of varied volumes, letting his eyes dwell on each cabinet and table and massive leather chair. Now that the moment had come he could no longer minimize the danger in calling to his presence this shadowy being that stalked, grisly and menacing, through the annals of an elder world. His mind dwelt fleetingly on the folly of it all.
Successful, honored, economically secure — why was he meddling with forces so dark and sinister that fellow scientists had shrunk from them aghast? For a moment his resolution wavered; then he had shaken off the fearsome doubts once more.
What was life, if he could not achieve his long-sought goal? A few more years like those of the past; then life and career would be ended, with all his hopes and dreams and restless longings unfulfilled for want of a moment’s stiffening courage, if he failed to act now. He knew he would not nerve himself to the ordeal a second time.
He began the evocation.
He did not rise and wave his arms and chant; nor light censers, nor enclose himself in a pentacle. He was attempting to draw to his presence an entity from so far back in the dawn of existence that these questionable appurtenances of later wizardry would have been meaningless to it. He was dealing in the crudely forceful elements of all theurgy, stripped of latter day trappings and embellishments.
The formula lay before him, but the grotesque gutturals were burnt indelibly into his brain. He could never forget them, unless through some hiatus of memory akin to the nervous stage-fright of an actor or public speaker. Nevertheless, he took no chances, but kept his eyes on the manuscript.
His tone was low and steady and conversational in pitch. Each uncouth syllable was pronounced slowly and stressed evenly. He knew that it was the combination of vibrations, propelled into the ether by the sound of the words, that would reach the thing he summoned. The sounds were the key — it was possible that the words themselves had no meaning. And consequently the volume of tone could have no bearing on their effectiveness. His great concern was the correct pronunciation of sounds whose blasphemous vibrations had not troubled the earth for untold ages. But he could only try, and hope that his transliteration of the writhing characters within the cartouche had been sufficiently accurate.
Nothing happened. He knew that nothing could happen until the last sound wave of the intricate series had winged its way outward through the atmosphere and perhaps the ether and the universe to its unknown destination, near or far, completing the interlocking pattern of vibrations that comprised the call. And so his voice droned on monotonously, mouthing crude, rumbling gutturals never intended for human utterance. With cold determination he held himself to a steady, unhurried gait. It might spoil everything for the slightest emotion-born quaver to disrupt the even flow of vibrations. It could destroy the efficacy of the spell entirely; or the variation in length of that particular wave, infinitesimal at its origin but gaining steadily in divergency throughout its journey, might create a summons subtly different from that which he intended. And the answer might be even more horrible and far less useful than the one he anticipated.
He reached the end and stopped. He could almost hear his heart thumping wildly in the contrasting silence; and traffic noises from the distant street, mingled with the rushing wind, seemed oddly unreal. After a moment he thrust the translation into a drawer of the desk and sat down, tense and strained, in the deep leather chair beside the fireplace.
He was prepared to wait. Somehow, an instantaneous response would have surprised him. The endless eons which must have passed since those syllables had been pronounced made it seem plausible that a little time — at least a few minutes — might elapse before an answer came, if it came at all. In the meantime his mind should be at rest. He had followed to its logical conclusion the only course remaining that offered a possibility of help. He had taken each separate step with the most painstaking care; and if no response ensued, he would know that the door to omniscience was closed to mortal passage.
But as he sat before the glowing fire an oppressive sense of doubt and foreboding stole over his spirits. Now that the summons was irrevocably completed, he was impressed ever more deeply by the rashness of calling up forces over which he had not the remotest control. The fulfillment of his dream did not so dazzle him, and muffle the warning voice of caution, as it had before. For a moment he had something of the panic feeling of a suicide who sees a suddenly appreciated existence slipping irretrievably away. He could almost accept a defeat of his hopes for realization of the dream, now….
He glanced at the clock and saw that half an hour had passed since he had finished the evocation. Apparently the call was not to be answered. And perhaps it were better so — better that nothing did or could arise from the gelid reaches of outer space to stand before him at his bidding and help him if it would.
But the vague dread rested heavily on his heart. It was still early and, moved by some perverse impulse, he seated himself in the high- backed chair behind his desk and made a long entry in his journal, bringing it up to date. Then he went upstairs to bed, tired and uneasy, with a growing sense of nameless menace weighing on his spirits.
He closed his eyes resolutely, and sleep came quickly, in spite of his fears — a healthful, dreamless slumber brought on by his exhaustion. But at length dreams began to form, and the sleeper muttered and tossed as he stumbled through a shadowy wilderness of tall, fernlike plants, misty with the exhalations of a new and uncooled world. The vegetation was rank and high and utterly alien, shooting up in a towering luxuriance that shut off all view, and through which he forced a pygmy pathway. From all about came sibilant whispers alternating with uncouth, deep-toned gutturals; and occasionally he heard the rustling of unseen bodies through the fern-like stalks. But they were always out of sight in the dense profusion of vegetation, and he steered a tortuous course trying to avoid them, for the sounds suggested no form of life that he had ever known.
Where he was going he did not know; but there grew upon him a sense of pursuit by some unknown and frightful follower. He was fleeing blindly through the enshrouding ferns, with unseen alien beings about him, from an awful and nameless fate that clung upon his trail. He was running now, running with a gasping, reckless haste through the dense growth, careless of discovery by the things that whispered all around him. He ran with a vigor and endurance that he could not have shown in waking life, crushing his way through endless miles of the tall, yielding ferns. But far behind he sensed the presence of the dogged pursuit, hanging grimly to his trail and gradually gaining ground.
He plunged on, panting, and ploughing his way through the mocking barrier with laboring effort. Then, suddenly, he had broken abruptly from the primeval forest upon a broad, bare, undulating plain stretching away to a hazy horizon, without a possibility of hiding- places. He would have turned back into the tenebrous growth behind, but the measured stamp of mighty footsteps already shook the earth along the path he had just made. Above the ferns towered the shrouded visage of a gigantic stalking thing, striding toward him through the dream with heavy, measured steps.
In the dream, Whitney turned to flee across the rolling open space; but a long, snake-like tentacle encircled his waist and jerked him to a halt. The tentacle was grey and rugose and semi-scaled, and its grip was like a loop of tensile steel about his middle. Whitney turned in the loose grasp and gazed up at the figure looming shadowy and monstrous high above his head. Its face was exposed now, and he saw a great, broad, impassive visage, vaguely suggestive of human mold, but with shocking and blasphemous differences. Cold, impersonal eyes met his own — long, narrow green orbs in which pity or hate or any human emotion seemed impossible.
Suddenly the tentacle tightened its grip and he was swung aloft. As his feet left the spongy soil a whirling nausea gripped him; a roaring filled his ears and the plain turned black.
Like a dream within a dream he opened his eyes on a vast panorama of cosmic grandeur unfolding with measured sweep before him. He was moving swiftly through illimitable reaches of space, passing great stars and planets and through constellations and universes. He felt the swirling rush and beat of blind, titanic forces all about him; but of their nature he could tell little save that they were mindless reservoirs of terrific energy, pulsing in accordance with unfathomable laws.
Finally he came to rest and saw, or was aware of, a giant gaseous globe, flaming endlessly through boundless reaches of space; and after untold millions of years beheld a stupendous explosion which scattered blazing gas across the universe. Like a god, he was conscious of the passage of more billions of years while the gas cooled and molten planets swung through their elliptical orbits around the parent star. He watched them cool and saw, at last, the genesis of life upon the third world from the sun. It seemed closer to him now, and he looked down upon dank, lush vegetation growing on a watery orb in which huge shapes, neither reptile nor mammal, bellowed and fought through long ages.
Then he beheld the migration from the voids of outer space of numberless alien creatures, winged and
