Atomic - Chapter 4: Voice of the Lake

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter four of Atomic by Henry Kutner. This LibriVox recording
is in the public domain. Chapter four, Voice of the Lake,
with stunning suddenness, out of my memory came the vision
of a great eye staring up at me through the
pale fog as I maneuvered or copter above the ring.
When Davidson and I first visited it. The eye was
the lake, a vast translucent lens that had caught us

(00:24):
like birds in nests, drawn us down the power of
its compelling summons, pouring from the lens into our brains
like sunshine into a darkened room. No, I said, thickly,
No I saw nothing go on. What its origin was,
I can't even guess, Sail said. But originally some molecule,

(00:44):
like a gene out of a million other molecules in
that ring area suffered a liberation of energy when a
secondary ionizing particle shot past, and it changed from a
gene to something else, something that grew and grew and grew.
Most of the development must have taken place underground. I
think the organism was complete when that caven occurred that

(01:06):
exposed it to the light into our attentions. It developed
amazingly into form so complex we may never understand them exactly,
he smiled grimly. If we're lucky, we never will. I
can tell you this much, though it recognized its danger.
Perhaps electric impulses from our own brain struck answering chords
in the organism, and it knew it had to defend

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itself fast. Now the lake has one fatal weakness. By that,
I think we can destroy it. I believe the organism
is quite aware of this, because of the way it
chose to combat us. He paused, looking at me so
strangely that I almost acted in that silent moment. But
just as I was gathering my muscles to rise, he
began again. The girl told me what happened when that

(01:51):
airliner came down. It must have been sure accident. It's
making a force landing at the edge of the ring.
Radioactivity blanked out their communications, and of course the air
itself was close to deadly. There didn't seem any hope
at all for the people in the ship, the girl said.
Many of them complained of feeling well, call it attention
focused on them. I know now it was the lake itself,

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that gigantic organism, studying them, slowly working around to a
decision about its next move. Then it came to a
conclusion that may not yet have reached its final equation.
The passengers saw a man stand up from behind a
rock near them. The girl said he looked familiar. He
shouted and waved them away. He warned them and would

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mean their death if they came closer. He vanished, but
the passengers were still trying to get a message out,
and they stayed in the ship. The man appeared three
times in all, each time warning them away in stronger
and stronger terms. Finally, he rose from behind a rock
very near them, and this time he invited them into
the ring. They were surprised to find that, when seeing

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this close, he was a mere image of one of
their crew members. The image beckoned and ordered them in.
They didn't want to obey, but they went. That image,
as you may have deduced, was a water figure created
by the lake itself. No one knows how completely it
may have been ninety percent illusion shaped in the minds
of the watchers. But you'll notice the lake had to

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imitate one of the crew It didn't at that time
know enough about human bodies to improvise. It did know
a lot, though, about human minds. In fact, its power
over them and its amazing selectivity make me suspect that
the original gene from which the organism developed might once
have been human, or close to it. The water image

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was the lake's first attempt to fight off mankind. The
attempt failed, in other words, and imitation wouldn't do, but
the real thing was close at hand for experimentation. What
happened next no one will ever know. Logically, the organism
must have moved forward another step in its defense against
invasion by mankind, and effect it created antibodies. It was

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inoculating itself with the virus of humanity and an effort
to immunize itself against the later attack. But it had
to effect a change in the humans before it could
absorb them. Physically. They must be changed to live under
the lake, and mentally they had to alter radically to
stay there of their own will. It was their will
the lake attacked. You saw that, I said before that

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something had apparently been washed from the mind of that
girl we saw, and some other basic drives substituted in her.
I believe now I was nearer the truth than I guessed.
He looked at me, keenly, almost speculatively. If I were
on a spot like that, he said, with the problem
of altering a human beings whole emotional outlook, I think
I'd strike straight at the route. Would be much simpler

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than trying to blanket his impulses with anything like hypnotism.
For instance, I think that for the instinct of self preservation,
those people now have another drive, instinct for the preservation
of the organism. It would be so simple, and it
would work so well. There was a roaring in my ears.

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For a moment, I heard nothing of what Sales said.
The flood gates had opened, and through the back flung
doors all my memories were pouring. But it hasn't worked perfectly,
sails were saying from far away. Unless the lake goes
a step further, we can destroy it. Perhaps it has,
Perhaps it realizes that static antibodies, which can't exist outside
its own blood streams, won't help much. Do you think, Chief,

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that it might have captured still other humans and worked
its basic change in their minds. Could it have implanted
in men like yourself a shift in instinct so that
you know only one basic drive. The organism must be preserved.
The idea had struck him suddenly I could see that
in his face as he leaned forward across the desk,
half rising, his features, congesting with the newness and the

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terrible danger of the thought. I didn't even get up
from my chair. I'd had my revolver out on my
knee for the past several minutes, though he couldn't see
it from where he sat. I shot him at close
range through the chest. For a moment, he hung there
about the desk, his hands gripping the bladder convulsively. He
had one thing more to say, but it was hard
for him to get it out. He tried twice before

(06:08):
he made it. You it's no good, he said, very thinly.
Can't stop me now. I've sent full report, mobile staff
reading it now. Blood cut off whatever else he wanted
to say. I watched impersonally as it bubbled from his
lips and he collapsed forward into the scarlet puddle forming

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so fast on the desktop. I saw how the blodder
took it up at first, but the fountain ran too fast,
and finally a trickle began to spill over the desk
edge and patter on the floor with a sound like
the dripping of lake water. From the girl's garments. As
she crossed the rocks towards us. The lake was blue
and wonderful in the sunlight. It was the most important

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thing in the world. If anything happened to destroy it,
I knew the world would end in that terrible crashing moment.
All my mind and all my effort must be dedicated
to protecting it from the danger threatening it. Now, I
knocked at the door, banished that vision. I sprang to
my feet and blocked off the desk from sight. Davidson
lunged into the room, slammed the door, put his back

(07:12):
to it. He was breathing hard. Thereafter you, Jim, he said,
they know about Williams. I nodded. I knew it too.
I knew why my mind had gone blank when the
need to silence Williams was paramount at that time. It
wasn't safe for me to remember too much. It wasn't
safe for me to know too much about my own actions,
my own motives. Oh, yes, I had killed him, all right,

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You knew all along, I asked him. He nodded. You've
got to do something quick, Jim, he said, I tell
you they're coming. They know we were there together, and
they are almost certain you did it? Finger prints, bullet type,
Think of something, Jim. I. There was a heavy blow
on the door behind him. He wasn't expecting it. He
jolted forward into the room, and the door slammed back
against the wall. What looked like a tide of black

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uniforms poured through. Louis at the front. His granite face set,
his eyes like steel on mine. Want to ask you
some questions, owen, he began. We have reason to think
you no more than then he saw what lay across
the desk behind me. There was an instant of absolute
silence in the room. Davidson had been hurled past me
by the slamming open of the door, and the first

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sound I heard was his gasp of intaken breath as
he leaned over the chair from which I had risen.
My mind was perfectly blank. I knew it was desperately
imperative that I cleared myself, but I'd had too many
shocks one on another all that day. My brain just
wasn't working any more. I had to say something. I
took a deep breath and opened my mouth, praying for

(08:39):
the right words. Davidson's hand closed on my arm. It
was a hard, violent, grasp, but very quickly before his
next move. He pressed my biceps three times rapid warning squeezes.
Then he completed his motion and hurled me aside so
hard it staggered three paces across the rug and came
up facing him, stupid with surprise. He had screwed up

(09:00):
the revolver, which I had dropped in my chair. I
saw his fingers move over the butt as if for
a firmer grip. But I knew what he was doing.
His prince would have a faced mine when the time
came to test it. All right, Louis, he said quietly,
I did it. I shot them both. His glance shifted
from face to face when it crossed mine. I recognized

(09:21):
the desperate appeal in his eyes. It was up to me.
I couldn't refuse this last offer of aid from him
in the service of a cause greater than any cause
men ever fought for. I knew the truth of that,
as I knew my own name. There could be no
greater cause than the protection of the lake. A look
of wildness, which I knew was deliberate, suddenly convulsed his face.

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He lifted the revolver and fired straight at me, except
it wasn't straight. Davidson was a good shot. He couldn't
miss at this range unless he meant to. The bullet
sang past my ear and shattered something noisy behind me,
and I saw the look of deep satisfaction relax his
face an instant before Louis's bullet smashed into it, erasing
his features in a crimson blur. He had to fire

(10:06):
the gun at someone. I think he remembered that wax
tests would otherwise prove he hadn't fired one recently, and
it might as well be at me to clear me
of suspicion. Perhaps too, he knew he couldn't make his
story stand under close questioning. So it was suicide in
a way, but suicide in a cause of tremendous, unquestionable
rightness that I knew in the deepest recesses of my mind.

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All right, owen you give the word, where would you
say it's most vulnerable? Was Louis watching me with irony
and his keen eyes as he asked it. For that question,
of all others, was the one I could not answer physically,
could not even had I wished, I think my tongue
would have turned backward, and my throat and strangled me.
If need be, before I could tell them the truth,

(10:51):
Make another circle, I said, I'll look it over once more.
Five hundred feet below us, the lake lay blue and placid.
Seen from this height, the majest cliffs above it were
foreshortened into insignificance. But I knew that deep beneath those
rocks lay the vital cavern, which no bombs must touch.
There was no sign of the mindless men and women

(11:11):
which it had used and discarded. The anti toxin premise
was no longer valid, but the next step to a bacteriophage,
which would seek out and devour the virus of attack.
That must not fail. I well knew what my task was.
Try the shallows over here, I said, pointing The ship circled,
and Lewis presently raised his hand. The depth bombs floated

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away behind us in a long falling drift. They were
not I knew, merely depth bombs sails. As Memorandum had
worked its recorder's will too fast for me. I had
silenced the doctor, but I could not silence the records.
I watched the falling bombs with a sickness in my
heart that was near despair. The organism has no white
blood cells. Sails had reported to the staff, his dead voice,

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speaking the words of my own destruction in the very
moment I killed him. I believe it can be eradicated
if we infect it thoroughly with the culture of every
microbe and bacterium we can pour into it. The chances
are something will take hold. If it doesn't, then we'll
have to try until something does. I would suggest depth bombs.
What tests I have made so far indicate the so

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called water of the lake is in effect a thick
skin which has so far protected the organism from the
entry of ordinary infection. The depth charges would serve the
purpose of a hypodermic needle in introducing our weapons where
they may take effect. Down there under the surface, something
must lie, which is the heart of the dangerous being,
something we have not yet seen. But destroy it we

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must before it mutates any further into a thing nothing
could cope with. When the first bombs burst, they might
have been bursting in my own brain. Only dimly I
saw the blue water fountain toward us. We circled, watching
the water poured itself over that terrible wound, ripples red
sluggishly out around it. Toward shore. It seemed to me

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there was a flush in the water where those death
laden charges had fallen. But if there was something working
in the lake effaced it, washed out the tocsins, healed
and soothed the danger away. I breathed a sigh of relief.
Where next Owen Lewis demanded relentlessly, and I knew my
ordeal had only begun. Desperation was welling up at me.

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How long could I drag this out? Sooner or later
we would work our way round to the danger area,
and this helpless being below us would die in an
unimaginable agony, unimaginable to all but myself. Try over there,
I said, pointing at random. Seeing my hand shake as
I held it out, I shut the fingers into a
fist to stop their trembling. How long it went on

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I could not remember. Afterward. There comes a point when
flesh and blood can record no further, and mercifully for me,
I reached that point after a while. By then I
knew what the end must be, no matter how long
I postponed it. I had done what a man could,
but it wasn't enough. The lake and I were helpless together,
and I knew. It was soothing to be sure that
we would in the end die together. Round after round

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we made above the shuddering blue water. Charge after charge dropped, splashed, vanished,
and fountained up again. From shore to shore. The lake
was racked by interlocking ripples from those dreadful wounds. Sometimes
the poisons the bombs carried were washed out and dissolved,
but as time went on, more and more often they
started great spreading circles of infection that traced iridescence upon

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the water. Yellow virulence rippled shoreward and crossed ripples running
from circles of angry crimson, The color of bruises mingled
with the color of blood, And the shuddering lake shivered
no more than I. But in me it was a
hidden shuddering. It had to be hidden. At least. It
was an I who pointed out the heart of the lake.

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That happened by sheer accident. It had to come sooner
or later. And after a long while it came deep
under the cliffs. That shadowy blue cavern, which I had
never seen, was riven asunder by a burst of white fire,
And that which lay coiled, and it was riven too,
blinded and agonized by the tearing of the explosion and
the quick avid onslaught of the disease it could not fight.

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The first we saw from above was the ominous shadow
suddenly uncoiling from beneath the cliff. It lashed out like
a gigantic serpent, a midguard serpent that clasped the world
in its embrace. Convulsively. It unwound itself from that shadowed
cavern and burst into the open in an agonized series
of spasms that made the lake boil around it. The

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men around me broke into a hoarse, triumphant shouting. If
I could have done it, I would have killed them all.
But it was hopeless. Now I had no longer even
the will to revenge. When a man's basic instinct dies
within him, he ceases intrinsically to be a man at all.
The water frothed and boiled beneath us. We lost sight
of whatever it was that lashed the lake in its

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death frenzy. I knew, but I would not look or think.
I had failed, and I was ready now for death
along with my dying master. Very dimly I heard Lewis
giving orders for the whole area to be bombed systematically
to wipe out any lingering vestiges of the thing which
had died there. It didn't matter, Nothing mattered. I was

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an automaton, going through the motions of a man until
I could shut them out at last and take from
my locked file drawer the little revolver I kept there.
In a way I envied Davidson. He at least had
died for a purpose, trusting me to make his sacrifice
not in vain. I had failed him too, I had
failed myself. I had no more reason to live. I

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put the muzzle of the revolver against my head, and
then and then I found I could not pull the trigger.
Something stopped me, some deep command, in a level of
the mind below conscious recognition. For an instant of frantic hope,
my reason tried to tell me that it was all
a mistake, that there had not, after all, been wrought
upon me. That change which turned me from a human

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to an instrument in the command of another will was
it self preservation, after all, that stayed my hand. If
I had that, I was free. No, it was not
self preservation. And the next instant I knew, and for
one immeasurable moment, the hope I had so briefly cherished, flickered,
and then went out and was swallowed up in a

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great surge of command. It was not dead. It lay
far down in subterranean waters, buried, waiting, depending upon me.
Commanded me to stay the hand that would destroy it
with me. I must live, I must serve it. One
deep wave of sick regret swept me in those levels
of the mind where human reason dwelt. If only I

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had pulled the trigger an instant sooner before that command came.
It was too late, and now a warm, confident cunning
began to well into my mind from that far away
source of command. It could wait. I could wait. I
could recruit where I must, and it would help me
to make others like myself until our ranks were strong enough.

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I had not wholly failed. But until I fulfilled my duty,
I must obey. Obedience would be a pleasure and a joy,
the insidious voice promised me, good and faithful servant, The
whisper said, work for my kingdom upon earth, and your
rewards will be delightful beyond imagination. I got up and
locked the revolver away again. Turning back, I caught my

(18:28):
reflection in the mirror on the wall, and paused there,
staring deep into my own eyes. I smiled. End of
Chapter four read by Elsie Selwyn. End of Atomic by
Henry Cutner.