Langdon had found immortality on the planet
Tanith. Naturally he wanted his wife to share it—if
he could prevent her from going insane first....
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
February 1951
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
He walked slowly through the curling purple mists, feeling the groundroll and quiver under his feet, hearing the deep-voiced rumble ofshifting strata far underground. There were voices in the fog, singingin high unhuman tones, and no man had ever learned what it was thatsang—for could the wind utter sounds so elfishly sweet, almost wordsthat haunted you with half understanding of something you had forgottenand needed desperately to remember?
A face floated through the swirling mist. It was not human, but itwas very beautiful, and it was blind. He looked away as it mouthedvoiceless murmurs at him.
Somewhere a crystal tree was chiming, a delicate pizzicato ofglass-like leaves vibrating against each other. The man listened to itand to the low muttering of the earth, for those at least were real andhe was not at all sure whether the other things were there or not.
Even after two hundred years, he wasn't sure.
He went on through the mist. Flowers grew up around him, great fragilelaceries of shining crystalline petals that budded and bloomed anddied even as he walked by. Some of them reached hungrily for him, buthe sidestepped their groping mouths with the unthinking ease of longhabit.
Compasses didn't work on Tanith, and only a few men could even operatea radio direction finder, but Langdon knew his way and walked steadilyahead. His sense of direction kept rotating crazily; it insisted he wasgoing the wrong way, no, now the house lay over to the right—no, theleft, and a few paces straight up.... But by now he had compensated forthat; he didn't need eyes or kinesthetic sense to find his way home.
There was a new singing in the violet air. Langdon checked his stridewith a sudden eerie prickling along his spine. The mist eddied abouthim, thick and blinding, but now the city was growing out of it; he sawthe towers and streets and thronging airways come raggedly into being.
Suddenly he stood in the middle of the city. It was complete this time,not the few fragmentary glimpses he ordinarily had. The mist flowedthrough the ghostly spires and pylons but somehow he could see anyway,the city lay for kilometers around.
It was not a human city. It lay under three hurtling moons, lit only bytheir brilliant silver. But it lived, it pulsed with life about him;the shining dwellers soared past and seemed to leave a trail of littlesparks luminous against the night. They were not men, the old folk ofTanith, but they were beautiful.
There was no sound. Langdon stood in a well of silence while the citylay around him, and he thought that perhaps he was the ghost, alone andexcommunicated on a world which lay beyond even the dreams of man.
But that was nonsense, he thought, angry with himself. It was simplythat temporal mirages transmitted only light, not sound. He was here,now, alive, and the city was dust these many million years.
Two dwellers flew past him, male and female with arms linked, laughingsoundlessly into each other's golden eyes. The male's great glowingwings brushed through Langdon's body. He stood briefly in a shower ofwhirling light-motes—and they didn't heed him, they didn't know he wasthere. They were only for each other, those two, and he was a ghost outof an unreal and unthinkably remote future.
...