The Unreasoning Mask Read Online Free

out

of nowhere like a ghost materialized.
     
     
Its back was to Ramstan, and it was facing the mural of St. George and

the dragon. Its head was concealed beneath a green hood, and the body

was covered with a green cloak. The back of the hands were very wrinkled

and bore huge blue veins and dark liver-spots.
     
     
He groaned again. He had seen such a hood and cloak and such hands once

before. A long time ago on Earth.
     
     
At Ramstan's command, the film began running forward again. The figure

stood looking at the mural for three minutes, then it turned. Ramstan was

looking into a face that he could not see clearly because it was deep

within the hood. But he recognized it. It was ancient, ancient, carved

with wrinkles, and it could have been the face of a very old man or woman.
     
     
The shadowy eyes seemed to be looking into his.
     
     
Then the person in green vanished.
     
     
Ramstan cried, "Al-Khidhr!"
     
     
     
     
     
     
... 3 ...
     
     
Ramstan sat before the table in his quarters. Canceling all shadows

except those in his mind, light pulsed faintly from the deck, bulkheads,

and overhead. His only communication with the outside was the audio from

the first-bridge, and that was one-way.
     
     
On the top of the table was an egg-shaped object below the electron

microscope. To the unaided eye, the egg was faintly yellowish-white.

It was smooth to the touch. Looking at the screen while he turned the

controls, Ramstan felt as if he were in an aircraft descending toward

a large albino elephant with a very wrinkled hide.
     
     
The wrinkled blank expanded, carrying the ends of the egg out of sight.

Tiny figures appeared, indistinct at first, then, suddenly, sharp. The

surface was as crowded with sculpture as an ancient Hindu temple.
     
     
Ramstan moved the controls so that the view swept to the figures at

the end to his left. Here, rising up from the surtace of a choppy sea,

was a multitude of forms: a twelve-tentacled squid with a bony, serrated

fin; a vast fishlike creature behind it, its leviathan mouth filled with

curving teeth and open to suck in the desperate mollusk fleeing via the

double propulsion of jet and sail; a gigantic amoeba which seemed to

pulse, its pseudopods reaching out to encircle and ingest a sharklike

creature; the gap of the shark's mouth about to close on a bulbous,

fat-lipped fish, the jaws of which were clamped on a bulging-eyed thing,

half lobster, half conical shell; the claws of the hybrid opening to

release in its death agony an eel-like creature with a cockatoo crest;

a school of things like animated flowers fleeing into the shallows;

a band of fish with fins that could swim in the sea or pull them along

like cripples on the beach sands, two of the crutch-fins lurching across

the beach toward low-growing plants.
     
     
Ramstan adjusted the controls again, and the sea surface became translucent.

Seemingly far below, though the distance must be an illusion, were many

things of many forms that crawled on the muck of the ocean floor, eating

the torn parts and the bodies that sifted from the carnage above, eating

the carrion and each other, dying, themselves being eaten, while eggs

spurted from mothers and fathers, eggs hatched, the young darted out in

all directions to escape the eaters, some of whom were their own parents.
     
     
Dimly, through the murk, the outlines of a long-buried city advanced and

receded, a shattered ziggurat topped by an altar and a leaning idol, a

pillar, a broken arch, an upside down trireme ragged with living valves

clinging to its hull, the hint of a huge and fearsome creature with

burning eyes quivering in its hollow, the granite head of a massive

statue up to its mouth in mud mixed with bones and shells, its long

curving nose and fierce eyes stonily proclaiming terror, arrogance,

and invincibility to an uncomprehending thing of a hundred skinny legs

and a beak like a vulture's.
     
     
Another turn of the