“A pretty woman?” demanded Oloana quickly.
“Not as pretty as you,” Hok assured her, with something like marital diplomacy. “She is dead. I kept her gift for you. It is to be worn on the neck.”
Oloana donned the bauble, and asked other questions, but Hok never had much to say about Maie, then or later. Today her name, as Mu or Mou, or Maya, is a name of mystery.
Zhik arrived from the hunt, to greet his brother heartily, and to him Hok presented the bronze dagger that he had taken from the priest of Ghirann. For himself he kept, forever after, the Wise Stone in its wooden handle, as a war-club hard enough to crush the toughest skulls of man or beast-
And finally he came to his cave, and sat alone by the fire in the entrance. It was quiet there, and he began to yawn. A patter of feet sounded from the gloomy interior. There emerged a plump little entity, with a shock of hair as pale as frosted barley grass. In one chubby fist was clutched a toy spear of wood.
“My son,” said Hok.
“Father,” came the solemn response. “Will you tell me a story?”
Hok drew the boy to his knee.
“I will tell you,” he began, “a story which you must remember as a great marvel. When you have children, tell it to them, and they will tell it to their children. It is the story of Tlanis, the home of many strange and wonderful things, and of how the sea drowned it and them.”
[1] Stone age men called the Neanderthal beast-men Gnorrls. See “Battle in the Dawn,” AMAZING STORIES, January, 1939.—Ed.
[2] From some such introduction to mounted men must have come the first conception of the centaur.—Author.
[3] The volcanic character of the rocks at Gibraltar, and across the straits in Morocco, suggests that a great volcano once rose there, shutting back the ocean from the sunken valley which now holds the Mediterranean.—Author.
[4] Ignatius Donelly, in his interesting work, Atlantis, offers an interesting collection of legends about explosives among Atlanteans.—Author.
[5] The splendid physical proportions and large skull capacities of the Cro-Magnon skeletons have led scientists to conclude that the Stone Age Spartans, Hok’s people, systematically destroyed the weak in body and mind, thereby improving the breed.—Author.
[6] This belief is common today, among many ancient peoples.—Author.
[7] The octopus is represented in the votive art of ancient Crete, pre-Spanish Mexico, and Japan.— Author.
[8] See the myth of Hercules, and his conquest of Geyron, the six-legged man-monster, in a land far to the west of Greece.
[9] Diamonds are often phosphorescent in complete darkness.
[10] Saltpeter can be produced in beds of dessicating kelp and other sea plants rich in nitrates. The priest’s formula has not been too far improved upon—25 percent of charcoal and sulphur combined, with 75 percent of saltpeter, has made a powerful explosive for later ages than his.—Author.
PROLOGUE
HOW do we know that this world cannot be visited from beyond space? How do we know that it has not happened already, far back in the darkest hour before history’s dawn?
The Chinese tell of an antiquity when a giant and flaming dagger—the very pattern of a space ship—dropped from heaven and disgorged conquerors. The Greeks once worshipped a father of gods who hurled thunderbolts like javelins. There are a myriad of tales concerning enchanted strongholds, grotesque scoundrels who owned flying carpets and magic missiles, winged dragons and strangely powerful Jinni, and living monsters of stone, brass or iron.
But there is another side to the picture. There are the glad memories of heroes and princes who invaded these unvanquishable fortresses, outwitted these bizarre enemies, learned their deadly secrets and turned them against their wielders, with the result that man lives and prospers unthreatened today, free to make his own magic by science—science that has raised him to the throne . . . and may yet, through misuse, hurl him into the pit.
Are these old legends real evidence? Did they begin with the day of dread when strangers came from a far world to settle and conquer this one, routing and almost destroying the human race in its youth—only to be checked and defeated by some paladin of daring wisdom whom we remember as Ulysses, St. George, or Jack the Giant Killer?
Maybe . . .
CHAPTER I
The Pioneers
THE ship that dropped down out of the sky was a gray-gleaming torpedo of metal, driven and guided by rocket blasts. The dozen who made up its crew were of the System’s most advanced race, and themselves the leaders of that race. Their star-spanning craft bore witness to that leadership. They had sailed from their own world, the world that was fourth from the sun, the red planet. Now, with diminishing speed, they were approaching the planet that circled just to sunward of them.
The Martians were a frail-looking lot, a fact consistent with creatures of a light-gravity planet like theirs. Their bodies were narrow and soft, and their arms and legs of a sticklike length and slenderness. But their eyes were bright, and their craniums swelled impressively above their skull-thin faces with sharp, toothless mouths and long snipe noses. Their color was a dark red, like baked clay, and they wore close-fitting garments of metallic weave.
While the commander steered, the others gathered about a great telescopic vision-screen, studying the new green world to which they were voyaging.
“It has much water, three times as much as land,” computed one. “Vegetation, large and small, covers everything. Life is rich here.”
The others thrilled to the report. Their own planet was dying, a globe almost empty of air and water. Their hunger, their thirst, had driven them to hunt a new home for their race. Here might be that new home.
“Look for animals,” spoke the commander from his steering levers.
They did so, questing here and there with the point of vision. At last, focusing by means of many dials and gauges, they could see one creature of the new planet. It was massive, mighty, its body covered with shaggy wool and supported upon four pillarlike limbs. Its mouth sprouted two great white teeth, and between those natural spears the nose sprouted into a wriggling arm or tentacle.
They looked upon the mammoth, which observers of today know only by its fossil bones. Interest and apprehension mingled in their minds. Ages before, the last wild creature had died on Mars, where every square foot of habitable ground, every breath of oxygen, every mouthful of food or water, was needed for the dominant race.
“A mighty beast,” said the observers to each other. “Cunning, too—see how big its skull is, and how it uses that twisting member like a hand. It might be dangerous.”
“Not to us,” pronounced the commander arbitrarily. “We have the power to defeat it—and use it for our own purpose.”
The group around the vision screen sought another viewpoint, focused upon another scene of life. Several beasts could be seen this time—a lithe, tawny mother at the dark door of a cavern, cradling two cubs between her forepaws and licking them affectionately, while a male, thickly maned on throat and shoulders, stood guard over them. It was a family of cave-lions such as once roamed young Earth, carnivora beside which modern lions would seem small and timid.
“There is real ferocity,” commented one watcher. “See how Nature has made that thing of muscles and fangs and claws. It could strike as swiftly as lightning, almost—and as fatally.”
“A natural machine of combat,” agreed his companions.
“Yet our artificial machines have outdone nature,” spoke up the leader drily. “Do not fear any blood-drinking brutes. We can do with them what we wish.”
THEY turned their peering view-mechanism elsewhere, studying birds that flew. This latter fact reassured them that their own flying machines could travel in this heavy atmosphere. They noted monkeys playing among bright green foliage, herds of antelope, a lumbering cave-bear, a giant snake.
At last they came to the landfall, in the center of a gently cupped green valley. Leaving his controls, the commander
moved to a gauge and quickly checked its figures.
“The air is good, full of oxygen,” he reported. “Open the hatch, and we will emerge.”
No sooner had they quit the zone of the ship’s artificial gravity than they gasped and staggered—the new world exerted almost thrice the pull they had known at home. But the more bracing, oxygen-rich air helped them to make the required effort, to overcome this unaccustomed environmental feature.
They proceeded routinely to make a fortress. One Martian, with an atomic blast-control, walked heavily in a wide circle around the ship, turning the nozzle of his mechanism against the ground. It churned up the earth into a great red-brown bank, which he shaped by skilful manipulation of the blast-control, and drew into existence as swiftly as he walked. Displacement of atoms, within planned limits, made such earth-sculptoring quick and sure.
Meanwhile others, exerting their stringy muscles against the threefold gravity, were joining together the parts of a flying machine, with a closed central gondola in which a pilot could sit forward and two observers aft. It had planes jutting to either side, a rocket engine for propulsion, and a destroying flame-ray at the front.
Three were told to board the machine and go off exploring. The others worked to finish the earthen rampart, and to raise shelters inside it. The shelters took longer and finer work with the blast-control, but the commander would not rest until they were finished.
“From the looks of this sky, and the samples of the atmosphere, we may have storms,” he pointed out. “They could do us more harm than any strange beast, or combination of beasts, on this planet.”
He had picked up a length of stick, to help support his heaviness in the new gravity. He walked to where one of the adventurers, the youngest, was bringing out and assembling with a wrench certain strange bits of machinery. As this work progressed, it took a form like that of the Martians but heavier —a body, two legs, two arms, a cylindrical head that bore a foggy-lensed lamp instead of a face. It was a robot.
“Vwil,” said the commander, “you are meditative.”
The young Martian addressed as Vwil lubricated the joints of the completely assembled robot, then pressed a switch in its body. The metal image came to life, moving stiffly but surely, like a Martian in armor. Vwil handed it the wrench and pointed silently to the interior of the space-ship. It moved away understandingly, brought out armfuls of new parts, and began building them into other robots.
Meanwhile, Vwil faced his chief.
His features, though thin, were fine-cut and responsive, and lacked the hard determination of the other’s.
“I was wondering,” he said, “if there were not creatures like us on this planet.”
The commander’s harsh mouth screwed into something like a smile, and he shook his head.
“No, Vwil. Nothing so close to your romantic dreams. We have observed no cities, no machines—”
“Are cities and machines everything?” broke in Vwil, not so courteously as he should. “I see this world as a great garden, full of good things, as our own was in the beginning. Perhaps there are fellow-beings, not as wise as we, but good and kindly—”
The commander interrupted. “Sentimentality is not good, Vwil. We outmoded it many generations back, and it does not fit your otherwise fine scientific character. Least of all is their place for it here. We are overcrowded and underfed at home—we are here to explore and establish a colony, not to dream.”
He paused a moment, musing.
“Yet you give me a thought. There may be animals here who approximate us—walking upright on two legs, with deft forelimbs like hands, and a considerable brain-case at the top. If so, they may prove most useful.” He scrutinized the robot, which was working on yet another replica of itself. “More useful even than those things of metal and motor.”
“You would enslave such unhappy beings?” suggested Vwil.
The other sneered.
“Do not torture yourself with dreams of how unscrupulous I am, until we know that there is such an animal—a two-legged entity, similar to us in shape, and of good potential intelligence.”
Vwil patently wished there would be nothing of the sort, for the commander’s attitude was of one who planned ruthless miracles.
The two did not know it, but even as they conversed, a tall biped, shaped like the Martians but along more powerful lines, was skirting a waterside not far beyond their horizon.
CHAPTER II
The Defier of the Gods
HE was blue-eyed, that specimen, and his shaggy hair was black. Despite his great length of limb and body, he was broad only where it counted most, in shoulders and hands. The bright sun he worshipped as a god had tanned all of him save where buckskin girdled his loins and sandals shod his feet. His face—broad-browed, square-jawed, straight-nosed, ready to smile—was clean of beard, as befitted a young bachelor of his people. His name was Naku, and he belonged to the Flint Folk—the tribe of hunters and fishers who dwelt in a village of wattle-and-daub huts under a lakeside bluff, and chipped beautiful tools and weapons from stone.
His name meant Lone Hunt. It signified that from boyhood he had preferred to play and adventure by himself rather than with the shrill naked rabble of other children. Now, as a young man, he still liked solitude. Neither sullen nor timid, he was yet reserved and meditative.
He might have become a priest, but the Flint Folk had begun to turn away from the sun-worship to which they were bred, and Naku scorned the new cult of the Thunderer—the more so because two years before, that surly deity had sent a storm and sunk the canoe in which his father and mother had been paddling on the lake.
Naku was a mighty stalker of game and shooter of arrows, the swiftest runner and the fourth best wrestler in the village. Secretly he hated the Thunderer for killing his parents, and often dreamed of vengeance.
Just now, following a deer-track along the lake’s margin, he reviewed in his mind all he had heard of the angry, bloodthirsty Thunderer. The fat lame priest, Ipsar, said it was like a great eagle, but larger and more deadly. Only Ipsar had seen it, and Ipsar preached terrifyingly about its powers and anger. But he, Naku, would never worship—might even find a way to make war against—
What Was That Shadow That Fell Upon Him?
Even as the great bulk blotted the sun from him, Naku dived sidewise from the beach into a reedy thicket, like a frog into water. His hunter’s instinct told him that the thing lived, flew like a bird—but was far bigger than any bird or beast he had known. From his place of hiding he glanced up, at great motionless wings, a gleaming body, and a quivering tail-like stream of smoke. The creature had a voice, too, a rhythmic rumble like the deep song of a locust. This much Naku noticed before the thing whipped out of sight beyond the horizon, as swiftly as it had come.
“Whoo!” said Naku, and came into the open. He had seen the Thunderer, heard it. Old Ipsar had foretold something of that sort for unbelievers—the fierce god would appear and stride them dead. Musing thus, Naku felt relieved. It had come for him, but had failed to strike or seize him. His dash to cover must have baffled it.
A new doubt rose. If the Thunderer could fail, it might not be a god after all. No, only a dangerous monster, like the dragons of old, of which grandsires told children, the beasts that had fought and frightened the ancestors of the Flint Folk.
Such a thing would be fought against, perhaps killed. Naku looked to the arrows in his otter-skin quiver. He set one to his bowstring and moved forward, warily but steadily. Forgetting the deer he hunted, he left the lake shore and struck through the forest in the direction taken by the flying thing. He moved swiftly, cunningly, between trunks of maple, beech and oak. After trotting many bow-shots of distance, he came to the edge of the woods, at the brow of a hill. Beyond was a valley he knew, shaped like one of the clay saucers which the Flint Folk knew how to model. From behind a spray of willow shoots, Naku peered out.
HE frowned. Did he know this saucer-valley, after all? Surely it had been only a gre
en round dip, with a pond at bottom. Whence had come those strange lumps and ridges of red-brown stuff, like clay gigantically moulded and baked? It was—yes—it was a village, a fortress, made here of earthy materials. Within an uneven curved compass of walls or dikes, rose the round and conical tops of buildings. And lights flashed from the hidden inner court of the enclosure, and smokes ascended, smokes colored brown, slate-blue, blood-red, black. Naku shifted. Those smokes were of unpleasant pungency.
Meanwhile, just outside the walls, the great flying mechanism that Naku fancied was the Thunderer had come to rest.
He peered and appraised. The big bird must live here, and indeed it was doing a most domestic thing—laying eggs. He saw objects issue from within it, two of them. But not eggs. These moved, they were alive. Baby birds? No. Animals? None that Naku knew. Men? Well, they might be men.
They were shaped something like himself, but were gaunt, scrawny, like rude figures scratched on a board or bone with single marks for limbs. Their heads were long and puffy, like very ripe gourds, and had no hair. Their skins were colored a deeper, warmer red than the walls they approached, and their eyes were large and round and green, with snipe-noses and thin mouths.
Except for those heads, and their spidery hands, the creatures were sheathed in tight, shiny clothing.
As Naku watched, the new mysteries moved toward the red-brown wall. A round opening appeared, like a cave-mouth from which a stone is rolled away. They went in, and the hole closed. For the first time, a man of Earth had seen an automatic door-panel in use. Only the giant flying thing, grounded and silent, remained outside.
All these things were strange, without precedent in Naku’s experience, but he did not let his wonder paralyze him.
“It is more and more like the strange tales of the grandfathers,” he told himself, “tales of beasts that speak, of dead warriors’ ghosts that come at night to foretell the future, and other things. This is like such a story,” Naku decided sagely, “but, instead of hearing it told, I see it happening. Men who see such things become great and strong if they can profit by what they see.”
The Complete Hok the Mighty Page 10