“I begin already to doubt my memory,” answered Doctor John. “I was never cut out for a cavalier, wooing weird adventures. I’m a solid citizen. I’m going back to my practice on the steamers.”
“When?” I asked.
“Next week.” Now the present had intruded in our talk, and the future. “What will you do, Colonel?”
“Been thinking of retiring to the country, but I doubt I could stick it after all the excitement we’ve been through. I expect I’ll stay on at the Albany. Lots of things happening about one, you know, keep a chap young.”
* * * *
I laughed to myself at the thought of the staid old-fashioned Albany being a bee-hive of activity, but said nothing. John went on. “You, Alec, what will you do?”
“Huh? Me? Dunno,” said Alec blankly. “Haven’t cogitated on it.”
“Me neither,” said Geoff.
“Marion and Will will marry, of course,” said the Colonel, as though that accounted for us forever, and no question about it. “And you, sir,” he said to Arold, making that worthy leap in his chair, “what do you intend doing? You’re a fairly well-to-do man now.”
“Ah, yes, thanks to you gents! As generous and kindly a lot o’ toffs—that is to say, gentlemen—as you could arsk for. Me? I’m going over the border. Scotland, that’s the ticket for Arold Smiff; nice little village, cozy house, new name, and plenty of gin—welp, anyway, I’m going to Scotland. Never meet nobody there who’d know me, and that’s ‘ow I wants it after the killings we done down at that there cawstle. Some of the blokes I ’ad to enlist ain’t what you’d call above thinkin’ of blackmail, to put it straight out. Course they don’t know you, but they knows Arold Smiff. Me for the heather!”
“What did you think of the fight?” I asked him. “How did you explain it to them?”
“Hexplyne? To them barst—them blokes? I guv ‘em fifteen quid apiece and all the loot they could find. What else ’ld they be wanting?” He grinned. “I might have cawst a few ‘ints, such as that we was involved in a political move; the boys is hell on political moves. Maybe I mentioned the Sinn Feiners, careless-lyke. They drawed their own conclusions.” He squinted into his cup. “I think I shall call meself Jock MacSmiff,” he said meditatively. “Ar, that’s a good Scotch name. Maybe I’ll even give up the gin. Take Scotch whisky instead, I mean. More patriotic, lyke.”
“You’ll be able to afford it, old chap, should you live to be a hundred,” I told him. “It was nearly all your doing, yours and Geoff’s, that we won our fight.”
The waiter brought a bottle of Piper Heidsieck ‘43. The Colonel stood up to propose the first toast.
“Gentlemen and Marion, I give you ex-Sergeant Henry Johnson. There is only one thing we can say of him: greater love hath no man, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
* * * *
We drank standing. The waiter popped up with a second bottle. We resumed our seats, and Alec said, “The next is mine. I drink to the good green earth, and the race of men who live on it. Maybe they don’t go about slopping over with gratitude for its beauty, but I think they appreciate it just the same, and I’m damned glad we saved it for ‘em!”
Half-laughing, we drank that one, and many more. I drank to my Jaguar, now a deep red color and never to be identified with the sinister black car which flew out of Manchester that night so long ago. Doctor John drank to Jerry Wolfe, who first discovered the abominable race of beast-folk. Geoff toasted our army of rogues.
They all drank to our happiness, Marion’s and mine. Then we called for a fifth bottle, and drank a tall glass down in memory of our victory, total and forever final, over the beast-folk of the silver land. I twirled my glass and stared at it, my eyes unfocused slightly, and I mused on them.
The usurpers....
Sir Lawrence Hockling, to give him his human name, had been as good as his word. Within a day, all through the land, the aliens had begun to decamp in disgust. As messengers raced behind the veil to tell their brothers the sad news, the exodus spread, first through the great centers of population, London and Birmingham and Sheffield, Cardiff and Liverpool, and thence into the countryside until all England was touched by this incredible mass desertion of a world, the beasts relinquished their stolen bodies and retreated into their own dimension. Well within my time limit of three days, the flight was completed. Some twenty-seven thousand robots were abandoned in the withdrawal.
Yet these puppets, these husks, had not died. They had become brainless, true; incapable of performing the simplest acts of caring for themselves; but they lived on. It was more horrible than their deaths would have been, I thought ... and yet there was a ray of hope. I had talked it over with my friends, and they agreed there was a chance of its coming true.
These new things (one could no longer call them puppets, when the marionette-masters had gone) were like nothing on earth so much as new-born babies, babies in grown or half-grown bodies. What if their brains, unimpressed thus far by any experience, now began to develop, even as a baby’s begins? What if they were not idiots, as they seemed to a horrified world to be, but simply newly-born humans who must be taught learning and manners and speech and all the rest, as though they were so many victims of a titanic wave of devastating total amnesia?
* * * *
If this were true—and it logically might be—then our rescue of the world would have been bought even more cheaply than we had calculated. Twenty-seven thousand amnesia victims to retrain is a damned sight better than that many idiots or, as we had expected at first, corpses!
There would still be sorrow and tragedy in the wake of the thing we had done. Couples who had spent lifetimes together had found themselves split, their mutual memories lost forever, as one turned infantile and looked mindlessly at the other. Men who had been forces for good in England (the usurpers were not intent on corrupting our daily lives, be it remembered, but on taking over our whole plane) had become useless hulks, great dribbling infants in old bodies. Many suicides had followed the plague of total amnesia.
Yet if my ray of hope chanced to be true, it took nine-tenths of the curse of the business off our consciences.
And some of the problems connected with the plague would then appear much smaller, and even rather funny; as for example, the twenty-seven thousand adolescents and adults who had never been house-broken....
Well! I came back to myself, filled up my glass again, and drank Arold’s toast to Lord Nelson. How he ever crept into our party, I’m sure I don’t know. By then, perhaps, we were all a little bit drunk; so we welcomed Lord Nelson, and drank to him joyously. Then we drank a final round to our long bitter fight with the usurpers, and we adjourned for the night. The next day we separated, each to his own place, and the great adventure was over at last.
CHAPTER XXV
It is just a year since we drove the usurpers out of England.
(About the robots that they left behind, my hunch was right; for they are learning to take care of themselves, to walk and speak and act decently, and many have even begun to read and think again. When I consider this, I am inclined to go to my knees in thanks. What might have happened...!)
For a while I could not realize that my wild bluff had actually worked. I kept expecting a trick, a wholesale re-invasion of our world by the ogres. Even yet it is hard to comprehend. I suppose the only explanation is that all created things hate and fear death: in their fashion, the usurpers were just as scared of dying as the humblest human, and must have decided that the vicarious pleasures of earth weren’t worth it.
Selfish fear gripped them, selfish deadly fear of murder in the dark. They shrugged themselves out of their stolen bodies, and abandoned the world they had hoped to conquer. The simplest of weapons, the easiest to employ, had done our work for us in a manner beyond our most optimistic dreams. The simplest weapon ... fear.
Marion and I were married, of course, a year ago. The delirious happiness of our marriage has not cooled for me. Some day, perhaps, my fe
eling will have calmed to a steady, staid, cozy sort of affection; but not yet. Not for a long time yet.
I bought a little bookshop in Bury St. Edmunds, and took in Geoff and Alec as partners. It’s the proper life for a quartet of reformed crusaders like the three of us and Marion. Peaceful, contemplative, and yet stimulating. We like it. And we like being together.
John is back on the seas as ship’s doctor, the Colonel is laired up at the Albany, and Arold lives in Kirkcudbright, swilling great vats of Scotch whisky, I have no doubt. One day soon we must all get together for a grand reunion....
* * * *
But a man cannot walk through fire without being burnt; and as there cannot be many such conflagrations as that through which I groped and fled and sought my way, it is only natural that my mind carries even yet a few scars of the burning. I do not expect—I dare not hope—that they will ever be wholly healed.
In certain moods, usually on dreary days when the sky is overcast and the sun is hidden, or sometimes at night when the great yellow hunter’s moon rides in a black sky, the horror of the usurpers comes upon me with fresh and lurid obsession, more appalling than ever it was in the weeks of my hectic and headlong warfare. Then I go out into the streets or wander on the moorlands and fight with my hallucinations. A thousand times I tell myself that they are gone, that the world is clean and inviolate again; and a thousand times I hear in reply the hideous laughter of the fear that lives forever at the bottom of my soul.
I walk past a tavern, and see its door swing open, and catch a glimpse of the barman; and he seems to me in that moment to be, not a jovial red-faced fellow, but a twisting writhing monster shot with vivid lights and fringed with rippling pseudopods. A friend comes up behind to clap me on the shoulder, and I dread to turn and look at him, for fear of what he may be. I hear a snatch of speech from a wireless set, and the soft cultured voice emanates, I believe in a sudden jolt of panic, from the lips of a marionette-creature controlled by a hellish and malevolent incubus.
So at last I take my terror home to Marion, and lose it in her arms....
BEYOND THE FEARFUL FOREST
Originally published in Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy, April 1951.
The bones lie light in the fertile soil of Sunset Fields. You can prod them out with a few thrusts of your bare toes. The roots of the big luxurious tree ferns carry skulls and skins and back-bones up to the frond-filtered shining of day, and even the delicately questing purple tendrils of the burrowflower may drag an occasional finger or toe bone from its uneasy rest, so light they lie.
The bones do not decay. Nobody knows why. Animal bones decay. The skeletons of our own revered dead fall away to powder in a generation or two. But the bones of Sunset Fields are like the unchanging granite of the jagged cliffs, and of them we make our arrow points and lance heads, our hammers and our needles. It is more difficult to work the bones, to chip and flake them into form, than it is to shape our tools of metal; for we have ways of heating and molding these, subtle methods handed down from the far olden times of our fathers’ fathers. There is no way to heat and mold a bone.
Our singers tell a legend that—oh, many years ago!—a man went by stealth and slew another man with his lance. Not many of us believed the legend even when we were children. To kill a man! Our singers say that he possessed a beautiful woman whom the slayer desired. Who would desire the woman of another man? Such a thing seems incredible and childish, even to a child. There are women for all men, men for all women, and do we not each love all others equally, reserving a special love only for our own mate? But the legend is sung that after this bloody deed was done, many men fought because of it, and their curst bones lie in the earth of Sunset Fields forever, a memorial to their fantastic stupidity.
It is a legend of the singers. Nobody really knows why the bones do not decay.
Beyond Sunset Fields run the three brooks: the Gray, the Blue, and the Crimson. Far to the south they meet, and there become the Wide River that flows turbulently on until it reaches the silver dusk that encircles the world. There was a man of our people who once set out to find the end of the Wide River, but he never came back.
Beyond the trio of brooks there rise the first grim ranks of the Fearful Forest, line after line of tall broad-leafed trees so evenly spaced you would think they had been planted by design. Pass the palisades of this forest and brave its terrors, its darkness and great angry beasts, and you will come after a time to the other side; and there, beyond a black plain where nothing grows save crawling vines and nauseous weed patches, you may see the towering cliffs of the country of The Nameless....
* * * *
I am a hunter. My father was a singer, and his mate also; but I have a poor voice, good for little except to shout across the valleys to my friends, so my father, affectionately calling me Bear-throat, counseled me to become a hunter; and this I did.
I am strong, of course. My arms are brown as a deer’s hide and they swell with muscle. My legs are sturdy and, though not thickset, can carry me at a run for the space of a day without tiring. I do not boast when I say this, for after all I am a hunter and my arms and legs are my tools as much as my lances and arrows and metal knife. My name is Ahmusk, though I am more generally hailed as Bear-throat, the nickname my father gave to me. I have eyes the color of Blue Brook where it runs into a deep pool. My hair, the pale golden hue of the earliest corn of autumn, is cut short in the fashion of hunters, falling scarcely to my shoulders in back, in front sliced off evenly just above my eyes. And I think this is all that need be said concerning the person of Ahmusk the hunter.
The day of which I would speak first was a day of cheerful sun and small breezes, with that crispness in the air that makes a man stand tall and blink once or twice, and perhaps shout for joy. I did just that, after I had wakened, and then I sat on the edge of my platform and looking down the tree’s trunk at the grass below I was astonished at its bright new-seeming greenness. I sucked in a great chestful of air and shouted again. In the tree nearest mine there were two platforms, and now someone sat up on the higher and rubbed her eyes and grumbled. “What is it, Bear-throat?”
“The morning, girl, the morning,” I said heartily.
“Need you be a herald of the dawn every day?” she asked, mock-petulantly. And I laughed.
“Throw off your furs and smell the wind, Lora,” I told her. “In the changing of the moon to nothing and back to fulness, the snow will fly. Today is the best day of the year.”
“To you, every day is the best of the year, or at least you say so each morning.” She put back her sleeping furs and stood up, naked and young and beautiful. “When we are mated,” she said, “I will see that you wake silently, and slide down the tree to find my breakfast while I sleep as long as I wish!”
“What a shrew,” I said happily. “What a ruler of men.”
“You will see.” She slipped her light garment over her head. “I will quiet you down, young Bear-throat!”
“I hope the day is soon, then, for your mating,” growled her father from the lower platform of their family’s tree. “Perhaps good folk will then be allowed to rest.”
* * * *
Grinning, I hung by my hands from the edge of my platform and dropped to the ground. Fifteen feet from toe to turf is no drop at all to a skilled hunter. The watchers were coming down the glen from their posts of the night, yawning and rubbing their eyes. I hailed them and they answered with waves of their arms.
“Any disturbances?”
“You would have heard, Ahmusk of the keen ears,” said their leader. “No, we glimpsed a knifetooth bear traveling his solitary way to the Gray Brook, but if he killed thereafter we were too distant to hear it. No noises save the small animals going and coming, going and coming all night long.”
“It is nearly a moon’s change since old Halfspoor ranged near the valley,” I said. “He will be coming back soon, if I know his ways; and then there will be disturbances in the night.”
; The leader of the watchers shivered. As far apart as we stood, I saw him shudder. “But do not lose your day’s sleep over him,” I shouted reassuringly. “This very moment I go to look for his track. If he ranges within our lands I shall know, and a pair of hunters will watch with you.”
“Watching is our duty, not yours,” he answered a little sullenly. “Beware of Halfspoor, or he will be using your pelt for a sleeping fur, Ahmusk.”
I was angered, I suppose. A hunter’s pride is a powerful thing. “Halfspoor is only a knifetooth bear,” I told him. “He is not, after all, one of The Nameless.”
They looked at me in horror; and then they turned and went to their trees without a word. I felt ashamed of myself. It was an evil thing to use that terrible name so lightly. Then Lora had clambered down her tree and was standing near me, looking up into my face, so that I forgot all that I had been saying and knew only that every day this girl became more lovely.
“Good morning, Lora,” I said.
“Are you really going to look for Halfspoor?” she asked me, her eyes, that were like the purple bells of the burrowflower, all wide and wondering.
“I am.”
“Perhaps he has left our lands.”
“I have known Halfspoor for five years, Lora, or it may be six. I know his rangings and his times for killing; I recognize his track though it be on the hardest ground, and I could tell you which snuffling grunt was his if a full score of knifetooth bears were all talking at once. He is due to come back today, or tomorrow or the next day. He is old and wily, but set in his ways.”
“I hope he has died on the banks of the Wide River,” she said, brushing a strand of her onyx-black hair away from her face. “I hope his bones are gnawed by jackal-rats.”
“And I hope your wish does not come true,” I said lightly. “Because I have chosen his hide for our mating rug, young Lora.”
The 53rd Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK; Geoff St. Reynard Page 11