Collected Tales (Jerry eBooks)

by Leslie F Stone

  “So now I beg of you to accept the truths I have placed before you, Fergus. All I ask is that another scientist, several perhaps, but study my researches, repeat my experiments, for I know that they can do no more than come to the same conclusions as I! In humanity’s name, I demand it!”

  “No! These things are lies—lies I tell you. Lies!” Fergus turned upon the servant. “Torgo, confess the truth. You are not he who was given this tattoo! That you usurped another’s place to hide a crime of your early youth! Confess!”

  Misbelief, bewilderment, fear swept the old man. He muttered and stammered, mouthing words before he could control his half-paralyzed tongue. “No—no, sire, do not accuse me. I am Torgo. I swear it. How in the name of your revered father could I—change this mark? Oh, sire—sire——” Then, suddenly, he pitched over upon the floor—dead.

  “It was too much for the old, heart to stand.” Toms sighed.

  “He lied, I tell you. The tattoo is changed. There was such a case in America ten years ago. His guilt killed him.”

  Again, Fergus lifted the speaking ring. “There is a madman in my chambers to be executed instantly. And send Bejo. I have a criminal case awaiting his attention. Hasten.” And plucking from a table the sheets of paper that held Prince Toms’ lengthy report he tore them across again and again.

  Toms watched him silently, pityingly. He did not mind dying, but he did mind that his work must go with him. Perhaps, had he searched far enough, he would have found some one to listen to him. The real pity of it all was that they must go on sterilizing avatars like himself, who alone carried the seed of sanity in their genes. The race had condemned itself to extinction.

  BUT PRINCE TOMS had erred in one equation. He had considered that the future of the race lived in its avatars. But throwbacks have a habit of breeding, for the most part, in the likeness of their direct forbears; they rarely breed like. It is the sport or mutation that is responsible for differentiation and modification of a species. The human genus was to survive only through these persons born with immunity to the disease of their race.

  Actually, the civilization of Fergus V of Mediterraneania, and his kind was to continue almost unchanged for practically one hundred centuries more, carried forward upon the momentum imparted by its upward surge. But even as Toms had predicted, the body continued to increase in size with the brain remaining static at eighty ounces. And with no push from within, the skull, likewise, remained almost stationary, growing just enough to allow for the expansion of the facial bones.

  Again, Toms had been correct in saying that his was the last new idea. Wholly imitative, repeating the practiced motions of its forbears, the race had nothing new to offer. The only change was in man’s accelerated rate of growth. Whereas, it had taken eighty centuries for man to double his size, in the hundred centuries following he not only doubled that height, but added another six feet besides!

  It is to be expected that with this increase in size the new giant would have built new homes. Instead, he simply made the old do by knocking out the second-story floor of his old house, making himself as comfortable as he could. Nor did he design new furniture. Either he joined two or more items together, else contented himself upon the floor.

  Yet, that was not all. Man began to forget how to use the implements science had given him. Even if he had thought to build new furniture, it is to be doubted that he would have known how to go about it. And as time went on more and more was forgotten. Although dwelling within the beautiful cities of the past, they gradually lost the ability to keep them in repair.

  As machines wore out, one after another, cities had to be deserted, because of the breakdown of water or light systems. Then, as the air service began to fall apart, city after city lost direct contact with the other. One day the giant radio-television station, that had served all the world, went out of commission and no one knew how to repair it.

  For many centuries all world commodities were delivered through a vast system of pneumatic tubes. Now, the system began to break up. Factories and mines no longer supplied the cities with even the necessities of life. It was found that the locations of many factories, mills and mines had been forgotten, were lost. By the end of the year 26,098, it was evident that, to keep himself alive, man had to revert to the tilling of the soil with hand tools.

  Once a machine ceased its function, no one had the initiative to examine it to discover what had made it go. But had it not been for the farming machines they would not even have had any idea how to go about farming for themselves. Ripping the plowshares from the machines themselves, those who had seen the machines in operation went about imitating its motions. Luckily, each machine carried hundreds of these implements.

  Had an intelligence quotient been taken at this time it would have shown that the large majority of the people were more or less feeble-minded. Here and there was to be found a man or woman slightly above average. It was they that made the last attempt to lift their race out of its slough of mental apathy. But once they managed to get the thought across that to eat, man must plow, plant and reap, it was simple to keep their slaves at their toil. On the other hand, it was sometimes just as difficult to halt the work at sundown. Otherwise, many would have gone on working until fatigue killed them.

  It was at this period that the eugenic board, which had somehow existed all these centuries, more or less, broke down completely. Men forgot to make a gesture at imitating the card indexing of their ancestors. From that time the little ones began to collect into settlements of their own.

  THESE PEOPLE were on an average of between six and nine feet tall, although there were occasional five-foot and ten-or-eleven-foot men and women among them. They differed from the old race in several ways: first, they had heads more in keeping with their bodies; second, they were far more intelligent. Yet they were to make a mistake that was to cost their descendants dearly. Entirely shunning the old cities, they lost their one chance of grafting the knowledge of their ancestors upon their new organization.

  Born when the cities were scarcely more than rubble heaps, filthy and filled with disease, the machines mere heaps of rust, their own parents dull-witted, eking a miserable existence upon the crumb heap of the past, they had not recognized the values upon which the cities had been built and knew nothing of the great libraries, of the stores of records lying dust-covered beneath the fallen stone. They simply made their own start from that period of their race’s decadence. Theirs was the beginning of a new iron age.

  Not all their offspring were as themselves. They could never know when a young giant would be born. In fact, at first, the percentage was high, as was the death rate of the mothers. And the new race would have nothing to do with them. They were determined to keep a standard of their own. They, the erstwhile freaks, were for prohibition of the appearance of freaks in their midst. All overlarge young were destroyed at birth. Those that showed an inclination to grow too rapidly were done away with. Parents who persistently gave birth to giant offspring were forced to leave the settlement. They, the despised, were now seeking race purity. Without knowing their past, they were disfranchising the giant.

  In the meanwhile, all was not going so well with the old race. Such cities as were still in use, because of their proximity to natural water sources, were becoming offal heaps wherein disease and terror grew year by year. Death stalked the streets at all hours and it appeared as if the end of the race was at hand.

  But another factor was arising to bring about a complete severance with the old civilization: by hundreds people were becoming mildly insane. It was increasingly difficult to keep them at work in the fields, or even at the simpler tasks of shepherding sheep, herding cattle. They were quickly becoming a drag upon their fellows and there was but one solution: to turn them out to fend for themselves best they could!

  That was an error. For these outcasts drifted together, roved and ranged as they pleased, either stripping the wilderness or raiding and pillaging the fields and storehouses of those
who had turned them free. Mostly, these people were not vicious—simply hungry. At first they were content to glean for what they could find on the edges of the farm lands. But that did not last long. Here and there a homicidal maniac might do serious damage. The dull-witted farmers hardly knew what to do with this new situation. They tried to defend their own with clubs, but as the company of the insane grew, the problem became acute.

  Toiling from sunup to sundown, the farmers were barely able to grow enough food for themselves and their families. To halve their rations with their unfortunate brethren meant near starvation for them all. After repeated attacks of ever-increasing bands of outcasts that were breeding among themselves as rapidly as the city dwellers, the time was to come when there was no more seed for planting. Driving their herds before them, the farmers were to desert the cities and take their chances in the open with their enemy.

  But that was no solution. Their herds decimated by both their own gluttony and that of the large, wandering bands of outcasts, man slipped lower down the scale of civilization from herder to hunter, taking food where he found it. And now, as there was no longer anything over which to fight, the outcasts were outcasts no longer. Insane and dull-witted roved together in the never-ending search for food.

  And all the while humanity continued to grow. By the three hundredth century the average full-grown male was more than forty feet tall. And it was not unusual to see oldsters several feet taller.

  All the world they roamed, foraging throughout daylight for food to fill their great stomachs. Each adult was now capable of eating two full-grown cattle a day and still feel the gnaw of hunger. But they could not always depend upon meat. The harvest of a single, well-laden fruit tree was considered a halfway decent titbit for one adult. By sitting in a field of wild melons or a vegetable or grain patch a man could manage to take off the edge of his appetite by devouring everything within reach of his long arms.

  This giant no longer bothered with the niceties of cooking his food, any more than he bothered to peel or skin it. Necessity drove him to fill his growing maw with everything within reach. Such bones as were too large to go down his gullet he cracked and sucked, and he was developing the ability to digest all sorts of roughage.

  ONE can wonder that any other living creature was able to survive these Gargantuan appetites. Yet with all the world rapidly turning into a wilderness, the animals, with unrestrained pasturage, had become increasingly prolific. Domestic animals that had been bred for countless centuries for the betterment of their own powers of regeneration did good part to regenerate the world with their kind. Particularly in those parts of the world where man first deserted his cities, the herds had developed unmolested.

  Long ago man had done away with earth’s predatory beasts, so that aside from drought, flood, famine, insects—until man again found them—the meat animals thrived wonderously. The forest had become filled with swine. Beaver, marten, otter and dozens of the smaller animals were again swarming the streams. Rabbits, mice, rats rampaged through the grasslands. Thus had. the world prepared itself for the coming of the most predatory beast of all time: man himself.

  And man, or that awful travesty of man, prospered through the years, even as he grew more witless. When herds of a locality grew scarce, deserting to greener, fresher pasturage, the great ones followed. And it was in the course of these wanderings that they discovered the little ones, dainty, tasty morsels that did not have the fleetness of the herds to escape their groping fingers. It is to be doubted that the witless monsters were able to recognize the little people as creatures like themselves in all but size.

  With the coming of this awful menace the little ones had to change their own ways of living. No longer could they dwell in the open, cultivating broad fields of grains, pasturaging great herds. Let a band of great ones stumble against their land, and all achievement was wasted, acres laid bare, herds devoured or scattered, themselves on the run. And in running they were no match for the terrible giants. Once the giants had discovered their existence, they went out of their way to find them, smelling them out, sighting them from their own great heights.

  It did not take the little ones long to recognize the fact that unless they deserted their villages they would soon be no more. They tried at first to save their herds, to keep ever on the move. But the great ones were everywhere, appearing suddenly from one direction or the other in bands of twenty, thirty or even forty individuals.

  And so, through necessity, the little ones retraced the steps of their ancestors. Gathering into small tribes, sometimes mere family groups, they nested in the most inaccessible havens they could find, in natural caves, in burrows in the earth, upon islands far from shore, hoping against hope that the great, mindless ones would not find them. Yet, they were found. A hunter moving through the trees, a child that had wandered afield, a woman scratching at a bit of earth were sufficient to bring the bellowing monsters down upon the tribe. And no cry was more dreadful than “The great ones come.”

  THUS, hundreds of centuries after Prince Toms had sounded his warning, the people of Lunda waited, shivering behind their fires, as four great brutes with idiot faces shoved the trees out of their way in anticipation of the delicate morsels of flesh hiding in the rock pile of the tor.

  Behind his cave fire, Gorg, the seven-foot hunter, leaned upon his spear as he peered through the smoke at the oncoming leviathans. So hot was the fire it blistered the skin of his face, arms and torso; yet all the while his body shook and trembled at the sight before his eyes. Brave of the brave, he could not hold back that shiver running through his stocky body; Would the fact that his cave was in the lowest tier on the cliff side protect him and his own? Those that dwelt higher faced the greater danger.

  He counted as they came. One, two, three—— Two gigantic males and a female. No, here came the fourth, trailing the others. This was a small pack, but sufficient to account for every man, woman and child in the caves. Gorg’s grandfather had told him of raiding parties numbering eighteen, twenty members. His father had recounted tales of groups of ten, twelve. But Gorg knew that nowadays a pack of four monsters was large. For some reason of their own they were moving in small groups. Gorg had heard stories of how the terrifying monsters fought among themselves over the spoils.

  What Gorg did not know was the fact that the giants were numbering less each generation. Less and less young were coming into the world. So ferocious had the miserable monsters become that they were likely to kill the mate for whom they had just fought and killed another male, forgetting in the blood lust why they had sought her out.

  Furthermore, if a female did become a mother she was just as apt to devour her own young before it got its walking legs—she or some other. The maternal instinct had to be increasingly deep for a female to carry its young in arms until the little one could fend for itself. And even if food were plentiful, let the little one make a single move that irritated its mother and she might, in insane rage, toss it from her. Again, it was rare for a mother to recognize her own, once it had left her arms. A foster mother might accept it in place of one just lost, or again, a male might decide to dine upon it himself.

  Considering these factors, together with the growing tempers of brutes who fought each other to the death on the slightest provocation, it was to be doubted that with their rapidly lessening numbers the giants could live out another century. Just as nature had eventually turned her back upon her monster offspring of other ages, so again she was preparing to rid the world of its present scourge. Should Gorg’s children live through the present raid, they had good reason to expect to live until that day when the last monster should be gone!

  UNAWARE of any of this, Gorg watched the brutes approach the cliff, cringing at the sound of their excited yowls and yammerings, growing white and shaken at the first gurgling shriek that told him that one of the monsters had made its first kill in the caves above. Then came the earth-shaking roar, as the two males fought over the prey. Through the smoke of his f
ire he could see their great feet and tree-trunk legs, as the pair danced and stamped around each other, while the female, making the best of her opportunities reached into the caves on the crest of the tor.

  Without turning his head, Gorg spoke a few words to his family. But he did not move from his place behind the fire. By the sound of their movements, he knew they obeyed him, creeping into the “safety room” he had long since prepared for this day.

  The settlement of Lunda was comparatively new, having existed some forty years. Here had come Lunda and a half a dozen companions who had escaped a raid of the great ones far up-country. Here they had believed themselves safe, out of the path of the roving monsters. Most of the present tribe had been born, grown to manhood, raised families with never a sight of a great one. And it had become their legend that they had naught to fear. But Gorg refused to believe that. He had readied himself against that day when the great ones should find them. He had begged his fellow tribesmen to follow his example. But only a few had been willing to do so.

  His preparation consisted of digging a second cave out of the old rock behind the cave in which his family dwelt. It was a small, dark hole, but large enough for the five of them to crouch together, seeking comfort in each other’s arms. Since, here they kept a portion of their winter’s stores of food they could stand a siege of many days, once the door was pulled to.

  The door of this crude cyclone cellar was a boulder some five feet across and as many feet through. It appeared immovable, but through long fire-lighted evenings Gorg had carved out its crude knob with stone and flint. By means of the knob he could get sufficient purchase to drag it across the opening of the chamber. But he could not bring himself to join his family immediately. He was held to his place at the cave mouth by awful fascination of the scene being enacted before his eyes.

  For while the adult monsters were squabbling over their spoils, the forty-foot youth had flanked them, and now on hands and knees was grubbing in the lower caves for his share. Youthful though he was, there was nothing about him to stir either admiration or pity, no sweet comeliness of the adolescence to attract the eye. He was, if anything, more idiotic, more hideous in his slobbering anticipation of the stolen sweets than his older companions. His dangling mouth drooling little rivulets of saliva he peered nearsightedly, with his little piggish eyes, for signs of life behind the fires.