The 35th Golden Age of Science Fiction: Keith Laumer

by Keith Laumer

  At the sound of the apex-tone, I racked instruments, walked, not ran, to the nearest transfer-channel—

  Another:

  Having assumed duty as Alert Officer, I reported first to coordination Control via short-line, and confirmed rapport—

  These were routine SOP’s covering simple situations aboard ship. I skipped a few, tried again:

  Needing a xivometer, I keyed instruction-complex One, followed with the code—

  Three rods further along, I got this:

  The situation falling outside my area of primary conditioning, I reported in corpo to Technical Briefing, Level Nine, Section Four, Sub-section Twelve, Preliminary. I recalled that it was now necessary to supply my activity code…my activity code…my activity code … (A sensation of disorientation grew; confused images flickered like vague background-noise; then a clear voice cut across the confusion:)

  You have suffered partial personality-fade. Do not be alarmed. Select a general background orientation rod from the nearest emergency rack. Its location is…

  I was moving along the stacks, to pause in front of a niche where a U-shaped plastic strip was clamped to the wall. I removed it, fitted it to my head—

  Then: I was moving along the stacks, to pause in front of a niche—

  I was leaning against the wall, my head humming. The red stick lay on the floor at my feet. That last bit had been potent: something about a general background briefing—

  “Hey, Foster!” I called, “I think I’ve got something.…” He appeared from the stacks.

  * * * *

  “As I see it,” I said, “this background briefing should tell us all we need to know about the ship; then we can plan our next move more intelligently. We’ll know what we’re doing.” I took the thing from the wall, just as I had seemed to do in the phantom scene the red rod had projected for me.

  “These things make me dizzy,” I said, handing it to Foster. “Anyway you’re the logical one to try it.”

  He took the plastic shape, went to the reclining seat at the near end of the library hall, and settled himself. “I have an idea this one will hit harder than the others,” he said.

  He fitted the clamp to his head and…instantly his eyes glazed; he slumped back, limp.

  “Foster!” I yelled. I jumped forward, started to pull the plastic piece from his head, then hesitated. Maybe Foster’s abrupt reaction was standard procedure—but I didn’t like it much.

  I went on reasoning with myself. After all, this was what the red rod had indicated as normal procedure in a given emergency. Foster was merely having his faded personality touched up. And his full-blown, three-dimensional personality was what we needed to give us the answers to a lot of the questions we’d been asking. Though the ship and everything in it had lain unused and silent for forgotten milennia, still the library should be good. The librarian was gone from his post for forgotten centuries, and Foster was lying unconscious, and I was thirty thousand miles from home—but I shouldn’t let trifles like that worry me.…

  I got up and prowled the room. There wasn’t much to look at except stacks and more stacks. The knowledge stored here was fantastic, both in magnitude and character. If I ever get home with a load of these rods.…

  I strolled through a door leading to another room. It was small, functional, dimly lit. The middle of the room was occupied by a large and elaborate divan with a cap-shaped fitting at one end. Other curious accoutrements were ranked along the walls. There wasn’t much in them to thrill me. But bone-wise I had hit the jackpot.

  Two skeletons lay near the door, in the final slump of death. Another lay beside the fancy couch. There was a long-bladed dagger beside it.

  I squatted beside the two near the door and examined them closely. As far as I could tell, they were as human as I was. I wondered what kind of men they had been, what kind of world they had come from, that could build a ship like this and stock it as it was stocked.

  The dagger that lay near the other bones was interesting: it seemed to be made of a transparent orange metal, and its hilt was stamped in a repeated pattern of the Two Worlds motif. It was the first clue as to what had taken place among these men when they last lived: not a complete clue, but a start.

  I took a closer look at an apparatus like a dentist’s chair parked against the wall. There were spidery-looking metal arms mounted above it, and a series of colored glass lenses. A row of dull silver cylinders was racked against the wall. Another projected from a socket at the side of the machine. I took it out and looked at it. It was a plain pewter-colored plastic, heavy and smooth. I felt pretty sure it was a close cousin to the chopsticks stored in the library. I wondered what brand of information was recorded in it as I dropped it in my pocket.

  I lit a cigarette and went out to where Foster lay. He was still in the same position as when I had left him. I sat down on the floor beside the couch to wait.

  * * * *

  It was an hour before he stirred, heaved a sigh, and opened his eyes. He reached up, pulled off the plastic headpiece, dropped it on the floor.

  “Are you okay?” I said. “Brother, I’ve been sweating.…”

  Foster looked at me, his eyes traveling up to my uncombed hair and down to my scuffed shoes. His eyes narrowed in a faint frown. Then he said something—in a language that seemed to be all Z’s and Q’s.

  “Don’t spring any surprises on me, Foster,” I said hoarsely. “Talk American.”

  A look of surprise crossed his face. He stared into my eyes again, then glanced around the room.

  “This is a ship’s library,” he said.

  I heaved a sigh of relief. “You gave me a scare, Foster. I thought for a second your memory was wandering again.”

  Foster was watching my face as I spoke. “What was it all about?” I said. “What have you found out?”

  “I know you,” said Foster slowly. “Your name is Legion.”

  I nodded. I could feel myself getting tense again. “Sure, you know me. Just take it easy pal. This is no time to lose your marbles.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “You remember, we were—”

  He shook my hand off. “That is not the custom in Vallon,” he said coldly.

  “Vallon?” I echoed. “What kind of routine is this, Foster? We were friends when we walked into this room an hour ago. We were hot on the trail of something, and I’m human enough to want to know how it turned out.”

  “Where are the others?”

  “There’s a couple of ‘others’ in the next room,” I snapped. “But they’ve lost a lot of weight. I can find you several more, in the same condition. Outside of them there’s only me—”

  Foster looked at me as if I wasn’t there. “I remember Vallon,” he said. He put a hand to his head. “But I remember, too, a barbaric world, brutal and primitive. You were there. We traveled in a crude rail-car, and then in a barge that wallowed in the sea. There were narrow, ugly rooms, evil odors, harsh noises.”

  “That’s not a very flattering portrait of God’s country,” I said; “but I’m afraid I recognize it.”

  “The people were the worst,” Foster said. “Misshapen, diseased, with swollen abdomens and wasted skin and withered limbs.”

  “Some of the boys don’t get out enough,” I said.

  “The Hunters! We fled from them, Legion, you and I. And I remember a landing-ring.…” He paused. “Strange, it had lost its cap-stones and fallen into ruin.”

  “Us natives call it Stonehenge.”

  “The Hunters burst out of the earth. We fought them. But why should the Hunters seek me?”

  “I was hoping you’d tell me,” I said. “Do you know where this ship came from? And why?”

  “This is a ship of the Two Worlds,” he replied. “But I know nothing of how it came to be here.”

  “How about all that stuff in the journal? Maybe now you—”r />
  “The journal!” Foster broke in. “Where is it?”

  “In your coat pocket, I guess.”

  Foster felt through his jacket awkwardly, brought out the journal. He opened it.

  I moved around to look over his shoulder. He had the book open to the first section, the part written in the curious alien characters that nobody had been able to decipher.

  And he was reading it.

  * * * *

  We sat at the library table of deep green, heavy, polished wood, the journal open at its center. For hours I had waited while Foster read. Now at last he leaned back in his chair, ran a hand through the youthful black hair, and sighed.

  “My name,” he said, “was Qulqlan. And this,” he laid his hand upon the book, “is my story. This is one part of the past I was seeking. And I remember none of it.…”

  “Tell me what the journal says,” I asked. “Read it to me.”

  Foster picked it up, riffled the pages. “It seems that I awoke once before, in a small room aboard this vessel. I was lying on a memo-couch, by which circumstance I knew that I had suffered a Change—”

  “You mean you’d lost your memory?”

  “And regained it—on the couch. My memory-trace had been re-impressed on my mind. I awoke knowing my identity, but not how I came to be aboard this vessel. The journal says that my last memory was of a building beside the Shallow Sea.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “On a far world—called Vallon.”

  “Yeah? And what next?”

  “I looked around me and saw four men lying on the floor, slashed and bloody. One was alive. I gave him what emergency treatment I could, then searched the ship. I found three more men, dead; none living. Then the Hunters attacked, swarming to me—”

  “Our friends the fire-balls?”

  “Yes; they would have sucked the life from me—and I had no shield of light. I fled to the lifeboat, carrying the wounded man. I descended to the planet below: your earth. The man died there. He had been my friend, a man named Ammaerln. I buried him in a shallow depression in the earth and marked the place with a stone.”

  “The ancient sinner,” I said.

  “Yes…I suppose it was his bones the lay brother found.”

  “And we found out last night that the depression was the result of dirt sifting into the ventilator shaft. But I guess you didn’t know anything about the underground installation, way back then. Doesn’t the journal say anything…?”

  “No there is no mention made of it here.” Foster shook his head. “How curious to read of the affairs of this stranger—and know he is myself.”

  “How about the Hunters? How did they get to earth?”

  “They are insubstantial creatures,” said Foster, “yet they can endure the vacuum of space. I can only surmise that they followed the lifeboat down.”

  “They were tailing you?”

  “Yes; but I have no idea why they pursued me. They’re harmless creatures in the natural state, used to seek out the rare fugitive from justice on Vallon. They can be attuned to the individual; thereafter, they follow him and mark him out for capture.”

  “Kind of like bloodhounds,” I said. “Say, what were you: a big-time racketeer on Vallon?”

  “The journal is frustratingly silent as to my Vallonian career,” said Foster. “But this whole matter of the unexplained inter-galactic voyage and the evidences of violence aboard the ship make me wonder whether I, and perhaps others of my companions, were being exiled for crimes done in the Two Worlds.”

  “Wow! So they sicced the Hunters on you!” I said. “But why did they hang around at Stonehenge all this time?”

  “There was a trickle of power feeding the screens,” said Foster. “They need a source of electrical energy to live; until a hundred years ago it was the only one on the planet.”

  “How did they get down into the shaft without opening it up?”

  “Given time, they pass easily through porous substances. But, of course, last night, when I came on them after their long fast, they simply burst through in their haste.”

  “Okay. What happened next—after you buried the man?”

  “The journal tells that I was set upon by natives, men who wore the hides of animals. One of their number entered the ship. He must have moved the drive lever. It lifted, leaving me marooned.”

  “So those were his bones we found in the boat,” I mused, “the ones with the bear’s-tooth necklace. I wonder why he didn’t come into the ship.”

  “Undoubtedly he did. But remember the skeleton we found just inside the landing port? That must have been a fairly fresh and rather gory corpse at the time the savage stepped aboard. It probably seemed to him all too clear an indication of what lay in store for himself if he ventured further. In his terror he must have retreated to the boat to wait, and there starved to death.

  “He was stranded in your world, and you were stranded in his.”

  “Yes,” said Foster. “And then, it seems, I lived among the brute-men and came to be their king. I waited there by the landing ring through many years in the hope of rescue. Because I did not age as the natives did, I was worshipped as a god. I would have built a signalling device, but there were no pure metals, nothing I could use. I tried to teach them, but it was a work of centuries.”

  “I should think you could have set up a school, trained the smartest ones,” I said.

  “There was no lack of intelligent minds,” Foster said. “It is plain that the savages were of the blood of the Two Worlds. This earth must have been seeded long ago by some ancient castaways.”

  “But how could you go on living—for hundreds of years? Are your people supermen that live forever?”

  “The natural span of a human life is very great. Among your people, there is a wasting disease from which you all die young.”

  “That’s no disease,” I said. “You just naturally get old and die.”

  “The human mind is a magnificent instrument,” Foster said, “not meant to wither quickly.”

  “I’ll have to chew that one over,” I said. “Why didn’t you catch this disease?”

  “All Vallonians are inoculated against it.”

  “I’d like a shot of that,” I said. “But let’s get back to you.”

  Foster turned the pages of the journal. “I ruled many peoples, under many names,” he said. “I traveled in many lands, seeking for skilled metal-workers, glass-blowers, wise men. But always I returned to the landing-ring.”

  “It must have been tough,” I said, “exiled on a strange world, living out your life in a wilderness, century after century.…”

  “My life was not without interest,” Foster said. “I watched my savage people put aside their animal hides and learn the ways of civilization. I taught them how to build, and keep herds, and till the land. I built a great city, and I tried—foolishly—to teach their noble caste the code of chivalry of the Two Worlds. But although they sat at a round table like the great Ring-board at Okk-Hamiloth, they never really understood. And then they grew too wise, and wondered at their king, who never aged. I left them, and tried again to build a long-signaller. The Hunters sensed it, and swarmed to me. I drove them off with fires, and then I grew curious, and followed them back to their nest—”

  “I know,” I said. “‘—and it was a place you knew of old: no hive but a Pit built by men.’”

  “They overwhelmed me; I barely escaped with my life. Starvation had made the Hunters vicious. They would have drained my body of its life-energy.”

  “And if you’d known the transmitter was there—but you didn’t. So you put an ocean between you and them.”

  “They found me even there. Each time I destroyed many of them, and fled. But always a few lived to breed and seek me out again.”

  “But your signaller—didn’t it work?”
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  “No. It was a hopeless attempt. Only a highly developed technology could supply the raw materials. I could only teach what I knew, encourage the development of the sciences, and wait. And then I began to forget.”

  “Why?”

  “A mind grows weary,” Foster said. “It is the price of longevity. It must renew itself. Shock and privation hasten the Change. I had held it off for many centuries. Now I felt it coming on me.

  “At home, on Vallon, a man would record his memory at such a time, store it electronically in a recording device, and, after the Change, use the memory-trace to restore, in his renewed body, his old recollections in toto. But, marooned as I was, my memories, once lost, were gone forever.

  “I did what I could; I prepared a safe place, and wrote messages that I would find when I awoke—”

  “When you woke up in the hotel, you were young again, overnight. How could it happen?”

  “When the mind renews itself, erasing the scars of the years, the body, too, regenerates. The skin forgets its wrinkles, and the muscles their fatigue. They become again as they once were.”

  “When I first met you,” I said, “you told me about waking up back in 1918, with no memory.”

  “Yours is a harsh world, Legion. I must have forgotten many times. Somewhere, some time, I lost the vital link, forgot my quest. When the Hunters came again, I fled, not understanding.”

  “You had a machine gun set up in the house at Mayport. What good was that against the Hunters?”

  “None, I suppose,” Foster replied. “But I didn’t know. I only knew that I was—pursued.”

  “And by then you could have made a signaller,” I said. “But you’d forgotten how—or even that you needed one.”

  “But in the end I found it—with your help, Legion. But still there is a mystery: What came to pass aboard this ship all those centuries ago? Why was I here? And what killed the others?”

  “Look,” I said. “Here’s a theory: there was a mutiny, while you were in the machine having your memory fixed. You woke up and it was all over—and the crew was dead.”

  “That hypothesis will serve,” said Foster. “But one day I must learn the truth of this matter.”