Godson of Almarlu: A Collection of Science Fiction Novellas

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by Raymond Z. Gallun


  Then, quite subtly at first, the aspect of the altered lunar scene, some of it visible to the prisoners through the windows around them, took on a new, disquieting element. A diffused ruddiness, like the glow of hot embers, spread itself ominously over the wild terrain. It came from the sky, from behind the dense translucence of the clouds, like red fire shining through a fog.

  The world without seemed very still; awe had checked human tongues in their wagging. Only the smooth, muted rustle of news-disseminator diaphragms told that these devices were in action, waiting for some one, somewhere, to speak into a radio microphone.

  But the Scanlons were not as awed as the other watchers, for their knowledge was more complete.

  “Do you know what the red glow in the sky means, Dave?” Jeff asked.

  “Yes,” said the youth. “The Earth is—going.” His lips curled as if he were in pain.

  And then several news-disseminator diaphragms, belonging to receivers that were correctly tuned to receive the incoming message, began to boom. Others joined them, as swift fingers, working almost automatically, adjusted dials.

  “CRUISER FMZ calling lunar colonists,” came the message. “Feodor Moharleff communicating. I must talk rapidly, for I have little time left. I have heard of the capture of Jefferson Scanlon and his nephew; and I wish to say that neither deserves death. Jefferson Scanlon is a hero, not a blackguard; for somehow—I know not how—he foresaw calamity and provided you with a means of escape.

  “I who have publicly denounced him, tell you this, though I swore I would never aid a money king. But things have changed. One cannot see nature crumble around him, and not attain a broader, clearer view; one cannot see death approaching as it is approaching me, and feel that petty animosities are worth their pain.

  “I have been a fool. If I had not been a fool I would be with you now, enjoying the same chance to live that is yours. Nor would I be sacrificing the lives of three of my loyal employees who are with me aboard the cruiser.

  “We are in space now, in the energy beam. We have just left the Earth. But we can never reach our destination, for the beam can last but a few seconds or minutes more. Only the tremendously stout construction of the Scanlon Tower has enabled it to remain active until now.

  “The Earth is exploding. The action is still chiefly along the equator. It is all happening with apparent slowness and great majesty. In a way it is a beautiful spectacle. Our old Earth looks now like a huge, rosy ball of cloud, gradually expanding around its middle. Molten rocks, like sparks of fire, are hurtling up through its cloudy atmosphere. Now a large chunk is drifting away into space.

  “Neither Scanlon nor his invention is responsible for what is happening; though the latter, by retarding the Earth’s rotation and imposing a certain strain on its structure, was guilty of a guiltless fault—that of aggravating an already hopeless situation. A small cometlike body, with a tremendous force of gravity, is the real cause of Earth’s misfortune. It caused Titan, moon of Saturn, to explode, too, as some of you may remember. It contains a large quantity of neutronium. There was also neutronium at the center of the Earth. There is little time to explain further, but there are scientists among you who can work out a theory.

  “The energy beam in which we are floating is wavering and flickering. The jolts are threatening to break up the cruiser. The neutronium inside the Earth was caused to swing back and forth by the terrific tidal attraction of the cometlike invader. Atomic energy was unleashed from broken atoms. And now, finally, under the fury of that energy, the neutronium at the center of the Earth is expanding to form common matter, probably lead. A speck of neutronium, too small to be visible, would weigh several tons. So you can imagine. For every tiny speck of neutronium, several tons of lead, much greater volume. Terrific explosive possibilities— I—”

  THE COMMUNICATION broke off with a sort of twanging crash that had the sound of sudden death. The slender, elastic duct from Earth to Moon had snapped; and, like a fly roosting on a tautly drawn strand of rubber that is suddenly released, the cruiser in which Feodor Moharleff and his loyal henchmen rode was crushed by the contracting forces.

  Everything now seemed deathly still. There was no sound except the sighing of the wind and the whisper of news-disseminator diaphragms. The people of Earth had respected Feodor Moharleff’s learning.

  Then the Scanlons heard the rasp of many slow footsteps. In a moment they saw awed and sheepish eyes looking at them through the windows. The door of the cabin, partly ajar, was opened wide. No one cheered, no one smiled, and for many seconds no one said anything.

  It was Jeff who broke the spell. “I guess everything’s all right now, isn’t it?” he asked very mildly. His old swaggering, oratorical self was dead forever; Jeff Scanlon felt very small and lost and trivial.

  There was a pause. Then a big, burly fellow spoke up. “Yes, I think so,” he said. “And I guess you’re in command here now, Mr. Scanlon.” He offered no apology for wrongs done, and he asked no questions. Yet his words were an expression of blind faith which most of his fellows must have felt, too.

  “No,” Jeff replied. “We all belong to a democracy. But there’s something I’d like you to do for me. Send out a radio call for my wife, Bessie Scanlon. I want to know if she came.”

  Several men leaped to obey his commands; but Jeff wasn’t flattered. He was only a comic little man, trying to do his best. The bonds that pinioned him and Dave were quickly cut, and they were helped out into the open.

  Timid questions were put to him, but he brushed them aside with brief and noncommittal answers, for he was too weary to attempt an explanation of ancient Almarlu.

  There was a small girl near by, crying; while he waited for an answer to the radio call, he tried to cheer her up by directing her attention to a large cat, greedily devouring a fish that had been brought to the Moon from the Arctic Ocean of Earth.

  “No report from Aunt Bessie,” Dave announced presently, relaying the information from a nearby plane.

  “That means that she isn’t here and won’t come,” Jeff said quietly. “Every one on the Moon would have received the call.” And though he smiled as he spoke, he knew that he had loved her more deeply than anything else in life, even though she had often irritated him. But she had never, never been willing to obey his suggestions.

  The sky above was much redder now. Meteors—fragments of the Earth—might soon be falling.

  Jeff looked at the fernlike lunar sprouts in the damp soil; he thought of food and of sleep and of work. Already the godson of Almarlu was turning over in his mind plans for the future. Adventure was at an end. Tomorrow toil would begin in earnest. Jeff was pleased.

  Dave seemed pleased, too, for he smiled grimly. Harsh fact had made a man of an aimless trifler.

  And the long-dead people of another sphere might have been pleased also, had they seen the successful termination of the thing they had planned—the survival of the folk who were, in a sense, their children.

  The End

  **************************

  Fires of Genesis,

  by Raymond Z. Gallun

  Astounding March 1937

  Novelette - 16777 words

  And so the Tegati—creatures of the Moon—come to Earth—

  I.

  Raah did not know that, but for the very peculiar circumstances of his birth, his name would have been Forster. But Raah had never heard of Chicago, where, twenty years ago, during the beginning of trouble, the Forsters had been famous.

  He had never heard of men such as Einstein and Arrhenius. He had never seen the hell that was overwhelming the planet of his ancestors; in fact he had never seen Earth at all. And he had but a dim conception of the tragic heroism of his mother who had died soon after his birth.

  She had come here to Wan in a space ship, in quest of something—she had not known what it was—that might help to check the inexorable progress of human extinction, which, by a strange paradox, had not begun its ghastly threat and promise with
the forces of death, but with the very fires of genesis itself, anachronistically unleashed.

  Always Raah had been here on Wan, a beautiful, wild, verdant, tremendously deep valley of an otherwise almost dead world. In a primitive environment he had grown to young manhood; he had learned to speak, in so far as his human vocal organs were able, the soft, liquid tongue of the furry elves of Wan.

  His life, in spite of hardship, had not been unhappy. There was danger, of course, and fear. The Tegati were the bogies of his existence.

  During the protracted day they slept somewhere high up in the tremendous mountain barriers that ringed Wan. They were alive; they were horrible, they were tenuous almost as ghosts, with their thin, bubblelike bodies, and the clawed tendrils that dangled around their fanged mouths.

  At dusk they came down into the valley to feed. And woe betide any hapless creature, not provided with a hard shell, who chanced to be away from the refuge of its lair at that time!

  Then, too, there was the constant threat of quake and volcanic eruption. Wan was fifty miles below the level of its surrounding inner barrier, and it penetrated close to the internal fires which still glowed faintly and dangerously in the heart of this small husk of a world. Ikaah, the black lake at the center of the valley, had once been an active volcano. In fact, carbon dioxide, bubbling from its depths, must have been the source of Wan’s rich oxygen, which was freed from the compound by the action of the chlorophyl in green plants.

  But in spite of these dangers and worries, there had been much to hold the attention of a growing boy. Old Treb, who on Earth might have been called a wizard or a magician, could tell tales of things incredible. Then, too, he was Raah’s foster parent, replacing, since the boy’s infancy, the mother whom he could not remember. Thus Treb held, for Raah, a position of authority and respect.

  There had been a time not so long ago, Treb had said, when many meteors had fallen. Soon afterward the Sun had arisen one dawn, its face tinged with a faint, glowing green. Before it was halfway toward its zenith this green veil had faded. But unfamiliar cancerous diseases had come to plants and animals alike, and an odd, corrosive scum had appeared on the surface of Ikaah. The diseases had now died out, but the scum still lingered.

  Then, a while later, a huge, gleaming thing that spat flame had appeared over the eastern mountains. It had paused in its flight; it had wavered; and then, with a roar, it had plunged straight into the waters of Ikaah. But before it had fallen it had disgorged a being who had floated to the ground, supported by a bulging contraption of white fabric. She had been like Raah, only more fragile.

  She had lived on Wan for some time, cared for by old Treb. She had spoken little, and in an unknown language; but there had frequently been, in her eyes, a look of horror eloquent of some cosmic catastrophe beyond the grasp of any Wanite.

  Yet a number of Wan’s long day-and-night periods, totaling in duration a terrestrial year, after her son was born, she had died; and her grim secret had perished with her. Treb had never been able to learn her language, and she had done but little better with the speech of the furry elves.

  This much Raah knew of his mother and of his origin. The result was an intense natural yearning to know more, which had grown upon him gradually during his adolescence.

  Once the ancestors of the elves of Wan had been slaves, serving a people of godlike learning. The latter had dwelt in magnificent cities, not far beyond the inner barriers of Wan.

  But in spite of their control over natural forces, the godlike ones had suddenly disappeared. Whether, moved by a hidden motive, they had committed universal suicide, or whether their science had enabled their intellects to discard the limitations imposed by tangible and mortal bodies, was unknown.

  Bereft of masters now, the furry elves had journeyed down through mountain gorges into warm and fertile Wan, bringing much marvelous equipment and loot with them. The transport system had still been functioning, and so the migration had been easy.

  But those tiny slaves were simple creatures. What knowledge they had had swiftly decayed; and they had reverted to semi-savagery, living in crude stone huts, tilling little patches of ground during the long day periods, and hibernating during the night.

  Only Treb’s direct family line—his father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather, and so on back—had made any attempt to preserve the ancient sciences. Invoking the magic of those sciences, Treb had scaled the mountain walls of Wan during his youth and had visited the region of dead glories.

  The experiences of this venture had provided him with many wonderful tales to tell his foster child, who was almost his only friend and associate, for his own people were suspicious of his great learning.

  While he and his pupil cultivated their garden patch, while they roamed the bizarre forest, searching for fruits and useful herbs, while they toiled over strange experiments in the wizard’s workshop, and while at sunset and dawn they viewed the grotesque grandeur of the valley that was their home, Treb had talked of the things he had done and of the mystic miracles he had seen.

  The effect was an inevitable one. Raah was only a half-naked savage under the passive spell of primitive Wan; but even during his early childhood we can imagine him lisping in the soft speech of the furry elves: “Some day we shall climb up there beyond the barriers. Some day we shall descend to the bottom of Ikaah, won’t we?”

  The wizard’s great, catlike eyes would shine with enthusiasm and he would reply: “Yes, child of the unknown. When you are adult, we shall do those things, if to do them is stamped in the fixed course of the future. I am too old to act alone.”

  II.

  Twenty years after the beginning of the catastrophe that had brought Amy Forster to this mysterious vale which was a deep hole, five hundred miles wide, in the center of a much larger valley that scarred almost half a world, master and disciple began to make definite plans.

  And a sudden, severe quaking of the ground forced the issue. The time was near to sunset. Raah had wandered off into the prickly forest of cactiform trees. For hours he had lain sprawled in the moss-like grass, looking up dreamily through the warm, insect-flecked haze, toward the jagged peaks of the western barrier that loomed clear and harsh in the partial vacuum that enveloped it.

  The first temblor passed quickly. The tortured, subterranean groaning that accompanied the shock died out. By then Raah was bounding down the forest trail toward Treb's lair.

  Through rifts in the jungle, he glimpsed Ikaah, its surface looking black and awesome now, like the stare of a devil. The lake was set between high cliffs of black, fire-formed basalt, which reflected specks of sunshine. Yet the water was lusterless and turbid now.

  Volcanic vapors were boiling up angrily through it, and above the lake hung a sulphurous, yellow pall. Soon, perhaps, Ikaah would be changed back into the volcano it had once been.

  The wizard’s workshop, built of roughly masoned stone, was located on a low, rocky knoll, isolated by several miles from any Wanite village.

  His lithe, athletic young body glistening with the sweat of exertion, Raah approached the structure. He hammered on the massive copper door. Its stout bolts grated, and he was admitted into the cool, dusky interior. The door was reclosed and bolted in his wake.

  From close beside him came a series of musical twitters, too soft and beautiful ever to be reproduced accurately by human vocal organs. To any other Earthman they would have been meaningless, but to Raah’s practiced mind they formed the words and sentences of coherent speech.

  It was Treb who spoke. “I was waiting for you, youth of another world,” he said. “I knew that you would come. The shaking ground told you that we must hurry. Though we face grave danger in our dive into Ikaah, we cannot delay it longer. The lake bubbles as I have never known it to bubble before. If we delay too much, the things we seek at its bottom may be destroyed. Dusk and the Tegati will come soon. We must wait until then, for now my people are away from their lairs; they would kill us if we dared to approach Ikaah, whos
e fire devils they fear we have aroused with our magic.”

  Treb was scarcely three feet tall. The fine, gray fur that covered his body was silvered at the tips; but his age, indicated thus, detracted nothing from his feline alertness. Dynamic energy snapped in each darting glance of his glowing, catlike eyes. But in those orbs, too, there was an indefinable something that was a reflection of the stuff of dreams.

  Raah nodded slowly, uttered a few words, coarse and grating to Wanite ears, but understandable. In him were the tensions, fears and fascinations of approaching adventure.

  Together Raah and his teacher moved about the cavernous chamber, gathering the things they needed. Any Earthman, suddenly transported to Treb’s lair, would have found his surroundings a quaint and mystic miracle. In it, the crude barbarisms of tools and devices, hammered roughly from copper, mingled incongruously with mechanical refinements which could not be realized on Earth in less than a thousand years.

  Arranged on shelves, woven from the stems of grotesque plants, were various glittering pieces of apparatus, belonging to another era. All that was here in the workshop represented the attempt of a keen mind to cling to the wisdom of a past that was dead.

  Treb and Raah donned small conical caps which some forefather of the wizard had brought down from the heights above Wan. Each of the adventurers provided himself with a stout copper bar and a coil of fibrous rope. Twice, while they waited, sharp temblors rocked the ground.

  Dusk came at last, soft, soothing and purple, mellow with a warm and shadowy stillness, yet heavy with grim portent. After several minutes there was a rustle, like the sound of a breeze in the forest. But it was not caused by a breeze.

 

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