Godson of Almarlu: A Collection of Science Fiction Novellas

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  The car came to a smooth halt beneath a colossal, phosphorescent rotunda. Treb had visited the metropolis before, and so he knew his way about.

  “We are here,” he said. “We are here in the place of uncertainty, where anything may seem possible. Here we must wait and rest until the coming of dawn. And then— We must go to a place of refuge, and we must seek food and drink. Our flame mantles wane in strength, and if they are inactive for a time, the caps will draw a little fresh energy from the forces of space. Come. Fortunately, our path lies through a building of many wonders.”

  When the wizard spoke of “the forces of space,” he meant the cosmic rays. All ancient machines drew their power from them. The old-time lords of this region had learned to concentrate the rays, hastening the process of charging any given piece of apparatus.

  They left the shell and strode across the great room, threading their way among many deserted cars that rested in grooved tracks. They saw nothing that moved or breathed, yet the attenuated atmosphere around them seemed to swarm with elusive presences, suggesting in a way that was not visual the machines and beings of another era.

  Perhaps something invisible was here—something belonging to the realm of fine, etheric vibration—that endured from the last days of glory. Or maybe the ancients were not truly gone at all; maybe their science had surmounted the difficulties of existence even here in this dead place.

  Staggering a trifle because of cold and hunger, Treb led the way through a broad courtyard and along a street. Presently he and Raah reached a gigantic edifice which we might call a museum, though it was not that exactly. Rather, it contained what was meant to produce a colossal illustration of the cosmos.

  The two from Wan moved slowly now, and cautiously; for Treb was warned by past experience. As they passed through the monumental gates of the structure, Raah knew that he was on the threshold of incredible revelation.

  He soon learned that it was not a material revelation—there were no rusty relics here, no crude models wrought in simple material form. Instead, there was something in this place that acted upon brain and nerve tissue, to produce visions of strange, phantasmal vividness. It must have been some form of telepathic wave, mechanically amplified, and drawn, perhaps, not from any sort of living mind, but from a mechanical record.

  The two from Wan lost all sense of contact with their actual surroundings. The bright starlight from the entrance of the structure was blotted out, in so far as their sensations were concerned. Even the stone pavement under their feet seemed to vanish, and they floated in a rayless gulf which some subtle intimation told them represented the two most eternal things—time and space. Always they had existed and always they would exist; a condition or state without them was inconceivable.

  Matter and energy, too, were eternal, though they were interchangeable and constantly undergoing various transformations. As if in direct rapport with some colossal intellect burdened with the wisdom of the ages, Treb and Raah grasped these simple truths. And other truths crowded into their minds in bewildering succession.

  Against the darkness around them they saw great, nebulous clouds swirling and contracting, forming at last hot, young stars. They saw those stars pass close to each other, pulling from each other’s substance the hot droplets of planets. They saw those planets cool, and they saw life spring up on their surfaces—life born out of a special and temporary process which went on within the stars themselves.

  They saw that life develop, bent and molded by various environmental conditions, into myriad, diverse forms; and they beheld some of those forms rise toward perfection, in which seemingly complete control of natural forces is achieved, only to be wiped out again in various, cataclysmic ways.

  All this appeared chaotic and disordered; but then there came another subtle intimation to Raah and Treb: There was no such thing as disorder. All that happened and existed was ruled, not by chance but by certainty. The law of cause and effect, absolute and unchangeable, made it so.

  A given group of causes, if completely taken into account down to their last minute detail, could produce but one result: Causes lying in the past not only influenced events of the present, but absolutely dominated them. And causes lying in the present exerted a similar dominance over events of the future.

  Thus, things to come—both the slightest and the greatest of them—were just as fixed and definite as the things that had passed and had become history. Even minute electrons and tiny waves of the ether did not possess free will, but were rigidly directed by the law of certainty.

  And even living intellects, which seemed so independent in thought and action, were not really free at all, but were ruled and swayed first by heredity and then by circumstance.

  Time and space were both circular. If one moved far enough in either, one came back to the point of starting. The universe was finite but unbounded; and in anything finite there is a limit to possible combinations. Thus, there must be repetitions. Worlds that had once been would be again, repeating their ancient course of history. In the gulf of infinite time, the past must inevitably become the future, and the future the past.

  Thus, for the first time, the immutable course of destiny was revealed to the young Earthman. Treb had experienced all this before; hence, he was less affected; but out of the miraculous grandeur of it, he, too, must have drawn a sense of solemn peace. Human thought on Earth had conceived ideas such as these, but they had been only theories. An older, wiser science had probed the universe, and had proven the truth.

  Teacher and pupil, both humble, both awed, emerged at last from the black fog of rapport with greater wisdom. They were in a real room now, crowded with machines arranged in orderly rows. But there was nothing here to aid them in filling their needs. So they continued on, out into the frigid, moveless glory of the night.

  Grown amid crumbling walls were bulbous things, massed closely together like gigantic soap bubbles. They were plants, or rather, parts of plants that had adapted themselves admirably to the rigors of their environment.

  It was these growths that Treb sought. His primitive ingenuity had found them useful on his other venture; and now they would be useful again, providing the means of survival for himself and his friend until the sun shone once more.

  He approached one of the largest of the bubblelike mysteries, and with a bit of sharp rock ripped an opening in it, close to the ground. Instantly, dense air puffed from its interior; but the tough, gummy texture of the balloon-like dome of translucent vegetable matter was sufficiently rigid to prevent its collapse when deflated. Treb crept through the opening, motioning Raah to follow.

  The elasticity of the material caused the edges of the rent to close together at once, and adhesive sap, warmed enough by the warmth of life to flow, in spite of the cold, would swiftly knit those edges together again, making the growth as sound as if it had never been punctured.

  Treb grasped his friend’s hand for communication: “There will be new air here presently,” he said. "All these queer hollow bladders are connected, forming a colony. And so air will be admitted here from the others, since no individual plant must be allowed to perish.”

  Any terrestrial savant, given an opportunity to examine this bizarre vegetation, would have been dumbfounded at the simple way in which life can sometimes surmount terrific obstacles to its continued existence.

  The glutinous domes covered the more delicate parts of the plants, protecting the latter from cold and confining the necessary atmosphere and moisture. The latter—both air and water—had an interesting origin. Hoarfrost, both of moisture and of carbon-dioxide crystals—the latter congealing out of the free atmosphere of this region during the colder parts of the night—was the chief source of both.

  Tendrils, which were developments of the root structure, groped up sluggishly at dawn through holes in the soil, raking the crystals together and drawing them underground, where they melted later in the day. The water in the frost thus reached the roots, while the carbon dioxide arose into t
he domes in gaseous form, there to provide the raw material for starch and oxygen.

  After a moment air came hissing into the dome that Treb and Raah had invaded. They dissolved their flame mantles and breathed the chill, musty gas. It was highly oxygenated and could have contained but little nitrogen, the inert part of it being chiefly carbon dioxide—which, while not specifically poisonous, was somewhat detrimental to the metabolism of animals and men. But Treb had done his best. Being here was better than suffocating in the brittle cold without.

  VII.

  Shivering, the two groped about in the weak starlight that found its way through the translucent dome. Their hands came in contact with masses of hairy stems, slightly warm to the touch. Like animals, these plants manufactured their own heat, probably in much the same way. The stems were tipped with small, globular knobs which might have been seed pods.

  Treb, whose eyes were better adapted to the dark than an Earthman’s, picked some of the knobs and crammed them into his mouth.

  “Food,” he said. “Not good food, but better than nothing. And there is juice, too, to quench our thirst.”

  They ate the bitter, acid fruit. Then they wrapped themselves in the warm stems around them and prepared for a long period of slumber. Worn out, Treb soon fell into the comalike state of hibernation, natural to his kind.

  But Raah did not have the same ability to woo Morpheus. For a long time he stared up at the dome, thinking, with a furious, maddening intensity, of the things he had seen and experienced, and of the colossal riddle of his home planet, which he could not quite place in the scheme of things.

  And so it was during most of the long, long darkness. He had accustomed himself to the conditions of Wan, and in so far as the duration of day and night went, they were practically the same here. But his sleep was fitful and was punctuated by visions of a hell on a dim, foggy Earth which was little more than a legend to him.

  Over all his thoughts of danger, horror and tension was the beautiful face and pert figure of one whose name he did not know. Ellayne Maynard was a mystery that disturbed him and fascinated him in a way that he found hauntingly sweet and utterly new.

  And so, finally, came the quick, ghostly, colorless dawn. The Sun was a corona-wrapped disk of dazzling brilliance. Shadows were long and dense, and suggestive of frozen death. Slowly the solar rays crept down into the pit of the incredible city. The gray soil, born of ancient volcanic ash, processed by the erosion of ages, glared dully with reflected sunshine.

  The spires and ramparts of the metropolis caught the slanting light in their grotesque and fanciful arabesques. Quartz rotundas, which must once have confined air, glittered ethereally. And outlandish plants, protected by flexible bubbles which were part of themselves, began their daily growth and activity.

  Raah felt the stirring of vegetable stems around him. He arose and peered out upon the new morning. His head ached dully from the effects of the obnoxious air around him; but because it was necessary he began to feed on the sour fruit of the stems within the dome. Treb was presently awake and doing likewise.

  “Perhaps soon you shall see the world of your ancestors, as I have seen it, long ago,” the wizard said. “Within a little time we will be able to answer much of the question of success or failure. Much depends on what punishment our flesh can endure. Come.”

  Protected by flame mantles, renewed to some slight extent but still weak, they broke out of the huge bubble that had sheltered them. The viscous sap that flowed in it, more sticky now in the sunshine, could not cling to their substance-less auras; but it was easy to imagine what would happen to any stray Tegati who chanced to foolishly attack a colony of this vegetation.

  The adventurers did not pass through the place of revelation on their return to the rotunda where they had left the rocket ship, but strode along its massive outer wall. It was necessary to shift the rocket to another car; but this caused little trouble, for Treb had traveled to their present destination before, and knew exactly what track to follow.

  Presently the car which now bore the shell from Earth moved slowly around a curve and along a grooved track which headed up, out of the pit and across a plain which lay toward the rising Sun. Treb and Raah watched from the windows of the rocket’s cabin.

  An hour after the outset, the car stopped in a tremendous gulch, pitted with mines and crowded with battered Gargantuan retorts—relics of the mineral industry of an unthinkable antiquity. From here the track did not continue.

  “Now comes the real test. Now we must carry the ship,” said Treb.

  The gulch was very deep, pocketing air that was unusually dense for this region. It swarmed with roosting Tegati. How they could have reached this place was a wonder, until one saw the mine tunnels. Some of them must have rambled far back through mountain ranges, opening into lowlands where air was denser, and providing an avenue through which the Tegati could come and go.

  Utilizing the remaining energy of their hoisting sphere to help them, Treb and Raah bore the space craft straight into the packed host of Tegati.

  Had not the creatures been sluggish and inactive, the two invaders of their realm would undoubtedly have been killed; for sharp, poisoned fangs and claws directed with any enthusiasm could have punctured their enfeebled flame mantles.

  Even as matters were, going through the deepest part of the gulch was a ghastly experience. The repellent monstrosities were everywhere. They impeded walking; they clung to the space ship like swarming bees, and their forms, bouncing lazily from the ground, made vision for any distance impossible.

  But Raah and Treb won through at last. In the rising slope and thinning air at the end of the gulch, the Tegati deserted them.

  The next two hours, however, were filled with the sheer, maddening torture that flesh can feel when opposed to conditions with which it was never meant to cope. More and more tenuous grew the atmosphere the two from Wan breathed, as the altitude increased, and the strength of the flame mantles waned.

  Without Raah’s help, tiny Treb would have faltered and given up many times; but the strong young Earthman was driven by a determination that seemed to carry him beyond even the limits of his body. There was so much to call him, to beckon him—to insist that he reach Earth!

  Thus, driven by an instinctive animal persistence when reason had grown fuzzy, he reached the top of the last jagged slope, and saw, notched between the serrated peaks of two mountains, a mottled, gray-green globe which glimmering consciousness told him was the goal of his dreams and his efforts.

  Grandly it hung there in the black sky, just above the horizon. The designs of Europe, Asia, and Africa were unmistakably visible through the haze of the planet’s atmosphere. This, beyond question, was Earth.

  The world in whose reverse face the valley of Wan nestled was the Moon. It was the proximity of Earth to Luna that had made Wan possible. The two worlds had been born together, dragged out of the substance of the Sun by an invading star. They had come close together in space—much closer than now. And the Moon had had to yield to the molding effect of her larger sister’s fierce attraction.

  First it had slowed lunar axial rotation until always the satellite must keep one face turned toward its primary. Then it had pulled and distorted still, plastic lava, causing the Earthward side of the Moon to bulge, and leaving the other side slightly concave.

  On its Earthward half, Luna had no atmosphere except for a tiny trace. But the other half could not be so easily looted by the covetous fingers of terrestrial gravity. Cupped and protected there in a deep valley, some of it would surely remain through many future ages.

  Treb was limp and unconscious now, and had been so for several minutes. Raah had been carrying him with one arm, while with the other he shoved the rocket forward. The supporting sphere, not quite run down, had held out. Its energy was still sufficient to hold the space craft an inch or so off the ground.

  The nose of the vehicle was pointed straight toward the disk of Earth. With the remnants of his expiring powe
rs, Raah entered the rocket with Treb and sealed the hatch.

  Then, rough with wooden clumsiness, he jerked the throttle wide—much too wide for a sane take-off. There was a dazing roar, a smothering thrust of acceleration.

  Wanite and Earthman were hurled to the rear of the compartment. As the rocket cleared the Moon, they lay bloody and motionless in its cabin.

  VIII.

  The place was the Kansas City refuge. It was after sunset. Into the sky, made murky by the effluvia of an alien form of life, a man peered with a large telescope. The expression on his angular, aesthetic face was eager and intense with the puzzlement of discovery.

  He turned to the girl beside him in the glass-domed chamber. The curve of his lips was almost one of mischief. ‘‘Funny things happen, Ellayne,” he said. “Here. Have a look!’’

  Ellayne Maynard frowned quizzically, then peered into the eyepiece of the telescope. Swimming close to the lunar disk was a tiny speck of flame. The girl’s reaction to the sight of it was less cool than her companion’s had been.

  “Amy Forster!’’ she burst out. “Amy Forster returning, after spending twenty years on the Moon!’’

  Roland Maynard nodded. “Yes, sis,” he said. “I don’t think that anything but a rocket could make that speck of light. And probably Amy’s piloting it; though, by a bare chance, it could be somebody else. It could be a Lunarian—or it could be—Amy’s child.”

  Brother and sister faced each other with mutual expressions of worship for the tragic heroine, whom Roland could not remember very clearly, and whom Ellayne had never seen at all in the flesh.

  The girl nodded. “Dad used to talk so much about Frank and Amy Forster,” she said. “Both of ’em were nuts about stratosphere planes and things—so nuts that their experiments always kept them broke. Then, just before the meteors came, and the Sun began to act up, they finished building the first practical space ship.”