“The cap you wore,” Ellayne would continue, pursuing a different lead, “it has some interesting qualities, which, if we could analyze them, might prove helpful. But the thing’s too intricate for our scientists. Who made it, and how does it work?”
This son of Amy Forster could tell her nothing, and even if he had been able to reveal the secrets of the metal cap, the marvelous device belonged to a science too advanced to be handled by Earthmen. The most skilled watchmaker could not have built anything so intricate.
Another week went by; Raah’s fever left him. With his broken arm still in a sling, he went out with the other battlers to sweep the scum back from the walls. Clad in a clumsy asbestotex armor, he wielded a little flame thrower sparingly, aping his companions’ actions faithfully, though he could mimic only a few of their words.
Two days later all the fuel for the flame throwers had been used up. Through the night that followed, the defenders continued to battle doggedly, beating at the senseless, viscid enemy with shovels and with anything else that was available.
Then, in the wee hours of the morning, a radio message was received. It was from a plane—Roland Maynard’s plane. He had flown to the Los Angeles refuge in the hope of getting aid, and now he was returning, without having been successful in his mission. Los Angeles was no better off than Kansas City.
But his voice buzzed excitedly in the speaker diaphragm before the weary and frightened listener at his home station: “Something new,” he said. “Something very new and very queer! Just for luck, I flew over the place where the Forster rocket landed. Thousands of odd animals were circling and bobbing about the spot. They aren’t Earthly; they can’t be. There must have been eggs or spawn or something on the rocket—spawn from the Moon! It hatched, and since there’s plenty of hell scum to serve as food, the things that came out of it have grown very rapidly. . . . Don’t call me a liar! Seeing is believing, isn't it, even if what you see looks cockeyed?
“All right! Now listen while I tell you what I think and what I’m going to do. I’ve got a hunch that these animals are the secret of the lunar valley’s immunity from the scum. They ate it up there as fast as it could grow, and so the stuff never got a decent start there. Just an old case of biological balance. Cats used to keep the prolific mice in check, you know. But Earth, unlike the Moon, didn’t have any sort of creature that could master the scum.
“Now, however, I’m sure the right kind of animals have been introduced here. The next step is to bring them to the vicinity of the refuges, where they will do the most good.
“I can see now that this isn’t going to be a very difficult job. As soon as these crazy lunar devils spotted my ship, they tried to chase me, their object probably being to eat up both me and the plane. But the gravity is too strong here to allow them to fly very well, so I’m giving them a break. I’m doing a lot of circling at low speed and close to the ground, just to egg them on. But all the time I’m working gradually closer to you folks at Kansas City. That’s all I can say for the present. Keep watching!’’
Raah of Wan could not understand what was said when a man rushed along the straggling line of battlers beyond the walls of the refuge, shouting the news. But he could guess, by the awed looks on the faces of his companions, and by their fresh enthusiasm, that the news was good.
Comprehension came to him with the first gray streak of dawn. First he heard the distant throb of a plane motor, somewhere to the west. The craft glided low over the slimy morass which had once been the Missouri River; then it doubled back, approaching the eastern wall of the great oval refuge.
In its wake, bobbing and bouncing over the hell scum, was a horde of black, ominous specks, silhouetted against the sky.
Sight of familiar objects in a foreign environment often gives an observer a pleasant surprise, even if those objects have once been looked upon with hatred and distrust.
“Tegati!’’ he yelled through the breath vent of his transparent mask. “Tegati!’’ For that was what they were, beyond question.
How had they come here to Earth? It took but a moment for Raah to find the explanation to the mystery. He remembered that deep gulch on the Moon, where an ancient mining camp had been located. The gulch had swarmed with thousands of torpid Tegati. They had gathered on the space ship as Treb and he had sought to bear it through their packed and sluggish masses, and they had deposited a quick-crusting jelly upon the hull of the craft. The gulch had been the spawning place of the Tegati, and the jelly had contained their eggs!
Though airless and utterly cold, space is not as hostile a region as is popularly believed. Heat can be lost by an object in only one way—through radiation. In a vacuum there is no such thing as convection and conduction. Besides, during part of the journey, the ship’s rockets had supplied warmth. And last but not least, the eggs themselves, in their normal environment, were adapted to conditions almost as rigorous as those of the void.
Within several minutes the Tegati host was swarming about the armor-clad defenders. But the latter, protected as they were, were safe from poisonous fangs and claws.
They were small Tegati, Raah could see; even they could not reach full growth in so short a time. But with food as plentiful as it was, there was small reason to doubt that their numbers would multiply rapidly, even under the alien conditions of Earth. These creatures were prolific.
They could not, of course, conquer the scum, now that it was deeply entrenched in an entire planet; but their powers were promising. At least, they might clear it from around the weakened walls and foundations of the refuges, saving them from destruction; and that was all that would be necessary.
In the gray half light, Raah saw some of the creatures settle on the scum. They bit into it savagely, lashing at it with the poisoned claws of their tendrils. The viscid stuff in their immediate vicinity quivered and died as virulent venom was injected into it.
The defenders began to cheer raggedly. Some minutes later, most of them retreated into the refuge. Only a small crew was left behind to make tentative repairs of the dangerous fissures in the walls and buttresses.
Ellayne Maynard met Raah in one of the public hallways. Out of sheer impish jubilance she threw her arms around his neck and gave him a hearty hug. “Maybe you don’t even know how you did it, Forster,” she said, “but that doesn’t change the facts. My friend, you’re tops!”
Raah wouldn’t have minded the compliment, had he been able to understand it, but the situation otherwise was so entirely new, pleasant and upsetting, that he felt extremely uncomfortable.
But there was a quiet friendship and love in the girl’s amber eyes in spite of her gayety, and it reassured the young savage a little.
“Thank you, Ellayne,” he said in English that was soft and accent-less. These were almost the only Earthly words that he knew. He understood the meanings of all of them, yet he was not quite sure why he said them now. He only knew that he wanted to say them.
In the two remaining refuges—the one at Los Angeles and the one at Kansas City—despair became hope, and hope gradually was changed to certainty. Lured by three planes, some of the Tegati were transferred to the Los Angeles refuge. In a wide ring around the great oval structures, the aerial devils from the Moon poisoned and ate the scum. The seeping flow of destructive acids was stopped.
Ten thousand people, relieved of the burden and tension of defense, went back to work. Materials that were needed were manufactured. And at last John Maynard completed his invention.
Not long thereafter, a squadron of planes set out from each of the refuges. Both squadrons dispersed, their object being to circle the entire Earth in every direction, forming, with their various courses, a wide but consistent and all-enveloping network. At the end of every fifty miles of its flight, each of the planes ejected a puff of luminous vapor.
This vapor was no mere poison; its potency was far stronger than that. It was a subatomic reagent, which reacted with a tiny and insignificant quantity of the nitrogen in the atmo
sphere, freeing its atomic energy.
But though the quantity of the nitrogen that was disintegrated was small the power released was enormous. When the planes returned to their bases, there was already a very noticeable rise in atmospheric temperature. Occasional gusty winds blew, but they were not expected to become dangerous, for the heat was evenly distributed throughout the Earth.
No flames or similar phenomena were visible, but the thermometer readings climbed steadily, reaching a peak of one hundred and twenty degrees Centigrade, or twenty degrees above the boiling point of water. No protoplasm, exposed to such heat, could live. The hell scum was dying, and with it, except for a few specimens kept for study, the Tegati.
For a month the broiling heat endured unabated, cooking the life from remnants of the scum which had seeped for a considerable distance into the ground.
Meanwhile, mankind remained within its concrete and metal refuges, sweltering but happy. Cooling systems made the temperature endurable. And at last the curing process was over.
It grew cooler. Heavy rains began to fall, laving the Earth, preparing it to receive its old familiar fauna and flora, for which the zoological and botanical gardens of the refuges could supply a start. Even the oceans were cleared of the scum, for the latter had existed only on the surface of the water. The dark inferno, sprung from the fires of genesis that burned out of time in the solar atmosphere, was at an end.
One day John Maynard called his son, his daughter and Raah to his study. On the wall beside his desk the picture of Amy Forster smiled a faint, almost amused smile. John Maynard could remember very clearly a gayer, sadder, more defiant smile on her face during the moment that she had waved farewell just before she had entered the ill-fated Moon rocket.
“I don’t know just why I asked you young folks to come here,” he said. “Just to relieve some haunting feelings of mine, I guess. This should be a time of all times to think of the future. But we can never forget the past. That lady on the wall, for instance. No tribute we can pay her could ever be too great. Of course, we shall always remember her. But for her brave and tragic journey to the Moon, we would have nothing to look forward to; in fact, we would not even exist! Sometimes it strikes one as strange how the past rules the future.”
Raah’s knowledge of English was still far too limited for him to grasp much of the meaning of the scientist’s words. Yet his own thoughts were of a similar nature, and his comprehension was more complete; for he had partaken of the wisdom of the ages in an ancient lunar city of a dead and glorious time.
He looked down at the girl at his side, and wondered, half in hope and half in awe, what days to come might bring. Between him and Ellayne there was a wide gap of training and background; still, he could learn. Perhaps she would even help him to learn. Yes, the gentleness of her eyes told him that she would.
The End
*********************************
Iszt—Earthman,
by Raymond Z. Gallun
Astounding April 1938
Novelette - 16072 words
Iszt was anything but human—and his job was to
protect the galaxy—till humans taught him something
his super-human race had forgotten— Adventure.
Curt Shelbey was not a man—but a thing—
a robot under the will of an alien horror—
ISZT was a demigod—one of unnumbered trillions of demigods like himself. His people, born out of the flux of universal history, cradled in the rugged lap of circumstance, had attained to a kind of ultimate Nirvana of wisdom and science.
Yet there were other peoples—perhaps a thousand of them, scattered thinly throughout the finite, but unbounded universe—who had reached a similar, exalted state. Cooperating loosely and at long intervals, these races were the guardians—the watchers—of the stars. When cosmic danger threatened, their knowledge was the key to action.
Though any man of Earth would have shuddered at the horror of his small, fragile form, Iszt had a soul. It was a strange soul, full of curiosity and adventurous yearnings. That was why he had been chosen long ago to fight the forces of disaster. He had journeyed across the transdimensional passages of space then, bridging myriad light-years of distance. And, after a long stay on a distant, primitive world, he had returned home for a brief time, to confer with his superiors, and to procure the things he needed.
He was in his laboratory, now. It was a great, polyhedral creation of crystal clearness, resting not on the surface of any planet, but floating in space. A huge, red sun brooded sullenly beyond its transparent walls. In the rays of that sun, other polyhedra—an innumerable, arcing host of them—gleamed like icy crystals. They circled the sun, each in an orbit of its own, and formed, in composite, a vast, nebulous, sweeping ring, grander by far than the rings of Saturn.
Iszt felt the majesty of their endless flight. And he felt, too, the glory of the progress that had changed completely the aspect of the region in which his kind dwelt. Once this great, red star had mothered ten, huge, natural planets. But the eradication of the death of physical decay, combined with the prolific results of a method of extra-corporeal reproduction, had long ago expanded Iszt’s race to a point where the planets no longer provided adequate room. And so, during a million years of time, they had been broken up, their elements transmuted when necessary, and used to build the polyhedra.
In these free-floating habitations, Iszt’s people lived and thought, and dreamed their wonderful, artificial dreams, their every common need taken care of by their science. They no longer attempted to expand in numbers now, though they might easily have done so. Materials were easy to procure in the vicinities of other stars, had they wished to construct more polyhedra.
For the most part, Iszt was proud of the greatness of his race, and in a way that was quite human. But he preferred a far more active existence than most of his fellows—an existence fraught with the thrills of danger, and of distant and fantastic environments. He loved playing an almost lone hand in colossal undertakings. This quality enabled him to act as the agent of the immense, though apathetic, wisdom of his kinsfolk. He loved contrasts, and in a way he even loved the tense uncertainty of fear. Though a demigod, with powers at his command that were staggering from an Earthly point of view, he was by no means omnipotent.
HE FELT that uncertainty throbbing within him now. In the calm, slatey expanse of the spatial star curtain, he knew that a threat and a promise of inconceivable catastrophe lurked—a catastrophe of hurtling, smashing forces that might destroy not only many worlds, but a segment of the galaxy. And he knew, too, that it was his job to battle and help check those forces before they could mature.
His myriad, hair-like grasping organs, black as soot, coiled nervously. His dozen little eyes, which saw not quite in a human manner, glinted as he peered through the crystal shell of his polyhedron, viewing the chill sun and the other majestic details of his native region. Perhaps he was contrasting this harsh grandeur with the trees and mountains and sky of that other, tremendously distant world, where he had spent so much time with his preparations. His flat, foot-long body, ridged with horny protuberances, quivered with some inner excitement.
But it was not his shape alone that set him apart from the race he had visited. Their world was, to him, a world of shriveling heat which only science could combat. For his kind had evolved on a giant planet of terrific pressure and terrific cold. His flesh was not a flesh of water and carbohydrates, but of liquified ammonia and of complicated compounds born of an un-Earthly metabolism.
From his beaklike mouth there issued a series of odd, slurring, sibilant chirps, best represented in the English alphabet as iszt—iszt—iszt. The sound was not his name, really; but for us, since we have no other way to identify him, it must serve as such. It was an utterance as natural to his kind as laughter is to men. Trilling softly in the frigid, compressed gas around him, it seemed to emphasize, because of its animal-like quality, the utter alienness of his being.
Now
, as if to make up for time lost, Iszt wheeled about. His body undulating like a caterpillar’s, he hurried to a runway that spiralled around a great fluted pillar of lustrous metal. Upward Iszt scrambled, ascending to the floor above. Here was a triangular chamber like the one below, though smaller. Like the first, it was packed with mighty apparatus, nameless to man. The sunlight, slanting bleakly through the clear walls of the polyhedron, made oblique shadows on the black floor and awoke the glint of treasure in the hunching masses of machinery.
Iszt threaded his way to the center of the room. Here, in this place of un-Earthly science, was something which was startlingly incongruous. It was the image of a young man, as perfectly life-like as truth itself, except that it did not move. It stood on a low pedestal. It sported a mop of curly blond hair, and its blue suit was neatly pressed. On its lips was a gay grin, as though it were ready to say “Hello!" It seemed only to wait for animation.
WITH A KIND of avid energy, Iszt scrambled up the pedestal, and climbed to the torso of the human figure. Little tentacles went to work, unbuttoning coat, vest, and shirt. Iszt crept from view, under the fabric, and attained entrance to the interior of the manlike robot through an opening at its armpit. Deftly, then, the opening was closed and sealed, until only the most minute scrutiny could have distinguished it from a scar.
Iszt settled comfortably into place in his vacuum-shielded refuge, to which no deadly heat could penetrate. His hundreds of tentacles contacted as many delicate controls. His small, black orbs peered into a periscope, of which the humanlike eyes of the figure were a part.
Godson of Almarlu: A Collection of Science Fiction Novellas Page 20