Godson of Almarlu: A Collection of Science Fiction Novellas

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  ISZT STATED his case clearly, even seeking to portray, in mental impressions of feeling, his own, personal viewpoint. Then he gave his motives—his thoughts of justice and of need—need not only for Earth, but for them, his people, too. And he stated his terms.

  “Do what I ask, and I will readjust the direction of the energized gas cloud streaming from Earth, as must be done in order to save us all from the galactic destruction that would result from the star crash. Without my cooperation here, the other gas clouds will not be effective to the degree that is necessary. Failure to do as I request can mean only that I will not help you at all, and that I will use the forces at my command here to neutralize and to hinder the effectiveness of the other clouds.”

  Such was the substance of his message.

  Iszt did not mean what he said. He was only trying to bluff, perhaps prompted to some extent by motives beyond those which he had stated. Adventurous mischief could easily have been part of his bizarre nature. He was strong, and self-opinionated, too.

  Now Iszt studied the creatures pictured in the vision-screen. Did he see doubt and fear in the nervous twitchings of their tendrils, or merely hot hatred, provocative of his destruction? After all, though, he held the master trump. If he should really decide to play the game he had mentioned—well it was possible that, with hurry, he might be killed, and his mischief corrected. However, peril to a galaxy—even a far lesser peril than the one introduced by Iszt—was not to be tampered with. And—he had learned the meaning, the idea of bluff here on Earth. They had not.

  Iszt shut off the apparatus of the view-screen. Mounted again in his human robot, he placed this apparatus in a shielded box. Then he wrapped the casket which contained the inert form of the real Curt Shelbey in a thick, fabriclike material of the same texture as his armor. Very heavily burdened, both with the box and with the casket, but by no means enfeebled in spite of this, he waded back through heat and wind, and the potential death of lethal radiations, to the great force-shielded building of the Winters laboratory.

  But he did not immediately correct the controls of the holocaust of disintegration. He wanted first to make good his bluff to the various beings, both his own people and the other great ones, able to watch at least the broader aspects of his operations by various transdimensional means of their own.

  Here on Earth, pathos and fury were all around Iszt—but who may say that he, marvelous, enigmatic little devil that he was, did not possess the capacity enjoyed by some men of tempering pathos with humor?

  He set up certain intricate equipment which he had hidden away here at the Winters lab. He opened the casket which contained the inert, though not dead, body of the youth who had served as the pattern for his human robot. For a while he was busy doing certain very complicated things. The body warmed a little, but the vapid substance of hibernation still in the air did not allow the man to awaken.

  THE MECHANICAL Curt Shelbey lifted his living original to the porcelain top of a table. There radiations were applied—radiations which carried a few fragments of Iszt’s own vast knowledge.

  Those radiations touched the cortex of the slumbering man’s brain, and permanent impressions were made in the delicate fabric of living cells.

  Iszt caused his robot to divest itself of its clothing, and to transfer the garments to the body of the genuine Shelbey. The latter he allowed to slump to the floor beside Anne and Dr. Winters. For a moment Iszt’s human-guise stood surveying the room, this act perhaps betraying pensive thoughts on the part of the strange little master. His understanding of mankind must have been far deeper than one might expect.

  Now Iszt set up the apparatus of the view-screen. Thus, presently, he was looking into his home region, seeing the great red sun and the limitless host of polyhedra. A horde of those polyhedra were already tearing themselves from their orbits, driven by power units that were a necessary part of them. Accompanied by numerous spaceships, they were moving at increasing speed. Soon they would shift into a transdimensional passage. And in a matter of weeks they would be in the neighborhood of Earth. Were the creatures aboard them merely coming to inflict vengeance on Iszt, and to attempt to correct this mischief? Maybe they were—now. But by the time they arrived—and they would come all the way, of course, since they must now feel that Iszt could not be trusted—everything here would be all right, as far as the battling of the dark star was concerned.

  They would have no reason to seek vengeance then, except for the threat itself, and for the trouble they had been forced to take. And by then, in traveling across the interstellar vacuum like that, and in feeling the grim grandeur of reality, they would have done something old, that was, nevertheless, new and strange and intriguing to most of them. Perhaps—

  At any rate, their vast capacities had truly been aroused to action. They were the folk who had broken up the ten huge worlds of their native solar system, transmuting the elements of those worlds when necessary, and fashioning the myriad swarm of polyhedra. When the time came, then, could they not rebuild the half-ruined Earth, replenishing its depleted oceans and atmosphere, replacing its disintegrated soil, perhaps using the substance of some of the asteroids for this purpose? Plant life might be brought in the form of spores and seeds from some distant, Earthlike world. Of animals there would be enough kept alive in the protected cities—enough at least to start replenishing the fauna of the planet. A few alien animals might, of course, be added.

  Such must have been the path of Iszt’s thoughts. These were things which he could never accomplish alone. But his people could—if the urge gripped them, if the spirit of adventure which might be awakened in them out there in the void made them more subject to persuasion. But, of course, Iszt could not be sure of anything. This uncertainty made him half afraid, and yet gave him a wild thrill of sheer ecstasy. Would he have to flee far into the depths of the cosmos? Maybe. Maybe not. He was working more for his own kind than for Earth, and if he could really arouse in his people the ecstasy that was his, then he knew that his battle was won.

  He toiled over massive controls, setting them perfectly. The energized gas cloud streaming from Terra was perfectly aimed now.

  Then, still ruling his man-guise which he caused to redon its armor, Iszt returned to his own laboratory. Guiding a crystal car, he catapulted away from it, having first shut off its force shield, thus assuring its destruction. That lab held too many wonders to be left for men to discover in their present state of development.

  Now he hurtled out above the surface of Earth, tearing through a hell of hot, chaotic fire. He saw cities sweeping below him—cities where mankind slept, awaiting either salvation, or death by asphyxia when they awakened. Already the cities, enveloped in shielding flame, stood on low plateaus, for the unprotected hills and plains around them were dissolving and sinking appreciably. Iszt’s craft shot out over the boiling, steaming madness of the ocean.

  Presently he guided the crystal car on a brief excursion into space, where, in the still, cold, emptiness, he could quiet his wild, feverish feelings.

  ANNE WINTERS awakened without knowing that nearly six months had gone by since she had last been conscious. Almost before she opened her eyes she listened, with a touch of panic, for the sounds of destruction going on in the world without. But she heard only a dreamy murmur, which might have been that of a light breeze. She could see, now, that the sun was shining through the windows of the laboratory room, gilding the accumulated dust on the floor, and awakening slumberous gleams in the levers and meters along the wall.

  “Anne!”

  She recognized the voice without effort, and with a deep thankfulness. Curt Shelbey was bending over her—the real Curt Shelbey, though she was never to know for certain that there was any difference.

  And this young man inert for so long—what of him, after his many years of suspended life? His face, gaunt and wasted now, bore a faint frown of puzzlement. He knew Anne Winters perfectly, though he had never really seen her before. He knew much of the tremendo
us happenings that had recently taken place on Earth. But his own life was a tangled skein of the real and the unreal, that he would never try seriously to unravel. He did not know about the implanting of a few scraps of alien knowledge in his brain. But he was vaguely conscious of the existence of an entity called Iszt, and of another science and another people. He was dimly aware, too, of a great purpose that had marched on to successful fulfillment, bringing security to myriad worlds. Earth had done its part. In the real Curt Shelbey’s thoughts there was now a sense of solemn benignance, and yet of happy peace.

  For a long moment he looked into the girl’s beautiful face, grown thinner now during her months of hibernation.

  “Everything’s quite all right, Anne,” he said gently. “The world’s changed a lot, but it’s still a nice world.”

  He helped Anne Winters rise, and together they walked to the window. No force shield burned beyond it now; the metal ring that had produced it had been melted into a shapeless mass, perhaps by the action of some weapon of tremendous power. Only Iszt had known the secret of those rings, even though he had had human help in building them. There were no more of them left on Earth, which perhaps was best.

  But from the window the steep slope of the hill, on which the laboratory now was perched, could be seen. Below was a sunken plain, scooped out by the disintegration of a two-hundred-yard depth of Earth’s crust. But it was green with a dense, fast-growing vegetation that looked like giant moss. Odd, bright-colored fruits grew on it in luxuriant profusion.

  Curt Shelbey expressed to the girl his vague ideas of what had happened. A thin layer of rich new soil created out of the transmuted substance of the asteroids. New air and new water, similarly manufactured, and poisonous radioactive substances taken away. It must have been a great time—that rebuilding of a world. New plants from across the interstellar void—

  “It’ll be tough going for a while,” said the youth. “Getting used to new conditions, and all that. Lots of folks will wonder what really happened, and I’ll be blamed for things I can’t explain. But there’s food out there in this new Earth—food and hope and promise.”

  ANNE POINTED toward the place where the readjustment station had been. But the great bulging shape wasn’t there any more.

  “Nothing but a big flattened mass of metal,” she said. “It’s been melted down—destroyed.”

  Curt nodded. “All of the readjustment stations have,” he returned. “Nobody will ever learn anything from the junk that’s left. Don’t ask me how I know, but the robots in the cities have been fused, too, and even the factories in which their parts were made, have been wrecked. Engineers will remember a little, of course, but nothing fundamental, for they were always in the dark there. Still, somehow, I have a few ideas, Anne, that won’t give us a science ahead of our mental and moral progress, but still will help us a lot. They aren’t my ideas, since, as far as I can say, I’m just a middling-good cub engineer myself. New inventions and things. New laws. Somewhere out where the stars shine, there are beings far greater than us, Anne. Our kind is going to be like them someday. But it won’t be getting there that’ll be the most fun. It’ll be the work and adventure of climbing that’ll count. Each people must climb most of the way alone—”

  Anne Winters listened dreamily, not trying too hard to reason out the incongruities of the past and the present.

  A party of people was coming across the plain.

  “From Chicago, I think,” Anne said quietly.

  And then she saw her father’s body on the floor. But it stirred with the reassuring evidences of returning animation.

  FAR, far away, Iszt, guiding a cylindrical car, sped through a transdimensional passage toward an island universe, bent on exploration. But he was not alone now in his pursuit of adventure. Behind his car trailed thousands of others, bearing demigods cast in twenty different forms. In the super-chilled fluids that flowed in Iszt’s veins, there throbbed a fierce exultation. He had won his point. He had shown his kinsfolk the way. And already several other super-clans had submitted to the same call. Nirvana was going beyond itself. Dreams had beauty, but though there was danger in reality, there was also more substance, more purpose, more thrilling satisfaction.

  Did Iszt, strange, unfathomable little giant, benignant, hard, with flesh that was not like the flesh of Earth, still feel an ache of gratitude for the primitive world that had been his inspiration?

  The End

  *********************************

  Coffins to Mars,

  by Raymond Z. Gallun

  Thrilling Wonder Stories June 1950

  Novella - 20015 words

  Those behind the first expedition to colonize Mars

  thought they had everything figured out,

  but they had no way of knowing how the colonists

  would feel about things on an alien planet!

  CHAPTER I The Old—and Wretched

  When the door chimes sounded “Rube” Jackson watched for the familiar flicker of nervousness and fear, glossed with humor, to come into his wife’s wrinkled face. He’d felt that tension often himself like a light frost in his soul. After he had glanced into the park-like street he clowned out a huge sigh of relief. Some kids were playing in the sunshine.

  Rube’s laugh was thin—that of a very old man. “The chimes only announce the arrival of the morning paper in the pneumotube, Joanie,” he said. “Nobody has come to talk to us—yet.”

  “So I see, Rube,” his wife chuckled sheepishly. “Darn it, though—I wish they’d get the inevitable over with, so I could stop being silly! Shucks, Darlin’—lousy me—we’re wonderfully lucky! So why be always scared?”

  The question was already old and he gave old answers. “Because adventure has burned out in us, Joanie. We’re set in our ways. Because, though we’ve seen a lot of newness in our time, still it’s hard to adjust.”

  For a second his big body swayed restlessly there on the divan in their living room. He hadn’t succeeded in saying all that he’d meant to say.

  Progress in science and in viewpoint had done much to remove misery, ugliness, injustice and unrest from the world. Certainly the motives of the brilliant tireless specialists who pried at the mysteries of the farthest stars and at the perhaps deeper enigmas locked in the cells of living tissue had included the betterment of mankind’s lot.

  By the simpler means of disease-eradication, hormone and radiation therapy, improved surgery and so forth the span of human life had been lengthened steadily. But that had created the new problem of overcrowding and shortages.

  Until a year ago, having reached a goal that was the culmination of a series of steps and the realization of a dream that was far older than its classic advocate, Ponce de Leon, the specialists had brought to the world a sullen and worried questioning, grim as war, which the International State had made obsolete. It smoldered mostly out of sight beneath the Utopian calm of planned living.

  It was the darker side of a miracle that could never be equaled again. It made Rube think of an ugly foreign word that belonged to his youth in World War II. Lebensraum. It was a question in itself. And even in a society whose philosophy was forced by democratic principle to remain benign the answers had to be, in some measure, harsh.

  “Just newness, Rube?” Joan chuckled. “Unnaturalness, maybe. Making wills with no true death in prospect—unless it’s by violence. Breach of biological custom. But the custom of babies being born goes on. What woman would ever want that stopped? It would stagnate life, darlin’. Agreed? Good! As for us, remember the cemetery monument we bought when you were a mere seventy-five? Moss-grown and futile now—and we’re looking ahead, past the peaceful green grass. To youth again. To Lord knows what.”

  Joan’s light humor helped bring Rube almost a sense of peace, bracing him against the chilly unknowns ahead about which, to be sure, he felt a certain eagerness, too. “So we’ll take it easy, hon,” he said. “Does it matter if the person or persons we’re waiting for, come tomorrow
or the day after? I missed the newscast. Shall we look at the paper?”

  In spite of television, whose moving figures were now in color, three-dimensional and all but alive in the crystal globe of a receiver, there still were people who liked their news in print. Seated in their porch swing, Joan and Rube looked at the paper together.

  SENATOR HUBERT, EUTHANASIA ADVOCATE, THREATENED WITH IMPEACHMENT . . . CENTENARIANS MORE NUMEROUS THIS YEAR BY SEVEN MILLION. MANY MUCH OLDER . . . NEW SYNTHETIC PROCESS GIVES HOPE OF MORE FOOD . . . NEW ARTIFICIAL ISLANDS FLOATED IN PACIFIC. EACH TO FEED 50,000 . . . LAST GREENLAND GLACIERS MELTING UNDER WEATHER TOWERS. POPULATION ABSORPTION POSSIBILITIES MODERATE . . . INTER AGE GROUP RIOTS IN ST. LOUIS . . . COMPULSORY RESETTLEMENT LAW FOR REJUVENATED AGED UNLIKELY TO BE MODIFIED.

  Rube and Joan paused over one heading:

  CARL ROLAND’S “WILD SCHEME” WINS EXPERIMENTAL APPROVAL AGAINST OPPOSITION. AGED REGISTRANTS ALERTED.

  Then, since by the laws of chance and the comparatively small numbers of people that would be involved they seemed safe, they looked on to another topic.

  MORE VITA CAMPS NEARING COMPLETION. OLD TO BE PROCESSED IN KEEPING WITH DEMANDS.

  There was a picture of such a camp—hastily built like the old army camps. But the connection with something else in Rube’s memory was even stronger. The dash across Germany. The pause at a murder factory. There was the same electrically charged barbed wire barrier. The same peaked towers that mounted weapons, pointing outward here.