“I’m afraid of nothing, I tell you! However, I am man enough to admit that a few things do make me nervous. Only a little, you understand! And that is only because my mother, all the mothers, warned the children about the Very Rare Beast. I, the man, am not afraid. But there’s a little child in me that’s still afraid. It’s that that makes me nervous.”
“The child in you must be very little indeed if he can get inside your little body,” Sharts said. His grin made his talon-ravaged face look even more horrible.
Hank and Sharts went side by side into the upsloping woods. Blogo was behind them because his short legs could not keep up with theirs. Also, he probably did not want to cause any more remarks about his bugaboo. Sharts was cursing because flies were settling on his open wounds, and then he stopped in the midst of a block-long blasphemous word that would have done credit to a German philosopher.
Hank stopped also. Blogo bumped into him and said, “Why don’t you warn a fellow, Giant?”
“Shh!” Sharts said.
They listened and heard, faintly, some piglike gruntings. But when they proceeded stealthily through the brush for thirty yards, they found that the porcine noises came from a big black bear. He was tearing at the carcass of a female moose.
“Meat!” the two outlaws said at the same time.
The stories were true. These men were cannibals.
They were close enough that the short-sighted bear could see them. He stopped eating and rose to his hind legs, swaying, his paws held out, his chops bloody.
The bear probably would not have minded being outnumbered if the strangers had been unarmed. But two held loaded crossbows, and one had an object the purpose of which the bear would not know but would suspect was a weapon.
“Beat it!” the bear said. “I killed this moose, and it’s all mine. Find your own food!”
Sharts said, “We don’t usually kill animals for food. But since you’ve done us a favor by killing this moose, we’ll eat it.”
“Over my dead body, freak-eyes!”
“That may be,” Sharts said. “However, why don’t you just go away? We’re not violent men; we’d just as soon not shed blood. There must be plenty of deer and moose in these woods.”
“I like bear meat even better than moosemeat,” Blogo said. “Why don’t we dine on both, boss?”
“Now, wait a minute,” Hank said. “That’d be murder!”
“Not if he attacks us,” Sharts said. “And if he doesn’t move on, that’ll be the same as attacking us.”
“How do you lamebrains figure that?” the bear said.
“If we start to cut off some of the moose, you’ll attack us, right?”
“Right.”
“We’re going to slice off a hunk.”
The bear snarled and said, “Try it!”
“You haven’t got a chance,” Hank said. “Why don’t we compromise, work something out? There’s plenty there for all of us. Let’s share it. Half for you, half for us.”
“I love bear meat,” Blogo said, and he smacked his lips.
“And I love to eat monkeys and roosters,” the bear said. “Which are you? Or are you a hybrid? Was your father a rooster? What isn’t monkey looks like chicken. In fact, you’re probably all chicken. Cut-cut-cuh-daw!”
“I’ll show you who’s chicken!” Blogo said, but he did not step toward the bear.
“I suppose,” Sharts said to Hank, “that if we kill this animal, you’ll tell Glinda about it?”
“It’d be murder,” Hank said. “You’d be outlaws again.”
“It isn’t such a bad life, boss,” Blogo said.
“I prefer the amenities of civilization,” Sharts said. “Books, good wine, warm houses, a bath every day, beautiful women, concerts, a laboratory. I’m sick of living like a savage.”
“Look, bear, what’s your name?”
“It’s none of your business, but it’s Kwelala the Unbeaten.”
“A tough guy, a champ, huh? Well, I’ll make you a sporting proposition, you ursine bum. I’ll fight you unarmed, no holds barred, and if I lick you, you walk off and leave the moose to us. If you beat me, we walk away. How’s that?”
“Yeah? No treachery? Your friends won’t shoot me no matter what I do to you?”
“I promise. The word of Sharts.”
“I never heard of you, man. But if you want to die, and you must, I don’t blame you, you’re such an ugly miserable-looking pile of weasel poppy, well, let’s have at it!”
Sharts dropped his crossbow and charged. The bear was so surprised that he backed away. Sharts leaped into the air and kicked with both feet. His wooden soles struck the bear’s lower jaw, and the bear fell backward, partly stunned.
Sharts landed on his back but was up quickly. The bear got to his feet just as Sharts struck the bear again on the jaw. Cross-eyed, the bear fell once more. But when Sharts leaped at him again, the bear swiped his paw at him. Sharts was hurled whirling away and fell. On all fours now, the bear charged. Sharts, on his back, kicked the bear in the nose and rolled while the animal was bawling with pain. He got up and jumped on the bear’s back and applied a full-nelson.
Hank’s eyes widened, and he swore softly. He would have said that no man was strong enough to bend the massive neck of a bear. But it was moving downward, and it was going to crack if Sharts could keep the pressure up.
The bear rolled on top of Sharts twice. The giant did not loosen his grip.
“Give up,” Sharts said in a strangled voice. “Or I’ll break your neck like it’s a toothpick!”
“I can’t believe this,” Kwelala said. “It just can’t be happening to me!”
“I won’t tell anybody I beat you,” Sharts said. “You can keep your pride and your monicker.”
“Promise?”
“My word is as strong as my muscles.”
“O.K. You can have the damn moose. I think she was sick, anyway. I hope you get sick eating her.”
“Shoot him if he tries anything,” Sharts said, and he released the bear. Kwelala walked off, grumbling, but he did not look back.
Sharts, breathing hard, said, “That stupid beast tore off my shirt.”
Blogo started to take off his knapsack. “I got another one for you, boss.”
Their mouths watering, they skinned the moose and cut off a haunch and cut out the kidneys and heart. Sharts chopped off some branches and whittled their ends so they could hold pieces of meat over the fire that Blogo was building. Hank went back to the plane to get the salt and pepper shakers which he always carried because no one ever put on enough for him.
When he returned, he found that Blogo was chewing ecstatically on a small and burnt piece. Hank held his own out over the fire, and, when it looked almost medium-done, he withdrew it until it had cooled off enough to bite into.
But when he brought the meat close to his open mouth, his gorge rose.
After looking at the meat for a long time, he threw it into the fire. He rose and said, “Hell, I can’t do it!”
Sharts, grinning, said, “You’ve been conditioned.”
“You might call it that,” Hank said disgustedly. He walked into the woods to look for nuts and berries. Two hours later, he returned to the plane, his belly full. He was still dissatisfied.
Bargma was swallowing a small piece of meat which Blogo had brought for her. She got it down and said, “What now?”
“First, the ruins. Then we have to look for somebody or some place with alcohol.”
“It’s more important to find fuel,” Blogo said. “I’ll start looking for it first thing in the morning.”
They spent the night under a ledge and next to a fire. In the morning, tired, stiff, and cold, they went out for food. Sharts and Blogo did not have far to go since the moose meat was still fresh enough for them. Hank went back to where he had found the berries and nuts and ate the now-monotonous food. When he got back, Sharts and Blogo were smearing a cream over their wounds. These were healing fast and were not, as he ha
d supposed, going to be deep scars. New skin was growing over the wounds, and the two expected the scar tissue to fall off.
He asked Sharts about the cream. The giant explained that Blogo had brought it with him when he had left his people. Sharts was thinking about analyzing the ingredients and manufacturing it when he returned to civilization.
“He and I, we’re going to become rich,” Blogo said. “It’s a secret remedy which only one of my people knows. But Sharts here, he’ll find out what the recipe is and make some more.”
Hank thought that if he could get the formula and take it to Earth, he could become a millionaire, too. But it was evident that there was not much chance for returning. Besides, he was not eager to do so.
Shortly thereafter, the Rare Beast set off northwestward along the plateau edge to look for signs of human life. Hank and Sharts walked to the ruins and poked around in the stones and the half-buried buildings. These were made of cyclopean blocks of some white mineral mortared together. Though erosion had crumbled the faces of the blocks, the mortar was untouched by time.
After a while, Sharts wandered off. Hank found a block of stone wider than his parents’ mansion in Oyster Bay. About twelve feet of it protruded from the ground. All around it were carved figures of animals and objects and strange-looking bipeds with human hands. Hank thought that they were meant to portray some kind of story. They formed a row running around the block. That this row might be the start or the end of the story was indicated by the tops of figures exposed by erosion below the upper row. A little later, he found a one hundred-foot-long metal obelisk lying on the ground. It was shaped like the “Cleopatra’s Needle” in New York’s Central Park and bore the shapes of living beings and objects and many inscriptions. He was looking at these when he heard Sharts calling him. Hank made his way through the bushes and trees growing on and along the ruins to the edge of the plateau. Sharts was standing by a place which looked as if an overhang of rock had broken off and fallen into the canyon.
“Look at this.”
Sharts pointed at a five-foot-high silvery dome sunk into the earth. At the base where it faced the precipice was an arched hole about ten inches high.
“Interesting,” Hank said.
“Wait a minute. I’ve been timing them.”
Fifty seconds passed. Then Hank was startled. A tiny figure, a simulacrum of the bipeds portrayed on the block, walked out. It paid them no attention but marched like a wooden soldier to the edge of the plateau and toppled over it.
“My God, what’s that?” Hank said.
“Wait.”
Sixty seconds later, a duplicate of the first walked out and, like it, fell into the canyon.
“I think it’s a toy-making machine of the Long-Gones,” Sharts said. “It’s still operating.”
“After two thousand years or more?”
“I know it’s incredible, but how else explain it?”
When, sixty seconds later, the next figure walked out, Sharts picked the tiny thing up. It still moved its legs and swung its arms as if it were walking on the ground.
“They must have had some control mechanism so that the child could direct it to turn and so on,” Sharts said.
Hank thought that he was assuming a lot, but he had no basis for argument.
“There must be thousands on the slope at the base of this cliff,” Sharts said. “The others, and there must have been millions, must have been carried off by the river.”
The body of the toy was human, and the face would have been human if it had had a nose. Where that should have been was a hole with many fine strands. These may have represented a network of hairs. On closer inspection, Hank saw that the ears were smaller in proportion than a human’s and the convolutions in it were different.
The joints of the legs and arms and the fingers and toes could be articulated.
Hank told him what he had found.
“I’d like to try to read whatever story is on that obelisk,” he said. “But we’d have to turn it over. The story is a serial one, and it spirals up from the base to the apex.”
Sharts went with him to the fallen monument. He felt the red metal, which was unrusted, and looked at some of the hieroglyphics.
“It must weigh from three to five hundred tons,” he said. “We could never turn it over to read the other side. We’ll have to be satisfied with what we can see. But look at this.”
He pointed at a representation of a dome which had an arched hole at its base. Out of it were proceeding figures like Blogo and the Winged Monkeys and other seemingly unnatural beings.
“That adds weight to my theory that the Rare Beasts and the Monkeys are descendants of synthetic vivants,” Hank said.
The exposed sides of the obelisk had the beginning and the end of the story. What was on the underside had to remain hidden, and there was much that they did not understand on the sides they could see.
“Nevertheless,” Hank said, “we have enough to know some of the history of the Long-Gones. Including the fact, I suppose it’s a fact, that they did not just die out. They left for another world, went through a gate they’d opened between this world and another. If I interpret the pictures correctly, their experiments in trying to open a way to another world is what made weak places in the walls between your universe and mine.
“Maybe I shouldn’t say walls. As I see it, the process is more like going up or down from one level of energy or configuration of energy to another. Anyway, the Long-Gones either could not get to Earth or, after a look at it, decided to go someplace else.”
He did not have to explain to Sharts why the noseless beings had abandoned this world. Sharts had also comprehended that the Long-Gones had decided not to fight any more. They had been pushed into this area, which was about the size of Alaska, and there seemed no way to expand it. They were repelling the forces that had devastated this planet and could do so for a long time. But it was not worthwhile. Not when they could go to a new green world and leave the attackers behind.
The energy configuration of the universe they went to would not permit their enemy to exist there.
“I suppose that they also can’t exist on Earth,” Hank said, thinking aloud. “But I’m not sure. I wouldn’t think that the energy entities which possess animals could exist there either. But Glinda told me that she sent a hawk through the opening to Earth, and it came back still possessed.”
“Did she ask you to pass that information on to your people?” Sharts said.
“Yes. Why? Oh, I see. She may have been lying so that my people would be frightened. I thought of that. However, I won’t tell my people... those people... that I think she’s not telling the truth. I wouldn’t want them to take a chance that she was.”
It seemed from what he’d read on the obelisk that there were two types of energy beings. One was composed of the giant rolling balls that hurled themselves against the edge of the green land. Most of them perished there because the Long-Gones had buried defenses along the border between desert and oasis. These were pictured as huge poles, subterranean lightning rods, as it were.
A long time before the ancient aborigines had left this universe, they had experimented at making gates to other universes. Their first success had resulted in what was to be disaster. The great balls of electrical fire had poured through before the gate could be closed. Thousands must have entered. And these had propagated their kind by using the earth and atmospheric electricity. They had sucked the electrical energy from all creatures, vegetable or animal.
“They’re not demons or souls loosed from hell to ravage on the living,” Hank said. “Your priests are wrong. They’re electrical Draculas. And they exist because the physical structure of this universe is not quite like that of mine. In my world they... no. I overlooked something. Why is it that the energy-things originated in another world and can live in this one but not in the world the Long-Gones went to?”
“Perhaps the physical laws of the world they went to are just dissimilar enough so
the things can’t exist there.”
Sharts might be a near-psychotic, but he was not unintelligent.
“You could be right. No!” Hank said hastily when he saw Sharts’s face tighten and turn red. “You’re right! Absolutely right. It couldn’t be anything else but!
“However, how do I know that the physical laws of my universe won’t permit those things to exist there? I don’t. I’ll make sure that I put that in the report.”
Sharts’s face loosened and regained its normal color.
“The defenses erected by the Long-Gones must be weakening in at least one place,” Hank said. “Otherwise, some wouldn’t be able to roll onto the green land. I saw some do that one night while I was in Glinda’s castle. They were blown up, but I’m sure that it was through Glinda’s doing. She was using her own forces to destroy them. What you call magic.”
A BARNSTORMER IN OZ by Philip José Farmer Page 27