by Gardner Fox
A guard smiled and nodded, when Bran reached the royal tent. Peganna was sitting at a table, waiting for her breakfast. She looked radiant in a striped jersey and wrap-around black skirt, Bran thought, slipping onto the bench beside her.
“I would have wakened you,” she smiled. “The blue egg is yours as well as mine. Without you I could never have found the well of Molween and so laid hands on it.”
“I marvel that you can eat,” he said.
She laughed. “It was to be a lesson in discipline. I asked myself, ‘If Bran were torn with this need to open the vault, to see what is inside it, what would he do?’ And then I told myself, ‘Why, first of all he would have breakfast, a good meal to tuck under his belt so that if he should find disappointment, at least it would not take him half starving to death.’”
A maid servant brought two platters of food to the table.
“Eat slowly,” Bran said, and winced at her under-the-table assault on his shins with a sandaled toe. There was an urge in him to hurry also, but he fought it down and ate as though he had nothing ahead of him this morning but a walk in the hills.
As if to mock and taunt him with her own patience, Peganna ate even more slowly. Twice she caught him scowling impatiently at her knife and fork, and gleefully she would wrinkle up her nose and chew more slowly.
Until at last—when she ordered a third cup of steaming kalf—he lost patience and with a whoop put both hands under her armpits and swung her up over the table. She laughed delightedly. Bringing the blue egg out into her hand, she raced with him across the compound toward the vault.
The camp came out of its tents and stood watching. From the military section, three uniformed Lyanir officers strode forward. Dozens of scientists followed to the ladders and mounted with them.
As she set a foot down on the metal top of the great rectangle, Peganna caught Bran by the hand. “If it should be empty, Bran? What then?”
“It can’t be empty, mavourneen,” he growled.
Her hand was shaking so much that Bran had to cover it with his own as she lowered the egg toward the hollow. With thumb and forefinger she put the blue jewel in its cradle. It fitted exactly.
There was no sound, no movement.
And then—
Faintly it sounded, like the breath let out of the lungs in a long sigh. A wheeze of power, a susurrus of air. Underfoot the vault appeared to tremble and rise upward, carrying them with it. Only it was not the whole vault that had lifted in this fashion but a rounded disc twenty feet in diameter, in the exact center of which rested the blue egg. The treasure vault of the Crenn Lir lay open. Its lock had obligingly risen out of its cradle and set itself aside.
There were stairs leading into the interior.
Bran could see the treads outlined in a bluish glow that grew brighter the longer he looked down into that open circle. The Crenn Lir had placed uthium lights inside their mausoleum, lights that would activate themselves when the egg was put in its hollow.
Peganna was shaking, putting one foot forward, timidly, so that she might peer more closely into the blue brightness within the vault. She was aware of Bran’s hand on her elbow, the soft syrup of his voice as he sought to still her quivers.
Then she was leaning over the edge of the opening, seeing metal spirals and twisted rods, odd loops of glittering compounds and great, towering oblongs. Her gasp was a soft cry of triumph.
“The Eldorado of the ages,” breathed Bran, and gestured.
Men came running and their excitement touched off a spontaneous roar of victory from the encampment that was picked up by the warriors Gron Dhu had brought with him. Three scientists reached them first, with an officer of the rank of adkhan at their heels.
“Keep the men back,” Bran told the adkhan. “Name details to lug out some of those things into the open, so all can see them. You, Pshen Wir,” he told a gaunt physicist, “pick a party to go down inside the vault and have a look—and I want men who know weapons when they see them, no matter how strange they may seem.”
Peganna was poised between laughter and tears as Bran went down the metal stair ahead of her, turning after one swift glance below to give her his hand. In that swift appraisal of the eyes, Bran Magannon knew they had found a treasure vault beside which gold and jewels paled to morning mists. This was Cibola and Tisingal, the vault of Angkor Wat guarded by an immense emerald Buddha, the mines of Ilmor Quan on Mars and all the flame pearls in the universe done up in one neat package.
His foot touched a metal floor and Peganna stood beside him, pressing closer, eyes wide with awe, lips a little parted to aid her hurried breathing. They stood in a forest of metal mysteries, of mechanical marvels which were the products of a million years of high culture.
“What are they? What do they do?” whispered Peganna.
“My hope is that the Crenn Lir told us, achushla. Otherwise we’re no more than a poor boy looking in a window at a store full of goodies, with no way to get inside.”
A scientist on the metal stair cried out softly. “Oh, by Kronn! I must be dreaming. Is it real?”
Bran moved toward a metal cone that rose twenty feet into the air, slapping its side. “It’s real. They’re all real. Only God knows what it is they do, though.”
They saw only shapes and sizes, some large and some small, with a bewildering array of discs and rods and filaments interwoven back and forth to make a fairy forest. There were tiny artifacts that fit into the hand and there were others that would need a crane to budge.
The uthium bulbs made everything as clear as daylight so that as far as vision went, they could see whatever they wanted. It was what was inside the structures that puzzled them. Bran lifted a rod that held a series of thin diamond panes inset with microelectronic plates and wires. He touched the diamond panes, set them to spinning.
A blackness grew about the Wanderer, spreading outward.
He could see inside that darkness as though he peered into violet haze, but they could not see him. Peganna looked startled, frightened, as the black blotch grew. Then Bran stilled the spinning panes and everything was as it had been.
Peganna asked, “What is it?”
“My guess is that it shifts the dimensional planes a little, refracting reality. I could see you. You couldn’t see me. On a dark night, an assassin equipped with one of these things could have a ball.”
“And this, Bran Magannon? What do you make of this?”
He walked with Peganna toward the scientist who had spoken, who stood beside a red spiral that climbed almost to the metal ceiling, set in a base of black stone that glittered as if it held the stars. There were levers in the black stone, and unknown symbols, with studs set for pushing. Staring at the thing, lacking understanding of its function, Bran shivered. There was something—deadly—about that crimson spiral.
“Don’t touch it,” he breathed. “It might be able to turn us all into no more than drifting dust motes, and the whole planet as well for all I know.”
He glanced about him as if seeking inspiration. There were transparent prisms and dull gray obloids, metal eggs and towering cylinders. This might be a playhouse for mad children, or for men more sane than any who now walked the starways. His eyes came back to the eggs.
The blue egg was a key, of course.
Might not these other eggs be keys, as well?
Some were large, too heavy to carry alone, for he tried it until his muscles bulged. But he went to a row of smaller eggs, lifting a pale green one into his palm. It was a jewel, similar to the blue egg that lay in its lock-hollow above him. Bran studied the egg, then turned and looked about the room.
Ah, just beyond that truncated cone, a pale green hexagon with a tetrahedron of bright rose above it in which black lights twinkled. Bran took the egg to the hexagon and fumbled on its surface. Yes, here.
He touched the egg to the hollow and released it.
The voice was gentle, sad, as it entered his mind.
Yow have found the treasure house of
the Crenn Lir. To you, then, do we leave the products of our greatest minds, over ten thousand centuries of scientific progress. This instrument you see before you is a protonic transversal capable of shifting any object, living or dead, animate or inanimate, out of our universe into a dimension of null-matter.
Upon its appearance in the null-matter universe, the object ceases to exist. It is not destroyed. It just ceases to be. Where no-matter is a norm, matter itself is impossible.
To operate the…
The voice went on speaking slowly, softly.
A hand-touch as his shoulder made Bran turn toward Peganna. Smiling, the Wanderer lifted out the egg, then told Peganna to replace it. Now the Voice spoke to her, perhaps because of sympathetic vibrations set up within her brain by the handling of the egg.
When the voice was done, Peganna stood enraptured.
“We are babies next to the Crenn Lir,” she breathed.
“Why not? Aren’t we their children?”
Her smile was brief, as though her mind were on other things. “I would hate to turn such a weapon against the Empire, Bran Magannon. I hope I never have to. Yet I would. I will—unless they see reason!”
He did not say to her that this one weapon was enough of a weight to tip the scales of controversy in her direction. If for no other reason than that the protonic transversal made the most ultimate of garbage disposal units. Dangerously radioactive elements could be eliminated instantly. Slums—there were slums even on mother Earth, and conditions grew worse the farther out into the stars a man went—could be nullified and the ground built on to make housing units. The atmospheres of certain poison-planets might be drained of the noxious elements in their air, opening a thousand new worlds to colonization.
Why, with this—Peganna could pick and choose her own homeland.
But maybe it wasn’t that simple.
Otherwise the Crenn Lir would have cleared their own worlds of the deadly radiation. Perhaps with more study, a way could be found to do this, to whisk away deadly radiation. The Crenn Lir might not have had time for such a study. “And this, Bran Magannon,” said another voice. An older man stood beside a thin lemniscate of white wires, a delicate figure-eight balanced on its side above a magnetic field that held it motionless. Bran took the white egg from the grimly smiling scientist and touched it to the hollow.
… dionesthenic gyrosentializer which opens up the warpways of the universe so that a man may stand here on Thrann and look away as far as Mawznor. To operate, touch the red stud…
The voice went on, not in the words which Bran knew but in thoughts and images which he might recognize. The Crenn Lir had been farsighted enough not to leave an oral record but a mental one, probably composed by one of their most expert telepathists.
He leaned down and touched the stud.
Instantly the lemniscate began to revolve, slowly at first, then more swiftly, until it was a blur that deepened in color from white to crimson, to blue and then to white again that was shot with lavender streakings. Slowly the streaks coalesced, grew wider, larger. The oval was a lavender haze now, and then it was gone. In its place was a segment of black space, space so dark that it seemed almost alive.
The space between the galaxies, finder of the vault. Beyond the blackness and far, far away, are what were once the homelands of the Yann.
Watch!
The blackness remained unchanged for a few seconds. Then there was a wink of light, a brightness. And another. Another. It was as though Bran Magannon stood in a spaceship that went faster than a thousand times the speed of light. He was approaching a galaxy.
Dimly he knew Peganna was beside him and the others, all frozen into the moment of staring upward where the whirling lemniscate showed them this distant realm of stars that held the enemies of the Crenn Lir. There were many stars now, uncounted millions of them, making a blue-white spangle across the darkness of space. The stars grew into giant suns and went away.
Somehow, the controls of the gyrosentializer were set to show whoever opened the vault the Yann worlds. Perhaps the creators of the vault feared that their war fleet may have missed a planet, that some of the Yann might still be alive. This was to guard against surprise attack. But there were no more Crenn Lir left. Only their children, standing here in awe and wonder.
A star neared, slowed its headlong pace. Then the star was gone and now a planet showed, round and blue, its atmosphere a haze about it. The lemniscate dipped down to skim above its surface.
Black rocks and red dust desert. No more.
Everywhere the eye looked, there were only rocks and dust, with not even a slim needle of metal to show where once the high spires of the Yann had lifted proudly to the skies.
This is the homeland of the Yann, who came and attacked the Crenn Lir, for no purpose and without provocation. Life has ended here. Or—has it? Only you can know, finder of the vault. If all you see is black rock and red sand, then the triumph of the Crenn Lir is complete. I hope, for your sake, it is so.
Bran told the others what the voice in his brain had said. He wondered if his voice were as sad as the thoughts he listened to.
From one planet, the lemniscate went to another and a third. A fourth, a fifth, to a dozen different worlds. All of them were the same. There was no life. The Yann had been obliterated.
Bran sighed and put an arm about Peganna.
Above their heads the lemniscate was turning blue and crimson, then the pallid white of inertia. Its rotation slowed, ended.
The scientist lifted the white egg and held it.
“They were gods,” he said gently.
“Kronn,” exclaimed Bran suddenly. “The Kronn you worship! Might it be a corruption of the ‘Crenn’ in Crenn Lir?”
The scientist shrugged and put the egg in its proper place on a rack. “We will never know, Earthman.”
Suddenly Bran froze, holding Peganna, and felt her stiffen.
Beyond the vault, the alarm was sounding.
NINE
THE LYANI-HORNS were braying like monsters in agony.
Bran caught Peganna by a wrist, whirling and bringing her with him to the metal stair and out of the vault to warm sunlight and the sweet, clean smell of air. Here and there on the high places of the encampment, men were standing with the spiraled horns to their lips, sending out their call.
It was a scientific irony that lyani-horns should sound above the vault that held the wizardries of the Crenn Lir. The horns were a way of life of a dawn civilization; the vault was an end product of countless millennia of high culture.
And yet—
It was not the fault of the Lyanirn that they must blow horns to alert their people to danger, Bran knew. The Lyanirn were long centuries of space travel away from their home world. They were the descendants of the scientists who had made the spaceships for that journey and given them the weapons with which they had fought off the Empire before Bran Magannon had been sent to take command against them. Was it guilt in the Wanderer that sent a stab of pity through him as he listened to those brayings? He did not know.
Peganna asked, “What is it?”
An officer came at the run. “A space fleet, highness. Marked with the star cluster of the Empire.” His dark eyes swung on the Wanderer accusingly.
Bran said, “Fight it off in a delaying action until we can get a couple of those weapons out of the vault.”
The officer shook his head. “The fleet was passed through by Gron Dhu’s men at Andelkrann. It is over the planet, now.”
The man flushed as Bran and Peganna looked at him. He spread his hands in a plea for understanding. “Gron Dhu made a pact with the Empire commander, with Alvar Drexel. He promised us a better world as a result. We listened to him and followed where he led.”
Peganna gestured impatiently. “It makes no difference—now. The damage is done. The Empire probably sent a war fleet here to bring us back to Earth, Bran. As a compliment to your former high rank, perhaps. Or to my own importance.” Her laughter was
bitter. “Had it come a week from now, we would be ready for it.”
Bran snapped orders to the officers. There was still a chance, a bare hope, if they could get a couple of the weapons out of the vault. The tetrahedron with the black lights in it, for instance. It could hurl an entire war fleet into the null universe, he was sure.
They needed time to study it, to discover its operation.
Alvar Drexel would not give them time. He would bring his space fleet here above the encampment, and out of range of the hand-weapons the Lyanir carried he would make his demands. If they were not obeyed he would destroy all.
Bran scanned the blue sky and saw only clouds and a few birds wheeling, dipping in their gliding flight. Time became an equation in which safety came up equal to an empty sky.
“Get busy,” he growled, and ran to help.
In the vault, Bran and twenty more men hand-wrestled the heavy pale green hexagon with the rose tetrahedron above it, moving it slowly and with much grunting toward the opening. The Crenn Lir had a better way to do this, he was sure. There were tools, some sort of lifting beam, a gravity nullifier, perhaps, somewhere here in the vault; but he could not spare the precious minutes to go looking for it.
They had to pause to push other objects out of the way. Any of these cones and rectangles, oblates and rhomboids might serve the purpose instead of the protonic transversal; again, he could not go seeking among them. He had to make do with what he understood, at least in part.
He put the egg in the hollow so that the recorded thoughts of the Crenn Lir telepath could come to him. He learned that to operate the black lights inside the rose tetrahedron, he must open a panel in the hexagon, turn the dials and the controls set there for manual working. Ah, and aiming the tetrahedron was a matter only of turning it so that its widest facet faced the object to be nulled.
The circle of blue sky they could glimpse through the opening in the vault ceiling came nearer. Sweat ran down their backs and the breath in their lungs turned to fire. Now ropes were being lowered on pulleys over the rim to be fitted about the weapon.