He looked first for his companions. Bronze was huddled behind a round boulder. Viki was running back toward the Gateway, zigzagging in a panic-struck search for adequate shelter. He saw her trip and fall, and an airtank went bounding away from her shoulder. She rose groggily to her feet and tried to run again.
Garth looked back toward the helicopter. What he saw confirmed the surge of fear he had experienced as its door had opened.
Four women approached with great leaping strides. They were dressed in odds and ends—a ragged halter, a smooth tunic, a slashed skirt. Each was dressed differently and casually. One carried a monstrous knobbed club. All were belted and had long daggers. Around the neck of the leader was a black chain from which swung a mighty jewel, which glowed and sparkled in the universally orange-gold light. The jewel was brilliantly, shockingly green—the characteristic glittering green of neo-tourmaline. But Garth had never seen a crystal of that size. It was gem-cut, and must have been all of forty inches from crown to apex. And the woman carried it comfortably at the end of its ten-foot stick-like mounting, on its chain with links the size of anchor-cable, because she herself was seventy-five feet tall.
Garth was conscious of a pounding in his ears. At first he thought it was the earth-shaking tread of the four giantesses—for the other three were almost as tall as the first. Then he realized that the pounding was caused by the simple fact that in his shock he had forgotten to breathe.
He turned and looked for his companions. Bronze was slack and awed, gaping skyward at the leader’s tremendous head. Viki was nowhere to be seen—
And neither was the Gateway. It was gone.
The leader stopped not twenty yards away, and bent, scanning the ground, fingering her jeweled pendant. Her face was distant, composed and cool. She was very beautiful, with long-lashed eyes and high-arched brows and a complexion like unveined marble.
“Bronze!” Garth screamed, for the second woman, a blonde with masses of flowing golden hair, had circled, and was behind Bronze as he stared up at the leader. The blonde raised her club, a thirty-foot mass that must have weighed all of a ton. She spoke—a deep, unintelligible strumming. Bronze, of course, could not hear Garth’s cry of warning.
The leader straightened up and glanced at the blonde. She said something equally incomprehensible—the frequency of their voice-tones was down in the subsonic—and the blonde reluctantly put down the club.
And then, to Garth’s horror, the leader bent and shot out a mighty hand. Bronze tried to scuttle aside, but the hand closed on him, lifted him high in the air.
Then it was that Garth recognized the giantess. He knew he had seen that cool, beautiful face before—long, long before, when he was a child.
Bronze squirmed and fought that gigantic grip. Garth saw him twist free, ball up and kick with both feet at the huge thumb. He slipped out of the grasp when the hand had carried him forty feet in the air. The giantess fell to one knee and reached out, catching him deftly. She held him up before her great calm face and watched him squirm.
Bronze suddenly struck out with both hands, twisted to one side, and got his hand on the blaster.
“Don’t Don’t” screamed Garth. He knew what that blaster could do at short range. But his raging was useless, he could not be heard.
The giantess fumbled for a second and then, with her left hand, brought up the pendant by its stick-like handle. She held the jewel close to Bronze as if it were a strange magnifying glass.
Bronze whipped the blaster out and up, and just as it bore on the huge, calm face, the great thumb moved on a stud on the handle of the jewel-mounting.
A blaze of green fire reached out from the jewel and enveloped Bronze’s chest, turning to dazzling white where it struck him. The jewel deepened in color and seemed to thicken, to grow more solid.
The magnetic buckles of Bronze’s helmet harness suddenly parted, and the internal pressure did the rest. The helmet popped off his head and flew up and around, swinging by the one back strap that was caught between his waist and the imprisoning hand.
Then the blaster spoke.
“Don’t!” screamed Garth uselessly. “That’s Glory Gehman!”
But instead of the shattering roar he expected, his earplates detected only a muffled f-f-ft! A weak tongue of fire, perhaps ten or twelve inches long, flickered wanly from the bore of the blaster, and then faded. Bronze writhed once, then went limp.
The great figure that looked like Glory Gehman held Bronze up like a tiny limp doll and called to the other women. They crowded around. The blonde reached with long, delicate fingers and lifted up the dangling helmet, pointed at Glory Gehman’s ears. Garth noticed for the first time that her ear pendants were made of Ffanx helmets, or rather a tremendously oversize version of them. The leader shook her head and laughed, and gently forced Bronze’s helmet back on his head. Holding her face very close, as if she were threading a needle in bad light, she set the buckle-magnets back in their grooves and gently tested the air-lines. Then the leader walked off toward the helicopter, while the other three resumed their search of the ground.
Garth’s eye caught a glint of metal a few yards away—the spare airtank Viki had dropped. But of Viki there was no sign, and gone, too, was the Gateway.
Garth Gesell was alone on this earth, a pygmy hiding under a rock like a beetle, while he was being hunted by colossi obviously bent on destroying his kind.
A great bare foot pressed the earth close to him. He could hear the stones crackle. He crept farther back in the narrow fissure which held him. He knew that the next step the giantess took might be on top of that flat rock, and that would be then end of Gesell on any world save for a revered memory.
And a fat lot of good the reverence would do him as he lay crushed under a rock.
“For Gesell,” sang Daw as he hooked the cable around the frame of the Gateway. Then something struck his back and side and sent him sprawling. He kept his hold on the cable as he fell, and part of him was gratified to feel it catch on the frame. He knew it had contacted, and he knew it without looking at the Gateway for the flickering gold light was abruptly gone.
He rolled and came up on one knee.
Lying on the floor, doubled up in pain as she nursed a bleeding foot, was Viki. She squeezed her eyes as tight as they would shut; even through the thick transparent plastic of her helmet Daw could see the silent tears she forced out.
She sat up and looked around her, then sprang to her feet and leaped to the framework. That brought her up against the rear wall of the laboratory. She stood for a moment feeling it with incredulous fingers, then turned and stepped out again.
Apparently it was only then that she saw Daw.
She slid the magnetic buckles apart and wrenched off her helmet. Her hair and eyes were wild.
“Daw. The Gateway!”
“A false Gateway for a false Gesell,” intoned Daw.
She looked around at the dead framework again, and then at Daw. “What are you doing here?”
“The hand of Gesell freed me for his good works,” said Daw. “I found a weak spot in the ceiling of the storeroom. Now, more than ever, I know the truth and reason behind my act. For you were spared, sister, spared from your own infamies, and saved, as a sworn Guardian, for the true Gesell.”
She looked at him, bewildered.
He explained to her, patiently, exultantly. “You were led to return from the company of evil, just as I obeyed Gesell’s command to do away with the false Gateway.”
“Return? I didn’t return!” she said frantically. “I fell. I was running, looking back and up at—at—” She closed her eyes and shuddered. “And then I hurt my foot, and fell … Daw, what has happened to the Gateway?”
“Gone,” he said, and smiled. “And good riddance. Come, sister. Let us go to the great portrait and receive more messages.”
“Daw, we’ve got to fix it! He’s in trouble. They’ll kill him, they’ll kill him!”
“You confirm it. Death to the impostor. It
is Gesell’s will!”
Understanding dawned on Viki. “You closed it?”
He bowed his head. “It was the wish of Gesell. I am but a poor instrument …”
She was on him like a tiger-cat. “You fool. You crazy, blind fool! Show me what you did. We’ve got to fix it. We’ve got to, Daw. Garth Gesell is the true Gesell, don’t you understand? And he’ll die in there if we don’t help him!”
“That Gateway,” said Daw in stentorian tones, “is a falsehood, a devil’s trick. When Gesell wants it to open he will open it, without wires and crystals and steel. As a Guardian I shall see the end of this contraption, and never again will I be duped.” He turned, his eyes blazing, and caught up a sledgehammer. “Never again will there be a Gateway in Gesell Hall until Gesell himself opens it!”
“Daw you’re mad! Stop!”
He stalked past her. She took one step after him and stopped. She saw the hooked piece of cable Daw had dropped. She leapt forward, caught up the free end, and as Daw raised the hammer high over his head, his right foot placed itself near the hook.
Viki stepped to one side, to be sure of a good contact, and pulled the cable violently. The hooked end caught Daw’s ankle, whipped it out from under him. He staggered, lost control of the hammer. The twelve-pound head fell toward him. He lurched aside and it caught him on the shoulder. He fell heavily, trying to turn. His jaw cracked against the stone floor.
He lay still, uttering a series of tortured sounds as he tried to pull himself together.
Viki stood over him like an avenging angel, waiting.
Daw rolled over, sat up. His hand went quiveringly to his shoulder. He looked up at her out of round, bloodshot eyes.
“Guardian …” he said.
“Help me fix the Gateway, Daw,” she said.
“You’re misled, sister.”
“I won’t discuss it with you. And don’t start that cant about my sacred duty. Get up!”
Daw rose and fixed her with his mad eyes. “I am counseled by Gesell,” he said painfully, “and now I counsel you.”
She closed her eyes in a visible effort at self-control. “Are you going to help me?”
“Why do you pursue this folly? What is the compulsion of this—this Garth?” The last word came out with contempt.
“I love him,” she said.
There was a crashing silence. It was the silence of utter shock—the silence of death itself, for indeed nothing moved, not even breath.
Finally Daw’s suddenly white lips moved, slackened, moved again. “You love him,” he whispered. “You?”
She was just as pale. “We all have our own kind of cowardice,” she said. “Bronze once told me what Garth Gesell thought of your madness. He said you were a Guardian because you had retired from a real world. You’ve gone mad trying to save the old ways for yourself. You can doom the world to the new savagery if by doing it you can return to patrolling the Court and humbling yourself before the portrait.”
Daw half raised his arms as if to ward off her hot words. He kept his eyes fixed on her, and when she stopped he said only,
“You’re Escaped!”
“Yes!” she cried, “Damn you! You never knew, did you? One of the rules you made up for yourself was that only the poor robbed hulk of a woman, with her womanhood completely gone, could become a Guardian. It’s what you chose to believe and what I let you believe. I told you we all have our form of cowardice. Mine was to pretend I was Returned. I stole the privilege of those poor creatures who had been discarded by the Ffanx. I lived with them and learned their ways. They walk in safety all over the world, and I took their coloration. And when the chance came to hide further under the cowl of a Guardian, I took it. I let myself sleep safely here. But I’m awake now …” Her lower lip became full, and her eyes grew very bright. “… awake and I love him, I love him, I love him …”
She lapsed into silence. She heard Daw grind his teeth.
“Slut!” he said hoarsely. “To think that for these years I’ve been living next to a—a—” In his mounting rage he stopped using words, and instead uttered a series of creaking, dripping animal sounds.
“Now that we know what we are, Guardian,” she said coldly, “Let’s fix the Gateway.”
“I am the Guardian and I am the Gateway, and in me alone is the trust, the duty, the fidelity, the—”
Suddenly he was upon her, raging. Gone was the last vestige of control. Gone was the carefully schooled impersonality of Guardian behavior, gone was the deeply conditioned, pitying reverence for the woman Returned.
His wild leap bowled her off her feet. They rolled over and over on the floor. Daw didn’t strike out at her with fists; he clawed. He pulled her hair and her clothes. He raked his fingernails down her body, twisted her, grasped and clutched and pawed.
At first she tried to get away, to protect herself. She writhed and scrambled and fell and pushed at him. Suddenly he was kneeling by her, both hands full of her hair, both arms stiff, pinning her head down to the floor. The pain of her scalp turned to terror—a rowelling primitive terror that was like nothing she had ever known in intensity. And in the briefest moments it was surpassed by another, new emotion. She had been afraid before, in her life, but this was something different.
For as he bent over her, brought his face close to her, she looked up into his eyes. They were round, staring, veined and toned with red. His jaws were open, and his bitten, bloody tongue flashed insanely in and out. Blood and froth splashed on her face, and at its touch, this transcending new emotion overtook her like a great flood-tide.
It was more than horror. It was disgust and revulsion raised to a peak almost impossible to contain. In one great surge she rose. She felt her hair tear away with a kind of savage joy. How she found the holds she never was to know, but one slim hand fastened into the side of Daw’s neck and the other on his thigh. She sprang straight up under him with her feet solidly planted and every dyne of energy in her healthy legs, back and shoulders behind the movement. Daw’s body went straight up.
When the weight came off her hands he was nearly at arm’s length over her head. She dug in her nails and kept her grip, and as he began to fall she pulled hard with her left hand, which was on his neck. Head down he hurtled, with all her convulsive strength speeding him on his way. He struck …
For a long time she stood like a cast-iron statue, her unseeing eyes on the thing which lay there, its misshapen head all but concealed, twisted grotesquely under the scrawny body. Then she became dimly conscious of an ache that became a pain that became a roaring agony—the knotting muscles in her calves, cramping with the onset of nervous shock. She tottered backwards, brought up against the wall.
She crouched there, breathing in great open-throated gasps. Suddenly she began to cry—high, squeaky crying that tore her throat and burned her eyes. She cried for a long time.
But the next day, and the next and the next, found her working.
Garth lay under the rock, his heart beating suffocatingly, but his eyes studying the amazing spread of calloused flesh that was the giant foot. Another came down beside it, and the first one lifted and kicked over a massive boulder nearby. Garth felt his sheltering rock vibrate alarmingly. He bunched his shoulders and waited.
At last the feet moved away. He edged out and lay prone, hardly daring to lift his head. The three women were working away from him, scanning the ground carefully. He got on all fours and scuttled backward into the shadow of a projecting rock, pulled himself to his feet and looked around.
The Gateway was gone. Viki was gone—probably through the Gateway, he surmised. Bronze was gone—captured certainly, dead probably. He wondered what that green fire had been. It looked like neo-tourmaline, but the rays had not burned Bronze’s body, at least not as far as he had been able to see. It was a little like the damper crystals that his father had developed, to capture and store energy.
But a crystal as big as that, with the pulling power it must have, couldn’t be turned on a hum
an being without out snuffing out the man’s tiny store of electro-chemical.
“Bronze …” he said aloud.
Big, bluff, faithful Bronze, with his quick temper and his hammer-thinking. Garth got a flash of memory—Bronze’s face when Garth had pulled him up short, pointed out some end result of Bronze’s impulsiveness. He used to get a puzzled, slightly hurt expression on his broad face, but he always began nodding his head in agreement before he had figured out if Garth was right or not.
Garth’s eyes felt hot. Then, with a profound effort of will, he shut his mind to his regrets and concentrated on his surroundings.
Moving carefully, he worked his way over to the spare tank that Viki had dropped. He worried it in between the two tanks he already carried. He’d live a little longer with it. “Though what for,” he muttered, “I wouldn’t know.” He gave a last, despairing glance to the site of the Gateway and began to move toward the distant helicopter.
A hundred feet away he found a leaf—a tremendous thing, eleven feet long and nearly five feet broad at its widest. He picked it up gratefully. It was very light and spongy. He pulled the stem over his shoulder and walked through the rocks, dragging it. The leaf was almost exactly the color of the soil, and ideal camouflage. All he need do would be to drop it flat and pull it over himself.
He was two-thirds of the way to the plane when a thudding from the earth warned him. He looked back and saw the three women coming rapidly. They seemed to be sauntering, but their stride was twenty to twenty-five feet, and they covered ground at a frightening pace. He dropped and covered himself. The steps came nearer and nearer, until he wondered how the earth itself stood up under that monstrous tread. Then they were past. He got up. They walked with their heads up, talking their booming syllables. They were obviously searching no longer.
He began to run. He had no choice except to stay with these creatures. What he would do, where he would go if they took off, he simply did not know.
They climbed into the cabin, one by one. He could see the landing gear—tremendous wheels as tall as a two-story house—spread as they took the weight of the giants.
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