"These stories of his, he'll have to publish. He'll have to get them circulated all over his planet, if he can. Possibly we can give him some indirect help, but he's going to have to carry a good share of the load.
"He knows his own people as we could never hope to. And he'll have to be thoroughly educated, so he can say what he wants to. And he'll have to be fully aware of the humanic equations and all their connotations. If he's to have any direct help, he'll have to choose his helpers from among his own people, and he'll have to choose carefully." Kweiros thrust at his temple with the heel of a hand, then shook his head violently.
"Somehow, he's going to have to accentuate any legends he may be able to find which present a favorable light on co-ordination and co-operation, and he'll have to invent more. And all those other legends--the ones which treat of superstition and destructive force--will have to be reduced to the realm of the storybook, submerged under a layer of amused condemnation, and kept there. All these things, that youngster is going to have to do.
"It's your job to help teach him."
* * * * *
Forell watched his friend closely as the critic laid aside the last page.
Andorra sat for a moment, his head cocked in thought. Then, he picked up the last page and looked at it again. Finally, he laid the sheet aside. He looked at his friend with a wry smile, then picked up his wineglass, looking at it quizzically.
"Do you always give your own name to one of your characters?"
Forell's grip tightened on the small object in his hand.
"Oh, sure," he said. "Gives me a better identification. If I can get into the story, it's easier to draw the reader in." He forced a casual smile. "I'll change that name later, of course."
"I see what you mean." Andorra sipped from his glass.
"You know," he added, "a couple of hours ago, I was almost ready to get excited about the idea of a cosmos full of super beings. And I even might have dreamed up something like this myself--and more than half believed it." He shook his head.
"But when a fantasist like yourself comes up with it, and makes it look so nicely possible, the idea almost looks foolish. After all, Elwar, if you actually were the guy in that little sketch of yours, you'd hardly be asking me to read it, now would you?" He looked down at the papers, then raised his head again, frowning.
"'He'll have to choose his helpers from among his own people,'" he quoted. "'All these things, that youngster is going to have to do.'" He sipped again from his glass, keeping a searching gaze on his friend.
"And on the other hand, if your story here should be true, you just might be asking me to read it, for one reason or another." He raised his glass, examining the bright liquid within it.
Elwar tensed, his hand coming part way out of his pocket.
Suddenly, Andorra set the glass down and leaned forward, hands gripping his knees.
"Tell me, Elwar," he begged, "this isn't a hoax, is it? Surely, no one could be so warped as to present a friend with something like this and then to laugh it off?"
Forell drew a deep breath and examined his companion closely. At last, his left hand relaxed a little.
"It's no hoax," he admitted.
Andorra sighed and leaned back.
"And you can use help? You're asking me?"
He paused, waiting as Forell nodded, then spread his hands.
"You know," he said, "it shouldn't take me too long to fix it so I would not be missed too much for a few years." He looked at the wall.
"It must be quite a training course."
THE END
RAYMOND Z. GALLUN
Raymond Zinke Gallun (March 22, 1911 – April 2, 1994) was an American science fiction writer.
Gallun (rhymes with "balloon") was born in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. He left college after one year and travelled in Europe, living a drifter's existence, working a multitude of jobs around the world in the years leading up to World War II.
He was among the stalwart group of early sci-fi pulp writers who popularized the genre. He sold many popular stories to pulp magazines in the 1930s. "Old Faithful" (1934) was his first noted story. "The Gentle Brain" was published in "Science Fiction Quarterly" under the pseudonym Arthur Allport.
His first book, People Minus X, was published in 1957 by Simon & Schuster, followed by The Planet Strappers in 1961 (Pyramid). The Ballantine collection issued in 1978, The Best of Raymond Z. Gallun, provides a selection of his early work. Gallun was honored with the I-CON Lifetime Achievement Award in 1985 at I-CON IV; the award was later renamed The Raymond Z. Gallun Award.
His pen names include Dow Elstar, E.V. Raymond and William Callahan.
A posthumous autobiography, Starclimber, authored in part by Gallun and completed by Jeffrey M. Elliot, was published in September 2007.
The Eternal Wall, by Raymond Z. Gallun
A scream of brakes, the splash into icy waters, a long descent into alkaline depths ... it was death. But Ned Vince lived again--a million years later!
"See you in half an hour, Betty," said Ned Vince over the party telephone. "We'll be out at the Silver Basket before ten-thirty...."
Ned Vince was eager for the company of the girl he loved. That was why he was in a hurry to get to the neighboring town of Hurley, where she lived. His old car rattled and roared as he swung it recklessly around Pit Bend.
There was where Death tapped him on the shoulder. Another car leaped suddenly into view, its lights glaring blindingly past a high, up-jutting mass of Jurassic rock at the turn of the road.
Dazzled, and befuddled by his own rash speed, Ned Vince had only swift young reflexes to rely on to avoid a fearful, telescoping collision. He flicked his wheel smoothly to the right; but the County Highway Commission hadn't yet tarred the traffic-loosened gravel at the Bend.
Ned could scarcely have chosen a worse place to start sliding and spinning. His car hit the white-painted wooden rail sideways, crashed through, tumbled down a steep slope, struck a huge boulder, bounced up a little, and arced outward, falling as gracefully as a swan-diver toward the inky waters of the Pit, fifty feet beneath....
Ned Vince was still dimly conscious when that black, quiet pool geysered around him in a mighty splash. He had only a dazing welt on his forehead, and a gag of terror in his throat.
Movement was slower now, as he began to sink, trapped inside his wrecked car. Nothing that he could imagine could mean doom more certainly than this. The Pit was a tremendously deep pocket in the ground, spring-fed. The edges of that almost bottomless pool were caked with a rim of white--for the water, on which dead birds so often floated, was surcharged with alkali. As that heavy, natronous liquid rushed up through the openings and cracks beneath his feet, Ned Vince knew that his friends and his family would never see his body again, lost beyond recovery in this abyss.
The car was deeply submerged. The light had blinked out on the dash-panel, leaving Ned in absolute darkness. A flood rushed in at the shattered window. He clawed at the door, trying to open it, but it was jammed in the crash-bent frame, and he couldn't fight against the force of that incoming water. The welt, left by the blow he had received on his forehead, put a thickening mist over his brain, so that he could not think clearly. Presently, when he could no longer hold his breath, bitter liquid was sucked into his lungs.
His last thoughts were those of a drowning man. The machine-shop he and his dad had had in Harwich. Betty Moore, with the smiling Irish eyes--like in the song. Betty and he had planned to go to the State University this Fall. They'd planned to be married sometime.... Goodbye, Betty ...
The ripples that had ruffled the surface waters in the Pit, quieted again to glassy smoothness. The eternal stars shone calmly. The geologic Dakota hills, which might have seen the dinosaurs, still bulked along the highway. Time, the Brother of Death, and the Father of Change, seemed to wait....
* * * * *
"Kaalleee! Tik!... Tik, tik, tik!... Kaalleee!..."
The excited cry, which no human throat could quite
have duplicated accurately, arose thinly from the depths of a powder-dry gulch, water-scarred from an inconceivable antiquity. The noon-day Sun was red and huge. The air was tenuous, dehydrated, chill.
"Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..."
At first there was only one voice uttering those weird, triumphant sounds. Then other vocal organs took up that trilling wail, and those short, sharp chuckles of eagerness. Other questioning, wondering notes mixed with the cadence. Lacking qualities identifiable as human, the disturbance was still like the babble of a group of workmen who have discovered something remarkable.
The desolate expanse around the gulch, was all but without motion. The icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque, angling drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. Patches of drab lichen grew here and there on the up-jutting rocks, but in the desert itself, no other life was visible. Even the hills had sagged away, flattened by incalculable ages of erosion.
* * * * *
At a mile distance, a crumbling heap of rubble arose. Once it had been a building. A gigantic, jagged mass of detritus slanted upward from its crest--red debris that had once been steel. A launching catapult for the last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was--half a million years ago. Man was gone from the Earth. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that.
"Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..." The sounds were not human. They were more like the chatter and wail of small desert animals.
But there was a seeming paradox here in the depths of that gulch, too. The glint of metal, sharp and burnished. The flat, streamlined bulk of a flying machine, shiny and new. The bell-like muzzle of a strange excavator-apparatus, which seemed to depend on a blast of atoms to clear away rock and soil. Thus the gulch had been cleared of the accumulated rubbish of antiquity. Man, it seemed, had a successor, as ruler of the Earth.
Loy Chuk had flown his geological expedition out from the far lowlands to the east, out from the city of Kar-Rah. And he was very happy now--flushed with a vast and unlooked-for success.
He crouched there on his haunches, at the dry bottom of the Pit. The breeze rumpled his long, brown fur. He wasn't very different in appearance from his ancestors. A foot tall, perhaps, as he squatted there in that antique stance of his kind. His tail was short and furred, his undersides creamy. White whiskers spread around his inquisitive, pink-tipped snout.
But his cranium bulged up and forward between shrewd, beady eyes, betraying the slow heritage of time, of survival of the fittest, of evolution. He could think and dream and invent, and the civilization of his kind was already far beyond that of the ancient Twentieth Century.
Loy Chuk and his fellow workers were gathered, tense and gleeful, around the things their digging had exposed to the daylight. There was a gob of junk--scarcely more than an irregular formation of flaky rust. But imbedded in it was a huddled form, brown and hard as old wood. The dry mud that had encased it like an airtight coffin, had by now been chipped away by the tiny investigators; but soiled clothing still clung to it, after perhaps a million years. Metal had gone into decay--yes. But not this body. The answer to this was simple--alkali. A mineral saturation that had held time and change in stasis. A perfect preservative for organic tissue, aided probably during most of those passing eras by desert dryness. The Dakotas had turned arid very swiftly. This body was not a mere fossil. It was a mummy.
* * * * *
"Kaalleee!" Man, that meant. Not the star-conquering demi-gods, but the ancestral stock that had built the first machines on Earth, and in the early Twenty-first Century, the first interplanetary rockets. No wonder Loy Chuk and his co-workers were happy in their paleontological enthusiasm! A strange accident, happening in a legendary antiquity, had aided them in their quest for knowledge.
At last Loy Chuk gave a soft, chirping signal. The chant of triumph ended, while instruments flicked in his tiny hands. The final instrument he used to test the mummy, looked like a miniature stereoscope, with complicated details. He held it over his eyes. On the tiny screen within, through the agency of focused X-rays, he saw magnified images of the internal organs of this ancient human corpse.
What his probing gaze revealed to him, made his pleasure even greater than before. In twittering, chattering sounds, he communicated his further knowledge to his henchmen. Though devoid of moisture, the mummy was perfectly preserved, even to its brain cells! Medical and biological sciences were far advanced among Loy Chuk's kind. Perhaps, by the application of principles long known to them, this long-dead body could be made to live again! It might move, speak, remember its past! What a marvelous subject for study it would make, back there in the museums of Kar-Rah!
"Tik, tik, tik!..."
But Loy silenced this fresh, eager chattering with a command. Work was always more substantial than cheering.
* * * * *
With infinite care--small, sharp hand-tools were used, now--the mummy of Ned Vince was disengaged from the worthless rust of his primitive automobile. With infinite care it was crated in a metal case, and hauled into the flying machine.
Flashing flame, the latter arose, bearing the entire hundred members of the expedition. The craft shot eastward at bullet-like speed. The spreading continental plateau of North America seemed to crawl backward, beneath. A tremendous sand desert, marked with low, washed-down mountains, and the vague, angular, geometric mounds of human cities that were gone forever.
Beyond the eastern rim of the continent, the plain dipped downward steeply. The white of dried salt was on the hills, but there was a little green growth here, too. The dead sea-bottom of the vanished Atlantic was not as dead as the highlands.
Far out in a deep valley, Kar-Rah, the city of the rodents, came into view--a crystalline maze of low, bubble-like structures, glinting in the red sunshine. But this was only its surface aspect. Loy Chuk's people had built their homes mostly underground, since the beginning of their foggy evolution. Besides, in this latter day, the nights were very cold, the shelter of subterranean passages and rooms was welcome.
The mummy was taken to Loy Chuk's laboratory, a short distance below the surface. Here at once, the scientist began his work. The body of the ancient man was put in a large vat. Fluids submerged it, slowly soaking from that hardened flesh the alkali that had preserved it for so long. The fluid was changed often, until woody muscles and other tissues became pliable once more.
Then the more delicate processes began. Still submerged in liquid, the corpse was submitted to a flow of restorative energy, passing between complicated electrodes. The cells of antique flesh and brain gradually took on a chemical composition nearer to that of the life that they had once known.
* * * * *
At last the final liquid was drained away, and the mummy lay there, a mummy no more, but a pale, silent figure in its tatters of clothing. Loy Chuk put an odd, metal-fabric helmet on its head, and a second, much smaller helmet on his own. Connected with this arrangement, was a black box of many uses. For hours he worked with his apparatus, studying, and guiding the recording instruments. The time passed swiftly.
At last, eager and ready for whatever might happen now, Loy Chuk pushed another switch. With a cold, rosy flare, energy blazed around that moveless form.
For Ned Vince, timeless eternity ended like a gradual fading mist. When he could see clearly again, he experienced that inevitable shock of vast change around him. Though it had been dehydrated, his brain had been kept perfectly intact through the ages, and now it was restored. So his memories were as vivid as yesterday.
Yet, through that crystalline vat in which he lay, he could see a broad, low room, in which he could barely have stood erect. He saw instruments and equipment whose weird shapes suggested alienness, and knowledge beyond the era he had known! The walls were lavender and phosphorescent. Fossil bone-fragments were mounted in shallow cases. Dinosaur bones, some of them seemed, from their size. But there was a complete skeleto
n of a dog, too, and the skeleton of a man, and a second man-skeleton that was not quite human. Its neck-vertebrae were very thick and solid, its shoulders were wide, and its skull was gigantic.
All this weirdness had a violent effect on Ned Vince--a sudden, nostalgic panic. Something was fearfully wrong!
The nervous terror of the unknown was on him. Feeble and dizzy after his weird resurrection, which he could not understand, remembering as he did that moment of sinking to certain death in the pool at Pit Bend, he caught the edge of the transparent vat, and pulled himself to a sitting posture. There was a muffled murmur around him, as of some vast, un-Earthly metropolis.
"Take it easy, Ned Vince...."
The words themselves, and the way they were assembled, were old, familiar friends. But the tone was wrong. It was high, shrill, parrot-like, and mechanical. Ned's gaze searched for the source of the voice--located the black box just outside of his crystal vat. From that box the voice seemed to have originated. Before it crouched a small, brownish animal with a bulging head. The animal's tiny-fingered paws--hands they were, really--were touching rows of keys.
To Ned Vince, it was all utterly insane and incomprehensible. A rodent, looking like a prairie dog, a little; but plainly possessing a high order of intelligence. And a voice whose soothingly familiar words were more repugnant somehow, simply because they could never belong in a place as eerie as this.
Ned Vince did not know how Loy Chuk had probed his brain, with the aid of a pair of helmets, and the black box apparatus. He did not know that in the latter, his language, taken from his own revitalized mind, was recorded, and that Loy Chuk had only to press certain buttons to make the instrument express his thoughts in common, long-dead English. Loy, whose vocal organs were not human, would have had great difficulty speaking English words, anyway.
Ned's dark hair was wildly awry. His gaunt, young face held befuddled terror. He gasped in the thin atmosphere. "I've gone nuts," he pronounced with a curious calm. "Stark--starin'--nuts...."
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One Page 130