I felt my body prickle. Already, then, I was at the goblin lair. If they were indeed the masters of such warlock powers as the story went, I would be stricken as I neared them. I would fall dead, or be turned to a snake and crushed underfoot, or run screaming and foaming through the trees as folk have been known to do.
But Evavy was in that cave.
Therefore I made myself into smoke, drifting through the shadows, crouching under boulders, flitting from tree to tree, with my bow strung and an arrow between my teeth. The sky was lightening, ever so faintly in the east, when I saw the goblin cave.
They kept a fire burning at its mouth. Ingmarak had told me that in his youth the Men did the same, but now it was no longer needful - the beasts knew who we were and dared not approach. Here there were more beasts than in our country. I had thought this was due to the goblin warlocks, raising plentiful game out of the mists. But as I stood peering through a spruce thicket at the fire a very great thought came to me.
“If they have the Power,” I whispered to myself, “then they should not be afraid of lion or longtooth. They should not need a fire in front of their dwelling. But they do keep one. Perhaps, O Sky Hunters, this is because they have no Power at all. Perhaps they are not even such good hunters as the Men, and for this reason there is more game in their country.”
I shuddered with the thought. I felt a strength rising in me, and there was no more fear at all.
Very softly, then, I crept over the last open stretch to the goblin den.
There was an old one tending the fire. His tawny hair had grown grizzled and hung lank to his wide shoulders. This was the first time I had seen a goblin so close, and the sight was dreadful. Much smaller than me he was, stooped over and bow-legged, but with great dangling arms. His forehead was low, the eyes nearly hidden under huge brow ridges, and through the scanty beard I could see that he had no chin.
He stamped his feet and beat hands. His breath was frosty against the paling sky. I saw that his dress was rude, little more than a few stinking hides clumsily lashed together, and he was barefoot in the snow.
I had been moving upwind. Now the breeze changed. His wide nostrils flared and he swung that big shaggy head around.
I broke into a rush across the last few man-lengths. The goblin saw me. He croaked something in his tongue and snatched for a club.
My bow and arrow seemed to jump of themselves to readiness. The cord snarled and the goblin lurched, clawing at the shaft in his breast. In the strengthening light I saw how his blood showed red on the snow.
I stood in the cave mouth, nocking another arrow, and roared for Evavy.
A goblin came out with a spear in his hand. I gave him my second shaft. There was one just behind him whose club rose up. I snatched a brand from the fire and crammed it at him. He fell backward to escape the flame.
It boiled with naked bodies in there. I could dimly see the squat, ugly women shambling to the rear, to form a wall in front of their cubs and bare their teeth at me. The goblin men bumbled in half-darkness, crying out, and I knew of a sudden that they were afraid.
“Evavy!” I shouted. “Evavy, it is Argnath come for you!”
For one lost heartbeat, I knew fear again, fear that her ghost would answer from a goblin mouth. Then she had pushed her way to the front, and I looked into eyes like summer’s heaven and felt tears stinging my own.
“This way!” I loosed another arrow blind into the thick smoky gloom. A goblin wailed. I gave Evavy my spear. “Now we must run,” I said.
They came pouring after us, howling and grunting. Evavy’s feet paced mine, her hair streamed in my face. They had not taken her clothes, but even through the heavy fur I could see the grace of her.
Down the slope we bounded, into the forest. The goblins swarmed in pursuit, but a glance across my shoulder told me that we were drawing ahead. They could not run as fast as Men. Once, as we crossed a snow-buried meadow, a stone whooped past me with more speed than a Man could give it. But they had no bows.
We came gasping to the riverbank where my log waited. “Get it launched!” I cried.
While she strained at its weight, I set my quiver on the ground before me and readied an arrow. The goblins burst out of the icy trees. I wounded two of them, then one got within arm’s length. He snatched for the bow and it cracked in my hand. I drew my flint knife and stabbed him.
Someone else thrust at me, but my leather coat turned the wooden point. Evavy jabbed with my spear, hurting the naked creature. The log was almost afloat. We waded out, gave a last push, scrambled onto it, and were in the river’s arms.
I looked back. The goblins were yelling and shaking their hairy fists. They must not have kept the log on which they came raiding. I laughed aloud and dug my paddle deep.
Evavy wept. “But you are free!” I said.
“That is why I weep,” she answered. The Earth Powers are strong and strange in womankind.
“Did they hurt you?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “There was one... I had seen him before, watching me from his side of the river. He and some others stole me - but they did me no harm, they fed me and spoke gently. It was only that I could not go back to you—” And again she wept.
I thought that with her fair hue like their own, she must indeed have been a lovely sight even to the grim goblins. They would have counted it well worth the risk to steal her and have her for their Mother... even as I was driven to steal her back.
I stopped my paddling for a little to stroke her hair. “It is well,” I said. “There has been a weird in this. We were afraid of the goblins because they look so strange that we thought they must command a Power.”
The river hallooed in the first long light of the sun. My paddle bit the water again. “But it was not true,” I said. “They are poor and clumsy folk, slow on their feet and slow in their souls. Our fathers who now hunt in the sky on winter nights drove the goblins from our lands - not with spears and bows, no, but because they could think more deeply and run more swiftly. Since they could do this, they could kill more game and thus have more children. We can do likewise.
“When summer comes I shall gather the Men and cross the river. We will take the goblin lands for our own.”
We struck the shallows of our side and waded ashore on numbed feet. Evavy clung to me, her teeth clapping in her head. I wanted to make haste, back to the fires of the cave and the great song of victory I would sing for the Men. But I looked once across the water.
The goblins had followed us. They stood clustered there on the other bank, staring and staring. One of them reached out his horrible arms. It was a goodly way to see, but I have sharp eyes and I saw that he was weeping.
Since he also cared for Evavy, I shall try to spare his life when we cross the river.
I came out of the long sleep. There was a floorlamp burning and night beyond the drawn curtains.
Rennie guided me back to the living room and offered a drink. It was a while before we spoke.
“Well?” he said at last. “Where... when did you go?”
“A long way,” I said. The strangeness of having been another man still filled me, I was half in a dream. “A hell of a long way.”
“Yes?” His eyes smoldered at me.
“I don’t know the date. Let the archaeologists figure it out.” I told him in a few words what had happened.
“The Old Stone Age,” he whispered. “Twenty thousand or more years ago when Europe was still half covered with the glacier.” His hand reached out to close on my arm. “You have seen the first true humans, the Cro-Magnon people, and the last Neanderthal ape men.”
“There wasn’t that much difference between them,” I muttered. “I feel sorry for the Neanderthals. They tried hard...” I stood up. “Let me go home and sleep it off.”
“Certainly. You’ll come back tomorrow? I want to record a full statement from you. Everything you can remember - everything! Good God, I never dreamed you’d go so far.”
He g
uided me to the door. “Do you feel all right?” he asked.
“Yes, I’m OK. A little muzzy, but OK.” We shook hands.
“Goodnight,” he said. His tall form stood black in the lighted doorway.
I took a bus home. It whined and roared so that for a moment I was tense with fear - what monster was this booming through the forest? what stenches of alienness were insulting my nose? Then I remembered that it was another man whose skin I had inhabited, and he was twenty thousand years in his grave.
The world still didn’t seem real to me. I walked through a winter wood, hearing the elk bellow, while ghosts crowded about me and twittered in my ear.
A little more solidity returned when I climbed the stairs and entered my apartment. Claire put down her cigarette, got up and came to me. “What’s the word, darling?”
“It was all right,” I said. “I’m kind of tired. Make me some coffee, will you?”
“Of course... of course... but where did you go, sweetheart?” She took me by the hand and dragged me toward the kitchen.
I looked at her, clean and kindly, a little plump, creamed, rouged, and girdled, with glasses and carefully waved hair. Another face rose before me, a face burned brown with sun and wind, hair like a great yellow mane and eyes like summer’s heaven. I remembered freckles dusted across a nose lifted sooty from the cooking fire, and the low laughter and the work-hardened small hands reaching for me. And I knew what my punishment was for what I had done, and knew it would never end.
<
* * * *
the end of the beginning
ray bradbury
He stopped the lawn mower in the middle of the yard, because he felt that the sun at just that moment had gone down and the stars come out. The fresh-cut grass that had showered his face and body died softly away. Yes, the stars were there, faint at first, but brightening in the clear desert sky. He heard the porch screen door tap shut and felt his wife watching him as he watched the night.
“Almost time,” she said.
He nodded; he did not have to check his watch. In the passing moments he felt very old, then very young, very cold, then very warm, now this, now that. Suddenly he was miles away. He was his own son talking steadily, moving briskly to cover his pounding heart and the resurgent panics as he felt himself slip into fresh uniform, check food supplies, oxygen flasks, pressure helmet, space-suiting, and turn as every man on earth tonight turned, to gaze at the swiftly filling sky.
Then, quickly, he was back, once more the father of the son, hands gripped to the lawn-mower handle. His wife called. “Come sit on the porch.”
“I’ve got to keep busy!”
She came down the steps and across the lawn. “Don’t worry about Robert; he’ll be all right.”
“But it’s all so new,” he heard himself say. “It’s never been done before. Think of it - a manned rocket going up tonight to build the first space station. Good lord, it can’t be done, it doesn’t exist, there’s no rocket, no proving ground, no take-off time, no technicians. For that matter, I don’t even have a son named Bob. The whole thing’s too much for me!”
“Then what are you doing out here, staring?”
He shook his head. “Well, late this morning, walking to the office, I heard someone laugh out loud. It shocked me, so I froze in the middle of the street. It was me, laughing! Why? Because finally I really knew what Bob was going to do tonight; at last I believed it. Holy is a word I never use, but that’s how I felt stranded in all that traffic. Then, middle of the afternoon I caught myself humming. You know the song. ‘A wheel in a wheel. Way in the middle of the air.’ I laughed again. The space station, of course, I thought. The big wheel with hollow spokes where Bob’ll live six or eight months, then get along to the moon. Walking home, I remembered more of the song. ‘Little wheel run by faith, Big wheel run by the grace of God.’ I wanted to jump, yell, and flame-out myself!”
His wife touched his arm. “If we stay out here, let’s at least be comfortable.”
They placed two wicker rockers in the center of the lawn and sat quietly as the stars dissolved out of darkness in pale crushings of rock salt strewn from horizon to horizon.
“Why,” said his wife, at last, “it’s like waiting for the fireworks at Sisley Field every year.”
“Bigger crowd tonight...”
“I keep thinking - a billion people watching the sky right now, their mouths all open at the same time.”
They waited, feeling the earth move under their chairs.
“What time is it now?”
“Eleven minutes to eight.”
‘You’re always right; there must be a clock in your head.”
“I can’t be wrong, tonight. I’ll be able to tell you one second before they blast off. Look! The ten-minute warning!”
On the western sky they saw four crimson flares open out, float shimmering down the wind above the desert, then sink silently to the extinguishing earth.
In the new darkness the husband and wife did not rock in their chairs.
After a while he said, “Eight minutes.” A pause. “Seven minutes.” What seemed a much longer pause. “Six...”
His wife, her head back, studied the stars immediately above her and murmured, “Why?” She closed her eyes. “Why the rockets, why tonight? Why all this? I’d like to know.”
He examined her face, pale in the vast powdering light of the Milky Way. He felt the stirring of an answer, but let his wife continue.
“I mean it’s not that old thing again, is it, when people asked why men climbed Mt. Everest and they said, ‘Because it’s there’? I never understood. That was no answer to me.”
Five minutes, he thought. Time ticking ... his wrist watch ... a wheel in a wheel... little wheel run by... big wheel run by... way in the middle of ... four minutes! ... The men snug in the rocket by now, the hive, the control board flickering with light....
His lips moved.
“All I know is it’s really the end of the beginning. The Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age; from now on we’ll lump those together under one big name for when we walked on Earth and heard the birds at morning and cried with envy. Maybe we’ll call it the Earth Age, or maybe the Age of Gravity. Millions of years we fought gravity. When we were amoebas and fish we struggled to get out of the sea without gravity crushing us. Once safe on the shore we fought to stand upright without gravity breaking our new invention, the spine, tried to walk without stumbling, run without falling. A billion years Gravity kept us home, mocked us with wind and clouds, cabbage moths and locusts. That’s what’s so god-awful big about tonight... it’s the end of old man Gravity and the age we’ll remember him by, for once and all. I don’t know where they’ll divide the ages, at the Persians, who dreamt of flying carpets, or the Chinese, who all unknowing celebrated birthdays and New Years with strung ladyfingers and high skyrockets, or some minute, some incredible second in the next hour. But we’re in at the end of a billion years trying, the end of something long and to us humans, anyway, honorable.”
Three minutes ... two minutes fifty-nine seconds ... two minutes fifty-eight seconds...
“But,” said his wife, “I still don’t know why.”
Two minutes, he thought.Ready? Ready? Ready? The far radio voice calling. Ready! Ready! Ready! The quick, faint replies from the humming rocket. Check! Check! Check!
Tonight, he thought, even if we fail with this first, we’ll send a second and a third ship and move on out to all the planets and later, all the stars. We’ll just keep going until the big words like immortal and forever take on meaning. Big words, yes, that’s what we want. Continuity. Since our tongues first moved in our mouths we’ve asked, What does it all mean? No other question made sense, with death breathing down our necks. But just let us settle in on ten thousand worlds spinning around ten thousand alien suns and the question will fade away. Man will be endless and infinite, even as space is endless and infinite. Man will go on, as space goes on, forever. Individuals will d
ie as always, but our history will reach as far as we’ll ever need to see into the future, and with the knowledge of our survival for all time to come, we’ll know security and thus the answer we’ve always searched for. Gifted with life, the least we can do is preserve and pass on the gift in infinity. That’s a goal worth shooting for.
The wicker chairs whispered ever so softly on the grass.
One minute.
“One minute,” he said aloud.
“Oh!” His wife moved suddenly to seize his hands. “I hope that Bob...”
“He’ll be all right!”
“Oh, God, take care...”
Thirty seconds.
“Watch now.”
Kornbluth, Mary (Ed) Page 10