“No,” Tyson said, with startling candor. “But I’m almost sure.”
“You might have tried—just to make absolutely sure,” Blakemore said. “Oh, well—”
“I was afraid to,” Tyson said. “You told me he blasted with it three times, perhaps more. We don’t know how many charges he may have used up before he brought your jet down. I might have wasted more than one in testing it out. No—it would have been foolish. There may not be any charges left as it is.”
“That’s a comforting thought,” Blakemore said. “All right. We might as well start down.”
They descended slowly and cautiously, testing the firmness and width of each step with their feet before leaving the one above. There were no handrails.
The emplacement seemed to go deep into the earth, and for close to half a minute they descended in absolute darkness. Then a faint glimmer of light became visible far below and grew swiftly brighter.
That would have been more reassuring than otherwise if something had not happened a few seconds after it became brighter that made Blakemore halt abruptly and stare with alarm at the shining tube.
The tube was moving very slowly back and forth, as if whoever might be operating the massive weapon was uncertain as to whether or not it should be fired again. It was almost as if there was a childish irresponsibility at work at the base of the weapon, a failure to understand that a weapon so formidable should not be operated in so erratic a way.
Just the fact that Blakemore was no longer outside on the plain, standing in the target area, did not mean that he had nothing to fear if the weapon went off again. The steps were so near to it that the heat of the firing alone might come close to incinerating him, if the concussion did not hurl him from the stairs.
Tyson had become aware of the danger too, and his voice was sharp with alarm, though he managed to keep it low-pitched enough to avoid giving their presence away before they reached the lower-most step and could no longer hope to keep it concealed.
“If that weapon goes off now we could be killed,” he said. “We’re within three or four feet of it. The recoil alone—”
“I know,” Blakemore said, cutting him short. “It means we’ve got to get down the rest of these steps fast. Proves one thing, though. That fireball was aimed at the machine, not at us.”
They got down the rest of the steps fast and were moving out from the lowermost one when the great weapon went off with a thunderous roar.
They were hurled to the ground and before they could get to their feet again someone darted past them and started ascending the stairs as swiftly as they had descended.
The light was very bright and they caught no more than a fleeting glimpse of him amidst a dazzlement that half-blinded them. But that brief glimpse caused Blakemore to cry out in furious disbelief and Tyson to cry out also.
The swiftly vanishing figure was that of a naked child—a boy of not more than eleven or twelve at the most, his hair long and matted, and straggling down over his ears, his skin glinting berry-brown in the glare of what looked like a dozen crude oil lamps sending out smoky fumes. He was carrying a short, stone hatchet, which he did not relinquish as he fled.
“A barbarian child!” Tyson said, looking so stunned it surprised Blakemore he could speak at all. “A Stone Age child. How could he possibly have known how to operate—”
“A boy half his age—a child of four even—could fire almost any weapon with an uncomplicated trigger mechanism,” Blakemore said. “The complexity of that one was apparently in the gadgetry on the tube and the precise technological function it was built to perform—perhaps a half million years ago.
“He was only a child,” he went on thoughtfully. “But an adult on the rude barbarian level might well be able not only to fire it, but to turn it on a hated enemy, without knowing a thing about its technological complexity. And the machine, arriving as it did out of the blue, might have seemed to the barbarian inhabitants of this age the equivalent of a fiery dragon breathing out smoke and flames. So they tried to destroy it with fire from this weapon—not knowing, of course, that it was the kind of fire that could pass right through an opaque metal barrier as only infra-red and other lands of invisible heat rays are supposed to be capable of doing, and still look like visible light.”
“The boy we just saw wasn’t a Stone Age youngster, I’m afraid. He’s just a boy of the far future, when mankind’s triumphs will have dwindled and vanished—as we now know, of course, they’ve done. We could hardly fail to know, since we’re standing right in the midst of the tragic remnants. I would say that the remnants have a very frayed edge.”
“And I thought it was Malador. I thought we’d find him here—not that boy.”
“Malador is here,” Blakemore said, gripping Tyson’s arm, and pointing, his fingers tightening on the younger man’s wrist like steel bands. “He couldn’t have fired the weapon, however. Not with that spear in him.”
Malador was lying on his back, half in shadows, with the crude oil lamps casting a flickering radiance over his head and shoulders. He was spread-eagled on a floor of smooth, but verdigris-encrusted metal, his eyes sightlessly staring and his arms stretched so wide they seemed to be wrenching to get out of their sockets, even in death.
A long gleaming spear, with a cluster of feathers attached to its hilt, protruded from almost the exact middle of his chest.
“God!” Tyson said, his voice choked. “You saw him and didn’t tell me. You went right on talking—”
“I had a reason,” Blakemore said. “There’s nothing we can do for him now, and I don’t want what happened to him to happen to us. I don’t think they liked the interest he took in their weapon and that’s why they killed him. It means we’ve got to get out of here fast. I had to make you see how important getting out fast is—just what it means to them to own a weapon like that.”
“I think I get it,” Tyson said. “You enraged Malador by growing a field of wheat and he enraged them just as much by violating a sacred taboo.”
“Exactly,” Blakemore said. “Now suppose we see how fast we can climb back out and get back to the machine. Any minute now they may discover that we’ve enraged them too. Just one look at that kid gives me a pretty good idea what the adults must be like. A stone hatchet at twelve might not be so bad in itself, compared to some of war-game toys kids that age played with in the past. But there was blood on it. Or didn’t you notice?”
“No, I didn’t notice,” Tyson said. “Freshly shed?”
“I think so. It could be animal blood, of course. A fine, brave little hunter. But if there are warring tribes in this age—”
“Come on,” Tyson said. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It happened more swiftly—and unexpectedly—than Blakemore and Tyson had feared that it might, and they had feared that it might not be long in coming.
The skin-clad barbarians—or were they savages?—emerged from behind a dozen boulders the instant Tyson’s head came into view and while Blakemore was still four steps lower down.
They came swarming over a slight rise in the landscape as well, some swinging stone axes and others armed with spears. They were not in the least Neanderthal-like in aspect, for the one thing that man had apparently not done in regressing culturally was circle back on the course of human evolution. They were sturdily built and tall in stature, clad for the most part in the skins of animals, although a few were totally naked.
They were not tribally well-organized and had seemingly no great skill in warfare, for they converged on the massive weapon singly and in pairs, waving their arms as they ran and occasionally taking long leaps that somehow failed to enable them to cover the intervening distance much faster.
A few bore themselves with more dignity and had more the look of seasoned warriors.
What saved Blakemore and Tyson from an immediate hand-to-hand encounte
r at the base of the weapon and enabled them to postpone it was the fact that the running tribesmen nearest to the weapon did not move quite fast enough.
It was a simple enough circumstance, but one which, across the ages, has determined the destiny of millions of individuals and not a few nations, and not always in the realm of warfare.
In a moment they were both several yards from the weapon and running across the plain just as fast, Blakemore found himself hoping, as the nearest of the pursuing tribesmen, who were comparatively few in number.
But their numbers swelled rapidly and when Blakemore glanced back for the second time—his first glance had been reassuring—he realized that he could not hope to outdistance them until he reached the machine. There were too many very rapid runners.
“You’ve got to use Malador’s weapon,” he said, pausing for the barest instant to bring Tyson to a halt. “Turn around, take careful aim and see what you can accomplish. You don’t have to blast them down. It’s crazy, I know—I ought to have my head examined. But it’s the way I feel about it.”
“What do you suggest I do?” Tyson demanded. “It is crazy, when it’s our lives or theirs.”
“Blast the earth directly in front of them,” Blakemore told him. “Rip a big trench in it, if you can. It’s not their fault they’ve regressed to barbarism.”
“Oh, all right. But it’s madness.”
Tyson was raising the weapon, his hands busy on the trigger mechanism which no child could possibly have operated when two hurled spears went spinning over their heads, making Blakemore almost regret what he’d told the other not to do.
“In another moment we’ll have spears sticking out all over us,” Tyson muttered. “You’ll be as sorry as hell and you won’t get any sympathy from me. I’ll be too dead to extend it.”
“Shut up and take careful aim. Hurry. If you can’t work it—I’ll try. It’s got to be done fast.”
Tyson had the weapon at shoulder level now. But Blakemore had no idea what was going to happen. Probably Tyson would blast to kill and apologize afterwards, but he’d done all he could to prevent it. His conscience was clear and he could sleep nights, but he was probably a fool in the bargain.
The weapon seemed to come to life in Tyson’s hands an instant before a long tongue of flame darted from it, followed by a deafening roar.
Though Blakemore was standing within four feet of him only his ears were deafened. There were no displaced currents of air lashing against him, nothing to indicate that a hand weapon more powerful than the gunmakers of the twenty-first century would have been able to construct in a lifetime of trying had gone off that close to him. Except that, when he looked down, he saw that Tyson had been hurled to the ground and was just struggling to a sitting position, the weapon still in his clasp.
Directly in front of him a thick curtain of smoke obscured what had happened. But it thinned out very quickly and he saw that Tyson had accomplished exactly what he had urged him to at least attempt. The ground immediately in front of the pursuing tribesmen had been ripped apart in eight or ten places and from the dust-filled craters which had been blasted out of the soil thin columns of smoke were still arising.
The tribesmen had scattered. Some had turned and fled, shrieking in terror. Others were climbing out of the craters, their faces smoke-blackened and looking as if they would have no heart for continuing on in pursuit of men they had made the mistake of thinking less than godlike.
But there was one who seemed undaunted, both by the yawning craters and the demoralization which had followed in the wake of the blast.
He leapt straight across the narrowest of the craters and came rushing straight toward Blakemore with his spear extended.
Blakemore waited until he was within four feet of him, then sidestepped the spear, brought his right hand up in a chopping motion no different from the one he had used to keep Tyson from committing an act of suicidal folly and finished with a blow that would have disqualified him if he had been a professional boxer. But deep in every man, Blakemore knew, there was a buried savage and if ever there was a right time to resurrect him it was now.
The tribesman crumpled as if a wedge of steel had slammed into him, Blakemore bent and picked up the spear, which had gone spinning.
He hoped he wouldn’t need it, for Tyson was on his feet now, and they were both in good mettle to make a final run for it.
He hoped he wouldn’t need it—and he didn’t. What could not have been more than three minutes later they were ascending into the machine, with no one at all in pursuit of them.
Before they passed inside Tyson paused just long enough on the topmost rung to ask: “Why do you suppose Malador wanted to bring down the thunder? He must have known what he’d be walking into. Whatever you may think about the extent of his paranormal gifts you’ll have to admit that they were unusual. He must have known exactly what those barbarians would be capable of.”
“He may have felt he was no longer among friends, exactly,” Blakemore said. “In a way, I feel sorry for him. He thought I was dead or dying and hating me was no longer something that could make him forget almost everything else. He just didn’t want to remain in captivity. He hoped to find a new world outside that he could reshape, a world that would enable him to live a richer, fuller and more abundant life than he had known in the twenty-second century. Wretchedness and starvation can make a man desperate, willing to take any risk to achieve something better.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Blakemore doubted if he would have been capable of performing a miracle and keeping it as closely guarded a secret as Faran had done.
He doubted also that he could have revealed the wonder of it in quite so dramatic a way.
Faran didn’t just walk into the viewing window compartment and say: “I knew I could do it. All I needed was a little more time. I won’t pretend I wasn’t afraid we might be stranded here forever until I got down to really studying the dials. But then I knew, it came to me.”
He didn’t say that at all. All he said was: “In just about four more minutes you’ll be taking your last look at our flower garden—or what’s left of it. When we come back—and I think we will—there isn’t one chance in a thousand we’ll come out tangential to the warp field at exactly this spot.”
No one spoke, no one said a word, because there are times when no one can, when speech becomes impossible. Blakemore could understand that and had no wish to change it. He might have said a few words, he felt, by making a supreme effort, but he preferred not to.
They saw it perhaps twenty seconds—not longer after the machine had been set in motion.
They were all standing directly in front of the viewing window when the mountain came clearly into view, and they saw the Great Stone Face.
It could have been carved out of basalt or quartz crystal or some other, unknown mineral. What it had been carved out of didn’t seem to matter.
Helen Blakemore cried out and then remained motionless, standing as still as the carved figure, which must have been at least a thousand feet in height, because it was the same height as the mountain.
Blakemore blinked, then swayed a little.
Tyson said: “After a half million years—”
It was Gilda who broke the spell. “You look a little pale, Dan. But it’s a wonderful likeness all the same. Isn’t it, Dad?”
“Yes, it is,” Faran said. “And it makes what I’m going to say—well, this is the right time to say it, I think.
“We saw the shining cities—we saw what Dan’s wheat made possible. But that, too, had to come to an end because the human clock ran down. Man’s energies simply gave out. Almost everyone knew it would be that way—the wisest philosophers simply saw it more clearly than most.
In this age man is on his way to extinction. It is really all over, or soon will be. But time travel and what Dan has done—can change all th
at.
Don’t you see? There can be another beginning, a new blueprint for the human race. We can build more machines like this and save the bravest and the best—from a hundred different ages—and set the clock to ticking again, a half million years in the future.
“We can and we will,” Dan said. “But there’s only one thing—that face out there should be yours, not mine.”
“I like Dad’s face just the way it is,” Gilda said. “It has a comfortable, fatherly look. But on you—both faces look good.”
The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel Page 63