The Lost Cavern

by H. F. Heard

  He turned away and lunged blindly through the forest. Automatically, night by night, he coiled himself up in the lianas. Once or twice he was attacked, but the creatures were evidently so specialized that they hardly recognized this strange object as possible prey. If he did not blunder on them, they hardly ever struck at him, far less trailed or stalked him. They were sluggish beasts, whose reactions were almost automatic and who had become so specialized that these reactions were hardly ever awakened save by the presence of their specific prey. Once as he stumbled along he felt a tendril flip round his neck. He caught it and looked up. From a tangle of creeper above him waved a cluster of tentacles. He took the tendril in his hands and tore it away. Fine spines in the under side of it had left a series of bleeding punctures in his skin. In terror he gazed up, expecting the other winnowing arms to close around him. But the moment the creature, which now he could see was some kind of land octopus, felt the unfamiliar contact of the human hand tearing it away, it was seized with a contractile reaction and curled itself up into a ball.

  Another time, when on comparatively open swamp land, he heard a great trampling coming toward him from the left. It was advancing so quickly that he stood still. But before he could take cover the thing broke out of the bush and swung across the open. It was a huge, lumbering beast. He had never seen anything to approach it. The legs, stumpy but stout as the masts of the biggest ships, sank and sucked and plunged as it plodded over the half-solid marsh. Its body nearly touched the ground and rose at the back to a frill of spines that came forward and spread like a collar round its neck. From this protruded a small head with a beak. The whole beast was the size of a ship, and it forged ahead like a boat wallowing over a choppy sea. It grunted as it thrust itself along and swung its head from side to side. He was unable to fly, so horrible did the monster seem to him. Its track brought it close by him, and in those steady swings of the head it swept its eyes over him time and again. But once more it was clear that this queer little human figure awoke no reaction in that dim coil of reflexes which were the sum activity of the minute brain that had to fit in behind the beak and the dull, heavy-lidded eyes. It stumbled grunting past. He was close enough to see its great rumpled and cracked hide, a rough pavement of horny plates, covered with parasites, barnacle growths, and limpet-like shells, with leeches and the tunnels of worms in the fissures. Then the head and shoulders met the thicket, and he heard the stamping and tearing as it drove its way along, the great calloused tail, like the coulter of a plough, leaving a last furrow in the packed leaf-mold as it was dragged after its owner.

  These incidents awoke him for a moment from his daze. Otherwise he had become almost as automatic as these creatures. He went on like a migrating animal. Sometimes he would take out his compass stone and look at it. But as the days went on he seemed to travel more by a blind instinct that told him he was making south. Automatically, too, when he came to the lusher parts he wiped over his body, grooming off fresh leeches that had managed to make a purchase or driving off the giant flies before they had pierced deep and sucked. He ate in the same blind way, reaching up his hand to fruit when it was near and munching it as he stumbled on.

  He hardly noticed, then, that the forest was becoming clearer, the mist had thinned, and rain was far less frequent. Indeed, he went right on until one day he found himself at the shore—the ocean itself before him. He had come right through. The sun was out. The sands were warm. A fresh spring flowed out there to the sea. He drank, ate some bananas that grew here almost to the water’s edge, threw himself down on the warm sand, worked himself into it, and fell asleep at once. He woke as the sun was setting, pushed himself into the cover of dried fallen leaves around the thicket of bananas, and went to sleep. So he stayed for some days, just waking to eat and drink and then sleeping again. At last he rose and stretched himself, looked out to the sea, and set out along the coast. He went around three or four shallow bays. Then he heard a shout—he was being hailed. He stood still. In a few minutes two men were standing looking at him.

  He remembered, as though in a story he had been told in childhood, that these men were of the fishing clan—he did not find his mind saying, “These are men of my clan.…” Then he noticed that they were looking strangely at him. He put his hand to his neck pouch. Yes, it was there after all those days, years perhaps. He didn’t know or care. He took out his stone and showed it to them. Yes, that worked: they came nearer. Then he reached inside and picked out several of the round objects from the inner pocket. They saw the huge, shining pearls—looked at them in silence for a moment. Then, as he put them back, they put out their hands and pointed to him where they were going and he should go.

  They did not touch him. They led him back to a camp. He heard them speak to the master of the crew. This expedition had just finished a visit to the shores of the Belt and was about to set home. The two Ailuck had met had gone a little farther afield to see if they could find better sea-truffle beds. The ship captain ordered him into the boat. He was put forward in the small forecastle. They never touched him but pushed his food to him. Perhaps it was because they dreaded him—though they knew him to be one of themselves, he had come from the haunted interior—that they did not try to take the pearls from him. When they arrived at their small port in Antarctica, and the ship had been inspected by the harbor officials, he was ordered off, but again not touched. They shut him in an empty room and pushed his food to him through a small hatch.

  After three days the door opened and one of the priest administrators stood there. He beckoned Ailuck out. In the street a car was waiting and attached behind it a trailer. Into this he was told to go, and the equipment set off. They went to the capital, to the great Place. Evidently his arrival had been foretold, for, though the common people paid him no attention, when he was brought into one of the administrative courts, it was empty of public, but a full court of officials was present. He was set down before them. To the questions whether he had been into the Belt, he nodded. They told him that the penalty for that was death. He nodded again. Then the court told him to withdraw, and he was led away by the priest who had come to fetch him—a young, clever-looking man. This man, when he had taken Ailuck to a cell, stood for a moment in the door looking at him. Ailuck put his hand into his pouch and took out a few pearls, holding them in the palm of his hand. The other pointed that he should put them on the ground, just under the stone bench that edged the wall. When Ailuck had done this with all the contents of his pouch, the other looked at him, nodded, shut the door, and locked it. After an hour he returned and led Ailuck back to the court room.

  The President spoke: “You have been condemned to death, but the priest who took you into custody says you have utterly repented of your sins.” Then, turning to the young man, he said, “Tell the prisoner what you have suggested as an alternative to his execution.”

  The young priest began by saying that mercy was not contrary to justice. “True, the victim of illusion had no doubt become seriously infected in the place of Evil. But the holy stones could purify him, and then his testimony, the witness that here was a man who had gone to Hell and come back and who could with his own word confirm what the Scriptures said and tradition ordered, would establish authority. If he were killed men might still doubt whether it were not blind superstition defending its rights that had destroyed him who had found out the truth to be other than was taught. But now, if he was spared, he could show that truth and authority were one.”

  The chief priest spoke again: Would Ailuck so serve for the rest of his life, if his life were spared? Ailuck bowed. Why shouldn’t he? Surely none of them could know as he did the horror of the Belt.

  He was taken away into a shrine behind the temple. There, on special altars covered with heavy, carved reliquaries of lead, rested the secret stones of power. The officiating priests robed and gloved themselves in lead-plated vestments and put visors of paste-glass over their eyes. They raised the lead hoods, and the radioactive ores shone in the dusk
with an unhealthy glow. They took up the stones they needed. It was clear they had quite a good practical knowledge of radioactive ores and of giving treatment with them. They passed them over Ailuck’s body, which they had stripped naked. Already the molds and fungus patches had appeared. After one treatment by the rays, they were gone. There were patches all over his body, some quite near the eyes. But all were gone in three days. But after the first day Ailuck found his eyes dazed. On the second, they were slower in recovering. On the third, his sight began to fade, and finally, after a week it was gone. It never returned. After a week’s treatment, he was left to rest. He felt very tired and slept much. The fevers only manifested themselves in one slight night attack. The infection he had caught going north had apparently given him resistance and almost immunity. Then he was led in front of the court. They were no longer afraid to touch him. He knew it was the court for he heard his young defender speak of the success of the purification and the High Priest admit it, and add, “And now that sight has been yielded as the price of such grave trespass, you will remember all the better what you have seen, that you may recite your pilgrimage in Hell to confirm the faith.”

  So his second life began. He was sent around the country, and at all great festivals he recited his saga. He was not allowed to tell of the actual quiet days in Arctica, but the whole of his wanderings he reduced to a kind of chant. It became known as the Divine Tragedy, and when he died it was put into written form and recited at all festivals. It was also learned by all those who were passing their high-school examinations.

  V. THE PLANETARY LINEUP

  So, as far as man was concerned, the Earth behaved toward him—now that he had set its balance at another adjustment and its course on another tack—like a giant centrifuge. Homo sapiens was driven away from the lands where he had been evolved because he chose to make these temperate zones impossibly tropical. He was driven up to find the temperate conditions he requires, right onto the Poles. The desert belt of the earth had long gone. The Sahara had swamped almost at once. Lake Chad had taken back its dominion. The African section of the Great Vegetation Belt spread up here and engrossed nearly the whole Mediterranean basin. No, man had nothing but the Poles, and the two Poles were now really, as far as communication went, two quite different worlds.

  Man was thus segregated into Homo borealis and Homo australis, Arctic man and Antarctic man. As ever, segregation began to tell—difference in variety began to become difference in species. Now at last there were really two races of man. Providentially they never, after that, met. They could have recognized no common humanity. The few thinkers that remained at either Pole could do little to prevent this, nor did they see any reason why they should. The dwindling number of minds that knew history, that could envisage the story of man, saw, they felt, with perfect conviction, that this had been inevitable. Man would not get on with man—the lines had at last been drawn for the battle royal when each—as in the duel with razors, with left wrist tied to left wrist—could with the new atomic weapons give the other the death-blow. The historian-philosophers thought therefore that the change, the new flood, the great Barrier Belt, all these things were providential. They were the only things that could have saved mankind from extinction and given him, if not progress, at least a decent, quiet life for some more millennia on the surface of the earth.

  Whether they were right or wrong, it is clear that, being sensible men and knowing that the art of good sense is to accept the inevitable, they could not have come to any other conclusion. The slightly larger number of people who cared a rap what they thought, approved their conclusions. Pragmatically they were, then, right. They gave reasons for living, for Life, and so possibly they were right even sub specie aeternitatis.

  The Martian astronomers—a class as small—were, however, puzzled. They found themselves involved in controversies which became—as such will—quite bitter. For no good observer could doubt that some immense change had overtaken the Earth with what any geologically minded Martian, still more an astronomer, had to call indecent haste. There was not the slightest reason why it should have happened. They were men who had brought astronomy to unequaled heights. They knew the causes of ice ages—sun-fluctuation, cosmic dust, loss of carbon dioxide, spread of oceans through volcanic upheaval. They knew them all, and they knew that none of them would serve. So, suffering from what to a researcher is a severe nervous disorder—acceptance of observations, masses of them, to which no possible explanation will apply—their tempers suffered, and each took it out on his opposite number. So desperate became some that they dared postulate that on the Earth there might possibly be some form of life—a quick-growing yeast, perhaps—that could generate enough heat to melt the polar caps—after which, of course, the other phase would follow. But this suggestion the majority scouted as mere superstition—just making up fancy things to get your mind out of a fix it’s too stupid to solve rationally. No one was quite so rash with his reputation as to suggest that there could be a rational intelligence which could have done such a thing. That would have been highly unpatriotic. Mars knew it was the one abode of life and intelligence—the chosen site—it was easy to prove that. Indeed, when this disloyal doubt did flash through one star-gazer’s mind he laid it easily enough—for if there were intelligent creatures on the Earth, would they have been such fools as to have made such cataclysmic changes? If there were they had undoubtedly perished, so anyhow the matter was self-closed.

  They could all meet on the wide, high platform of observation. Season after season—as their beautiful series of colored telescopic photographs showed—their inner neighboring satellite showed remarkable changes growing. From being a greenish object, mildew blue-green with rust-mold markings on it, it had become a body with a belt whose brightness was equal to that of Venus, and on either side, instead of those rather garish light spots, the bright belt tapered into a lovely aquamarine tint. Yes, it was a distinct addition to the Martian outlook. However much the observers might be at loggerheads when they tried to account for this improvement, they all had to agree that of all the objects that adorned the night sky, the planet next out from the White Planet need not now fear comparison. For sheer beauty of coloration and remarkable quality and distribution of albedo, it had established itself as unique.

  THE CHAPEL OF EASE

  Terror’s quite different from horror. You agree? Well, I wouldn’t have, I don’t think. For I don’t think I’d ever given any thought to such grisly distinctions. No, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t, unless I’d found out at the same time this further thing about them. Horror’s much less awful than Terror. You doubt that? Well, I have as little doubt of the one proposition as of the other. Why? Because I had the fullest demonstration of them both.

  Yes, I’ll give you the facts. Perhaps you won’t draw my conclusions, but, as you’ll see, I have a witness of a sort, and one who, as far as character goes, and general information and intelligence, rates, I think, pretty high. Anyhow, the story might interest you. It certainly throws some light on human psychology.

  I’d come back to Britain from a Civil Servant post abroad—a moderate case of sick leave. But just when I was ready to ship back, there came the war. I couldn’t get to my old base; and at home they stood in need of the kind of Civil Servant knowledge I had. And the early strain of the first part of the war was a real stimulant. You know, of course, that when a war starts, the suicide rate always drops with a slump, and the mental homes for the neurotics empty, and the nerve doctors for a time have quite a bad belt of business to go through—till life adjusts and feeds them, as it were, from other fields. Well, to one who had spent a great deal of his administrative life rather on the rim of things and felt he was rather banished, this coming back to a crusading atmosphere was really quite a wonderful experience. We were all friendly, comradely. I was taken in at once in the big office where I was serving as a kind of old friend. I had a lot of expert knowledge that was needed. No one was jealous, and I was given quite a high-u
p post. I found my team grand people to work with. Yes, I have to own it: I was glad of the war. Yes, even when the bad raids began in the autumn of ’40, all that only made us more of a team. And when we were evacuated and had to open office far away in a western town, in what is called by that odd name “a watering place,” we made our exodus and our provisional settling-in with the kind of good humor and comradeship that people find in getting over difficulties with proved friends.