The Halfling and Other Stories

by Leigh Brackett

  Esmond to Marcia Rohan, Marcia to her father—and now here they were. Esmond was going to get a Fellowship in the Interplanetary Society of Ethonologists and Rand Conway was going to get what he had lusted for ever since he had stumbled upon his father’s notes and read in them the story of what lay in the Lake of the Gone Forever, waiting to be picked up by the first strong pair of hands.

  That portion of the notes he had never shown to anyone.

  Here they were, plunging out of the sky toward Iskar, and it had all been so easy—too easy. Conway was a spaceman and therefore superstitious, whether he liked it or not. He had a sudden feeling that he was going to have to pay for that easiness before he got through.

  Esmond had pressed forward in the cramped space, staring raptly out at the distant glittering of silver light that was Iskar.

  “I wonder what they’re like?” he said as he had said a million times before. Marcia smiled.

  “You’ll soon know,” she answered.

  “It is odd,” said Rohan, “that your father didn’t tell more about the people of Iskar, Conway. His notes were strangely fragmentary—almost as though he had written much more and then destroyed it.”

  Conway tried to detect an edge of suspicion in Rohan’s voice, but could not.

  “Perhaps he did,” said Conway. “I never could find any more.”

  With that one exception it was the truth.

  Marcia’s face was thoughtful and a little sad, in the dim glow of that outer sky.

  “I’ve read those notes over and over again,” she said. “I think you’re right, Dad. I think Mr. Conway wrote his whole heart into those notes and then destroyed them because he couldn’t bear to have them read, even by his son.”

  She put a sympathetic hand on Conway’s arm.

  “I can understand your wanting to know, Rand. I hope you’ll find your answer.”

  “Thanks,” said Conway gravely.

  He had had to account for his own interest in Iskar and he had been able to do that too without lying except by omission. The story of his father was true enough—the dark brooding man, broken in health and spirit, living alone with a child and a dream. He had died before Rand was ten, by his own hand and with the name of Iskar on his lips. I can never go back to the Lake of the Gone Forever!

  Conway himself had never doubted what his father’s secret tragedy was. He had found a fortune on Iskar and had not been able to go back to claim it. That was enough to drive any man mad.

  But it was easy, out of his childhood memories and those strangely incoherent notes, to build a romantic mystery around the lonely prospector’s discovery of an unknown world and his subsequent haunted death. Marcia had found it all fascinating and did not doubt for a moment Conway’s statement that he was seeking to solve the mystery which, he said, had overshadowed his whole life.

  And it had. Waking or sleeping, Rand Conway could not forget Iskar and the Lake of the Gone Forever.

  He watched the misty globe grow larger in the sky ahead, and the beating of his heart was a painful thing. Already his hands ached with longing to close around Iskar and wring from it the power and the wealth that would repay him for all the bitter years of waiting.

  He thought of his dream. It was always unpleasantly vivid, and remained with him for hours after he woke. But this time it was different. He thought of the vision of his father, standing in the crystal valley, alone with his dark sorrow, and he said to the vision, You should have waited. You should have had the courage to wait, like me.

  For the first time he was not sorry for his father.

  Then he forgot his father. He forgot time and Esmond and the Rohans. He forgot everything but Iskar.

  The Rohan shuddered rhythmically to the brake-blasts. Iskar filled the port, producing a skyline of shimmering pinnacles so like his dream that Conway shuddered too in spite of himself.

  The pinnacles shot up swiftly into a wall of ice and the Rohan swept in to a landing.

  CHAPTER II The White City

  The spaceship lay like a vast black whale, stranded on a spotless floe. Behind it the ice-wall rose, its upper spires carved by the wind into delicate fantastic shapes. Spreading away from it to the short curve of the horizon was a sloping plain of snow, broken here and there by gleaming tors. In the distance other ranges lifted sharply against the deep dark blue of the sky.

  Rand Conway stood apart from the others. His face had a strange look. He slipped the warm hood back, lifting his head in the icy wind.

  Great golden stars wheeled overhead and the air was full of dancing motes of frost. The wind played with the powdery snow, whirling it up into shining veils, smoothing it again into curious patterns of ripples.

  The plain, the sky, the frozen spires, had a wondrous beauty of color, infinitely soft and subtle. There was no glare here to plague Conway’s eyes. Iskar glimmered in a sort of misty twilight, like the twilight of a dream.

  Iskar—the bulk of it solid under his feet at last after all these years. Conway trembled and found it difficult to breathe. His eyes, black and luminous as a cat’s now with the expansion of the pupils, glistened with a hard light. Iskar!

  Quite suddenly he was afraid.

  Fear rushed at him out of the narrow valleys, down from the singing peaks. It came in the wind and rose up from the snow under his feet. It wrapped him in a freezing shroud and for a moment reality slipped away from him and he was lost.

  The shadows were deep under the icy cliffs and the mouths of the valleys were black and full of whispers. It seemed to him that the lurking terror of his dream was very close, close and waiting.

  He must have made some sound or sign, for Marcia Rohan came to him and took him by the arm.

  “Rand,” she said. “Rand, what is it?”

  He caught hold of her. In a moment everything was normal again and he was able to force what might pass for a laugh.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Something came to me just then.” He could not tell her about the dream. He told her instead what he knew must be the cause of it.

  “My father must have told me something about this place when I was a child, something I can’t remember. Something ugly. I—” He paused and then plunged on. “I thought for a moment that I had been here before, that I knew…”

  He stopped. The shadow was gone now. To the devil with dreams and subconscious memories. The reality was all that mattered—the reality that was going to make Rand Conway richer than the Rohans. He stared away across the plain. For a moment his face was unguarded and Marcia was startled by the brief cruel look of triumph that crossed it.

  The others came up, Rohan and young Esmond and Captain Frazer, the well-fed but very competent skipper of the Rohan. They were all shivering slightly in spite of their warm coveralls. Esmond looked at Conway, who was still bare-headed.

  “You’ll freeze your ears off,” he said.

  Conway laughed, not without a faint edge of contempt. “If you had kicked around in deep space as many years as I have you wouldn’t be bothered by a little cold.”

  He pointed off to where the distant ranges were, across the plain.

  “According to my father’s maps the village, or what have you, lies between those ranges.”

  “I think,” said Marcia, “that we had better break out the sledges and go before Peter bursts something.”

  Esmond laughed. He was obviously trembling with eagerness.

  “I hope nothing’s happened to them,” he said. “I mean, since your father was here. You know—famine, plague or anything.”

  “I imagine they’re a pretty hardy lot,” said Rohan, “or they couldn’t have survived at all in this godforsaken place.” He turned to Frazer, laughing. “For heaven’s sake, get the sledges.”

  Frazer nodded. The crew had come tumbling out and were rollicking like schoolboys in the snow, glad to be released from the long confinement of the voyage. The Second Officer and the engineer were coming up and Frazer went to meet them. The Second turned back to r
ound up his men.

  The sledges came presently out of the cargo hatch. There were three of the light plastic hulls—two to carry the exploring party, one to be left with the ship in case of emergency. They were fully equipped, including radio and the efficient Samson riot guns, firing shells of anaesthetic gas.

  Rohan looked at his daughter. “I want you to stay here, Marcia.”

  The girl must have been expecting that, Conway thought, because her only reaction was to set her jaw so that she looked ridiculously like her father—smaller and prettier but even more stubborn.

  “No,” said Marcia.

  Esmond said, “Please, darling. These people may not be friendly at first. You can go next time.”

  “No,” said Marcia.

  “Marcia,” said Rohan pleasantly. “I don’t want any foolishness about this. Go with Frazer, back to the ship.”

  Marcia studied him. Then she turned and kissed Esmond lightly on the cheek and said, “Good luck, darling.” She went off with Frazer. Conway saw that there were tears in her eyes. He warmed to Marcia. She hadn’t been trying to show off. She just wanted to be with Esmond in case anything happened.

  Rohan said, “I guess we might as well go.”

  They climbed in, six men to a sledge, all burly spacehands with the exception of Rohan and the ethnologist and Conway, who had sweated his way up from the ranks to Master Pilot.

  The small jets hissed, roared and settled down to a steady thrumming. The sledges shot out across the trackless plain like two small boats on a white sea, throwing up waves of snowy spray.

  Conway was in the leading sledge. He leaned forward like a leashed hound, impatient to be slipped. Part of him was mad with excitement and another part, completely cool and detached, was making plans.

  The spaceship began to grow smaller. Almost imperceptibly the gleaming pinnacles of ice lengthened into the sky.

  Presently the pace of the sledges grew slower and slower still. Tors, half rock, half ice, rose up out of the snow and here and there a reef, mailed and capped with the shining armor, was scoured clear by the wind. The man at the controls thrust his head forward, squinting.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Conway. “Why the delay?”

  The man said irritably, “I’m afraid of ramming into something, sir. It’s so bloody dark and shadowy, I can’t see.”

  “Is that all!” Conway laughed and shoved him aside. “Here— let an owl do it.”

  He took the controls and sent the sledge spinning ahead. Every reef and tor, every ripple in the snow, was as clear to him as it would have been to most men in broad daylight. He laughed again.

  “I’m beginning to like Iskar,” he said to Rohan. “I think I’ll start a colony for people with hemeralopia, and we can all be as happy as bats in the dark. My father must have loved it here.”

  Rohan glanced up at him. Conway had forgotten to put his hood back up. The wind was whipping an icy gale through his hair and there was rime on his lashes. He seemed to be enjoying it. Rohan shivered.

  “I’m nyctalopic myself,” he said. “I’ll stick to plenty of sunlight—and heat!”

  Esmond did not bother to listen to either one of them. His dream was as strong as Conway’s and at this moment he had room for nothing else.

  The sledges rushed on across the plain, the one following the tiny jet-flares of the other. The spaceship was lost in the white distance behind them. Ahead the twin ranges grew against the stars. Nothing stirred but the wind. It was very lovely, very peaceful, Conway thought. A cold, sweet jewel of a world.

  The words sang in his ears, the words that had themed his father’s death and run through his own life as a promise and a challenge. “The Lake of Gone Forever—Gone Forever…”

  He had long ago ceased to wonder what that name meant. Only in his nightmare dream did it have the power to frighten him. He wanted what was there and nothing else mattered.

  The Lake of the Gone Forever. Soon—soon—soon!

  Yet it seemed a very long time to Conway before they entered the broad defile between the twin ranges.

  He was forced to slow his breakneck pace because here the ground was broken and treacherous. Finally he stopped altogether.

  “We’ll have to go on foot from here,” he said.

  In a fever of impatience he waited while the men climbed out, shouldering the Samson guns. They left two to guard the sledges and went on, scrambling in single file over the tumbled rocks. The wind howled between the mountain walls so that the air was blind with snow. There was no sight of the city.

  Conway was in the lead. He was like a man driven by fiends. Where the others slipped and stumbled he went over the rough ground like a cat, swift and surefooted even among the deceptive drifts. Several times he was forced to stop and wait lest he leave the party too far behind.

  Suddenly, above the organ notes of the wind, there was another sound.

  Conway lifted his head to listen. Clear and sweet and strong he heard the winding of horns from the upper slopes. They echoed away down the valley, calling one to the other with ringing voices that stirred Conway’s blood to a wild excitement. He shook the snow out of his hair and plunged on, leaving the rest to follow as best they could.

  A jutting shoulder of the mountains loomed before him. The wind blew and the deep-throated horns called and called again across the valley. The blown drifts leaped at him and the icy screes were a challenge to his strength but they could not slow him down. He laughed and went on around the shoulder and saw the white city glittering under the stars.

  It spread across the valley floor and up the slopes as though it grew from the frozen earth, a part of it, as enduring as the mountains. At Conway’s first glance, it seemed to be built all of ice, its turrets and crenellations glowing with a subtle luminescence in the dusky twilight, fantastically shaped, dusted here and there with snow. From the window openings came a glow of pearly light.

  Beyond the city the twin ranges drew in and in until their flanks were parted only by a thin line of shadow, a narrow valley with walls of ice reaching up to the sky.

  Conway’s heart contracted with a fiery pang.

  A narrow valley—The valley.

  For a moment everything vanished in a roaring darkness. Dream and reality rushed together—his father’s notes, his father’s dying cry, his own waking visions and fearful wanderings beyond the wall of sleep.

  It lies beyond the city, in a narrow place between the mountains—The Lake of the Gone Forever. And I can never go back!

  Conway said aloud to the wind and the snow and the crying horns, “But I have come back. I have come!”

  Exulting, triumphant, he looked again at the city, the white beauty of it, the wind-carved towers bright beneath the golden stars.

  It was a strong place, walled and fortified against whatever enemies there might be on this world of Iskar. Conway ran toward it and as he did so the braying of horns rose louder and then was joined by the shrill warcry of pipes.

  They went skirling along the wall and through the snow-mist he saw that men were there above him looking down. The glitter of their spears ran like a broken line of silver from both sides of the great stone gate.

  CHAPTER III The Fear

  Conway’s blood leaped hot within him. The pipes set him mad and he flung up his arm and shouted at the men, a long hail. He could see them clearly now. They were tall lean men with bodies tough as rawhide and strong bone in their faces and eyes like the eyes of eagles. They wore the white furs of beasts kilted about them, thrown loosely over their naked shoulders, and they were bareheaded and careless of the cold.

  Their spears rose up and menaced him.

  He stopped. Once again he cried out, a cry as wild and shrill as the martial pipes. Then he stood still, waiting.

  Slowly behind him came Rohan and the others. They formed into a sort of knot around him. Some of the men reached nervously for their riot guns and Rohan spoke sharply. The pipes fell silent and the sounding horns. They waited,
all of them.

  There was movement on the wall and an old man came forward among the warriors, a cragged, gnarled old man with a proud face and fierce eyes, standing strong as a granite rock.

  He looked down at the alien men below him. His hair and his long beard blew in the bitter wind, and the white furs whipped around him, and for a long time he did not speak. His eyes met Conway’s and there was hatred in them and deep pain.

  Finally he said, very slowly, as though the words came haltingly from some long-locked vault of memory, “Men of Earth!”

  Conway started. It had not occurred to him that his father might have left some knowledge of English behind him.

  “Yes,” he answered, holding out his empty hands. “Friends.” The old man shook his head. “No. Go, or we kill.”

  He looked again at Conway, very strangely, and a little chill ran through the Earthman. Was it possible that the old man saw in him some resemblance to the Conway he had known before? He and his father had not looked alike.

  Esmond stepped forward. “Please,” he said. “We mean you no harm. We only want to talk to you. We will obey you, we will bring no weapons—only let us in!”

  He was very like a child pleading, almost on the verge of tears. It was unthinkable that he should be denied now.

  The old man said again, “Go.”

  Rohan spoke. “We have gifts, many things for your people.

  We want nothing. We come as friends.”

  The old man flung up his head and laughed, and his mirth was like vitriol poured on the wind.

  “Friend! Conna was my friend. In my house, as my own son, lived Conna, my friend!”

  He cried out something in his own harsh tongue and Conway knew that it was a curse and he knew that Conna was his own name. They had not forgotten his father on Iskar, it seemed.

  He was suddenly angry, more terribly angry than he had ever been in his life. Beyond the city, almost within reach, lay the valley of the Lake and nothing, not all their spears, not death itself, was going to stop them now.

  He strode up under the wall and looked at the old man with eyes as black and baleful as his own.