With his last strength Jaron thrust a foot behind Ennu, and managed to fall forward against him. Ennu fell over Jaron’s leg and lay now across his thigh, his throat still clasped in Jaron’s fast-weakening grasp.
Ennu’s eyes, before now sure and fiery with certain eventual victory—were the only things Jaron could see in the dimness that had now come upon him. There was no flow of strength from his Goddess Cyre, there was nothing on earth but the eyes of this foul wizard and his neck between Jaron’s hands.
INTO Ennu’s eyes came a fear, and bent back as he was over Jaron’s leg, his own hands could not claw yet another magical tool from his belt. So Ennu came to the last resort—his own two eyes and their power over men’s minds.
In front of Jaron the eyes of Ennu became two black absorbent pits of darkness. Jaron’s mind whirled, weakness grew, but still he pressed the priest back and back, his spine creaked across Jaron’s leg. Jaron squeezed harder on the struggling neck.
Those two eyes became to Jaron avenues to death. He tried to tug his gaze away from them. But it was of no use, and the slow little dim thinkings that was all that was left of Jaron told him—“either break his back or he breaks your mind. He has upon him the crystal of malnesite—and no man’s mind can stand the eyes of one who controls that power.”
Back and back he pressed the shoulders of the wizard, and darker and darker grew the mind of Jaron, and it was not Jaron who heard the wizard’s spine snap, but the fierce warriors waiting. They cried out in a vast shout of admiration for the mere man who could slay a wizard with his bare hands. Jaron heard it not at all, but lay unconscious upon the floor, the strength and the wits of him drained . . .
BUT a second elapsed in this unconsciousness. Then within his mind a soft and far-off voice vibrated in lovely notes:
“Thank you, oh, thank you, Jaron of Korl. Noble have you proved yourself. The fire-drug that Ennu flung through the Fire Globe struck me powerless for a space. Without you Ennu would have revived the Blue Men’s faith in their God—and our cause would have been lost. I give thanks to the man-strength in you that has saved us all.”
With Cyre’s voice came flooding back into Jaron’s body the ecstatic strength—quick with little laughing lights all through him alien and utterly sylphic—from the gleaming cloak she had given him. Jaron bounded to his feet, facing the close-pressing mass of fierce yet smiling faces of the Blue warriors.
The mass of warriors shouted in unison: “Hail the new God—Hail!”
With an irresistible rush they swarmed over him, tossed him aloft on their muscled shoulders, bore him about the gloomy chambers of the Temple, did not cease their jubilant march till the sun’s morning light struck into the clearing. When they at last put him down before the embers of the great log fire at the temple entrance, somehow the shadow of the Black God’s power had completely lifted from that temple and from the people.
Jaron stood with his back to the fire, his arms uplifted—acting out the part they had given him to play.
“As your new God, I proclaim today the great feasting day of the Blue Horde, and may it ever after be the day that my divinity is celebrated! Now bring to me the woman who came here with me, that together we may celebrate this joyful occasion.” Nela was brought, still wrapped about with her bindings, and Jaron himself cut her loose, sat beside her where they had brought piles of moss to the fireside. The big-framed Blue women brought water, bathed her face and body—brought hot food and wine.
After Nela had somewhat repaired her appearance, she drank down a great bowl of the blue wine, and gave a laugh of pure relief and joy. The Blue women laughed too, echoing her own bright relief and the last dark mists of the sprit of evil seemed to lift from the clearing and from the faces of the Blue men and women.
After a time, as the musicians got again into swing, and the dancers again began to sway and posture—after Jaron had eaten, and Nela felt the weariness somewhat driven away by the wine—she nestled closer to Jaron’s shoulder, looking up at him.
“Now Cyre will have her Fire Globe and ourselves again be the keepers of the Globe. Our troubles are over for a time . . .”
“Have you decided that question which you came to decide?” asked Jaron, smiling down with just a trace of God-like condescension.
“Oh, yes, I have decided, Jaron.”
Jaron looked for a time at her now sleepy eyes, at the new-combed red-gold curling hair—at the ivory whiteness of her limbs lovely as a master’s marble, even though scratched and bruised. He thought too of something very valuable to a man—his own freedom. And he thought of the immortal beauty of mysterious Cyre, of the strange and lovely flames that were delight entire . . .
So it was that Jaron of Korl won for himself an immortal protectress and mentor—and failed to fall completely slave to the soft snares of a Queen.
Battle in Eternity
“My life is spent; it was a precious sum Spent like an arrow for the bow’s swift hum.”
Hafiz
GRAYSON RAN his hand through the girl’s hair regretfully, where she sat by the pool of the crater which was his stronghold. It was Hell to risk it, but he must. So he said:
“You’ve got to leave, Thea. I am going to do the deed tomorrow!”
“If you can stay and face it, why can’t I?” She turned up her young fresh face to his, smiling and confident of his utter approval. She was Grayson’s dearly beloved ward, more a daughter than any daughter could be.
She made a picture of complete loveliness there outlined against the deep blue of the crater pool, around them the marble benches and exotic shrubs Grayson had planted to relieve the austere chaotic lava of the crater bowl.
“For years, you’ve been planning for this day, and now it’s here, I want to be in on the fireworks.” She made a little pleading mouth, but Grayson shook his head vigorously. He murmured softly, bending over her:
“Why do you think I have put it off so long, little bird of paradise? Only to keep you by my side that much longer. But I can put off no longer what must be risked for the sake of all men. I cannot be a coward; if I were, such creatures as your own clean self would not love me, would they?”
It was a pretty little lie, he had rushed the work as hard as he could, but he was a fond sort of parent, and he could not resist the impulse. She laughed. “You tell such sweet lies, dear Professor, of your dark secrets, forever hiding from life behind your screens and wires and retorts and dynamos. You are a fraud, and you want to be alone for awhile. But I do not want to go back to the hot city, when it is so cool and quiet here.”
She watched him for a moment, where he stood tall and wide-shouldered, his black hair touched with grey, the lean brown quick hands, the intent piercing, deep-blue eyes. Her sleek brown head turned quizzically, taking in the whole wild scene of the crater he had made into a patio of an immense kind.
“Whatever made you choose this place for your workshop, Paul?”
“It exactly fits my requirements, dear Thea. It is big and remote from other people, and it is enclosed by vast rock walls, no one can be harmed by any blunder on my part. I alone will be killed if I misjudge my ability to handle the new power.”
“The new power . . .” she murmured, stressing in the words the vast meaning it had—power to turn the wheels of the world, to lighten men’s load, give them time for thought and study instead of labor. “You make your work seem so important, and us so much less important! Is it really so big, Paul? So utterly new?”
“Yes, it is big and new and quite unpredictable in its present stage. Anything can happen! That is why I want no arguments about your leaving now, this night. It is a baby that may throw its bottle quite a long, long way.”
“This old volcano you picked for a home, Mt. Falsmor, may turn into an active new volcano, the way you talk!”
“Yes, Thea, it is just that powerful. The volcano may do just that, when I release the giant infant from its swaddling clothes.”
ABOVE THE two, talking earnestly
there by the deep cold pool, the ancient bore of the volcano thrust up and out, majestically awesome and rugged, letting in the evening sun at the top, and reflecting it from its black, calcined sides again and again in wide dim shafts of strangely altered sun-light.
At the base of the cliffy sides of the shaft, the openings of a score of lava-bubble chambers showed black and ugly, half of them had been changed into doorways by Grayson’s workmen, now departed—and led into the immense inner chambers in the base of the mountain. The place was honeycombed with natural passages and lava-bubble chambers formed by the gaseous action of the volcano—and in these naturally perfect insulated chambers Grayson had in the past year built a laboratory second to none, a research laboratory where his brain-child was even now waiting and ready for its first efforts at freedom. That freedom which Grayson feared he would be unable to control.
The shaft itself let in the sun daily for long mid-day hours of beauty, isolated beauty that Grayson had created there of the crater’s little lake and the natural rugged chaotic scene of ancient force and heat and explosions of steam.
Grayson bent and kissed the girl on the forehead, and she got to her feet with one lithe young bound, and fled from the place. She did not want to show her emotions, for she knew very well that she might never see her foster father again. A moment later he heard the motor of her car echoing from the dark openings of the tube that led through the side of the mountain and to the outside world. He sighed, turned back to the big metal-grilled archway in the crater wall that was the locked and guarded entry to his research laboratory.
He was about to leave the tremendous patio-crater, but the sound of an approaching car in the tunnel-entrance gave him pause. He turned back to the pool, and in a moment was greeting a short, wide-bodied little man whose face was quite stern in spite of its rotund, smile-creased ruddiness.
“What’s all this about you making a will?” growled the little man in a deep bass. “You expect to die overnight, or something?”
Grayson laughed, he always laughed when Jepson, his lawyer, frowned at something. It was so incongruous, like a cuss-word from Santa Claus, or whiskers on a lovely lady.
“Not exactly,” said Grayson, “but the experiment I’m working on is the one that blew up my house before, some years ago. I have been spendding all my money since getting this place in readiness to go on with the taming of that power. It’s something that could change the face of the world.”
“Like the atom bomb, by busting it to pieces, I suppose?”
“You remember the work, don’t you? You handled the suits from the neighbors, Jepson.”
“Yeh, a new way to split the atom, but it turned out different! I remember it like I remember New Year’s Eve, by the headache it gave me.”
“What I wanted to do,” explained Grayson, “was to drain off the energy of an atomic fission slowly, instead of suddenly. Like putting a faucet to Niagara Falls so we could use it in the kitchen.”
As they talked, Grayson had led the way through the locked grill of the opening into his laboratory section of the rock bubbles in the crater walls. He had paused beside a bulking, complicated mechanism taking up the whole, of one huge circular chamber. Jepson allowed his jaws to relax, his mouth hung open a little foolishly as he took in the details of the monstrous thing for the first time.
“This is what you’ve been spending all your good dollars on,” he mused, slowly walking around it like a cautious cat circling an elephant.
“Yes, that’s my baby. It’s complicated only in appearance. In reality it is a simple multiple repetition of the same thing that caused the former explosion, a series of coils focusing magnetic fields upon one small point. I had intended to collapse an atom, but what happened was something else entirely. I tapped a new source of power. I got a much greater flow of energy than my calculations called for, hence the explosion. This time I’ve figured on it, I’m ready! That’s why I want a will drawn, to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything;—just in case.”
“You know what you’re doing, almost, eh? Well, I can’t stop you! But why should a focus of magnetic give off power? I don’t get it?”
“Well, if I didn’t collapse a lot more atoms than I expected, I did something far more remarkable. I burst through the walls of sub-space, let out the utter power of the substructure of the universe. If I didn’t do that, I’ve tapped cosmic power of an entirely unknown kind. That’s why I have to draw a will. I may have the means here of letting the walls of space collapse, of boring a hole through dimensions and letting the wind out of matter itself by misplacing the force that holds it in our space. I don’t know exactly. That’s why I have to experiment, to study this force and learn all I can about it.”
“You mean you don’t know if you can harness your new cosmic power, but you’re going to try. I don’t like it, Grayson! You should have built many more small models like your other, not this monster! How do you expect to control the power this gives off if you couldn’t handle your smaller model?”
“Exactly why it’s big and strong, to stand the strain and still do its job, I want to release the power long enough to know what I’ve got, to watch it and use it! I can graduate the power I put in, but I can’t change the strength of light materials. Here I’ve got range, I can make a little or a lot of “cosmic power.” He put a hand on a switch. “Shall I give you a demonstration?”
Jepson turned pale. “Not for me, Prof! I’ll draw up your will, then I’m getting far, far away from here! I can remember what happened before! Took your roof right off!”
THE TWO men walked back out to the coolness of the pool in the evening light, sat on the marble bench by the water.
“You’re a famous scientist, Grayson. Why should you risk your value to men in this admittedly dangerous work? Your loss would be irreplaceable! Turn it over to the military, or something, let them do it! I’d lose a good client, too, you know!”
Grayson laughed. His face was quite indicative then of his reasons for going on with the work, it was the expression of a bronco-buster seeing a wild stallion of beautiful lines for the first time. He wanted to ride that mighty horse he had discovered, he was thrilled by the possibilities, he could no more leave it alone than a woman could resist jewelry. He wanted to play with the titan force, and he was going to do it! Jepson sighed. The face of the man told him it was no use.
Later, Grayson escorted the lawyer to his car, parked in the tunnel, shook hands with the little man, watched him drive off. He rubbed his hands together suddenly in a kind of anticipated ecstasy. He was alone, he could work now, no one would be in danger but himself!
With a quick hurrying step, Grayson crossed the exotic crater, his eyes thoughtful, but excited, anticipating—what?
Locking the grill behind him, he crossed into the great chamber of the unknown machine of his creation, his eyes caressing its great black steel flanks, resting on each pressure dial and voltmeter, one by one. His fingers twitched a little, he pulled a little switch on the wall, and a glow came from the heart of the great dynamo-like mechanism. It was not an atom-smasher, thought Grayson, it was a space-smasher!
He had impervious Mt. Falsmor around him; if he wanted to toy with the forces that held the universe in its frame, it was his own affair. There were no other humans now for miles.
A little hum from the conical coil he had just sent current through told him it was warm. He pulled another switch, then another. He could no more have delayed this trial of his monstrous creation than he could have shot himself. “Maybe it’s the same thing;” he mused, as one after another the conical, pointed coils in the heart of the big magnet-frame of his “smasher” warmed into humming, vibrant activity. Each conical point centered in a focus upon a round solid heart of metal, which was pierced by two heavy pipes, pipes reinforced again and again by windings of tempered wire. They were the conveyors of water, to cool the heart of his device. Beneath the round, two-ton piece of metal, a great turbine began slowly to turn. He knew that th
e sole power that turned that turbine was being manufactured in the heart of the “smasher”, the heavy foot-thick power pipes carried the turbine fluid down; and back after it condensed.
DIALS AND gauges began to register, steadily the power output rose, and exultation rose in Grayson, he gave a little cry of sheer joy in accomplishment. The all-pervading hum of the coil vibrations rose to a shrill scream. Grayson’s eyes glittered, his hands stretched out to shut off the power. The utter driving curiosity of the scientist slowed his hands, he stopped. Why had this happened. The dials and gauges rose in pressure faster and faster, the power-output voltmeter of his turbine was registering full capacity, the whole rocky chamber was suddenly shaking, vibrating, as if his great turbine wheel was off center!
The shrill scream became steadily more and more nerve-wracking. Grayson went on with his arrested motion toward the big cut-off switch on the wall.
One instant he was pressing on the handle of the master switch with both hands, the next he was rushing up the shaft of the volcano and out into the night!
His friends, watching the great black sides and the cone of the top of Mt. Falsmore, were treated to a sight of the greatest gun on earth being fired. From the top of Mt. Falsmore came a terrific blast of steam, straight up and out of sight into the stratosphere, followed shortly by an eruption’s characteristic dust clouds, flying showers of hot rocks, and ending finally as glowing, red-hot lava flowed from the great seams opened in the sides of the no-longer extinct volcano.
* * *
Whatever ultimate components the body of Dr. Grayson had been blown to; whatever inner ego of all life still survived after that Devil’s Inferno of atomic fire and infinite pressure and heat beyond computation of degree that he had released within the ancient crater of the mountain—whatever he was now that all that rushing, so similar to the rush of a shell up the shaft of a cannon and on into space had ceased; Grayson found that he still lived!
The 47th Golden Age of Science Fiction Page 11