by William Tenn
They looked up to see Hermes twirl down from the bright blue sky a little more rapidly than usual. He carried a peculiar and bulky package slung from his belt. He began walking toward them the moment his toe-tips punched the soil.
"Is he ready? I hope he's been practicing with those weapons."
"As a matter of fact," the little old man said, rubbing his forehead, "he just began to examine them. You're a little premature, Hermes: remember, these people only arrived last evening."
The golden-skinned young man nodded absent-mindedly for a moment, then bent to open his package. "I know. Unfortunately, a good deal has changed in the world since then. The Gorgons will be making their final attempt at conquest in the next twenty-four hours. Medusa must be killed before tonight."
"I won't!" Percy raved. "You just can't pull a man out of a nice, comfortable world and expect him to—to—"
"As I recall," Hermes drawled, turning around with a pair of calf-length metallic boots, "I pulled you out of a series of highly unpleasant situations. You were not too comfortable in that underground cell, and you would have been even less so the next day in a certain large cooking vessel which I destroyed. Then, there was the meeting in the arena..."
"Percy's point," said Professor Gray uncomfortably, "is that he has hardly begun to adjust to the situation, psychologically. And physically—well, he's not even able to flourish the sword as yet."
"I'll take care of those difficulties!" the messenger promised. "Here are your boots. When you rub them together like so, your mobility is multiplied by a factor of twenty. Put them on and take a drink of this."
Dubiously, Percy donned the boots that were to make him twenty times as fast. The soles vibrated underfoot in a way that was not exactly pleasant.
With even more uncertainty, he swallowed some liquid out of a long tubular flask which the golden one held out to him. He almost doubled over as the drink hit his stomach like a bursting rocket. "Whee-ew! That's potent stuff!"
A thin, smirking grin. "Wait! You've yet to find out how potent it really is. Now, I want you to pick up your sword, Percy, and remember as you do how strong you've become. Why, you're such a powerful man that I wouldn't be at all surprised to see you wave it around your head like a tiny twig fallen from a dead tree."
Percy reached for the sword, a rather silly grin on his face. It was all very well for Hermes to try to inspire him with such confidence, but he knew his capacity. A sword as heavy as that...
Only it was very light. It was the easiest thing in the world to lift and flourish. He did so, marveling at the feel of power in his arm and wrist muscles.
"Wonderful!" Professor Gray breathed. "That flask—does it contain the fabled Nektar, the ineffable drink of the gods?"
"After a fashion," the messenger said. "After a fashion. Now that we're all set, Perseus, suppose you gather up your armory, and we can start out."
Events got very dim after that. Percy found it hard to remember their sequence. Sometime or other, Ann had come up and said a good deal of angry nonsense to Professor Gray, who had seemed very confused. Then, just as she was about to throw her arms about his neck, Hermes took him by the hand, and they went soaring away. His head felt a lot clearer when they were high against the clouds, racing southward across an island-dotted sea.
"Why," he said, "don't you people, with all the tremendous stuff you have at your disposal, go after the Gorgon yourself?"
"A matter of prophecy. The legend of Perseus must be fulfilled at all costs." Hermes let the words dribble out of his mouth as he peered ahead anxiously.
Vaguely dissatisfied, Percy found himself wondering if the answer made any sense after all. Like so many of the things he'd been told recently, it sounded as if a small lump of truth had been used to flavor a great steaming bowl of nonsense.
The drink must be making him feel this way, he decided. Professor Gray was an entirely sincere if slightly bumbling human being. Still...
"And why did you tell us that we'd get sent back to our own time? According to what Professor Gray says, that time is dead forever."
The golden man shook his head impatiently, and they both almost turned over. "Now, now, this is no time to look for problems and disagreements. You need another drink. Here."
He almost forced the flask to Percy's lips. Again there was an explosion in his intestines which, while not so violent as the first, had much more of an echo. He looked at Hermes with new trust and fondness. How could he ever have doubted so splendid a friend?
"Let me tell you what you will see when you force your way into Medusa's chamber," Hermes was saying with a drowse-provoking smoothness. "Medusa herself will appear to be a horrible, horrible..."
Under them, the waves raced gleefully through each other, pausing every once in a while to shake a fistful of foam at the constantly watching and disapproving sky. Percy swung lazily from the hands of the steadily talking golden man. Life was simple, he thought, when people told you what to do and what to expect. Everything had become so easy.
He looked up as he felt Hermes let go one of his hands and fumble for the switch on his cap of darkness. A moment later, the same hand made a similar gesture on its owner's wide belt.
"Making us invisible, that's what you're doing," Percy commented, nodding his head slowly. "Are we there already?"
"Yes. Sh-h-h! Please be quiet!"
—|—
Turning his head, he saw a long, greenly rich island expanding up towards them. "Why did you people have to go to so much trouble making this cap for me and all that sort of thing, when you could have given me something you already had—like the belt, for example—and I'd have been able to travel here all by myself? What I mean," he went on with large, drunken generosity, "is that you're probably a busy man, Hermes. 'Sa shame for me to drag you away from—"
"Will you shut up?" Hermes's voice was a whispered custard of fear. His eyes flickered up and down, right and left, as they dropped into an enormous, silent city built from massive blocks of gray, moss-covered stone. "We didn't give you a belt for the same reason we gave you a sword instead of a ray gun. Short supply."
"Sup—supply?" Percy asked stupidly. He scratched his head and almost knocked the cap off.
"Supply. And besides, do you think we're foolish enough to trust a human with our weapons?" Their feet touched the worn surface of a rock balcony high up on a building. Hermes pulled him behind the great finger of stone that served as one of the lintels for the doorway. Percy could feel the twitching tenseness in the body of the golden man as he hugged him to the wall and waited to make certain that no one was coming out on the balcony to investigate.
He tried to remember the last thing that Hermes had said. He found he couldn't and wished desperately that the black blobs in his mind would go away and let him think again. But he remembered that Hermes had made some sort of slip in his fright, that abruptly he had almost had the vision of—of—What?
"You need one more drink before you go inside," came the insistent whisper. Percy started to protest that he had been drinking entirely too much of this strange concoction but, as he did so, Hermes thrust the flask into his mouth. He gagged and managed to dribble the bulk of the liquid down his chest, but enough entered his stomach to provide a walloping accompaniment to the clouds which slid over his thoughts once more.
"Now, you know what you are to do. Her bedroom is the first one to the right of the corridor leading away from the balcony. Don't even try to think, Perseus: it will only lead to disaster! All of your instructions are safely buried in your mind; if you just relax and let them take over, you will do exactly the right thing every time. Remember, you can't fail! You cannot fail! Now go!"
Hermes pushed him around the lintel and down the hall. Percy stumbled the first few feet, then managed to walk upright and as stealthily as he knew he should. He wanted to turn back and argue some very important points with his guide, but somehow it was much more important to keep walking, to keep one hand on the hilt of his great
sword, to have every nerve anxious and waiting...
The hall was covered with tapestry of a fabric so strange that it almost seemed logical for his eyes to be unable to focus whenever he tried to make out the design. The tapestry ended just before an archway supported by spiral stone columns. He walked in.
Almost before he saw the reclining, sleeping figure with the headful of drowsy, slightly restless serpents, he had flipped open the kibisis and ground his boots together to close the subsurface relays. He was speeding toward Medusa at a fantastic rate of speed across an enormous stretch of floor thoroughly as slimy as Hermes had said it would be. And along the walls, his eyes noted—yes, there were chained the groaning, writhing human captives on which the Gorgon race was constantly experimenting. All, all as Hermes had said it would be, droning the picture into his ear as they flew toward ancient Crete above the gaily splashing sea.
He hardly remembered grasping the snakes with one hand and, pulling slightly to extend the neck, lifting the heavy harpe behind him. The sword poured down and the chillingly ugly head came free, greasy stinking blood pouring from it. He dropped it into the kibisis with the snapping, sideways motion that Hermes had told him to use, flipped the lid shut and turned to run back, exactly as Hermes had told him he should.
But, in that moment before he closed the kibisis, a single, frantic thought had sped out of the severed head. It hit his swirling thoughts like a pebble from a sling-shot and sent them rippling in so many directions that he almost came to a full stop.
Almost. But he ran on, shaken by the awful familiarity of that mental voice. It was as if his mother had tearfully asked him to stop, to stop now, this moment, no matter what the consequences. It was as if the wisest men in the world had assembled in convention and passed a resolution addressed to him, formally requesting Percy Sactrist Yuss in the name of humanity and universal intelligence to turn somehow, before he plunged the whole world into disaster. It was as if a million tiny infants had bawled out in a terrible, unendurable agony that he alone had caused.
The voice was safely shut in the kibisis, but its dwindling harmonics rang on and on in his mind.
Hermes came around the lintel as he emerged on the balcony and waited for him to rub his boots back into normal speed. Then he held out a hand. "All right, give it to me."
He started to hand the kibisis over, but the memory of the thoughts locked inside made him pause for a moment. He swung the black bag from its long, looping handle undecidedly.
The golden-skinned man laughed. "You're not going to keep it?"
Percy didn't know what he was going to do. He certainly didn't want that head of surpassing horror for any reason that he could think of. And, certainly, wasn't he supposed to give the kibisis to Hermes as soon as he had filled it with the grisly contents for which it had been designed? Certainly he was. Someone had explained all that to him. But that thought he had received from the head...
"Let's not have any trouble, Percy. Give me the bag and we can start back. Your girlfriend is waiting."
That was decisive. He still couldn't think as clearly as he would have wished, but he could remember. He recognized Hermes's manner now; the bitterness was still too fresh in him for forgetfulness.
It was the manner of the broker who had sold him the half-interest in a more than half-bankrupt restaurant. Just at the point when he'd started to ask the questions that had been bothering him about a series of bookkeeping entries, the man had shoved a fountain pen in his band and begun to prattle of the possibility of selling the place the very next week at a tidy profit. "Of course, I don't know if you'd be interested in getting rid of it so soon after purchase. I imagine if the profit were sufficiently high, however, you would hardly feel like holding on. Well, Mr. Yuss, as soon as we leave my office, I'll have you meet Mr. Woodward. Mr. Woodward has been interested in purchasing this restaurant for some time and, quite confidentially, I think we can get close to..." He had signed almost before he knew he had and acquired therefrom a piece of property that was more like a cash incinerator than an eating place.
And he had sworn not to be taken that way again. He recognized Hermes's manner now: it was the con man getting a little impatient at the sucker's delay and throwing out some more bait.
"No," he said. "I won't give it to you until we return. I think I want Professor Gray to look at it first."
He never knew how he realized that the tiny red tube Hermes suddenly flashed was a weapon. He leaped clumsily sideways and the stone wall section in front of which he had been standing exploded like a burst paper bag. He kicked the boot switch into operation and tore the harpe out of its back scabbard.
Hermes was turning the ray gun around at him with the same unpitying, contemptuous smile he had flashed so many times before, when Percy became a darting, feverish flicker of humanity. As the golden man rolled backwards to find a good shot somewhere in this incredibly fast creature who seemed to be one continuous line, his eyes grew wider and wider, his lips pulled in deeper and deeper; a fear ricocheted through him. And, when the screaming sword finally bit his head off, it rolled to the balcony floor looking just like that—thoroughly popped eyes and almost nonexistent mouth shaming the refined gold of the skin and carefully cut, artistically designed features.
Percy leaned on his sword and breathed hard. This was the second in one day! He was becoming a wholesaler!
He turned the boots off. He didn't know when he might need that extra speed again in a hurry or how much fuel they still had left in them. He stepped carefully away from the bleeding, decapitated corpse.
Abruptly the sword grew very heavy; he holstered it with difficulty. The drug was wearing off. He knew it was a drug now as the hypnosis induced by Hermes began to dissipate. The city was still the same quiet stone. But it was no longer the thing of implicit horror it had been up to a few minutes ago. Men lived here, he knew, and went about their tasks in their various human ways.
The building on whose balcony he stood was much older than the others around it. It had a distinctive style of architecture—more pillared stone and friezed decoration than even a palace should have.
He tiptoed back along the hall. There was the tapestry he remembered, except that now he could see it quite clearly. Men and women were dancing around a huge upright snake in one section; in another, a great lizard plowed a field while people walked behind it joyfully strewing flowers across the new-made furrows. In the last, a tall and beautiful woman stood before a crowd of young children and allowed a pair of small snakes to curl around her bare breasts.
He paused at the entrance to the room, reluctant to enter and confirm his suspicions. In his hands, the black kibisis undulated slowly as if the thing inside it were still alive. Well, there at least Hermes had told the truth.
At last he looked into the chamber. It was a large, clean room lit by three huge torches, very sparsely furnished. There were no chained humans along the walls; there were colorful murals instead which dealt with a strange nonhuman race.
There was a kind of triangular altar in the middle of the floor. On the other side of the altar, there was a high dais supporting an intricately carved wooden throne. And sagging in the throne was the headless, blood-covered body of a creature Percy had never seen before.
He brought his hand across his lips as partial understanding came to him. This was a temple. But who—or what—had he killed?
The head inside the bag moved once more. He had to find out! He snapped the kibisis open and—
He didn't have to take the head out. Understanding came to him then, complete and rounded, to the best of his capacity to understand—as the still-living and slowly dying thing in the bag telepathically thrummed out its history. It gave him the information he wanted without reproaches and with complete objectivity. And, as he realized what he had been tricked into doing, he almost fell to his knees.
In the almost nonexistent time it takes to feel a doubt or experience surprise, Percy came to know—
—|—
Long before Man, there had been the other mammals from which he had derived. And long before mammals, millions of years before, there had been the reptile. The reptile had eaten across the planet as herbivore and carnivore, had raced across it as thundering dinosaur and pygmy, rodent-like lizard. In a span of time beside which the reign of mammals was as a moment, the reptile had ruled the Earth with an absolute despotism in all the forms—and many more besides—that his warm-blooded successor was to achieve.
Inevitably, one of these forms laid its accent on intelligence.
A creature arose which called itself Gorgon and walked its way with pride. Great cities the Gorgons built; they captured and tamed the unintelligent dinosaurs and made cattle out of them, even to the ground-shaking brontosaurus. Those they could not tame, they destroyed for sport, much as a thoughtful simian newly arrived from the trees was to do much later. And, partly for sport, partly for burning conviction, they destroyed themselves.
War after war, superweapon after superweapon, they fought and lived through. They even destroyed the continent on which they had originated, the home of most of their science and art and all of their major industry—they saw it sink into a boiling sea, and they lived through that. Then, at last, they gathered in their shrunken numbers upon inhospitable shores and created a way of life that made war between them impossible.
There was a brief season of great cooperative achievement, an instant or two of Indian summer, before the curtain began to fall upon the Gorgons once more. Their seed had been injured by one of the latest weapons: they were no longer breeding true. In small quantities at first, the number of monsters and defectives being born increased rapidly. Almost the entire energy of the race was channeled into a frenzied biological research.
They cured every disease that had ever made them the slightest bit uncomfortable, they doubled and quadrupled their lifespan again and again, they came to such ultimately complete understanding of their bodies and minds that they were well-nigh godlike and just this side of immortality. But still, every generation, there were fewer of them...