by Chad Oliver
Conan Lang put out his hand to the man he had called the Buzzard and Gottleib shook it with a firm, powerful grip.
“Good-by, Conan,” Fritz Gottleib said softly.
Conan Lang turned and walked from the dark room, leaving the man from Rerma sitting alone in the shadows of the Nest.
The little bullet rose vertically on her copter blades through the evening sky, hovered a moment in the cool air under the frosty stars, and then flashed off on her jets into the west. Conan Lang set the controls and leaned back in the seat, at peace with himself at last. There was meaning to it all, there was a purpose—and Andy and all the others like him on the far trails had not sacrificed their lives for nothing.
Conan Lang breathed the clean air of Earth and smiled happily. Ahead of him, waiting for him, were Kit and Rob and he would never have to leave them again. He opened the lateral ports and let the wind hurl itself at his face.
THE LAND OF LOST CONTENT
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
—A. E. Housman
The trial by Council was unreal to Brighton; a confused fantasy of smoke, shadows, and droning voices. All of the people—tragic reminders of a dying race—were there in the old Council chamber, but they filled hardly a third of the seats. Lawrence, the aged Head of Council, and his ten Council Members faced Brighton and Lynna and the people. His voice, still strong with the strength of a once-powerful man, echoed hollowly through the vault.
“You know the laws of our people?”
“Yes.”
“Yet you have gone to the forbidden land?”
“Yes.”
“You are aware that you may be punished by death if this Council so decrees?”
“Yes.”
“Speak, then, in your own defense.”
Brighton faced the Council, feet wide apart, eyes blazing. This was insane. His crime was that he was alive in a world of corpses. What could he say to these people? How do you talk to the dead, the dying, the uncaring?
He tried.
“Look around you,” he commanded. “Look at the empty seats. With every meeting of the Council there are fewer of us. Soon there will be none left, and then whom will the Council have to rule?”
A rustling in the shadows.
“Lynna and I are known to you, all of you. We have all lived together in peace; we have done you no harm, we have committed no crime against you. We have tried to find life in this sick world, life for ourselves and for our people, and we have not let children’s superstitions stand in our way. We have found a way to life—to the roof of the world!”
Electricity in the air.
“This is your chance, our chance. What are you afraid of? What have you to lose—you cannot lose anything on a journey from death to death. Are you going to allow meaningless laws to cut you off from a chance for life? If you kill us, you kill yourselves. Think—for once in your lives, think!”
Angry murmurs.
“He mocks the law!” cried Wentworth.
“Let him speak,” Lawrence said wearily.
“Crazy, crazy,” voices whispered.
Brighton said, “Listen to me!”
His mind filled with his dreams of the roof of the world, he talked—talked for hours and told his people what he knew, what he thought, what he believed. They laughed at him.
“Are you through?”
“Yes—yes, I’m through.”
The Council debated out loud, in open session.
“Broke the law, that’s what counts!”
“Impossible …”
“Never been done before …”
“Always been that way….”
“Defy the gods …”
“Wrong to change …”
“Insult …”
“Our wise ancestors …”
“Crazy …”
“Kill him!” yelled Wentworth. “Kill him!”
Mutterings among the people.
Lawrence raised his hand. There was silence.
“I am an old man,” he said quietly. “I see death all around me. We are too few to kill each other needlessly. This man, and the woman with him, have not harmed our people. But they have broken the law.”
He paused. Then: “They have broken the law,” he repeated gravely. “That fact cannot be altered. No man can be permitted to break the law with impunity. Our ancestors, in their wisdom, gave us the laws by which we live. It is our duty to see that they are enforced.”
He looked at Brighton and Lynna, regret in his eyes.
“It is the judgment of Council,” he said, “that the prisoners shall be executed when seven sleep periods have expired. That is all. The Trial by Council is over.”
Brighton took Lynna by the hand and the Council Guards led them out of the chamber. The people watched them blankly. They didn’t care; it made no difference to them. They were apathetic, slow, already dead. Brighton and Lynna emerged into the cold world of rocks and caves and shadows.
“The fools,” he whispered slowly. “The blind, dead, stupid fools!”
Brighton had begun to think when he was twenty years old. The others, almost all of them, were dying—slow and pale and weak. But Brighton still had the spark. He began to ask questions.
He did not question the people, for he knew that he would find no answers among them. He turned to the world around him. He flung his questions at the clammy rock that made a vault of gloom above his head. He asked the cold water, the air, the fires in the pits. He asked the black shadows that crawled on the walls of the world.
His mind was a whirlpool of confusion, and his strange eyes made him a stranger to his people. His eyes blazed through them, beyond them, seeking, demanding. He was dissatisfied, but he did not know what was wrong, or why. He neither knew what he was looking for, nor where to seek it. But he tried. He had to try.
Was the world all there was? What would happen if you dug further into the rock—what if you dug and dug until—until what? Would you come to an end to the rock, an end to the world? How could it end? What could possibly lie beyond matter? Air? Nothing? If there were nothing there, what held the world together?
What about the old songs that no one understood? The legends, the superstitions, the gods who had lived on the roof of the world? Why were his people dying?
Brighton had to know. He had Lynna, and a few friends. But the others were suspicious of him, He was haunted by an age-old, timeless spectre—the ghost of loneliness that stalked through the world with him, the terrible loneliness of the man nobody understands.
He decided to go to the Old Man.
The Old Man had had a name once, but it had been forgotten. He was just the Old Man. His face was lined, and he had a dirty white beard. He lived in an isolated niche in the wall of the world and everybody thought he was crazy.
He had used to talk a great deal in his youth, but few people had ever listened seriously to him. Minds were sluggish and the fires of life were burning low. He had gradually been driven within himself, and now he sat nodding before the fire pit, silent and alone.
The Old Man looked at Brighton and saw himself—as he had once been. Skin that was pale but not dead, black hair, sensitive features, restless eyes. And something else. Something forever beyond analysis that set Brighton apart.
“Sit down, lad,” the Old Man said. “I have been waiting for you.”
Brighton sat at his feet. He instantly recognized that he had at last found someone to talk to, and so he said nothing. He listened. The Old Man talked and spun a web of dreams in his mind.
He told the stories he had heard from his father, who had heard them from his father before him. Wonderful, incredible stories about the gods who had lived on the roof of the world, in an enchanted land of warmth and light.
There had been many gods, the Old Man said. Many more than the number of people who now lived in the world. Per
haps there had been as many as a million of them, although that was, of course, hard to believe. They had grown and prospered. They built fantastic cities and had green, succulent things to eat instead of eyeless fish and synthetics.
But even the gods had not been perfect. They had fought one another and conceived better and better means of destroying themselves—nothing like the crude clubs and knives the world used now. They made killing their business. Being gods, they were terribly efficient—they finally set off an inferno of flames and plague germs and death. They annihilated themselves.
Almost. A few escaped, hiding in a hole in the roof of the world. But they were trapped. They were afraid to go back into the flames and the germs. Upheavals of rock had sealed them in. Their fear of the horror from which they had escaped translated itself, in time, into laws and taboos and superstitions. Generations crept by, and the gods began to die. They became stagnant and dull. They forgot that they had ever been gods. The world around them was the only world they knew and they lived in the darkness like animals.
Brighton stood up, tense, his fists clenched.
“We are the gods,” he said slowly. “We are the gods!”
“We were the gods,” the Old Man whispered. “Once.”
He turned back to the fire pit and closed his eyes. Brighton looked at him but couldn’t speak. His mind in a turmoil, he ran back through the rocks to Lynna.
The next sleep period, in the silence and the flickering of the smoldering fires, Brighton set out to find the roof of the world. With Lynna, he picked his way through the rock passages, their flaring torches casting grotesque shadows on the world around them.
“What will we find?” asked Lynna. Her hushed voice was hollow in the darkness.
“I don’t know,” Brighton said. “Nothing, probably. But we may find everything.”
“Everything?”
“Everything that counts.”
They were silent then. For a long time they passed through old and little-used passages, where twisted columns hung from above and pushed up from below. The cold water oozed through the wet walls.
“You’re very sure, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
They stopped on a high shelf. The world lay before them, dark and still. Brighton shivered and put his free arm around Lynna. He lifted his torch high and listened to the slow drip of water somewhere in the vast sable distance.
“Look,” he said softly. “Look at the rocks and the emptiness and the cold. We don’t belong here. We aren’t made for this. This is for the snakes and the fish, the white fish without eyes. You know what I’m trying to say—you know, don’t you, Lynna?”
“I know. We have to try to find something else—have to try even if we never find it.”
“Lynna, you know why.”
“Yes. For us,” Lynna said, and smiled at him.
Brighton nodded and held her closer. For them. For them and for others like them. In her own way, Lynna understood. He was grateful for her. If she hadn’t understood, if there hadn’t been someone to turn to in this bleak world—Brighton didn’t like to think about it.
They went on through the empty passages, pausing occasionally to replenish their torches with chunks of the rock that burned. They were alone and tired and uncertain. But they went on. Something made them go on.
“This part of the world is forbidden,” Lynna said. “What if the Council finds out?”
“They are fools.”
“But they are the law.”
“The law will have to be changed.”
“Do you think that there really are … things out here? Like the stories say? What if there are?”
“I don’t know.”
They went on. They crawled and stumbled and climbed until their legs turned to lead and their minds went blank with fatigue. Then they made a fire pit and slept on the damp rocks. Somewhere, water dripped coldly.
When they awoke, they both thought they heard sliding, reptilian sounds in the dark recesses of the world. They looked at each other, but said nothing. They swallowed some food concentrate, drank chill water from their containers, and set out again through the rocks.
They were utterly alone in the world—more isolated than ever because of the faint slithering and the lonely drip of the water in the silence. Brighton was worried. What if he were wrong? What if the world went on like this forever, all rocks and desolation and cold? What if he found a passage to the surface and it proved to be a hideous tunnel that crawled with death and disease from the roof of the world? Most legends, most superstitions, had a grain of truth in them somewhere.
“How much longer?” Lynna asked. Her voice was tired.
Brighton shook his head. “If we go back,” he said, “we go back for keeps.”
They went on.
“The world is getting smaller,” Lynna said suddenly. “It doesn’t feel as big.”
She was right. They quickened their steps, pushing through the rocks with new spirit and energy. The walls of the world closed in on them almost perceptibly, until they found themselves in a narrow cave. The end of the world danced before their eyes in the flaring light of their torches—a pile of broken, jumbled rock that clogged the passage.
Brighton thrilled, his heart hammering in his throat. He scrambled forward and pulled at the rocks. They were too large to move. But they were loose. He sat down on a boulder and looked at Lynna.
“We’ve found it,” he said quietly. “The way to the roof of the world. The way back.”
“We may have found it,” Lynna said. “But we can’t use it. We could never get all those rocks out. They may go on for miles.”
“We can’t use it now,” Brighton corrected her with new confidence. “We’ll go back and get help.”
“What if they won’t help? What if it doesn’t go anywhere? What if death still lies at the other end?”
Brighton kissed her.
“They’ve got to help,” he whispered. “And there is death all around us where we are; the people are dying. They don’t have much to lose. We’ve got to try.”
They started back. The rocks cut at their feet and their torches threw twisted shadows on the walls of the world. When they stumbled back into the inhabited part of the labyrinth of caves, Wentworth was waiting for them with the Council Guards.
Condemned to death, Brighton slept the sleep of exhaustion in the prisoner’s cave—a dank hole in the eternal rock, a cell within the greater rock prison that was the world. He dreamed the same dream over and over again. He was running across a flat, endless surface, gasping for breath, his feet torn and bleeding. He could see an enchanted land of warmth ahead of him—see it clearly with its brilliant greens and blues. He had to get to it, had to! He fought his way nearer and nearer, his heart pounding in his throat. He forced his tired body across the featureless plain. He fought for air, bit his lips until the blood came and trickled down his chin. He was closer—he could almost touch it! He reached out for it, sobbing—and watched it writhe away into a hideous horror of rocks and death and cold black water full of blind, laughing fish.
He woke up in a cold sweat. Someone was calling him.
“Brighton? Brighton, can you hear me?”
He scrambled to his feet, shuddering. He leaned against the wall of the cave and made himself relax.
“Yes,” he said. “I can hear you. Who is it? What do you want?”
“It’s Wilson,” the muffled voice answered. “Hang on—we’re going to get you out of there. You’re taking us up.”
Lynna pressed close to him, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes.
“What about the guards?” Brighton asked. “Can you move that rock away from the entrance? Who’s with you?”
“Don’t worry,” Wilson’s voice assured him. “We’ll get you out.”
Brighton felt hope surge up within him again. There were others, then! The people were not all dead, not all fools. The Old Man had been at the trial, silent, thinking his own thoughts. And there must hav
e been others—others in whom the spark of life still smoldered under the ashes of the centuries, others who still thought for themselves. They had been lost in the crowd where they had always been, not saying anything, waiting.
He heard the chink of metal and the murmurs of the men as a metal bar was rammed in behind the rock. The rock groaned and swung back. He felt light-headed and dizzy. They were free.
He walked out with Lynna into the sleeping world, taking deep draughts of the cool air. He shook Wilson’s hand wordlessly and looked around him. There were four others with Wilson—Hatcher, MacDonald, James, and Hayes. Two guards lay sprawled on the rocks with their skulls crushed.
“We had to do it,” Wilson said, nodding at the dead bodies. “There was no other way.”
Brighton looked a question at him.
“We believed you,” Wilson said simply. “We’re ready to take a chance with you, no matter what the others think.”
Brighton did not waste words in thanks. “Are there any others?” he asked.
“Over at my place,” Wilson replied.
“Let’s go then,” Brighton said. “We’ve only got a few hours to work in, and we’ve got plenty to figure out.”
The seven shadowy figures moved quietly among the flickering fire pits, their shuffling feet sending hushed echoes through the darkness of the sleeping world.
There were nineteen of them in all, besides Brighton and Lynna—nine men, nine women, and the Old Man, who was alone. Against them stood the world with its three hundred people.
Brighton listened to them talk and forced himself to think clearly. He had to think straight now and he knew it. This was their chance. If they missed it, there would never be another. He watched the others, eyes narrowed, as they crouched around the blazing fire in an inner cavern of Wilson’s home.
There was Wilson, who wanted an armed rebellion—twenty-one of the living against a world of the dead. There was Hatcher, who wanted to keep the whole affair secret and furtive. There was James, who wanted to force the Council to back them up. And there was Hayes, who was in favor of doing something in a general way, but who was too cautious ever to decide upon a single course of action.