Then and Now: Another Collection of Science Fiction

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  Moving erect on his hind feet, but shuffling awkwardly, for the land was not the natural habitat of his kind, he advanced along the beach toward the mouth of a gully which led upward among the crags.

  WHEN HE reached the gully entrance, he heard a long, soaring hoot from up its dank, fern-packed throat. The sound was the cry of Ree-Jaar-Env. It was the same cry which had first drawn Grud’s clan to an investigation that had found for them their devilish master. Several evenings before that hoot had first echoed over the hills and jungles and sea, there’d been a flash and a roar from the heavens, like the falling of a great meteor. Hours after that there'd been another flash and roar, ascending toward the stars. Minutes later, the cry had begun.

  Familiar though that weird ululation was to him now, hearing it again still could cause Grud’s cold pulses to quicken. Mixed with the sound was the savage, bubbling grunt of a colossal denizen of the inland marshes. Grud could picture what was happening up there behind the crags easily enough, yet fascination drove him to haste.

  At an awkward run he advanced up the gully, where the broad feet of his kind, going to their worship, had worn a path through the thickets of tall, pale ferns. Long-winged dragon flies buzzed in the hot, golden air, but Grud, of course, paid them not the slightest attention.

  He stopped at last behind the bole of a giant fern, and peered into the little glade ahead. Scarcely any vegetation grew there. The ground was just oozy mud, mixed with the rotting, oily stuff of dead animal flesh—the flesh of Grud’s own kind, for the most part.

  At the center of the glade, in ghoulish glory, amid the bones and the reeking stenches of his dreadful sanctuary, stood the idol of Ree-Jaar-Env.

  Grud had never seen a human being in his life, but that was what this black image, wrought crudely in painted metal, represented. It was not a portrait. The hands that had molded its clay pattern, had been too unskilled for that. Nevertheless there was a certain ruthless brutality stamped into the heavy features and frowning brows.

  At the other side of the glade hunched the swamp monster, ready for the charge. The animal looked a bit like a carnivorous dinosaur of Earth’s Mesozoic epoch. Its jaws slavered as it opened and closed a mouth bristling with teeth, some of them six inches in length. Once again Ree-Jaar-Env, that towering black presence there, surrounded by the decaying evidence of its destructive might, had aroused a horny swamp-lord to battle pitch. The animal arched its short, armored neck snakishly. Then at last it leaped.

  Grud felt a sort of thrill at sight of that reckless, insensate audacity. But he knew the outcome before it became fact. The siren concealed within the idol still hooted. From the lips of Ree-Jaar-Env there flashed a thin jet of white fire. The swamp-lord burst apart like a smashed balloon. Tatters of flesh and bone and entrails flew in every direction, as the minute atomic bullet exploded. Like a solid thing, the sound of the concussion beat its way through the fern-jungles to the tops of the distant, murky mountains, and surged back and forth again and again in echoes that mocked the futility of simple brute prowess, when pitted against magic.

  GRUD GAVE a brief start. His huge muscles trembled. Fear was in him, but he longed to hurl himself along the same path of fury that the shattered giant had followed. At least such action would express defiance; at least it would be an attempt, however futile.

  But Grud could not let this impulse rule him. Not when there was perhaps another, better chance. He forced his fangs and great molars to relax their gritted pressure. He tried not to remember the odor of carrion, most of which had once formed the bodies of his comrades. Cautiously, almost cringingly, he advanced into the glade, aware that in the next moment it was possible that he might be stricken down. But probably the god would at least converse with him first.

  Humbly, before the idol, he raised his paws in submission. Still, in spite of his attitude, pride showed in him. That way, he looked like some outlandish Vercingetorix, facing the throne of a conquering Caesar.

  The eyes up there in that coarse, broad face of painted metal surveyed Grud with a cruel glitter in their quartz lenses. Grud had never heard of radiovision or remote control, but he knew that through those eyes Ree-Jaar-Env saw him.

  The divinity spoke, its microphonic voice ponderous and snarling, yet shrill when compared to the bull-roar of Grud’s people.

  “Three days have passed since the latest offering, Stupid One. That is too long a time.”

  The words, belonging to the primitive tongue of the Surf People, were crudely assembled, and faulty in pronunciation, but Grud could make no mistake as to their meaning. Once Ree-Jaar-Env had been unable to speak the language of the Surf People at all. Still, with great noises and bursting death, much of which came, not from the lips of this image, but from the inscrutable heavens, where his real self was evidently located, he had terrified his devotees into abject slavery. And with a strange force-magic he had jerked the necklaces of pearls from their throats, carrying them up into the sky. So they had known what this vengeful deity required in the way of tribute.

  Pearls! Great, rosy pearls, the like of which had never been found on Earth. Grud could picture in his mind his clansmen down there on the dark sea floor, groping among the shells of the giant mollusks that produced these jewels, searching the ooze for more treasure, struggling against water pressures that they were scarcely able to endure. Somehow they had to find enough wealth to again appease Ree-Jaar-Env’s lust. Unless—

  Grud smothered the thought, for he could not be sure that the soul of the black idol could not sense his very purposes.

  “Tonight, Ree-Jaar-Env,” he grumbled, scarce daring to plan. “Tonight we shall bring you another offering—”

  HIS PROMISE ended in a hoarse grunt of pain. One of the small, movable tubes, the muzzles of which were just visible between the lips of the god, was aimed at him. From it a dart had shot out and had embedded itself deep in the scaly flesh of Grud’s chest. Grud shivered as he plucked the tiny torture splinter of metal away. But the fiery sting of the formic acid which the dart had borne, could not be so easily removed. Grud turned; he almost leaped frothing at his invulnerable tormentor. But he checked himself just in time—

  “It is well, Witless One,” said Ree-Jaar-Env, “that you remembered who it is that rules. It would have pleased me had you lost your sense completely. Now go. But here is another thing for you to hold in your mind: If the gift is not enough, I shall not be satisfied to kill a few of your tribe, and to spit darts of punishment into the bodies of some of the others. I tell you surely that the very ocean beside which you live shall boil, and that the cliffs shall fall down upon you!”

  Grud of the Surf People turned away. He tried not to scowl, but even if that hideous, fanged visage of his had registered its most malevolent expression, it could not have betrayed adequately the hate that was his. Torture darts Grud had felt before, but in the stinging pain that now burned in his chest muscles, there seemed to be concentrated the anguish and grief of all the wrongs that had been done to himself and to his clan since the beginning of the black god’s dominion. The urge of murder swept the last drops of fear from his mind like a hungry tide. Superstitious dread and the recognition of things probably insurmountable, could mean nothing to him in his present mood.

  As he ambled back down the gully, he was visualizing, with the same vividness of imagination that children often display, just what would happen again tonight. His tribesmen would come here to Ree-Jaar-Env’s sanctuary. They would bring the skin of a sea monster, formed into a sort of sack, and partly filled with pearls. They would deposit the skin before the idol. Then tiny lights of an unknown energy would flicker around the former, and it would lift upward, gaining speed magically, as if pulled by an unseen hand. The skin would vanish toward the stars—toward the hidden lair, where the real Ree-Jaar-Env concealed himself.

  But why shouldn’t there be two skins instead of one? Grud took hold of that wild scheme of his with grim determination. No more did he waver, as the hunger for vengeance
shrieked in every cell of his vast, coarse carcass. Poor primitive that he was, he did not know that ten thousand miles of frigid vacuum lay between himself and the object of his hate.

  Tarl and Rebu would give him help. He might have to argue and challenge and ridicule, to raise their courage above their fears. But they would carry the second skin—

  RICHARD ENVERS looked at the radiovision screen before him, and smiled a slow smile. He was handsome, maybe fifty, and his physique was broad and powerful. His face wore no signs of real cruelty. The game he was engaged in was only a business proposition to him. He’d ranged the interstellar regions for a long time, looking for a way to rebuild a broken fortune. Back home on Earth he had two daughters and a son who were clamoring for this and that, on a pretty expensive scale. And—well, a fellow didn’t like to let the kids down, of course, particularly when it wasn’t possible to see them more than once every few years, on the occasions of his rare visits at home.

  “The sweetest racket that’s ever been thought up, eh, boss?” said the little spindle of a man who stood beside Envers in the pilot compartment of the spaceship. “No danger to ourselves up here. No work to speak of. No exposure to heat and bugs and possible disease germs. Nothing to do but ride our gravity screens, round and round the planet, over the place where these water babies live, and make a big noise down below. Gosh, lucky we got those dizzy natives for stooges! It’s a cinch we wouldn’t get far if we had to gather those pearls alone. Good thing we saw our friends wearing those necklaces, when we landed. Binoculars come in mighty handy—”

  To this enthusiastic speech, however, Richard Envers offered no response except an absent nod. His attention was occupied by the view in the screen—a view radioed up from the television apparatus concealed in the body of the thing known to the Surf People as Ree-Jaar-Env.

  Illuminated by a weird light—not moonlight, exactly, but something very similar—a horde of those grotesque primitives was visible in that plate of ground glass. It had been quite unnecessary for Envers to move the remote-control switch that would turn on the floodlamps behind the eyes of the image of the god, far, far below, beneath the enwrapping gases of a dense atmosphere.

  Envers noted with satisfaction that the Surf People still bowed humbly before the idol. He noted also, that they had brought two bulging, oily skins, which at first glance was most satisfying.

  The man, however, was not fooled for more than a moment. One skin was decidedly well-filled, and it bulged in a manner that was all wrong for its supposed contents. Its shape was quite like that of a Surf Man, huddled up to occupy as little room as possible.

  Richard Envers grinned at this transparent evidence of naive craft. “You see, Muggsie,” he said to his companion, “one of the more ambitious boys from down under, wants to pay us a visit. I guess maybe he’d like it quite a bit if he could take us apart and see what makes us tick, eh?”

  Muggsie gasped. “Gosh, boss!” he said. ‘“That’s crust, ain’t it? But after all, he don’t know what he’s up against. Ten thousand miles of empty space, and just a hide to cover him. Whew! And he’s used to a hot climate, too! Glory! He’d be frozen stiff before the attractor-beam pulled him more than a couple of hundred miles above the ground! What are you gonna do about it, boss? Give all those babies another good taste of hell?”

  Envers seemed to consider briefly, glancing at the breech of the neutronic cannon nearby. “No,” he said at last. “Not yet anyway. We'll just play dumb, as though we didn’t smell anything fishy. Maybe we can figure out something real impressive to do with the corpse of our visitor. Meanwhile, though we can’t neglect the usual dose of devil-medicine. Savage psychology, you understand. Helps keep the beasts in line. Fear is the only thing that will ever soak through their thick skulls.”

  Whereat, Richard Envers peered into a sighting device which was part of the radiovision apparatus before him. He jabbed buttons on the instrument panel, with no more show of emotion than if he were digging a hill of potatoes. From the speaker he heard the crash of a small atomic explosion. The idol had spat death again. Three Surf Men were killed. Their comrades were howling “Ree-Jaar-Env!” in hoarse, submissive terror.

  But Envers reacted only in terms of commercial satisfaction. From time immemorial, on Earth, there had been men like him, neither cruel nor kindly. They had helped to build and to wreck empires.

  Touching the switch of a microphone, Envers spoke a guttural command in the language of his wild subjects. Radio waves sent it winging down there to the receiver in the image.

  The Surf People began to disperse. Envers pressed a lever. The attractor-beam was now in action. The two skins pictured in the view-screen leaped upward, and disappeared from sight.

  Envers stretched luxuriously. “It'll be quite a while before the pearls and our bold native arrive here, Muggsie,” he said. “I’m going to take a nap for an hour or so. You watch things—”

  TO GRUD, the sensations of flight upward through the atmosphere were thrilling and terrifying, yet at first not entirely unpleasant. Then he began to feel cold. Presently his lungs started to ache, as the air thinned. At last he was in the grip of the unknown.

  What did Grud do? What was there for him to do? He huddled up tighter in that ballooning hide which was his only protection. And he prayed silently to the old gods of his clan—the blue star that was the center of this solar system, and most of all to Leedaav, the Veil. Grud, peeping through tears in the skin of the sea monster, saw that mass of dust shining, silvery and distant, just above the murky curve of the world he was leaving. That colossal ghost, reflecting light from its sunward flank, was far off now, yet Grud could remember its strange might—

  He stared at it, and at the hardening stars, his deep-set, lizard-like eyes growing bloodshot because of decreasing atmospheric pressure. Frost glazed his lips. He struggled, but the attractor-beam pulled him on toward the sky that was changing from nocturnal purple to brittle, gray-streaked black. His body was growing numb in the tenuous, frigid wind of his swift passage through the upper stratosphere. In the shadow of the planet, there was no sunshine to replace heat-loss. Grud’s chest expanded and contracted, searching breath, but it worked like the spring of a broken toy—without resistance. Grud’s last movement, almost, was a tightening and then a relaxing grip on the handle of the great stone club that was to have been his tool of revenge.

  RICHARD ENVERS, clad in a vacuum armor, was the one who jockeyed the two skins and their contents into the airlock of the spaceship. With a sharp knife he cut the now brittle and frozen rawhide of each sack-like wrapper. There were the pearls, beautiful rainbow-sheened spheres, many of them perfect. And there was the dead visage of him who had dared.

  Frozen blood in great, dark nostrils. And a frozen look of pain on hideous, curling lips that revealed long fangs, coated with frozen saliva. Grud’s corpse was bloated a little, and it was as rigid as a statue carved from oak. The loss of warmth may be gradual in a vacuum, but there had been time enough to congeal every trace of fluid in Grud’s body. The only impassable limit of cold in the void is absolute zero, and the decline toward that point is steady. Grud’s eye-lids were tightly closed in a final effort at protection.

  Richard Envers felt a bit sickened, somehow, at the thought of how terrifying this strange death must have been to the monstrous Surf Man, torn from a tropic world to a—to him—inconceivable, frigid destruction. It was almost the first time that Envers had ever felt any pang of regret.

  Yet he shrugged it aside easily, and turned on the heat in the airlock compartment. Pearls might crack if the temperature was raised too abruptly. But the thermostats would take care of that. As for the body, it might be an interesting thing to examine when it thawed. Then, mutilated and once more frozen, it could be hurled back to the stamping ground of the Surf People—a grim example.

  NEMESIS crept upon Richard Envers while he was asleep. He had spent most of the short daylight hours playing chess with Muggsie Manners. Before turning in after nig
htfall, he had taken a brief look into the airlock compartment, noting that all was apparently well.

  Deep in luxurious slumber, he hadn’t heard the shattering of the lightly constructed inner portal of the lock, or the tumult in the pilot room that accompanied the murder of his assistant.

  And now, in his narrow quarters, there was towering over him a vast, black bulk. The sound of the door being clubbed into a dented piece of wreckage had, of course, aroused him to quick wakefulness. But there was no weapon within reach. Why should there be any need for a weapon, here in the deserted safety of an untracked part of space?

  Still hazy-minded with sleep, Envers looked in unbelief at the gigantic Surf Man looming there, beside the little collapsible metal stand which held his toilet articles.

  There was no light in the room, except that which came through the small window. It was the shine of the Veil, which, in its slightly sunward orbit, peeped around the bulk of Karud, planet of Ree-Jaar-Env’s worshippers.

  Richard Envers, real self of the god, began to think very swiftly. There was nothing that he could do to save himself. Retreat through the doorway was effectively blocked. And it would take a wrench and minutes of work, to unscrew the fastenings of that massive window, built to resist even the impacts of small meteors—even if there was time to get the vacuum armor out of its locker against the wall, and don it.

  But before a huge flipper-hand descended upon Envers with crushing force, he almost had the answer to the question of how this giant, so recently congealed and still, could be grimly animated again, now. Envers’ association with this solar system had been too brief for him to have grasped even all of its simpler phenomena.

  Now, however, he understood something previously unguessed. The Veil, and the planet of the Surf Men—they traveled around that Titanic blue star in tremendous orbits that were still only five million miles apart. And the Veil was huge in extent—