His black science threatened the whole cosmos.
Against him frail Princess Nuala thrust her ancient
knowledge--but he sneeringly smashed that. And
space-toughened Clark Travis stood by helplessly.
Of what use here was a pair of ready fists?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Summer 1948.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
He should have known better. He admitted that, now. Listening to the
spacemen in Trixon and Cleg would have saved his skin. They told him
that Flormaseron was a hellhole where Creation had run mad. The only
thing was, even they hadn't known how bad it was. Clark Travis worked
the walnut stud of his _stil_ disintegrator hopefully, but when it
sputtered he gave it up.
The arklings were coming for him. Through the opening in the stone
traceries of the ancient doorway, he saw the red aura that floated
over them as they came up the stone ramp. Clark turned and ran along
the sloping floor, down into the black, labyrinthine windings of the
ancient city. His spacebooted feet made soft, slapping sounds. His
beamlight cast a white brilliant glow ahead of him. He ran past several
intersecting corridors before he skidded around a corner into one.
Clark Travis lost himself in the ruins. He went down into the bowels of
this city that was in its glory before the Earth had been more than a
spinning ball of fire in space. He saw odd animals carved in the walls,
queerly human things at work on ships and weapons, tall men and lovely
women etched in bas-relief in the marble.
The deeper down he went, the more he was putting himself in the
arklings' power. They were familiar with this rotting pile of masonry,
where the tunnels were dark strips out of Hades. Their red aura lighted
the winding passageways. Clark only had his beamlight for the blackness.
He snapped off the power, stood waiting. His breath came softly. The
tunnels were black, as black as space itself; as black as Martin
Kent's eyes had been when he first told him about Flormaseron and the
sleeping goddess of the crystal crypt.
"She isn't a goddess, of course," Kent had said, seriously. "She's
the last remnant of the first race that ever came into existence. The
product of a million generations of culture and scientific knowledge.
When the disaster struck at her people, the chief scientists encased
her in a block of crystal and hid her somewhere on Flormaseron. She's
still there--and still alive.
"Think of it, Clark! A woman with the knowledge of such a race. Before
they enclosed her, they thought-fed her brain with knowledge, and so
arranged the crystal that during all the years of her interment, she
would learn! A brain like that--why it would revolutionize our own
culture. The Earth'd go millions of years ahead in science, if we could
only find her--and bring her back to life!"
Travis had said, "If she's entombed on a hellhole like Flormaseron,
how'd you ever hear of her?"
Martin Kent took Travis by the arm, led him out the door of his office
and into the museum corridor. Here in Solar Museum, Mars Division, Kent
was absolute ruler. Behind him he had the billions of credits that
Earth and Mars and Venus poured into their cultural endeavors. From
all over the solar system Solar brought stuffed animals, crumbling
bricks from ancient cities, rusted weapons that experts studied and
reconstructed in glittering _stil_.
They walked past a panoramic window of a Venusian sea-bottom and into a
narrow room that held a safe inset in its east wall. Kent put the flat
of his hand on the lock, and waited. A deep humming throbbed from
behind the glistening metal wall. The huge door swung open.
Kent reached in and brought out a tiny vial of green metal. He
unscrewed the lid, withdrew a folded scroll. "It's all here, Clark.
Stylogrammed on flexible metal. It's ages old. One of our field parties
came across it in a dried sea-bed on Clex. It puzzled us a long time,
until Fielding came across a key to the writing, and translated it."
Travis turned the metallic paper over, looked at the queerly graceful
writing. He looked at Kent inquiringly.
Kent smiled, "Well, what do you say? I'd go myself if I were younger.
And, if it didn't cost so much, I'd send a field party. But it's a
gamble, and the Board probably wouldn't agree to spending credits on
it. But one man could go. One man--like you."
Travis grinned. He was tall and saturnine, brown with the heat of many
suns. His body had been hardened on the deserts of Proxima Centauri,
and under the seas of Venus.
Kent went on, "You're the best archaeologist I know. You've been in
tight spots before. You can fight, if you have to. A thing like trouble
is an old friend to you."
Travis remembered the polyps in the Venusian water-caves where he'd
almost lost an arm before he got past them to bring the museum the
only specimen of the primal undine race of Venus ever seen above the
sea-mists. He had found a petrified boat on Sirius' third planet, to
prove that at one time there had been seas on that baked potato of a
planet. But for the last six months he had moped around Mars Port,
studying alluvial deposits, wishing for something to take him and his
equipment out into the star-paths again.
"I'll go, Mart. And if you'd only shaved this morning I might kiss you
for the chance!"
Kent laughed and waved a hand. "Order what you need. I guess the museum
can afford a few thousand credits, considering your record--even on
such a gamble."
* * * * *
Travis took his spaceboat out from Mars to Titan, and then on to
Proxima Centauri. He asked questions in taverns and study halls. He
heard of the _arklings_, of the ruined cities and temples. He heard
of the _arklings'_ hate for strangers. But Travis didn't scare easily.
He checked his weapons and equipment, tossed in an extra case of
_safusas_-wine and waved a farewell.
In the darkness he tried to grin and failed. He could hear them coming,
at a distance. Their queer _slip-pat_ footsounds carried a long way. He
couldn't tell just how far away they were.
Travis went on, into the darkness.
The light came suddenly, as he rounded a bend in the tunnel. It was
milky-red, like the ancient ko-yao porcelains, delicately flushed and
tinted. It shook as a veil might in a breeze. It bellied and leaped. It
sent its streamers into the blackness and lighted up the tunnel.
There was a queer menace about the light, a beating like the breath of
an angry Sindri, Venus-god of fire. It came in little pinkish puffs.
There was no heat, only that overbearing menace. Through the pink
light, Travis thought he saw queerly shaped forms standing still and
brooding. There was a series of cones, and huge globes that seemed to
float in an orbit--
He did not hear the _slip-pat_ until too late. A hairy body landed on
his shoulders and he pitched to his knees on the eon-old stone floor.
As he fell he whirled and brought his _stil_-gun up. It was empty, but
the long, ringed barrel sideswiped the _arkling's_ face and knocked him
away.
Travis got to his feet as the others hurtled at him. Giant hands that
were smooth-palmed and hairy-backed hasked at his arms and leather
space-harness. He slammed fists at the faces revealed by the floating
red aura over them. He tried to use footwork, but the space was too
narrow. It was kill or be killed, and he just didn't have the strength
to stop them.
A palm caught him on the ear and sent his head ringing like a carrillon
tower. A fanged mouth fastened on his thigh, biting deep. Another hand
raked at his naked arm and gouged out flesh.
Travis leaped for them, hoping to run over their bodies and go back up
the tunnel faster than they could follow. But a big _arkling_ rose up
from the pack and swung a flat hand. The blow caught him on his chest,
sent him reeling and sickened, back and back--
The _arklings_ cried out just as the pink light swept up all around
Travis. The menace was unbearable as he fell back and into the pale
barrier. It bathed him and whispered to him and threatened him with
queer and maddening ways to die. It caught him in its tenuous folds and
held him there, cradled, as the voices told him of a water-death that
took eleven years, each year more painful than the last; they gloated
over a spit and a fire of red coals that cooked a man over a space of
months; they whimpered, themselves scarcely daring to think of the
barbaric tortures of Rudra the eternal....
A cool something touched his forehead. Travis tried to focus his eyes
through the subtle distortions of the pink mists. He saw the twin blue
pools at first, and then the yellow shower of hair graced with the
triangular headgear blazing with jewels. The blue pool were her eyes,
and they were wide and open, and filled with a wisdom that made Travis
shudder deep in his guts.
And yet, there was a _fear_ in those blue eyes, too.
She wore a transparent film with a slender golden thong looped at her
middle. She murmured, "You are Clark Travis, an Earth-thing. You came
to kidnap me. Yes. And the _arklings_ have harmed you."
The woman turned and stared toward the tunnel. A white hand fumbled at
her girdle, drew out a pencil-thin rod of metal. She went away from
Travis and stepped into the tunnel. Travis tried to watch her, but the
pain of his wounds, and the ringing in his temples bothered his eyes.
There was a terrific green flare that tinted the pale pink light--
And silence.
Travis knew the _arklings_ were just so much powder drifting from
tunnel ceiling and wall.
The woman came back, seeming to float through the light. She brooded
at him with her wise eyes. Travis could read the fear in them more
distinctly, now.
* * * * *
She put out a hand and closed her warm fingers on his. She led him
through the beams of pink light and into white brilliance, into a room
that he had beheld briefly through the pink mists from the tunnel. The
cone-towers were there, grouped by threes around the room. And the
globes that rotated lazily overhead in orbits were fiery with golden
luminescence. They warmed Travis as they floated.
In the middle of the room lay a huge crystal, scooped hollow by some
long-dead artisan. It had indentations and mounds in it. Travis
realized it was carved with exact care to fit a reclining body. From
the walls of the crystal calyx stemmed thin golden wires, reaching
across to the cones. And against the wall, humming and throbbing, were
the dynamos and engines that fed the cones.
"I am Nuala," the girl said in her silvery voice. "I am of the
Nekkalad, the first humanoid race in our universe. I have been encased
in the calyx for eons. Unrememberable eons. I have seen the rise and
fall of your planet, and the fall of others. I have seen--"
She broke off, shuddering.
Travis said wonderingly, "You look so young. If it weren't that Martin
Kent told me about you, I'd--"
She let him look at her, standing with her eyes lowered. Travis had
seen the _landuli_, the dancing girls raised by the princes of Orion-3;
had seen the white-tressed houris of Venus; had seen the golden women
bred for men's pleasure by the Kafars of Proxima Centauri. He had
never seen anyone as lovely as this first woman. Her legs were long
and white, her hips gently rounded. The high arch of her breasts were
poetry.
And then she raised her lashes.
Her blue eyes were ancient as space itself, as filled with nameless
knowledge, with wisdom beyond Travis's understanding. They had beheld
all things, from the slug that came out of a borning world's ocean
bottom to the scribblings of the universe's mightiest scientist. Her
ears had heard the songs of Sull and the symphonies of Bach and Lyrn.
Travis was aware of all that staring into her eyes. He whispered,
"But--how?"
She gestured at the calyx and the wires. "Those machines feed me
energy that I need to stay alive. They also feed me the intellectual
stimulation I need to stay sane.
"Man's thoughts can be recorded. You know that. Therefore they give off
some electrical flow. I will not go into the whys of it. You would not
understand. But those electrical flows never die. They fade and fade,
almost to nothingness--but not quite. The dynamos here pick them up,
amplify them.
"Here in the crystal calyx I have been fed all thought since the
Werwile smashed Flormaseron. I spent years with a being called the
Discoverer--before he disappeared into some strange twisting of the
space-time continuum. It was he who warned me of Rudra, the Werwile. He
said he was stirring--about to come again."