_Accidentally, Yorgh sent whirling
off into space a grim, 200-year-old
message ... and lived to see his
dead world meet the vibrant future._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories January 1952.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The Star was obscured by blowing sand, and Yorgh could not see much of
The World either. The wolly he rode snorted in panic at the howl of the
sandstorm. Finally, the big hunter swung down to the ground and dragged
the six-legged beast by the guide rope.
"Where are those trees I passed this morning?" he muttered.
He longed for a drink from the water-skin slung at his shoulder with
his rolled cloak, but there was so much sand in his short, golden
beard that he would probably choke himself.
The sand whipped against his gray pants of coarse wool and the dark
red tunic for which he had given the Sea People two dozen copper
arrowheads, and twirled loosely beneath his calf-high leather boots.
Yorgh squinted his eyes till they were mere gleams of bright blue among
the laughter wrinkles.
"And I didn't even find the copper rocks!" he growled. "I should have
stayed in the flatlands, hunting with the others."
He discovered that he was heading into a gully where the ripping winds
had scooped sand from between ridges of dark rocks. Yorgh was not sure
whether it offered shelter or the chance to be buried alive, but he
plunged ahead to investigate. Within fifty paces, the howl at his back
diminished.
"Not the rocks; it's a lull," he exclaimed, peering upward.
The sky was an ugly reddish brown, dark and menacing. He wondered
how soon more tons of sand would sweep down to refill the gully. As
he gazed upward, a round stone rolled under his foot and he sprawled
forward. Even as he dropped, it seemed that he was falling further than
he should be.
He brushed sand from his eyes and looked up. From the edge of a hollow
whirled from the floor of the gully by opposing winds, the wolly stared
down at him with an expression of scared idiocy. The ends of his horn
bow and copper-tipped lance thrust up beside the saddle.
As Yorgh scrambled up and his head came above ground level, he saw that
the hollow was at the junction of his gully with another. Sand was
already beginning to collect again as the wind shifted. Behind a worn
rock at his side, Yorgh glimpsed a glint of metal.
Copper? he wondered, stepping forward.
It was not copper, nor any other metal he had ever seen.
To judge from what protruded above the sand, the thing was shaped
slightly like the wagons the people of the Hunter tribe used in their
migrations. Every part of it was smoothly rounded, even the skeleton
sitting in the front seat.
Yorgh stared, feeling the prickle of rising hairs on his neck.
The moan of rising wind made him shiver. At least, he told himself it
was the wind. It sounded uncomfortably like a wailing spirit.
Any skins or leather padding on the seat had long since crumbled. Only
sand-scoured bones and metal remained. Except--
Something gleamed from the small deposit of sand remaining about the
feet of the skeleton. Yorgh reached out cautiously and touched the end
of a whitish metal cylinder as thick as his thumb. It was loose enough
to pull out. He did, and it lay in his palm, about six inches long.
Yorgh could see no mark of any kind on the surface. He wondered if it
would stand sharpening as a spearhead.
"Must have been one of the Old Ones," he muttered uneasily. "It is said
they had strange and wonderful powers. I wonder if this was one of the
wagons that skimmed over the ground with nothing pulling them, as are
told of in the legends."
He had been turning the cylinder over in his hands as he considered.
One end moved beneath his fingers and the opposite extreme abruptly
flashed a bluish green light at him.
"Gaaghk!" choked Yorgh, and flung the thing from him.
It arched over the edge of the hollow, and its flight was followed by
the thud of hooves as the wolly scampered away. The growing wind was
again raising stinging flurries of sand.
"Ho! Come back here, you knob-headed idiot!" roared the man, scrambling
up the side of the hole to give chase.
* * * * *
The animal, stung by the flying sand, ran faster. Yorgh stooped,
groping for a stone to throw ahead of it, so as to turn it back in his
direction. His fingers grasped upon something hard, but the shape felt
wrong and he looked down.
It was the white metal cylinder.
I never should have touched it, he thought. Naturally, it would have a
curse on it. I must put it back!
Glancing over his shoulder, he saw there would be little time. Sand was
heaping up again all along the gully. But the wolly had disappeared up
a slope to the surface of the desert.
"I'll come right back!" said Yorgh aloud, with an uneasy feeling that
there just might be someone to hear him.
He thrust the object into the leather pouch on his belt beside his
bronze knife, and ran up the slope with long-legged strides, even in
the sliding sand. The wolly was out of sight.
The moan of wind rose to a shriek from the blackening sky.
Yorgh staggered blindly ahead. Once, peering between his fingers,
he thought he caught a glimpse of the animal, but a gust whirled him
around and he lost the direction. He floundered onward, wishing he had
stayed in the gully. Then he remembered the company he would have had,
and wondered if the Old One had been trapped by a similar false hope of
shelter there.
With fumbling fingers, Yorgh unslung the cloak that hung behind his
shoulder and wrapped it about his head. It gave some relief, and he
plodded forward, afraid to stop in one spot.
Something jarred his shoulder roughly. Yorgh reached out, but his wild
grab did not find the wooly fur of his mount.
"The trees!" he gasped in relief.
It was the only shelter this side of the hills that separated the
desert from the grassy plain. Yorgh pulled off his cloak, tied one
corner to the tree with the strap of his water-skin, and set about
making as good an imitation of a tent as possible. It might at least
give him breathing room till the storm ended.
The Star shone hotly at noon the next day before Yorgh tramped wearily
into the shade of the tree-lined creek that would lead him to his
people's camp on the plain. He was lured to this route partly by the
promised coolness and partly by the sight of a herd of kromp out on the
open flat. These were six-legged, like every animal on The World except
man. There were eighty or a hundred, and a few of the ill-tempered
bulls were already sniffing the air and aiming their four horns about.
Yorgh splashed water over his face and neck. He wished he could stop
for a swim, but he had walked all night after the sandstorm died down
to get through the hills and out of the desert. The only thing which
could have kept him from the camp, where he could hope for badly needed
sleep, was a chance to find the gully again. When the sand had settled,
however, he had found--not entirely to his surprise--that he had
completely lost the direction.
"It's like the old legends," he murmured, standing up and taking the
cylinder out of his pouch to look at it again. "Things like this always
happened to the ancient heroes. They even flew among the stars--huh!
That's a likely tale! But this...?"
Once again, as he had learned, he twisted the end of the cylinder. The
other end glowed with a blue-green light.
Yorgh shook his head in wonder, and returned the object to his pouch.
He went ahead at a relaxed but steady pace. In a few minutes, the sound
of voices through the undergrowth brought his head up sharply. He went
on, parting the bushes silently. Presently, he grinned as he peered out
at a wide pool.
Five of the younger women were swimming or splashing in the shallows.
Piles of wet clothing on the bank indicated the task that had brought
them to this sheltered eddy in the creek. Yorgh looked hopefully for
the red-gold tresses of Vaneen, the shapely--if too haughty--daughter
of Chief Tefior, but vainly.
Let me see, he pondered, shall I be a clumsy kromp snorting through the
trees, or a meat-eating ponadu?
Raising his hands to his mouth, he emitted a wailing cry that was the
trademark of the only prowling killer on The World large enough to hunt
a man. The splashing in the creek ceased immediately.
* * * * *
Yorgh ducked his head lower and wailed again. For good measure, he
added a few guttural coughs, as if the animal had scented game. The
splashing resumed for a second amid low cries of alarm, then was
replaced by the hasty pat-pat-pat of bare feet along the bank. Yorgh
peered after the wetly gleaming figures, and doubled up with one hand
firmly across his mouth.
Taking time only to refill his water-skin, he followed the trail along
the creek at a good pace. Just as he sighted the outlines of tents
through the thinning trees, a handful of hunters ran pell-mell up the
trail toward him.
"Hold! What's this?" snapped Chief Tefior, raising his spear to halt
those trotting behind him. His gray-streaked beard bristled as he eyed
Yorgh suspiciously.
"Yorgh, your best hunter," answered Yorgh, casting his eyes modestly
downward. "I would have returned last night, had not my wolly run off
in a sandstorm."
"About you, I do not worry!" retorted Tefior, fingering the haft of
his spear. "The girls just ran into camp shrieking that a ponadu was
stalking the woods."
"Panting, wide-eyed, and in all the glory of their rather damp
tresses," added a dark young bowman named Kwint, hiding a grin behind
his hand as he examined Yorgh's innocent features.
"I thought I heard something," admitted the latter.
"Come then, Father!" half-grown Puko urked. "You'll help, won't you,
Yorgh? Here, take my spear!"
Yorgh was half-inclined to let them go. He liked the sort of joke that
brewed a while, gaining savor, like the time last spring when he had
the luck to knock a ponadu unconscious with the butt of his broken
spear. He still dreamed of having another such inspiration as that
which impelled him to tie a dead log to the creature's hind legs, and
then lead a group of young hunters into that part of the woods on the
way to their nightly courting.
They had been enraged at spending half the night up trees, not daring
to venture down in the dark with only their bronze knives. But they had
been unable to prove that Yorgh had done anything worse than run faster
than they, and he had enjoyed a unique evening being wined and fed and
listened to with respect due the only man present, while the others
waited for the disgruntled beast to free itself and slink unhappily off.
Yes, it would be good fun to let them go on, but Yorgh could not
think of a quick excuse to separate Puko from the band. The boy was
his favorite, perhaps because he so admired Yorgh's feats of fun and
strength, or perhaps because his brown eyes so resembled those of his
older sister.
"Well, truthfully," said Yorgh, "having only a knife in my belt, I
broke off a branch and yelled aloud to scare the slinking thing. I
distinctly heard it run off up the creek."
Some stared at him; other glanced sidelong at each other.
Yorgh grinned good-naturedly, until he saw Tefior's scowl.
"Well," growled the chief, "I think we are too late to catch whatever
it was, much as I would have liked to!"
Yorgh widened his eyes to their most innocent expression at the pointed
emphasis of the last phrase.
"You, Puko!" added Tefior. "Run back to camp ahead of us and find the
fathers of those silly wenches. Tell them I said two or three are to
go back with the girls to get the wash, and to smack their bottoms for
going so far without even small bows!"
The tramp back to camp was made in silence, save for subdued snickering
at the rear of the file, where Kwint and others whispered of the
winter camp. The Sea People there still told stories of sea monsters,
remembering the great, black, slippery thing that had been shot full of
arrows and hauled up on the river bank before it was seen to be a kromp
skin mounted on a frame of boughs. No one had admitted creating the
"monster," but Kwint thought he knew the maker.
Despite Tefior's disapproving glare when Yorgh appeared before the
chief's tent at suppertime, the customs of hospitality suffered no
greater breach than that the tribal leader stamped off to inspect the
picket line of wollies below the camp immediately after finishing his
bowl of stew. Yorgh allowed Puko to shame Vaneen into offering a fourth
helping, on grounds that he had not eaten during his desperate trek
through the burning sands. He watched her move about the fire.