Collected Short Fiction, page 307
“Arthedne!” he choked. “You—?”
She was real, all human. Even the delicate lifted threads of her color-pulsing antennae were natural, beautiful. They were necessary as her arms. She would have been disfigured without them.
A faintness came over him. He gritted teeth against the pain.
“My darling,” he whispered. “I’ve seen you—flying. So beautiful. I’ve wanted—hoped—to come!”
He swayed. Her quick hands caught him.
“Ames! I perceived you, beyond the New Lands!” Her strong arms supported him. “In you alone I felt kinship to my own lost race, whom the Tech-men murdered. So I called to you. But Ames!” She shuddered with alarm. “You are ill!”
He whispered, “Dying.”
“Not yet, Ames—for I brought you this!” She produced a small metal bottle, poured its screw-cap full of a pale blue liquid. “You are like Dr. Hope—of the old life, that cannot endure the rays of the New Lands. Drink this! It is the neutralization formula that kept him alive.”
Ames swallowed it, and felt a swift recovery. In a few minutes he was able to rise from his knees. He remembered the skulking follower, looked apprehensively back.
“I saw the Tech-men.” Her voice was a quiver of dread. “They are hunting tonight. But perhaps we can find Futuron. They have never found that, beyond its tor-field screen.”
HER eyes were dark with grief and dread.
“Futuron was the last city the neozoans—my people—built,” she said. “When the war-rays of the Tech-men destroyed all the rest, they ceased to strive, and bore no more children to live in the world of despair. I am now the last neozoan—and still the Tech-men hunt. “But come!”
Ames stumbled heavily on again, beside her. They came to the bluff where he had seen that puzzling flicker. It was a jutting salient thrust out into the shining, poisoned Missouri. Excitement and fear sent shimmers of color along Arthedne’s fine antennae.
“Where—?” Ames was gasping.
He stopped, rubbed his eyes. He had heard a faint humming. And now the Dead Lands were gone. They had come under a vast dome of roseate light. Before him rose graceful colonnades, and the white towers of spacious temple-like buildings.
“This is Futuron,” she whispered.
“But I didn’t see it!” protested Ames, bewildered. “And this pink light—”
“The city is invisible—almost,” explained Arthendne. “That is our only defense from the Tech-men. The tau-field, an adaptation of Dr. Hope’s sigma-field, deflects light around it. The rosy light is a fortunate incidental effect. Otherwise, since no light enters save through the spy-ports, we should be in darkness.”
Delicate flowers, strange bright-hued blooms of varieties Ames had never seen, splashed pleasing color everywhere. He caught an exotic perfume. Arthedne led him to the simple, silent apartments where she dwelt.
“All this city!” Ames asked, trying to repress a shudder of awed wonder, “has lived and died since the Dead Spot came?”
“Time moves faster, in the sigma-field,” she told him. “Twelve of my people fled with Dr. Hope to found the first neozoan city. I was born of the fourth generation.”
They sat on a couch in a rose-lit pavillion. Ames turned intently to face her.
“The Tech-men?” he questioned. “Dr. Hope created them?”
“Them, and the neozoans also,” whispered the girl. “He sought to fashion a new race, more gifted than the old. There were many errors, failures. The Tech-men were the first that gave promise. They had large brains, inadequate bodies that had to be supplemented with intricate mechanisms. He kept them under observation in the laboratory compound.
“Meantime, however, another experiment brought forth the neozoans. We had a balance of physical and mental beings, so that we were largely independent of machines. We had new senses, new capacities, that the Tech-men lacked.
“Dr. Hope chose to let us live—as a small colony, that might exist at peace with the old race. And he planned to destroy the Tech-men, for he was alarmed by a strain of atavistic ruthlessness that had appeared in them.
“All his creations were adapted to life in the sigma-field, and for that very reason unable to survive outside it. Dr. Hope planned merely to reverse the field in the quarters of the Tech-men.
“They had keen brains, however, and the desire to survive. They suspected Dr. Hope. Under the leadership of a mutant born with an aggressive will to power, they revolted, seized all the laboratory, and expanded the sigma-field to cover a vast space.”
“I see!” whispered Ames. “That was when the Dead Lands came!”
“To us, the New Lands,” murmured the strange girl beside him. “The rebel leader, the Tech-Czar, attempted to kill Dr. Hope and all the neozoans,” she went on. “But they escaped, to found our first city. And the Tech-men, remaining, built Technopolis—”
“Technopolis!” gasped Ames. “The city I saw, under a pall of green?”
“That city of great machines is Technopolis,” said the girl. “From it, the Tech-men have waged war on my hunted people. A long time the neozoans hoped to survive. They built seven cities, hidden under the tau screen. But Dr. Hope died, and the new atomic weapons of the Tech-Men overwhelmed them.
“Then the Tech-Czar began stepping up the power of the sigma-field, maintained by the great generators in the central tower of Technopolis. He seeks to spread the New Lands over all the planet. He aims at world dominion—”
“So that’s it!” whispered Ames. “It’s that machine that makes the Dead Spot grow. Then it must be destroyed!”
ARTHEDNE started to speak, checked herself. Strange dread darkened her violet eyes. Her slender body shuddered in the silver tunic, and the glow of color faded from her drooping antennae. At last she said, gravely: “That would not be easy, Ames. Technopolis is far distant, and the Tech-men are already hunting us, here. The city, and the tower of Tech-Czar, are guarded well. And the field generators are too vast to be easily wrecked.”
“I’ve a weapon.” Ames touched the atomic bombs. “And I can try.”
The girl seemed oddly solemn.
“When you are recovered,” she murmured slowly. “Now you might remove your armor,” she told him. “It is useless since you have taken the drug. And we shall dine.”
Silently, she set a table laden with food strange as the flowers that graced it. Eerie music played softly, the threnody of a vanished race. Ames tried to forget the horror beyond the rose-lit colonnades and the desperate task ahead. He drew the grave, strange beauty of Arthedne down beside him. She was warm and tremulous in his arms, her lips intoxicating. For a space he did forget. . . .
Suddenly Arthedne sprang to her feet, antennae lifted and shimmering with alarm.
“They have found Futuron,” she cried. “The spy-plate will show—”
She ran to a tall cabinet. Ames looked over her shoulder, into a hooded screen, and saw the Tech-men. A score of twelve-foot metal giants, they came stalking swiftly out of the flat drear Dead Lands. Gleaming arms gripped strange mechanisms—weapons! Frantically, Ames searched for a gap in the dosing rank. But there was only the deadly shining river.
He caught the girl to his body.
“You can fly,” he whispered swiftly. “You can get away. And I’ll—meet ’em!”
She shook her golden head, hopelessly.
“They will be watching with the war-rays. They would burn my body in the air.” She clung to him, whispering, “Besides, Ames, I would not leave you.”
His level blue eyes suddenly narrowed. He snatched one of the little atomic bombs, quickly set its time-screw.
“There is a way!” His voice rang low and grim. “The river!”
He dropped the bomb behind him. Counting under his breath, he caught the girl’s arm, ran with her to a tower that stood on the riverward edge of Futuron. Behind them, four Tech-men burst through the rosy screen.
Crouching to meet them, Ames saw bulging, gigantic heads inside the glass and steel of great helmets. He glimpsed tiny, atrophied limbs at the controls of metal bodies. Then the glittering eyes, deep-sunken, huge, lambently nonhuman, discovered them. Bright tubes lifted ominously.
The automatic hammered and jerked in the great hand of Ames. The three nearer giants fell, helmets shattered. But, from the fourth, a green, incandescent finger probed the white columns of Futuron. A graceful central spire exploded—and the rosy screen was gone!
All the flat waste of the Dead Lands was revealed again, and the circle of giants came rushing in, queer weapons level.
“—nineteen,” breathed Ames. “Hundred-twenty—Jump!”
He dropped tire empty gun, swept Arthedne with him off the bluff. The oily shining river leapt up, struck them a cold crushing blow, swallowed them.
A TERRIFIC impact came through the water, as if all the world had rung to the impact of a cosmic hammer. Half stunned, they struggled back to the surface—and dived swiftly again to escape the shattered fragments of the city and its invaders raining on the river.
“Futuron!” Her whisper was choked, sorrowful. “Where I was born—” They swam down the river. Nothing moved along the darkly gleaming bluffs. They came out at last, lay side by side to rest on a bar of yellow-shining sand. Ames drew the girl into his arms, whispering, “My darling, you know I love you.”
Her violet eyes misted with quick tears. She kissed him, clung to him. Soft warm hues pulsed through her long antennae.
“Hold me closer, Ames,” she murmured, “before joy makes me fly away.” But suddenly her slim body went rigid, as if from a spasm of pain. She sat up. “Why pretend?”
Her voice was hoarse, choked with pain.
“You are like my own people, Ames. There is a new, vital spark—in you, evolution sought to bridge the gap between your race and mine. And I love you, Ames—want you. But you cannot dwell in the New Lands—not long. And I cannot live outside.” She caught a sobbing breath. “Your nature gropes toward mine. But there is still a gulf between that we can never cross. Unless—”
Her violet eyes looked far across the shining river, and she shuddered again. “Unless as we die!”
They left the river at dawn. Ames examined the remaining atomic bomb, his only weapon; found it unharmed.
“You can guide me,” he asked, “to Technopolis?”
She nodded, solemnly. “But there are many barriers.”
All that day they tramped across the dusty, desolate plain. They saw the gray ribbons where roads had been, and the low square piles of crumbled houses. Now and then, in a small heap of ash, they could trace the white outline of a human skeleton.
Ames said nothing of his own discomfort. But his skin stung, and the ache was returning to his bones. He began to suffer with torturing thirst.
Arthedne seemed in a strange mood. Sometimes she tried to jest, hut always upon her was a shadow. Once she left him, soared away on the wings of splendid flame that spread at will between her delicate antennae.
“It is glorious to fly,” she breathed happily, alighting again beside him. “I wanted one more hour of it.”
The wings flickered out. She caught his hand and they walked on together. The strange dust had fallen again, and the dead plain beginning to glow with unearthly, sullen light, when she paused, pointed.
“There—” she whispered. “Technopolis!”
It stood upon the dark-burning crest of a far-off hill. A wall of metal towers, bathed in a glare of light, palled with greenish smoke. Approaching, they heard the hum and beat of great machines, a harsh and endless reverberation.
“I see,” whispered Ames, “why Dr. Hope repented of creating the Tech-men. For your city of Futuron was a sweet heaven. And this clangorous hell is too much like the cities I have seen.”
They slipped forward again, and Arthedne pointed.
“That highest central spire—the one tipped with cold purple flame—is the tower of the Tech-Czar,” she breathed. “The generators are there.”
Ames clutched his hydrogen bomb. “If we can reach it—”
They came to a twenty-foot barrier of jagged metal blades, from whose points leapt vicious blue sparks. Ames stopped before it, doubtfully. But Arthedne held out her arms to him.
“Hold my wrists,” she whispered. “My wings are strong enough.”
He obeyed, reluctantly. Her antennae spread outward, and the wings of light flashed between them again. Her face set white with pain. But she rose, lifting him. They passed over the fence, glided toward the base of the towers beyond.
“Oh, Ames!” came her tortured breath. “I can’t—”
The bright, wings vanished. They sprawled together on the ground. Ames picked her up. She was breathless, unconscious. In a moment, her violet eyes flickered open.
“Sorry,” she whispered. “Exhausted——?”
THEY slipped ahead, through luminous gloom, into deep canyons of streets. A group of gigantic robot-like bodies stalked down upon them, strange huge heads visible in helmet-turrets. Ames drew Arthedne back against a wall, looked at her in dismay.
And she had vanished!
A sudden pall of absolute blackness fell upon him. Bewildered, he groped again for her hand, found it tense and quivering. She caught his fingers, returned a swift pressure. In a moment the darkness lifted. The Tech-men had passed.
“We—” Ames gasped. “Invisible?” The girl nodded, motioned for caution. “Dr. Hope’s evolutionary acceleration created new powers in the neozoans,” she whispered, “mostly based on a direct grasp of the warp of space. We fly by one adaptation of it. Another creates a light-deflecting field—but I am not expert enough to do it well for long.”
They slipped on toward the lofty central tower. Again and again Arthedne made them briefly invisible, while danger passed. Ames clutched the atomic bomb. They came at last to a main thoroughfare.
“Beyond.” She pointed at the next building. “The tower.”
Endless ranks of metal giants stalked before them. The pavement shook to a rumbling stream of immense, strange machines. They were like tanks, Ames thought; cannon; and armored cars mounting huge queer tubes.
“The Tech-Czar is prepared for war,” whispered Arthedne. “If your race penetrates the New Lands—”
An armed giant came down the alley behind them. She made them invisible until it had passed. The effort left her weak. But a break came at last in the war-like parade. Wrapped again in darkness, they darted across the street.
Ames stumbled on the opposite curb. A dull sob of exhaustion came from the girl. The shroud of darkness vanished, and she fell beside him. Ames saw gigantic Tech-men striding upon them. A whistle of alarm ripped his nerves.
“Sorry—” Arthedne whispered faintly, and lay still.
Ames set the dial of the bomb at three seconds, hurled it through a window into the tower that made the sigma-field. He snatched the girl into his arms, stumbled with her back across the street, just ahead of a lumbering tank.
Scores of the Tech-men, whistling, humming, clicking, were reeling grotesquely toward him. Breathless, Ames counted:
“—two—and—three!”
He dropped with the girl behind the land ironclad, waited for the burst of supernal energy that should level the city. Probably kill them, too; but if it stopped the Dead Spot, that didn’t matter. He waited, breathless.
And nothing happened.
A fantastic, clangorous mob, the metal giants came down upon them. Frantically, still, he hoped—until another Tech-man stalked out of the tower, carrying the atomic bomb. The time-fuse was smashed. Could the Tech-men have foreknown—?
A flailing metal arm crushed the thought from his head.
Awareness came back to Ames in a lofty metal hall, lit with the harsh red flicker of neon. Two mechanical giants held him upright, pinioned his arms. Before him stood a great desk, covered with buttons and dials and strange apparatus. Behind it sat another metal-armored body, larger than the rest, its occupant concealed behind a grim visage of steel and glass. The ruler, it must be—the Tech-Czar!
Arthedne was gone—where?
Immense and terrible as a god of steel, the Tech-Czar turned upon Ames. Great cold lenses peered down. A brazen voice boomed through the red-lit hall:
“Man of the old race, why are you here?”
Ames gritted his teeth, twisted against the metal arms.
“Very good,” came the sawing voice. “You need not speak aloud. . . . You are Ryeland Ames, chief of the SSS. . . . What are the plans of your organization, against the advance of the New Lands?”
SICK, trembling, Ames tried to make his mind a blank.
“Good,” came the rasping, “Then we need fear no opposition.” The steel face turned to the guards. “Take him to the laboratory. Proceed with the dissection of both prisoners. It will provide new data on differing races—and end any opposition from them.
Dissection—both prisoners!
The words throbbed in the aching head of Ames, like a gong of doom. The giants dragged him away. He tensed his body, made a sudden, desperate lunge, jerked away from the one on his right. The other tripped, crashed down awkwardly. He was free.
Arthedne! Where—t
But the metal limbs of the first guard flailed at him. A red bomb of pain exploded in his bruised head. Dimly, he knew that he was being carried—toward the dissection laboratory. . . . Then he was lying on the street. His head throbbed, and his stiff body ached. He struggled upright, incredulously.
For Technopolis was—dead.
The two guards lay beside him on the pavement. Their tiny, big-headed bodies were stiff and blue in the cabs of their sprawled machines. Technopolis had stopped. All the Tech-men he could see were dead. What had happened?
And Arthedne—where was she?
He stumbled uncertainly across the silent street. Beyond the end of it, he glimpsed a remote vista of the Dead Lands—oddly changed. The weird luminosity was gone. The consuming fire in his own body, he realized suddenly, had diminished.
“Ames!”
