Collected Short Fiction, page 320
“I’m glad that I’m a man,” exulted Kel Aran, He was blistered and blackened from a barytron ray that had come too near. His disruptor gun was empty in his hand. “No machine could die like this, for they are not alive!”
“We must leave, Kel.” It was big Zerek Oom, gray behind his bright tattooing, hoarse and trembling. “It’s time for us to go.” He caught nervously at the Earthman’s arm. “Or well die here, Kel!”
Kel Aran laughed at him, and pushed grimy fingers back through his singed yellow hair.
“And where’s a better place to die, Zerek?” he demanded. “There’s no other city left. No other men that we can find. There’s no hope now of finding Verel. No need, for the technomatons have won. What is there better than to fight with the rest?”
“But, Kel!” Zerek’s teeth chattered. “To die—”
“Yes, to die—”
The Earthman’s voice caught suddenly. He looked quickly upward. And I saw a flake of prismatic color drifting out of the lurid roaring chaos of the sky. It dropped upon his shoulder, clung there eagerly. And a soft voice warbled faintly:
“Kel! Oh, Kel, poor old Setsi’s come so far! Her poor old life is nearly done. But find her a drop of grog, Kel. Please, oh, please! For Setsi’s got a thing to tell! Grog, Kel! Just a drop of rum, so she can tell!”
I stared, rigid with wonderment. For the bright thing on the Earthman’s shoulder was the sandbat, the curious silicic being that we had lost in Malgarth’s trap on far Ledros. Or part of her. For her glittering form was no longer whole.
XI
THE GIRL OF EARTH
ZEREK OOM looked sadly at the spoonful of raw synthetic alcohol left in the flask from his hip, and gave it to Kel Aran. The Earthman emptied it into his palm, gently detached the stiffly clinging sandbat from his shoulder and held it over the reeking liquor. The bright, broken body stirred weakly, and it sucked at the fluid.
“Setsi!” Kel implored. “What is it. you have to tell? Is it—Verel?”
The sandbat was silent, sucking avidly at the alcohol. I saw that it was gravely injured. Two of its six flat limbs were gone. And, over half its remaining body, the iridescent scales had been fused into a dull glassy mass.
“Setsi’s hurt! Poor Setsi’s hurt! She’s dying!” The whirring voice came faintly. “Help her, Kel. Give her grog.”
“Tell me!” demanded Kel Aran. “Where is Verel? Do you know?”
The bright many-colored fragment of the silicic being clung to his big hand. The solitary dark eye in the middle of its vivid pattern stared up at him sorrowfully.
“Setsi’s came a long way to tell you, Kel.” The melodious warbling was so low, beneath the thundering chaos of the robots’ assault, that we had to bend intently forward to hear. “Oh, what a long and dreadful way! For she’s injured, Kel, oh, so sorely! And the machines rule all the planets she could find, but this. Oh, those evil machines, so blackly evil! They destroy all life. And they have no grog for Setsi!”
The Earthman shook the little shining being, and gazed impatiently into its single eye.
“But, Verel? Where’s she?”
“Oh, Kel!” sobbed that faint liquid voice. “Don’t be angry with poor Setsi. For she has come so far to tell you, Kel! She had flown all the way from dead Ledros. She’s crossed scores of light years of hostile space. Wounded and tired and all alone, she came to tell you, Kel!”
“Tell me what?”
Bright membranes fluttered. Like some incredible, diamond-winged moth, the sandbat lifted briefly from his hand. It dropped back, and clung.
“Setsi’s come to tell you that she found Verel, Kel. When she was out alone in space, on the long, long way from Ledros, Kel, her mind found Verel’s. Found Verel all alone, Kel. Oh, all alone, Kel. And so in need of aid! For the robots hunt her, Kel. And she has lost the Stone!”
“Where is she?” whispered Kel Aran. “Please, Setsi! Where—”
“She’s on Meldoon, Kel,” came that tiny whir. “Setsi found her on Meldoon, where we are. She’s been on Black Mystoon, Kel. Malgarth held her there. Oh, Kel, that’s a fearful place! Guarded Mystoon, where old Malgarth hides! But she escaped it, Kel. She came to Meldoon. She tried to enter Achnor. For Achnoris, the last city, Kel. But the robots turned her back. She fled into the desert, Kel. For her geodesic sled was wrecked. She’s hiding in the desert, Kel. In the grim, gray desert of Kaanat. The robots hunt her, there. She’s in danger, Kel. Oh, what black danger!”
“Where? Can you show us?”
“Setsi’ll guide you, Kel. She’ll show you—if she lives, Kel. For poor old Setsi’s dying. Her long, long days are done. Soon she’ll join those other two. She’ll try to show you, Kel, before she’s gone. But she must have a little rum! Setsi’s come so far, Kel. tier wound’s so grave. She’d die now, Kel, without her rum!”
AND the sandbat stiffened suddenly on the Earthman’s hand, like some strange diamond-dusted jewel.
“Come!” shouted Kel Aran. “We’ve got to go to Verel.”
We started back toward the park where we had left the Barihorn. It. was a march through pandemonium. The robot fleet still hailed death into the city, and the metal invaders still swarmed through the gap in the northward defenses. One red mighty ship had fallen across our route. Its mechanical crew survived; it was a mile-long fortress of the enemy, within the city. Flaming rays and fearful explosions met a desperate attempt to storm it. And a metal column came to its aid, led by the trim, silver-winged New Robots.
A sluggish, creeping mountain of purple-shining gas blocked our progress. Dim-seen men within it shrieked and died and flowed into black thick liquid. We took masks from the dead without, and plunged into it.
Kel Aran led the way, clutching the thin bright fragment of Setsi. Jeron Roc, stalked beside him, tall and dark and implacable. Zerek Oom was very sober again, green behind his mask. Wizened little Rogo Nug was missing. But he rejoined us suddenly, triumphantly displaying a great bundle of the rust-colored roots of goona-roon—he had raided the hoarded stock of a wealthy trader.
We came to the tiny ship, half buried in debris, but unharmed. It carried us upward again, through the glare and din of death. The doomed city dropped beneath, a greenish, red-struck, thunder-shaken storm cloud on the dark face of the planet. We turned eastward, toward the vast flat desert region of Kaanat.
Zerek Oom opened his last treasured bottle of rum. It revived the stiffened sandbat, but feebly.
“Hurry, Kel!” came its faint trill. “Oh, hurry! For Verel is in danger! And Setsi may die before she can show you the way. Hurry, hurry! And find more rum for Setsi!”
Kel Aran held his ear close above the feebly vibrating membrane. Setsi’s voice had become too faint for the rest of us to hear. He relayed her directions to Jeron, at the controls.
The land beneath us had been desolated by the victorious robots, ruthlessly. Buildings had been burned, masonry blasted, life blotted from field and forest with poison sprays. There remained only a sere wilderness of barren soil and naked stone.
In the universe of the triumphant robots, life would be exterminated.
“In that canyon!” The voice of Kel Aran was tense and dry. “Beyond the plain.”
He laid his ear back upon the bright crystalline thing on his hand. And Jeron dropped our little craft into a vast rugged gorge. Dark jagged walls tumbled down, red and brown and black, swallowing the silver filament of a buried river.
Here and there, however, in some inaccessible crevice, I saw some tiny glint of precious green—some bit of grass or shrub that had escaped the robots. Life was yet a stubborn thing.
The Barihorn slipped around dark fantastic battlements of age-weathered stone, and passed the grim towers that guarded a tributary gorge. Something flashed, then, on a narrow ledge ahead. And the sandbat fluttered briefly on the hand of Kel Aran.
“Oh, there she is,” I heard the whirring trill. “There’s your Verel, Kel! Your lovely Verel, Kel. And the frightful things that stalk her!” That sad, solitary eye seemed to cloud and darken. “Now, it’s farewell, Kel. Oh, forever farewell, to all the long, long life that Setsi’s lived.” The sobbing warble was almost too faint to hear. “There’ll be no more grog for Setsi.”
AND she stiffened abruptly on the Earthman’s hand.
“Here.” The eyes of Zerek Oom glistened wetly, and he offered his bottle. “Give her rum, Kel. All of it.”
“No.” Kel Aran shook his head. “I think—Setsi’s dead!”
Hard and fragile as some broken toy of blown glass, the silicic being lay on his trembling palm. The queer still fragment of a gorgeous crystalline flower, green and purple and scarlet and blue.
“Queer,” muttered Jeron from his levers. “To think that she had lived since man was born on Earth. And now that she is dead.”
But we had no more thought, just then, for Setsi. Kel Aran was already pointing through the ports, shouting. I saw a weary human figure stagger across the ledge ahead, and drop behind a boulder. A bright ray stabbed, and stabbed again. And I saw two bright graceful things wheeling and diving above her, like silver hawks. Two of the New Robots!
“It’s Verel!” Kel Aran was sobbing. “This time really—Verel!” His lean hand swept Jeron back from the controls, hurled the Barihorn into a reckless dive. And he began to hum the chorus of his old song, “till I find her or I die.”
The deadly velocity of that unexpected dive, the deadly skill of the Earthman at the controls, caught one of the winged robots square on the nose of the Barihorn, smashed it to bright fragments. The Saturnian tumbled up into the gun turret, to reach our little barytron projector. But the second metal thing had already fled up the gorge. It was gone between two pillars of time-carved stone, before Kel could turn the ship again.
“It will give the alarm!” he muttered. Then his voice was choked with joy. “But Verel! We have found her.”
He dropped our little ship lightly on the ledge, and leaped out through the valve. The girl swayed to her feet, and stared at him incredulously. Her young body showed the blue pinch of want. She was ragged, scratched, bruised. A heavy, clumsy-looking cathode gun—a weapon she must have taken from the robots—was clutched in her thin hands. Yet, for all that, she was beautiful.
I could see the lovely Verel Erin that Kel Aran had loved and surrendered in that hidden valley on the Earth. For her hollowed eyes were blue and her hair was a spun-gold tangle, and her tanned face still had a lean honest grace.
She came limping very slowly to meet Kel. The heavy weapon fell from her hands. A queer, stricken wonder had stiffened her face. She reached out a trembling hand, touched his shoulder, his lips. And a slow, transcendent joy illuminated her features.
“Kel!” she said softly, “you’ve come.”
The Earthman moved hungrily, to take her in his arms. But she withdrew. All the joy fled from her face, leaving it bleak and gaunt with pain.
“The Stone, Kel!” she cried bitterly. “Eve lost the Stone! Malgarth has it, still, in his guarded temple on Black Mystoon.”
XII
THE FASTNESS OF MALGARTH
KNOWING that the robots would soon be after us, we left the great planet Meldoon, and fled again into the wastes of space. When we had given her a little to eat and to drink, for the robots had left nothing in this land to sustain any living thing, Verel Erin whispered her story.
Jeron stood by the controls, scanning the telescreen for inevitable pursuit. Little Rogo Nug was tending his hard-driven converters. Zerek Oom, rattling pans in the galley, was cooking up some delicacy for the famished girl. Pale and thin from all her hardships, but yet beautiful, she lay on a narrow bunk. Kel Aran and I stood beside her, and the Earthman grasped her hand.
“We saw the Earth flung into the Sun,” said Kel Aran. “And the fleet of Gugon Kul destroying all who sought to escape. A dreadful time!” His voice was husky. “We hardly dared hope for you, Verel.”
The girl’s blue eyes looked a long time up at his face in them a blend of joy and dread that somehow wrenched the heart. She caught a deep, sobbing breath, at last, and whispered:
“It’s a long time, Kel. A long, long time, since we herded goats in the hidden valley, and climbed to the eagle’s nest! Since I was chosen Custodian, and you went away to be a rover of space. Since—” Her whisper caught. “Since the end of the Earth!”
“Tell me.” The Earthman bent closer. “What happened?”
“From the observatory on the peak,” she breathed, “we saw the fleet come. All the planet was riven with the forces that checked it in its orbit. The sky was shadowed by day and luridly bright by night, Quakes and tidal waves drove us to the uplands. Soon it was clear that the Earth indeed was doomed.
Then the Warders opened the cave where the ship of escape had been always kept provisioned and ready, against discovery. A crew was chosen, by lot. And I went aboard, with the Stone. The Earth had already dropped past Venus, when the last night fell.
We tried to run up the cone of shadow. But a magnetic ray caught us, and the fleet was warned.
“We tried to fight—to fly.” Her eyes closed a moment, and her thin face was rigid with pain. “It was no use. We were the prey Malgarth had sent them to hunt. We were brushed with a barytron beam.”
She gulped, and her hand went tense in Kel’s.
“I woke up in a hospital room on Gugon Kel’s flagship, with a humming robot nurse bending over me. All the Warders—all the people I had ever known but you, Kel—and I knew only that you had been lost ten years in space—they all were dead. And the Stone had been taken from me!”
Kel Aran touched her pale brow, softly.
“And what then, Verel.”
“When I could walk, robots took me from the room, and up to Gugon Kul. He laughed, and made the robots drag me to a port, and I saw the end of the world. A tiny dark circle splashed in the Sun, and was gone. The Earth—gone!
“Then I was put on a tender ship of the Space Police. I saw no more human beings, Kel. But only whirring, clicking, clattering robots, staring at me with cold blue lenses that had no feeling.” She shuddered on the bunk. “A world of machines, without any voices, any laughter, any emotion you could understand. It was dreadful, Kel. Horrible!”
HE caught her trembling hand again, waited.
“The robot police took me to some agency of the Corporation,” her dry weary whisper resumed. “There they put me on a larger ship, that was laden with the loot of planets that the robots had vanquished. That carried me to some other world. The robot nurses drugged me as we landed. When I came to, we were on another ship, out in space again.
“That ship took me to Mystoon!”
She lay motionless for a long time, then, with her eyes closed again. Her breath was a faint dry sobbing sound. Softly, the Earthman brushed the glistening tangle of yellow hair back from her forehead.
“Mystoon?” he asked at last. “What’s it like, Verel?”
The blue eyes opened, somber pools of dread.
“Don’t ask me, Kel,” she whispered. “I can’t endure to talk of Black Mystoon. Not now. No more than I must—Malgarth’s there. It has been his hidden fortress for half a million years. It’s guarded well. I think I’m the first human being to escape it—if any had been taken there before me. I did it only because I had to find you, Kel. Had to!”
She clutched his hand again, and sighed.
“But still Malgarth has the Stone, on Mystoon. He has preserved it, trying to find in it the secret of his own mortality. I saw it once, while they were making that—that copy of me.”
She shuddered again.
“The Stone?” Urgency tensed the Earthman’s voice. “Still it has the power to destroy Malgarth?”
The golden head nodded, on the bunk.
“Still it holds the ancient secret, that Barihorn entrusted to it. And now at last it is willing to strike—for clearly no other recourse is left. The Shadow of the Stone came to me before I escaped, and begged for aid to strike. It begged me to send you, Kel, and Barihorn—Barihorn, who it told me had returned to crush his old creation! It foretold that I should find you on Meldoon. And it aided me to plan the escape.”
Dark with wonder, her blue eyes came briefly to my face.
“And you are Barihorn,” she breathed. “Maker of Malgarth! Well, it’s time you returned! Still the Shadow waits, within the Stone. But it won’t endure for long, after Malgarth’s science has got its secret.”
Kel Aran was asking:
“You escaped from Mystoon? How?”
The girl’s eyes went back to him.
“I followed the Shadow’s plan,” she whispered. “It showed me how to snatch the cathode gun from the robot guard who brought me food. How to escape through the long black corridors of Malgarth’s temple. How to reach the geodesic sled that was waiting for one of his silver-winged robot commanders. There was pursuit. But the ship was very swift. And I had to reach you, Kel!”
The Earthman then bent over her, tensely.
“You did.” And his voice snapped with the question: “Can you guide us back to Mystoon, Verel? Do you know the way?”
Faintly, she nodded again.
“It’s a long, strange way, Kel. But I can try. For we must reach the Stone before it is destroyed.”
“Or,” Kel Aran put in grimly, “before we are!”
Then I ventured to ask an anxious question.
“If this Stone has the power to destroy Malgarth,” I asked, “why doesn’t it destroy him?”
“If it were as simple as that—” The girl’s somber, curious eyes came to me again. “The ages must have fogged your memory, Barihorn. The Stone has the secret of Malgarth’s doom, yes. But it has no power to act alone. The Shadow can only guide its human helpers. That is why there were Custodian and Warders.”
HER head shook gravely, “No, Barihorn, the Stone can never strike at Malgarth, unless we arrive to aid it.”
Red stars followed us again—the repulsors of pursuing robot ships. But Kel Aran, singing a gay new song of the return of Barihorn and the vengeance of the old Dondara Stone, drove our tiny ship through a dark asteroid cluster. The ponderous cruisers of the fleet were delayed in finding safe passage through those black hurtling islands of space. We gained a little margin of time. And then, with Verel for a guide, Jeron turned the Barihorn toward the secret world of Malgarth’s lair.
