Collected Short Fiction, page 369
Hall’s arms squeezed tighter.
“I believe they escaped,” he said. “Because I saw one plane that didn’t fall. It was a queer machine, with wings that beat like a huge golden bird’s. It climbed safely into the clouds.
“It must have been one of the flying machines that Shadrona’s people used in the ancient times. I believe that she and Carter were aboard. I’ve got a mighty good hunch that they’re all right—somewhere.
“Perhaps they are back in the old monastery. I don’t know—I’ll never know. Because I’m sure that they would rather be let alone.”
“I suppose so.” Linda Gaylord snuggled contentedly in his arms, and presently whispered, “I love you, Jimmy.”
Hall grinned at the stars.
“Darling,” he answered grimly, “you’ve told me so many lies—even if you thought the cause was good—that you’ll have to spend the rest of your life convincing me of that. You can begin, right now.”
Her warm lips lifted, and she obediently began.
The End.
1940
As in the Beginning
Man had done his best to destroy all life, but the world was not quite dead.
THE world was not dead . . . .
Adams knelt in the red, caked mud that the tidal waves had left everywhere. Tears stung his eyes. Reverently, his trembling fingers touched the three translucent spears.
Life still endured. . . .
His misty eyes looked across the red barren flats, toward lonely sea and lifeless sky. Their terror had suddenly fled. These tiny blades of green had banished his despair, and laid the stark horror that had haunted him back from the moon.
They flooded his heart with a quick pity for his prisoner, that dissolved grief and hate and madness. Abruptly he was sorry for the sentence he had passed.
After that vain and frantic search across a world crushed and overwhelmed, when at last he had brought the Victory down upon this flat red isle of mud, beside a sea that would never bear ship again, Adams had gone back to his prisoner.
In the rocket’s dark interior, hot and stifling with motor fumes, Dr. Everin lay bound in a cramped fuel compartment. He was still in the bulky, insulated suit he had worn on the moon; his features were still concealed behind his grotesque oxygen mask, for the tank was not ventilated.
“Dr. Everin, do you hear?”
The reply was muffled, weary:
“Yes, Adams. We are back on Earth?”
“We are.” Hatred turned his voice to steel. “Are you ready to stand trial for what you have done?”
“I’m ready.” The tone was serene. “My only crime is duty to my country. No just court will condemn me—”
“I am the court,” said Adams, hoarsely. “You are charged before me with the murder of mankind. What have you to say?”
Silence. A faint whisper:
“Murder . . .?”
“I searched the whole Earth,” rasped Adams, “before I brought the rocket down. Both Americas are drowned. There is a chain of desolate islands, where the Rockies and the Andes stand above the sea. . . . Africa was swept clean by the tidal waves. . . . Your own Europe is cleft, shattered, lifeless. . . . Asia is a desert of smoking lava: the seas explode upon it into mountains of steam . . . A new continent has risen east of where Australia sank, a continent of lifeless mud. . . .
“Your atomic weapon did well, Doctor. Murderously well. The radio is still; the seas are empty; I found no sign of man on all the planet.
“We two are the only men alive. And I alone am the court to try you for the murder of your race.—You may speak.” Silence, in the dark tank.
A whisper, faint, incredulous:
“I didn’t know. . . . Dead I . . . And we’re alone . . .”
At last, a stricken voice:
“Adams, if you are my sole judge, spare my life. For your sake! Remember, my death will leave you quite alone.”
But vengeance had frozen his heart. “Don’t ask for mercy. You have destroyed the humanity in me.” His voice rang hard. “I will grant you one hour, Doctor. Then I will unbind you and shoot you through the heart.”
Then he had left Everin, and come out through the air-valve upon the plain of mud.
Three blades of grass.
MIRACULOUS life, in the seeds, had endured the hate and fury of war, survived acrid gas and shattering explosive and ray of flame, escaped the final atomic beam from the moon that uprooted mountains and thrust riven continents beneath maddened seas.
War is death, he whispered. And there is ever war of life and death. And life is ever victor.
Three blades. . . . But there would be others; the miracle must happen again. Trees, Adams thought, would grow from the seed of the fruit in his supplies. Somehow, he himself would live. . . .
He was staring at the green mirror of the sea. Its agony had overwhelmed the land; but still it was alive, and the eternal mother of life. A fish leapt, a white shard flashing against the morning sim. Adams’s lean face smiled. The world was not dead. . . .
He went striding back toward the Victory. It was a long bright shell, fallen in the mud. Its silver was darkly stained with red oxides.
It was well named, this last desperate achievement of American engineers, that had carried him triumphantly out to capture Everin upon the stark central peaks of Tycho’s crater. But what a victory, when one man alone survived it!
The hour was nearly gone. But Adams had warmed to the eternal miracle of life. If the world were not dead, had he been too severe?
A treaty—no better than most treaties—had outlawed atomic force from war. But should Everin be held for his government’s crime?
Adams stopped and shut his eyes. Could he himself forgive the loss of home, country, all his world? . . .
The bullet stung his shoulder. Falling, he heard the brittle spang from the rocket’s air-lock. His eyes flew open to glimpse the bulky figure crouching there.
He was prostrate when the pain came, like a slow red flood. Gasping, he pressed it back from his brain, and sought a way to strike back.
His left hand still lived. It found his gun, dragged it under his coat. He lay still, watching through his eyelashes. Everin would come to him, for he had the keys to controls and stores. If he could hold off death, feigning death, until the man bent to search him. . . .
The oldest game of mankind, he thought dimly, played to the last man. And madder, now, more meaningless, than ever. In the lonely horror of the solitary years to come, the survivor would need the other. But war was ever blind to human need. . . .
He gripped the gun harder. The mounting tropic sun smote him with a giddy violence. Red baked mud and green shimmering sea began to waver and spin. He thirsted for the cool of the sea. The throb of pain was growing dull, but he could feel the trickling blood, hot and sticky, across his throat.
His enemy could stop that blood. . . .
His finger nestled against the trigger. He must be quick. Everin was clever, to have worked out the atomic weapon. Clever, to have escaped. . . .
Adams heard cautious footfalls. Red dust flew abruptly against his eyelids; a gun crashed close behind. But his schooled nerves repressed any start.
He could hear the man’s breathing.
Now he will bend over me. When he looks into my face, his heart will be in line. And one flick of my finger will repay me for home, country, my own life. . . .
A cool shadow touched him. Now!
But abruptly, instead, he was laughing at the madness of it, at the monstrous jest of all war. Blood couldn’t wash out the past. His arm relaxed, and the hidden gun slid down into the mud.
“Well,” his faint voice whispered, “I won’t kill you, Everin. Too bad if the last man died by violence. Let’s finish . . . at peace. . . .”
A low voice said:
“I am glad. . . . I know now what my father meant . . .
ADAMS had closed his eyes; he relaxed in the shadow. He felt deft hands baring the wound. The voice said:
“My father invented the atomic beam to turn the machinery of a peaceful world. When he was commanded to take it to the moon, for a weapon, he drank cyanide. In a note he said: War is death, and peace is the life of the world.
“The War Office sent for me. I had been Father’s assistant; I thought I understood the beam. For love of my country, I carried it to the moon.
“I know now that I didn’t understand it—or father’s note. The force escaped my control. And father was right. Peace means union, common effort. And the life of the world is more than my country—any country—”
The tremulous softness of the voice drew open Adams’s eyes.
The oxygen mask was gone, and for the first time he saw Everin’s face. It was an oval of pale beauty, framing serene eyes deep as the sky.
He whispered, “A—a woman?”
“I am Dr. Everin’s daughter. You might call me—Eve.”
When again at last he emerged lightheaded from the chaos of pain, there seemed no strangeness in the question:
“Then perhaps this isn’t the end—of man?”
Fastening the bandage, she softly breathed:
“No, Adams—or Adam.”
And she said:
“We were mad to fight. Nothing is changed, really, since we are alone. But it’s so clear, now, what my father meant.”
“Peace,” he sighed. “And the world lives on. . . .”
The Reign of Wizardry
Foreword:
Once there was an island empire. Its fleets ruled the seas for a thousand years. Its wealth and splendor dazzled all the world. Then it was destroyed—cataclysmically!
Its fall still presents a mystery. For it was cut off abruptly, in the full tide of power. The fleets that had guarded its rich commerce and its unwalled cities were suddenly no more. Its capital city, where men had dwelt for ten thousand years, was looted and burned and leveled by earthquake shock. Its people were scattered, and presently lost even the memory of their departed greatness.
The history of that empire’s splendor and its passing became a legend. Generations of retelling confused the details. Men came to call that lost world Atlantis, and at last began to doubt that it had ever been.
But the account of Atlantis that Plato heard from the Egyptian priests—in almost every detail save the vague location beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and the complete submersion of the land itself—fits what is now known of Minoan Crete.
The conquerors, also, told their own story of what happened. Minos the god-king, the monstrous Minotaur of the Labyrinth, the artificer Daedalus, fair-tressed Ariadne and the victorious Greek hero, all became the figures of a splendid myth.
But merely a myth—until, a hundred years ago, a poor child named Heinrich Schlieman was given a storybook of Homeric Greece. He saw a picture of the walls of Troy, and said that such walls could not have been obliterated, even in three thousand years.
Schlieman ignored the derision of scholars. Beginning life as an ill-paid grocer’s clerk, he educated himself, made a fortune, and at last realized his splendid, stubborn dream—he excavated the mound at Hissarlik, and found not one Troy, but nine!
The forgotten gates of a magnificent pre-Homeric world were thus thrown open to knowledge. Sir Arthur Evans was one of the brilliant men who followed Schlieman. He uncovered the great building that was the very heart of that lost world—the Palace of Minos at Knossos in Crete.
Even the carved stone throne of Minos has been preserved, with the griffin frescoes that graced the throne room; a cast of it may be seen in New York’s Metropolitan Museum. Excavations at other sites in Crete, at Mycenae and Tiryns, have filled out the picture of a reality more amazing than the legend of Atlantis and the myths of the Greeks.
It was a strangely modern world, whose remains the spades have brought to light. Uncannily modern, in matters as various as plumbing and art and architecture and woman’s gowns. Every find at Knossos helps bring to life a gay and sophisticated court.
But the Minoan world had its darker side. Archaeology supports the grim legend of the Minotaur. Wall paintings show men and girls engaged in the deadly game of “bull vaulting”; and Dr. Evans found even the dungeon pits, in which the victims of a cruel religion must have awaited sacrifice.
After all the scraps of knowledge have been pieced together, however, Minoan Crete remains a strange and fascinating riddle. The Minoans, it is true, had writing. In fact they were the first printers—on clay—from movable types; and the Phonecians probably got the alphabet from the Philistines, who, after the disaster, were Minoan emigres. But, although thousands of specimens have been discovered, the script has proved mockingly undecipherable.
The fall of the ruthless and decadent Minoan despotism, it seems, must have been one of the decisive events of history. For the democracy and the civilization of Greece, the basis of our own, could have been built only upon the ruins of the Minoan age. The Greek conqueror, then, is one of the supreme men of history. Legend has brought us his name—Theseus.
Knossos fell. The coincidence of earthquake and sword and torch is still a riddle. But the world’s oldest and greatest palace was turned into a mound of ruin. For three thousand years it lay abandoned, “uncanny, haunted ground.”
Magic and ritual—as the findings of Evans and McKenzie and Pendlebury and the Haweses and others confirm—played a grimly dominant part in the life of Crete. Immemorial Knossos may well have been the cradle of the magical arts. The jigsaw puzzle of myth and archaeology and the fragmentary Egyptian records seem inevitably to fall into a dreadful pattern. The most plausible answer to all the riddles of Minoan Crete is—wizardry!
I.
“WHAT are the omens, Captain Firebrand?” Cyron, the bearded Dorian pirate, looked nervous. A hairy hand clutched one of the stays that supported the long galley’s single mast, and his scarred face was apprehensive as he peered across the glancing blue water between the green headlands. “Shall we run for the islands?”
Theseus, the tall Achean, stood near the high wolf’s-head standard that rose above the prow. His legs were set wide against the roll and toss of the narrow ship, and his long red hair whipped back in the wind. He shaded his blue eyes, and looked with Cyron into the strait ahead.
Dancing on the white-glinting blue, between the points of land, he found two black dots and a yellow one. He studied them carefully, and the cloud-streaked westward sky, and the ruffled track of the wind upon the sea.
At last his hard tanned body straightened, in the simple loin cloth of captured Egyptian linen. He tossed his red mane back again, and his quick voice rang above the weary monotonous chant of the oar slaves and the creak of the wind-strained rigging.
“The wind is with us, Gamecock,” he said. “They are only two against our one—we can forget the trader until the war galleys are sunk. And our bronze beak makes us the equal of three—you said so yourself, when we rammed the last Egyptian.”
“Yes, Captain Firebrand,” agreed the anxious Dorian. “But that was an Egyptian—”
The hairy pirate shuddered a little, in the long stiff cloak of bead-embroidered purple silk that had belonged to a Cretan naval officer. But Theseus drew the long straight sword from his belt, and looked into the polish of its blue steel.
“The men are hungry for plunder,” he told Cyron. “And the Falling Star is thirsty for blood.” A tense little smile touched his lean face. “I read my omens in the mirror of the Falling Star,” he said, “and they are always good!”
He turned on the planking that decked the narrow bow, and shouted past the mast to the slave driver perched on the lip of the oarsmen’s pit beyond:
“A faster stroke! We must cut them off before they pass the headland!”
“Aye, Captain Firebrand!”
The Mycenean’s long whip hissed and cracked. Forty-four slaves bent to twenty-two oars, eleven to the side. Their endless chant grew swifter, and the galley leapt to its rhythm.
“Hail, Captain Firebrand!” came a shout from the twoscore of sailors and fighting men crowded on the deck above the after cabin, beyond the pit. “Do we fight again?”
Theseus cupped tanned hands to his face. “We fight,” he shouted. “And when the lots are cast, we shall have treasure from the north coasts to divide. Gold and amber and furs—and perhaps even fair northern slaves!”
Cheers answered, and he ordered:
“All hands make ready to attack and board!”
Bronze blades rang to the stone. Archers flexed and strung their bows, a slinger stretched his thongs. The boarding crew fitted on leathern helmets, laid ready their long bull-hide shields. At his fire above the pit, the one-eyed Tirynthian cook began heating pots of sulphur.
BUT CYRON shook his scan-ed dark head uneasily. Anxiously fingering the edges of the beaded cape, he stepped close to Theseus and protested in a husky whisper:
“But those leading sails are black, Captain Firebrand.”
“I see that they are black, Gamecock.”
“The black sails mean that they are war galleys of the royal navy of Minos,” rasped the apprehensive pirate. “They are guarded by the uncanny artifices of the warlock Daedalus, and by the wizardry of Minos himself. There will be black priests of the Dark One aboard them, to blast our bodies and our souls with their deadly magic.”
Urgently, he touched the bronze arm of Theseus. “Let us turn and run for the islands, Captain Firebrand,” he begged, “before their tricks of wizardry set the wind against us, to shatter us against some hostile coast!
“Let us wait for an Egyptian galley,” he pleaded huskily, “guarded only by the distant sleepy gods of the Nile. Or perhaps a trader from the East, that trusts in the dusty deities of dead Babylon. Or maybe we shall meet another merchant that carries only the feeble godlings of Troy.”
His hairy hand trembled. “Captain Firebrand, we dare not defy the gods and the warlocks of Crete—your attacks must already have angered them, and their wizardry is the strongest in the world. An Egyptian priest told me once—before I disemboweled him—that all magic came first from that evil island. Shall we turn back, captain?”
