Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  “Take the impostor forth before the people,” his old voice crackled savagely. “Take him and hold him there, till Kuvurna comes forth and the council of the Pack sits in judgment over life and death!”

  The gathering crowd out in the sunburned square had surged nearer and packed more densely as the grapevine telegraph carried the word of great doings to all quarters of the dog people’s village.

  The air was stifling with dust and the odor of many bodies pressed close together—an odor which differed subtly from that of humanity in the mass. Only a little space about the palisaded gate remained still invisibly roped off; in it, clustered closely and silently together, the little group of dogmen who had discovered Doody in their forest still waited bravely for the return of their marvelous heavenly messenger. But when they saw him emerge hemmed in by the armed acolytes of Kuvurna, a captive, threatened on all sides by sharp spears, yet failing to employ any homicidal magic for his liberation—hastily they shrank back, appalled, into the throng, slinking away fearful lest they should be involved in the consequences of their own error. But Doody, on the sharp-eyed alert, thought he saw more than one sinewy hand tighten convulsively on a spear haft before its owner thought better of his half-formed intentions.

  The sun beat down uncomfortably, and Doody was sweating stickily under his clothes, while striving to preserve an airy nonchalance in the face of the heat and the indignity of his close, rather smelly cordon of priests. The watching crowd, most of its eyes and mouths wide, was hushedly silent, save for the intermittent shuffling of bare or sandaled feet as this or that shaded his eyes over his neighbor’s shoulder, squinting into the sun, and for the shrill little yelping cries of the children—puppies—who played in the rear of the assemblage.

  Dispassionately, Doody considered the dog people once more from his vantage point—this time for what they were, rather than as human beings. They wore not an unhandsome breed, and were certainly well-made physically; and there was about them a gentleness, a humility, that the human animal lacks. Man had done a better job of domesticating them than he had ever succeeded in doing on himself.

  There was a curious, wistful appeal in the great eyes of some of the young—well, female dogs. Doody broke off on that line of thought. Considering, he did not imagine that there had been any interbreeding. In the perfect uniformity of the dogmen there was no trace of the corruption which, even in Rudnuu’s day, had been engulfing all humanity, and which seemed to have reached its nauseous fruition in the unwhisperable Kuvurna.

  A stir went over the multitude, like the sigh of a single voice. Doody wheeled to stare over the heads of his guards, saw that the lattice gate had swung inward and that the canine high priest was issuing forth, strutting ceremonially and surrounded by his subordinates or accomplices in the priestly racket, as Doody mentally labeled them. The shriveled little dogman advanced to a point where he could command the attention of the whole great crescent of villagers ranged about the southern border of the square; then, flinging his two skinny arms on high, he cried in a loud and penetrating voice:

  “Kneel, O Pack! The Man comes!”

  With a combined rustle of ragged garments, the hundreds went down as one to their knees. Their eyes were turned upward eagerly to behold their deity; Doody was close enough to the front rank to see the look they held, rapt, worshipful, and it hit him with a queer nostalgia. He remembered a puppy that had been his when he had been a boy on an Ohio farm—only a spotted mongrel tyke, but a blue-ribbon winner so far as he was concerned.

  Out of the court, as the throng still knelt expectant, was borne Kuvurna, a huge, degraded, pulpy hulk, lolling amid padded cushions, upon a swaying and luxurious litter carried aloft by six strong, sweating priests. A broad, fatuous smile covered his countenance as he fluttered his fat white hands languidly toward the worshiping dog folk, after the manner of a benediction. Doody averted his eyes and resolutely said “No” to his stomach.

  The six priests eased the litter carefully to the bare, dusty ground, its barbarically ornate magnificence contrasting oddly with the naked square, the squalid rags of the onlookers.

  “Arise, O dogs, and hear how justice is to be done! There has come among us a stranger, this person with the queer garments and the black hair, who says that he is a Man. He proclaimed himself as such to some of our hunters; and they, being of the ignorant ones, believed him. But for this they are to be excused on account of their ignorance of the law and the belief.

  “This pretender must be tried according to our laws. The members of the Pack Council will now come forward and take their places at the foot of Kuvurna, in readiness to administer the high justice before all the people.

  “But first I will remind the Council and the Pack that a Man, it is plain, should know a Man and welcome him as a brother; whereas from this who calls himself a Man our lord Kuvurna has turned away his face.”

  The fact that at that precise moment Kuvurna was gazing point-blank at Doody with a fixed and foolish grin, the while he blew small bubbles between his teeth, did not seem to disturb the speaker or his wide-eyed and attentive listeners. For some reason, Doody was reminded of the fact that most primitive idols wear bay windows and vacuous smirks.

  From among the assembled dogmen, a round dozen individuals were wriggling and pushing their respective ways forward, and were beginning to form in a close huddle before Kuvurna’s royal palanquin. This brow-beaten-looking handful must be the council—the rude beginning of a representative form of government, whose scanty influence was vastly overbalanced by that of the priests with their backing of divine omnipotence. They stood, shuffling their feet uneasily and eying Doody with some hostility—the high priest’s statement of Kuvurna’s position on the subject evidently carried much weight with them.

  This Heliogabalus of the dogmen advanced swiftly to confront the “jury,” as Doody’s twentieth-century mind insisted on labeling them. His face was twisted, and his wasted old figure—clad only in a garment which resembled nothing more than a soiled towel wrapped around his waist with ends dangling—quivered with a fierce ecstasy compounded equally of religious fervor and burning hatred. His voice shook with the same feverish intensity, as, with one sidelong glance at Doody, he began in the singsong of one reciting from some ancient and holy record:

  “Before you sit in righteous judgment, O Council of the Pack, I conjure you to remember the true belief, given to our ancestors of old, that the truth might be theirs and their children’s:

  “For Man created the dog in His own image; in the image of Man created He him.

  “And He said to him, be fruitful, and multiply, and cover the Earth, that in all the Earth may the aspect of My face be known, through all the ages of all the time to come.

  “And for all his days shall the dog serve Man, because He created him, who was as the dust of the earth, and without understanding.”

  Doody did not hear the priest’s voice grind on with the rasping indictment. He was lost in a blaze of sudden revelation that was like apotheosis; the lost piece of the great puzzle had been all at once supplied, and now he knew the answer to all his blind questioning.

  His quick mind fitted the jigsaw together, constructed a picture of what had happened thousands of years in the past, when the dogmen had first come into being. Somewhere in the slough of rotting earthman civilization, a fine mind or minds had been born—rising, perhaps for the space of one lifetime only—above the sluggish apathy of degeneration, able to foresee but not to check the oncoming doom.

  Perhaps they had been of the scientist rulers of that latter-day state, with its unlimited technical resources at their disposal. But more probably they had been rebels, daring, audacious.

  They had seen the extinction of humanity approaching; and for man they had made the last great gesture, the passing of the torch—the bestowal of man’s erect form, his wonderful hands, and his immense stored knowledge upon a younger, stronger race.

  What choice more logical for man’s successor tha
n that of man’s age-old, trustworthy companion, the companion who had never forsaken him throughout a long, confused history of fifty thousand years? It had been no magic for the mighty science of that sunset age—to set the dog upon two feet, to alter body and brain and give him speech, to make him—by planned mutations, fine juggling of germ cells—outwardly a human creature. “That in all the Earth may the aspect of My face be known”—when man himself is dead and vanished from the universe.

  Only a short time ago Doody had despised himself for belonging to a species which included such a creature as Kuvurna. But now he felt a brief, warm glow of pride—pride that his race, before it fell utterly, had risen high enough to make its last significant act one of exalted unselfishness and dedication to the hope of a future it would never know.

  “—consider then the facts, O Council, and decide whether this one is not a liar and impostor worthy only of the meanest death!”

  Doody came out of his cosmic reverie in time to hear the close of the high priest’s hysterically vindictive speech. He glanced at the withered little dogman almost in pity, and, with a new understanding, over the jam-packed, breathless crowd which swayed back and forth, straining to catch a glimpse of their god and of the far more godlike prisoner.

  “Prepare for death, stranger,” snarled the priest, advancing to shake a knobby, clenched paw at the object of his hate. “Or perhaps in your ignorance you know no rites of preparation. But die you shall, and soon.”

  Doody ignored his fury in haughty silence, but his lips half formed the word, “Perhaps.” He meant that to be a big perhaps.

  His gaze fell once more on the dogmen’s witless deity. His lips curled in a mirthless smile which brought shocked surprise into the faces of the watching priests. He was thinking—an activity which, in Doody’s type, usually results in action—and his thought ran thus:

  Humanity, being of sound mind and clear judgment—if only for a briefly lucid flash on the down path of its existence—had made its last will and testament. And the heir apparent of human civilization was not this loathsome last-born of the corrupt old race.

  The council had gone into a deliberative huddle. Kuvurna drowsed in stupid torpor, lulled to a mindless serenity by the rhythm of the wide-headed fans with which his attendants kept the air above him moving. The rest of the assemblage sweltered uncomplainingly beneath the sinking but still blistering sun. A gurgling snore bubbled in him.

  The high priest squatted like a deformed spider beside the litter of his man god, scrawling aimlessly in the dust and muttering to himself, but keeping an unwinking, murderous gaze on Doody. The latter scowled back, then affected a carefree, rakish grin, white teeth flashing in his dark face. It must have nettled the old hellhound considerably, for he bounded suddenly to his feet and whipped round to face the jury in high impatience.

  “You have debated long enough, O Council of the Pack!” he snapped. “Let us hear your judgment upon the impostor!”

  A dogman of more than usually heavy build, with a great red beard that tumbled fanwise over his massive chest, shuffled forward, nodding vigorous and jerky approval of the high priest’s words, very like a child who knows he will be slapped if he does not say the right thing. He opened his mouth with diffidence to say the right thing, but Doody broke in.

  “Hold on a minute!” he exploded, half enraged, half amused. “Am I to have no chance to speak in my own defense?”

  The high priest whirled wrathfully, stood rigid for a moment, his skinny body vibrating like a tuning fork with the intensity of his passion. When he spoke, though, his voice had the quiet deadliness of a bushmaster’s hiss. “Speak, then!”

  “Very well, I will speak—and I have plenty to say,” said Doody softly, and the amusement in his voice was genuine, if bitter. His hand had slipped unnoticed inside his coat and had closed on something there. He raised his voice, made it carry to the massed hundreds of the dogmen, silent and patient under the burning afternoon sun: “However, I first wish to state that the question of my human or canine nature is of small importance. There is another issue, though; one of great moment.

  “What should be on trial, her.e and now—as man or dog may plainly see if he is not blinded by superstition or fear or sacerdotal lies—is the right of this bloated, depraved, hydrocephalic idiot who calls himself a Man, or any other like him, to rule over you, O strong young people!

  “Look at him. What is he but a swollen parasite on the community, unable to feed or care for himself? Any of your young warriors, dog or not, is a better man. And I say to you in solemn truth that you are not dogs any longer, for I knew you when you were dogs, and I see that now you have become men!”

  A murmur swept over the crowd and was followed by a rising babble of confusion that became a roar. The dog people surged to and fro, each trying to find room to gesture wildly and expound the revolutionary new idea to his neighbor. Some recoiled, shocked by the mad atheism of Doody’s claims, horrified by the ruthless demolition of cherished tradition. But many of the younger ones grasped at it eagerly, for it went through the blood like a swift fever, a thrilling fever that urged instant action.

  Doody watched, smiling still faintly—triumphantly. He wondered if the world had not lost an excellent firebrand political speaker when he had taken up time exploring. Even now shrill cries were raveling out from the tangle of chaotic hubbub; spears were lifted threateningly above the mob. Even Kuvurna had roused enough to blink incuriously and purse his lips as if in mild disapproval of such behavior.

  But the man god’s high priest was like one possessed as he saw his world rocking and crumbling around him, tottering on the verge of the final clash into oblivion. His face, as he fought his way toward Doody through the surging rabble, was terrible, unhuman. His eyes glared madly, his lips were drawn far back in a frightful snarl to display his long canine teeth. Over the surf roar of the crowd rose his piercing scream:

  “Seize him! Seize the impostor! He is nothing but a dog—a dog who is not faithful! Kill him—eeeyaaaah!”

  The last was a sheer animal shriek of unbearable rage as, with a bronze knife gleaming wickedly in his bony claw, the high priest hurled himself headlong upon Doody. The American wheeled half about to avoid the point and threw a left-handed punch with muscle and weight behind it; the blow collided midway with the dogman’s chin, and each of the two went staggering backward—Doody to make a lightning recovery, the high priest to roll over and over and lie sprawling, a limp bundle under the trampling feet of the crowd.

  Through the milling mob, armed priests were thrusting toward the blasphemer of their faith, while their brethren ringed close about the divine litter, a dangerous cordon. But for the moment a space was clear about the stranger from time; he shook himself and took a deep breath, and then—

  “Of course, I couldn’t stay to see the rest of the show,” said Doody regretfully. “But before I pulled out for the good old twentieth century, I took just time enough to jerk the pin from my emergency Mills bomb and let it fly with three seconds to go. If the old arm hasn’t lost its knack since my baseball days, that hand grenade went squarely into the bulging paunch of the feeble-minded Kuvurna himself.

  “That’s the final argument I mentioned. I hope it did its bit to give the heirs of human civilization a fair start on the Earth. The world is going to the dogs, Johnny, and the sooner it arrives, the better. The dogmen were—are—will be—primitive, of course; but some day they will have progressed sufficiently to decipher the ancient records of stored knowledge, which the lost race has left behind. But I think they will really come into their heritage when they learn to call themselves men.”

  “You were right,” I said, without preamble.

  “Eh?” Doody’s dark eyes opened drowsily; his thoughts might have been far away, down that long road he had journeyed to the dim and far-off time of the dogmen.

  “It makes me—think,” I confessed, studying the white tablecloth beneath the mellow, indirect lighting; but I fancied that I, to
o, could peer a little way into the mist of years. “You’ve followed the human race to its final end—you have yet to find its beginning. Perhaps it is another of the cycles—the beginning and end of the race are the same, and we are only the unknowing heirs of an elder culture—that of the beings men call gods. But somewhere there must be a true beginning—”

  “Somewhere,” said Doody softly, as if the word was. sweet. “Some day. Perhaps I will seek it out—some day.”

  THE END.

  PERIL OF THE BLUE WORLD

  The First Earth Expedition was the scouting force of the conquering Martians. But conditions were totally different from those expected, and science was of no value—for on Earth were “beings” that weapons could not fight.

  THERE are those who have criticized the wisdom of the members of the First Earth Expedition in returning to Mars so precipitately, without completing the observations and explorations which it had been intended they should make. For some time now, we who were with the Expedition and knew the real reason for that return have chosen to ignore these few but noisy individuals; but latterly some of the hot-headed younger generation, but lately out of the egg and unwilling to trust to the wisdom of their elders, have begun to talk of launching a second expedition to the Blue Planet.

  Therefore, I, Shapplo with the Long Proboscis, interpreter to the First Expedition, have been commissioned by the crew of the Earth Rocket to tell the full and unexpurgated story of our adventures on Earth, and the reasons for our contention that the planet must forever remain closed to Martian colonization.

  I will pass over the details of the interplanetary voyage, which consists chiefly of scientific data and figures not calculated to interest the average reader. Suffice it to say that the Earth Rocket, with the twenty-three members of its crew alive and intact, came safely to rest on the crest of a gently-swelling hill in the midst of an island in the northern hemisphere of Earth. This island is located by our astronomers as 1-2-2-(1) North, but is called by its inhabitants, Engelond or Britannia.