Yerk looked with interest upon the captive. “Where are his weapons?” he asked his men, but they could tell him nothing. Yerk repeated the question to Kasson, stumbling in the language of the People.
“I have none,” said Kasson, and it was true; in his long wanderings in the south, he had exhausted the virtue of his magic weapon and had cast it away.
“Liar!” said Yerk and slapped him, not lightly, once on each side of the face. Kasson blinked and set his jaw.
“You are the fool,” he answered stubbornly, “because I have nothing you want.”
“Torture him,” Yerk ordered.
They beat Kasson with the shafts of spears until he fell; then they began making a fire ready, but at that the victim rolled over, shielding his head, and cried, “What do you want?”
Yerk stood over him, grinning. “The gods have weapons. I know, because my great-grandfather talked with a god, and afterwards killed him and took what he possessed. But after a while it did not work any more. Where are your weapons?”
“I have none,” repeated Kasson. But as the hordesman motioned to his helpers, he went on hurriedly, “But I know where the weapons of the gods are hidden.”
“Tell me the place.”
“I cannot tell you, but I can lead you there.”
Yerk considered, then nodded slowly. And to his warriors: “Bind him well, but give him food.”
THREE DAYS later, having burned the villages, trampled the crops, and wrecked the irrigation-system—lest any remnant of the People that might be hiding in the mountains should try to begin again—the brown horde marched once more, this time northward into the high country. They were a nomadic folk, and one way was to them much like another; but this way they had rarely gone before. They, too, feared the giants. But no giant let himself be seen in all the whispering pineland; and Kasson said that they had all died, because they were too large.
That was unintelligible to Yerk; but he thought, with satisfaction, that the giants were really gone, this forest-country with its wealth of game—untouched for so long because of the fear that remained from the old time—would make a fair new home for hm people.
In the evening of the fourth day, Kasson halted. He was gaunt now, covered with bruises from the beatings they had given him in their impatience, and he stumbled frequently; but his sunken eyes burned with a fixed fire.
“What is it?” growled Yerk.
The god pointed. “There.”
It was a cave-mouth on the flank of a mountain that towered above the table-land a mile or more away. The entrance of a very large cave, apparently, but so masked by its union with the natural form of the mountain’s jutting shoulder, and by the new growth of trees that covered it, that they might have marched past many times without seeing it.
Yerk licked suddenly dry Bps. His slitted gaze darted to and fro, seeing the sweat beaded on the coppery faces of his warriors, their awed eyes. He demanded hoarsely, “The gods’ dwelling?”
A sardonic ghost of the old remote amusement passed over Kasson’s haggard face. “There is no one alive there, now,” he said; “the gods are dead.”
Yerk thrust out his chest, gripping his stone-headed ax, bawling orders. A hundred of the horde went with their chief and his prisoner to seek the god-weapons; the rest were to encamp here, to rest from their heavy march and hunt fresh meat.
A roadway, hewn from the living rock by Titanic builders, had slanted up the mountainside. It was ruined now, and the climb was hard; nor did they see any sign that men had passed this way before them. The desertion of the place reassured the men of the horde, as did what they saw when, panting, they reached the top of the ascent: the cave-mouth was carpeted with blown soil and pine needles and fragments of fallen rubble, and no footprint had disturbed it.
AT THEIR leader’s command they lit pinewood torches and ventured into the dank darkness, having first bound Kasson’s hands once more as a precaution. After a dozen steps fear clutched them again, for the smoky glare of the torches showed that the cave was immense, and the form of its interior was disturbingly regular, making them feel that they had stepped out of reality into a fantastic geometric world. Underfoot, beneath the windborne detritus, was a queer surface of uncannily smooth stone.
Out of the shadows loomed a colossal winged shape. Incredibly huger than any bird, it dwarfed the invaders to insect smallness; reflections as of many eyes winked down from its lofty head, and for a moment it seemed swooping . . . But Yerk seized a torch and brandished it on high, shrilling, “Look! Its wing is broken; it is covered with dust; and it does not move! It died long ago!” He wheeled on the fettered god and thrust the flaring pine-knot almost into the bearded face. “Where are the weapons?”
Kasson coughed and jerked his head indicatively toward the darkness of the cavern’s depths. Then, prodded by spears, he led the way. Other weird, unmoving shapes appeared from the gloom, and things flashed like great cats’ eyes or gleamed like ice and fire.
They halted, huddled together, where the roof arched vaulted above them. Here was a row of squat, wheeled platforms, and on some of them lay great cylinders of dully gleaming metal, held in place by metal wedges.
“These are the weapons of the gods,” said Kasson.
Yerk struck him across the face. “Do not lie! How can such things be weapons?” Merely to look at them, it was plain that any number of men would have been unable even to lift one of those things.
Kasson said stolidly, “I will show you how they work; untie my hands.”
“You will tell me how the god-weapons work. Am I a fool?”
“Very well,” answered Kasson wearily. “First, you must turn the round thing at this end. It will come loose, and you will find . . .”
“Shamsh!” snapped Yerk, and a hordesman came shakily forward. “Do as the god directs—and we shall see.” Yerk knew that a weapon does not harm the man who wields it, but he was taking no chances, though his brain was ablaze with eagerness for the power soon to be his.
The dead Kiin might have remembered and understood a saying of his god: “You would not understand such things as weapons . . .”
“Now,” said Kasson quietly, “you must move the little arrowhead until it points straight up, and then . . .”
FOR MILE after mile the great forest was fallen and burning. The remnant of the horde that still lived struggled through a flame-bright hell to escape; now and then one dropped, burned or exhausted, and was hidden by the billowing smoke and buried under the rains of hot ashes and cinders that fell from the sky: and still more perished as the crown-fire overtook them, whipping through the tops of the still standing pines. None survived who had seen the mountain burst asunder and rain earthward again; but some noticed that the felled trees all lay pointing away from the direction in which Yerk had gone with his captive god, and they knew by this sign that it was the vengeance of Kasdon.
In the end, some two hundred won clear and found their way back to the land of their people. Not until much later—in their time-reckoning—could it be known whether these had truly escaped, or if they carried within their bodies the seeds of a new age of change.
And the fiery cloud that had risen from the crucible of Kasson’s last experiment was carried by the prevailing winds far eastward, over the fertile prairie lands, and was washed to the earth by rains.
PROFESSOR SCHLUCKER’S FALLACY
We know a great many mystery novelists, western writers and other purveyors of popular fiction; and in all of these circles “a young writer” is anyone under 30. In the “serious” novel, youth extends to at least $9; a biographer or historian is considered young in his 40’s; and an erudite academician may well be looked on as one of the younger men up until his retirement age. But science fiction is different; here it almost seems as if a man who reaches voting age without having published is hopelessly retarded. Robert Abernathy, true to this tradition, was born in 1924 and sold his first story in 1941; what’s more, it proved to be a minor classic: Peril o
f the Blue World, one of the cleverest of all alien-invasion variants. He’s written disappointingly little since then, choosing to fiddle away his time on such trivial pastimes as taking a Harvard Ph.D. in Slavic Linguistics; but it’s good news that he’s now back in production again, with the same wit, ingenuity and readability plus (now that he’s reached the venerable age of 2.9) a broader knowledge of human mores. Particularly, of course, the singular mores of Ph.D.’s and other denizens of Academe, whose foibles he now sets before you with a fine absurd logic.
PROFESSOR WOLFGANG SCHLUCKER was entertaining a fallacy—an amusement in which Professors of Philosophy occasionally indulge.
“Have a spot of tea,” said the Professor.
“Don’t mind if I do,” said the fallacy.
It thrust its proboscis into the teapot and slurped noisily. The Professor regarded it with undisguised loathing. “Beg pardon,” he said, “but I don’t think I caught the name.”
“I,” said the fallacy, shrugging its eyestalks deprecatingly, “am a fallacy of extrapolation. See?” It extrapolated its fourth arm across the room and seized a handful of the Professor’s cigars from the mantelpiece, where he had thought they were safe.
“That’s not what I meant,” said the Professor testily. “Can you prove yourself inductively?”
“Nothing simpler,” declared the fallacy, lighting cigars and puffing until it resembled an old-time ship of the line firing broadsides. “Statistics show that, during a period of 50 years, the average height of college entrants increased by 3 per cent. Ergo, the class of 2510 will average eight feet one inch in height; and by the year 3000 the incoming crop of freshmen will be upwards of eleven feet tall.”
“Ha!” said the Professor, a crafty light coming into his eyes. If the fallacy had only been better acquainted with him, it would have thought twice before slurping his tea and looting his humidor. Professor Schlucker was renowned as an almost morbidly vindictive man. Not long since he had taken a peculiar and nerve-racking revenge upon a colleague who had poked fun at his criticism of Hegel: secretly obtaining a photograph of this person—a mild, bespectacled introvert—he made a great many copies in the University print shop, captioning them wanted and appending a catalog of crimes ranging from bigamy to stagecoach robbery. These Schlucker surreptitiously tacked up in the local post offices; since then the unfortunate scholar had been picked up and grilled by the police every time he went to mail a letter.
On another occasion, Schlucker had demolished a rival by smuggling excerpts from the Marquis de Sade into the other’s lecture notes for a class in Moral Philosophy. By the time the victim discovered what had happened, the lecture had already been recorded in 32 students’ notebooks, and it was impossible to avert a scandal of seismic proportions.
But the fallacy did not know with what manner of man it had to deal. It smirked in fancied invulnerability, secure in the knowledge that its motley hide was syllogism-proof.
“Shall we take a turn in the fresh air?” suggested the Professor innocently.
The two of them strolled arm in arm across the campus; the Professor steered a seemingly aimless course, past the library, past the fishpond, toward the Physics building.
A buxom coed, walking with a scrawny freshman (5′ 9″), met them and greeted, “Hi, Muscles.” She was not wearing her glasses, to avoid spoiling the view, and to her blurred vision there was something fetching about the fallacy’s supernumerary arms. The fallacy leered back at her and extrapolated a curve. The coed squeaked, “Quit that!” and slapped the freshman, who tumbled into the adjacent fishpond, whence he was seined out by a brace of upperclassmen and fined for violation of Tradition No. 325, passed the previous afternoon, forbidding freshmen to swim in the pond with their clothes on.
Meanwhile Professor Schlucker strode on his way oblivious, busily plotting the downfall of the fallacy trotting beside him.
His awareness that fallacies can be dangerous when roused did not deter him; danger was to him a heady drink. He thought with scorn of his acquaintances in the natural sciences; smugly entrenched in their stodgy world of fissionable nuclei, plasmagene mutations, neuroses and supernovae, they little knew the perils of metaphysics. . . . For example, there was the case of poor old Meerkat, who after 40 years of intensive deduction had arrived at a conclusive disproof of his own existence and had disappeared before he was able to publish, together with all records and memories pertaining to him. How Professor Schlucker knew of this incident is a mystery.
However, physical scientists sometimes have their uses, and this was such a time. Professor Schlucker paused in front of the Physics building. With a nonchalant air he struck a match on the statue of Lambert Bisley, the University’s founder, and lit a cigar. Then he took a firm grip on his fallacy.
“Come on up,” he urged ingratiatingly. “I want you to meet a friend of mine.”
They entered the Physics laboratory. Professor Hornbeam, head of the department, looked up from the corner bench where he was tinkering with the wiring of his time machine.
“Oh, hello, Wolfgang,” he greeted. He blinked uncertainly at the fallacy’s anomalous protuberances. “Didn’t know you were married, old man.”
“I’m not,” said Professor Schlucker. “This is a fallacy of mine. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to use your apparatus for a few minutes.”
“By all means,” Professor Hornbeam assented happily. He plugged in the device and watched ecstatically as its tubes warmed up.
“Allow me to introduce myself,” said the fallacy. “During one half century the average height of college freshmen increased by a factor of .03. Ergo—”
“If you’re going to be sick,” said the physicist hastily, “please go outside.”
The fallacy sulked. In the meantime, Professor Schlucker had cunningly made fast all the doors and windows of the laboratory. He faced the fallacy in triumph.
“Got you!” he sneered. “I purposely neglected to tell you that Professor Hornbeam here has just perfected his time machine!”
The fallacy blenched; its eyestalks swiveled wildly in search of an exit. It was trapped.
“No!” it shrieked. “Not that!”
“What’s the matter?” queried Professor Hornbeam.
“According to this preposterous proposition,” explained Professor Schlucker, “the freshman class of the year 3000 will average eleven feet tall. I intend to send it bodily into the year 3000. Arriving there, it will be confronted by empirical evidence—and it will automatically become an exploded fallacy.”
But while the philosopher gloated, the desperate fallacy had stealthily extrapolated two yards of ankle. Abruptly it tripped Professor Schlucker so that he toppled backward into the operating field of the time machine, and simultaneously, with an extrapolated arm, it threw the sending switch.
With a gulping sound like that of an uprooted quahaug, the Professor vanished.
Professor Hornbeam pulled worriedly at his lower lip. “I didn’t think he was going,” he said.
“Neither did he,” said the fallacy gleefully.
“But he can’t ever get back,” the physicist pointed out. “Since g = k (t1 – t0), a time machine can only work one way.”
“Yes,” said the fallacy, stretching luxuriously. “Ain’t nature grand?”
Professor Schlucker arose from the greensward where he had landed. He brushed himself and looked around. He was glad to see that at least he was still on the campus, and that the University, thanks to its mellow traditions and lack of funds, was but little changed in the year 3000; but he was acutely conscious of his predicament.
He stood on tiptoe to pluck at the sleeve of a passing freshman. “Excuse me,” said the Professor, “but can you tell me—You see, I’m from 1953, and I’d like—”
“You want to see the Counselor for Temporal Maladjustment,” said the freshman promptly. “Past those trees yonder—second quonset from the end.” Without waiting for thanks, he stilted off, stepping carefully over the hedge
s in his path.
Professor Schlucker set out in the direction indicated, apprehensively dodging hurrying students. He was relieved to note that, though the members of the incoming class towered precisely as his fallacy had predicted, the sophomores rarely topped nine feet, the juniors were still smaller, and the seniors were generally under six feet tall; evidently the Faculty still knew how to cut them down to size in four years.
A little bitterly, he reflected that if he had been able to afford a television set on a Professor’s salary, he would not have spent the afternoon entertaining a fallacy, and none of this would have happened.
The Counselor for Temporal Maladjustment was a wizened, rapid little man. “Yes? Yes?” he snapped. “What can I do for you, sir?”
“I seem,” said Professor Schlucker, “to be badly maladjusted in a temporal sense—”
“One moment!” said the Counselor briskly. He scribbled illegibly on a slip of paper and extended it to the visitor. “This prescription will fix you up. Get it filled and use as directed. Good day, sir.”
A little dazed, the Professor stumbled out with the prescription clutched in his hand. Ten minutes later he was back, angrily brandishing a box of pills.
He snorted, “According to the directions, these pills will produce suspended animation for periods of from 10 to 10,000 years as desired. Now what—”
“Isn’t that what you wanted?” said the Counselor. “If you’re maladjusted in the present era, you have your choice of any number of future periods.”
“But I,” said Professor Schlucker, “came here via time machine from 1953, and I want to get back!”
“Dear me!” The Counselor for Temporal Maladjustment looked dashed. “That’s impossible; ever since Hornbeam’s pioneer researches, everybody has known that time travel only works one way. . . .” Suddenly the Counselor snapped his fingers. “But now that I remember, we have a graduate student, a bright young fellow named Smith or Jones, who’s making a study of Hornbeam’s original equations. If anybody can understand your problem, he can.”
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 50
