by Jerry
Coyne when, halfway down the room, something moved.
Indistinct at first—then it was an animal, a dog. It got to its feet, stood wavering, then staggered forward. Blindly it dashed head-on against the wall and crumpled again to the floor. Its body was a clotted mass—horrible! Coyne saw it—then the man-things, little and beastly, came.
Singly at first, then in a rush of dwarfed bodies, they darted in, tearing at raw flesh, leaping back, shrieking their delight at each sudden spurt of blood. The tortured creature gave a shuddering cry that tore Coyne from the utter horror that had frozen him. An instant later he was among the swarm intent upon the ghastly play.
His hands closed upon one of them. He swung the screaming thing in his two hands as if it had been a club. He cleared a space above the quivering body on the floor and at last flung his living weapon into the faces about him.
“You damned little beastly apes!” The words grated through his set teeth. “How could evolution have ever produced——” Then he was stooping above their victim. Only kindness was in his hands as they brought quick death.
SHRIEKS of rage made pandemonium about him. “Zeeten!” was the cry. “Zeeten!” Suddenly the uproar stilled. In the grillwork at the front of the cell a door crashed open. The big she that had captured him was entering. “Zeeten!” her great voice roared.
She loomed hugely through the soft violet haze. She was taller by two feet than the ones in the outer room. But Coyne’s whole attention went suddenly to something she held in her hand—a silver ball. From it a short rod projected. On the end of the rod was a disk.
The pack was swarming about her. “The brant!” they screamed. “Zeeten—the brant!” She sent them sprawling with one quick sweep; then she came toward Coyne.
Coyne backed slowly away. What new horror was this—a silver ball, and a disk on a short rod?
She held it before her as she came on. She did not rush him; she only followed while he retreated down the cell. He came to the end wall. Another grilled door was set in it. He felt the metal pressing against his back.
The big beast came close. For the first time Coyne saw her clearly—saw on the muscles of one arm a brand. And, with that, he knew the meaning of the cries.
A letter and a number—Z-10. It was seared on her left arm. And the man-things—the same mark was on them. Coyne’s eyes came swiftly back to the silver ball and the disk.
The disk had grown red. It changed from red to orange; then it was white hot. In dazzling fire he read the inscription: a circle, and in it, reversed, Z-10. It was the brand of this beast and her own pack.
He read more in the same instant. Here was the answer to his questions. She had saved him for herself; he was to be branded with her mark, held here as a slave—or as a mate for this hideous thing.
She was close, her ugly features contorted. Instantly, too swiftly for his eyelids to guard, she thrust the white-hot brand once at each eye. Heat seared his eyeballs, though the deadly thing did not touch him. But in that fraction of a second, while his eyes stung with the heat, Coyne saw a vision of himself as he would be.
Blinded, helpless, he would lie on that filth-strewn floor struggling vainly. The man-pack would be tearing at him. Not killing him—he would be praying only to die. They would torture him as that animal had been tortured! He got it all while the hot disk stabbed twice—then it was lowered.
He had flung his left hand to his face. The monstrous thing whose gross body towered above him tore back the gold cloth from his arm. Coyne, trying to tear his eyes away, could see nothing but the brand. He saw it move forward. He felt the sear of it as it came close. The big beast was stooping. Suddenly Coyne drove his right fist squarely between the little savage slitted eyes.
He knew it was hopeless; knew that he didn’t have a chance. He wondered dully, as his blow smashed home, at the beast’s shrill scream of fear—wondered, too, as the violet light enshrouding them changed to blazing fiery red.
The red light came from behind him. It showed the body of Z-10 as she fell in a paroxysm of pain. She pitched convulsively toward him with the brand still in her hand. Her weight was behind it as it plunged against Coyne’s bared arm—the smoke of his burning flesh was a quick spurt of gray.
But Coyne never felt it. He could not. His whole conscious mind was too stunned by a new miracle.
The red light flooding the room, the big beast and her loathsome pack in convulsions on the floor—all this was wonder enough. But Coyne, clinging to the grilled door with his right hand, had swung himself about. He was looking at the flaming spark from which the red light came. And, seeing beyond it, he was staring in total unbelief at the figure of a girl.
He was half blinded by the glare, and still he could see her holding the light. She was tall, slender; a robe of blue metal cloth clung to her body in flowing curves; below the dazzling point of light a bare suntanned leg extended; above the light was one glimpse of a rounded breast and her face, white and bloodless in the red glow.
She stood poised as if still running. Her lips were parted. She said suddenly in a voice warm and human and vibrant with indignation: “The homoid brand—on a man! You beast—you beast!” Then her eyes met Coyne’s.
Dark eyes and lovely, dark as the waving tendrils that curled about her face. Her eyes locked with Coyne’s—held him. Her cheeks, her whole face, flushed swiftly.
Coyne’s voice was hard to manage. He said gaspingly: “A woman—a girl—here! And that means there——”
But the full meaning was too much for mere words. Coyne threw his whole weight against the grilled door.
VI.
IT WAS the girl, touching some hidden release, who opened the door. Coyne stumbled through, but he clung to the bronze while his knees sagged. To find human companionship when he had abandoned all hope was unnerving.
The girl came close. She still held the little silvered rod whose end made a point of flaming red, but her other arm went about Coyne to steady him. Her own body, warmly vital, pressed against him, supporting him. She said in a voice that was tremulous with amazement:
“But—but we thought, I and my people, that we were the only ones—we thought there were only the homoids left. The homoids captured you, but—but where are you from?”
Coyne could only say haltingly: “Homoids! Beasts like men! But your people—there are others—and you——” The lovely oval of her face was close to his; her eyes were tender with compassion.
Back of him in the cell hideous things screamed and writhed or stumbled to their feet and ran. Beyond, in the great hall, was pandemonium of shouting and shrieks.
“Zeeten! Zeeten! Kill!——” But Coyne, looking only at the girl beside him, hearing only the echo of her voice, said again: “And you are——”
She drew away. Again her face was flushed. She said gravely: “I am Lorell. I came from far away. I saw the great sphere fall. Always my people have said that some day it would fall, then Koh-een would wake and save us. Tell me—have you seen Koh-een?”
“Koh-een——” Coyne fumbled for a minute before he got her meaning. “You mean Coyne? I was in the sphere. I’ve been there a thousand years and more. I am Coyne.”
She tore herself away from him. The silver pencil with its blazing tip fell from her nerveless fingers and clattered upon the hard floor. The red light suddenly was gone, and once more only the violet haze filled all the rooms. The girl was wide-eyed with unbelief—then she must have known. She flung herself at his feet, and her hands pressed to edge of his golden robe to her lips. Half fearfully she raised her face.
“Koh-een!” She only breathed it. “You are Koh-een, the one who sleeps! And you have come to save us!”
From the cell and the greater hall beyond, the cries that had never ceased rose to a din of savage rage. Great bare feet, thudding on the floor, made an endless rushing roar. And the red light was gone! Coyne moved swiftly.
He swept the girl to her feet. In the same motion he forced his left hand to snatch u
p the little silver device, though the burn on that arm was a living pain. He held the girl to him with sudden strength.
“I’m Coyne,” he said, “but, as for saving you, those devils will tear us in two. The light’s broken. Come on——”
He half carried her with his one arm as they raced away down an unfamiliar corridor; then the girl sprang ahead and gathered her blue robe about her. Her slender legs were tireless; her sandals twinkled as she ran.
She called back: “Come, Koh-een; I know the way.”
The corridor seemed endless. Death, coming on thudding feet, was at their backs. Lorell turned, dashed down a branching hallway to a smaller room, then into another passage. But the floor of this slanted upward, curving upon itself in a great spiral.
The girl stopped suddenly. “I am lost!” she gasped. “I did not—come this—way!”
Coyne was still holding the silver rod. The homoids might not know it was useless; it might hold them off. He reached for Lorell’s hand and ran on. “There’s only one way to go,” he panted; “that’s ahead.”
THE SPIRAL ramp led always up. It cut through hallways with interminable rows of rooms; floor after floor was left behind. The violet light had changed to a mellow golden glow shining from inlays in the walls when a burst of savage sound from the floor above showed that they were cut off. Behind them the spiral passage echoed to pounding feet and snarling calls. Beside them a wide corridor offered one chance of escape; then even that last avenue was blocked as naked near-human things with mottled-brown bodies leaped into view far down the hall.
Coyne, panting, staggering with weariness, half fell against a wall. Lorell stood looking at him. Hopelessness was in her eyes and the droop of her lips; yet somehow she still hoped. Coyne read it in her look. To her he was Koh-een; surely Koh-een could save them.
Somehow he threw himself from the wall. He gripped at her shoulder. Twenty feet away down the corridor a door hung open half torn from its hinges. “Come on—quick!” he said. Then they were in the room.
He did not try to close the door, hopelessly jammed with debris. He stopped dead, saw there was no other exit, then shot one swift despairing glance about.
He was in a laboratory. Sunlight flooded in through sheets of glass in the wall. It shone on dust-covered equipment, on twisted coils, intricate apparatus of pure platinum; it showed disorder everywhere: even the tables were overthrown. But, against one wall, on serried shelves, objects which struck a familiar chord in Coyne’s mind were untouched.
Flasks! One or two had been smashed on the floor; after that the rest had been left undisturbed. Coyne’s hands were on them in an instant; he whirled with a flask in each hand.
The doorway was a solid mass of jammed bodies; the room seemed bursting with the clamor of their cries.
Coyne shouted to the girl: “Get back! Come back here!” then hurled the flasks.
Fighting, screaming things spewed in from the door. Coyne took the reagents as they came. No time for choice. His hands flashed. Flasks crashed in rapid succession on walls and floor. One broke squarely against the nearest homoid beast not ten feet away. Then smoke came.
Brown and gray clouds! They made writhing misty folds about the homoids. Coyne got one strangling whiff as the girl reached his side. He choked:
“Hydrofluoric—bromine—Heaven knows what else! A window—quick!”
Lorell bent over suddenly. A wisp of brown haze had blown near; she was strangling. Coyne reached for an autoclave on the floor. He raised it, hurled it through a window, then dragged the girl with him as he staggered away. Then, after a long minute, still gasping, still choking, his throat cramped and afire, he felt a blast of pure air.
He turned after a time. Lorell, trembling, one hand pressed to her throat, was able to stand. Coyne stared at the heaped bodies in the door where eddying fumes still blew out into the corridor. Out there the clamor had changed; choking cries; strangling, horrible sounds; running feet, pounding away—then silence.
Coyne said soberly: “That was damnable—but it had to be done. I think there was hydrocyanic in one flask.” Then he turned back to the shattered window.
Roofs, in a flat expanse, were far below; there was no escape there. Coyne saw great metal arms that lay opened as if waiting some huge thing that they might embrace—waiting, after uncounted years. Others were closed about shining, cylindrical shells. Platforms were near. There were giant metal grids and great silvery spheres above them. Gleaming signal lamps caught the sun like great empty eyes. One battery of them still blazed; even in the full sunlight the shafts of red and orange and green light were thrown upward like vivid flames.
But wreckage covered it all; Coyne passed it by—for beyond it all, out where the buildings ended about a great open space, was a marble hill; and on its top rested the sphere.
The sphere! A hiding place! Sanctuary was there, safety for a few hours however brief. He saw it so plainly. Then, swarming in the avenues, racing across the slender fairy spans, were innumerable homoid shapes. She-things! Beasts! They were searching everywhere, hunting, hunting. They were between him and the sphere.
VII.
UNTIL the coming of Lorell, Coyne had been living in a dream. Nightmare things had beset him; danger had threatened mysteriously on every hand. Now it was different. And most amazing of all was the ease with which he accepted it.
The past was gone; it was almost forgotten, so keen was the reality of this new life. But this was two days later when he and Lorell had left the city behind them and were following a great highway almost buried under encroaching vegetation.
The two days had not been pleasant. Only the food tablets that Lorell found had kept the two alive while they ran and hid and escaped death a score of times—mere hunted things, living only from one moment to the next.
But, at last, deep in a maze of subways, Lorell had said: “This way I came, Koh-een. Now, I think, we are saved.” Then, stumbling through the dark, clambering through stalled cars, dimly lighted, in which mummified figures of men and women lay grotesquely, they had emerged where the subway became a skeleton tube close by a highway.
The reality of it all no longer stunned. It was uplifting, glorious. The sun shone; they were traversing a world gone back to primitive wildness; this girl, Lorell, was beside him. And ahead But——Coyne could not quite imagine that.
“The mountains,” Lorell explained—her accent was oddly fascinating; she stressed the wrong syllable at times; her speech, while understandable, was a delightful departure from the language Coyne had known—“my people live in the mountains. Beautiful mountains, too big for even the homoids to climb, but we know the way.”
Coyne wondered about those mountains; he wondered still more when their cloud-wrapped crags same in sight. This was only four days’ travel from New York. He scowled in perplexity until Lorell repeated what, to her, were mere legends. Slowly Coyne got the picture of what had been
A merging of nations into two great races, each covering half the Earth. In the two Americas had been people like himself and Lorell. But in the eastern hemisphere an
Oriental race had overrun the lands. There had been wars, with armadas darkening the skies, then ripping that darkness to crashing, rending flame—until wars were impossible since each half of the globe was impregnable. Then catastrophe had altered this equilibrium of power.
In North America—Coyne placed it all in his own words although Lorell used other names—earthquakes had brought devastation. Mountains grew overnight; the ocean swept in. And, when it receded and the earth quieted, only a fragment of the white race remained. Then the Orientals had come.
Men like Tahgor, cold, brilliant scientists, cruel and heartless. They had destroyed; then they had rebuilt. When they were through only scattered bands of humanity whose skins were white instead of yellow were left in isolated parts. Contemptible bands, merely hunted for sport. And then, after many years, Tahgor’s race had gone.
“The purple death,” Lorell said, as
if this explained all.
Coyne said softly: “A thousand years!” Much had happened in a thousand years. Then he demanded; “But the homoids—what of them?”
But here was something Lorell could not explain. The homoids had always been; they were the slaves, the workers; and they had carried the purple death although they were themselves immune.
She was leading over slopes that seemed impassible; she found narrow passes that led through to more rock-strewn, rugged slopes waiting to be scaled. And, at last, a valley, hidden deep in the mountain ranges, lay before Coyne’s eyes.
A little lake took the blue of the sky and became a sparkling gem in a setting of green fields. On its shore, heaps of twisted metal, like wreckage of airplanes, glinted in the sun. Squares of brown meant tilled soil; rude huts were scattered among them. Coyne, looking down from the last high pass in the surrounding cliffs, could even see tiny figures moving here and there. Suddenly it came to him that he was looking upon what was perhaps the last of his own race.
Lorell said timidly: “It is home, Koh-een; it is all we have. While Tahgor lived our fathers’ fathers dwelt in caves—you can see the openings in the cliffs—but we have done better. Now, with you to teach us, who knows what we will do?”
Coyne said softly: “Who knows!”
His eyes were on the moving figures. Abruptly he saw no longer a dying race but the nucleus of the race to come. Under his guidance, with what he could learn and teach them in turn, what could they not do? They could reclaim the world for humanity, no less!
He still spoke softly, almost humbly: “Yes, Lorell; I will teach you. Whatever ability I have has been brought forward a thousand years for just that, it seems.”
“If only the homoids do not find
Some sound, almost unheard, must have flashed the fear to Lorell’s mind. Her words were bitten off by a scream from the narrow pass at their backs. Coyne, whirling, knew what it was; no other beast had screamed exactly as had Z-10.
