by Emil Petaja
“Fight him!” Carl cried out aloud.
“H-how?"
“With what he wants—your mind power."
“But we're so weak compared to-"
Hiisi was growing, expanding, pulling the energy out of their minds, feeding on Silia's wild panic. Carl felt a draining pull from him, too. He resisted; he began to know true fear.
Hiisi spoke:
“You have guessed well, earth-mind. Yes, we are old. So old that the histories of all your terran civilizations are but a bubble in the time stream. But you are wrong; your hope misleads you to say that my mental contact with your planet has been cut. Your Psych-Head is frail and stupid. Your people have been taught a gospel of weakness, and they have become like vegetables.
“Yet there were those among them who rebelled from the Psych-Head doctrines. They fought! They actually fought! And in the scramble of battle many of the carefully shielded warehouses with the Finnish Rare Earth in them were broken into. The results were glorious! Never has Hiisi eaten so well!
“My rebellion is leading to open war. The placid sheep have learned to hate and fear and fight again! Before it is over your planet will be a mindless ball spinning around its minor sun. Even-"
Hiisi's voice stopped short, but Carl's thrill of anguish for his world made him unaware for the moment. All his bursting brain could think of was that Earth—beautiful, foolish, battered-by-war Earth—was about to lose its finest achievement: Man. The Third Atomic War had frightened humankind into becoming no more than a great culture of admitted psychotics, to be spoon fed by Psych-Head until they recovered from their hostility syndromes toward one another. It was understandable that Psych-Head had overwritten its part in the recovery. The pendulum had swung too far in the other direction. Yet, this, too, was temporary. As mankind recovered, the overbalance would be corrected. The other planets of the Sol system were too unlike Earth to handle the overpopulation, but the stars still beckoned.
The stars would never know human laughter. Hiisi, the mind-eater, was even now ravishing the green planet. The human mind, nurtured and taught and expanded to soaring heights of technical and artistic achievement, was nothing but food for the predators, for Hiisi, fuel power for his monstrous crusade of devouring the mind-power of every planet he touched.
Carl's soul shriveled up in defeat. Psych-Head had looked to him to find the answer. Dr. Enoch had said: You must be heroic as were the great legendary slayers of Evil-you must cast out all trace of timidity and fear. You must not allow for the possibility of failure. YOU MUST BELIEVE! That was the key. Belief.
But ... how, against this enormously powerful mind? How could he, Carl Lempi, with his pitiful esp-emp that Psych-Head had relied on-How could he, alone?...
“That's it!” he cried. “Not alone-!"
Silia was sobbing; the effort to resist having her mind sucked into the thing suspended above them was too much.
“I can't-"
“Yes, you can!” Carl thrust the thought into her like a cruel sword. “Wait! Think of the Finnish songs! The runic patterns. Speak them, out loud! Hold on to your mind! Speak the vibratory word patterns!"
It was as if Hiisi rumbled with laughter. Carl knew why. Every moment Hiisi was becoming stronger from the mind power he was draining out of the warring humans in their confusion and panic brought on by the suicides. Mere word patterns might protect on the tundras of Lapland, fend him off if only by the implicit belief that they would. Not here. Not in Tuonela. This was Hiisi's dark domain from which no one could ever return.
“Ilmatar!” Carl cried out. “Help us!"
Nothing. The Creatrix of the Universe had forsaken Carl's alter-ego, Lemminkainen.
Carl shook a look at Silia. Her eyes were closed and her lips were moving grimly over the Suomi songs against evil. At least it was an evasive action. It kept Hiisi from overwhelming her panicked mind as he overwhelmed the unwary terran suicides.
A contact. Like Hiisi, himself, Carl must have a contact point. Something out of Earth.
He whipped off his glove, scrambled out the light-rod. He gripped it fiercely.
“Ilmatar! Ilmarinen! Vainomoinen!"
Hiisi gave an animal growl; Carl felt him move down in a great crimson-black cloud. But now the hint of fear Carl had esped before was palpable. Hiisi must take him now!
Carl felt the sweat pour off his forehead into his eyes, down his long body muscles. It was like being in a sauna. “No,” he told himself. “You can't have my mind. We won't let you!"
We.
“Lemminkainen! My golden apple!” Ilmatar's lilting voice thrust through the vortex, through the black shell, through Hiisi's ravenings.
“I am here, friend Lemminkainen!” said the red bearded wondersmith.
“I, too,” said Vainomoinen, the great wizard. “Hiisi tried to take me, as he is trying to take you. But I would not let him. My magic was strong. The best Hiisi could do was scatter my mind power and chain it in the black walls of this cursed city-ship. You have enabled me to put my mind back into one piece, with your belief."
“Wonderful!” Ilmarinen cried. “Here we are again, we three heroes! The greatest heroes the world has ever known!"
Hiisi threshed the air above them by his wild anger.
“It is not enough!” he mocked.
Carl gasped. Then, when the black clouds enveloped his mind and started to squeeze out all recognition of his heroic friends and of Ilmatar, he knew Hiisi was right.
It wasn't enough. Hiisi had become too strong. He had fed too well on helpless Earth minds.
“Ilmatar!” he cried out. “What can I do?"
“You know, my beautiful golden apple. Seek back in your mind. Far back."
With all the will be possessed, Carl kept Hiisi at bay. He thought. And then he knew. He called and called. It was like a great chain reaction, and it all spilled from his high-esp mind. All the genetic strength, all of the implacable belief of his ancestors since before the Great Bear—all this, and the gods in which they believed. All crowded into his mind: the entirety of a great People.
It was as if all of this believing power was made physically present by the kinetic strength of this vast army. They crowded the black city. Their broadswords rattled. Plow on shoulder, fishnet swishing carelessly behind, songs spilling out and symphonies thundering courage and trust, they came.
Carl felt himself grow tall with bursting pride.
Little Aiile was there. Tuuri and the people of Imari. All determined, believing fast in the shining truth their legends had given them.
“We must destroy Hiisi,” Carl told them. “He has plagued our world twice. He must not, again."
“Ai!” agreed Vainomoinen and Ilmarinen, together.
The minds moved in as one.
* * * *
He stood with Silia on the barren tundra where yellow flowers waved like bright flags between the patches of melting snow. Dawn was like a forever thing, a radiance of dazzling color, as the sun skimmed up over the rim of dark pines at the eastern horizon.
“Did we ... they..."
Carl's arm circled her shoulder. He smiled. “Yes, we ... they did. The power to defeat even Hiisi was there, and is there again, if we need it. It needs only concerted belief in the final infallibility of the human mind to bring it crashing into action."
“Where are we?"
Carl surveyed the arch of blue sky and the snow dunes and woods with glad eyes. “Back where we first lost contact with each other and stepped into legend. See!” Above them Virokannas, the eagle, made slow circles, then swooped down to them, crying his harsh atonal greeting. “He will guide us back to Ilmar and the world."
THE END
(The saga of the descendents of the four legendary Finnish heroes against the Pahaliset continues in The Cosmic Kalevala Book Two, when scientist-sorcerer Ilmarinen's future incarnation must challenge the mighty Star Witch, Louhi, to save the universe from “The Star Mill” his own greatest masterwork, which she has stolen and per
verted so that it is destroying the very fabric of space and time.)
* * *
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AWARD WINNING & NOMINEE STORIES AND AUTHORS
People of the Darkness-Ross Rocklynne (Nebulas nominee author)
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Women of the Wood and Other Stories-A. Merritt (Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame award)
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A Yank at Valhalla-Edmond Hamilton (Sense of Wonder Award winning author)
STEFAN VUCAK'S EPPIE NOMINEE SPACE OPERA “THE SHADOW GODS SAGA"
In the Shadow of Death
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Dwellers in the Mirage-A. Merritt
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Ghost Hunters and Psychic Detectives: 8 Classic Tales of Sleuthing and the Supernatural-(ed.) J. M. Stine
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Nightmare!-Francis Stevens
Possessed!-Francis Stevens
The Cosmic Wheel-J. D. Crayne
The Forbidden Garden-John Taine
The City at World's End-Edmond Hamilton
The Ghost Pirates-W. H. Hodgson
The House on the Borderland-William Hope Hodgson
The Insidious Fu Manchu-Sax Rohmer
The Interplanetary Huntress-Arthur K. Barnes
The Interplanetary Huntress Returns-Arthur K. Barnes
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Women of the Wood and Other Stories-A. Merritt
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