by Earl
Sharina and Sem Onger sat dumbly through most of the reels, watching trains, autos, aircraft without comment. But when a common two-wheeled bicycle appeared in one scene, they broke out in excited words. It was something they could almost understand. Its motion to them seemed swift and miraculous.
Sharina always stared with pathetic yearning at the women’s clothing shown in the pictures. It was a pitiful manifestation of the eternal feminine, and it summed up in itself the aching absence of the things of civilization.
Old Sem Onger kept shaking his head at what he saw, as though denying the evidence of his eyes. He jumped back half frightened as a city scene showed an elevated train rounding a curve.
“It will fall!” he cried.
“Don’t worry,” admonished Ellory, chuckling. “If it didn’t then, it won’t now.”
He caught his breath. He tried to realize that all this had happened 3000 years ago. That these were nothing but mocking images, ghosts of things that were, caught on a film. That it was all vanished into limbo.
“Ah, there were so many great things in the past!” old Sem Onger sighed. “So many secrets that we can never know, of that time and later. What was the secret, for instance, of that man of 3000 A.D., who wrote at the close of the scientific age?”
Ellory suddenly stopped turning the handle and let the film come to a stop.
“Yes!” he said, realizing that this had been in his subconscious mind all along. What was that secret? Sem Onger, when did you find his original writing?”
“In the ruins of ancient Norak. What did you call it—Noo Yoruk? I have often wandered there, trying to imagine what that great city was like before its fall in 3090 A.D., in some terrible war. The papers seemed to be carefully preserved, in an envelope of gold leaf, among the debris of a stone vault.”
In Ellory’s mind rose a vision of a tiled laboratory. A scientist of the Thirtieth Century had toiled there, had discovered some great thing and then had died with it; but he had left an enigmatic record. It might mean something. It might not.
“Can you find the stone vault again?” Ellory asked.
“Perhaps.”
“Then we’ll make a trip to Norak,” Ellory stated. “I want to see the ruins of New York anyway.”
All that month, Ellory had been thinking deeply, adjusting himself to Fiftieth Century life. He had nourished the thought of doing something for the Fiftieth Century, with his Twentieth-Century knowledge. But where to begin? Perhaps he would find a lead among those ruins, symbol of a greater age, even if the strange scientist’s secret were not found.
“I’m going with you,” Sharina said unexpectedly.
“What?”
Ellory turned a dubious face toward her. “I think you’d better not, angel. Mai Radnor wouldn’t like it—”
“I’m going,” tile girl reiterated. She smiled up at him with all the enigmatic caprice of womankind in any age. “Besides,” she added, half in explanation, “It will be dull up here. Mai Radnor leaves, himself, soon, for the border garrisons in the south. He is war chieftain. There is a rumor of trouble with the Quoise.”
“Wouldn’t your father object?”
“He has told me to treat our guest from the past with the utmost of attention!”
“But still—”
Sem Onger broke in, toothless mouth drawn up in a sly grimace.
“You cannot argue with a woman of our day, Humrelly, any more than you could, I warrant, in your time. Besides, she is a good cook and one gets hungry traveling.”
The next moment his tone changed.
“However, we will not leave till after the visit of the Lords of Antarka. They will come tomorrow.”
Ellory stiffened. “Lords of Antarka—visit? What for? I thought they had nothing to do with the rest of the world?”
“Tomorrow—you will see.”
Ellory could get no more out of them. It seemed a delicate subject, and courtesy forbade too much prying.
CHAPTER VII
THE SLAVES GO FORTH
ELLORY did see. He noticed in the morning, how strangely the atmosphere had changed. The city’s normal activity was suspended. A shroud of silence and gloom lay over the people.
Ellory noticed all this subconsciously. But mainly he thrilled at the thought of seeing these mysterious Lords of an isolated civilization, perhaps talking to them.
Promptly at noon, a great gleaming airship appeared over the city and descended like a mechanical eagle. Banks of underjets drummed out with a steamy hiss, cushioning the fall. Ellory feared a crash, within city limits, but with consummate skill the invisible pilots maneuvered in a glide toward the wide main square before the Royal House.
Rubber-tired wheels touched wooden paving blocks. Forward rockets thundered out and the plane rumbled to a smooth stop within a hundred yards. Its rocket flames died and the ship became quiet.
Ellory stared.
The craft was like a sparkling jewel in the stone-age setting. In contrast to the mechanical perfection of the ship, all the surrounding city faded to a collection of miserable hovels. Ellory tried to be loyal, but he suddenly compared himself to a wanderer among half-savages, about to be rescued and taken back to civilization.
Ellory stepped forward from the Royal House, in company with Sem Onger, following Jon Darm. Back of them came Mai Radnor and Sharina. The city square had been deserted for the landing, but now faces appeared on all sides, from the streets and windows, peering with fascinated eyes at the great plane.
“This is a machine such as you knew, Humrelly?” queried Sem Onger.
“A little more advanced than any we had,” admitted Ellory. “If this ship flies to Antarctica and back non-stop, it’s a marvel to me too. What is its fuel, do you know?”
“Fuel?” echoed the old seer vaguely. “Must a machine have fuel—oh, yes, I had forgotten.” He shrugged. “It probably uses coal,” he hazarded blandly.
Before their party had reached the craft, its occupants stepped out, emerging from a swinging hatch in the enclosed cabin’s side, under the shadow of one huge wing. Three men and a woman.
They were all tall and well built, their garb resplendent in contrast to the rough, drab clothing of Jon Darm’s people. The men wore silken skin-tight trousers, trim jackets of blue velvet, helmetlike hats and boots of shiny patent leather. The woman’s costume differed only in being of more exquisite colors and more flowing lines.
They made a magnificent group, like four regal figures from the pages of an exotic Arabian Nights.
Ellory thrilled. The evidence of the machine was in the weave of the cloth, in the ship, in everything. Civilization! He strode forward eagerly. They bore their title—Lords of Antarka—in manner as well as in dress. Their stares were endowed with a distinctly lordly air that Ellory faintly disliked. But just the same he was on fire to meet and speak to them.
Sem Onger’s bony hand pulled him back.
“Softly, Humrelly. You must not precede Jon Dorm.” He glanced up with a strange grimace. “You will soon enough know what mannered people these are.”
Jon Darm stopped ten feet before the visitors, inclining his head in a deferential gesture which the Antarkans returned only as a brief, haughty nod. Ellory began to sense this was all part of some ceremony. Curbing his impatience, he waited for events to unfold.
He looked the visitors over closely.
BLOND they were, whiter of skin than any humans Ellory had ever seen. Lack of sunlight down in Antarctica, he surmised. Slimly built, finely featured, innately immaculate in poise, it was plain that they led a life of ease, perhaps indolence. They had a China-doll elegance. In contrast, the Stone Age people were hurry, rough-skinned, hardened by open-air labor.
Ellory’s mind weighed these comparisons slowly, without forming a conclusion. Somehow, in the bizarre tableau, he sensed a significant twist in his conception of this queer time, in which the reincarnated Stone Age and post-Twentieth-Century world existed side by side.
Shock f
roze him suddenly, as he gave his close attention to the woman of the party. The shock of incredible beauty.
Almost albino-blond, she was a dream of exotic loveliness. Artful touches of cosmetics outlined half-moon eyebrows and upturned lashes in black, lips in cherry red, cheeks blush-rose against alabaster-white skin. Platinum curls peeped from beneath her helmet and fell in a silvery tide past shell-like ears to her shoulders. Gold and silver threads woven into her dress enhanced the lissome lines of her figure, glinting with each slight movement. A flashing blue diamond, pendant at her soft white throat by a chain of golden filigree, vied with the sparkling blue of her eyes.
By all standards, past, present and future, she was outrageously beautiful. Sharina paled and coarsened beside her.
Ellory’s hand went unconsciously to his bristly chin, which he had never been able to shave cleanly with flint razors, She saw the motion, but her sky-blue, slumbrous eyes flicked past him impersonally. Naturally, in her eyes, he was just another Stone Age primitive. Ellory had to bite his lip to keep from speaking up, to tell them who he was—a man from a civilization comparable to theirs.
Jon Darm spoke, straightening up after his bow. “Welcome, Lords of Antarka!” He turned toward the woman, inclining his head again.
“Lady Ermaine, of Lillamra!”
Ellory’s mind, skilled now in perceiving language relics, translated instantly. Lillamra—Little America. Once the holding of the long-gone United States in that polar land.
“You please me, Jon Darm,” said the woman, her voice bell-like. Although the language was identical to the one Ellory had learned, she used an unfamiliar accent, patrician in quality. “You have a certain grace,” she added, “so lacking in most of these Outland chiefs.”
Her voice, patronizing, became impersonal. “You have the picked ones ready? Bring them forward. Let us not delay.”
Jon Darm waved an arm.
From one of the streets filed ten young men, through a silent crowd, standing before the Antarkans. In build and appearance, revealed by brief garments, they were obviously “picked ones”—tall, lithe and strong.
Ellory’s brows drew together. Something strange and ominous was going on.
The Antarkans looked the ten young stalwarts over, with searching eyes, as they might have looked over a choice breed of cattle. At commend, the young men turned around like mannikins on display, expanding their chests and flexing their muscles. Their faces were expressionless, as were those of the crowd around. It all had the air of something casual, accepted, done a thousand times before.
Ermaine, Lady of Lillamra, consulted in low tones with the three men of her party, then pointed out two of the youths.
“Substitutions!” she said curtly.
One of them had i. small scar on his leg. The other was slightly stooped in posture. They moved away. Jon Darm waved again, and from the same source as before stepped two replacements. Looking these over carefully, the Antarkans nodded.
“They will do, Jon Darm,” said the Lady Ermaine.
She signaled and her companions led the ten picked ones to the rear of the ship, into a roomy space.
THUNDERSTRUCK, Ellory broke from a paralyzed trance. He gripped Sem Onger’s arm fiercely. “What is the meaning of this?” he demanded in a sharp whisper.
“Every ninth month the Lords of Antarka come to take away ten young, able-bodied men, to serve them. They never return. . . . Also stores of food products. These, however, we ship down to them in our sailing vessels.”
Sem Onger said it so expressionlessly that Ellory gasped twice, at that tonelessness as well as the information itself. He looked at the others. Jon Darm stared at the ground, faintly bitter. Mai Radnor’s eyes had just a slight dull anger in them. Sharina alone, by the way she bit her lip, showed other than complete resignation.
“It has been so for a thousand years,” explained Sem Onger, in a guarded whisper. “The Lords of Antarka are powerful. They have metals, science, weapons.”
His voice was still even, unperturbed, as though he spoke of death, or rain, or something equally as unpreventable.
“Outside of that, the Lords of Antarka have nothing to do with us and all the other people of Earth. They do not interfere in our affairs.”
Ellory was still aghast. “Don’t interfere!”
His voice burned with indignation, and complete bewilderment. Taking tribute in lives and products—and they didn’t interfere! How could Jon Darm’s people so dispassionately allow this item of black tyranny to go on? A second count against the Antarkans, in Ellory’s mind, was letting the world go on in Stone Age backwardness, while they had science.
Ellory’s emotions warred. Almost he jumped forward, protesting, but the woman known as Lady Ermaine of Lillamra was speaking again. He paused, waiting to see the whole thing to the end.
“I wish three young girls also this time,” she said imperiously.
Jon Darm made the faintest of grimaces of disappointment, then waved again. Obediently, three young women, at the threshold of womanhood, stood as scantily clad as the young men had, before the Antarkans. The Lady of Lillamra stepped aside with a faint smile, to let her three male companions do the choosing. By their bold, frank visual examination, Ellory guessed the implication.
His fists clenched tightly. One of the girls was rejected, and immediately replaced by another who proved satisfactory to their standards, and all three were led to the ship’s rear compartment, vanishing within.
Humans on an auction block—slave-trade! Without payment, without protest. Ellory once again gripped himself in steel bands of control, as the Lady Ermaine spoke.
“This selection does not seem as choice as the last levy.” She frowned slightly. “See that the next lot is better, Jon Darm.” Her eyes had flicked over Ellory’s tall young frame.
“There,” she pointed. “He is the type we most desire, among the men.”
As if at a cue in a play, Ellory stepped forward, setting himself directly in front of the lovely creature who dealt in such unlovely business. He glared straight into those careless, haughty eyes. “Am I?” he said ironically. “Suppose I didn’t want to go?”
HIS voice cut through the sudden hush air like a thrown knife. He felt Sem Onger’s hand on his arm, tugging him away, but he shook the old seer off with such force that he barely kept his balance.
“Suppose, Lady Ermaine,” Ellory added grimly, “we didn’t want to send any young men and girls with you?”
In one stroke, using the word “we,” Ellory had placed his loyalty with the Stone Age people. A few minutes before he had hoped to establish relations of one sort or another with the Antarkans. Now that the ugly drama of the slave-taking Had unfolded in full detail, he knew he could never ally himself with them.
The Lady of Lillamra was staring at him. Cold, steady eyes looked into his without emotion. The frosty eyes of a superior being who knew her powers and disdained to be angry with those under her.
“Indeed?” The voice was thinly amused. “Those are hazardous words to—”
“I have more to say,” Ellory broke in roughly. All his accumulated rage broke like a dam before a flood. “By what right do you people take slaves?” he stormed. “And those girls—” He choked.
“Slaves? That is a harsh word. Servants, rather. They are treated well. The girls come to like it.” The Lady of Lillamra used a calm, conversational tone.
“As for rights, that is a queer question. What is the wrong of it? For centuries and centuries we have used a few of your people as helpers in our cities. And you supply us with food. We do not interfere otherwise in your affairs. We do not hinder your border wars, or community life. Why should you wish to change our mode of living, as we have ordered it?” Ellory gasped, at the sheer effrontery of it. He was not deceived. The woman’s argument was shallow, unconvincing, designed to soothe a ruffled Stone Age mind, or confuse the issue hopelessly. Behind it, she knew the truth of their position of tyranny. It was apparent in her calcula
ting eyes.
She was watching him closely, waiting for his reaction. Back of her, one of the men slid his hand within his jacket, as though clutching a weapon.
“Steady, Humrelly—danger!” It was Sem Onger’s whisper in his ear.
Ellory clamped down on his anger. He sensed the dangerous ground he was treading on. He was dealing with cold intelligence, not Stone Age simplicity. One more outburst and she might change tactics, condemn him as a radical, command his death. Very likely they were just that high-handed in their domination of these helpless people.
The situation could not be solved in a moment, with hot words. It would take careful thought, this manifestation of an institution a thousand years old.
Ellory shuffled back, simulating embarrassment, easing the taut atmosphere. “Forgive me, Lady of Little America,” he mumbled, turning.
“Wait!”
She stared at him suspiciously. “What did you call me? Who are you?”
“Little America,” he had said, unconsciously using his Twentieth-Century English. Warning lanced into his mind, against revealing his identify.
“Humrelly is my name,” he murmured, in their slurred syllables. “Just a herdsman. I have a defect of speech at times.”
“For a moment,” she said with narrow eyes, “I thought ycu used an ancient accent, as though—but no!” Her face cleared, and she laughed at her own suggestion. “It was a fantastic idea. See that your thoughts about your lords are less violent hereafter, Humrelly the herdsman. Tend your flocks and think not too much of things beyond your station.”
He was dismissed. Inclining his head, he backed away humbly. Within, he burned at her insulting tone.
“The usual supply ship of food products is on its way, Jon Darm? All the inner lands have contributed?”
A slim white hand raised, patting a dainty yawn. It was routine questioning, many times repeated in the past, with always the same answer, from Jon Darm:
