The 35th Golden Age of Science Fiction: Keith Laumer

by Keith Laumer

  I read:

  For the first time, I am afraid. My attempt to construct the communicator called down the Hunters upon me. I made such a shield as I could contrive, and sought their nesting place.

  I came there and it was in that place that I knew of old, and it was no hive, but a pit in the ground, built by men of the Two Worlds. And I would have come into it, but the Hunters swarmed in their multitudes. I fought them and killed many, but at last I fled away. I came to the western shore, and there I hired bold sailors and a poor craft, and set forth.

  In forty-nine days we came to shore in this wilderness, and there were men as from the dawn of time, and I fought them, and when they had learned fear, I lived among them in peace, and the Hunters have not found this place. Now it may be that my saga ends here, but I will do what I am able.

  The Change may soon come upon me; I must prepare for the stranger who will come after me. All that he must know is in these pages. And say I to him:

  Have patience, for the time of this race draws close. Venture not again on the Eastern continent, but wait, for soon the Northern sailors must come in numbers into this wilderness. Seek out their cleverest metal-workers, and when it may be, devise a shield, and only then return to the pit of the Hunters. It lies in the plain, 50/10,000 parts of the girth of this(?) to the west of the Great Chalk Face, and 1470 parts north from the median line, as I reckon. The stones mark it well with the sign of the Two Worlds.

  I looked across at Foster. “It goes on then with a blow-by-blow account of dealings with aborigines. He was trying to get them civilized in a hurry. They figured he was a god and he set them to work building roads and cutting stone and learning mathematics and so on. He was doing all he could to set things up so this stranger who was to follow him would know the score, and carry on the good work.”

  Foster’s eyes were on my face. “What is the nature of the Change he speaks of?”

  “He never says—but I suppose he’s talking about death,” I said. “I don’t know where the stranger is supposed to come from.”

  “Listen to me, Legion,” Foster said. There was a hint of the old anxious look in his eyes. “I think I know what the Change was. I think he knew he would forget—”

  “You’ve got amnesia on the brain, old buddy,” I said.

  “—and the stranger is—himself. A man without a memory.”

  I sat frowning at Foster. “Yeah, maybe,” I said. “Go on.”

  “And he says that all that the stranger needs to know is there—in the book.”

  “Not in the part I decoded,” I said. “He describes how they’re coming along with the road-building job, and how the new mine panned out—but there’s nothing about what the Hunters are, or what had gone on before he tangled with them the first time.”

  “It must be there, Legion; but in the first section, the part written in alien symbols.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But why the hell didn’t he give us a key to that part?”

  “I think he assumed that the stranger—himself—would remember the old writing,” Foster said. “How could he know that it would be forgotten with the rest?”

  “Your guess is as good as any,” I said. “Maybe better; you know how it feels to lose your memory.”

  “But we’ve learned a few things,” Foster said. “The pit of the Hunters—we have the location.”

  “If you call this ‘ten thousand parts to the west of chalk face’ a location,” I said.

  “We know more than that,” Foster said. “He mentions a plain; and it must lie on a continent to the east—”

  “If you assume that he sailed from Europe to America, then the continent to the east would be Europe,” I said. “But maybe he went from Africa to South America, or—”

  “The mention of Northern sailors—that suggests the Vikings—”

  “You seem to know a little history, Foster,” I said. “You’ve got a lot of odd facts tucked away.”

  “We need maps,” Foster said. “We’ll look for a plain near the sea—”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “—and with a formation called a chalk face to the east.”

  “What’s this ‘median line’ business?” I said. “And the bit about ten thousand parts of something?”

  “I don’t know. But we must have maps.”

  “I bought some this afternoon,” I said. “I also got a dime-store globe. I figured we might need them. Let’s get out of this and back to the room, where we can spread out. I know it’s a grim prospect, but.…” I got to my feet, dropped some coins on the oilcloth-covered table, and led the way out.

  It was a short half block to the flea trap we called home. We kept out of it as much as we could, holding our long daily conferences across the street at the Novedades. The roaches scurried as we passed up the dark stairway to our not much brighter room. I crossed to the bureau and opened a drawer.

  “The globe,” Foster said, taking it in his hands. “I wonder if perhaps he meant a ten-thousandth part of the circumference of the earth?”

  “What would he know about—”

  “Disregard the anachronistic aspect of it,” Foster said. “The man who wrote the book knew many things. We’ll have to start with some assumptions. Let’s make the obvious ones: that we’re looking for a plain on the west coast of Europe, lying—” He pulled a chair up to the scabrous table and riffled through to one of my scribbled sheets: “50/10,000s of the circumference of the earth—that would be about 125 miles—west of a chalk formation, and 3675 miles north of a median line.…”

  “Maybe,” I said, “he means the Equator.”

  “Certainly. Why not? That would mean our plain lies on a line through—” he studied the small globe “—Warsaw, and south of Amsterdam.”

  “But this part about a rock outcropping,” I said. “How do we find out if there’s any conspicuous chalk formation around there?”

  “We can consult a geology text. There may be a library in this neighborhood.”

  “The only chalk deposits I ever heard about,” I said, “are the White cliffs of Dover.”

  “White cliffs.…”

  We both reached for the globe at once.

  “One hundred twenty-five miles west of the chalk cliffs,” said Foster. He ran a finger over the globe. “North of London, but south of Birmingham. That puts us reasonably near the sea—”

  “Where’s the atlas?” I said. I rummaged, came up with a cheap tourists’ edition, flipped the pages.

  “Here’s England,” I said. “Now we look for a plain.”

  Foster put a finger on the map. “Here,” he said. “A large plain—called Salisbury.”

  “Large is right,” I said. “It would take years to find a stone cairn on that. We’re getting excited about nothing. We’re looking for a hole in the ground, hundreds of years old—if this lousy notebook means anything—maybe marked with a few stones—in the middle of miles of plain. And it’s all guesswork anyway.…” I took the atlas, turned the page.

  “I don’t know what I expected to get out of decoding those pages,” I said. “But I was hoping for more than this.”

  “I think we should try, Legion,” Foster said. “We can go there, search over the ground. It would be costly, but not impossible. We can start by gathering capital—”

  “Wait a minute, Foster,” I said. I was staring at a larger-scale map showing southern England. Suddenly my heart was thudding. I put a finger on a tiny dot in the center of Salisbury Plain.

  “Six, two and even,” I said. “There’s your Pit of the Hunters.…”

  Foster leaned over, read the fine print.

  “Stonehenge.”

  * * * *

  I read from the encyclopedia page:

  “—this great stone structure, lying on the Plain of Salisbury, Wiltshire, England, is preeminent among megal
ithic monuments of the ancient world. Within a circular ditch 300’ in diameter, stones up to 22’ in height are arranged in concentric circles. The central altar stone, over 16’ long, is approached from the northeast by a broad roadway called the Avenue—”

  “It is not an altar,” said Foster.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because—” Foster frowned. “I know, that’s all.”

  “The journal said the stones were arranged in the sign of the Two Worlds,” I said. “That means the concentric circles, I suppose; the same thing that’s stamped on the cover of the notebook.”

  “And the ring,” Foster said.

  “Let me read the rest: A great sarsen stone stands upright in the Avenue; the axis through the two stones, when erected, pointed directly to the rising of the sun on Midsummer Day. Calculations based on this observation indicate a date of approximately 1600 B.C.

  Foster took the book and I sat on the window sill and looked out at a big Florida moon over the ragged line of roofs with a skinny royal palm sticking up in silhouette. It didn’t look much like the postcard views of Miami. I lit a cigarette and thought about a man who long ago had crossed the North Atlantic in a dragon boat to be a god among the Indians. I wondered where he came from, and what it was he was looking for, and what kept him going in spite of the hell that showed in the spare lines of the journal he kept. If, I reminded myself, he had ever existed.…

  Foster was poring over the book. “Look,” I said. “Let’s get back to earth. We have things to think about, plans to make. The fairy tales can wait until later.”

  “What do you suggest?” Foster said. “That we forget the things you’ve told me, and the things we’ve read here, discard the journal, and abandon the attempt to find the answers?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m no sorehead. Sure, there’s some things here that somebody ought to look into—some day. But right now what I want is the cops off my neck. And I’ve been thinking. I’ll dictate a letter; you write it—your lawyers know your handwriting. Tell them you were on the thin edge of a nervous breakdown—that’s why all the artillery around your house—and you made up your mind suddenly to get away from it all. Tell them you don’t want to be bothered, that’s why you’re travelling incognito, and that the northern mobster that came to see you was just stupid, not a killer. That ought to at least cool off the cops—”

  Foster looked thoughtful. “That’s an excellent suggestion,” he said. “Then we need merely to arrange for passage to England, and proceed with the investigation.”

  “You don’t get the idea,” I said. “You can arrange things by mail so we get our hands on that dough of yours—”

  “Any such attempt would merely bring the police down on us,” Foster said. “You’ve already pointed out the unwisdom of attempting to pass myself off as—myself.”

  “There ought to be a way…” I said.

  “We have only one avenue of inquiry,” Foster said. “We have no choice but to explore it. We’ll take passage on a ship to England—”

  “What’ll we use for money—and papers? It would cost hundreds. Unless—” I added, “—we worked our way. But that’s no good. We’d still need passports—plus union cards and seamen’s tickets.”

  “Your friend,” Foster said. “The one who prepares passports. Can’t he produce the other papers as well?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess so. But it will cost us.”

  “I’m sure we can find a way to pay,” Foster said. “Will you see him—early in the morning?”

  I looked around the blowsy room. Hot night air stirred a geranium wilting in a tin can on the window sill. An odor of bad cooking and worse plumbing floated up from the street.

  “At least,” I said, “it would mean getting out of here.”

  CHAPTER V

  It was almost sundown when Foster and I pushed through the door to the saloon bar at the Ancient Sinner and found a corner table. I watched Foster spread out his maps and papers. Behind us there was a murmur of conversation and the thump of darts against a board.

  “When are you going to give up and admit we’re wasting our time?” I said. “Two weeks of tramping over the same ground, and we end up in the same place.”

  “We’ve hardly begun our investigation,” Foster said mildly.

  “You keep saying that,” I said. “But if there ever was anything in that rock-pile, it’s long gone. The archaeologists have been digging over the site for years, and they haven’t come up with anything.”

  “They don’t know what to look for,” Foster said. “They were searching for indications of religious significance, human sacrifice—that sort of thing.”

  “We don’t know what we’re looking for either,” I said. “Unless you think maybe we’ll meet the Hunters hiding under a loose stone.”

  “You say that sardonically,” Foster said. “But I don’t consider it impossible.”

  “I know,” I said. “You’ve convinced yourself that the Hunters were after us back at Mayport when we ran off like a pair of idiots.”

  “From what you’ve told me of the circumstances—” Foster began.

  “I know; you don’t consider it impossible. That’s the trouble with you; you don’t consider anything impossible. It would make life a lot easier for me if you’d let me rule out a few items—like leprechauns who hang out at Stonehenge.”

  Foster looked at me, half-smiling. It had only been a few weeks since he woke up from a nap looking like a senior class president who hadn’t made up his mind whether to be a preacher or a movie star, but he had already lost that mild, innocent air. He learned fast, and day by day I had seen his old personality reemerge and—in spite of my attempts to hold onto the ascendency—dominate our partnership.

  “It’s a failing of your culture,” Foster said, “that hypothesis becomes dogma almost overnight. You’re too close to your Neolithic, when the blind acceptance of tribal lore had survival value. Having learned to evoke the fire god from sticks, by rote, you tend to extend the principle to all ‘established facts.’”

  “Here’s an established fact for you,” I said. “We’ve got fifteen pounds left—that’s about forty dollars. It’s time we figure out where to go from here, before somebody starts checking up on those phoney papers of ours.”

  Foster shook his head. “I’m not satisfied that we’ve exhausted the possibilities here. I’ve been studying the geometric relationships between the various structures; I have some ideas I want to check. I think it might be a good idea to go out at night, when we can work without the usual crowd of tourists observing every move.”

  I groaned. “My dogs are killing me,” I said. “Let’s hope you’ll come up with something better—or at least different.”

  “We’ll have a bite to eat here, and wait until dark to start out,” Foster said.

  The publican brought us plates of cold meat and potato salad. I worked on a thin but durable slice of ham and thought about all the people, somewhere, who were sitting down now to gracious meals in the glitter of crystal and silver. I’d had too many greasy French fries in too many cheap dives the last few years. I could feel them all now, burning in my stomach. I was getting farther from my island all the time— And it was nobody’s fault but mine.

  “The Ancient Sinner,” I said. “That’s me.”

  Foster looked up. “Curious names these old pubs have,” he said. “I suppose in some cases the origins are lost in antiquity.”

  “Why don’t they think up something cheery,” I said. “Like ‘The Paradise Bar and Grill’ or ‘The Happy Hour Cafe’. Did you notice the sign hanging outside?”

  “No.”

  “A picture of a skeleton. He’s holding one hand up like a Yankee evangelist prophesying doom. You can see it through the window there.”

  Foster turned and looked out at the weathered sign creaking in the evenin
g wind. He looked at it for a long time. When he turned back, there was a strange look around his eyes.

  “What’s the matter—?” I started.

  Foster ignored me, waved to the proprietor, a short fat country man. He came over to the table, wiping his hands on his apron.

  “A very interesting old building,” Foster said. “We’ve been admiring it. When was it built?”

  “Well, sir,” the publican said, “This here house is a many a hundred year old. It were built by the monks, they say, from the monastery what used to stand nearby here. It were tore down by the King’s men, Henry, that was, what time he drove the papists out.”

  “That would be Henry the Eighth, I suppose?”

  “Aye, it would that. And this house is all that were spared, it being the brewing-house, as the king said were a worthwhile institution, and he laid on a tithe, that two kegs of stout was to be laid by for the king’s use each brewing time.”

  “Very interesting,” Foster said. “Is the custom still continued?”

  The publican shook his head. “It were ended in my granfer’s time, it being that the Queen were a teetotaller.”

  “How did it acquire the curious name—‘The Ancient Sinner?’”

  “The tale is,” the publican said, “that one day a lay brother of the order were digging about yonder on the plain by the great stones, in search of the Druid’s treasure, albeit the Abbot had forbid him to go nigh the heathen ground, and he come on the bones of a man, and being of a kindly turn, he had the thought to give them Christian burial. Now, knowing the Abbott would nae permit it, he set to work to dig a grave by moonlight in holy ground, under the monastery walls. But the Abbott, being wakeful, were abroad and come on the brother a-digging, and when he asked the why of it, the lay brother having visions of penances to burden him for many a day, he ups and tells the Abbott it were a ale cellar he were about digging, and the Abbott, not being without wisdom, clapped him on the back, and went on his way. And so it was the ale-house got built, and blessed by the Abbott, and with it the bones that was laid away under the floor beneath the ale-casks.”