Godson of Almarlu: A Collection of Science Fiction Novellas

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  ANNE WINTERS, in the tense, dazing, unexpected movement of that moment, still could notice this incongruity, this inexplicable and eerie absence of humanness portrayed against the backdrop of her own terror at the unheralded assault. Here was a new touch of the bizarre, associated with her unbelievable companion. But she paid no deep attention to it now, of course. She, herself, was uninjured.

  “Curt! You’ve been wounded!” she cried. “Let me—”

  He pushed her away with a muttered word of reassurance. Even if his face did not respond, he now betrayed no error of purposeful intent or coordination otherwise. His foot went down on the accelerator with quick, assured, reasoned fury. The car roared on.

  Curt gave no notice to the mocking, half hysterical laughter that came from the rear, or to the challenge that came in thick, mad words: “Go on, run away, you yella devil! We saw yuh! We recognized your car, Curt Shelbey! You’re the fiend that’s causing all this hell, just so you can be dictator, or somethin’! A friend of ours saw yuh coming down the road, and phoned us to lay for yuh. You—”

  The car had climbed over the hill by then and the balance of what the farmer back there had to say was drowned and muffled in the growl of the motor.

  Iszt knew that he might easily have been killed, outright and at once, as the result of a tiny slip of carelessness—of a moment of being off guard. He knew, too, that, but for the swiftest, most efficient action, he was still doomed to die—his work of salvation broken off before it could really begin.

  He could feel searing waves of heat, touching the flesh of his alien body. And he could feel, too, the anguished ache of lowered pressure. The bullet had not touched him, nor had it seriously damaged his robot. But the protecting metal shell that surrounded him had been grazed, receiving a tiny, though, with time, inexorably deadly puncture. For the shell was meant to maintain the high pressure he needed, and to keep out, with its insulating material, the warmth of Earth, the heat of a furnace to his cold-born tissues.

  Iszt, crouched in his dark retreat, responded with a kind of terror, which, instead of paralyzing him, acted as a stimulant. His terror was less personal than cosmic. It concerned far more his duty than his own safety.

  And he was angry, too—angry with a dark, bestial fury, directed at the primitive being who had tried to kill him. Emotions like fear and anger have a universal purpose in connection with all sentient forms of life, be the fluid in their flesh water, liquified ammonia, or other liquid stuff. For those emotions are the spirit of the universal law of self-preservation.

  From the instant of the rifle’s report, Iszt’s keen brain had been busy. Back of its action was the science and the intellectual sharpness of a thousand ages of development. But there was something fierce and vengeful, too. Iszt was not cruel by nature—but now he was enflamed with fury.

  THE CAR WAS OVER the brow of the hill now—safe, it should be, from the effects of a withering, inconceivable blast on the other side of that hill, where his assailant was.

  A few of Iszt’s tendrils were still in contact with the remote-control apparatus that guided his robot ships in space. Before the echo of the rifle’s report had died away, one of those ships had started vengefully down. The speed which that glittering, hurtling thing, invisible from the ground, could attain was a matter which belonged to a meteoric scale, rather than to any common Terrestrial standard of velocity. And the range of the bolts it could hurl was tremendous.

  Something happened, some cataclysmic thing just beyond the hill, to the rear of the car. What that event was, or just how human nerves and brain received cognizance of its occurrence, were matters not easy to interpret. The thing that happened—though of stupendous destructive fury—was not exactly an explosion, as mankind understands such calamities. There was no sensation of a concussion—or of sound—at first. But perhaps this was only because human senses have their limitations. Living organs of sense are not meant to detect cataclysmic blasts and other material manifestations of a magnitude which, under any ordinary circumstances, can take place only at the tremendous pressures and temperatures which exist at the centers of those gigantic furnaces of space—the stars.

  Perhaps because of these facts, Anne Winters was conscious of catastrophe only as a blurred, disordered, incoherent impression that suggested the end of the world. And if that impression were analyzed, it would have proved to be only the shock of nerves, jolted by forces both beyond their capacity to feel accurately, and their experience. Anne did not know that what was taking place was a tiny sample—an infinitesimal analogy, so to speak—of the kind of catastrophe that Iszt was trying to prevent.

  For a minute fragment of time Anne Winters could hear or see nothing that she could interpret on the basis of past familiarity. Luckily, anyway, her eyelids were tightly closed, and held that way by a defensive reflex. Movement was perhaps too swift for human eyes even to capture. Then came what seemed a slow, painful, stunned awakening. Now she could hear an avalanche of sound—sound which must have been caused by air snapping back into a vacuum from which it had been forced. Now there was a blaze of light, stabbing searingly through eyelids themselves. If Anne’s eyes had not been closed, she would have been permanently blinded.

  Now she could hear the clatter of falling rocks and tree branches, and instinctively she huddled up in the seat. She tried to scream, but her terror was too great for her to utter even a faint, agonized squeak. She stayed in a huddled position until the roar of the disturbance dwindled away to silence.

  THEN, ready to meet as best she could whatever new threat might make its appearance, she sat up. That she had not lost consciousness and was still game, spoke well indeed of her pluck and stamina. Her whole body burned as if seared over a fire—the effect of rays like those of radium, weakened by passage through massive obstructions, but still lethal. She could scarcely see out of her pain-wracked eyes. But she could tell, in the moonlight, that the tops of the trees were sheared off at an up-slanting angle, as neatly as if cut by a knife in the hands of an Atlas. The air was alight with a barely perceptible, fluorescent glow, such as might be induced by radioactivity.

  And Anne knew, too, that the assailant and his companions, back there, had perished. But she did not know that this was an act of vengeance.

  Unbelievably the car was still on the road. It was going faster and faster. But, of course, it had been protected from that nameless blast by the intervening bulk of the hill.

  Curt Shelbey was behind the wheel, steering calmly. But there was something more than mere courage in that calm. Courage is admirable up to a point. But beyond that point its aspect is too demoniac to be admired. That grim, unchanging smile, revealed by the glow of the dash lamps. It was—inhuman!

  And then Anne saw the windshield—a little area of it right in front of her. It was pitted in an odd way—pitted as if by acid. No, not quite. Little punctures. A thousand of them. A million of them. And a strange, blackened flaw within the glass that somehow didn’t suggest minute foreign bodies shot into it, but rather the transmutation of elements—the transmutation of silicon into the black of free carbon!

  And then Anne’s scattered thoughts coalesced into an explanation. She, the daughter of the noted Dr. Forrest Winters, was herself a scientist.

  What had happened back there on the other side of the hill was—an atomic explosion! A small mass of material changed in an instant into a hurtling mass of energy! No crude explosion, this, no feeble, expanding gases tearing and hurling simple chunks of steel. But a blast of almost pure energy! Inconceivably concentrated radiations, mostly of short wavelengths, like cosmic and X-rays! Such radiations were born in the hearts of stars, but before they reached space they were filtered and thinned and changed in quality by hundreds of thousands of miles of stellar material!

  The fading atmospheric fluorescence, seemingly radioactive in origin—that helped in itself to prove Anne's atomic explosion theory. For radioactivity is one of the manifestations of the disruption of atoms. And the carbon t
here in the silicon compound of the windshield—that was an apparent example of transmutation. A thin shaft of unobstructed radiations, holding all their original, terrific force, had somehow stabbed over the brow of the hill, and had hit the car and had passed through it. The fearful impact of those radiations had changed the very character of the elements they had touched.

  GLANCING around, Anne could see a small, ragged circle of burnt upholstery behind her and, visible through a hole in the crumbly stuff, she saw bright metal of the car’s body. But that metal had a yellow lustre which told beyond doubt that it had ceased to be steel!

  Anne knew, then, how close she had come to death. Just a few inches. That beam of radiations must almost have grazed her head! And she was aware, too, with a vivid acceptance of reality, of the unbelievable fury of the more cryptic forces of the universe. The stars—the interiors of the stars!

  But she did not know how closely this illustration dovetailed with fearful, hidden fact!

  Curt Shelbey—Iszt—beside her, was now regretting a little that he had allowed stupid anger to get the better of him, imposing upon himself and his plans an unnecessary risk.

  It wasn’t till now that Anne paid any real attention to the fact that the car was being driven with demoniac speed. The swift, dazing, unprecedented movement of the past few moments had reduced the fairly commonplace velocity of a hundred miles an hour to the position of a trivial thing, scarcely worthy of notice. But now the utterly reckless negotiation of curves along the moonlit highway, which, after what had happened, might have dangerous obstructions, and the recession of events to the near-normal, made her conscious once more of present and more simple danger,

  “Curt! Be careful!” she advised. And then, with the memory of the atom blast still ringing in her brain: “What does it all mean? Oh, God! What does it all mean? Do you understand what it is that’s happening to everything, Curt? Do you really understand?”

  Her attention shifted once more, as she recalled something else, which had been smothered in the welter of an un-Earthly episode.

  “You were shot, Curt!” she cried. “That man with the gun back there! Let me drive, Curt! I’ve got to get you to a doctor—to a hospital!”

  There was love in her plea, and tense, selfish loyalty.

  There was grave danger that he would fail in his immediate objective, and so he was driving like a reckless devil, his actions backed up by a demigod’s fierce, indominable will. Without that will, he would already have lost consciousness.

  BUT HE DID cause his man-guise to speak four toneless words, which held no trace of human inflection: “No doctor. No hospital.”

  Anne Winters must have found something eerie in those words, yet it was not surprising that she attached no special significance to such a discovery. Concern for the man she loved led her to yield to impulse.

  She clutched at Curt Shelbey’s clothing in quest of the bullet wound. Iszt’s fading mind was already too blurred for him to be quite aware, at once, of what the girl was doing. He drove on unheeding.

  Thus Anne presently touched warm pseudo flesh, which, because of the perfect imitation it achieved, offered no obvious enigma in itself. But beneath Curt Shelbey's collar bone, there was a wound—a bloodless rent.

  And Anne’s fingers, in contact with it, felt the unmistakable hard smoothness of a piece of broken metal!

  She withdrew her hand quickly. But even after her instinctive retreat, realization of an unheard-of mystery lurking here was slow to come. Earthly minds, like Earthly flesh, are conditioned to the ordinary. Extraordinary phenomena tend to confuse and confound both. And so Anne Winters was more inclined to doubt the evidence of her senses, than to concede the reality of that evidence. A man—a sentient and tangible personality—composed partly of metal—in a vital region? Impossible! Everything in the mere idea fairly shrieked “Impossible!”

  And then the girl heard, from the depths of the human chest of Curt Shelbey, a muffled, eerie, animal noise of anguish. It sounded a bit like the chirping of an injured and abhorrent bat: “Iszt—iszt—iszt—iszt—iszt—”

  There was a faint odor, too, which Anne now noticed for the first time. The pungent smell of ammonia, seeping from Iszt’s punctured refuge. To the girl it suggested a noisome, bestial reek which belonged to a dark, unplumbed lair of horror.

  To her mind, then, there came a little of the truth, which she could less than half believe. Yet the trans-stellar grotesqueness of it made her stammer wild, confused words.

  “You’re not—Curt,” she accused, almost in a manner of apologetic embarrassment. “You’re something else that— You’re the thing that’s causing—the—the—everything that’s scaring people! And killing them! You’re trying to— Oh, Lord!” Her last words ended in a rasping scream of revulsion.

  She tugged at the handle of the car door feverishly, as a cat being dumped into a river might claw at its captor.

  Iszt, his senses worn to a thin, glimmering thread, still could think a little. He knew that at last he had almost been found out. And he, knew, too, the deadly danger that would follow his exposure. Even his vast powers would not be enough to ward off the fury of mankind, face to face with horror, unless he destroyed the entire species. And if he did that, the aid the Terrestrians could have provided would be gone. Even with the aid of his robots, how could he then accomplish that which he had been ordered to do?

  THERE WAS a simple way out of the present danger, of course. One of Curt Shelbey’s arms came up. The false muscles that moved it were backed up by the fearful power of disintegrating atoms. One terrific blow, and that puny girl-shape would be reduced to a limp, bloody corpse, its head smashed as if hit by a sledge hammer. The death of Anne Winters would be easy to explain in these troubled times.

  The arm of Curt Shelbey was poised to strike. For a brief moment the girl’s life seemed to be forfeit. Then—need intervened. Iszt’s consciousness was almost gone.

  The robot’s hand groped out, clumsy in the absence of adequate control, yet still with that terrific potential power behind it. It clutched the shoulder of the cringing, struggling girl, and pulled her away from the door she was trying to open. It took hold of her left hand, and guided it to the rim of the steering wheel.

  “Steer,” came the flat, yet compelling order.

  And Anne obeyed as best she could from her position, for to do otherwise, in that careening vehicle, was death. She felt numb now, as though she were acting in a dream—a hideous dream which she found incomprehensible.

  Curt Shelbey was slumped in the seat like a loose sack of meal. But his gaze was fiendishly intent, watching, always watching the highway, with a supreme effort of will.

  Since he still occupied the driver’s seat, his foot was on the accelerator. Presently he slackened speed, so that when a side road was reached, the car was traveling at a comparatively moderate rate.

  “Turn left,” came the command. Hypnotized with fright, the girl obeyed.

  Bumping along a rough road, still at dreadful speed, the beams of the headlamps bobbing in the gloom. Then a jolting, screeching stop, as brakes were applied with a drunken abruptness.

  Here was a lonely wilderness of rocky ground, elder thickets, and scrub pines. This was a place useful only as a hideout.

  Something gleamed in the darkness—a sphere of crystal that floated in the air. The mechanism had companions, a half dozen of them. They darted in close.

  Once more Anne tugged at the handle of the door beside her. Cold tentacles of metal, dangling from one of the spheres, yanked the door open. Now the thing was resting its massive weight on her lap, its tendrils fastening themselves around her arms, her legs, her body and her throat, so that she could neither move nor cry out. She could scarcely breathe.

  Others of the crew of half sentient automatons hoisted the limp man-form out of the car, and carried it on ahead through the darkness.

  A SPHERE crouched behind the wheel of the car, its various appendages placed so as to duplicate the mo
vements of a human driver. The motor purred. There was a smooth whirr of gears being skillfully shifted. The car rolled forward, and turned into a driveway that led into the woods.

  Presently, a rectangular section of ground, covered with elder bushes, folded upward like a trapdoor before the vehicle. An incline of stone was revealed, down which the car was now coasting. To the rear the trapdoor was folding back into place. The light ahead was soft, flickering, eerie and bluish, made to suit the best comfort of eyes different from those of men.

  Here, concealed in caverns blasted out of Earth, lay a little bit of another region, another culture. And here, surrounded by the minute and gigantic evidences of a science stupendous, the car was brought to a stop.

  Anne Winters, courageous though she was, and accustomed to the natural miracles with which her father’s work brought her into daily contact, had fainted.

  Slowly she regained her senses. She was still in the car, and the spherical automaton still clutched her, though it had released its grip on her throat.

  The air around her, she noticed, was tainted with the strong odor of ammonia. But this air, admitted from the Earthly atmosphere above, she found quite breathable. The cavern was large, and its roof was supported by fantastic arches. Weird apparatus, some massive and some as incredibly delicate as frost and spiderweb, were arranged here and there. There were stall-like compartments along the walls, some of them harboring stout, ugly-nosed vehicles designed for subterranean boring. Other compartments were empty.

  Near a pillar was a strange little device which was certainly a radio of some sort, invented by other-world people. From it an excited human voice was speaking:

  “Meteors—Chicago—great craters blasted— A million and a half people killed— London—”

  Anne Winters scarcely noted the broadcast. Her eyes roved to a massive crystal door. Beyond it another, smaller, eerily lit chamber could be seen. And there, stripped to the waist, was the form of Curt Shelbey. It stood erect on a pedestal. And the entire front of its chest seemed to be cut away, revealing vitals that nothing but a machine could possess—vitals which were the key to a vast deception.